Firstly, my apologies for a slow
week on the blog—homework and newspaper(work) have been somewhat of a slog
recently. I’ll be sure to keep the content updated this week. Secondly—I know
some of you out there look forward to this feature—but there will be no
Saturday Songs feature for this week. Next week I’ll try to make it up to you
in assembling a five-song collection of fun, free music from a bunch of
different artists. Until then, enjoy the first of my two- or three-part
discussion of film trailers!
~
Confession: I have been a film
trailer addict for a long time.
I wait for new trailers with an
almost religious fervor; I watch my favorites over and over again; I spend
hours on trailer websites poring over the minutia of romantic comedy plots and
mindless action sequences. I like to compare old trailers with their resulting
films. I like to compare the textual teaser sometimes on the side with the
trailer itself. I hate teaser trailers. I hate trailers that don’t tell you
anything about the film they’re supposed to be advertising. Either tell me the
twist or don’t—don’t only tell me
that there is a twist.
But more than anything, I hate
trailers that make a film into what it is not.
In the wide world of marketing,
the film trailer is the one form of advertisement that most people don’t find
bothersome. My family, at least, makes a special point to arrive at the movie
theater on time just to make sure that we don’t miss the previews. Even I
subscribe to that movie-going requirement…despite the fact that I’ve usually
seen all the trailers already.
~
So what is at the root of my
obsession?
Consistency. Security. Sameness.
Those are some answers as to why I (and many others) turn to film trailers as a
pastime. Film trailers, despite the humongous amount of different films and
types of cinema that they represent, are usually more or less the same. That’s
partly because there aren’t that many ad agencies out there that make trailers
(you can usually tell when it’s not one of the professional outfits working
with the trailer) as well as because the form of the trailer has, for the past
20 years or so, been more or less agreed upon.
What’s so fascinating about the
trailer is that there are some strict qualifications attached to them. The
first, most important one is that trailers have been designated by the MPAA
(Motion Pictures Association of America) to be no longer than two minutes and
thirty seconds if they are to be shown in theaters. Secondly, trailers have
their own specific rating system, which has come into use over the past couple
years. This trailer rating system, it turns out, works a lot like traffic
lights. There are three colors used to designate the appropriateness of
trailers: green, yellow, and red—which work together in a loose kind of
severity.
“Green-band” trailers, as the
industry usually refers to them, are for general audiences of all ages. They
can be shown before any film in a theater. “Yellow-band” trailers are only for
the Internet and connote age-appropriate trailers for whatever website they’re
posted on. This seems to be a generally lackluster effort to provide some
racier material than the usually inoffensive “green-band” trailers but still
avoid the kiss-of-death “red-band” trailers. “Red-band” trailers, as you’ve
probably guessed, are approved for only restricted audiences, meaning that they
may be shown for R-rated or NC-17-rated films.
All this, however, is a
roundabout way of pointing out that those people out there who assemble film
trailers have quite a series of guidelines they have to work around. A lot of
the dirty humor included in film trailers is extraordinarily indirect or aloof;
they cannot reference anything explicitly or the MPAA will be all over them.
~
But back to that sense of
security—why do I feel so safe and comfortable watching film trailers? What’s
the psychological pull for me behind those “green-bands”?
Some literary theorists subscribe
to the notion that there are a very limited number of plots out there in the
world. Some of them are obvious—how many times have we seen the “outsider
enters a native population being destroyed by the outsider’s civilization (for
fill-in-the-blank-reason) and decides to help them and resist own population”?
To the unwary eye, that sounds like a pretty darn specific “plot”. But stop and
think a second. That plot—or subplot—exists in dozens of films; two major
Hollywood film—Avatar, Dances with Wolves—immediately appear as
prime examples. So there’s something to this theory of plots. The real interest
to some of these theorists is how the plots differ in terms of context (in this
case, alien plant vs. the American West) and, for instance, how that resulting
contrast ends up being revealing about our culture.
The best example in popular
culture right now is the link between the much-derided “fuck-buddy” films Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached. The two films not
only share the same basic plot, but an eerily similar ad campaign. I stumbled
across a mash-up of the two trailers and was struck by that eerie similarity. I
noticed then that the individual film trailers—not necessarily because they’re
incapable of showing specific details in the film, but because they’re
interested in appealing to that basic plot—are the same thing. Check out the
trailer below.
~
What’s so laughable about my
obsession is that I don’t ever end up watching most of these films…so why do I
watch the trailers? And why do I love the trailers of some films, but not the films
themselves?
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