The Curious Pre-Cancellation of Jeremy Saville
When it came time to choose Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place articles for my upcoming book The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything, I took a Noah and the Ark approach and took two of everything. For example the book starts with pieces on two fascinatingly reactionary, self-loathing anti-feminist manifestos released during the height of the woman’s liberation movement in the form of Joan Crawford’s 1971 lifestyle guide My Way of Life and Marabel Morgan’s The Complete Woman.
The Joy of Trash also chronicles a pair of bad taste comedies weirdly synonymous with 9/11 in Emeril, Emeril Lagasse’s legendarily misconceived sitcom vehicle, and the Turtle Club sequence in Master of Disguise.
The Happy Place’s second book will also feature a pair of late-period, non-Marvel vehicles for Stan Lee’s Texas-sized ego and gift for self-promotion in Stripprella and The Mighty 7, an animated X-Men knockoff with the audacity to cast as its lead character Stan Lee as himself when the Marvel mogul was deep into his eighties.
Speaking of Stripperella, it has another unsightly twin in the unforgivable Ren n’ Stimpy reboot Ren n’ Stimpy’s Adult Party Cartoon, which was part of Spike TV’s adult cartoon block alongside Gary the Rat, which I could very well end up writing about for The Joy of Trash as well.
It doesn’t end there. The Joy of Trash will also have two entries that extensively feature Fuck Jerry and meme culture in The Fyre Festival and Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign and the foundations of bad movie culture are represented by two movies it’d be impossible to imagine ironic trash movie appreciation without in Plan 9 From Outer Space and Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Speaking of bad movie culture, I also write about a movie that had the internet utterly mesmerized two years ago in Loqueesha. Online smart-asses derived an unseemly joy in Loqueesha’s preposterous yet undeniable existence.
Could the movie possibly be as bad and offensive as it looked? In my capacity as a bad movie professional I took it upon myself to watch Loqueesha to find out, then wrote a 5000 word evisceration for this here website that’s still one of the Happy Place’s most read pieces.
I was fascinated by the premise of Saville’s other movie, 2012’s The Test, so I watched it and wrote a similarly exhaustive 5000 word manifesto on its myriad flaws.
Loqueesha and The Test are endlessly fascinating to me for the same reason The Room and Neil Breen’s movies are fascinating: for their singular, overwhelming, utterly hypnotic awfulness of course, but also for the poignant insight they provide into their creator’s psyche, egos and desperate need for approval and validation. Like Breen’s movies and The Room, Loqueesha and The Test could not be more earnest or embarrassingly sincere, not to mention personal. It may be a comedy, but Loqueesha genuinely believes in the transformative, healing powers of a white guy doing a bad Madea impersonation.
Loqueesha and The Test are both so overflowing with insanity that I could do a minute-by-minute podcast articulating everything egregiously, fascinatingly, mesmerizingly wrong about them.
Loqueesha and The Test were like The Room and Breen’s unhinged exercise in crazed narcissism in that they were made in no small part so that their writer-director-star could kiss attractive women professionally obligated to pretend to be physically attracted to them.
But where The Room and Breen’s homemade melodramas made them trash culture icons whose work is endlessly celebrated and mocked on social media and in bad movie podcasts like The Flop House, We Hate Movies and How Did This Get Made, Saville is as weirdly invisible in bad movie circles as he is everywhere else.
People were fascinated by Loqueesha and its mysterious, reviled creator until it was released, at which point the world seems to have lost interest in it entirely. That’s certainly not because Loqueesha is unexpectedly boring or not as offensive or racist and sexist as it looks. Loqueesha is many things but boring it is not. If anything, Loqueesha somehow manages to be even more sexist and racist than it looks and it looks almost inconceivably misogynistic and backwards in its racial politics.
So why have Saville and his movie been ignored by bad movie lovers despite having so much in common with garbage movies we never stop celebrating, ironically or otherwise?
The answer, I think, has to do with the curious, fragile and unique cultural moment when Loqueesha was just barely, sorta released in 2019. Loqueesha’s trailer was released in the thick of the #MeToo era, in the midst of a long-overdue culture-wide reckoning about sexism, sexual harassment, sexual assault and toxic masculinity.
Powerful, revered men were finally being held accountable for their transgressions, criminal and otherwise.
Saville, however, had no power. He was not revered. Nobody knew who the fuck Saville even was before the trailer for Loqueesha swept across the internet, inspiring a tidal wave of mockery.
Saville was not Louis CK. He didn’t have a thriving television career. He didn’t rank as one of the most popular, acclaimed and respected stand-up comedians alive, as CK once did.
Saville had nothing that could be cancelled except for his dumb fucking movie. So the controversial auteur had the curious distinction of being pre-cancelled, or canceled before he actually accomplished anything, or had anything that could be cancelled or taken away.
The bad movie world was content to mock Loqueesha’s trailer. Anything beyond that was apparently seen as supporting a man whose film made him not just toxic but radioactive, an independent film pariah.
I understand why some people thought that doing anything more than making fun of Loqueesha’s trailer gave Saville attention that he did not deserve, even if that attention was bound to be overwhelmingly negative.
With Saville, there is an undoubtedly a moral aspect at play. Breen and Wiseau may be deeply problematic but they are not know primarily for being racist and sexist. Saville, on the other hand, is infamous ONLY for his racism and sexism. If anything, Loqueesha was seen, perhaps rightly, less as an actual movie that people should see and talk about, if only to make fun of it, then as a cinematic expression of its creator’s racism and misogyny, of his internal ugliness.
At the same time, I think there is something to be said for calling out that racism and sexism, in exploring how Loqueesha’s backwards ideas about gender and race reflect those of society at large. If nothing else, I’m glad a historical record exists exhaustively documenting Saville’s crimes against cinema, comedy and pop culture in my website and The Joy of Trash.
The world seems content to leave the business of seeing and writing about Loqueesha specifically to me, Nathan Rabin. I don’t know whether to feel insulted or flattered by that.
Oh well. The bad movie world’s loss is The Joy of Trash’s gain.
Pre-order the Happy Place’s second book, The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/weirdaccordiontoal/the-joy-of-trash?ref=project_build
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here