Two movies, their meaning and the messages for marketers.

The elusive art of finding deep resonance with mainstream contemporary audiences was spectacularly realised by the Barbie movie in 2023. 

But two other movies released earlier, during the countdown to the year’s Oscars, also offer valuable insights. 

Movies are always launched into the most competitive of marketplaces. Usually, they enjoy the promotional support of the most high-profile spokespeople: their stars. Yet most movies have fleeting life cycles. 

So, as with any marketed product, the critical challenge for any movie is to get not just its content right, but also its messaging. The grim reality though is that in this over-messaged Digital Age, relatively few movies manage to even recoup their costs. 

But align all the variables in the mercurial movie mix and the rewards can be exceptional. 

So it proved for Barbie. And for the unlikely darling of the 2023 Oscars, Everything everywhere all at once. A psycho/sci-fi drama focused on the key character’s vexed relationships (played out in an erratic “multiverse”), this movie earned a surprising $141 million at the global box office. It cost just $25 million to produce.

Babylon, an even more ambitious and much-hyped early-2023 movie by the celebrated auteur Damian Chazelle, did not fare as well. 

An homage to the bacchanalian excesses of early Hollywood in the period of transition from silent films to “talkies”, Babylon is grandly ambitious in its scope. It cost a hefty $110 million to make. Yet even though it features Hollywood headliners (including Barbie star Margot Robbie, with Brad Pitt), this movie’s global box office languishes at less than half that of Everything everywhere. 

The interesting thing about this thematically disparate pair of movies is that they are both driven by chaos. 

The key characters in each story battle events that constantly spill out of their control. This is reinforced in both cases by the kinetic intensity of their visual narratives: in different ways, both movies have a compelling sense of momentum. 

Despite its zany repetitive time-shifting structure, Everything everywhere succeeded with audiences because it reflects a truism: that in the Digital Age, we often feel a sense of overwhelm. Sometimes accompanied by an attendant low level of anxiety, this overwhelm happens because our attention is more thinly spread than ever before. 

This is a concept eloquently explored by author Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book The Shallows. 

The primary cause of overwhelm is this routine attention dispersal, driven by our addictive digital habits. Our brains have been rewired by the unrelenting coverage of inconsequential content that we tap, flick and swipe through our smartphone screens, every hour of every day. 

Because all of this material—both images and prose—always physically moves through the hand-held screens of our smartphones, we have also unwittingly conditioned our brains to an addictive sense of momentum. 

So unless our attention has a “live” target, something kinetic on which to fix itself, often we can feel unsettled to some degree. This is why we find it so difficult to give full and sustained focus to any intricate task. 

A flow-on effect is that these distractive habits, traits and trends of the Digital Age have compromised our communication efficacy—at all levels, from the interpersonal up. As a communications professional, this whole subject fascinated me so much for so long that I wrote a book about it. 

My research for the book identified and explored six universal contemporary behavioural characteristics. I think of these as the key sociocultural drivers of Digital Age norms. I see aspects of them reflected everywhere in popular culture, including these two movies. 

The first and most obvious such force is the rise of polarisation. Consensus on anything is increasingly elusive these days. Everything everywhere may have found consensus within the Academy but in the Digital Age, mainstream audiences are far more judgemental. 

Critics at the noted website rogerebert.com awarded Babylon and Everything everywhere a modest 2.5 and 3.5 stars respectively. Talk to those who have seen both movies though and you soon find that, on first-hand anecdotal evidence alone, these movies polarise opinion with most people. 

Of course, so do most movies, including Barbie—though when you attract a far bigger viewing audience, polarisation is less significant. 

The energy of both Babylon and Everything everywhere reflects another of my Digital Age sociocultural drivers, alluded to above: the emphasis on momentum at the cost of focus. 

Neither of these movies is a languid mood-piece; the viewing experience with both is characterised by that headlong sense of momentum. This worked well for Everything everywhere because it was integral to the sense of overwhelm. 

But Babylon, not so much. This was because Babylon’s structure, events and story content were all far more complex and ambitious in scale. There was simply more stuff happening, so momentum was dispersed across multiple fronts and characters.

The third and most significant of those sociocultural drivers of the Digital Age, also evident in both movies, is the dominance of effect over meaning. 

In the opening sequence of Babylon, for example, an elephant is shown defecating on an unfortunate victim, who happens to be at the wrong end of the animal at the wrong time. This event has no significance to the story—it’s there purely to create an arresting effect. Babylon is full of such effect-driven moments. 

Similarly, the repetitive signature time-and-space shifting of Everything everywhere is also an effect that often overshadows meaning. Personally, I felt that it even compromised character development and empathy, often to the point of narrative improbability (I didn’t buy the mother-daughter reconciliation). 

So what are the messages here for marketers and creators of persuasive communication  that aims to influence individual choices and behaviour? 

Well, those sociocultural drivers of the Digital Age can be useful considerations when plotting or gauging the resonance of your messaging with your audience. So always be aware of the potential for any communication vehicle to polarise people. And in doing so, galvanise—or alienate—portions of your audience. 

It’s important to remember though that no audience today is 100% homogenous. So polarisation is preferable to general indifference. But like the creators of Everything everywhere, you must always ensure that the critical mass of any polarising influence enhances your core proposition. 

How? By anchoring it in a relatable human truth, as that movie does: in this case, the Digital Age’s familiar sense of overwhelm. 

This is resolved with that putative “happily ever after” ending that delivers a mended mother-daughter relationship. And, thus, respite from the madness of the multiverse. Babylon, on the other hand, ends with a grim irony.

So with your air media, ask: does the momentum of the marketing message allow the audience to clearly grasp the key benefit, or hook of appeal? Does it blur or sharpen the focus on that benefit? 

If the former, might your proposition or brand be better presented by counterpointing Digital Age momentum with a more languid, reflective treatment?

And in the final execution, consider whether any element or technique that creates an effect strengthens or weakens the clarity, resonance and meaning of your message. 

If there’s one key takeaway from this consideration of Babylon, Everything everywhere all at once and even Barbie, it’s this: 

in a polarising, momentum-fuelled, effect-driven Digital Age, it’s far more advantageous to be interestingly understated than ostentatiously overdone. 

Photo by Myke Simon on Unsplash