Snakes on a Plane

On my 14-hour trip back from LA yesterday I bought Esquire Magazine. Don't ask me why. I am not much for men's magazines, but there was a big article on John McCain that interested me and, well, my flights got all messed up and I was bored.

Anyway, in this issue Chuck Klosterman wrote a non-review of Snakes on a Plane. I call it a non-review because he hadn't even seen the movie. This thoroughly (and probably rightly) enraged my girlfriend, but it was a pretty entertaining piece nonetheless.

He begins the piece with a definition of "populist" which seems somehow relevant to the debate about whether marketing is good or evil which I have been blogging and commenting on a bit of late. Anyway, here's what he said:

People get confused by the term populism, especially when the word is applied to entertainment. People seem to think calling something "populist" means it was purposefully consturcted to be stupid, solely to attract the largest possible audience. This is not accurate. The Beatles are populist. The Godfather is populist. The Bible is populist... You can't design populism--and if you try, you'll inevitably construct the opposite.

I guess what I like about this was the idea that watering down a product isn't neccessarily the route to  making it popular. When applied to books that means have a provocative idea, write a good book, and market it to the people. Marketing isn't about watering down, it is about putting it infront of the right people. If the book is good it will gain traction and the right people see it, it will become popular.

Apparently SOAP (hipster speak for Snakes on a Plane) went the other route--going out of its way to find out via the internet exactly what people want and give it to them. We'll see if it works. If it does, I'm not sure we'll know whether it was because of or in spite of their efforts at forcing populism. But whatever, it is just something to chew on.