Tease Me
The argument for teasers only, no trailers, thank you.
‘You’re such a tease’, is not an insult. It’s a compliment on your mysterious charm, your seductive allure. You offer the idea of a fun romp in the hay without the actual act of romping and the possibility of waking up disappointed, or worse, with regret.
So go on and tease me why don’t you.
I mean, theatrically of course.
In a recent Vox piece ‘Stop watching movie trailers’, Alissa Wilkinson makes the argument for the immediate halt of movie trailer viewing. Her points on their shortfallings include;
Movie trailers feel redundantly similar to one another
That they show us (the only and) best moments
They don’t accurately reflect the tone of the movie (ie. White Noise, whose trailer should have been more closely related to Dr. Strangelove than 2012),
And that they feel so looooooooooooooooong.
How many time have you heard BRAAAM in a trailer since Zimmer’s score for The Dark Knight? Hollywood is just as apt as any other, if not more, to latch on to a new trend that works and beat the audience over the head. “Scream at a white wall about it why don’t you,” they say smugly. “You’re still watching them.” And those clever little devils are right. The echo of redundancy likely won’t cut out until the introduction of the next trend.
This trend machine has puppeteered the trailer for quite a while now. Once upon the dawn of movie trailers, one company, The NSS, was practically the sole monopolizer in charge of every trailer release from the 1930s to the 40s. They created many of the themes we still see today including; the use of typography, narration, music, and montage. Sound familiar? Hmm…
These four themes were rotated in tone and description depending on the genre. Now, there are only so many genres to choose from. Just as many in the 30s in fact as there are today. And, same as today, the movie must be marketed in one of these categories. If the movie doesn’t fall into that acutely outlined category it will be forced onto the nearest team as its only means of survival. No stragglers allowed! Danger Noah Baumbach! Conform! CONFORM!
And yet… before the fiery wreckage of the trailer, there is a spark. Before redundancy and conformity, there burns a magical marketing mechanism that manages to slip past the hungry cogs of entrapment… The Teaser.
Let’s Save Ourselves a Little Time
Out of a two-hour movie, the teaser features only 30-45 seconds of material. So fast! This means that as long as you have just 1 in every 160 juicy bits to plug into your sales pitch, you’ll be off to the races, Seabiscuit. It’s the perfect length of time to show the audience only the most crucial hints as to what your movie is going to be and how you want the audience to feel. No plot? No problem. Show us some sweeping landscapes, famous faces, and pick up the pace with a series of adrenaline-inducing inserts that imply importance, and BAM (or BRAAAM) you’ve got yourself a ticket to all of our tickets.
The trailer on the other hand, as decreed by The MPAA, can be up to two minutes and thirty seconds long. Now sweet pets, just because the MPAA has gifted you two minutes and thirty seconds does not mean that you need to use every last drop. Your movie can be however long you want it to be. Get your gluttonous minutes in then if you want.
Oppenheimer
Full-length trailer: Two minutes and three seconds of slow-motion bomb imagery, typical drone scenery, and close-ups of worried expressions that could have been condensed just as easily back into its original teaser form.
Teaser: The adrenaline builds from the very beginning- a voiceover; “You gave them the power to destroy themselves.” and the figure (Oppenheimer) leaves the frame with a ticking countdown that feels like impending doom. In forty seconds. This is all the feathery tease of cataclysmic trauma that I want. We can wait for the bomb to drop on the release day.
The Whale
Teaser: One minute and fourteen seconds, but really when you take the production companies and closing credits away, sits in about that forty-second range. With just a hallway, a beach, a line of voiceover, and those three mournful faces- you’ve got forty seconds that build to chill-inducing punch-me-in-the-heart-gut emotion. Go ahead and tell me I’m wrong!
Full-length trailer: An abundance of soapy snapshots that don’t have room to breathe followed by a lot of quotes telling you how great it is. Seriously, congratulations on the accolades, but we already know it’s going to be great! You can leave it out and with it the award show back-pattery.
Have you seen the trailer for Citizen Kane? Yes, I know, how on earth is anyone supposed to hold a candle to the cinematic masterpiece?! But hear me out. Citizen Kane did many a great thing for The Movies, and one of these was the trailer. It’s chock full of artistry, personality, and charm. Because it’s more than a trailer. Like Alfred Hitchcock later did with the trailer to Psycho, it’s more ‘Welcome to my crib’ the short film than trailer.
Yet cribs can still be welcomed-to within the teaser time limit. And not just the cribs. There are whole worlds of creative wiggling room! Feel free to reinvent the wheel, or put your mark on the old one, as Ms. Gerwig did this year. At the time of this article, there has yet to be a full-length trailer released for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie; The production that took the world by trend-setting storm from the first neon bedecked paparazzi photos. What followed these photos though was a work of art. Even if the movie never comes out, at least we’ll have that Space Odyssey introduction to a doll version of Margot Robbie as a testament to what one-minute greatness can be.
Oh-ho, but the teaser isn’t enough, you say? You just need to give us MORE my precious little marketing monsters? Then pair the tease with a nice, three-sentence paragraph description, (the kind they used to print at the back of the newspaper with the star rating, and just the four stars instead of ten). And that’s it. That’s the only allowance I’m giving.
In doing this, you’re ensuring that when we leave the theater with dreams of sugary cinema dancing in our heads, there’s no opportunity for us to be upset. We can’t be mad about seeing the movie before the movie or feeling mislead by the tone, etc,… The only thing about the movie the audience can be upset at is… the movie.
Sure, maybe it’s misleading. Like if they only put the positive outcomes of your arthritis medication in the ad and intentionally didn’t mention that you could experience the lengthy list of side effects that makes you wonder how the drug is even legal in the first place. But this isn’t the pharmacy. This is the movie theater and the medicinal properties of cinema are that of the emotions and not inflammation of the joints.
Understandably this may come off as a reckless sense of abandon- a lawless Fury Road that could lead to even further false advertisement than the trailers already offer, but… won’t it be more fun?
I raise my ticket stub in a rallying cry that we release ourselves from this burden we carry. That we remove the weight of the trailer and keep only the teaser as the hitch. It’s a one-size-fits all attachment for any vehicle that will usher any and every family to where they need to be- back in the movie theater.
References;
The original trail(er) blazer;
Wilkinson, Alissa. “Stop Watching Movie Trailers.” Vox, Vox, 29 Nov. 2022, https://www.vox.com/culture/23482221/fabelmans-trailer-armageddon-she-said.
Read this incredibly insightful short history of the movie trailer by Daniel DiStefano here;
DiStefano, Daniel, et al. “A Brief History of Film Trailers, or: Turns out This Post Is Not about Peter Orner.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 1 July 2015, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2015/07/a-brief-history-of-film-teasers-or-turns-out-this-post-is-not-about-peter-orner/#:~:text=Film%20trailers%20were%20conceived%20in,films%20shown%20at%20Loew's%20theaters.
and Matthew Schimkowitz’s here;
Schimkowitz, Matthew. “An Epic History of the Movie Trailer.” Hopes&Fears, 20 Nov. 2015, http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/culture/film/214473-epic-history-movie-trailers-mad-max-independence-day.
