Unanswered QUESTIONS
SERIOUSLY! WHAT IS UP WITH THAT CINEPLEX PRE-ROLL SHORT FILM WITH THE DAD, SON?
Let me tell you a disturbing story: on a cold winter evening, a well- meaning working- class father, in a world where movies are loaded by projector into balloons and popped when it’s time for them to be screened, buys a balloon-movie for his eager little boy. Father and son return home, but dad receives a call just as they’re sitting down together to watch it. The man drives a plow for a living and he’s got to go out straight away to clear the evening snow. The balloon-movie will have to wait for another time.
Day after day, night after night, the gruelling demands of his job keep the father away from home. The balloon- movie, meanwhile, has begun to deflate from neglect – they deflate, apparently, and are utterly useless once flat. The weary father, dragging himself in after another brutal shift on the road, soon discovers his son asleep on the couch, still clutching this pathetic withered entertainment as though tonight might finally have been the night. Dad bears his son to his bedroom in his arms and sadly tucks him in. Then he spots something under the bed: a box of long-deflated balloons. The son has been forsaken. The father is ashamed.
Like this grim tale of disappointment and sorrow?
Permit me another. A young girl lonely for companionship wills a snowman to life. He is able, using light and shadow, to project movies by magic onto the brown picket fence in the girl’s backyard, and the two of them watch and laugh together joyously all winter long. But when spring arrives, and the snowman begins to melt, the girl must act drastically to save her frosty friend, so she moves him to a standup freezer in the back of the family garage. Winter returns once more the following year, but the girl, getting older, has forgotten all about her pal. She leaves the poor snowman confined to his glacial coffin for decades, without sparing him so much as a passing thought.
These macabre fables – like Grimms’ Fairy Tales, or Black Mirror episodes, or children’s stories by J.G. Ballard — were in fact devised f or the Cineplex theatre chain by the Canadian advertising agency Zulu Alpha Kilo. A Balloon for Ben, as the first of the short films described above is called, has screened before every single movie in every single Cineplex- branded multiplex in the country since it was i ntroduced i n December, and it will continue to do so through the rest of the winter, just as Lily & The Snowman, the second of the shorts described above, did the year before.
Zulu Alpha Kilo’s shorts are not, as far as I can tell, meant to be harrowing enquiries into pain and human imperfection. They’re not intended to frighten or alarm the many millions of people who will see them at least once and, at most, dozens of times this season. They’re not horror movies by design. In a press release put out last month, a Cineplex representative describes the company’s latest traumatic drama as “heartwarming.” “We hope,” the rep explains, “that it encourages viewers to once again make time for what’s really important in their lives.”
Yes, well, it may do that – in much the same way that pictures of lung cancer dissuade people from smoking or the Old Testament encourages people not to sin.
I am at the movies often enough t hat by now I’d wager I’ve seen A Balloon for Ben in its tragic entirety at least a dozen times. And I have questions. Why does an infant child, glimpsed at the beginning of the short with a balloon in her hands, seem upset when the balloon pops, if popping is precisely what the balloon is supposed to do? If the movies become unwatchable after a few days without use, why store them on balloons in the first place?
And if the balloons are designed for home use, would they not more readily evoke video rentals rather than a trip to the local Cineplex, which is presumably what Cineplex itself, who paid tens of thousands of dollars for what is essentially an advertisement for its theatres, would want us to have in mind?
I’ ve become fixated on what’s absent for most of the film: the boy’s mother. Why doesn’t she watch one of the balloon- movies with her son if the father is so busy he can hardly manage to make it home while the kid is even awake? Perhaps you’ll suggest that the boy’s parents are obviously divorced. Which is what I assumed, too – until I noticed, on the seventh or eighth viewing, that the mother steps out of the house to join her husband and son in the short’s final two seconds.
Does she work day and night too? Or does she have some irrational contempt for movies? And if neither parent is available for a bit of bonding in the evening, who’s watching after, let alone feeding or nurturing, this helpless little child? Maybe it isn’t balloon- movies these people ought to be making time for.
If all of this seems rather obsessive, Cineplex is to blame: they’re the ones who’ve forced this ghastly horror show upon me so often, leaving me to contemplate it with a fervour that increases every time it screens. Those of us who make time already for what Cineplex would l i ke to promote – those of us who enjoy an evening among the figurative balloon- movies with loved ones and friends more than once a season – must endure this fright and its bullying didacticism relentlessly, wondering all the while over details the people who created it evidently didn’t think about at all.
Hearts are not warmed, assuredly. Fear strikes them. Ballard himself never unnerved or bewildered so thoroughly.
THEY’RE NOT HORROR MOVIES BY DESIGN.