In the same interview I mentioned in my previous entry, Ray Bradbury mentions that when he was young, he saw every movie that came out: “When I was seventeen,” he says, “I was seeing as many as twelve to fourteen movies a week.” That’s a lot of movies, including a lot that weren’t good, that is, that had weak plots, poor acting, flat characters, and so forth. “But that’s good,” Bradbury says.
It’s a way of learning. You’ve got to learn how not to do things. Just seeing excellent films doesn’t educate you at all, because they’re mysterious. A great film is mysterious. There’s no way of solving it. Why does Citizen Kane work? Well, it just does. It’s brilliant on every level, and there’s no way of putting your finger on any one thing that’s right. It’s just all right. But a bad film is immediately evident, and it can teach you more: “I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that” (Zen in the Art of Writing, p. 128).
I read this paragraph a week ago, and I’ve been turning it over in my mind from time to time ever since. There’s a lot of truth to what Bradbury says here, I think. Bad art (by which he and I mean poorly crafted art, not wicked art) can help you learn things that great art can’t, namely, what not to do. But I suspect that it teaches that lesson only to those who love great art; the rest don’t recognize the mistakes in bad art as mistakes and end up emulating them. Bad art teaches, it seems to me, only if you approach it in the right way.
Still, I think there’s more to be said, and so I invite you to interact with Bradbury on this point and to sharpen my own thinking.
