Trailers and the political hook: how a horror franchise did it better than a Hollywood thriller

When I saw Green Room a few months back, the trailers attached to it were mostly were generic slasher shit, but two stood out: the trailers for Jodie Foster’s "Money Monster", and "The Purge: Election Year". Both intend to comment on The State of America; Election Year’s main character is a senator running for president who wants to end the titular purge, and Money Monster is about a Jim Cramer analogue who is taken hostage on live television by a man whose life was ruined by faux-Cramer’s faulty stock tips. Watching them back to back, it seemed like The Purge: EY’s trailer did a much better job of selling its film, even though it’s part of a franchise, and Money Monster completely fell flat. Of course, with Money Monster released a month and a half ago and The Purge:EY on its second week, the actual films are available to judge, but let's look at these trailers anyway; whether we want to admit it or not, trailers have their own significance.

Rewatching them, it’s clear that while both trailers intend to use current events as a hook, The Purge: EY’s trailer shows a better understanding of allegory and the current zeitgeist than Money Monster’s. Both trailers are pretty damn heavy handed, with The Purge: EY cross cutting “Keep America Great” with violence while “America the Beautiful” plays, but while The Purge at least uses imagery to get its point across, Money Monster shows its antagonist spouting anti-Wall Street rhetoric (“I might be the one with the gun here, but I’m not the criminal; it’s people like [faux-Cramer]”) or a protagonist giving us exposition about his motivation.

The basic idea behind the Purge is that, for one night, all crime is legal to let off steam and get the base urges of humans out for the rest of the year. The senator’s opposition, besides the barbarism, is that we, as Americans, should be better than that, should be on moral standing with the global community. American exceptionalism runs deep on both political parties, but the senator’s use (“The soul of America is at stake”, “It is a night that is defining our country. The Purge has to come to an end.”) is reminiscent of liberals using more socialist countries (usually in western Europe), to implore for empathy and change. The supporters of the purge are associated with the evangelical religious; a pastor delivers a sermon exalting America and the purge, leading his disciples in a chant to “Purge and Purify!”.

 "Keep America Great" is reminiscent of the slogan for Trump’s campaign, which has focused entirely on hyperbolic vitriol, painting immigrants as rapists and advocating internment camps and jailing women for having abortions. In essence he wants to “make America great” by cleansing it, pointing to minorities, immigrants, and women as scapegoats. The Purge doesn’t target anyone in particular, but the senator argues it targets the poor, her supporters shown are all black, and the name suggests the forceful ejection of dead weight while giving the purgers visceral satisfaction,. That juxtaposes the Purge with the evangelical right, which has become a significant force in the Republican Party (though not necessarily to Trump), and the senator with minorities and the poor, both whom liberals claim to champion (and believe the GOP explicitly excludes.) I doubt The Purge: EY is intending to be Democrat or liberal, but it is clearly associating the Purge with the extremist views within the GOP and especially Trump and his followers; Trump has actively championed violence against protesters. The argument for the Purge are that it’s an American Tradition, and that it mitigates the inherent aggression in humans, which assumes that violence is normal and unavoidable. With Trump clinching the Republican nomination (barring some legal masterstroke from the GOP), it strikes a very current chord in the social and political zeitgeist.

Money Monster’s subject, the financial crisis, while still relevant, is a well tread road; it’s been almost five years since the Occupy movement began with Occupy Wall Street, so there’s an expectation that Money Monster will do something new with the material, especially with films like Margin Call and The Big Short preceding it. Money Monster racks up the stakes with the hostage situation premise, but the dialogue follows very easy beats, material that at this point can be distilled into Advice Dog/Scumbag Steve-type memes.

 That doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to say about the crisis (there’s always a way to put a new spin on something), but the trailer doesn’t hint at anything particularly unconventional. Of course, since these are just trailers, none of this may apply to the actual films. Trailers can be misleading, and a good trailer interests the viewer without giving much away. But they are an integral part of movie marketing, and how people decide what to see, so what a trailer chooses to show sends a message about what the film wants to be.