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If you’re not familiar with The Last Drive-In (Shudder), the show consists of Joe Bob hosting a film - introducing it, rating it, and interjecting hosted segments periodically during the film’s run-time. These segments include commentary on the movie, sharing insights about the making of it as well as its stars and director.
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Watching one is like sitting down at your favorite sports-ball game with someone who knows all the players, the history of the team, has read interviews with all the above, and can share all that information with you in an interesting way - but instead of a sports-ball game, it’s a movie.
With that said, since you’re reading this, it’s likely because you’ve seen an episode of The Last Drive-In. As such, you are already aware that hosts Joe Bob Briggs and Darcy “The Mail Girl” know what they’re talking about. They’ve done the research, they’ve dug into the minutiae, and they’ve read up on the creators’ interviews.
And it’s in the discussion of those director interviews where Joe Bob frequently mentions the “Intentional Fallacy.”
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Intentional Fallacy is a term used in art, literature, (and clearly film) criticism to say that the makers of these things (writers and directors) can’t be trusted about what they say their intention in making that book, poem, film, or painting was. From the critic’s point-of-view, these creators basically can’t be trusted and (as Joe Bob mentions in one of the following examples) could just be making shit up after the fact.
If you’d like a more academic definition than that, just fill in ‘author’ with filmmaker/director and ‘text’ with film in the following quote from The Critical Experience which describes the problems that create the Intentional Fallacy:
“First, we can never know what the author’s intent was. Our best evidence is the text itself. And what do we do if we decide intent and text differ, but we still have a good poem? Second, the authors may not know exactly what they intend, or they may change their minds (as when they revise).” (Cowles 12)
Essentially, it boils down to a single idea - the artistic creation should speak for itself. All the explanation that we can find in interviews, all the times a writer or director tells an interviewer what ______ means in their movie or book, and all the backstory or content (that’s not actually in the book or movie) a director or writer adds through these interviews or discussions after the fact - all of it should be tossed aside.
It's clear that Job Bob is a big believer in the Intentional Fallacy because there were at least three different times during the course of The Last Drive-In when Joe Bob has used this term (in addition to this one in an interview with 1428 Elm). Let's take a look at them...
1. VHS Night (Season 3, Episode 15) - Sledgehammer
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During the fourth Joe Bob segment (1:16:02), he talks about the lengthy establishing shots of the film's house in Sledgehammer.
There’s even mention of the notes he takes as he watches the films he presents to us. And in those notes, Joe Bob puts together an interesting theory as to why those shots are so long (“He summons the spirit of the killer because you’re watching that house, and the image holds for so long, you’re expecting something to appear.”) But Joe Bob read an interview with David Prior (the writer/director of Sledgehammer) where Prior said those long shots were just padding for the movie’s short run-time.
After that setup, he reminds us viewers of our English class. And especially that we shouldn’t fall victim to the Intentional Fallacy. Joe Bob finishes the thought on a definitive note saying, “I don’t care what he intended to do" preferring his own interpretation of what he saw in the film.
2. Night of the Living Dead (Season 4, Episode 1)
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In the second (of recent memory) mention of Intentional Fallacy from Joe Bob, he mentions that many times viewers will "justify their interpretation of it by quoting something that Romero said about it."
But as you might have guessed, Joe Bob follows that up with, "I don't care what Romero said about it. I only care about what's on the screen. Romero might've been trying to do a lot of things. There may be a lot of things in his head, but using his words to explain the movie - that's what my English Profs used to call the Intentional Fallacy. And we won't be doing that here."
This leads into a discussion of Duane Jones as the lead, and what Romero may have meant to say to the audience by casting him as such in 1968. Joe Bob dispels any rumors of a message that might be found in Jones's casting. And finishes by saying that Duane Jones "didn't much care."
3. Tenebrae (Season 4, Episode 10)
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The third reference to Intentional Fallacy from Joe Bob comes as he's talking about Dario Argento's 1982 film, Tenebrae. The film includes a very extended shot of the exterior of a house that follows the outer structure of the building, peers through open windows, then moves to more outer structure, etc. According to Joe Bob, Argento said the film is "set five years in the future, after an apocalyptic event has thinned out the population. And now everybody is rich, and there's more space. But nobody remembers what the apocalyptic event was." To which, Joe Bob's response is, of course, "What? I guess it's an interesting idea, but that's nowhere in the movie. You know, how are we supposed to know that? It sounds like bullshit you make up later so that you'll sound interesting in an interview."
While he doesn't explicitly mention Intentional Fallacy this time, it's pretty clear that's what he's referencing.
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So, if there's a lesson from Joe Bob here, it's to disregard what writers and filmmakers and directors say about their work. They could have started off meaning one thing, but changed their mind when it was all edited together. They might have started off meaning to convey one thing, but the audience found something else entirely in what they created. They could also just be FUCKING LYING. We won't and can never know.
Be sure to listen closely and you might hear Joe Bob mention Intentional Fallacy again when they return for Season 5!!
Cowles, David. The Critical Experience. Dubuque, Iowa, Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1994.
