Venom’s Trash Philosophy

Oh Venom. Will there ever come a day where I don’t love you? Well, maybe, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

I remember the first time I watched Venom in theatres. It was intense, exciting, and dizzyingly dumb. What accent did Tom Hardy think he was doing? Why was the writing so cheesy and awkward? Intrigued, I watched the movie again - 7 more times, in theatres. Each time it got funnier, until the seventh time where it understandably started to get a little old.

Venom was not a good movie then, and now that I’ve seen Venom : The Last Dance, I can confirm that things haven't changed much. But oddly enough, there’s a point where something is so trashy it becomes deeply meaningful - which brings us to Venom’s trash philosophy.

For the rest of the article, just assume that every time you read “trash” it isn’t negative. Imagine distilling the very essence of sewage waste. It’s obviously still awful, but somehow there’s something glorious in its purified state. I suspect it’s the almost religious dedication it takes to focus so intently on something so terrible, but regardless of the cause, that’s what the Venom movies are for me.

I’ve already mentioned some of what makes the Venom movies terrible, but The Last Dance was truly a perfection of the art. There are so many things I could pick out, but as a writer, the writing really stood out to me. How much of writing advice is just “show don’t tell”? And it’s a visual medium, so it should be easy to show… right? Well, based on how much of the dialogue was just pure exposition, including characters repeating information into the void right after the audience learns it, it seems like it might not be.

Honestly, I would have normally cringed at that level of laziness—the characters seem to switch between the verbal roles of “amnesiac encountering the world for the first time” and “AI-generated answers to all of their questions.” Yet somehow, it fits Venom’s franchise perfectly. It's so awful that it feels borderline dadaist to me, which is what led me to realise that Venom (intentionally or not) holds a similar philosophy.

Consider the characters we’ve met throughout the Venom movies. If you focus on just the most recent one, you might notice something : all of the “good” characters are cringe-worthy at best and kinda slimy at worst. There’s Doctor Payne, a woman who gives off the same vibes as a horse girl but about aliens. There’s Sadie Christmas, a woman who leans into her last name a little bit too much, at least in the eyes of some of her coworkers. There’s a weird alien-obsessed hippy family who… well, they’re alien-obsessed hippies.

Oh, and of course there’s our dear Eddie Brock, a sweaty divorced man who’s barely managing to stumble through life at best. When it comes to more traditional hero types like military man Rex Strickland, though, he’s not a bad guy but he’s not exactly a hero either.

I wouldn’t call Venom’s glorification of trashiness dadaist because I don’t think it’s really meant to challenge social norms, but I do think it’s a love letter to the all the weird and cringy parts of life and especially to the people who’s defining characteristic is being “weird and cringy”. To me, the trilogy’s philosophical core is more or less that trash can be beautiful and meaningful too, and the fact that the movies communicated that by being trash themselves is a move that I unironically consider really artistically interesting.

Still, I’m not going to say that Venom’s creators should keep expanding on their philosophy of trash. Like I said at the beginning, there may come a day where I don't love it anymore. Apparently, the films were intended to be a trilogy and I really think they should stay that way. Like I said at the beginning, I love the Venom movies, but I don’t want to see any more of them - I even refused to watch the post-credits scene for The Last Dance. Even the best series can only go on so long before they become repetitive and played out, and I think Venom is already reaching that point. So please, if Kelly Marcel is out there reading this stick to your guns and leave the franchise where it is. There's no need to touch perfection.

Venom is awful, but its sheer obsession with being and loving trash has kept it fresh enough that we don’t mind the smell. I’ve done my best not to spoil the ending of The Last Dance here, but it’s heartfelt in a way that's as surprising as it is fitting. The reviews aren't wrong - The Last Dance is awful -, but know that being bad isn’t always a negative. That’s the trash philosophy Venom has been trying to teach us all along.