HIGH PLAINS SCRIBBLER: GATEWAY DRUGS

The gateway theory is crap. I've never, ever had it happen. And not for lack of trying.  The thing is, and I've said it before, people jumping on pop culture bandwagons are after a completely different experience than bona fide fans of a genre or hobby. 

Your gateway success stories pretty much make up the entire fanbase for this website.  We all became interested in various genres and subgenres of cinema (and other media) through initial "gateway drug" material.  Turning around and being a champion of the things we love is never easy.  Nine times out of ten, what you show to people who seem interested in something similar just won't click with them.  What that tells me more than anything is that they only having a passing interest in the subject and aren't really wired to be interested beyond the initial thing they enjoyed.  If you find ten people who loved Rango and then show them a Sergio Leone film, I guarantee about nine of them will be unimpressed.  If you can get one that is though, then it is completely worth it................for both them and you.

 

A personal example would be my love of Italian horror.  When I was in middle school, I sat down and watched Halloween with my Dad around that designated time of year.  My father has never really been a slasher fan. That, above all others, is the main reason I didn't develop my love for splatter horror until my teenage years....................despite the fact that I was watching films like Aliens, Predator, The Terminator, etc. since I was in kindergarten.  My father does love Carpenter's Halloween though and that happened to be the first time I watched it.  I loved the hell out of it.  Next time we were at the mall, I bought Halloween 2 and devoured it.  From there I plowed through the sequels that existed at the time at the rental store.  Then, no more Halloween.  What next?  The Friday The 13th franchise and whatever other slasher flicks that they had in stock.  Done.  Now what?  My most trusted video store employee recommends Dario Argento.  So I pick up Tenebre and Trauma.  Love them, definitely the former more than the latter.  From there I plow through Argento, Fulci, Bava, etc.  Whatever I can get my hands on.  The point is, before that October my taste in horror was based solely off of what I watched with my father.  He prefers supernatural or science fiction based horror.  He'll give other subgenres a shot, but that's where his taste mainly lies.  All of a sudden he shows me Halloween and my horizons branch out exponentially within months.  I end up with a newfound appreciation of foreign horror and end up tackling countless subgenres.  Hell, that also started me on the "auteur" theory.  I devoured Carpenter's films and did the same to the works of any director whose films I loved while tackling each and every subgenre.

Edited by S.D. Bob Plissken - 3/18/11 at 11:39pm

To further elaborate.........

 

My brother is my gateway partner in crime.  We are about 90% in sync with what each other likes.  We can easily recommend one another to chase after or avoid any film.  When I recommend something to him that falls within a genre or subgenre that he is not well-versed in, I am pretty confident that he'll probably end up loving it and view anything similar that he can find.

 

My wife, however, is just the opposite.  She is my grand cinematic experiment.  Her likes and dislikes utterly baffle me.  Since the subject of westerns has already been brought up, I'll go with that.  One night a couple of years ago, I started watching Tombstone while she was playing on her laptop in the same room.  After the opening sequence, I caught her paying attention to the screen.  About ten minutes later, the laptop was put away and she watched the rest of the movie with me.  She loved it.  I was shocked because she had always had nothing but negative statements about westerns in general.  From there on out, I tried to pop in films from time to time in the genre that I felt she might respond to.  Sometimes they were ones that I felt were at least somewhat in line with Tombstone................others that were similar to other films she liked or starred actors she was fond of.  The results were ridiculously varied.  She liked A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More.  She hated The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.............though mainly due to its length.  She liked Hang 'Em High, Two Mules For Sister Sara, Joe Kidd, and Clint Eastwood in general.  She hated Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and High Plains Drifter................but likes Eastwood enough now to give most anything he is in a shot.  Score one for me!  So I attempted to branch out beyond Clint.  I've thrown all kinds of westerns at her.  Action-oriented, classic-style, spaghetti westerns, comedic westerns, etc.........................all to varying results:

 

 

Wife-Approved:

- 3:10 To Yuma (2007)

- American Outlaws

- Dead Man

- A Fistful of Dollars

- For A Few Dollars More

- Hang 'Em High

- Joe Kidd

- The Magnificent Seven TV series

- The Missing

- Navajo Joe

- Once Upon A Time In The West

- Open Range

- Quigley Down Under

- Red Hill

- Rio Bravo

- Run, Man, Run

- Seraphim Falls

- Silverado

- Texas, Adios

- Tombstone

- True Grit (2010)

- Two Mules For Sister Sara

- Wyatt Earp

- Young Guns II

 

 

Disapproved:

- The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.

