Movie trailers - premature, determinist remixes?

(SPOILER ALERT: In this post, I discuss the movie 127 Hours, involving some revelation of key moments of the film. Moreover, as I'll get to, I found the second linked trailer to be an offensive spoiler of the film itself, so, with this in mind, navigate this post with caution) :)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how the process of watching movie trailers can really affect the process of watching a movie itself, and the case of the fantastic 127 Hours, which I watched yesterday, proves a definitive example.

The film was marketed by two very different trailers, one which I saw countless times before watching the movie, and one which I (thankfully) saw after having already watched the film itself.

Here’s the first one, officially referred to as the ‘teaser’.

This, to me, proved the perfect example of a trailer setting up the audience for the experience of watching the film while ultimately divulging little in terms of content or plot – the bulk of the film starts right when the trailer ends - thus serving to pique interest without excessively slanting expectations.

In contrast, here’s the second trailer.

As you can see, the second trailer focuses extensively on the process of Ralston’s actually being trapped by the rock, and the eventual ‘testament to the human spirit’ interpretation of the film. This shift in focus of the trailer was likely reactionary to early controversy of audience members fainting due to the graphic content of the film, with Fox attempting to stress it as a tale of human perseverance rather than an exploitative story of entrapment and torment.

Nonetheless, this second, more ideologically guided trailer irritated me for not only spoiling what I found to be the best part of the film (Ralston’s on camera ‘confessional’) but also shaping the interpretation of the film for viewers too overtly. The joy and emotional impact of the film for me lay in experiencing Ralston’s stream of consciousness ‘journey’ alongside him and arriving at the interpretation boasted by the trailer as a process, rather than coming in with such a preconceived agenda in mind.

I found this to be relevant to the blog because we’ve talked extensively about the process of remix as something done after the fact: taking texts that are understood as ALREADY KNOWN by audiences and, through juxtaposition and editing, ascribing new meanings or interpretations to them. That said, a movie trailer is, by definition, a remix of the film itself, but in the case of the latter 127 Hours trailer, it seemed almost as if that process of recontextualizing meanings was being done in advance rather than after the fact.

I don’t presume to take a hard and fast position on the ethics of remix and its reprocessing of meanings and readings of texts, but I did think it would be worth speculating on premature textual remix, and whether it almost defeats the purpose of reworking the ‘message’ of a text when it is done before consumers have had the chance to experience the original text itself. I know this might not be the best example necessarily because 20^th Century Fox assembled the trailer in the hopes of luring in larger audiences, but I did find it worth speculating on how intrinsic being retrospective is for remix.

Similarly, to momentarily cite Walter Benjamin, I started to wonder whether remixing past texts might jeopardize the intended ‘aura’ or meaning for those who aren’t already familiar with it as a text in the same way that I would have found 127 Hours entirely ruined for me had I watched the latter trailer before seeing it. Should there be some kind of 'spoiler alert' in remix practices to suggest acquiring awareness of the source text first, thus maximizing how the new textual messages were coded through differentiating from the initial ones?

Now, a “Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor” remix of 127 Hours? THAT I’d love to see.