I’ve mused about this before, but the release of a teaser for a commercial for The Incredible Hulk has made me feel that we’re really fucked up. It’s this movie in particular that has made me feel this way, because of the high level of awareness that there has not yet been a trailer for the film. It’s like we’ve gotten Pavlovian about the way movie marketing happens, and if a trailer isn’t released when we expect it to be released, we start to get weird.
Marketing has poisoned us. Will most people reporting on this teaser for a commercial see the inherent weirdness of such a thing? Aren’t ads supposed to be what we’re ignoring, what are cluttering up our landscapes both physical and mental? Yet here we are getting excited about an ad for an ad.
This has made me aware of something else: most of the people reading this probably experience movies primarily through ads. Most of the movie discussion on our message boards seems to be about the posters, trailers and ancillary licensed tie-ins for films rather than the films themselves. This is obviously anecdotal at best, but I feel like there’s a truth to it, that more and more people are skipping the theatrical experience, consuming movies as a series of advertisements, and eventually checking the actual product out on DVD or cable. Something’s broken.