Stuff to procrastinate with

[trinityvixen]

One of my favorite occasional blogs (as opposed to those I check everyday, several times a day), is Tiger Beatdown. Sady Doyle is one of those people, who, like glvalentine, makes absolutely everything fucking funny. It's safe and accessible feminism with humor, thus giving lie to the "humorless feminist" stereotype. That stereotype fucking sucks. It muzzles women. Today, I had to refrain from commenting on a friend's LJ post that was a bunch of sexist drivel made in pursuit of a political point. If you're that friend, you probably suspect it's you. I'll spare you the suspense: it was.

Anyway, Tiger Beatdown has a post up by a dude--dudes who can be feminists!? WHOA-OA. He happens to be gay, which might explain his lack of being cool with patriarchal norms. He has a post about the de-gaying of movie trailers, specifically about the de-gaying of the trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. There really is no argument you can make against his thesis.** While Scott Pilgrim has two gay characters and at least one assumedly bisexual character, few of them appear in the otherwise awesome trailer. Coupled with the other examples he cites about Valentine's Day and, more damning, A Single Man, it's hard not to see the trend. Even when the movie is about a gay man mourning the death of his lover, gayness is absent.

It might have behooved him to do a little more research to ascertain that, yes, those characters are in the movie (neither he nor people in the comments seem to realize that). I, for one, am astonished that Wallace wasn't in the trailer given how fully half the laugh-out-loud parts were his doing. That's okay, I forgive him for not doing his research fully: he gave a shout-out to Hollywood Montrose of Mannequin fame. Yes, it is possible to be famous for being in that movie. I'd also like to point out this character to the Hollywood anti-gay-trailer squad: I didn't realize Hollywood was gay until I was in college. I really just thought he was weird. To be fair to me and my obliviousness, he is weird. (He hangs around--voluntarily!--with Andrew McCarthy, for one.) His defining traits have more to do with his outrageous--even for the 80s!--fashion sense and tendency towards hysterics than they do about his being into guys. Notably, however, he does talk about dating men. SHOCK.



**He's right that Wallace is absent, and the authenticity of the bisexual's dual-gendered interests does read as if it's just a fad, not a lifestyle. But he's talking out his ass when it comes to the other gay character, seeing as she's featured fairly prominently in the trailer. Their choice of phrases about the evil exes is also not as he represents. So, really, perhaps Scott Pilgrim was not the best trailer upon which to launch the Bitch Ship.

Comments

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

The people who are going to go see a movie because they're gay characters already know the movie and are going to go, they are what we call a highly engaged consumer. A trailer is just a commercial, and you don't aim commercials at people who are already buying your product, you want new people. Besides, people who would avoid a movie because there are GAY PEOPLE OMG might get tricked into seeing it this way and be exposed to gay characters and come out less biased. Or at least they're out a few dollars which serves them right, bigots.

Anyway yeah, some of those complaints aren't quite apt about the trailer or at least are about the source material, not the movie itself. I think Ramona refers to the gang as her seven evil ex-boyfriends herself early on in the graphic novel, so that's not really anyone's fault in the trailer cutting department.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Well, to be perfectly frank (and partially spoiler-y, which I see I don't have to worry about with you), Ramona doesn't say they're her "ex-boyfriends." Scott does. Ramona, repeatedly, says "evil exes," without modifying for gender. That was an annoying derailing of the argument. It's a 1.5 minute trailer, and you forgot/decided not to recognize that what you're saying is wrong never actually happened in the clip? Pshaw.

On the marketing aspect of trailers: I think you've got it backwards. I don't doubt that with Scott Pilgrim especially, you're going to look to pull in the hardcore fans of the graphic novels, and that you really won't hardly have to try for them because, hey, they're already tuned in. (The internet kind of exploded when the trailer came out.) I'm not saying you had to put gay characters in the trailer to attract them, but you might have wanted to put Wallace in at least given that he's a large part of the finished product. I mean, the fans want Wallace. Why leave him out? Why hobble yourself by leaving people wondering about how badly you're going to F-up that character? Have him in it for two seconds, no problem. Taking the core audience--who are guaranteed ticket-buyers--for granted seems to me not to be worth the trade-off of possibly appealing to other people.

Also, if your goal with the trailer is to reach as wide a net a possible, why not show the gay characters? Gays are a demographic, too. And, again, I say Wallace was probably >40% of the hilarity of the film between the epic battle levels of hilarity. Not mentioning him at all seriously hampers your ability to prove how awesome your movie is. Save something for the theater, sure, but everything? That will just make it look boring, something which your movie is not!

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

I mean, I went to the comic's website (scottpilgrim.com) and this is in the description, in the author's words, for the first volume: "Will he have to face Ramona's seven evil ex-boyfriends in battle?" My point is that the particular phrasing in question is in the original material, so blame that rather than the trailer.

I agree that it is, perhaps, not the best marketing decision. But it might explain it, if they're expecting to gain more viewers by showing another character for 3 seconds instead of Wallace, that's the way they'd go. It's more likely that someone, somewhere, was thinking of it in terms of dollar signs than an agenda. For all I know That Kid From Home Alone's Brother's agent might have demanded too much money to use him in the trailer so they just decided they could do without him. I agree that from a cinema perspective, the Best Friend is an important role so I can only imagine it's either a stupid oversight or behind the scenes rationale.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Firstly, I doubt that Rory Culkin forbade anyone from using his footage in the trailer. No one short of possibly Julia Roberts-level stardom gets to make those sorts of calls in contracts. Stars are fussy, but anyone that fussy has to be a $20M paycheck person or they're not in the business any more.

