Mismatched movie trailers

Am I just a square?

Hadestown…yes, yes…

Our family has become huge fans of Hadestown. Our daughter, in particular, is completely smitten. Music is one of her superpowers and she could barely stay in her seat when we went to the version that was released in theaters this past weekend.

If you’re not familiar (and, if not, you should be!), the musical combines two classic love duos—Orpheus and Eurydice with Hades and Persephone. It’s brilliant and beautiful.

But before we could get to the brilliant and beautiful, we of course had many, many trailers to watch. I love trailers, but as they went along there seemed to be a growing…mismatch between the audience that would attend a show (or screening) of Hadestown and the one that would attend the movies that these trailers were promoting.

Big feelings aren’t bad for kids

While Hadestown isn’t exactly Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, I think it certainly qualifies as friendly for teens and preteens (our daughter is 12). It’s about big emotions, big feelings, love and death and poverty and trust. And (spoiler) it’s a tragedy. It doesn’t end well for our two main lovers. It’s good for younger audiences to understand that not all endings are happy.

So far, so good…

A trailer for a rerelease of The Piano put me on notice that these previews were going to skew more mature. But I was put at ease when this trailer made it clear that it was a movie for grown-ups, but left out any of the explicit material.

And many of the other trailers followed suit. But two of them decided to go off the reservation and left us scrambling to shelter our preteen’s eyes and ears from the images and words that cascaded over us.

Okay, what??

Maybe it’s the puritanical instincts that have risen to the surface from being a father with a young daughter…or maybe whomever matches trailers to features had never actually watched Hadestown and assumed that, since it has “Hades” in the title, it must be filled with sex, violence, and disturbing images.

Which is the only explanation I can come up with for why our daughter was expected to enjoy the trailers for I Want Your Sex and Victorian Psycho. Unlike The Piano (which, granted was a trailer from another era), these two films wore their content on their sleeves.

I’ll let y’all watch them for yourselves in the links above and judge. But we said no thanks. And we covered our daughter’s eyes and ears.

Do we need to just get out of the way?

I confess, I don’t know much about these two films, their directors, or their source material. They may, in fact, be great movies. Great for our daughter when she’s…at least a little older? I’m sure there are mature, film-nerd 12-, 13-, 14-year-olds somewhere who are watching them, loving them, having challenging, productive conversations about them.

And, yes, our daughter is treading into more mature waters already (anyone else read the Wynd series?) but, I’m sorry, the wife and I are putting the brakes on, at least a little for now.

If that makes us square…

…we can live with that.

❤️
Adam