TNN's Godfather ad
TNN

TNN is airing The Godfather "uncut" tonight — "uncut" meaning with all the graphic scenes and language in, but not un-cut into by commercial interruptions (though they promise these are "limited") — and The Godfather II on Wednesday. They've been promoting this hard — this weekend while watching an hour's worth of Saturday-morning fishing shows with my father-in-law (this is the network that brings you both "Hangin' With Mr. Cooper" and "Mossy Oak's Hunting the Country"), I saw it at least four times — and while excessive promotion is itself hardly worth addressing, the content of the ad knits my brow every time I see it.

It may be worth mentioning that this is The New TNN. Literally — no longer The Nashville Network but The National Network. This repositioning coincided with the AOL Time Warner merger, resulting in a lot of AOLTW-owned stations doing a lot of interesting rejiggering — the WB let "Buffy" go for expense-related reasons at the cusp of its highest acclaim; TNN got exclusive non-Pay-Per-View rights to WWF, which has since enveloped Time Warner's own wrestling franchise, WCW; and so forth. As striking as any of it is the anti-old-TNNness of this ad.

The first striking part of the 30-second spot is that it contains in excess of 40 cuts and dissolves. Now, 40 is a very conservative figure; if you consider all of the cuts within a text block — for instance, showing a combination of the phrase "a network television first" intercut with close-ups on just the word "first," sometimes in white text on a dark background and sometimes in black text on a white background — then the number of cuts top 100. That's an average of three cuts per second. And even if you discount the edits in these verbal sections, it's still less than one second per shot.

But frenetic editing and typography is nothing special anymore. What's really head-scratching about the ad is its premise. In between the hyper titles, we see — and I had to step through a tape of the ad frame-by-frame on my 4-head VCR to capture all this detail — two shots layered over one another of people descending a staircase, one shot from about 15 feet away and one from about three feet; a shot of more people ducking under a railing or lowered garage door; and finally a groin's-eye-view of two women surveying the scene. These are all party people that look like they were extras from Madonna's "Music" video; the one most central in this last shot is wearing a black scarf knotted at the throat, a cloak, a black bra, a red sarong and a bellybutton piercing. Then, shots of what's affectionately known here in Madison as "hoochie dancing"; almost every person seen so far is a woman, such as the belly dancer caught in a distended silhouette on a brick wall. This is some kind of dance club, and the most accessible analog from pop culture might be the vampire orgy at the beginning of Blade, or what everyone thought the party scene in Eyes Wide Shut should be.

In case those without total recall of Francis Ford Coppola's American epic are wondering, these are not scenes from The Godfather.

Then, in what are the first non-fast motion shots, everyone starts looking over their shoulders — finally, a gent among them — and the title and announcer interject: The Godfather uncut. Next we see, over a picket fence of shoulders and backs of heads, a movie-theater sized screen showing Marlon Brando in The Godfather; everyone is in rapt attention. Then: The Godfather II, and now we see the revelers clapping above their hands, watching Pacino in the dancing scene, and the crowd is egged on by three arm-pumping, luau- and/or sports-bra clad masters of ceremonies at a stage beneath the screen. We see the partiers dancing again, and now, stone-faced, they're chanting a piece of Pacino's dialogue in unison — the first time we've heard anything other than the announcer, sound effects and dialogue and music from the film — before breaking into more fevered dancing, shot in fast motion and cut faster than the brain can comprehend, and closing with the titles: "The New TNN. Yeah, TNN."

TNN's slogan was — or, if "Yeah, TNN" hasn't replaced it, still is — "We've got pop," a counterpoint to sister station TNT's "We know drama." A melding of the two catchphrases is in order: This seems to want to communicate that TNN knows pop — as in the Old Testament meaning of "knows." The degree of fetishization here is outlandish; the pop worship on display transcends geeky celebrations like "Pop-Up Video," becoming something more akin to a full-on fertility rite. It's like a straight, and therefore oh-so-crooked, version of the midnight Rocky Horror shows, or some mythical nightclub where you're guaranteed to only meet people with great taste in movies, but who take them far too seriously.

Much (well, some) has been made of The Godfather's slow assumption of the title of No. 1 American movie of all time, crowding out the arguably less accessible Citizen Kane. But no Coppola scholar would have ever conceived of this kind of a show of support, and, in fact, it's somewhat hard to imagine the TNN marketeers that did. It's undoubtedly bold, and that I saw it during, I believe, "In-Fisherman Televison" shows The New TNN's real schism; I don't know if there's even been a television network with a more effusive evocation of such mass-cultural fanaticism, and a less attuned audience base — even with its monopoly on the collegiate guilty pleasure of professional wrestling, TNN is still miles away from the cachet of MTV, VH1 or even TNT.

AOL Time Warner has long had a reputation for pursuing pop intelligently and aggressively — their Rhino record label being their greatest testament to this, long may their records spin. But there seems to be a line, semantic though it may be, between idolizing pop culture and pop culture idolatry. And while we may be pop culture garbage disposals, I'm not sure we're ready to embrace those who cross it.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)