Otherwise, I don't think there's anything sacrificed by having Wallace in the trailer except money. I think you only lose out when you fail to feature something that's heavily part of your story (and a large part of the funny!) in a trailer, period. Yes, you can give too much away, but leaving too much out also ends up making a trailer that looks like it's for another movie. Scott Pilgrim is very much about the politics of friendship and romance. It also happens to be an arcade game story. If you don't feature both, you sell yourself short.

[onefishonly.livejournal.com]

Well, this is part of the blogger's point. Studio execs (seem to) believe that showing gayness in a trailer means some people who would otherwise go see the movie, wouldn't. They get the word that there are gay people in the movie out to that "niche" audience some other way. And so they hope to have their cake and eat it, too - to have a trailer that appeals to the widest possible "mainstream" audience (which, they think, can't highlight gayness), but also draw in an audience that is happy to see queer characters in a movie. And the blogger is upset by this, which, admittedly, if that is the thought process, doesn't really respect queerness or treat it fairly.

Now, there might be an interesting discussion to be had here about whether drawing in people who might be turned off by gayness in the trailer, or just think "oh, that movie's not for me," and then putting gay characters unapologetically in front of them with the film, is, in fact, a positive thing, in terms of simply ensuring more people watch a movie with queer characters who are real and funny and appealing, and perhaps some of those viewers have their minds just slightly expanded or whatever. But my understanding is that this sort of "cautious/timid" introduction of queerness into the mainstream is not acceptable to the blogger in question. This is an argument/discussion I tend to have about a lot of different things - the effectiveness of radicalism vs. pragmatism. And I never come to an actual answer. But on a purely ideological level, there's a problem with the belief that "visible gay characters = less money," just as with the (hopefully no longer) widespread publishing belief that "non-white character on the cover = less money" and the apparent film belief (with, essentially, the exception of Aliens) that "primary protagonist is female in any genre other than 'chick flick' = less money."

[saturn-shumba.livejournal.com]

I read that article a few weeks ago, and I agree with you about Scott Pilgrim--I understand his frustration, but, like you said, perhaps SP wasn't the best choice to illustrate it.

A Single Man, however, is an EXCELLENT example, especially since I didn't know it was gay at all from the trailer. Interestingly, the trailer uses up almost all the clips of women in the film (I shit you not--with the exception of Julianne Moore, almost all the clips of women in the trailer were their entire scenes) as kind of a way to make it seem less gay. Which is totally dumb, since the whole movie is about a gay man.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't know how normal people perceive things a lot of the time. Most of the time, I know a lot about the movie before there's a trailer, so anything huge, like, say, the major plot being ABOUT A GAY MAN MOURNING THE DEATH OF HIS LOVER, would be subtext to me before I saw the trailer. It colors how I see the marketing to know more about the film beforehand.

However, I wasn't clued into the sexual politics of Scott Pilgrim prior to the movie, but even I knew that there was a woman in the evil exes crowd. She's...right there. Even if you somehow miss Scott fighting her in the trailer--that battle seems to get twice the time of the other ones--she is in the splay of evil exes. It's left up long enough for you to see them all, and, sure enough, there's a chick there!

So, he has a point. He just picked it with the wrong movie.

[onefishonly.livejournal.com]

I'd seen that post, and had a slightly resistent response re: the Scott Pilgrim discussion in that yes, it's pretty clear that there's a girl among the evil exes - complaining that this isn't highlighted more clearly is like complaining there's no scene in the trailer where Michael Cera says "I'm Scott Pilgrim, a twenty-something slacker in Toronto" (that is, calling it out more explicitly would waste valuable time and insult the intelligence of the viewer). As far as I followed, the blogger's argument was that the trailer was structured such that media outlets reporting on the trailer could/would refer to "seven evil ex-boyfriends," and so SECONDHAND reports about the movie wouldn't mention any gay content. Which seems a slightly specious argument. Since when is the content creator responsible for other people's misinterpretation of the content?

Personally, I'd guess the author had been bugged by this sort of thing and wanted to write about it for a while, and used the timely release of the Scott Pilgrim trailer as a hook on which to hang the rest of the article.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

No, clearly you're right--this is a bone that's gone unpicked and the slightest thing sets it off. Doesn't change the fact that there does seem to be serious down-playing of the gay in trailers. I admit to being caught totally by surprise that there were gay characters in Valentine's Day. I...did not get that from the trailer. (I did get that that movie looked ass-awful, though, so my bullshit instincts are at least working even if my gaydar is being thwarted.)

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I didn't read all of the comments following the OP, but Wallace IS in the trailer.



It could be argued that frame-by-framing a trailer requires more obsessiveness than is necessary, but since this is a movie made for the geek crowd, I'd have to say any easter eggs hidden in the teaser are there on purpose.

In regards to the blog in question, you almost see even less of Scott's band, and the band members are arguably more prominent in the books than Wallace is, so there's another reason his argument is poor.