Everyone* was super excited about the new Star Wars trailers released yesterday. Oh my, how glorious! New Star Wars! GIVE ME ALL TEH STAR WARS!
Let's watch one of these new trailers!
This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Not because I'm a big Star Wars fan (what am I, some kind of nerd loser?**) who can't wait to see what JJ Abrams has in store for all you dorks (who I am definitely not one of, c'mon). Rather, it's the greatest thing I've ever seen because it's the single most commercial thing that has ever been created.
Think about it: This is an advertisement teasing a theatrical trailer—itself little more than a commercial for a movie. But, like Inception***, we need to go one level further down. Because the film itself, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, is little more than an advertisement for toys and books and comics and clothes and lunchboxes and branded foods/drinks and DVDs and Blu-rays and theme parks.
So what caused everyone**** to get excited yesterday?
An ad for an ad for an ad.
Capitalism ftw!
*Read: "Everyone in my Twitter feed," which is actually a very small and non-representative subset of "everyone" given that very few people are on Twitter and that the people I follow on Twitter are disproportionately likely to be interested in film and/or politics.
**Don't answer that question.
***This is a movie directed by Christopher Nolan that Ben Dreyfuss doesn't understand in which people have dreams within dreams within dreams in order to steal information from other people.
****See footnote "*".