Young Sadult.
The last trailer before Young Adult began was for Titanic in 3D. I raced to cram my fingers in my ears so as to not get the horrific Celine Dion song we all know and hate stuck in my head. Didn’t work. You’ll be happy to hear that the trailer included every single thing you remember oh so fondly from that bad bad film: Kate and Leo flying on the prow, the spin-dance, nude sketching, sex in the car, the iceberg, and, most poignantly, that dude who bangs into the smokestack while plummeting to an ice-cold watery death. No Billy Zane, which is fine, since I can barely recall that he exists at all.
I grimaced through this entire godforsaken meal of tripe and thought, “How can the marketing team who selects the trailers that run before the feature believe that the audience for Young Adult wouldn’t scoff at Titanic?” Because as we all know, Young Adult is about a grown up mean girl who goes back to her hometown to wreak havoc on the yokels. She’s a self-serving, narcissistic, angry, myopic cunt and people who would be drawn to watching a film about her probably aren’t the sort who would sit through a bloated, histrionic mess. In 3D no less. Like “Hey, Madagascar’s set in Africa right? Cool, let’s throw it on the front of Hotel Rwanda.”
The most obvious reason the Titanic 3D trailer was stuck in there is because marketers break down demographics into highly specialized groups so as to ensure that whatever they’re selling will be aimed at the audience most willing to buy it. Clearly, these guys have a very specific bucket labeled: “WOMEN.” If you’ve got va-jay, you’re definitely gonna pay to cry.
After Young Adult finished however and I’d been forced (albeit willingly) to endure an hour and a half with a beautiful but ugly on the inside (IRONY) anti-heroine who barely grasped that her romantic ideals of “running off to the city with her first one true love” are downright delusional to the point of mental handicap, I considered the deeper implications of including that Titanic trailer.
Charlize Theron’s character is the sort who would watch Titanic or Twilight or some other bland rom-com filled with stereotypical, wrong-headed views on male-female relationships. She seemed like the type who had actually believed and acted on ideas she’d learned from this crap that women so happily, brainlessly devour. And since she’s a writer of books aimed at teen girls, she’s actually complicit in the creation of these lie-filled stories. She came off like a delusional escaped mental patient — a victim of never having grown out of a particularly bad phase in high school.
The idea of the film is that you get to dwell in the spectrum of her horrible behavior and thrill at her spectacular self-involvement. There are visceral moments of mortification where you shield your eyes. Most of these were given away in the trailer however, which is a shame. This isn’t praise for Young Adult’s filmmakers because it’s tough, unpleasant work spending time with a spiteful, amoral alcoholic (who isn’t me!). You actually think, “How did this person get this way?”
And so the answer is by watching brain candy like Titanic and reading Twilight?
