fandomhighdorms | Fourth Floor Common Room, Sunday Evening

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Fourth Floor Common Room, Sunday Evening

Joker and Eleanor were not on a date. Dates were lovely, but dates were private affairs, not ones where they set up in the common room and tried to lure other people into joining the activity. (Which would be a little odd, since most date-related activities involved kissing, anyway.)

This was, rather, a Bad Movie Night. Joker had discovered Eleanor's dearth of knowledge about horrible movies, and was seeking rectify matters. There was popcorn, there were fizzy drinks, and there was a miniseries that Joker had promised was going to be nothing short of abominable on all possible fronts: ludicrous science, half-hearted acting, wooden characterization, paper-thin plot. Super-earthquakes were coming, from super-secret faults! And only nuclear bombs could save the day!!!

"Okay," Eleanor said, frowning at the TV as she waited for the miniseries to start. "I'm still not following you. If it's so awful, why are we watching this instead of something good?"

(Joker modded with permission. But this is emphatically not a date, and this room could not be more open; if you so much as stroll by, you can be dragged in and made to experience fake science at its worse. PLEASE, COME WATCH A TERRIBLE MINISERIES WITH JOKER AND ELEANOR.)

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"Because it is awful," Joker tried explaining again. "I mean, not awful awful, but... Okay, look: It's kind of like a car wreck. It's terrible, and horrible, and you feel sorry for everyone involved. And you can't help yourself, but you're curious, and you look anyway, because something in you wants to see it. And then you point and laugh, because that shit is funny."

"So ... it's so bad that it becomes unintentionally funny?" she asked, weighing that answer. "Which somehow is more funny than something that's funny on purpose."

She supposed it was possible. This was an experiment. If the movie proved to be intolerable, she'd convince him to try something else.

"I don't see how bad science could be funny," she added. "You said the show pretends there are super-deep fault lines somewhere in California. There aren't, but there are worse premises from which to start."

No one had told her about the nuclear bombs, no.

"Okay, just watch the opening sequence, and you'll see what I mean. This is baaaaaad. It's funny because it tries to present itself as a real actual movie, instead of the steaming pile of crap that it is."

Said sequence involved someone riding a bike during an "earthquake" while a few rigged boards and things fell nearby in an attempt to make it look like buildings were collapsing, followed by a model of the Seattle Space Needle falling over onto a model city.

"Just for the record, if a really big tower is ever falling onto you, you turn and run to the side, mmkay? And not directly away from it."

Eleanor was staring. She had a few pieces of popcorn suspended in mid-air, because she'd forgotten to place them in her mouth.

"That was utterly preposterous," she said. "A top-heavy monument tipping over to the side like a bowling pin, without rupturing any of the smaller parts and collapsing in on itself and -- never mind that, how did the idiot stay on his bicycle if the ground was shaking so badly that entire buildings were toppling? In what appeared to be very, very slow motion!?"

Edited 2014-04-21 02:34 (UTC)

"Oh, look who's beginning to understand!" Joker exclaimed with a grin. He tossed a kernel of popcorn in the air and caught it in his mouth. "You are now officially smarter than everyone involved in the production of this movie. Put together. I mean, you obviously were before, but now it's official."

"Now, we could knock the special effects -- because that was a really badly done miniature -- but not everyone can have state-of-the-art CGI. Instead, let's focus on the fact that no building, ever, would topple over like that -- especially not one as soundly put together as the Space Needle."

"I'm not familiar with it," she admitted -- Rapture wasn't very good with current events -- "but if it's that solidly built, I have to wonder that it toppled while it seemed every smaller building we were shown was perfectly fine. And biking away in the shadow of the monument ..."

She cut her eyes over to look at Joker. "Were they doing it on purpose?" she asked. "Is it some kind of joke, that you're supposed to laugh and nod along and know how bad it is?"

"No, Troma films are the advanced class," Joker told her. "Today we're dealing with the basic bad movie: someone has a terrible idea for something they think will look good on the screen, someone else ruins it, there's not enough money in the budget to do it right, and no one ever bothers to fact-check it."

He gave her a grin. "The problem you've spotted is a confluence of two major things: One, the scenes filmed on-location obviously couldn't have real buildings falling down. And two, it looks more impressive and exciting for the Space Needle to destroy buildings when it lands than for it to fall onto rubble."

