Salt: A Better Defense

As with all things that taste good but just might kill you, salt appears to be coming under fire. It was one thing with the crusades against MSG, coconut oil, and transfats; most people don’t know what those are exactly, but they sound like they could be dangerous, so we might as well be rid of them, even if it changes the face of delicious food as we know it.

Can you still call it "Original Recipe" if it's missing my precious transfats?

But this time around, it’s different. This is salt we’re talking about. This is the most important spice in the history of spices, and that includes ones we have to mine from other planets. This is an ingredient that ran the world for hundreds of years, started and ended countless wars, and the control of which could raise and topple empires. This is the magical element that can make water boil and terrible food taste vaguely edible. This is the default flavor of most breakfast items at restaurants. This is the substance whose grains make us so much more level headed in the face of rumors. This is the stuff that makes aliens learn to shapeshift just to kill us for it. This is the only flavoring material I know of to get its own movie deal.

Who knew flavor was so sexy?

My point is, salt is so great the world will be jumping to its defense the moment there’s even the slightest detraction brought to its name, right? Surely the Salt Institute, the world’s foremost salt advocate, could come up with legitimate defenses in their sleep over this, right?

Well, recent appearances indicate otherwise. With thousands of years of human history screaming about how great salt is, the best defenses they’ve come up with is liberal use of the term “food police” (said while hoping the ghost of George Orwell doesn’t sue them for criminally lame attempts at villainizing someone) and staunch denial that too much of a good thing results in anything remotely negative, even if that good thing is made by combining two horrifyingly poisonous materials. This level of defense is embarrassing, and as a result, I propose a simple campaign to restore the good name of salt.

Namely, just point out the obvious.

Ladies and gentlemen, you already know that most things that taste good aren’t healthy for you, and even the ones that are fine are not meant to be consumed in Brobdignagian levels. That said, this is still salt we’re talking about. I mean seriously, it’s so delicious. It goes on anything, it makes everything better, and let’s face it, eggs would be just inedible otherwise. So what if the average person sucks in more salt than Galactus, I’ve got two words that will make all the health problems in the world seem like perfectly acceptable collateral damage: French Fries. The world in which we live is an ugly, cruel, depressing place that has a dangerously high level of ways it can kill you at a moment’s notice. One of the few solidarities we get in this life is food made delicious via salt, and if we choose to enjoy it in copious amounts, that’s between us and the bathroom scale (or the doctor, that depends entirely on us). My point is so what if it will lead you to an early grave. Give me a good reason to believe that’s not a decent trade off. Honesty is the best policy, so we’re just going to lay out the fact for you: you can either eat healthy, avoid indulgences, and live to a ripe old age, spending your abnormally long twilight years in an old folks’ home wishing your kids would visit you more often, or you can pile on those glorious little crystals, and die young with a smile on your face [:)] and a grin in your belly [?]. THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS!

I can guarantee you, salt, air this in your ads and you will not see any decline in sales whatsoever. In fact, you’d probably get some kind of award for corporate honestly or something. Or really, don’t do anything at all. Salt is very, very popular, and it’s not going to go the way of transfats and lose its place in established recipes.

Bucket full of LIES!!

Why do I Keep Watching?

I’m going to go ahead and preface this by saying that when it comes to movies and TV, I’m a special kind of snob. I watch what I like, and I like what I feel is “good”, high quality entertainment based on a personal rhetoric of critique. This rhetoric can be very different from most critics and most audiences, but it encompasses the things I enjoy and appreciate; I rarely will admit to liking a “bad” movie, as I almost only enjoy movies I feel are “good”, even when that is vastly disagreed upon by almost everyone else. With that out of the way, let’s continue.

One trend in cinema and television that I am growing restlessly tired of is shortcuts. In what once was a market where capitalism demanded making good movies to achieve audience support, filmmakers have been looking for, and finding, easier ways to get to all that cash. Like professional athletes turning to drugs to enhance their performance, audiences are falling victim to the effects of cinematic steroids. Here I am going to list some of the most insidious examples.

"What Have We Got To Lose?": Probably the oldest and easiest trick in the book is to simply put so little effort into something that the slightest gain results in inexplicable profit. The Scary, Epic, Date, Dance, and Disaster Movies are proof of that. Why hire writers when all you need is other scripts, scissors and hot glue? Why hire actors when all you need is people dragged off the street who maybe look like famous people when you squint. Epic Movie was, economically speaking, a huge success because of its $80 million gain over a comparatively low budget. The very fact that there are more on the way, means this trickery is working.

