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I remember when they used to show cartoons before this movies. I remember Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny. I like Bugs Bunny way better. I was almost as excited to see the cartoons as the feature film.
Movie pre-shows date back to the early days of cinema but what happens before the movie has changed over time. These changes tell us a little about who we are and how our society has changed over time.
Newsreels
Before television became so ubiquitous, most of us got our news from the radio or the daily newspaper. Although these provided information and the occasional picture, they weren’t moving. Newsreels were shown before the feature films filled this niche. Only in the theatre could people see moving pictures of these significant events. I would bet that some people went to the theatre in early 1942 more to see the newsreels of the bombing of Pearl Harbor than they did to see Bette Davis in The Man Who Came to Dinner.
The Hindenburg Disaster in 1937
Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics
There is a good dose of propaganda in the newsreels. The messages in each of the above newsreels are not all that subtle. These taught us how to think about Nazi pride and racism, or Japanese treachery. The newsreels carried a powerful message about who we are and what we did and stood for. We were the good guys and proud to be so. Newsreels represented orthodoxy; they formed identity and created confidence in who we were confident in who we were as a people, and our place in the world. It was manipulative, but the end goal was to achieve a common vision that was thought to be of benefit to the country.
Cartoons
When I was a kid, the newsreels had phased out. Television news offered the events of the day in moving pictures in the comfort of home. Apparently, the movie house people figured we needed something before the feature. perhaps to help us settle into our seats, so they replaced the newsreels with cartoons.
Why cartoons? I don’t really know, but I can surmise. Why are people coming to the theatre in the first place? Theatre goers came to be entertained, so let’s entertain them? Cartoons are entertaining; the solution was simple and logical.
Is it just me or does there seems to be some respect for the audience in this idea? I paid money to be entertained, and they entertain me.
But then it changed.
Ads
I don’t want to see ads. When it comes to the long list of things I don’t want to see, ads are just above: emergency surgery on children, snot, vomit, and very old people rollerskating.
Yet here I sit, forced to watch commercials and I am paying to do so.
Gone is the respect; back is the propaganda.
But this propaganda is not designed to shape a people for mutual benefit and the national identity. This propaganda is designed to create discontent for the benefit of corporations.
We are no longer seen as human beings, but as consumers.
Every day we are bombarded with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of commercial messages–newspaper, magazines, radio, bus-stop benches, the bus, stuck on trucks and cars, pens, billboards, sports stadia and jerseys, the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, every game I play on my phone, and television.
For just a day, try to pay attention to just how many ads you are exposed to and you’ll be blown away. It will be a lot more than 1,000.
So, I go to the movies to get away from it all and then there’s an ad. I remember the first time I saw an ad in the pre-show. I said, quite audibly, “Oh, come on! Seriously!” A few people seemed to agree with me, but most didn’t seem to have a problem with it, and now no one does. That first time, it was just a single ad. I just saw Rocketman tonight–there were many non-movie related ads.
Ads Create Discontent
The underlying purposes of the newsreels was to inform and to shape us into what a particular people, what the creators believed was a better people.
The people behind the ads are not interested in our well-being or that of the nation. In fact, they want us to be a worse kind of people.
Is it better to be content or discontent? Content, obviously. But a content people is bad for the corporate bottom line.
Human beings have teeth. They are tooth-coloured. Someone correctly surmised that they could make a lot of money if they convinced people that tooth-coloured teeth are not the right colour for teeth, and then sold them a product that would make their teeth this new colour. Their whole goal is to change our idea of what is normal for tooth colour from natural to an artificial colour that we need to pay $50 a month to maintain. They chose white, but they’ll be moving onto pastels any year now.
Someone else created dishwasher detergent that killed 98% of the bacteria. This made them a tonne of money after they managed to convince people that bacteria is not a natural occurrence, which it is. Then, they exploited the psychological connection between bacteria, germs and residual food on dirty dishes. Voila! Billions.
This is two of many examples where advertisers deliberately manufacture desire–they create a perceived need so they can sell us an unnecessary solution.
The goal and cumulative effect of these types of advertisements are to convince us that we are not good enough, or we can’t be happy unless we buy something. Although they make it seem like they are serving us, they aren’t–they are exploiting us. They don’t want us to be content. If we were content, we wouldn’t buy their crap. They want us to feel like we are lacking–perpetually unfulfilled, forever needing. Coca-Cola spends over two billion dollars a year on advertising because it can make many, many more billions by doing so.
The corporate attitude behind the ads–we are objects. Objects to be used for the benefit of the corporation, usually to the detriment of our own.
Who let these scum into the movie theatre?
Bring back the cartoon!
Bring back Bugs Bunny!
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Ads before the movie! Who let these scum into the theatre? Bring back the cartoon! Bring back Bugs Bunny! #AtTheMovies #Commercialism #Consumers” quote=”Ads before the movie! Who let these scum into the theatre? Bring back the cartoon! Bring back Bugs Bunny! “]