You may not know it, but there is currently a large Zardoz-shaped hole in your life.
In 1974, writer-director John Boorman treated us to his vision of a mystical futurescape, a post-apocalypse where a giant floating stone head named Zardoz (who loves guns, but hates penises) rules over a tribe of savages. One of these savages, Zed (Sean Connery), travels in the stone head to a utopian land populated by powerful, immortal beings, and Zed soon learns they are the real arbiters of his reality. It is a very silly film executed with the straightest face. The effects look pitiful, the sets feel like they’re about to fall apart, and the locations (which are meant to emulate the ravaged far-future) exclusively resemble the Irish countryside.
But Zardoz is not just remarkable for its shoddy production values. Its ambitious ideas are handled with such an overpowering pomposity that you can’t help be sucked into its madness. Zardoz reeks of both clunky, low-budget awkwardness and pseudo-intellectual, high-art philosophising, as if someone was intermittently interrupting a stagnant high school production of Shakespeare with the massive glaring message, “GOD IS DEAD.” It’s clear John Boorman is scared of ageing, and is dramatising this fear in the most convoluted, head-scratching way. You kind of go along with it; on some level you’re invested in its pondering on the ethics of immortality and the exploitative nature of religiosity, and then without warning the film veers into completely nutty territory with a crap effect or bizarre dialogue, keeping you on your toes. It’s a puzzle of a film – a rare gift of cinema to be broken apart and ridiculed for all eternity.
When I was 17, there was no movie I hated more.
I spent my teenage years watching so-bad-they’re-good movies. After seeing RedLetterMedia’s first episode of Best of the Worst, I longed for the warmth and joviality of laughing at trash with other people. I selected one of my friends, and over three years we forged a brotherly bond sitting in my basement marathoning terrible films. I would carefully curate our picks from the lowest IMDb scores and whatever junk I could find in second-hand DVD shops. It’s how I fell in love with Nic Cage, where I discovered my lifelong obsession with The Room, and where I learned my first lessons in no-budget filmmaking. Together, we fostered a network of in-jokes and references that irritated everyone around us, but we didn’t care. The sheer giddiness we’d get from seeing Samuel L. Jackson’s death scene in Deep Blue Sea, or how love caused the villainous Plughead’s head to explode in Circuitry Man 2 was worth it.
As we neared the end of our school days and university approached, we became aware that our time watching and cataloguing bad movies together was likely coming to an end. We decided to cap it off with a 24-hour marathon of 10 films, and as we had recently fallen in love with the trailer for Zardoz (which is still the best trailer I’ve ever seen), we chose that as our final one.
But Zardoz was not the film we were hoping for. It was a slow, confusing clunker that bored me to tears. I found it pretentious and irritating, and hated all the faux-intelligence it stood for. It was a terrible arthouse effort, and not the hilarious ride I had been promised.
As the years pass by, my deadening experience with Zardoz feels more and more like a betrayal, because bad movies became ingrained into who I am. At university, hosting bad movie nights became a staple of my social calendar. I would programme double-bills for drunken friends to shriek and cackle at, I bonded with fellow trash-aficionados over our personal favourites, and I got to experience classic bad movies with fresh eyes again and again. They were an amazing social activity where people could feel connected with a group of strangers, but they would also feel deeply personal; a strangely intimate link between the few people who witnessed the same cinematic insanity as you.
But there were, of course, downsides to my feverish pursuit of schadenfreude. When I sat down to watch a bad movie, my mind was already made up on its quality. I had set out with an agenda — to look for incompetence and unintentional hilarity, and this seriously restricted any appreciation of craft. I’ve recently realised it’s never the case that our favourite films are without flaws, but instead what we love about them simply outweighs any less-than-perfect attributes. This nuanced perspective is out the window if we’re watching a film just to laugh at it — we can only see flaws. I’ll never forgive myself for the one night when, in a desperate search for something to entertain the crowd gathered around my TV, we started laughing at Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria (1977).
Maybe this had been the case with Zardoz. At 17, my knowledge of experimental cinema extended to one very confused watch of Eraserhead. My sensibilities had grown and changed so much in the last half a dozen years, surely a reassessment of the film was worth a shot? Maybe the film I hated most, the greatest disappointment of my bad movie career, deserved forgiveness?
Except it was never going to be as easy as watching the film a second time. Revisiting Zardoz meant revisiting the person who watched it; someone I’d spent years trying not to remember, who I only think about with venom and dislike.
