There are many things on television that can cause one’s soul to pale, but perhaps the worst for me are horror movie trailers.
These trailers consistently use a type of screen flash between their brief segments that I find to be offensive, due to the way it takes advantage of our reflex to focus on sudden bright bursts of light. Many commercials use this technique, but horror movie trailers are the worst abusers, both because they use it the most, and also because the trailers themselves are often very disturbing in content.
Once you notice this advertising technique, it is hard not to see it when you watch TV. The flash between commercial segments immediately brings a person’s focus straight to the TV set, no matter where you are in the room. In fact, I usually try to press mute during commercials, but even that does not lessen the effect of the screen flash on one’s senses.
As highly evolved living organisms, we have powerful sensory apparatuses that react to such stimuli by activating our flight or flight reflex, and these advertising techniques seek to take advantage of that. When I see the screen flash during these kinds of commercials I feel like a deer stuck in the headlights, frozen for a second by the powerful light. Like a moth to a flame, we cannot help being fascinated by such bright lights. I would like to raise the question, however, of whether such techniques are morally right?
I believe that, as Americans, we all have a basic right to a minimum level of decency from our fellow citizens. This level of decency should extend to things that are not necessarily covered or strictly enforced by law, like signaling before changing lanes or trying to talk quietly on your cell phone when in a train car.
George Orwell once wrote, a bit tongue in cheek, that “one has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.” I take this statement to mean that there is a limit to what lengths are acceptable to go to when attempting to reach your audience. In a way, we are all poets, since any action involves some sort of creation, and therefore we should all take some care with how our art affects other people.
Television may be inherently evil (although a necessary one for me), but I think that advertisers should refrain from using distasteful and exploitative techniques like half subliminal screen flashes. Personally, I find it disgusting that it is horror movie trailers that most often use the screen flash technique, forcing their images of fear and pain onto your brain.
Living in a free market society as we do, surely some self restraint is called for on the part of sellers and advertisers of powerful matter like horror movies? The least that I would ask for is that these mentally painful movie trailers not use such distressing techniques for attempting to capture the attention of their viewers.
