on guilty pleasures
YAM: Do you believe in the term “guilty pleasure”?
MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS: No.
YAM: Neither do I, you like a movie, you like a movie, right?
MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS: It’s an audacious statement for people if they actually thought about it. I don’t ever want to try to make someone feel bad for needing to have a guilty pleasure, but what it’s insinuating is that they have such high-brow beliefs in art and it isn’t just that their taste is high-brow, it’s that you would never even consider this “guilty pleasure” in the same conversation. So it’s like a joke. That’s a belief system in “good” or “bad” art and it’s really intense.
I think that you get that from your teachers and you get that from your parents and you get that from people who actually care about art. It’s so detrimental to your future on this planet. The more people I meet who have passionately loved something, the more it seems they end up hating it as they get older. They feel brokenhearted by it, that it disappoints them.
Their expectations get so high as to what is actually “good” because of that same mentality that there is “good” and “bad” art and that you can secretly like “bad” art, but only on the weekends. I’m concerned about those people, because I think that’s how you become a hermit, that’s how you become stuck in generation gaps and it’s how you ultimately feel the world is against you.
It’s that you started shutting off, you started to decide what was intellectual and what was pop culture and that somehow the two don’t mix; that you watch a “movie” for fun and a “film” for education. That old school idea, and I love that it happened because it validated movies in the first place, to become films, I don’t think it’s relevant anymore. It had to happen, but that’s from the 60s, we’re not in the 60s anymore.
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