Dear Gretchen: Why Should I Eat Trash?

Dear Gretchen,

You've written about trash recently. Could you talk about what makes trash trash and what makes good trash please?  (p.s.I love your shit)

-Tony

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Hey Tony, thanks for your question, and for the compliment! 

Trash is something I identify on kind of a Potter Stewart "I know it when I see it" basis, but broadly I'd define it as art that doesn't take itself too seriously. Ken Russell's The Devils is, I think, the perfect example of trash. It's lurid, pornographic, unconcerned with period accuracy, extremely melodramatic, and most importantly it is in no way interested in elevating itself above sordid human experience. Trash is art made at least in part by people who understand degradation, whose idea of sex is more public and integrated into daily life than is generally deemed acceptable, who are marginalized or have some kind of experience with or connection to marginalized living.

A useful term in understanding trash as a definition is film maudit, or "cursed film," which Cocteau coined to refer to movies vilified by society. Trash is entertaining, or meant to be entertaining, but its willingness to broach taboo topics in loud, ugly ways can provoke a moralistic pushback. Think of Sister Jeanne of the Angels' licking blood from Grandier-as-Christ's bleeding side, or the infamous "wound-fucker" scene in Cronenberg's Crash -- these sequences communicate debased desire and a need to probe at our deepest hurts through sexual release, but in doing so they transgress firm social boundaries and risk rejection by the public. 

Trash by definition can't come from the mainstream. At best, as in the case of Scott's Alien, it arrives as a sleeper hit, tapping some hidden vein of anxiety or prurient desire. The sexual component -- the core human experience most often excised from art -- is the reason for the long-running tradition and underground success of trash. It integrates daily human life more completely and more sensually than other art, revels in the fluids other films eschew, lingers more and more lovingly on bodies less often construed as attractive. 2019's Knife+Heart and Hagazussa both center unusual bodies, in both cases those of characters implied or directly shown to be homosexual or bisexual. Fat bodies, broken out skin, facial hair on women both trans and cis -- these are things consciously and systematically kept out of mainstream film, and their inclusion is a strong signifier of trash.  

Trash pushes against established norms not with reasoned arguments but with the full force of repressed rage, longing, lust, and hunger. It rubs our noses in what offends with the understanding that on some level that same filth also titillates, that we burn in secret to touch degradation. Trash is the most cohesive and humanist body of film because it sets no part of human experience apart from the whole. It positions our base nature as identical to our so-called higher nature, our most debased and abject fantasies as part of the same continuum as work, friendship, and dinner. It dares to suggest that the forbidden is commonplace, the human animal a tangle of conflicting needs held in straining, wounded stasis by a society fundamentally ignorant of its nature.

We should eat trash for the same reason Sister Jeanne drinks the blood from Christ's wound: because we need it to live.