It’s difficult to know where my self-hatred comes from. My mental illness is no doubt accountable for the obsessive, demeaning way I criticise myself, how I can’t shake intrusive, negative thoughts, and how it’s nearly impossible to move on from mistakes I made years ago. It means whenever I think about how I used to act and behave, it’s always with a pang of fear and regret. The past looms above me like an enormous and unassailable stone head, mouth dark and agape, threatening to consume me whole.
Regardless of the cause, I have trouble viewing myself in a positive light, and resent all past versions of me. I hold myself to an impossibly high standard, wishing I could wipe out the past and retroactively make myself a better person. Self-deprecation is second nature, and I’m trapped in a cycle of undermining and belittling myself because I genuinely don’t think I deserve happiness.
Like an infection, this hatred is spreading. Unsatisfied with just obsessing over bad memories, it is now attaching itself to good ones. The evenings I spent joking with friends at the expense of bad movies no longer seem as pure and happy as they felt in the moment. I now see, at their centre, a pathetic person trying to entertain those around him in a desperate attempt for attention and validation.
Nobody in their 20s likes who they were at 17, but the vitriol I have for myself at that age is staggering. I fixate on how I was annoying, insensitive, mean to my friends — problems that would soon grow into issues that jeopardized relationships. I feel about 17-year-old me the same way I felt about Zardoz: frustrated, embarrassed, and disappointed that things weren’t better. I resent how unaware of his own flaws that person was, ignorant to how they would manifest into mistakes in the years to follow. I want to tell him, just as the Zardoz trailer professes, “I have seen the future, and it doesn’t work.”
Thoughts like these eat away at me, bit by bit, until I am scared there won’t be anything of me left. I became so scared of the past that weird films from the 70s can trigger a stream of anxious, self-critical memories. So I would try to avoid my anxieties, and in the process reaffirm in my head that these are things worth being anxious about, making it so much harder to shake free of them. Hate traps me.
But hate is exhausting. The effort of putting myself down, time after time, was draining. And while my chemically imbalanced brain was largely at fault, being self-critical always felt like a choice I was making — a decision to look at myself in a certain unkind way. Just like how I’d go searching for films to laugh at, I had a pre-existing agenda with which I was assessing myself. What would happen if I let it drop?
So, to run an experiment on this theory, I rewatched Zardoz. I wasn’t looking forward to it, and I wasn’t expecting it to be fun. But it occurred to me that I wasn’t remembering anything substantial about the film itself. All that existed in my mind was my hatred of it. I needed to see if there was any evidence for the resentment I had accumulated in my head for years.
On my rewatch, was Zardoz as unintentionally hilarious as I once hoped? No, it wasn’t. But neither was it the tedious slog I remembered. Zardoz, my least favourite movie of all time, was actually genuinely good.
I saw things in a whole new light. I forgave what I previously lambasted, and I could appreciate the film’s attributes far more than its flaws. Zardoz didn’t change: I did. And if I could absolve a film, could I turn the same lens onto myself? Could I find the person I had hated for years worthy of love? Acceptance isn’t as simple as flicking a switch, but once I had given myself a taste of it, I realised how freeing it could be.
So I love you, Zardoz, you great thing of eccentric beauty. I love your stark and blistering world stricken with dissatisfaction and pain. I love your massive stone head nonchalantly floating over the countryside. I love the sincerity of the performances delivering nonsensical dialogue. I love how delicately your story strides the line between epic and ridiculous. I love how the big ideas were absolutely not executed well enough, so the subpar production value means that your high concept futureworld looks like it was shot in someone’s backyard over a weekend, but I love how that in itself is striking. I love everything you strived for, I love the courageous way you shout, “we age, we change, and then we die,” and how the most meaningful thing we can do is to accept that.
I have made mistakes, but I am learning and changing every day, constantly filing away at the person I want to be. I will not let the negative voices, booming from the snarling mouth of that levitating, graven image, tell me that I don’t deserve love.
When the brightness of Zardoz’s shine fades and it’s only remembered as a cult curiosity, I will remember what it taught me. As we age, we bring along who we used to be, but we shouldn’t punish them for not knowing what we know now. The world is too harsh and loveless to insist on putting ourselves down. What is good about me outweighs my less-than-perfect attributes.
Like Zed, I want to clamber aboard Zardoz’s floating head and sail through the sky. I want a different, untethered perspective on the world that for years has felt constricting. I have started the arduous journey from the suffocating bleakness of my mind into a brighter, kinder unknown.
