A sense is emerging that the things we eat, wear, play or communicate with are now as useful a source for dramatic entertainment as novels or plays. The movie star is dead. Intellectual property is king, writes Donald Clarke via irishtimescultr
Ben Affleck is winningly eccentric as the Nike chief executive in Air. But does anyone sit back and suggest that this is just a bleeding shoe? They do not. Photograph: Amazon Studios/PA PhotoThe golden rule of journalism is you need just three instances for a trend. The film industry’s current obsession with biopics of brands – brandopics if you will – is fast galloping past that marker. We have, this year, already had Tetris and Air .
What the hell is going on? You didn’t catch David Lean making films about Embassy Regal or the Tunnock’s tea cake. Can we next expect Paul Thomas Anderson to tackle the Whopper? Somebody is going to. A sense is emerging that the things we eat, wear, play or communicate with are now as useful a source for dramatic entertainment as novels or plays. The movie star is dead. Intellectual property is king, and the second word in that construction is the one that matters. Never mind the intellect.
It was this attitude that allowed Steve Jobs, a man who sold hardware, to become a guru for the post-religious. Perhaps he was a better sort of guru than the traditional spiritual hucksters. If you gave him your cash you at least got a computer at the end of it “The cynical answer is that the [intellectual property] chain of title on all these products is a lot easier to pitch to money people,” Matt Johnson, director of BlackBerry, told the Los Angeles Times. “And so I think this is just the beginning of what is probably going to be a flood, provided there’s a market interest.”
Tetris is a British film. BlackBerry is from Canada. But the trend, nonetheless, connects with a very American belief in the brand as culture, as religion, as art. You can see this in the world of cinema itself. Note how US commentators long to establish a house style for the independent studio A24. Despite releasing such varied titles as Lady Bird , Hereditary and The Whale , cinematic social media yearns to believe that A24 is a genre as well as a business.
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