Where Have All the B Movies Gone?

On Writing a Messy, Extra, Feels True Novel

I’ve been doing a lot of writing in this newsletter about how subversion has gone mainstream. Over the last couple months, I’ve had pieces on how:

• Miss Americana, Taylor Swift, sells songs about being weird and ugly while acting hinged and looking pretty

• Barbie espouses an anti-patriarchal ideology that patterns itself after patriarchal hierarchies

• And Just Like That (very quietly) amplifies stories about people of color while much more loudly coopting their culture

The problem is that it isn’t really possible for art to be both subversive and mainstream — the terms contradict each other, mainstream the current that swallows the tributary of subversion. It isn’t really Taylor, Barbie, or Carrie Bradshaw’s fault that their attempts at radical messaging are muffled — the very medium they’re delivering these views from (stadiums, Spotify, mega-streamers, and movie theaters) is inherently distorting. Any message meant for everybody is a mono-message; made flat by the minds of the many execs it had to go through to get to your screen.

Of course, there have always been ways past the censor. My favorite mass media legerdemain has always been the B movie; the flip side of the feature, the cheaply made picture too insignificant to have many eyes on it between production and projection. I brought this up in an interview about my novel MONARCH with the podcast Programmed to Chill a few months ago in an episode titled “Novels as Spycraft: Alienation and Weaponized Trauma.” I was trying to articulate that, as is the case for many B movies, the plot of MONARCH was never that important to me. Read on for my craft theory thoughts on writing the “unhinged” novel, plus a 90 second Camp rec.