112 Time March 15/March 22, 2021
if you subscribe To NeTflix or aNy oTher sTreamiNg
service, you know—or you’re at least made to feel—that even
if you’re not yet ready to return to theaters, you’ll never run
out of things to watch. That should be exciting. So why isn’t it?
The unending supply of that thing with the deeply unromantic
name content is dispiriting: we’ve become a league of pris-
oners waiting for our rations to be dropped from the sky. Of
course, thanks to streaming, we can watch just about anything
we want, of any genre or from any era. But what if we’re eager
to connect with others who have also just watched the same
film we did? From our individual snow-globe worlds, how do
we assert our individuality while still feeling part of a film-
watching community? How do we affirm for anyone, let alone
ourselves, our sense of what is good, bad or outrageous?
Behold—the rise of the instant cult classic.
Before you protest that the phrase is an oxymoron,
remember that we’re in the midst of a pandemic whose scope
we couldn’t have imagined a little over a year ago. While this
has been an inordinately painful period for most of us, time has
also, weirdly, flown by. It used to take years for a film to become
a cult classic, to find its way to audiences who would ultimately
adore it—at first by word of mouth and midnight screenings,
perhaps later via repertory programming or academic
reassessments. A true cult classic tends to be an oddball outlier
of some sort, either a mainstream picture that flopped at the
box office—like the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski—or a low-
budget film with some indefinable vitality—like John Waters’
Pink Flamingos or David Lynch’s Eraserhead. When we think
of cult classics, it’s generally movies
like Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 From
Outer Space, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker
Man and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls
that spring to mind, movies that draw
viewers hypnotically over a span of years
and decades.
But in the past year, our sense of
time has become both compressed and
elongated. Even before the pandemic,
social media had become our chief way
of communicating with one another
about things we’d seen and loved. Once
we all began working from home—or,
more crushingly, not working at all—
even the face-to-face conversations we
might have had with co workers were
no longer an option. Cult movies are
basically the result of communities of
like-minded people finding one another
over a period of time. As we reach the
one-year mark of living these extremely
interior lives, it’s little wonder that
we’re collapsing that time, consciously
or otherwise. We don’t want to wait
months or years to find that merry band
of outsiders who love the same odd lit-
tle movie we do. We need their compan-
ionship right now.Take BarB and Star Go to Vista
Del Mar, a willfully ridiculous candy-
colored comedy about a duo of 40-ish
friends—played by the movie’s writers,
Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo—who
try to banish their middle-aged ennui
with a sunny resort vacation. Recently
released on streaming platforms by
Lionsgate, Barb and Star is hardly an
outsider’s movie. But you might call it
a smart dumb comedy, an enterprise—
along the lines of the Farrelly brothers’
Dumb and Dumber and Adam McKay’s
Step Brothers—that transports you be-
yond caring whether or not your enjoy-
ment of it marks you as a person of
good taste.
Perhaps because nobody really
knows how to market a film during
a pandemic, Barb and Star emerged
somewhat out of left field. But the
movie’s stealth arrival worked in itsTimeOff Movies
The rise of the
pandemic-era cult film
By Stephanie Zacharek
◁
Wiig and Mumolo in Barb and Star
Go to Vista Del Mar, which has
emerged as a favorite on social mediaIf you can’t
accurately
call Barb
and Star
an instant
cult classic,
you can
probably
call it an
instant cult
favorite