Over the weekend, I attempted to watch Daniel Espinoza’s 2022 film, Morbius. Yes, I read the reviews but if there’s a superhero involved, especially a Marvel Comics superhero, I’m in. I am less than elated to report that the reviews were not wrong. It really is not a good movie.
As I am off for the week, I then undertook to watch Robert Eggers’ The Northman. The reviews were better than the movie. An extremely violent retelling of Hamlet, The Northman is 137 minutes of sturm und drang und tedium. Seriously, Netflix’ The Last Kingdom does WAY more story with WAY less star-power and budget.
“But my point—and I do have one…” Ellen DeGeneres
However The Northman’s worst offense is not in the telling but in the marketing. “Conquer Your Fate” is the tagline on the poster. There is much blood-letting, two or three disembowelments, and a yawny-dismemberment, (imagery stolen from Game of Thrones). Yet no fate is conquered.
Spoiler alert—the cited examples are OLD
However, The Northman is not the only offender. When I was 20-ish, I went to see James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day, with a woman I was sweet on. If you haven’t seen it, let me promise you that it is not, contrary to marketing, a romantic movie. No “woo” was pitched that day.
In fact I was perfectly fine never pursuing romance ever again. Yeah, I was so PISSED, I read the Ishiguro novel. Same title, btw. Same shitty ending, too. There is no redemption. No remains to be had in the day. It is desolate and beautiful and it PISSED me off even more.
SHE DID WHAT?
There’s Dorothy Parker’s sarcasm and then there’s Dorothy West’s sarcasm. Parker zings you and makes you shake your finger while you laugh at yourself. Wests cuts your heart out with your own wants for Cleo Judson, the conniver/protagonist of The Living is Easy.
If all you know of Dorothy West is The Wedding, stop. Go no further. Seriously I have cherished memories of The Wedding. But The Living is Easy, is a WAY different, hard, HARD book. You see the train coming and you know Cleo's house of cards will be destroyed by it but she persists in building on the damned tracks.
It doesn’t have to be this way
Annie Proulx’ Postcards is a nice, middle-of-the-road title that conveys the drama without misleading the reader. The misery of the Blood family across the wastes of the 20th-century-American family is in the pages, not on the cover. Is there pain here? Boy-howdy, is there. In fact, if I had read Postcards first, I would’ve never read Proulx’ big-hearted The Shipping News. Which is an EVEN BETTER title for a brilliant love-letter to growth and second acts in hard lives.
Contrary to published descent, (seriously, people did not get it) I hold Richard Adams’ Watership Down high in spot-on titles. The stated story—rabbits trying to find a new home when the destruction of their warren is foretold by a seer—is a fantastic allegory for war, (the Second World War specifically). It is perfectly titled to sell the drama and tone. This is also an excellent example of publishers often knowing better than authors how to sell a book.
“...the horror, the horror…” Mr. Kurtz
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness delivers on that title. Mr. Kurtz’ final line, uttered from his deathbed, haunts me as it haunted Captain Marlow. If all you know is the Brando meme traveling on the interwebs, go, read Heart of Darkness, now, run-run-run.
So, if it sounds like I’m picking on The Northman, it's because I am. In the first act, 10-year-ish-old Prince Amleth swears to avenge his father, (more ham sammich than foreshadowing) while the old man is still alive. Amleth is told there is no “scaping his fate.” As a full-grown Viking, Amleth encounters the Seeress, (Björk) and she gives him all the cheats to avenge his father, save his mother, and kill his uncle. She also tells him there is no “scaping his fate.”
It's a whole thing
Amleth hears the same message at least twice more before uttering it himself at the end before he completely does the opposite promised in the tagline. Long story short it’s a LONG drive for a short trip. To make a shorter point, Universal Pictures overcorrected for this turkey with a bad-check tagline.
Don’t do this to your readers. Sell your actioner as an actioner (Alex Finley’s The Nightshift). Sell your romance as a romance, (Nisha Sharma’s Dating Dr. Dil). Do NOT sell your pompous treatise in navel-gazing as an actioner (Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger) or your dystopian-social commentary as a romance (Sara Fletcher’s Be Here to Love Me at the End of World).
As goes the old saw, “You can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time…” but no one appreciates being schnooked. Also, Duane Swierczynski will never turn another dime off me after I bought a heist novel titled The Wheelman but instead it was a 220-odd page intro to his assassin.
So make sure your title and your marketing serve your story. If the objective is to “fool” someone into buying your book, you need another plan. Maybe another vocation, too.
The photo at the top, "The Northman" movie poster is the property of Unversal Pictures. It is used here for educational/instructional purposes as covered by the Fair Use Doctrine.
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