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. With A Turn of Phrase
In Consumed: “Snakes on a plane” (the phrase, not the movie): When a movie promotes the hype more than the hype promotes the movie.
You could make a good case that the great comedy hit of the year was “snakes on a plane.” Not the film (which wasn’t really a comedy, or a hit) but the phrase — or, if you prefer, the phenomenon. There has been a lot of theorizing about this and its implications for, or lessons about, the future of marketing in the postmodern, participatory era and so on, with the inevitable invocation of words like “viral” and “meme.” But really, it was never rocket science to figure out why “snakes on a plane” was popular: It was funny. More to the point, it was funny in specific ways: it was instant, mutable and unmoored….
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Reader Comments
“…while the DVD version of “Snakes” will include a 12-minute featurette about Finkelstein and other key figures in the “snakes” phenomenon, it would probably be more interesting if the disc were conceived as a massive digital document of the many grass-roots phrase creations, with a 12-minute featurette about the film. But that’s not going to happen.”
Wait for the Criterion Edition!
And you’re right about all of this, but I think there’s one more important element here: ownership. The producers of “Snakes on a Plane” [movie] own the film in a very proprietary way – they own it exclusively, and make money by selling access to its restricted content (movie tickets or DVDs). The product is valuable to them because of its restricted access.
The fans/creators of the “Snakes on a Plane” [Internet meme/phenomenon] also own the phenomenon, but in a way that is inherently open-source. The phenomenon is valuable to them because of its openness, and becomes more valuable with each additional participant – none of whom has (necessarily) paid a dime in the effort.
Obviously, there is a conflict central to this, which I think Larry Lessig explicates quite nicely here.
I think I agree with what you’re saying.
Or maybe that I just don’t disagree with it.
But I think the issue of ownership in a capiitalist/legal sense is a different ball of wax than what I was trying to focus on in this particular column. Actually releasing a DVD of everybody’s contributions to the Snakes thing would , in fact, be a legal nightmare — but I wasn’t serious in suggesting that. What I was interested in was … well, I already wrote it, so if it’s not obvious, I failed!
“Actually releasing a DVD of everybody’s contributions to the Snakes thing would , in fact, be a legal nightmare…”
Of course – and it would also totally miss the point for the SoaP-as-phenomenon community. The phenomenon is the product, and inherent in that product is its being “free as in speech” and “free as in beer.” The SoaP-as-film producers were savvy enough to catch on to, and play along with, the former, but because of the current realities of the film business simply could not be part of the latter. SoaP-as-film still needed to make money as a film, and since SoaP-as-phenomenon was inherently not about making money, there was a major disconnect, there. What you captured quite nicely was the lack of understanding that the studios still have over the “conversion of buzz to dollars” – all buzz is not equal in its convertibility to revenue.