Trailers Undone

Don’t let the gleeful anti-establishment vibe coming from Green/Cheadle distract you from the fact that this is the latest entry in a sub-genre of cinematic storytelling so specific that we can call it "the controversial radio personality movie": Good Morning Vietnam, Talk Radio, Pump Up The Volume, Straight Talk, and Good Night And Good Luck being the first five examples that come to mind.

"You may have just cost me my FCC license!" rages Martin Sheen, the actor-as-archetype who represents white people, the law, capitalism, and actors who were already famous for excelling in morally ambiguous roles in the time in which this movie takes place. And yet, the final line of the trailer is "…and you walk like you got a stick broke off in yo’…" with the word "ass" neatly excised. Lean close to your speaker and you can hear the whisper: "Worry not, gentle soul. The bars on the creature’s cage are heavy and will protect you from the its claws. Trust us, we forged them ourselves."

Talk To Me trailer

If you’re a man, the sell here is this:

You get to see it-girl Scarlett Johannson as a vulnerable, insecure, impoverished darling taking joy in her maternal instincts in spite of herself. In other words, you get to imagine that the most unattainable It-Girl superstar of our day, who is already so rich that she could probably have you killed for her amusement if she so desired, is actually coltishly unaware of her sexuality, focused mainly on taking care of a child, and on a quest for a man who can provide for her. And you’re the guy in the Harvard t-shirt, who, it’s implied in the trailer, not only gets to fuck Scarlett, but whose interest she clings to as her only escape from her quasi-Cinderella like existence.

If you’re a woman, the sell here is this:

You get to see the most unattainable It-Girl superstar of our day, who is already so
rich that she could probably have you killed for her amusement if she
so desired, coltishly unaware of her sexuality, focused mainly on taking care of a child, and on a quest for a man who can provide for her. And you get to tell yourself that Scarlett is a mortal woman with real problems like yours, not a sex goddess who probably sleeps on a bed more expensive than your car, and you also get to imagine that during your most awkward moments, you actually comport yourself with the same easy grace that she does. And you get to imagine fucking the guy in the Harvard t-shirt.

If you’re gay, you’re not in the target audience, and you’re not really expected to even see it, although there is a faint hope that you’ll see it anyway because of the diva stuff with Laura Linney.

The Nanny Diaries Trailer

Many movies that originate with a "high concept" also have a "working title," which is to say, a title that concisely indicates the marketing strategy driving the project. Sometimes it’s something like "Adam Sandler 2007 Project" or "James Bond 7," and sometimes it’s something like "Snakes On A Plane."

In the latter case, if the movie still has the generic high-concept title by the time it gets to the theater, that’s a good indication that not much texture has been added. In a case like this, though, we can go a step further and see the working title behind the working title: "The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Except Instead Of The Guy Being 40, He’s Blind." In fact, it’s not unrealistic to suppose that at some point in pre-production, this project was referred to as "The 40 Year-Old Virgin meets Ray."

Blind Dating Trailer

The only thing potentially funny about sheep attacking people is that you could hardly blame the sheep. Which is to say, the humor has to be tinged with a bit of actual fear that maybe sheep should be attacking people.

If you’re not going to go down that road, then you’re asking the audience to laugh at the equivalent of showing us your valentine underwear for ninety minutes.

Finally, the phrase "the violence of the lambs" is only going to be funny to someone who doesn’t understand the reference.

Black Sheep Trailer

No amount of acknowledging the mediocrity of your own product will ever make up for the fact that you have a mediocre product.

Bee Movie trailer

Aqua Teen trailer

A psychoanalyst has some high-tech way of getting inside people’s dreams and helping them battle their inner demons. 

That’s all the Paprika trailer tells us about the plot, but that’s all we need to know.
And that’s probably all there is, anyway. You don’t watch anime for the plot, even really good anime, although there is inevitably some idea informing the stunning imagery, usually something about the relativity of nationalistic morals, or the duality of mind and body, or the sexual appeal of octupi.

