I’ve mentioned previously that I love movies and recently went to see the new movie “There Will Be Blood”. Now, for copywriters and marketers movies and stories can contain many useful lessons.
Why? Well because, used properly, stories can be employed in copywriting or your general marketing material to great effect. Basically, stories enable you to engage the reader and slip “under the radar” and disarm their natural scepticism to some extent.
And good stories are so powerful because we humans seem to be hardwired to respond to them. Everyone loves a good story, right?
Now, this topic deserves a lot more attention than I’m going to give it in this post. For the moment I’ll simply suggest that books by Joseph Campbell (for example “The Hero With A Thousand Faces”) or “The Seven Basic Plots” by Christopher Booker are well worth reading.
Back to “There Will Be Blood”. The movie has been widely applauded by critics and is in line for all sorts of industry awards. The lead, Daniel Day-Lewis, has been praised (rightly, in my opinion) for his performance.
However, as of the time of writing this post, the box office take in North America has been around $27 million. In other words, the movie has not been a success at the box office, despite all the “buzz” and good press.
The reason, in my opinion, is that it’s not a good movie or a good story. Without spoiling the plot for people, the story isn’t terribly interesting. There’s very little tension. None of the characters are very appealing. The movie is dominated by Daniel Day-Lewis as the oilman Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis is on screen for most of the movie). But the character is strangely one-dimensional. We never really get to understand the man. The other characters are hardly developed at all.
The “story” as such is a pretty transparent anti-business movie with the almost obligatory anti-religion sideswipe. The ending is, well odd. And it doesn’t really reach any sort of satisfying conclusion. It’s left up in the air.
(Note to copywriters. People hate unfinished stories. If you start a story in your copy or “tease” people, make sure you don’t leave them hanging. “Blind Bullets” are different, because the way to answer that nagging question, of course, is to buy the product.)
It’s typical in many ways of the direction taken in the last 30-40 years by the “artistic” end of the movie business. It used to be the case that movies and stories usually had a “Happy Ending”. Well, starting sometime in the twentieth century “Happy Endings” became less fashionable and a darker tone, more nihilistic really, came into vogue. “Film Noir”, “Anti-Heroes”, the whole counter-culture thing.
The problem is that there is a very good reason why classical stories have “Happy Endings”. People like that and while the purpose of stories is to pass on certain lessons about life, one of the other purposes is to provide people hope.
So, movies like “There Will Be Blood” are just a big downer. As a result, few people will want to see it again and few will recommend it to others. Have to say, I’m glad I saw it and it certainly held my attention. It’s a long movie (almost 3 hours) and it was only about 30 minutes from the end that I felt like it was dragging a little. However, it was more like the macabre fascination of watching something horrible unfold, rather than being engrossed in the story!