Billion-dollar psychology lessons for cheap

“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”

You recognize that?

​​It’s from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of the biggest movies of all time. And an incredibly valuable resource — if you only know when to stop watching.

When I was a kid, around age five, my eyes bulged out each time my parents took me past the main movie theater in town.

​​For some reason, the ​theater​ still showed the marquee for E.T., even though the movie had stopped playing years earlier.

I was too young to see E.T. when it came out. And I suffered for years, seeing that marquee. I wanted to watch the movie so bad — a real life alien! On Earth! Makes friends with a little boy and turns the boy’s bike into a flying machine!

It’s everything my 5-year-old self wanted in life. But the movie was no longer in theaters, and there was no VHS either.

So a few years ago, fully grown and rather jaded, I downloaded E.T. to finally heal this childhood wound, and to see why this Spielberg fantasy is called the #24 greatest film of all time.

Unfortunately, the moment has passed.

I couldn’t really get into E.T. But I did get some use out of it.

​​That scene above. Let me repeat it in case you didn’t read:

“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”​​

That’s when E.T. dies, about nine-tenths of the way through the movie. And the boy, Elliott, who had a psychic link with E.T. and who has felt everything E.T. has felt, suddenly cannot feel anything any more.

I can imagine that when E.T. played in movie theaters, both the kids and the parents choked up at this point.

​​The kids, because the cute little extraterrestrial is dead.

​​The parents, because they felt on some level this scene might be about their childhood dreams, hopes, and capacity for joy and wonder… which have been drained out of them as they grew up and became adults.

And then of course, in the movie, E.T. comes back to life and everything works out just fine. Which is the insight I want to leave you with today.

If a story reaches mass popularity — E.T., Fight Club, Bad Santa — it’s because it makes people vibrate.

The thing is, social order must be maintained. That’s why each mass-market story either has a happy ending (if the characters were deep-down deserving) or a moral to be learned (if they were not).

Don’t let that fool you.

Market-proven tear-jerkers like E.T. can really show you true human nature — if you don’t wait until the end. The end is just tacked on to muddy the waters. But the psychology lesson is all the emotional buildup that happens before the turnaround.

That buildup shows you how people really are. Those are the real problems and desires people respond to, and that’s what you should speak to. Everything else is just Hollywood.

Meanwhile, in an alternate cinematic universe:

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Hollywood tear-jerker: Billion-dollar psychology lesson for cheap

“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”

You recognize that? It’s from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of the biggest movies of all time.

When I was a kid, the main movie theater in my town for some reason kept the marquee for E.T. long after the movie had stopped playing.

I was too young to see it when it came out. And I suffered for years, seeing that marquee. I wanted to watch the movie so badly — a real life alien, and cute too! On Earth! Makes friends with a little boy and gets the boy’s bike airborne!

It’s everything my 5-year-old self wanted in life. But the movie was no longer in theaters, and there was no VHS either.

So a few weeks ago, I downloaded E.T. to finally heal this childhood wound and to see why this Spielberg fantasy is called the #24 greatest film of all time.

Unfortunately, the moment has passed.

I couldn’t really get into E.T. But I did get some use out of it. That scene above.

That’s when E.T. dies, about nine-tenths of the way through the movie. And the boy, Elliott, who had a psychic link with E.T. and who has felt everything E.T. has felt, suddenly cannot feel anything any more.

I can imagine that when E.T. played in movie theaters, both the kids and the parents choked up at this point. The kids, because the cute little extraterrestrial is dead. The parents, because they felt on some level how this scene might be about their childhood dreams, hopes, and capacity for joy and wonder… which have been drained out of them as they grew up and became adults.

And then of course, E.T. comes back to life and everything works out just fine. Which is the insight I want to leave you with today.

I recently re-watched Dan Kennedy’s Titans of Direct Response keynote speech. In one part of this amazing presentation, Dan tells an Earl Nightingale story. Two farmers each thought the other guy’s farm had the greener pasture. And when they get their wish and swap farms, it turns out the other pasture is no greener.

Dan: “Earl didn’t tell that story to be a marketing lesson… but I got the marketing lesson out of it.”

And you can too.

If a story reaches mass popularity — greener pastures, E.T., Bad Santa — it’s because it makes people vibrate. The thing is, social order must be maintained. That’s why each mass-market story either has a happy ending (if the characters were deep-down deserving) or a moral to be learned (if they were not).

Don’t let that fool you.

Market-proven tear-jerkers like E.T. can really show you true human nature — if you don’t wait until the end. The end is just tacked on to muddy the waters. But the psychology lesson is all the emotional buildup that happens before the turnaround.

That buildup shows you how people really are. Those are the real problems and desires people respond to, and that’s what you should speak to. Everything else is just Hollywood.

By the way, Brian Kurtz generously made Dan Kennedy’s keynote speech freely available online. If you haven’t watched it yet (or in the past month), it’s time to fix that.

But in case you need more convincing about the value hidden inside this speech, you might like to sign up for my email newsletter. In the coming days, there’s where I’ll be sharing some more Dan-inspired marketing ideas, like the one you just read.