Persuasive Techniques Used in the Movie Trailer #2 for Wolf of Wall Street

At its heart, all advertising is rhetorical and persuasive. Its goal is to get its audience to do something it wouldn’t normally do (if the audience would, in fact, do that something anyway, the effort is wasted); in the case of a movie trailer, to get viewers to decide to spend their time and money on seeing a particular movie rather than another movie or on some different activity altogether. The official trailer #2 for the movie, Wolf of Wall Street uses the classic rhetorical techniques of appeals to ethos and pathos, and to some extent logos and kairos, as persuasive tools to persuade potential audiences.

Like television commercials, movie trailers have very little time to deliver their persuasive messages. This means that just as television commercials don’t have the time to construct a rational reason why people should buy the products advertised, movie trailers don’t have the time to show why, in fact, a movie would be worth paying to see. Just as Bud Light sells not because of its taste (in this author’s opinion, it sells in spite of its taste) but rather, its successfully being advertised as a cheap ticket to parties and carefree fun (drink Bud Light and be instantly surrounded by half-naked, gorgeous, drunk women!), so are movies advertised in trailers based on a carefully edited sequence of scenes, some of which may not even ultimately appear in the movie, that collectively suggest an emotional experience (Wow! Explosions!).

Classical Rhetorical Thought

The art of rhetoric was viewed by the classical Greeks as a means to an end, but those means were carefully proscribed. Aristotle, in Rhetoric, often mentioned that though the goal of rhetoric is persuasion, ideally, the audience should be gently led rather than dragged toward agreeing with the speaker or the position he espouses. Hopefully, using the argumentative tools available to an accomplished speaker, the audience will come to see and agree with the speaker’s arguments by their own thought processes (or at least, they’ll think that is what happened). Aristotle explained that the credibility of the speaker is paramount in this process: “Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible” (Book 1, Chapter 2). In the case of movie trailers, this author doesn’t assign much credibility to them as they are heavily edited and often constructed to showcase one feature of the movie while ignoring others. In this author’s experience, the vast majority of movie trailers are completely unreliable as indicators of whether a movie will be worth seeing; in fact, sometimes they are deliberately misleading, as in a trailer that uses carefully selected scene cuts to suggest that a movie is a romantic drama when it is really an action film. Aristotle would probably disapprove of this!

Three Distinct but Largely Inseparable Strategies

Per the ancient as well as modern rhetoricians, the three fundamental means of persuasion are appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. This is not to say that rhetoric can’t combine two or even three of these appeals, but usually, one is more effective than the others in a given situation. Nonetheless, as Michael Frost observed, “Classical rhetoricians created these divisions for purposes of analysis and discussion, but did not consider logos, pathos, and ethos as completely separable from one another” (86). Per Lisa Kernan, the purpose of trailers is that “By offering audiences concise, direct-address cinematic texts that serve as both attractions and as a form of persuasion, trailers allow audiences to read the phenomenon of promotional narrative in a particularly dramatic way” (2). While in most forms of modern media advertising, a mixture of methods is used, one approach usually stands out, especially given the limited duration of most advertising messages. Therefore, the following methods might be used to construct a persuasive movie trailer.

Ethos. This refers to “what we have done in the past”; a society or other group’s collective ethics and values. This would, in a movie trailer, consist of referencing popular movies from the recent past (you saw that, and this will be just as good or better), noting that the screenwriter(s), director, and/or actors are the same as in a recently successful production (if you liked him/her in that, you’ll love him/her in this), or (somewhat weaker) note that the studio or production company was the same as that in a previously successful film.

Ethos in a film trailer could also be viewed as appealing to shared values. This is particularly effective if the movie has a political orientation. For example, the producers of The Day After Tomorrow,” a thriller based on the effects of global warming, used the prevailing fear of climate change and the unpopularity of the George W. Bush administration, represented by a very unsympathetically portrayed Dick Cheney-like figure, to sell the movie in a series of effective trailers. In the case of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the title itself suggests that the populist portrayal of Wall Street brokers, bankers, etc. as amoral, greedy, vicious, evil reprobates, fed by the recent financial crises here and in Europe, would be a very effective springboard for an appeal to ethos.

Pathos. This refers to “how we feel now,” a measurement of the audience’s mood and inclinations. Appeals to pathos are aimed at the visceral more than the cerebral. Thus, movie trailers (and TV advertisements, billboards, etc.) should aim for appeals to pathos, as emotional reactions are quicker and more powerful than cerebral ones. Most movie trailers do, in fact, appeal to the audience’s emotions rather than providing a rational reason why they should see the movie. In this approach, making the audience form associations is as powerful as with ethos.

