trailer

This morning I saw an appalling movie trailer. The movie is Machete. The trailer consisted mostly of a guy chopping off a bunch of people’s heads in various clips from the movie. It’s a real movie. I looked it up. There are other trailers that are “approved for appropriate audiences” (the green band previews) that are still pretty violent. But the one I saw this morning showed heads coming off and blades going into bodies, an explosion or two and a bare ass. (I hope it was a red band trailer… “mature audiences only”.)  It kept coming up as a 15-second ad before other videos.

I’m not generally squeamish about movie violence, but this was just violence…no context. I didn’t know if this was a good guy violently avenging wrong, saving the lives of innocents, whatever OR some crazy psycho bad guy just killing people for kicks. Now, having looked at one of the other trailers, I have some idea of the context. And this first trailer I saw was probably a compilation of the most violent 15 seconds from throughout the movie. So it’s not just a feature-length film full of creative beheadings.

It was truly disturbing, especially because it kept coming up every time I tried to watch some other video. I’m not a fan of censorship, but if you’re gonna do it (and we do) that sort of glorification of violence has got to be more damaging than a graphic realistic-looking sex scene, which I’ve rarely seen in a commercial movie and never in a trailer. Who would put together a trailer like that? Who is the target audience? Seriously, what…the…fuck!?