PICTURESHOW: Pairings, or Very Short Memes

14 March, 2011 at 9:36 pm (webjunk)

Maud reblogged this on her Tumblr account, and I attempted to trace it back to its source, and in doing so discovered that so, so, so many people had re-Tumblred it that it seemed like some sort of glaring error that I hadn’t included it in my collection of screen-shown business cards. This was further and quite quickly confirmed by the rapid-fire pullulation of links to this hangman-style movie quiz, which used Mr. Bateman’s proffering of his business card as it’s iconic object. Not the celebrated axe. A business card.

I haven’t seen the film, naturally, so I can’t be expected to have included it in my collection as part of my own research, but I am slightly surprised no one mentioned it subsequently. I blame Pete. As I do in all things.

Watching a Misery Bear video, I laughed at the instance of a Post-It note on his head, as it reminded me of one of my favorite moments from Gilmore Girls. I think there must be, like the business cards, a whole big stash of of variations on this image out there. But, like American Psycho, I likely haven’t seen them. Also, I think I need a catchy term for them. Post-It Heads? Head-It Notes? Ugh, and double-ugh; nothing works, so far. So, until I figure out something more compelling to do, here are the two I do have.

Lastly, I just finished reading One Day by David Nicholls. It was recommended to me this summer, and I did a little research on it and found that, at the time, it was the number two book on reserve in public libraries across the country. Despite the fact that I try to keep up on such things, this book seemed to come out of nowhere, and despite popularity in public library hold queues across the land, no one I knew seemed to be reading it. I read the first chapter, and liked it enough to buy the paperback. It then sat in my personal reading queue (or stack) until just recently. I liked it. I liked it more at the beginning when I could relate to and laugh at the gruesome desperation between the two leads, and when it out-aged me, I found myself connecting with it a little less, but it was still both a reliable trifle and emotional sucker-punch of a novel. But what most struck me, upon reading the final scene, was that it was unmistakably the image that had been released in February as the poster for the upcoming film adaptation. I had thought that was an audacious choice on the part of the promotional people when it was done in The Ghost Writer, and I find it a little stupefying here. Then again, A.O. Scott of the New York Times likes to use the final scenes from films when recommending movies in his video podcast — which I also think is a bold choice, since I assume that he must expect a significant portion of his audience to have not seen the film he’s recommending. So, along with Post-It Notes, here’s another tentative collection that will hopefully grow into a larger list: films that have used their final image or impression as the poster or seminal promotional image. And we shall see if I’m correct about One Day when it reaches cinemas.