Literally setting such a movie in the world of dreams makes a lot of sense, because the audience can let go of its silly concerns about what the heck is actually going on. Watching this movie is going to be almost exactly like watching the trailer; it’s just going to last longer.

The core idea was also used in Dreamscape, although that movie was more about the real-world
intrigue around a presidential assassination attempt that takes place in the dream world.

The notion of going into others’ dreams to repair their trauma is a metaphor for our collaborative desire to reconnect with one another through the collective unconscious.

Penelope is the name of Odysseyus’ wife, who waits with unflagging faithfulness for him to return from his long journey. The implication of the heroine here having the same name is that she’s a diamond in the rough, a domestic treasure waiting to be found. She’s a princess who is the reward for her own rescue; having her means having everything a man could want in a wife. To have all this, he must only persevere through a long and arduous journey, i.e. get over the fact that she looks like a pig.

On his way home, Odysseus encounters the nymph Circe, who turns most of his men into pigs. Odysseus himself is immune, and for this, Circe falls in love with him and rewards him with herself. So, the trailer indicates, he who remains immune to Penelope’s pig-ness (read: his own pigishness in caring about her pig-ness), will be rewarded with the woman who is both the source of the pig problem and the reward for getting past it. This combination of Penelope and Circe is not a stretch. Circe further rewards Odysseus for his integrity by helping him return to Penelope, and years later she implicitly endorses their marriage when she marries their son Telemachus, who has waited with his mother for his father’s return.

The casting of Christina Ricci is significant; since the audience knows that the ostensibly ugly girl is actually Christina Ricci, it’s understood that she’s beautiful "on the inside," the fact that men are disgusted by her is easily understood to mean that those men are simply wrong ("they don’t realize it’s Christina Ricci" = "they don’t realize that she’s actually beautiful" = "they don’t see her inner beauty"). Ricci’s quirky appeal is also useful here.   

Another implicit reference here is the Twilight Zone episode, " The Eye of the Beholder," in which a young woman with a beautiful human face is deemed ugly by an alternate world full of pig-faced people. And no movie buff is going to watch this trailer without thinking of Mask, a much more serious treatment of the ugly-is-beautiful story (and based on actual events), starring Eric Stoltz.

Penelope Trailer

The protagonist’s name, Farley, awkwardly invokes the Farrelly brothers, whose names we would not have been surprised to see on this film, an association that the screenwriter may have hoped to create in the mind of readers back when this project was in its early stages.

The antagonist’s name, Woodcock, suggests indefatigable machismo, i.e. in a battle of masculine stamina, you can’t compete with a wood cock. A wood cock won’t get tired or soft, it hurts, and is unaffected by, what it penetrates. The fat boy turned self-help guru (Farley, read: eternal adolescent) must face the fact that the overwhelming masculine force that dominated him in his childhood isn’t going away; he must contend with it again as an adult.

This is an Oedipal comedy. Woodcock is a father figure, both in the sense that he was the dominant
masculine force in Farley’s formative years, and in the sense that he is now married to Farley’s mother. Farley, coming home from a book tour (read: living on the energy of his newfound adult strength as his own man) finds his mother married to the gym teacher that tormented him (read: the pseudo-father whom Farley thought he had escaped from has now reasserted his father-ness by becoming an actual stepfather). Farley and Woodcock proceed to compete in masculine arenas; wrestling and working out. If Farley can find a way to defeat Woodcock, he will effectively "kill" the suppressive "father" in his own psyche, allowing him to feel like a real man.

It’s significant that the mother is played by Susan Sarandon, whose sexual appeal seems not to diminish as she gets older. The good mother is still sexy, the bad father is still virile; therefore there is still a chance that the son’s rise to alpha-male status is only temporary, or perhaps has always been illusory.

The appeal of a story with such powerful archetypes is that everyone intuitively understands them. We all have our Mr. Woodcock, whether it’s a person or a thing. We have all won major battles that we secretly fear are not really over. The one brief moment in the trailer where we see Farley physically overpowering Woodcock is a calculated tease. What’s really being sold here is the opportunity to work through one’s own Oedipal conflict without having to actually get out of one’s chair.

Mr. Woodcock trailer