"Look At Me! Look At Me! Look At Me!": A snappily edited trailer can go a long way into making something not funny look funny:

Some folks just don’t rely on being low spenders. Despite the fact that they actually spent money and effort, they still ended up with nothing but crap, and now they have to sell it. How do you do that? With the trailer, and any other alluring aspects that come out before the film does. Case in point, Year One. With that trailer and that cast, there was no way it couldn’t be hilarious. Yet there I was in the audience, wondering how so many funny people got together and couldn’t think of anything funnier than ample use of the word foreskin. It didn’t take long for people to realize just how bad it was, as it dropped off the charts by the end of its first weekend. But the opening made enough money to be considered a financial success. What put it in that category was the fact that they spent far more time and effort making enough funny bits to look good in a preview, than trying to make a good film. Between casting and trailers, and any other non on screen choices that will trick people into thinking something will be good long enough to make them pay for it, one can still make a success out of the snakiest of oil.

Also, remember this still works on a week by week basis. The revival of “V” has contained a dream sequence almost every episode, the entirety of which manages to be incorporated into every next week preview.

You left your gun in my promo material.

"Indie Darling":

Tricking people with a stunning trailer for a bad film is still strictly small fries, though. The end result will be a good opening weekend with little else; to get a good long run requires tricking people on a larger scale to think something is good even after they’ve seen enough to know otherwise. How to do this? Enter the hipsters. As someone who’s taken three High School art classes, I’ve had firsthand experience with people who think Juno is a legitimate film. Few social groups are easier to trick into liking something ridiculous than hipsters. Anything with the words Indie in it originates from somebody who knows this, and is determined to make money off of them. But what really takes the cake is the career of Wes Anderson. I’ll be the first to admit that the trailer for Life Aquatic looked hilarious. And now that I’m older, wiser, and not trying to impress my art class friends, I’ll also be the first to say the actual movie was very much not hilarious. Wes Anderson, the kind of jokes you’re not supposed to laugh at, who I’m certain has blank parts in his scripts that he convinces his producers are jokes only smart people can see, managed to make a preview that appeared like it was a mainstream, laugh out loud comedy. After the opening weekend crowds realized it wasn’t, there was always the ever reliable hipsters there to back it up for the rest of its theatrical run. Clever, Mr. Anderson, very clever indeed. But when it comes to long running, career spanning trickery, there is truly only one master.

"Looks Can Kill": J. J. Abrams is a genius. An evil genius. For starters, he is the man who made Cloverfield. Cloverfield can be called many things; “good” and “a movie” are not among them. Having taken a camcorder and ran around New York on any given Friday night for an hour and a half, he released it into theatres and told people that if they look hard enough, there might be a monster in there. People didn’t go to see it because it was a good movie, because it wasn’t a real movie. They saw it because of the huge network of viral marketing, and the countless unanswered questions that would all be explained in the film itself. There was more effort put into the advertising; there was more plot put into the advertising. But people ate it up, and still are; just check out the buzz surrounding his newest trailer, Super 8. Basically it’s Cloverfield 2 except with a different blur for a monster, and a different group of presumably attractive teenagers. And also because the Cloverfield 2 is its own thing.

But on the subject of unanswered questions, how can we overlook Lost. He made another claim, slightly less incredulous than saying Cloverfield was a real movie, that Lost was real sci-fi. But it got people watching. And kept them watching for 6 years. Pretty much the best thing to get and keep people watching (that is allowable on network television) is curiosity. Lost had curiosity in spades, and refusing to answer any question asked along the way really just lead to even more curiosity. It filmed in Hawaii, thus winning over all the crowds who would otherwise be watching the Travel Channel on any given Wednesday night. Several main characters (like Kate and Sawyer) were played by former models, and it doesn’t take 12 seasons of America’s Next Top Model to tell you why folks tune in to watch those people. And when all else fails, there was always the good old fashioned soap opera storylines. This is in fact a show where the decision to change the course of history via nuclear proliferation fused with time travel on who was in love with who at the time (a status which changed about 15 times in that episode). When using this conglomerate method of storytelling, it didn’t really matter what actual plot events happened, as nothing actually happened on Lost. This wasn’t plot, this was formula and trickery and every aesthetic choice possible made with the goal of getting people to watch week after week, and never question until it was all over. For 6 years. In perspective, the popularity of Lost outlasted the reign of presidents and the existence of certain countries, despite every episode consisting of attractive people moping in Hawaii, and occasionally some goes out to murder a teenage girl or pregnant woman. Because J.J. Abrams really, really hates pregnant women.

Honestly, audiences, if we keep letting ourselves get bamboozled like this, we deserve it by this point.