Logos. This is “what we should do, based on the law, proven facts, and/or reason.” This is perhaps the weakest approach for most films, simply because most films are made, and most movie audiences go to the local multiplex for, entertainment rather than enlightenment. There are, of course, exceptions, such as “An Inconvenient Truth,” a pseudo-documentary by Al Gore that warned about the dangers of global warming. The message in just about all of the film’s publicity is that “You need to see this.” In other words, logos demands that a citizen acquire the knowledge offered in the film.

Kairos

This refers to the act of “seizing the moment.” At least in theory, there is an optimal moment to deliver your message. This has been referred to in modern discourse in many different ways: John Jerome in his work on athletic brilliance, which also referred to excelling in life in general, coined the phrase “The Sweet Spot in Time” to refer to the ideal moment; an opportunity to achieve brilliance. Certainly, movie trailers are carefully arranged so that they are delivered at precisely the (perceived) optimal moment; for example, trailers for similar movies are often grouped together, and those trailers that might appeal to a given segment of moviegoers are more often shown before those movies that they prefer. That said, there is not much in viewing the trailer itself that suggests when or how the movie distributors have chosen or will choose to present it.

Trailer #2

The trailer focuses on Leonardo DiCaprio’s character as he initially goes to work for a Wall Street firm but, it is implied, quits because of a colleague’s frank admission that the goal of the firm is to make money for itself, even at the expense of its clients. The “Wolf” replies that it should be possible to do both, and when told “no,” resolves to start his own firm. Next is shown the Wolf’s firm’s meteoric rise, to the point where the Wolf and his firm make obscene amounts of money. This is depicted by showing him taping packs of money to beautiful, statuesque blondes and having them parade around at office parties, crumpling up and throwing away $100 bills, and amusingly, a scene where his father is incredulous at him having spent $26,000 on a single dinner. The last part of the trailer deals with the federal investigation into the crimes that the Wolf and his firm are accused of; bribery of Federal officials is mentioned.

The trailer’s appeals to ethos are a bit outdated but effective. Lampooning the hyper-wealth of the super-rich dates back all the way to Scrooge McDuck rolling around in his basement vault full of money to the Gordon Gekko “Greed is good!” character in the film, “Wall Street.” In fact, the wasteful way the rich supposedly treat money is definitely a trope in popular and populist culture, and may be dangerously close to a cliché as used in this trailer, especially with the blondes-dressed-only-in-packets-of-money device shown not just one, but four times. Nonetheless, an appeal to ethos here is, “We don’t like rich people, because they foolishly waste their money and don’t live like sensible people (like us) do.” A further appeal is in the trailer’s obvious references to financial scandals of the recent past, such as Enron, the crash of 2008, and Bernie Madoff. “In the past, we have taken down these corrupt, evil, law-breaking rich bastards, and in this movie, you’ll see it happen again!” Effective advertising indeed!

The trailer’s appeal to pathos is related to its appeal to ethos. We’re supposed to be disgusted when we see the Wolf throwing $100 bills in a garbage can. We are also supposed to be appalled at the Wolf’s colleague’s frank admission that making money for the client is a secondary consideration at best (and we are supposed to extend that impression to all financial institutions). We’d like to see the bastards get their comeuppance, and the last part of the trailer implies that we’ll see exactly that. Furthermore, we’ll get validation of the populist trope that nobody gets that rich without being a crook.

There isn’t much appeal to logos here other than the aforementioned depiction of the Wolf and his firm breaking the law to achieve their goals and the subsequent punishment that (it is implied) comes down on their heads. But as mentioned above, appeals to logos in a limited-time medium such as a movie trailer aren’t very effective anyway. Likewise, it’s hard to measure any effect of kairos here; many studios time their marketing and release of movies (and movie trailers) to coincide with current events, including the postponement of releases. There aren’t any highly topical references here, however, and financial crises and crooked, evil brokers and bankers are more yesterday’s news than a hot topic for today.

Movie trailers are constructed not so much to present an accurate synopsis of the movie as to persuade the audience to go see it. In fact, if the film’s publicists feel that misrepresenting a movie in the trailer will make it more appealing to a given audience or demographic, they will often do that. (This is one reason why most releases feature multiple trailers.) That said, this author’s opinion is that if the trailer is an accurate representation of the movie (and a big “if” that is), the movie will not be all that successful. The movie’s basic approach, it seems, that of “Let’s watch a rich bastard crash and burn,” is clichéd and formulaic. Using that approach in the trailer was therefore a bad strategy, which raises the question of whether the content of the movie left the studio publicists no other choice but to frame it that way (i.e., truthfully).

Works Cited

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Books One and Two.

Frost, Michael. "Ethos, Pathos & (and) Legal Audience." Dick. L. Rev. vol. 99, 1994, p. 85.

Jerome, John. “The Sweet Spot in Time: A Classic Guide to Exploring and Reaching Your Full Athletic Potential.” New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Kernan, Lisa. Coming attractions: Reading American movie trailers. U of Texas Press, 2004.