A Discussion Of The Art Of The Trailer (II)

So why do I watch trailers? And why do I love the trailers of some films, but not the films themselves?

I think a lot of it has to do with what one of my professors says about trailers: once you see the trailer you don’t even need to see the film. That’s somewhat of an exaggeration, but he makes a fair point. Most of the time, trailers tell you all you need to know. If there’s a plot twist, the trailer either directly hints at it or plain gives it away. If it’s a comedy, the trailer provides all the biggest laughs. If it’s a romantic comedy…well…we already know how those plots work anyway.

The point is that trailers, in some small way, prove to us that films aren’t about the plots. Films are about the experiences. What marketing firms have figured out about mainstream audiences is that they want to know what they’re going to get. They don’t want surprises. That’s part of the reason that trailers tell you everything you need to know about a film.

Could I—in any way—claim that to be wrong?

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This argument dives directly into a fun area of literary theory that follows out of Russian Formalist theories derived from the work of Vladimir Propp. Although not a literary theorist himself, Propp has become famous in literary circles thanks to his in-depth analysis of the elements in Russian fairy tales, breaking down the stories into recognizable “morphemes.” These morphemes, according to Propp’s arguments, could theoretically be used as building blocks in the construction of fairy tales. Naturally, people who could not have cared less for Russian fairy tales took Propp’s work and applied it across the broad spectrum of literary fiction.

Whether or not one agrees with the Proppian notions of narrative construction (I, for one, am fascinated by his ideas, but not wedded to them), they present a clear method of discussing popular fiction and film—particularly when looking at common plotlines, such as romantic comedy, in which I indulged in the last post in that brief comparison of Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached. Two different films, for sure, but the trailers seem to disagree. They seem the same, because that sameness is what the marketing world thinks we want.

And maybe they’re right?

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As a study case, however, I seem to represent a tacit failure on the part of these marketing ventures. By watching the trailer of Our Idiot Brother over and over again (I’ll probably see it one more time before the night is over), I won’t need to see the film. I’ll know pretty much how everything turns out in the end. I can picture the good-natured stoner played by Paul Rudd pressing his heartwarming life-view on his three sisters and I can imagine the three of them—each faulted in their own way—changing thanks to his tireless good humor. So it turns out that I don't need to see the film at all! The film trailer did that for me!

In that way, trailers become mini-films for me. For some people, they save, I think, quite a bit of time in the long run. Unless, that is, you watch one of them upwards of 40 times...in that case, you might as well just watch the damn thing.

A Discussion Of The Art Of The Trailer (I)

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

Saturday Songs - Sept. 3

1. “It’s Better To Spend Money” – Quiet Company

Beginning with infectious keyboards and a cheer from the band, you know from the start that Quiet Company is a band to reckon with. But not only that, there are lyrics that jump out of the melody with a snarling comedy—“all the whores that you’ve had won’t make you a man.” They’ve got the same careful balance and sense of song structure as the pop geniuses Guster, but not yet the mature cachet. Perhaps someday?

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2. “Odds of Being Alone” – Amy Stoup and Trent Dabbs

This delicate song of love and loss is right up there with “Paperweight” (Joshua Radin and Schuyler Fisk). Consisting largely of the repeating lyric “wouldn’t you like to know?”—a question explicitly directed at the problem of the song’s title. With a gentle, acoustic rhythm, the song sounds just as sad as the lyrics are.

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3. “Harlan County” – Jim Ford

One of the most famous songs from a man who is now considered a “lost” songwriter—in the same vein as Blaze Foley—“Harlan County” is a tragic, funny anti-ode to the coal-mining county in Kentucky. The song is filled with arch character sketches, including of Willie, who marries his mother:

“He stood five-six

his brother was a shovel and a coal mine pick

with the heart of a lion and the soul of a man.

He worked twelve hours a day,

seven days ever’ week,

forty days ever’ month,

diggin’ for a bone in a hillside.”

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4. “Welcome to the Working Week” – Elvis Costello

Classic Costello, this was also the first song on Costello’s debut album. You have a template for so much of his work to come all in this one track. You’ve got the stirring of white-collar rage here (Costello had previously worked a number of office jobs—data entry clerk, etc.) and the suggestive wordplay that would become his trademark.

