Guilty Pleasures Are Innocent: A Defense of Loving the 'Wrong' Beer and the 'Wrong' Movie

I'm going to tell you something that might get my Cinema Brewers press credentials revoked, but here goes: I have watched The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift more times than I have watched Bicycle Thieves, and every single viewing has been voluntary.

I also, on a fairly regular basis, drink Coors Banquet. From the can. Without shame.

I have a friend — a genuine, credentialed film critic who has sat through the complete filmography of Béla Tarr — who watches Mamma Mia! every December and considers it a spiritual practice. I have another friend who manages a well-regarded craft brewery and whose personal fridge at home is stocked primarily with Miller High Life.

None of us are confused about what we're doing. We know the difference between Stalker and Tokyo Drift. We know the difference between a dry-hopped saison and the Champagne of Beers. We have the taste, the vocabulary, and the context to make those distinctions. We're just choosing not to apply them all the time, because sometimes what you actually want is the thing that makes you feel good rather than the thing that makes you feel sophisticated.

The question is: why do so many people in both the film and craft beer worlds make us feel like that's a character flaw?

The Hierarchy Nobody Asked For

Every enthusiast community develops a hierarchy eventually. It's almost sociologically inevitable. You start with a shared love of something, and then you start subdividing — the people who got here first, the people who know more, the people who've had the rarer thing or seen the more obscure film. The hierarchy feels like connoisseurship from the inside and looks like insecurity from the outside.

In craft beer, the hierarchy has a specific flavor. It tends to manifest as the tap room regular who visibly winces when someone orders a domestic lager at a bar that has thirty craft options. It's the Untappd power user who has checked in 2,400 beers and considers this a personality. It's the online forum where a newcomer asks for a recommendation and gets three paragraphs about why their palate isn't ready for what they're asking about.

In film, it's the Letterboxd review that spends more time establishing the reviewer's credentials than engaging with the actual movie. It's the film school graduate who can't discuss Jurassic Park without air-quoting the word "entertainment." It's the podcast that treats any enjoyment of a commercially successful film as evidence of false consciousness.

Both communities have built elaborate systems for making newcomers feel unwelcome and enthusiasts feel inadequate, and both would benefit enormously from just... not doing that.

What We Actually Mean by "Guilty Pleasure"

The phrase itself is worth examining, because it's doing a lot of ideological work in a very small space. A guilty pleasure implies that the pleasure is real but that the guilt is warranted — that there's something genuinely wrong with enjoying the thing, and that a more evolved version of you would have better taste.

This is nonsense, and I mean that in the most technical sense available.

Sarah, a bartender at a craft brewery in Austin who asked me not to use her last name because, and I quote, "my regulars will never let me live this down," told me that her comfort movie is Legally Blonde and that she pairs it, always, with a Lone Star. "I know every note of every beer we make," she said. "I can tell you the IBU count and the yeast strain and what food it pairs with. But sometimes I just want to watch Elle Woods get into Harvard Law and drink something cold and familiar. Those two things coexist fine."

Marcus, a film programmer at an independent theater in Chicago, has a similar confession. "I program Bergman retrospectives and I write grant applications about the importance of preserving difficult cinema," he told me over, appropriately, a very serious Flemish red ale. "And I have seen Con Air probably fifteen times. Nicolas Cage putting that bunny on the airstrip is one of my favorite moments in American film. I'm not being ironic. That movie is a joy."

What both of these people are describing isn't a failure of taste. It's a sophisticated relationship with taste — one that includes the ability to step outside the hierarchy and just be a person who likes things.

The Gatekeeping Tax

Here's the practical damage that gatekeeping does, beyond making people feel bad at parties.

In craft beer, the culture of connoisseurship has historically been a barrier to entry for communities that weren't already represented in the industry — women, people of color, working-class drinkers who didn't grow up with the cultural capital to decode the vocabulary. When the price of admission to a conversation about beer includes knowing what a "dry hop addition" is and having opinions about the Burton Union fermentation system, you've built a moat around something that should just be enjoyable.

In film, the equivalent cost is the experience of someone who loves movies but doesn't love the community around them. The person who watches everything on Netflix and has genuinely passionate responses to what they see, but who's been told often enough that their taste is basic that they've stopped talking about it in certain rooms. That person's enthusiasm — unmediated, uncurated, completely genuine — is exactly what both art forms need more of.

Gatekeeping doesn't protect the quality of the thing. It just protects the social status of the people doing the gatekeeping.

A Proposal for Unironic Enthusiasm

The alternative to gatekeeping isn't the abandonment of standards. You can think Jeanne Dielman is a masterpiece AND cry at Paddington 2. You can appreciate the complexity of a Rodenbach Grand Cru AND genuinely love the fact that a cold Modelo exists on a hot day. These are not contradictions. They are the full range of a person who actually enjoys things.

The move I'm advocating for is unironic enthusiasm — the willingness to say, without protective hedging or self-deprecating qualifiers, that something made you happy. Not "it's a guilty pleasure" or "I know it's dumb, but" — just the clean, direct statement that you liked it.

Try it. Next time someone asks what you've been watching or drinking, lead with the thing you actually enjoyed most, not the thing that makes you sound the most impressive. See what happens to the conversation.

My guess is that someone else in the room has been waiting to admit the same thing.

Mine's Tokyo Drift. Yours is whatever it is. Both are valid. Both are welcome here.

Cheers.