Trailers

There was a time when I watched movies and didn’t really bother following the story. It all just kind of washed over me, disconnected names and characters and images, and none of it made sense. I didn’t really care. Somewhere in the back of my mind there was an idea that it should be making sense, that there was a reason for why that purple lizard was kidnapping Mike Wazowski and I was probably doing a bad thing by not trying to figure it out. But the pictures on the screen looked cool and changed often enough that I didn’t get bored, so I was happy enough that comprehension didn’t bother me all that much. I think I started actually understanding stories sometime in early elementary school, but it was never something I totally mastered. Up until middle school, I think, I’d sometimes be content to let movies stay bright and pretty pictures that kept my mind moving, albeit in no particular direction.

This has been bothering me for two reasons. For one, we’re learning about dependent readers in my education class, the kinds of kid who can decipher words but can’t or won’t take the time to understand what they mean. It makes me wonder if I’m really fit to be a teacher if I’m not too far removed from being that kind of reader myself and, worse yet, that kind of movie-watcher.

The other reason is that I’ve been on a kick of watching movie trailers during study breaks these past few days, and it’s made me remember that, even back when I couldn’t decipher movies, I loved trailers. In the theater I used to keep hoping there would be one more trailer. I’d rejoice at the green “Appropriate Audiences” screen and dread the opening credits. And I think that’s because trailers gave me exactly what I wanted. There’s plot, sure, but only for maybe thirty seconds, and only the barest kind, mostly serving to hype up the disconnected moments of spectacle that follow. Even in trailers for slow and artsy movies, they make sure to show the only gun, the only half-nude shot that appears in the entire film. It’s pure awe and pleasure, disappearing before you even understand it, with a pretense of story to give it the mystique of something whole but hidden. This probably sounds like Marxist analysis of why everything in our society is barren and meaningless. If it does, I’m sorry. Because I love trailers, even though I know I really shouldn’t.

It occurred to me the other day, though, that when I visualize the ideal form of something I want to write, it doesn’t come as a novel. That’s understandable, maybe; 80,000 words can be pretty hard to visualize all at once. But it doesn’t come as a movie, either. It comes as a movie trailer. Enough set-up plot and character to justify its existence, then a barrage of high-emotion moments, orderless and simple. And, in case it’s not clear, that’s a bad thing to want if you want your writing to be taken seriously. Or if you want to take seriously yourself. Or if you want to believe what you’ve been saying all these years, about empathy for characters being an essential human function or stories revealing the complex truths of life, rather than dismissing it all as an excuse for sixty second of catharsis.

I feel like I’ve reached too far in this post for how simple the resolution is: simply that I should plot my stories out all the way before starting to write them. I go in too often with a movie-trailer mindset, that once I plot out the basics the rest will be pure and joyous flow. And as for my other fears, that I’m a dependent reader, that I’m addicted to trailers and don’t actually want to understand movies, I think that every artistically inclined person worries that they aren’t serious enough. Either that or they worry that they’re too serious (or they should be worrying that, anyway), and I think the latter is worse.