The Hangover and The Saturday Night Fever Effect

I'm sure you've heard of The Hangover if you paid any attention to the 2009 summer movie season.  When the trailers came out in the spring, it looked like another one of those atrocious movies where a couple of guys get really drunk, forget their wild and crazy night, then have to piece together what happened over the course of the movie.  I've never seen one of these movies get acceptable reviews, and the quick plot summary isn't interesting enough to get me to go see one.  Thus, I assume they're all awful.

When The Hangover came out, this was the generally accepted way of thinking about it.  "Doesn't that look terrible?" could've been its tag-line.  But then something happened:  people started seeing it and liked what they saw.  Reviews popped up all over the place praising it.  Friends of all kinds said it was the must see comedy of the summer.  It was apparently the funniest thing ever, and therefore I felt a little guilty when I never got around to seeing it.  And let's face it:  this is not the kind of movie I'd pick up from a video rental place.

Fall came and I returned to college.  Carleton has this awesome program called SUMO.  Don't ask me what it stands for, but what it does is find two movies a weekend that are either somewhere between theater and DVD release or classically awesome and screen them multiple times over Friday and Saturday.  It's a great thing to do if you're bored on a weekend night, especially if you like movies.  Since that last sentence seems to specifically describe me, I tend to go to a lot of SUMO movies.  This week, as you no doubt have guessed, they showed The Hangover.

I wasn't even planning on going, to be honest.  Few of my friends wanted to see it, and I still wasn't intrigued enough to check it out myself.  After all, what's sadder than seeing a guy bonding movie all by yourself*?  Then 11:30 on Friday night rolled around, and I happened upon a friend making her way over to the Olin lecture hall to attempt to stay awake through the subject of today's review.  (Generally the drunk people yelling at the screen help with that awake thing.)  I followed her over, and...

What a mediocre movie.  I mean, I liked it, but it was super average.  The plot is nothing we haven't seen plenty of times before.  The crazy antics of the night before are exactly what you'd expect from a blackout bachelor party set in the silver screen version of Vegas.  The jokes made me smile but rarely laugh.  What was so wonderful about this movie that it made so many people recommend it to me?

Here's my theory.  I believe this is a perfect case of The Saturday Night Fever Effect at work.  A term stolen from the book First Among Sequels in which the characters discuss the movie their effect is named for.  The idea is that if you go in expecting Saturday Night Fever to suck, then it will be great - an eternal classic.  But if you go in expecting that classic status, it turns out to suck.  Expectations completely change your opinion of a work.  I've seen this thing at work even on movies I've seen before.  When I saw the first Harry Potter movie, I thought it was bad.  A week later when I saw it again, I thought it wasn't half bad.  This is because the first time my expectations were through the roof, and the second time they were in the toilet.

I think The Hangover is a victim of this effect.  People must have gone in expecting crap since that's what the preview seems to promise.  Then when it wasn't crap, they told everyone it was solid gold.  Then everyone else went expecting solid gold and, well, it didn't deliver.

Perhaps I'm over thinking this.  Maybe the people that actually went and saw it were just the kind of people that goes to a movie like The Hangover even before they've heard it's good.  These people would be used to low quality films, so an average one would knock their socks off.  They told their friends, and their friends went and found what was actually there:  a few laughs and tolerability.

Whatever the case, The Hangover is an okay movie.  The important thing to take away here is that I want to study the way expectations shape our experiences.  Such a cool idea.  I'm trying to think of other movies that have been colored by what I've heard about them, but I'm falling short.  Catch-22 wasn't great for me probably because the book was so amazing.  That's a common occurrence with adaptations, I think.  I bet I wouldn't hate Spiderman 3 as much as everyone else does since I'd go in expecting nothing.  Little help, anyone?

SAM'S VERDICT:  Okay.  Delivers exactly what it promises.


*Answer:  twelve dead puppies**.
**Be glad I didn't go with my original answer***.
***You thought this was going to be the original answer, didn't you?  Instead I'm just going to say "WOOOO NESTED FOOTNOTES".