You knew it all along. You felt it in your bones when you were watching Charlie’s Angels. You sensed it that time you stayed up until 4:30 a.m. back in fourth grade to see Vampire On Bikini Beach on USA’s Up All Night. And the realization gripped you powerfully as you enjoyed The Room for the 15th time: I am smart as hell for watching this, you thought to yourself. If only there were some evidence of that!
Fret no more, because science has again come to the rescue. Academics at the Max Planck Institute For Empirical Aesthetics—which is an actual school and not the punchline to a joke about postmodernism run amok—have published a new study, and according to The Independent, the results are clear: It’s actually the smarty-pants among us who are doing a lot of the viewing of trash cinema. “We are dealing here with an audience with above-average education, which one could describe as ‘cultural omnivores’,” said Keyvan Sarkhosh, a postdoctoral fellow who participated in the study. “Such viewers are interested in a broad spectrum of art and media across the traditional boundaries of high and popular culture.” Which is a boring way of saying you are a true Renaissance thinker, and the fact that you’ve seen Lake Placid 3 more than once is nothing but a symbol of your profound intellectual depth.
Now, it’s possible this is a bit of a reach. After all, studies have also been conducted that justify smoking as a means of possibly reducing the potential for heart attacks and strokes, which is a bit like saying cancer is great because it lowers the odds of you dying painfully at a very old age. And yes, it might sound like this is a case of academic masturbation, with pretentious post-grads bending over backwards to try and come up with a valid explanation for their lazy taste in movies. But even if that’s the case, you know it doesn’t apply to you. You are the diamond in the rough, you little Mensa member, you.