Look, I’ve wasted god knows how many Tuesday nights defending my love for Twilight to folks who treat having taste like it’s a goddamn meritocracy. You know the type—they act like admitting you like something “bad” is a confession before some sort of cultural purity tribunal, a sign your judgment is broken. But here’s the real screw-up: treating those pleasures as aesthetic failures is itself a failure of criticism. It completely misses why we actually enjoy things and what art is even supposed to do in the first place.

The Guilt Is Peer Pressure, Not a Real Aesthetic Problem

The phrase “guilty pleasure” stacks the deck from the jump. It frames your enjoyment as something illicit, a deviation from the one true norm of good taste you’re supposed to feel ashamed about. But who actually made that rulebook? Usually it’s a cocktail of high-culture gatekeepers, academic groupthink, and critics who think a film’s value gets measured by how much it looks like a Merchant Ivory production. The guilt isn’t baked into the work; it’s pure social anxiety, the dread of looking unserious in front of the wrong people.

I still remember catching Showgirls for the first time at a rep cinema, packed in with a crowd laughing at all the “wrong” beats. They were in on the joke, yeah, but they weren’t just sneering. There was this real, crackling delight—in the unhinged choreography, the line readings that felt beamed in from another planet, the sheer, sweaty excess of the whole thing. That delight isn’t a fake coping mechanism for bad art. It’s a direct response to something tangible in the work, even if the creators never intended it. The guilt only slinks in when you picture some phantom tastemaker hovering behind you, keeping score.

The Intentionality Trap Is a Dead End

So much of the “guilty pleasure” tag comes from an obsession with what the author meant to do. If a work aims for seriousness and faceplants, we stamp it “bad,” and our enjoyment gets filed under “ironic.” If a work is knowingly camp, it’s “good” because it meant to be that way. This logic is a mess. Art isn’t a vending machine where you punch in a meaning and a tidy response drops out. A film can totally whiff on its stated goals and succeed wildly at something else—something weirder, more personal, way more interesting.

Look at The Room. Tommy Wiseau was clearly convinced he was making a Tennessee Williams-style drama. He wasn’t. But the result isn’t just a broken drama; it’s a masterpiece of disjunctive storytelling, a movie where every scene seems to operate in its own emotional dimension. That’s not nothing. That’s a specific aesthetic experience you simply can’t get from a well-made drama. When I crack up at “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” I’m not mocking Wiseau’s failure. I’m responding to the bizarre, painfully sincere energy of a line nobody else would’ve written—or delivered—that way. My pleasure is a real aesthetic reaction, not a category error.

Why Messy Art Feels More Honest

This is where I get unpopular: I’d argue a lot of “guilty pleasures” are more honest than the polished, middlebrow stuff that gets a free pass. A Marvel movie is technically competent, sure, but it’s also been focus-grouped into a smooth, inoffensive paste. A disaster like The Book of Henry is a car crash, but it’s a genuinely fascinating car crash—a movie so earnestly wrong-headed it spills the director’s id all over the screen in ways a competent film never would. When I say I love The Book of Henry, I’m not claiming it’s good in any conventional sense. I’m saying it’s more revealing and more memorable than a dozen anonymous thrillers that hit their marks and evaporate from your brain by the time the credits roll.

This is what the whole “so bad it’s good” crowd often misses. They frame the enjoyment as a happy accident, a bonus that has zip to do with the work itself. But that enjoyment is embedded in the work’s specific, weirdo choices. A different bad movie might just bore you to tears. The Room works because of Wiseau’s strangely specific fixations on betrayal, football, and rooftop chats. The pleasure comes from the actual texture of the failure, and that texture is an aesthetic property, full stop.

Guilty Pleasures Are Cultural Evidence, Not Glitches

Taking guilty pleasures seriously as real aesthetic experiences isn’t just personal vindication. It’s a sharper way to read the culture. When a big group of people finds pleasure in something critics slam as “bad,” that tells you something real about what audiences actually hunger for. The long, undead afterlife of Twilight isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a sign the series tapped into something about desire and repression that more “respectable” works never even grazed. The stilted dialogue, the chaste longing, the aggressively teal color grading—these aren’t bugs for the fans; they’re the features that build the specific emotional weather the series runs on.

