Conclusion
Trailers are the advance guard of a film, marching ahead of it into the territory of popular culture. Frequently, then, by the time the actual film arrives on the scene, audiences are already interacting with the film’s meaning and aesthetics, power and “effects,” identifying with or against characters, intrigued or bored by plotlines and themes, and so forth. Trailers do not create the film in its entirety for all viewers, but they do create it in entirety for many would-be viewers, and they establish interpretive frames that might limit and focus many audience members’ subsequent consumption of “the film itself.” Given these powers, now that trailers are multiplying, yet more of the mediasphere is being fashioned by trailers, hence forcing us to reevaluate concepts such as creation, ownership, and authorship.
On one hand, through fan-made trailers, fans can put their own imprint on the production process, creating their own frameworks for interpretation and evaluation of the subsequent film. If one criticism of the “active audience” approach to media consumption was that such a viewing position came after the fact as a purely reactive “tactic” of what Michel de Certeau (1984) dubbed “making do,”4 fan-made trailers allow for “poaching” (see Jenkins 1992) before the film arrives. On the other hand, though, the mediasphere is significantly more populated with official trailers than it is with fan-made alternatives, and as I have shown, trailers raise a studio’s marketing team up to the level of virtual co-creator, if not of “the film itself,” at least of its entry and initial presence into popular culture. Thus, over-enthusiastic proclamations of “You” being the powerful entity of the day, and of the death of corporate agency in the field of cultural production fail to recognize how the high trade in trailers over MySpace, YouTube, IFilm, and friends is putting ever more power into studios’ hands to repurpose, or, rather, pre-purpose, a film prior to release. Final cut is au fait, as marketing allows producers plenty of (p)re-creative abilities.
Meanwhile, though, trailers are not alone in preceding films; indeed, in a convergent media culture in which synergy and promotional vortexes can surround even the smallest of films, films may now be preceded by video games, toy lines, Happy Meals and other food products, and promotional campaigns that stretch through television, cinema lobbies, bus stops, subway cars and buses, roadside billboards, newspapers and magazines, and any unexpected location of guerrilla marketing. Hence, in actuality trailers will work alongside (in the case of coordinated campaigns) and/or in combat with (in the case of contested releases) other paratexts, hype, and synergy. As they do, the powers of creation continue to disperse, and authorial control is left open for strategic or tactical raids by various forces from the studio to the fan. The very term “trailer” is of course an odd hold-over from when trailers followed films, but in today’s media environment, movies are trailing the trailers in months not minutes, slowly plodding forth while meanings, interpretations, evaluations, and all manner of audience and industry chatter are already on the scene and underway.
Gray, Jonathan.
Movie Trailers and the Creation of Meaning.
Working Paper, Fordham University, 2007?
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