(From The New Yorker
by Rachel Arons)
If you want to know what’s wrong with the modern book trailer, you might start by watching the one for Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” Sitting at a table in front of several rows of bookshelves and looking directly into the camera, Franzen explains—in a tone that is polite but characteristically aggrieved—his “profound discomfort” with having to use moving images to promote the printed word. “To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place,” he says. “You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book … To me, the world of books is the quiet alternative—an ever more desperately needed alternative.”
Franzen may be tiresomely preoccupied with the ways in which new technologies are threatening the life of the mind (what other writer would make a book trailer about being reluctant to make a book trailer?), but in his vexing and insightful way he articulates a common sense of unease about the advent of video advertisements for literature. In an article in the Rumpus highlighting “fantastic” book trailers, Shirin Najafi wrote that “a trailer inherently removes an element of the imaginative process and potentially cheapens the medium by suggesting a sort of inadequacy.” According to the International Business Times, Ben Marcus—whose trailer for his 2012 novel “The Flame Alphabet,” animated by Erin Cosgrove, is one of the more original examples of the form—thinks it’s “sad” that books today must appeal to readers through visuals. What’s most sad about it is the whiff of defeat—the sense of a publishing industry in forlorn compliance with the laws of a YouTube world.
For each expression of apprehension, though, there is another of pragmatic acceptance. Lorin Stein, while helping to conceive trailers as an editor at F.S.G., in 2006 (when the rise of YouTube was giving videos a new reach), pointed out that the job of publishers is “putting books in people’s hands.” “We’ve been advertising our wares in silly ways since putting a dirty picture on the cover of a Faulkner book,” he said. Even Franzen, in the same breath he used to state his objections, admitted that book trailers have become a necessary evil: “I understand that a lot of commerce happens online now,” he said in the “Freedom” trailer, “so I think it makes eminently good sense to be recording little videos like this.”
This sense of necessity has driven many authors and publishers to embrace “little videos” in recent years. The results are often dismal: at worst, the one- to five-minute ads are made with stock footage and bad sound effects, and text-presentation flourishes reminiscent of PowerPoint. (One especially lame but popular early approach, seen in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trailer, was recycling a book’s cover design and promotional blurbs.) The better ones look like low-budget film trailers, or impressionistic video collages that give only a vague sense of a book’s storyline. Of the fifty or so trailers I watched while writing this article, approximately eight—several of them animations, like Ben Marcus’s or Sloane Crosley’s, for her essay collection “How Did You Get This Number”—piqued my interest. The rest of them, so clearly made in haste or half-heartedness, suggest publishers’ lingering uncertainty about whether trailers can actually help sell books.
Then there is the leading book-trailer auteur of our time, Gary Shteyngart.
The key to Shteyngart’s trailers, which are more like Funny or Die videos or comedic short films, is that they parody the absurdities and humiliations of authorly self-promotion. In the trailer for his 2010 novel “Super Sad True Love Story,” which featured James Franco and a slew of famous writers, he played a Russian-accented version of himself who knew how to navigate the literary world despite the fact that he couldn’t read (for example, by teaching a seminar at Columbia on how to behave at Paris Review parties). When the paperback edition of “Super Sad” came out, he made a follow-up in which Super-Russian Gary and Paul Giamatti played roommates trying to pick up women at a book club in Brooklyn.
The newest edition to Shteyngart’s oeuvre is a trailer, released last week, for his memoir “Little Failure,” which comes out next month (and was excerpted in The New Yorker in June). Featuring actors like Alex Karpovsky, Rashida Jones, and, once again, James Franco, its premise is that Franco, playing Shteyngart’s husband, has written an “erotic journey” called “Fifty Shades of Gary” that has completely eclipsed “Little Failure.” There are matching pink bathrobes and a cameo by none other than Franzen, in the role of Shteyngart’s shrink. The jokey theme of the video, like his earlier ones, is that social or professional success is elusive when you are a nebbishy immigrant who writes literary fiction. But the meta joke is knowing that Shteyngart’s trailers are, in fact, expert works of viral marketing, packaged with comedic appeal, respectable production values, and a peppering of Shteyngart’s celebrity buddies (this is one popular nebbish!). The first “Super Sad” trailer got a quarter of a million views on Facebook; the most recent one premièred on Buzzfeed last Friday and has since been enthusiastically “liked” and reblogged.
There are a number of other authors who have made self-deprecating, parodic book trailers—Julie Klam, Dave Hill, Thomas Pynchon—and theirs, too, are generally more intriguing than the straight-faced ones. (In Hill’s, for “Tasteful Nudes,” Dick Cavett calls spell check a “too-thin contraceptive”; in Pynchon’s, for “Bleeding Edge,” smoked salmon is used as a skincare product, and a guy in a “Hi, I’m Tom Pynchon” T-shirt stands in for the press-shy author.) Like Shteyngart’s, these videos do not attempt to convey, in a few minutes of film, the content or quality of the books they’re promoting, because how could they? Maybe one secret to book trailers is acknowledging that it is impossible. But they do give a meaningful sense of the authors’ sensibilities. The message I take away is not that words are inadequate without visual aids, or that books are slaves to YouTube, but that some writers have imaginations that extend across different media, and a few even know how to access their inner hams.
*On a personal note - I have blogged in the past about book trailers. The first time I saw one was about two months ago. It was for a romance novel. It was way too long, too much still pictures, too much music, and just too much. I know I did not get comments here but some of my friends that read my blog got me on Facebook or my email and told me how horrible it was. I was praying this would not be the future of book media. I have also complained in my blog that there are no commercials about books. Maybe one or two a year....yes a year and only by a famous authors. I believe it is a media that should be explored and there is nothing much more that has to be done besides showing the book cover, mentioning the name of the book, the release date, and maybe a quick spoken synopsis. The ads on utube are totally ridiculous. I do hope that someday we will see commercials for books like we do for movies. We will see the book commercial for a book by our favorite author that is coming out in two months and we can get exctited about it. But there are so many more books than movies. But we could try to start tackling the task so maybe when your child watches television they may say "Mom I just saw a commercial for a book I want on Nickelodeon". How cool would that be?
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