The celebration of low culture has emerged as a fashionable pursuit in recent years, a vogue stretching from the blog world to as far as the tallest of ivory towers. We can look at Slavoj Zizek’s perennial disclosure of the tents of Lacanian psychoanalysis through the use of cinema, television and dirty jokes, or Fredric Jameson’s inquiries into science fiction. But regardless of the politics behind their disquisitions or the specific examples they wrench from popular culture, their work remains bound up within an institutional mode of discourse, adorned with academic rhetoric – bourgeois whispers carrying insight after insight on a carpet of restricted readership.

Vern’s everyman voice, by contrast, can be digested by all and doesn’t require citations of Hegel and Althusser to bolster its argument. The depth of his examination can be seen in the way he picks out minute details hitherto concealed by pace, pausing the action to identify newspaper headlines and diary notes, factoids that either enrich the story or cause an already confusing narrative to become that bit more confusing. He also humanises the productions by reminding us that there are genuine ideas that go into making these films, interesting and ambitious ideas that are beset by financial and logistical obstacles.

The political gesture of Seagalogy is that of a fist shaken at elite naysayers who disregard the aesthetic worth of films of the sort that would feature Seagal, cultural products that are deemed to be low culture and often refused a chance to exhibit their worth. Action flicks, horror flicks, comic books, heavy metal, computer games, these are regularly subject to scoffs from elite opinion, looked down upon as homogeneous feed for the stupid masses, brainless sludge to keep the proletariat under the thumb – even Adorno held this view. I mean, I like high modernism as much as anyone, but I’d be just as inclined to watch Hell Comes to Frogtown as I’d be to read The Flowers of Evil; both are wonderful, individual works of art and merit many hours spent in their company. Sure there’s shite out there, but a work of art is shite in its own right, not by way of its genre classification or the cultural presumptions associated with it. We must not forget that there’s just as much creativity involved in the development of computer games or graphic novels as in, say, theatre or art cinema, and that the former have the ability to excite and enthral just as much as the latter. While I myself am given to extreme hyperbole and heavily ironic gestures, my passion for the cinema of Bruce Campbell is as sincere as my passion for Nabokov (I mention Nabokov not to neutralise the former but to create a field of equality and balance).