Open Collections

Teasing the Twitter timeline: examining Hollywood’s internal pre-teaser

University of British Columbia

The endless scroll of social media complexifies today’s era of film promotion, expanding and fragmenting promotional materials such as trailers and teasers that proliferate in endless abundance. The social media user frequently scrolls upon such texts unintentionally, perhaps never continuing to view their source films. Many have acknowledged the internet’s liberation of movie trailers from the theatrical screen, but less considered is the new intimacy these texts find in the social media screen. The social media timeline now teems with stand-alone encounters that alter the form and function of the modern Hollywood trailer. Foregrounding the Twitter platform and its video autoplay technology, this thesis unpacks how these conditions evoke a new convention in the Hollywood trailer text. Specifically, it connects the 2015 advent of autoplay on Twitter with the 2016 outbreak of teasers-within-the trailers, excerpts or micromontages edited within the opening seconds of official trailers and yet signalled as separate from the trailer with an ‘Official Trailer’ title card. Proposing the term internal pre-teaser (IPT) to account for this online phenomenon, this work maps the convention’s formal parameters and historicizes its emergence, offering a timeline and arguing that key events in technology and industry contributed to this formulaic opening device. Engaging with theories of network temporality, this work considers the centrality of immediacy and incessancy in both the conditions of the Twitter timeline and the IPT’s textual strategies. Ultimately, it argues that the central significance of the internal pre-teaser is the interplay it reveals between platform and text. Exploiting the forced flow of autoplay, the internal pre-teaser deploys spectacle and speed to cause an affective jolt that ultimately stops the scroll. Exchanging narrative investment for an entrapment of eyeballs, the internal pre-teaser reveals a recasting of persuasive strategies in the online Hollywood trailer.

Text

2021-02-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77361

Cinema and Media Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/