When you're advertising, you usually want to cater to your reader's/viewer's most basic needs and desires. It's why they choose video stills from the trailer that are the most likely to show something vaguely erotic, even in a movie that is not sexy in the slightest. I wrote about that tendency here.
I don't think there's probably a single image in The Whale that has the chance to get a heterosexual male all hot and bothered, even when taken totally out of context. But if you can't show anything sexy, at least try to show something that isn't sexy's exact opposite. At least that's the computation the marketing department for a studio -- or in this case, a movie theater chain -- would make.
I get why advertisers don't want to show a picture of Brendan Fraser's Charlie in this film. Charlie weighs about 600 pounds, and there's no angle that doesn't reveal that fact about him. Never mind that Darren Aronofsky's whole movie is designed to make us sympathize with Charlie, challenging our regrettable instincts toward fatphobia to show us the depths of this person's soul, rather than just the surface of this person's body. If the marketing department thinks a picture of Charlie's face -- which, you would agree, is the image you'd extract from the film if you wanted to truly demonstrate what it's about -- will inhibit ticket sales, they won't include it.
Which is why this still, in an advertisement for the movie playing at Hoyts, includes an image of ... Ty Simpkins.
Was Ty Simpkins considered the sexiest thing in The Whale? If you were going sheerly by normal advertising logic, you'd probably go with Sadie Sink, who is young and is generally considered to be conventionally attractive. She's also arguably the film's second most important character, though Charlie has dynamics with a couple characters that are central to the story depending on the angle from which you're analyzing it.
So on the one hand, I guess it's a win that they didn't just go with the most obvious approach of weaponizing the apparent sex appeal of Sadie Sink. On the other, Ty Simpkins? Least essential character in the film, I would argue, though of course all five characters we spend time with make the film exactly the emotional powerhouse it is.
The really troubling inconsistency here is that the ad's copy is specifically selling Brendan Fraser. It starts out with the words "The Brenaissance is upon us!" Which I think is a pretty lively way to market the movie. It rolls off the tongue better than "McConaissance," or however they spelled it when Matthew McConaughey stopped doing romantic comedies.
But it creates quite a disconnect with the image we see. Yes Fraser undergoes quite the transformation in The Whale, but not even the best actor in the world can play 33 years younger without some sort of significant digital assistance. (Could they really be trying to convince readers this is Fraser? Certainly not.)
And I just don't think The Whale is really a bait-and-switch movie. The title itself is not going to attract anyone outside of marine biologists and Moby Dick enthusiasts, and certainly most people with any inkling to see it must know the premise of the movie. Or at least the sort of person at its center.
And it's not Ty Simpkins.
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