New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Guilty pleasure (n.): A guilty pleasure is something one considers pleasurable despite feeling guilt for enjoying it. Often, the "guilt" involved is simply fear of others discovering one's lowbrow or otherwise embarrassing tastes, rather than actual moral guilt. --Wikipedia.org

Author's note: I don't actually get to Ocean's 12 until late in the game in this column. Apologies in advance. If you need to know now, I like it the best in the series, definitely more than 13 and a little more than 11. Commence verbal attacks at will.

Strictly speaking, I don't do guilty pleasures. I think we would all be a lot better off if we enjoyed what we enjoyed and quit apologizing for it. Perhaps it's a strain of this country's Puritan origins and schizoid/bi-polar modern history that so much of what we like we feel compelled to cordon off with tape as if it were a body at a crime scene. Regular readers of this column know that I take pride in (or simply am majorly OCD about) knowing why I like what I like and attempting to communicate that in words. Some may view that as strictly in the realm of the critic but I think it's good for everyone to understand their cultural appetites.

I am certainly man enough to own up to my lowbrow as well as my highbrow tastes and I refuse to feel guilty for either one. I grew up in a pop-culture vacuum and had to fend for myself in carving out my tastes. It was a trial and error process in the pre-Internets days and help - in the form of a friend's advice, the sage words of a respected critic or even opting to buy one cassette over another because there were 24 tracks on Cassette A versus 12 tracks on Cassette B making it a much better deal for my hard-earned $9.99 - was always appreciated. In the days when the world seemed a little smaller, it was also a little less headache-y. I wouldn't know where to begin or how to cope if I attempted to become acquainted with even a fraction of the unsigned musical artists posting tracks on MySpace. Walking into a revered Portland rental shop/landmark like Movie Madness with its tens of thousands of hard to find videos and DVDs both foreign and domestic, big screen and small screen, legitimate and bootleg, can be similarly overwhelming. I have to decide in advance what I am looking for and how to quickly grab it, lest a search party be commissioned to track me down hours hence.

Back on topic: when people bring up their "guilty pleasures" - which seems to happen as regularly as feigning ironic disinterest to show how cool you are to not care about something - my bullshit detector goes off. My simple, but untested, theory is that if you really want to know someone, catch him or her when they off-handedly bring up their guilty pleasure. It needs to come from their lips to your ears and not as the result of a query on your part. This is a more honest approximation of where their tastes lie. The guilty pleasure doesn't necessarily need to fall on the lowbrow end of the spectrum either. Someone could just as easily feel guilt about enjoying some esoteric tome that almost no one on the planet has actually waded through. There's that equal strain of suspicion of the over-academic-ized as well, as if there is that one too many book, play, movie, or album that will mark you as a (sniff sniff) cultural snob.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5