The Extratextuals

After having discovered the Internet Movie Poster Awards site, I’m on a movie poster kick. I went browsing through their archives for some particularly spectacular and memorable posters, and intend to discuss one a day for the next week.

However, it’s perhaps worth starting by noting how taken aback I was by how dull and derivative most posters are. Scrolling through hundreds of pages of the IMPA galleries showed me endless posters that simply showed a star’s head, or some disembodied part of a young woman’s anatomy. The former style basically says, “Look, we have a star!” and thus relies more on the star to sell the film than actually getting off its creative ass and telling us something more about the film, its characters, themes, world, etc. The latter is just sexist and regressive, saying, “Look: T&A” (though legs figure heavily too, it must be stated, usually splayed open in some configuration or another). So, stars and sex sell: nothing new learned there.

But the posters I stopped on are those that set up the film in a more satisfying way. Really good posters don’t just appeal to a frustrated libido or let star image do all the work: they do what a good trailer does and invite you into the film’s world, they give you a tantalizing sense of what to expect, and then they leave you thinking about the poster and the movie afterwards. All of the posters I’ll discuss this week did this for me.

And now, I start with the best, and by best I mean the poster that bar none has had the most effect on me.

Jaws
I have a bone to pick with this poster. A big, 4 layers of teeth jaw bone. For most of my life, it’s been single-handedly responsible for limiting my joy in swimming in the sea. In truth, it’s not the film that got to me – I grew up with a lot of horror films and novels, and while they all scar(r)ed me in their own way, I basically knew not to worry about creatures in the dark. But the poster scared the crap out of me. And I spent two years of my childhood living next to a beach, the famous Cottesloe Beach in Perth, Australia (famous for great surfing amongst surfers, for John Fiske’s [pretty accurate] reading of a beach in Reading the Popular, and for big ass great white sharks). The idea that I could be swimming, oblivious to the fact that a massive shark was rushing to gobble me up has never really gone away. So while many blame Spielberg or Benchley for being scared of the water, I blame whoever designed this poster. Jaws was a good film, but when the real horror lies in the poster, that’s some excellent work.

Tomorrow, another Spielberg film: ET.

poster art Jaws, poster art, posters