Additionally, in his first line, he has the audacity to make a masturbation reference: “Now that you’re picture’s in the paper being rhythmically admired” (my emphasis); how many artists have that kind of gall?

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5. “Amassed Complications” – Food Will Win The War

LISTEN HERE

Saddled with, as they admitted at a show I saw, “one of the worst band names in history,” Food Will Win The War starts off their five-song debut EP with this rollicking track. The rest of the EP, unfortunately, finds the band losing steam over the last four tracks, but this two-and-a-half-minute song is a real gem.

10 Things: A Tamer "Taming"?

Sometimes—not very often—we all have the good fortune to stumble upon a literary work and its filmic adaptation within days of one another. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I find it immeasurably helpful, bringing about the unintended consequence of useful parallels and contrasts. We cannot, of course, miss these watching a filmic adaptation (or, vice-versa, read a textual original).

Over the past week, I had the fortune of both reading The Taming of the Shrew (this, I admit, was for class) as well as seeing the film 10 Things I Hate About You (which is, I think it’s safe to say, mainstream Hollywood’s favorite Shakespeare adaptation). As wildly different as they are, the two still create a substantial dialogue when placed side by side.

The character of Kate, for one, is seen in an entirely different light thanks to some careful backstory in 10 Things; Kate’s having slept with the sleazy-greaser-like Joey Donner ends up serving as a somewhat plausible explanation for her “shrewish” behavior. Kate (Katharina) in the play is never provided with any similarly compelling backstory for her behavior in the Shakespeare version of the story. From the first time she appears on stage, she is a sharp-tongued, often-angry woman.

In light of these two different characters, my temptation is to respond to the fuller (at least by first perception) character of Kate in 10 Things. Part of human nature, I think, is to look for rationale behind strange behavior; once writers/directors provide us with the reasons for why characters do the things that they do, we are often attracted to that resulting fullness.

Thinking in this manner about Kate in 10 Things led me, however, towards an examination of Katharina and her curious attitude and “shrewish” behavior in The Taming. When I reread the first scene of Act I, it appears as if Shakespeare sets up Kate’s character as a kind of stereotype rather than a “full” character. This Kate, being a stereotype, forces the reader to re-imagine the intended effect of the blatant sexism and cruelty endured by Kate. In a way, I think that the mere presence of stereotypes often points not only to farcicality, but also to critical satire.

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Whether or not I buy that interpretion of The Taming of the Shrew as not so much a display of egregious sexism but rather a carefully (and maybe not so openly) constructed critique of gender relations, I think that it’s fair to say that 10 Things does not offer any sort of critique along the same lines as Shakespeare.

This lack of critique in the film adaptation is due partly to the absence of the Induction in the play; the Induction helps distance the audience from the actually plot of The Taming and provides a frame by which we can perceive the satirical nature of the roles. Viewing Katharina as a stereotype, however, also helps us to visualize that satire.

The issue here is that while The Taming is overtly sexist and makes a big show about that in order to push the satire home, any sexism in 10 Things is hiding beneath the surface. However, once you start to pick apart the character of Kate in the film, the underlying sexism is obvious. Why has Kate been angry and “shrewlike” for her high school career? According to the backstory provided by the writers, Kate is angry because she (prematurely?) lost her virginity to Joey Donner thanks to the fact that “everybody was doing it” back in the ninth grade. Her essential "wickedness and rebellion," she goes on to explain to her sister Bianca, is because she never wanted to do something just because everyone else wanted to ever again.

That sounds fair enough…but the fact is that the reason for her rebellion is not just peer pressure and the desire to be different—but peer pressure about having sex and endorsing sexuality with her boyfriend. None of this seems all that sexist until we consider what brought her back out of this “shrewish” behavior: Patrick Verona. Verona—the character of Petruchio in the play—eases her out of her mode of rebellion such that, by the end of the film, we are left with a Kate who seems more acceptable and less “shrewish.” She lacks the stark obedience and submissiveness of Katharina in the play, but she has still been changed...or "tamed" from earlier in the film.

It is such that the film actually “tames” women far more than the original play does (so long as it is read as a farce/satire). Perhaps Shakespeare adaptations for the big screen aren't so simple as they seem?