Naked Lunch, Its Awesome Trailer, and Movie Ads

Yes, I’m talking about Cronenberg again. Hold onto your butts. 

Marketing, in theory, is a pretty simple operation. Well, the operation isn’t simple at all, but the core concept is: Sell your product. Marketing for movies is even simpler. Just copy whatever the latest big trailer did.

I mean, how many of us have mocked the glut of ads aping the “Inception noise?”

Now, you guys want to see a kick-ass trailer that stands out, for a movie that was surely almost impossible to sell? I suggest the trailer for David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Despite the fact that it didn’t exactly light the world on fire, I think its trailer is indicative of the best approach to selling ANY kind of movie. Meet me after the jump and I’ll show you.

Personally, I would have been intimidated as hell if I drew the “make trailer” straw for Naked Lunch. I’ve touched on the movie before in one of my many Cronenberg-related pieces, but it’s a trip. Not a drug trip, necessarily (though that’s part of it), but a trip into the dark crevices of the creative process. David Cronenberg took a look at this lurid, obscene novel Burroughs wrote and instead of rendering a straight adaptation, he decided to do a “making of” movie. Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch is a look inside the mind of the guy writing Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Still with me? Good. It’s excellent, too, if a touch on the difficult side. But this isn’t a review of Naked Lunch. The point of sketching out the movie’s parameters is to show how difficult a concept it is to sell to the masses.

So how did these guys do it? They simply answered the question, “What is Naked Lunch?”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0fhzA_j6lQ

These days, it seems that a good many of our advertising materials are chasing trends; trying to make us think that this movie is like that movie, and we liked that movie so we’ll like this one.

Naked Lunch‘s trailer isn’t having any of that. This is an advertisement that wears its identity on its sleeve. Where others would hide behind trends, Naked Lunch walked in, looked people straight in the eye, and said, “Listen up.” Nothing to fear; nothing to hide. I feel that I must remind you again, this movie is like really really weird and not audience-friendly at all.

So, given that something as cerebral as Naked Lunch can have an honest marketing campaign, why the hell would a movie like John Carter have an advertising identity crisis?

John Carter was a rollicking, old-fashioned adventure movie. The kind that makes people say ‘they don’t make ’em like this anymore,” except with eye-popping modern visuals and rock-solid acting. A movie with a capital “M.” It wasn’t perfect or anything, but it had a strong sense of self and certainly earned its ticket price.

And what did they focus on in the trailer? “This movie is called John Carter.” They skated over the century-long legacy of the books, swept any mentions of Mars under the table, and avoided the movie’s central romance almost altogether.

But you got to hand it to them, those ads made damn well sure you knew the main character of the movie was John Carter. What they didn’t seem to realize is that the audience immediately had one question: “Who?”

WE ALREADY SAID JOHN CARTER

In other words, the ad campaign provided absolutely zero CONTEXT for the movie.

That’s where the core of that ad campaign should have been. “Who’s John Carter?” It’d be a great question for them to answer. After all, he’s the hero who inspired Lucas, Cameron, Herbert, and a dozen other entertainment titans. Like adventure? Meet the original adventure hero, in a movie 100 years in the making.

Looking back at that Naked Lunch trailer, a huge chunk of its (limited) runtime is given over to making sure the audience is equipped with the right foreknowlege to enjoy the movie*. By the time the footage of Peter Weller breathing on a centipede or whatever pops up, the audience has been prepped with the knowledge that they’re in for some loopy stuff. By the end of this trailer, you’ll know if this is the sort of thing you’d like to check out.

Also of note is that the Naked Lunch trailer doesn’t just warn the audience that they’re in for a head-scratching, hallucinatory art film. It makes a head-scratching, hallucinatory art film seem cool.

Because it is.

I can’t for the life of me find the article, but I remember Roger Ebert (?) writing a piece in response to the folks who claim that movie critics want to be the arbiters of public taste. Amongst other things, he made the observation that nothing a critic says or does can offer a whiff of resistance to the juggernaut of advertising dollars.

Advertisers can convince us (the public) that a layered headscratcher like Inception is acceptable pop entertainment. They can make the cheesy romance of Titanic cool. They can knight visionary directors, groom movie stars, and make a century-old social satire seem like the sexiest movie of the summer.

Sell it the right way, and people will go see anything.**

The problem now is that we aren’t selling things honestly. Movie trailers nowadays mostly focus on sizzle and flash; the common currency is moments that work brilliantly out-of-context and much less brilliantly in the tempo and flow of a feature film.

It’s okay, guys, I was fooled too.

Either that, or they just cram every major story beat into two minutes. But it really doesn’t have to be this way.

I assume you guys and gals checked out the Pacific Rim WonderCon footage. People are flipping out a bit over it***, but what I found cool about that reel was that it doesn’t seem to give away much of the movie’s endgame. There are really only a couple of discernable “big moments” in the whole thing — odd for a robot-based action movie.

When asked about the trailer’s lack of cheer-inducing Big Moments (by the you-should-be-reading-him Drew McWeeney), Guilllermo del Toro said that much of the movie’s action simply didn’t work when sliced out of the movie and Frankensteined into a promo reel.

Instead, Pacific Rim‘s trailer does almost nothing but articulate the context of the story. Sure, it’s a plot context as opposed to the cultural context seen in the Naked Lunch trailer, but the function is still the same: “Here’s what you need to understand about this movie.”

Go back to John Carter again. That trailer was full of BIG MOMENTS. War speeches, clashing armies, and incessant footage of whatever those white apes are. I, along with what I’m sure was most of the other people watching those ads, was kinda like… “what?” However, in context, those moments that looked so generic in the John Carter trailer had real weight and import. The battles meant something; the high-flying action had consequence, rhythym, and balance. It was a good movie.

Also, Disney’s most badass princess yet. Where was she in the ad campaign?

I’d love to see an advertising field where trailers stopped obsessing over Big Moments and plot details. Instead, tell us why we should see it. Be confident. Make us think you know what you’re doing and you’re proud of it. If you want to hit a home run, keep your eye on the damn ball and connect.

Of course, this means there need to be movies with tangible, unique qualities to sell, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing.

FOOTNOTES:

*Y’know… hopefully. It’s also a movie that is simply not going to appeal to everybody, and that’s kinda the way it goes.

**Okay, this isn’t technically true. There are a bunch of other factors that influence what is popular, and people aren’t simply machines you can operate. However, it’s no coincidence that the highest-grossing movies of the year are always well-advertised. And yes, I know Naked Lunch wasn’t a smash by any means, but it’s had multiple home video releases and gotten referenced on The Simpsons. It’s doing fine for what it is, which is a cerebral adaptation of an unfilmable cult novel.

***As opposed to the first trailer, which did garner some interest but a) reminded people of Transformers and b) had that damn Inception noise running through it.