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Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings

Academic and popular accounts of film and television are frequently suffused with discussion of what happens after watching, following such questions as “What did you think of such-and-such a show?”, “What effects might it have?”, and “What does it mean?” The social science tradition of studying media has also produced considerable work examining what happens before watching, with, for instance, a strand of “uses and gratifications” research that studies the motivating factors behind one’s choice to watch, and another strand of production studies and political economy that explores the creative and economic processes that go into creating media. But comparatively little work exists from within a humanistic tradition examining how meaning begins and where texts come from, suggesting by its absence that texts begin when the first scene of a film or program begins. A refreshing exception is Charles Acland’s reading of multiplex geographies, construction, and contexts.¹ Exploring similar terrain for television (and for films on television), Barbara Klinger has also examined the geography of the home theater.² As important as such work is, and as much as it reminds us of the paratexts of geography and technology, in this chapter I argue that films and television programs often begin long before we actively seek them out, and that their textual histories are every bit as complex and requiring of study as are their audience, creative, or economic histories. This chapter is thus about the true beginnings of texts as coherent clusters of meaning, expectation, and engagement, and about the text’s first initial outposts, in particular trailers, posters, previews, and hype.

As was discussed in the Introduction, Hollywood invests large amounts of money, time, and labor into hyping its products. Therefore, just as one would not expect Nike to construct its ads half-heartedly, there should in theory be nothing random or accidental about the meanings on offer in Hollywood’s trailers, posters, previews, and ad campaigns. Clint Culpepper, president of Sony Screen Gems, warns, “You can have the most terrific movie in the world, and if you can’t convey that fact in fifteen- and thirty-second TV ads it’s like having bad speakers on a great stereo.”³ As a result, DreamWorks’ head of creative advertising David Sameth has said of trailers, “We’ll spend five months to a year obsessing about them, every single cut and every single moment we use,”⁴ showing how carefully manicured many texts’ ads are. In a rare academic account of trailers, meanwhile, John Ellis writes of them as offering a “narrative image” in which everything can be assumed to be there for a reason, and “can be assumed to be calculated. Hence everything tends to be pulled into the process of meaning.”⁵ Rather than regard trailers, previews, and ads as textually removed from the shows they announce, therefore, Ellis suggests, albeit briefly, that they are part of the show’s narrative, and that they are concentrates of the show’s meaning. Precisely because trailers, previews, and ads introduce us to a text and its many proposed and supposed meanings, the promotional material that we consume sets up, begins, and frames many of the interactions that we have with texts. More than merely point us to the text at hand, these promos will have already begun the process of creating textual meaning, serving as the first outpost of interpretation. Promos often take the first steps in filling a text with meaning. The term “trailer” is a hold-over from when trailers followed films, but in today’s media environment, movies and television shows are trailing the trailers and promos in months not minutes, slowly plodding forth while meanings, interpretations, evaluations, and all manner of audience and industry chatter are already on the scene. We may in time resist the meanings proposed by promotional materials, but they tell us what to expect, direct our excitement and/or apprehension, and begin to tell us what a text is all about, calling for our identification with and interpretation of that text before we have even seemingly arrived at it. This chapter will examine how texts begin, not in their opening scenes, but in their hype, promos, trailers, posters, previews, and opening credit sequences, and how these paratexts may continue to figure into the interpretive process even after the film or television show has started.

I will begin by discussing the role of promotional campaigns and trailers in initiating textuality, creating a genre, networking star intertexts, and introducing us to a new storyworld. This discussion leads into examinations of several movie posters and their initiation of their texts, and of a 2006 promotional campaign for ABC’s Six Degrees. Looking at a New York subway poster campaign and at the show’s advance teaser website, I will argue that both set up a gender, a genre, a style, and an attitude for the show before it hit the air. This pre-text was not a wholly accurate reflection of the television program that followed, and so too is my next case study one in which the paratext and the show itself failed to work in concert with one another. Close-reading two trailers for Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter, I examine how one film can “begin” in such starkly different ways depending upon the trailer that precedes it. Then, following this example, I ask what we are to make of the rise of trailers and hype, and of their increasing prominence on television and online in particular, especially given that, as I will argue, they play a constitutive role in establishing a “proper” interpretation for a text. This interest in “proper” interpretations finally leads to a discussion of television opening credit sequences as paratexts that can operate both as entryway and in medias res, telling us how to interpret a text, and then returning to remind us of this official, sanctioned interpretation, and serving a ritual purpose of transporting us once more into that storyworld. Throughout the chapter, my interests lie in where texts come from and how we return to them.