Trailers

“Hurry up. Tick tock. Don’t want to miss the previews – and all of the excessive commercials.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events S1 E3, ‘The Reptile Room: Part One’ (2017)¹

I love trailers.

 

These seats aren’t as fancy as the ones in the last cinema I went to. Then again, I probably paid a lot more than I would have at the cinema in the picture.

Honestly, I find myself genuinely saddened when I arrive to the cinema late and miss out on a portion of the specially-selected audience-appropriate run of trailers shown before the feature film. The trailers are where the magic begins. Unlike the parade of consumer advertisements that invariably precedes them, they don’t belong to the mundane outside world and its endless mechanical exchanging of goods and services; they are little nuggets of other worlds, three-minute glimpses into the lovingly-drawn private universe of this director or that.² It’s during the trailers that the dull concerns of reality are stripped away and one’s soul is reawakened to the teeming possibilities of the human imagination, and so primed to plunge straight into the story of the following feature presentation without needing the first few minutes of exposition to really settle down to the thing at hand. By the trailers one’s appetite is whetted for what follows; they are the canapés where the feature film is the main course.

What they are decidedly not is films in their own right. They may perhaps be well-crafted and enjoyable pieces of cinematic artistry in their own right,³ but at the end of the day, a trailer isn’t designed to make you love the trailer; it’s designed to make you want to go and see the film it’s promoting.

If it sounds as if I’m stating the obvious, good. Now that we’ve all got a picture in our heads of someone obsessing over how cool a trailer is and yet failing to express any enthusiasm whatsoever to watch the film it’s about, and a sense of how odd and amiss such an attitude would seem, it’s time for me to throw this week’s spiritual analogy into the mix.

See, I think this world is and has been strewn with a whole variety of things that can be plausibly understood as trailers for the world to come. A bunch of the miracles Jesus performed while he was walking about on earth – ‘signs’ as the New Testament calls them⁴ – can be put into this category. It’s often emphasised – and very rightly so, I might add – that Jesus’ signs were designed to demonstrate his identity as God by proving his power over creation, but there are any number of ways he could have demonstrated that: the fact that a comfortable majority of the miracles recorded in the gospels consist of the supernatural healing of diseases and disabilities⁵ reveals something more than Jesus’ divine power. It reveals something of the nature of the coming kingdom he preached about – in this case, that there will be an end to physical suffering. That’s not the whole picture of what the new creation is going to be like, any more than a trailer gives you every detail of the plot of the film to which it pertains,⁶ but it’s a nugget, a glimpse.

Another example is marriage. Paul wrote that marriage is an analogy for the relationship between Christ and the Church; John recorded a vision of the ultimate cosmic wedding-feast in question; Jesus affirmed that after the resurrection, people aren’t going to get married to each other any more.⁷ Marriage as we know it now, then, is a trailer for what God’s relationship with his people will be like in the world to come. It’s not the whole picture, but it’s a glimpse.

In fact, there’s arguably an extent to which every good thing God gives us in this age is a sort of trailer for the utterly, exhaustively, and unimpeachably good world to come, if not as clear a one as the above examples. After all, if that world will exhibit goodness to its fullest extent, everything good we have now must be a tiny piece of it, however dim a reflection it may represent.

Now go back to that image of someone obsessing over how much he or she loves a trailer, yet showing little interest in the film said trailer was designed to promote. Isn’t it arguably just as odd and amiss when we obsess over the good things of this world and show little interest in the ultimately good world to come?

I’m not saying, just to be clear, that supernatural healings and marriage and all the good things of this world aren’t actually good or worth wanting after all. Didn’t I start this post by saying that I love trailers? And indeed, trailers can be excellent bits of cinematography in and of themselves. On top of that, when one has to wait a really long time for the actual film to come out, one appreciates every frame of trailer one can get one’s hungry eyes on all the more; I lost count, for instance, of how many times I watched the Spider-man: Homecoming trailer before I was able to actually go and see the film.⁸ (It was well good, by the way. Would heartily recommend.) Since we haven’t been issued with a release date for the new creation, then, it’s no wonder we’re keen to enjoy as many trailers as we can in the meantime.

What we mustn’t do is forget that the trailers are only trailers, and the point of a trailer isn’t to make you love the trailer, but to give you a flavour of how good the feature film is going to be. Every trailer of the new creation that we get to enjoy should increase our longing for when we finally get to see the real thing. Equally, if God in his wisdom and his steadfast love denies any one of us access to a particular trailer – if no physical healing comes despite prayers that it would, if we don’t find a spouse despite dearly wishing for one, whatever it may be – we can be reassured that, ultimately, we’re not really missing out: the trailer was only a trailer and we’re still going to get to see the feature film. That doesn’t make waiting for the release date magically easy, but it offers great comfort nonetheless.

In fact, the only way to really miss out isn’t by failing to experience any particular one of the trailers, but by failing to take advantage of the opportunity to see the feature film. Advance bookings are open; Jesus already paid the ticket price; the release date is unknown, but sooner every day. Tell your friends. This one really is a must-see.

Footnotes

¹ I finished watching the first series of the Series this week. It’s very nicely put together, faithful to the books and in some ways improves on them. Good show, Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80114990?trackId=200257859.

² As lovingly-drawn private universes go, the trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is too spectacular for me not to put a link to it in this post:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8oVfkZM3pA. I hope the film lives up to it.

³ The UK trailer for The Pirates! In an Adventure, with Scientists is a good example of a trailer that’s kind of its own thing as well as a promotion for the feature film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOFLtsDvbw. Or, indeed, think of this ‘first look’ trailer for Frozen that’s essentially a short story in its own right, with barely a hint at the actual contents of the feature film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdC4DaYIeQ.

⁴ The Greek word is σημεῖον (sēmeion). It means ‘sign’. There’s really nothing more to it than that.

⁵ If I can count (which is somewhat doubtful) twenty-one of thirty-seven recorded miracles of Jesus were healings, not counting driving out demons or raising the dead. That’s about fifty-seven per cent. (I totally cheated and checked a list, https://www.thoughtco.com/miracles-of-jesus-700158, by the way, just in case you were under the impression I could spontaneously reel off a list of Jesus’ recorded miracles off the top of my head.)

⁶ Unless it’s this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXSj1y9kl2Y. Nailed it again, Studio C.

⁷ You’re looking at the end of Ephesians 5, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+5&version=ESVUK, the middle of Revelation 19, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+19&version=ESVUK, and the middle of Matthew 22, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&version=ESVUK (or Mark 12, or Luke 20, but there are only so many hyperlinks it’s seemly to put in one footnote).

⁸ And now I really want to see the film again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0D3AOldjMU. And am also already raring to go for a sequel. *Sigh.*