Watching the White House Korea Trailer

I’m a scholar in American Studies who’s worked on film and now thinks about democracy: obviously, Trump’s Korea trailer is pure gold for me. So here are my two cents on the issue – some thoughts and ideas that try to unearth why watching this future piece of political history’s curiosity shop is such an awkward experience.

According to the New York Times, Trump played this trailer on his iPad for the North Korean dictator, and later on the video was shown at the beginning of the Singapore press conference, before Trump came on stage. In fact, the Washington Post reports that when the clip was initially shown in Korean, before an English version followed at the Singapore press conference, American reporters in the room thought they were watching North Korean propaganda footage.

What the Washington Post report clarifies, in concert with much of the news coverage in the US and beyond, is that the insight that this ‚trailer‘ came from the White House is not exactly reassuring. But rather than examining the pure fact of its existence, I’d like to have a closer look at the ‚trailer‘ itself. We’re all more or less familiar with the classical film trailer format – a montage of sequences from the film that usually outlines a bare minimum of its story and includes shots that exemplify the film’s visual quality, its action stunts, it’s slapstick jokes, or some other defining feature of the upcoming spectacle. In fact, the baritone voiceover, though now mostly out of use, still has the capacity to serve as an identifying marker for  promotional film pretending to originate out of, or mocking, Hollywood.[1] When watching the Trump trailer, I’d like to stress two things: trailers are probably the single most self-consciously capitalist product of the film industry and trailers are made for movies, not for historical events.

Starting with the second observation first, note the voiceover’s nod to Hollywood’s remaking culture: „Their story is well known, but what will be their sequel?“ (shoutout to my friend Kathleen Loock who studies remaking). The trailer treats history as a movie, which then dissolves in footage of melting film strip. Offering two options – the destruction of the world in nuclear war, yes or no – the trailer then advertises a utopian sequel (starting with a classic old-timey countdown of three, two, one) to the story that portrays Korea as a marketplace of milk and honey. But whereas life is no movie, movies do impact the ways in which we conceptualize history, and they typically do so in heroic biopics that rewrite history through individual focalizer protagonists (see, for instance, The Post). That being said, maybe the trailer doesn’t advertise political diplomacy and world peace but in fact promises a future movie that the political leaders on both sides of the pacific would love for their respective county’s citizens to watch. That notion of vanity is in fact underlined by the clip’s beginning, which mentions the number of world inhabitants but then stresses that only a few truly make a difference. But then, if (and hopefully so, and here I oppose the supposed view of Michelle Wolf’s Sunday audience) the US-Korea relations finally do ease, we’ll be thankful whatever the cause. Let’s just try to remember the trailer whenever someone considers commemorating the moment with a Hollywood biopic.

Sorry, I’m not done. Trailer’s sell stuff, that is their self-acknowledged function, and they directly address their viewers in ways we wouldn’t expect of the movies they usually advertise. That is the first reason why the trailer makes us so uneasy: it is fake because we know the film it promises isn’t actually in the production phase, and we usually expect not only honesty, but also integrity and certainly no ambiguity from the White House (thus the president’s retrospective assigning of intentionality to his hostile rhetoric, as explained in the Hannity interview, seems out of place). In a way, the trailer is Hollywood’s most obviously capitalist product – and the White House’s trailer even more so, since it not only openly sells stuff, but it sells selling stuff. That is, what it sells isn’t human rights or democracy – the kinds of things we think  Korean people need – but the kind of ocean-front capitalism Trump considers to be the US‘ core value. „Movies are a universal language, but it really is a weird format for diplomacy,“ Matt Novak writes on Gizmodo. I personally don’t buy the universal language myth, but I believe that Hollywood movies are a phenomenon global enough to reach North Korea (including the country’s movie-fan dictator) and teach a language that the White House now, maybe for the first time, seeks to employ. But Hollywood is an international brand rather than an inherently American cultural product, and, as we’ve seen, it sells its own marketing plan and the marketplace in which it operates maybe more than values of democracy or human rights. That is to say, even if the film proves effective, will the opening of Korea’s markets cooccur with a change of the regime, and will the promise of capitalism turn the country, as the film suggests, into a blueprint version of Miami Beach, or would it join other countries‘ entrapment in extended circles of exploitation? I guess we’ll have to wait for the sequel.

[1]: An earlier version claimed that this kind of voiceover continues to be ubiquitous. Scott Higgins questioned that assumption, so I changed the sentence, also because the only example I could come up with after his criticism was Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.