When Articles About Advertising Work As Advertising Themselves

The January 19 issue of The New Yorker has an article by Tad Friend about movie marketing. The article itself is interesting. He talks about the marketing for W., The Fast and the Furious, Saw II, and New In Town. He also talks about how marketers see people and how they make films relatable. He tells us that "the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women." When I read that to my mother over the phone, she was incensed that they would leave out baby boomers and perplexed that they would lump her and me into the same category. Interestingly, when I read his descriptions of the four quadrants, my actual likes fall into both the young women and older women categories, and I've spent some time enjoying the same thing as young men, although not so much recently. (Exception: horror movies, which I've never really been into, unless it's of the so-and-so fights the devil variety. "They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.") I don't like movies for older men (the examples marketing consultant Terry Press gives Friend are Wild Hogs and 3:10 To Yuma) at all.

Friend outlines five rules marketers have "for making their films seem broadly 'relatable.'" My favorite quote from them, from the section on movie posters: "Because stars are supposed to open the film, and because they have contractual approval of how they appear on a poster, the final image is often a so-called 'big head' or 'floating head' of the star. Every poster for a Will Smith movie features his head, and for good reason: he is the only true movie star left, the only one who could open even a film about beekeeping monks."

It's an interesting article that really does tell you a lot about how the movie industry works. What's even more fascinating to me is how well the article itself works as a piece of marketing. One of the movies whose marketing development Friend follows is New In Town ("a title no one actively disliked"). When I saw the trailer, I thought it looked awful, although the premise is the kind of thing I like. The article, though, with how it talks about how they twist trailers to make movies seem watchable and how Tad Friend says he liked the movie and that "Blanche (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), Zellweger's administrative assistant at the plant, had got many of the biggest laughs. 'Droll and folksy reads as quaint, reads as art house,' Palen said. 'I love Blanche, but I can't sell her.'" actually made me think the movie might be worth seeing. It also made me think that The Proposal might be better than its ghastly trailer, although that might just be wishful thinking - I love a good they have to get married story, and I'm at least mildly fond of both Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds.

2009 Dewey Decimal Project: 700.1 L

This month's book was Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. I'd read something about the book several months ago (I have a vague recollection that it was a blog post about an interview wherein someone asked Lehrer about Kanye West, possibly either at Marginal Revolution or Mind Hacks), and when I saw it on the new books shelf at the library, I picked it up.

I'm finding it interesting how many nonfiction books are more like a collection of essays than a coherent whole; this book fits into that mold.

The basic idea behind Proust Was a Neuroscientist is that artists have anticipated many things that neuroscience is only just now realizing. It's an interesting premise, and a lot of the things artists have known before neuroscience seem somewhat like common sense.

The book was certainly interesting, although I think it might have been more interesting if I'd read more (or, rather, any) of the works he references. I think my favorite chapter was "Auguste Escoffier: The Essence of Taste," about cooks and chefs discovering that umami is real before neuroscientists found the receptors for it on the tongue. It made me hungry, and revealed why my first attempt at black beans really needed tomatoes or salsa added to it. (Tomato sauce falls in his list of "potent sources of L-glutamate.")

In the chapter "Igor Stravinsky: The Source of Music," he tells us:

Over time, the auditory cortex works the same way; we become better able to hear those sounds we have heard before. This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know (since they sound better), and to ignore the difficult songs that we don't know (since they sound harsh and noisy, and release unpleasant amounts of dopamine). We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness.

How do we escape this neurological trap? By paying attention to art. The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before.
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Without artists like Stravinsky who compulsively make everything new, our sense of sound would become increasingly narrow.

This makes me think I need to start listening to new music. I know I've noticed my own tendency to not bother with music I don't already know.

My favorite bits of the book are the entertaining commentaries and summaries of the works he covers. About George Eliot's Middlemarch: "Many depressing pages ensue." About Proust: "A sickly thirty-something, Proust had done nothing with his life so far except accumulate symptoms and send self-pitying letters to his mother." About Gertrude Stein: "If she is remembered today outside college campuses and histories of cubism, it is for a single cliché, one that is almost impossible to forget: 'A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.' Although Stein used this aphorism as a decoration for dinner plates, it now represents everything she wrote. This is the danger of avoiding plots."

Lehrer's concluding "Coda" is a manifesto of sorts in which Lehrer criticizes current popular science books and proposes a new way of marrying art and science: "What the artists in this book reveal is that there are many different ways of describing reality, each of which is capable of generating truth. Physics is useful for describing quarks and galaxies, neuroscience is useful for describing the brain, and art is useful for describing our actual experience." I'm not overly convinced by his argument. I think it's obvious that science and art describe different truths, and I'm not sure Lehrer's book successfully mixes art and science, although it is an interesting exercise in literary criticism by way of neuroscience.

Snippet: Freak (Leverage, Eliot/Parker, 500 words)

Uh, yeah. I've clearly been influenced by moirariordan's "Four and One," which I read earlier this week. (And on the subject of Leverage fic recs: "Five Times Eliot did What Had to be Done" by teand is awesome.)

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( Freak )