Arts & Culture
Art in the Age of the Trailer
Earlier this week, The New York Times published a story by Michael Powell about Andrew Sarris, the longtime movie critic for the Village Voice, staunch advocate of the French New Wave, and mortal enemy of Pauline Kael.
Yeah, but have you seen the preview? | Photo: mustseeflix.com
The story is a tribute, a this-is-your-life moment for an 81-year-old man who helped define the golden age of film criticism on the occasion of his being sacked by the New York Observer. During the heady 1960s and 70s, Sarris and Kael and a few others were the rare intellectuals who were known and read by the public; they were taken seriously and they took seriously the world they wrote about. For them, Powell writes, film “was art worthy of sustained thought and argument.”
It’s amazing to think now that there was ever a time when film was deemed worthy of sustained thought. To think about an America where people waited to hear what some film critic had to say about Alfred Hitchcock’s use of mise-en-scene or the socialist underpinnings of The Wild Bunch is like trying to imagine a world covered in chocolate, packed with waterslides, populated by elves wearing Technicolor burlap sacks.
Because despite what box office statistics and celebrity gossip magazines might be telling us, movies just aren’t that relevant anymore. This is the age of YouTube and private video collections made public. It’s the age of instant gratification and discrete bursts of entertainment. It’s the age of movie trailers, not movies. And as our movies get louder and more formulaic, the trailers keep getting more subtle and sophisticated.
If there were some way to quantify aesthetic value, I would hire a statistician to conjure up a line graph representing the relative worth of movies vs. movie trailers over time and then publish my findings in some obscure journal. I guarantee the graph would look like a big “X,” with the quality of movies descending in inverse proportion to the rising value of their previews.
Which makes sense. We live in an age saturated by advertising, where products and promotional strategies have been so thoroughly market-tested and vetted, it’s almost as if marketing has become a branch of psychology: as accurate an understanding of the desires of the human brain as we’re likely to get. Because understanding the best way to convince millions of people to give you their money is probably the best way to understand people.
What does it all mean for the film industry? For one thing, it’s continually becoming less interested in the production of art and more interested in cross-promotional campaigns and product-placement deals with shoes companies and soda manufacturers. Studios know that these days even bad or nationally unsuccessful films will make money overseas or on the DVD market, so why bother making good movies? Just make them familiar and formulaic and full of skin and stars and explosions and the rest will take care of itself. And thus the selling of a movie becomes more important than the movie itself. Which explains why the quality of previews has gone up so dramatically over the last 20-30 years while the quality of the movies they’re promoting has gone down.
It didn’t used to be this way. Movie trailers used to be awful: bland afterthoughts so lacking in suspense or emotion or creativity that even a lover of the classics like me can’t help but cringe whenever one appears on a DVD. Compare the trailers for three of the best movies from the first 70 years of Hollywood history – The Third Man, High Noon, and The Godfather – to those of three of the worst from the last 10 years – A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Crash, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. There’s no comparison. The brilliant and subtle The Third Man is dressed up to look like a pot-boiling romantic Saturday serial in order to appeal to suburban housewives and their daydreaming husbands, High Noon is plagued by extended dialogue sequences that mean precisely nothing to anyone who hasn’t already seen the movie, and the team behind The Godfather trailer seems more interested in promoting a fictional book called 10 Essential Mafia Platitudes of Good Business by Vito Corleone than it is in the violence and Shakespearean intrigue at the center of the movie. Meanwhile, the trailers for the three more modern movies are completely and totally engaging; they move with a rhythm and a cadence that used to be reserved for feature-film storytelling. They come off sounding deep and significant and dramatic and exciting rather than precious and pompous and pretentious and self-important … which is what they are.
Unfortunately for those of us who love movie trailers (and who find a certain jaded hope in their unstoppable rise), the perils of putting too much weight on them as miniature pieces of self-contained art are starting to appear. For example, the climax of last year’s Oscar-nominated Frost/Nixon didn’t come an hour and a half into the film like it was supposed to; it appeared at exactly the two-minute eight-second mark of the theatrical trailer: “I’m saying when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Boom! Frost/Nixon in a nutshell, the whole dirty business – the film’s whole reason for being – summed up and laid bare for anyone with a television or a ticket to I Am Legend to see. Could you imagine if Darth Vader had mentioned that he was Luke Skywalker’s father in the preview for The Empire Strikes Back? Or if Faye Dunaway had blurted out the nature of her relationship with John Huston in the trailer for Chinatown? Maybe in their mania to compete with the narrative thrills of a three-minute home video about a kid hopped up on pain-killers, producers are forgetting the first rule of a teaser: You’ve got to tease. Give up the whole show for free and no one’s going to want to pay 10 bucks for a ticket.
Especially not when they can watch a cat playing the piano on their iPhone for nothing.
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