Critics who wave this off as bad taste are basically refusing to analyze a massive chunk of cultural life. They’re like botanists who won’t study dandelions because they’re weeds. But dandelions are everywhere for a reason. They thrive where other plants give up. Similarly, guilty pleasures often thrive because they offer what high culture neglects: direct emotional access, zero ironic distance, permission to feel things that are too big or too messy for polite company.

The Gatekeepers’ Quiet Panic

I’d bet the resistance to taking guilty pleasures seriously comes from a fear of losing cultural authority. If a critic’s whole job is telling you what’s good and bad, a thriving counter-canon of “bad” works is a direct threat. It hints that the criteria for judgment are wobblier than advertised. It suggests audiences are active participants in making meaning, not just passive quality-receivers. And for someone whose whole identity is built on being a tastemaker, that’s frankly terrifying.

But criticism should describe before it prescribes. Before you decide Twilight is a bad film, you should understand why millions of people connect with it so fiercely. That doesn’t mean pretending it’s Citizen Kane. It means taking the pleasure seriously as a phenomenon, investigating what the work is actually doing out in the world. And often, what it’s doing is a hell of a lot more interesting than what the “good” films are up to.

Toward a Shameless Kind of Criticism

So what would a criticism that doesn’t treat guilty pleasures as screw-ups look like? It’d start by assuming that if people love something, there’s a reason—even if that reason has little to do with the usual yardsticks of quality. It’d look at a film like Mamma Mia! and instead of griping about Pierce Brosnan’s singing, it’d ask why his strained, heartfelt warbling makes audiences so ridiculously happy. (The answer, I think, is that it transforms a polished musical into a karaoke party, where the joy comes from participation, not perfection.)

It’d also drop “guilty” as the default setting. Call it a private pleasure, a weird pleasure, an unexpected pleasure—whatever works. The guilt is optional, and it’s usually a sign you’re more worried about your own social standing than about the work itself. When I say I love Twilight, I’m not confessing. I’m stating a fact about my aesthetic life, one that’s just as valid as my love for Tarkovsky or Toni Morrison. They do different things for me, but they both do real things.

In the end, the problem with treating guilty pleasures as aesthetic failures is that it flattens the whole experience of art into a single, dreary metric of “goodness.” But art isn’t a test you pass or fail. It’s a messy, living exchange between a work and an audience, and sometimes the most interesting stuff happens in the gaps between intention and reception. Your love for a “bad” movie isn’t a mistake. It’s a clue. Follow it, and you might learn something about yourself, about the culture, and about what art can actually do. The only real failure is refusing to take your own pleasure seriously.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t it just ironic enjoyment? Aren’t we just making fun of bad art?

Sometimes, sure. But irony is a thin coat of paint that usually covers up genuine engagement. If you’ve watched The Room a dozen times, you’re probably not just feeling superior to it. You’re soaking in the rhythms, the performances, the weird little world it builds. Irony can be a way to give yourself permission to enjoy something, but the enjoyment itself is the real deal. The mistake is assuming the ironic frame is the whole story.

Does this mean there’s no such thing as a bad movie?

No, it means “bad” is a way slipperier term than we usually let on. A film can be incompetent by the standard textbook rules and still be aesthetically valuable. A film can also be dead competent and completely worthless. The point isn’t to abolish judgment—it’s to expand the damn criteria we use. If a film consistently gives audiences a meaningful, memorable experience, calling it “bad” without any qualification is just intellectually lazy.

How can I defend my guilty pleasures without sounding like I’m making excuses?

Stop defending and start describing. Instead of “I know it’s bad, but I like it,” try “I like it because it does this specific thing no other work does.” If you can put words to what the work does for you—an emotional release, a visual texture, a weird performance—you’re not making an excuse; you’re just doing criticism. And if someone still calls it a guilty pleasure, just tell them the guilt is theirs, not yours.