Becca Rothfeld flies to Los Angeles for the premiere of Neil Breen’s seventh feature, “Dire Duplicity,” and comes back with a theory of cinema’s most misunderstood category: trash. Trash is badness raised to a sublime, singular art — distinct from camp, from prestige failure, and from the formulaic “slop” that defines our era.
- Trash is not merely bad: it’s monumentally, inspiredly incompetent — scrambled plots, amateur actors, nauseating camerawork, dialogue that makes no sense. Canon: “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” “Manos: The Hands of Fate,” “The Room,” “Troll 2,” “Birdemic.”
- Breen is the ultimate trash auteur: seven films since 2005, all written, directed, produced, financed, and starred in by one man — a mysterious ex-architect who plays savior figures fighting shadowy cabals of bankers, CEOs, and politicians (“Isn’t that corrupt?”).
- Sincerity is the secret: “When somebody makes an attempt at comedy and pretends they’re in on the joke, it’s not interesting. Sincerity is what sells.” Breen never winked — unlike Wiseau and Nguyen, who sold out.
- Trash fandom is communal: sold-out screenings, standing ovations, “Breen mitzvahs” (watching a Breen movie thirteen times), an affective community of cinephiles.
The real distinction Rothfeld draws is trash versus slop. Slop is formulaic and impersonal, “the aggregate of everything that is already imitating everything else”; trash is jarringly personal, its failures human. To paraphrase Tolstoy: all slop is alike, but every piece of trash is trashy in its own oddball way.
Slop predated AI by a decade — algorithm-curated feeds and committee-built blockbusters were already flattening badness. AI merely completes the homogenization: “Henceforth, all badness will be homogenized.” Trash is the last bastion of something cracked and precious — an elegy for a kind of ineptitude that is disappearing.