within us sleep pearls of our former consciousnesses - one of mine, the 13 year-old boy i was many many years ago. today when i saw a link to a trailer for a new (final?) Indiana Jones movie, something stirred. i clicked.
it seems fine. the kind of movie people will call "fun". if nothing else i support a septuagenarian's right to punch a nazi one last time.
the trailer follows a formula that is almost eye-rollingly familiar at this point - the slow build up, teases and reverent glimpses of familiar characters and themes. then, the "boom": at the 1:00 mark we are hit with what can most succinctly be described as a "trailerized" version of the classic John Williams Indiana Jones theme.
if you're not familiar with "trailerized", clicking a few random links from this youtube search will give you an idea: it's a collection of music production techniques that mesh into a kind of aesthetic filter, that turns seemingly almost any piece of music into the bombastic "Hans Zimmer having a wank at his DAW" sonic artifact that has become so familiar to moviegoers since the turn of the 2010s - the Inception (2010) "bwaaah" being perhaps the loudest and most identifiable touchstone.
what's wild about this is that the original Indiana Jones theme was arguably already "trailerized": it was the most bombastic, emotionally punchy, pop-Wagnerian stuff you could pull out of an orchestra circa the early 1980s. the Indy theme is as recognizable to nerds of certain generations as the Star Wars fanfare, and John Williams' oeuvre during that period had a huge role in defining the aesthetics of blockbuster cinema. so what does it mean for it to be "trailerized" in 2022? it reminds me a bit of how "better graphics" has worked as a social-aesthetic feedback loop in videogames since pretty much the dawn of that medium. it's about spectacle and [wrinkles nose a little] "epic-ness" and emotional punch and, most deeply, intensity. and it's interesting how the trailerizers - not-untalented folks on youtube posting their amped-up versions of familiar tunes - have excavated this previously unseen plateau of a particular aesthetic of emotional intensity, like kids finding several cases of Jolt Cola in an overlooked closet.
i'd ask what will happen when satiation sets in and this previous high of intensity becomes normal and even boring, but the mere existence of the term trailerization shows that's pretty clearly already happened. what next? does this satiation+new-peak-seeking behavior loop indefinitely? in another decade or so will there be another aesthetic that displaces, eclipses, or explodes atop this one? will Inception (Ultra-Giga-Trailerized Mix) be melting our faces off in 2032? [in the distance a nuke detonates, cutting me off mid-concluding-thought]
