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Experience

So I've been delving more and more into trailer stuff, and I found some things I thought some of you might find interesting.

The book A Cinema of Coming Attractions discusses trailers as phenomena unto themselves. We see trailers, Lisa Kernan argues, in a different way from how we see movies, since trailers make us aware that we are watching an advertisement for a movie (thus destroying our suspension of disbelief) and yet we can be totally engrossed in the experience. Furthermore, various trailer machinations actually make us nostalgic for the movie, which we haven't seen yet. It seems to me that this nostalgia is created by piggybacking off of things we already hold dear, like soft music or archetypal life events (break-ups, death, getting some).

Nostalgia for something that HASN'T HAPPENED YET! Isn't this fascinating?

Submitted by magnoliafan on Tue, 2007-03-20 09:49.
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Submitted by mark p on Tue, 2007-03-20 09:59.

I totally get this. I've tracked down enough Spider-Man 3 trailers and snippets that I do somewhat already feel nostalgic for it. They brilliantly tap into all my lil spidey lovin neurons (and the previous films I reckon, which makes trailers for sequels another interesting wrinkle in this). Does more "piggybacking" occur when the film has something to do with a symbol or icon that already has huge built in love and nostalgia going for it in other media?