Purple Rain: Synergy Success Story

Prince’s Purple Rain is considered by many to be an aesthetic masterpiece, not only in terms of plain beauty, but for its success in business to synergy marketing.  Simultaneously Purple Rain uses synergy as well as aesthetic lighting to give the movie a post-modern tone.

            In terms of synergy which is somewhat similar to vertical integration, wherein the thought process is: ‘if there’s good music then there people will pay money to see the movie.’  In this case it certainly worked as Purple Rain went on to gross over $80 million, while the album sold 20 million copies worldwide.  Purple Rain had gathered this business plan from other films such as Footloose, Saturday Night Fever and Top Gun that had made money for both the film and subsequent album.  Leonard Goldberg, the producer of War Games said "If you get a really hot soundtrack and you can get MTV playing it all day long you're in business.”  As a counter argument and overall pattern many albums had a rise in success based off of their music video.  R. Serge Denisoff and George Plasketes say in their article Synergy in 1980s Film and Music: Formula for Success or Industry Mythology? that “The new stress on music videos created an anomic, or at best a confused situation.”  Primarily popularized by Prince nemesis, Michael Jackson, music videos set the standard and boosted the success for an album based off of the relating music video.  The music video, Thriller became a number one box office hit and boosted the album of the same name to be the greatest selling album of all time.  Purple Rain shares post-modern ties to The Beatles and James Brown.      

            Not only did Purple Rain maintain the 1980’s trend of post-modernism, but also Prince as an artist.  As a music film, it contains similar lighting to earlier music films such as The Beatles Help!  Similarly, both films share many of the same gentle lighting and pure aesthetic quality in order to provide the audience with a gentle, fun tone.  Many of the color schemes lay similar as both use soft colors, such as white, blue, or light green, allowing the audience to not only enjoy the movie’s undoubtable fun aesthetic, but also provide the audience with eye candy while listening to some of their favorite songs.  As a film Purple Rain certainly has a pure aesthetic style, although that proves to be one of the only reasons (along with the relating album) that made it a hit.               

            Ok, here’s where I have to vent and I’m even breaking my typical formal tone to do so.  As a film I think Purple Rain offers little if next to nothing. I think that it provides the audience with some nice lighting while hearing a couple of Prince songs.  As for the revolutionary gender bender look Prince had, many artists had that look before him such as David Bowie, Michael Jackson or any other number of 60s-70s rock stars.  In the film gender I believe had played little part aside for Prince being the middle ground to the misogynistic Morris Day character and the female Apollonia.  As a regular film viewer I feel as if the movie would have been more successful as a piece if it tried to evoke a visceral feeling by taking a David Lynch surrealist approach and completely entrenched the audience in the mysticism that is Prince.  Even if Prince had wanted to make a concert video and released it I think that would have at least provided the audience an opportunity to feel what it had been like to go to a Prince concert.  Prince also could have just made something similar to The Beatles Help or Pink Floyd’s The Wall which utilized successful synergy and made each film a box office success.  All in all, the movie was released to make more money while giving the audience a sub-par piece of film while attempting to sell more records: which worked.

            I’m going to be honest; this was one of the first times I’ve ever watched a movie for the second time and still had absolutely nothing to say about it.  Throughout the movie I was looking for some sort of inkling of character development or layering, or significance to the dialogue or a layered theme pertaining to humanity or the human experience, but there is no one to be found.  Many say that the film had been nominated and even won an Oscar for the film score (which was well-deserved), but the film was also nominated for two Razzies.  The film in my opinion was primarily made to rival the “King of Pop’” and his classic Thriller music video, although I must admit the lighting was nice and conveyed the tone of the film very well.