Sharknado, pundemic on Twitter, has restored the B-movie back to its rightful place in American life: cult summer blockbuster and universal inside joke. To join in you don’t need a TV or even to have seen the movie. You only must appreciate absurdity (and tolerate portmanteaus:
In case the title left anything to doubt, a quick summary of the film: a tornado spews sharks into Los Angeles. One lands in Tara Reid’s pool, another bounces off a barstool. Helicopters throw bombs at the weather. A character named ‘Fin’, played by a Chippendales dancer, leaps into the open jaws of a projectile Great White and chainsaws his way out of its rubber belly, screaming. The tagline reads: “Enough said”.
SyFy only pulled 1.4 million viewers – below average for their original movies and over 6 million fewer than watched The Big Bang Theory on CBS that night, yet as Vulture put it, “Sharknado won the Internet Thursday”, with over 5,000 tweets a minute at the height of the online frenzy. It has been made into gifs’ The B-movie production machine Asylum has their biggest hit yet. Everyone from Mashable to the Washington Post has joined the comedy online, like lists of suggested titles, such as “Velocirapture” and “Piranhacane”. Shark and chum puns and ideal endings (such a title card that reads ‘Fin’) abound. Everybody wins.
There is something universally heartwarming about flying sharks and the chaos they wreak. (Perhaps they’re drawn by the overpowering scent of ham coming off a certain subset of Hollywood.) And what’s not to love? The awful production values, the silly one-liners, the relentlessly straight-faced nonsense – the deliberate badness of is charming, in its way. The cast and crew are in on the joke but aren’t obnoxiously ironic about it; they’re having fun too. For a few hours, the rich and famous commented alongside the rest of the world. Other than sporting events and political debates, how often can you get staff at Buzzfeed and the New Yorker talking about the same thing?
Where The Lone Ranger and would-be blockbusters fail, Sharknado succeeds: it embraces its pulp absurdity without trying to be clever about it. The best part of Johnny Depp’s western-adventure-reboot, which includes massacres and cannibalism, is a railroad chase at the end, the only part of the movie that has zero pretensions of being anything other than a cartoon. Attempting to craft the blockbuster with everything, the filmmakers ended up with nothing.
Sharknado, on the other hand, does nothing but create the raw, dumb material for an audience to make up jokes. Too goofy and fake to merit any protest, it has no pretensions past absurdity. Anything – a sharktopus, radioactive pandas, demonic koalas – is possible, and you can have exactly as much fun with the cuddly monsters as you want. B-movies like Sharknado take movies out of the shushed theaters and into homes, making them social events that are snarky yet without animus. All you need are some friends – enter Twitter, which may have had its giddiest, least abrasive evening ever. When everyone’s in on the joke, we’re laughing with each other, not at someone or something.
At New York magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz astutely compares watching a terrible-good movie with friends to “a ritual sacrifice of sorts, one done with good humor and exuberance”. Of course, SyFy planned this strategy (if not in those words), but the movie itself is still unabashed silliness, and for that we love it (and for the flying sharks, which basically exist).
After so many summers of moody superheroes and comedies dedicated to the arrested adolescence of grown men, it’s refreshing to see a movie that encourages viewers to let loose on their own terms. The #Sharknado meme may run its course before SyFy can air Sharknado again on Thursday, but if Twitter turns into a weekly viewing room for terrible movies, the world will be a better place. Nothing unifies like being in on a joke together, and we should be glad that terrible movies are still American made.
