Sorting through countless movies, trying to decide which to watch, my cousin and I came across one that I had never heard of: The Conspirators. The trailer and movie description presented it as the real story behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The movie presents eight potential accomplices of John Wilkes Booth, who are each tried in aiding in the assassination of the President. Although we didn’t watch the movie, the story the trailer tells has remained in the front of my mind. What interested me were the historic alterations; The Conspirators didn’t necessarily make me consider the validity of Lincoln’s assassination, but rather the validity of history in general. As we all probably recognize by now, everyone is shaped by their surroundings, and the past was no different. People’s choices are influenced by others, or current events, just as we saw in Kindred; by today’s understanding, those living in the 1800’s had a skewed perception of race, but at the time, slavery was standard.
Because we recognize how our surroundings influence decisions, and how the past shapes the present, it seems expected that we are intrigued by “what ifs” and “could have beens.” Why else would Hollywood spend the time and money to produce a movie like The Conspirators if not to capitalize on our desire to think about how one miniscule change in history could severely alter lives today? We are intrigued by movies like The Conspirators or The Butterfly Effect seemingly by natural curiosity, but the movie industry knows how to magnify this curiosity in order to make the movie successful. Trailers depict excitement, romance, plot twists, humorous scenes, favorite actors, good music and more to attract a wide variety of audiences. If assembled correctly, a trailer can make any movie look good, no matter the topic. I strongly dislike history as a subject, yet somehow, The Conspirators trailer drew me in, quite obviously so much so that it’s still on my mind and I can write a blog post about it.
I agree that the movie industry uses trailers to manipulate movie goers. I’ll usually only go to a movie if the preview is good. How else would I know what I was getting into? However sometimes they give a somewhat false representation of a movie. For example, over break I went to see The Descendants. The previews had led me to believe that it was a comedy because the scenes shown in the preview were funny. I discovered that the movie was much more dramatic and sad than I had expected. There were comedic moments, but there were also a lot of intense, heart-wrenching moments.
ReplyDeleteMy Dad always says that the previews are the only good scenes in the movie. Now I don’t agree that this is the case for all movies, but we should take the manipulation of the previews into account when deciding what to see.