E.G.

An "after-school special" is/was a type of show which was shown on TV when I was a kid.  Generally, ASSes (sorry about the acronym) were designed to convince kids to do certain things.  Usually, these were things which, among adults, kids were uncontroversially supposed to do: Not lie; not steal; not cheat at school; help your younger sibling, even when you don’t want to; avoid drugs and alcohol; etc.

These shows were unintentionally funny for at least two reasons.  First, the characters were "anti-developed."  The characters were not individuals, and weren’t supposed to be.  They were supposed to represent generic types: "the nerd," "the cool kid," "the drug-pusher," etc.  I think kids thought it was funny to see a living person (an actor) so completely absorbed into an immediately recognizable archetype. 

Second, the aim of these shows was comically transparent.  You knew after just a few minutes watching what vice or virtue the show would address, and you knew that everything that happened for the rest of the episode would be designed to make you see things exactly as the show saw them, and to do exactly what the show wanted you to do.

I don’t know if these shows ever had much impact on kids’ behavior.  I doubt many kids who already were in the habit of lying, or cheating, or whatever, were persuaded to change their ways.  But if, by some chance, someone hadn’t already told you that lying, cheating, etc. were wrong, these shows at least served the purpose of letting you know that that was the general consensus, at least in the adult world.

Many movies in the "mainstream independent" category (i.e., movies which have achieved relatively wide success without being produced and/or distributed within the "traditional hollywood" system) have adopted the ASS model.  I call these "Sundance After-School Specials" ("Sundance" being the entity which often distributes, promotes, or is otherwise involved with these movies).  The main difference between a regular ASS and a Sundance ASS is that Sundance ASSes generally advocate patterns of behavior which are "progressive."  So, for instance, rather than trying to get you to refrain from doing things like stealing, these movies try to get you to refrain from doing things like harassing the lesbian couple next door.  But the main characteristics of regular ASSes remain: anti-developed characters standing in for types; transparent pedagogical purpose behind every plot-point; etc.

Some people ridicule Sundance ASSes, presumably for the same reasons that they ridiculed regular ASSes when they were kids.  But I think watching an ASS-style movie can be interesting.

Here’s an example people use in philosophy sometimes.  Suppose I shine two flashlights at the wall, making two disks of light appear.  Suppose that, by moving my left hand, I move one disk toward the other, making the first disk "collide" with the second.  I immediately move my right hand, causing the second disk to move away from the first.  This creates the appearance that the "collision" of the first light-disk "caused" the second one to move.  A child might be fooled into thinking that this appearance is reality — that the first disk of light really did cause the second one to move by colliding with it.  An adult knows that the child is wrong — that the real cause of the motion of the second disk lies in the movement of the flashlight in my right hand.

Movies are like that, usually.  Plot-event B follows plot-event A, and we’re asked to believe that there’s a causal relation between them.  There is, of course, no causal relation there; "plot-event A" is only a series of frames of light flashing on a screen, and such a thing cannot cause anything.  But a movie "works" when the viewer is able to enter a state of mind in which she somehow "believes," or imagines, or whatever, that event A is really happening, and has a genuine causal relation with the events that follow it. 

Many people think this effect is nowadays very difficult to achieve.  Early movie audiences, people say, were naive.  For instance, supposedly people on one early occasion jumped out of their seats when footage of a fast-approaching train was shown.  But modern audiences are thought to be wise and jaded, so movie-makers must work very hard to get audiences to enter that child-like state of mind required for a movie to "work."  But the facts suggest otherwise.  Mainstream movies are now more implausible than ever.  I think that by growing up watching movies and TV shows, people have learned to enter the requisite state of mind at will.  Movie-makers no longer have to work very hard to get audiences to suspend disbelief, because audiences have trained themselves to do that on their own.

All this holds for non-ASS movies.  Non-ASS movies are designed to create the illusion of real, specific people really carrying out specific actions and really speaking.  But that’s easy, I claim, now that audiences have trained themselves to conspire with the movie in creating that illusion.  What do ASS movies do?  In a sense, ASS movies do exactly the opposite of this.  An ASS character, for instance, isn’t supposed to be anything remotely like a real, specific person.  ASS characters are, as I say, types.  Indeed, everything about an ASS movie is a type.  The actions which ASS characters perform, for instance, aren’t supposed to be concrete doings; they’re supposed to be types of actions — actions which the movie hopes you (and everyone else) will perform or not perform.  When Billy refuses to take drugs in an ASS, for instance, you’re supposed to ignore Billy; Billy’s completely irrelevant.  What you’re supposed to see is yourself, or your friend, or indeed anyone and everyone, refusing to do the same thing in the same type of circumstance.  Or rather, you’re supposed to see yourself and everyone else ought to refuse to do the same thing in the same type of circumstance.  In this way, an ASS-style movie adds a whole new, and kind of weird, layer to the experience of movie-watching.  This layer means ASS-style movies don’t "work" in the usual sense — and that’s what makes them funny — but I think that’s also what can make them interesting to watch sometimes.