- Companeros

- Dances With Wolves

- Django

- A Fistful of Dynamite

- The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

- The Great Silence

- High Plains Drifter

- Keoma

- The Magnificent Seven

- Mannaja: A Man Called Blade

- Massacre Time

- My Name Is Nobody

- The Outlaw Josey Wales

- Pale Rider

- The Professionals

- The Proposition

- The Quick and the Dead

- The Searchers

- Shanghai Noon

- True Grit

- The Wild Bunch

- Young Guns

 

 

She has a bad tendency to tune out of a film if she isn't interested, so she hasn't seen all of the in the latter category from start to finish............though many she has.  You see what I mean about her interests being scattershot though?  This plays out the same for every genre and subgenre of film that you can think of.  Basically, showing her a film is like playing Russian roulette.  There is almost NO way for me to figure out ahead of time if she will like something, be indifferent, or hate it. I'm at a loss in terms of what she does and doesn't like.  The upside....

 

- She doesn't turn her nose up to the genre anymore.

- She's a big Eastwood fan now.

- I also turned her on to the films of various other actors (Kurt Russell, Kevin Costner, Kiefer Sutherland, Michael Biehn, etc).

 

 

Final verdict?  A positive one,  Westerns have certainly been kinder to me than some genres when it comes to getting some cinematic enjoyment out of my wife.  Horror is the worst, but that's another story altogether.

Personally, these things tend to work better for me when TV is involved. For instance, my brother was a fan of Heroes (it was still Season 1, people; we were still innocent). Because he liked Heroes. I showed him Lost. Because he liked Lost, I showed him Fringe. And because he liked Fringe, I showed him X: Files.

A good common ground to get anyone interested in almost anything is the talent involved. For instance, I showed a friend Dr. Horrible because he liked Firefly, and sure enough he loved it. Of course that doesn't always work, as seen with your attempt at turning a Whedon fan into an Astonishing X-Men fan, but there's an exception to every rule.

Still, great post. Will look forward to reading the next one on Wednesday. Or Thursday. Or Friday. Regardless, I'll be watching!

I get what you're saying Plissken but I don't think it directly applies to the Potter/Twilight/DaVinci Code/whatever crowds. What you're doing is more like slow indoctrination than the "If you liked this maybe try that" argument that the gateway theory presents. And as for your personal story, of course it worked that way. It did for everyone on CHUD. Something falls on your lap that clicks for you. So you start searching for other stuff to provide a similar experience. What I'm saying is that, for example, the Twilight crowd isn't into it because of some previously unrecognized love for vampire literature, at least not in any statistically significant percentage. A teen girl whose only major exposure to vampires has been Twilight isn't going to end up reading Polidori's The Vampyre anytime soon. She probably won't even pick up the cash-in stuff.

That's because many (if not most) in the Twilight crowd are clicking with the sappy love story elements...................................not the fact that it involves vampires.  I think this is the core thing that studios are missing when they try to put out stuff like Beastly and Red Riding Hood to draw that same element.  Yes, I imagine both contain those as well, but not to the ridiculous degree that the Twilight films do.  It isn't the fantasy aspect that interests these girls.  It is the "he's cute and he picked normal ol' me to love for all time" aspect.  Twilight, at its core, is about an outsider girl who has the "perfect guy" (hell, two of them actually) fall unconditionally in love with her.  As soon as someone pops out a movie that taps the same vein, it'll click with them.  The upcoming film Prom has a way better chance of scoring that fanbase than any "Twilight-ized" horror or fairytale flick that studios might have on the way.

 

The Potter fans are a different breed, especially since the storytelling is of an infinitely higher grade.  They don't bite onto Percy Jackson, Golden Compass, and Narnia because the films are either pale imitations and/or tepid adaptations.  That's why only Potter and LOTR have made it where the others couldn't.  Both were good adaptations of quality material.  If something of equal cinematic quality came along, I have a feeling it might swing the same fanbase over to its corner.  For the record, most Potter fans I know love LOTR as well.........................and vice versa.