Hey Clickbait, Don't Make So Many Assumptions About What I've Seen or Remembered!
When I see a clickbait headline promising to hip me to the wildly improbable, hitherto unknown existence of some crazy cult movie that I’ve never even heard of my response is invariably one of annoyance.
Despite what these screaming headlines insist, I have, almost invariably, heard of the movie they’re positive I’ve never heard of. I not only remember these ostensible unknown obscurities; I’ve often written about them as well, sometimes more than once.
Then again, since I started writing for the A.V Club in 1997 my job, and by extension my life has revolved around celebrating crazy movies and obscure movies and movies that should not exist for any number of reasons yet miraculously do.
I am consequently not the audience for these articles, which make assumptions about their readership and their collective frame of reference that I find insane.
definitely seen these!
These articles assume that their entire readership share the same blind spots. They would make more sense and be less presumptuous if they delineated that they were about crazy ass movies that the average person does not know about or remember, but perhaps that is implicit in this whole weird, bizarrely vast sub-section of pop culture media.
It goes without saying that sure, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese have heard of these ostensibly unknown, obscure cult treasures just waiting to be discovered. The same is probably true of people like myself who have made knowing about weird movies and loving weird movies and celebrating weird movies the core of their careers.
To cite two examples from the last hour I spent online, I saw an article entitled “‘Snake Eyes’ Is the Forgotten “Nicolas Cage Is a Lunatic” Film” on Decider and another on “Brad Pitt's Insane Movie We Forgot Existed” on Cracked.
“Brad Pitt’s Insane Movie We Forgot Existed” is Cool World, a movie I knew existed before it came out, and then after it came out, and sure as shit did not forget about at any point. Neither did a bad movie realm that similarly remembered Cool World and podcasted about Cool World and wrote lengthy articles about how insane it is.
The weird way the Cracked headline is phrased attests to the fact that Cool World was a pretty big movie when it came out, and became infamous as one of the biggest, most misguided animated flops of all time. It went down in history all right, as a boondoggle for the ages.
I don’t blame the author of that article or any other for the ubiquity of this groaning cliche. Freelance writers oftentimes don’t have control over how their articles are packaged. I know that when I contributed to Cracked briefly sometimes the headline for a piece I wrote would change after it was already posted to see whether traffic would increase with a sexier title.
Besides, it is tough to pitch articles successfully so sites who tend to play it safe by sticking to a group of sturdy, dependable templates, one of which is “The Crazy Movie Involving a Big Star You’ve Never Head Of” or “The Crazy Vehicle for Johnny Big Time We All Forgot.”
In a perfect world these articles would perform a valuable public service by alerting the public to the existence of crazy cult obscurities they might otherwise not be aware of, but that they might dig.
Just as these headlines assume that their audience are mediocre or less in their film knowledge and frame of reference, they also assume that their readers are young. As a Gen Xer born in 1976 I remember very vividly not just seeing Cool World and Snake Eyes but also the build-up and hype and subsequent disappointment.
Hell, I’m doing a podcast tomorrow about Snake Eyes with two other people who just saw Snake Eyes and are excited to talk about it. For the next twenty-four hours or so Snake Eyes will be the least forgotten movie ever as far as I am personally concerned. I am certainly doing my humble little part to ensure that it is not, in fact, forgotten because it's far from an overlooked masterpiece but it is a whole lot of fun.
Then again, I assume that the readership for these articles consists at least partially of people like me who click in anger, feeling under-estimated and vaguely insulted by the assumptions they are making about my cultural literacy.
Beyond some deeply personal irritation about some egregiously wrong insinuations, I suppose the danger in the prevalence of these pieces lies in contributing to the dumbing down of our discourse through the implicit assumption that we haven’t seen a whole lot of movies or experienced much in the way of colorful and outrageous entertainment, and consequently can be endlessly baited with cheap, formulaic come-ons involving movies we’ve never seen and didn’t even know existed, but would blow our minds.
They’re more a pet peeve than a cultural poison but I certainly mind if this template were to, at the very least, grow a little less ubiquitous and oppressive, even as I can’t see it ever going away entirely.
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