"The movie does begin to smack of low-effort," Eleanor agreed. "These actors look bored. I can't say I blame them. So they're totally throwing logic out the window in favor of whatever is going to --"

She stopped abruptly, because what the stupid scientist lady had just said was far too stupid to be allowed to pass unchallenged.

"Did she just say the earthquake didn't have an epicenter?"

"Hmmm, did she?" Joker asked smugly. "No, no, that can't be right. Saying an earthquake doesn't have an epicenter would be like saying a person doesn't have mass. So she must have said something that makes actual sense, like -- YES. She did actually say that. You see? You see why this is so amazing?"

"That is ... I can't ..." Eleanor was looking over at Joker like maybe, maybe, there was something she wasn't understanding. "The epicenter is the middle. The center. The place it happened. If it happened, it happened somewhere. Where did it happen? It happened there. If it doesn't have an epicenter then it ... didn't ... happen anywhere, and if it didn't happen anywhere, then it didn't happen."

She was aware that she was babbling. But that was breathtakingly stupid. She had to be misunderstanding something here, right?

... Please?

Oh she was too precious! Joker nodded. "Congratulations, you have just completely broken an important plot point via the cunning subterfuge of knowing the definition of a word. Remember what I just said a few moments ago, vis-à-vis you, the movie makers, and 'smarter than'?"

Eleanor was rubbing her forehead. "How do you ... how do you write a movie about earthquakes and not know any of the words?" she asked. "It isn't as though the movie's about a pastry chef and they mention earthquakes incidentally. They're hoping the plot makes sense, and even the deep fault lines aren't ridiculous, on the very face of them, but this ..."

Okay, maybe her brain would stop trying to eat itself soon. Please?

"I'm overthinking this," she realized, with a sudden, blinding epiphany. "They picked the word because it sounded fancy. It's not just that they didn't know the definition. They ... didn't care."

It was somehow a relief. The world ... was making sense again.

Joker nodded. "Exactly. They put a lot of work into making a movie that they intended to be taken seriously, and never bothered fact-checking it. The idiocy is staggering."

Cecil poked his head in and waved. "Hi! I hear there's bad movies?" Next to him, Foucault poked his head in and blinked and honked inquisitively.

"We're watching a miniseries that apparently would get an F in geology," Eleanor informed him. She beckoned for him to join them with the hand that wasn't holding a large bowl of popcorn. "Do you know anything about earthquakes?"

Also, um.

"Is ... that a flamingo?"

"Sort of?" He scritched Foucault's head, which was pretty much even with his own now. "Except for the size, of course. And the eyes. I think maybe he's part ostrich or something?" He shrugged. "His name is Foucault."

Foucault honked at the sound of his name, and Cecil grinned as he flopped down on the floor in front of the couch. "I'm not sure about earthquakes." He shrugged. "We have them all the time apparently, in Night Vale, but nobody ever feels them."

"Is he your pet?" Eleanor asked, making the obvious assumption. "Does he like popcorn?"

She was perfectly willing to share her popcorn with a flamingo-ostrich hybrid, but perhaps it was unhealthy for him, so she felt she ought to ask first.

"Most earthquakes are too minor to be felt by people," she said, helpfully. "As you go up the magnitude scale, the frequency decreases. Were you near a very small fault line?"

"Yep! I got him at the shelter in town. And he loves popcorn." He snickered as Foucault gave Eleanor a big-eyed look.

"I don't know about any fault lines. Apparently the scientists' monitors go all crazy like everything should be just falling apart! There was one that was a..." He stopped to remember. "Nine point seven? Right underneath us." He shrugged. "The government sent us a big check for the supposed damage."

He turned to beg for some popcorn of his own. "Do you have a lot of earthquakes where you're from?"

"A nine point seven?" Eleanor said, staring again. "That's ... cataclysmic. I don't think there's ever been a nine point seven before in recorded history. How did you ..."

Faulty equipment? An alternate plane of reality?

"Thankfully, no," she said, with a shudder. "A few very minor ones. We're only about a hundred miles from the Mid Atlantic Ridge, but that's more volcanic than seismic. I managed to feel the tremors once; it was as though someone grabbed the bottom of my chair and shook it violently for a few seconds."

Edited 2014-04-21 03:15 (UTC)

"Oh, I bet it's pretty frightening underwater." Cecil shuddered in sympathy. "You have volcanoes, though? Neat!"

"Just cracks and fissures," she said easily. "Enough to harness the energy and keep the city going. If you ..."

She wasn't sure that she understood how he had survived a catastrophic earthquake without so much as noticing it, but she couldn't help but be curious about it.

"... if you ... didn't need the government's money," she asked, "did you at least spend it on something nice?"

Maybe ... earthquake-proofing the buildings, in case time somehow flowed backwards around his town.

"Comptroller Barnett suggested we should all take a look at those cute Mini Coopers. But right now, I think the City Council's just debating it a lot. That sounds really great and ecologically sound!" Cecil paused. "It is, isn't it?"

"Surprisingly, yes," Eleanor said. Sometimes, the cheapest option was also ecologically sound. Good thing, because it wasn't like the Captains of Industry in Rapture gave a damn otherwise. "Will each citizen get a check, then? That's fair, at least. Too many places, the government would hoard the money itself."

She realized she'd been neglecting Foucault, and lobbed some popcorn in his direction.

Foucault snapped out his head and caught it, head bobbing as he ate it.

"Maybe? I'm sure they'll do something good. But it may take a while to make a decision. Bureaucracy." He rolled his eyes.

"It could be worse," Eleanor noted philosophically. "They could wrap it up in bureaucracy and then do something bad. Benevolent leaders are nothing to take lightly."

"Oh, I don't know if ours are terribly benevolent," Cecil protested. "But they're not bad. For politicians," he qualified.

Joker pulled off his hat and clutched it to his breast morosely. "Yes, I'm afraid. I hate to be the bearer of bad news... but such movies do, in fact, exist in this world. It is tragic, I know."

"How bad?" Cecil asked, delighted. "Throw things at the screen bad, or throw the TV out the window bad?"

"Oh, mainly point and laugh bad," Joker told him, as he put his hat back on. "At least tonight. I only throw things if I expect better from the movie. This movie is a fuck-up. It knows what it did."

"Those are the worst," Cecil answered, nodding his head somberly. "The unrepentant ones. Count me in!"

Joker held out his bowl for Cecil to grab from. "Popcorn? You are in for a real treat, I promise! Just the dialogue alone, or the special effects, or the basic premise, are each enough to make this terrible. Together, they are unstoppable!"

Cecil took some popcorn and grinned. "Thanks! So, what's the occasion? Is there one?"

"Does there need to be an occasion? Eleanor didn't understand the concept of movies that are so bad they're good, and that just could not stand!"

He pointed at the screen, where the seismologists were calling out numbers from their scientific-y measuring equipment as an earthquake's intensity increased. "I love this part. Oh no the numbers are going up! That is bad!"

"Definitely bad." Cecil nodded. "Hey, do they still have this sort of bad movie when you're from? Or where?"

"Some things are constant in this world, and bad movies are one of them," Joker replied. "But this television couldn't show them in all their three-dimensional badness, and I'd have to explain way too much as they went along. Besides, you really can't go wrong with the classics, am I right?"

"Is this a classic, then?" Cecil asked curiously. "I don't think I've seen it before."

"Well, 'classic' as defined by a few extranet message boards devoted to bad movies, but... yeah, pretty much. It's no ~~meta for~~ Plan 9 From Outer Space, but it's up there. It's only a few years old at this point, though -- totally missable if you didn't know to look for it."

"So we're early adopters! Or...early appreciaters?" That was kind of nifty.

"Is it weird watching things in only 2D?"

"We are at the cusp of a great cult following, yes," Joker agreed. "And 2D's not so weird, actually. Holos are great for certain things, but there's something about movies that just makes 2D work better."

"Do you still get new films made in 2D, like we sometimes get black and white films?"

"Oh, sure. And we get plenty of old films 'stunningly remastered'" -- he threw some air quotes on the phrase and rolled his eyes -- "in 3D. Or remade, or rebooted..." Joker shrugged. "Whoever it was who said there are only however many plots in fiction that keep getting re-used was right. In my century, we're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel."

He turned and looked at Cecil thoughtfully. "So, what are movies like where you're from? People get sucked inside them? Demons talk to people through them?"

"No more than usual." Cecil shrugged. "Well, not if you're careful."

It was possible Cecil's "usual" wasn't most people's. Joker was probably shocked.

Joker sighed and shook his head. "Yeeeeah, that's about what I thought. That sort of thing doesn't happen at all, most places."

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Fourth Floor Common Room, Sunday Evening

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