Searchlight Pictures has released the first teaser trailer for Guillermo Del Toro's film noir thriller Nightmare Alley, based on the 1946 book of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham. This teaser introduces the movie's twisted carnival setting and its all-star cast, promising a potential awards contender to follow up Del Toro's previous Best Picture Oscar winner The Shape of Water. It also showcases a scene instantly ready-made for memes: a shot that looks like a live-action recreation of KC Green's "This Is Fine" comic.
During the cast introductions sequence of the trailer, Bradley Cooper's manipulative carny character Stanton "Stan" Carlisle is seen lighting a house on fire and walking away from the flaming building. In the final shot of the trailer, after the film's title card, Cooper is shown sitting in a chair as flames consume the room around him. It's not clear whether this is connected to the previous fire scene involving Cooper or if there's just a lot of house fires in Nightmare Alley.
This immediately brings to mind KC Green's memetic "This Is Fine" comic strip, in which an orange dog in a bowler hat sits in a chair while everything burns around him, uttering the line "This is fine." Initially published in 2013, the comic has become an all-purpose meme response to any new piece of overwhelming terrible news. It's even popular enough to get an animated spot on Adult Swim and its own Funko Pop.
The context of the Nightmare Alley scene might not be the same casual resignation in the face of disaster that's made "This Is Fine" such a popular meme. It could be that Cooper is passed out drunk, or possibly even relishing a job well done if he is the one who burned down the house he is sitting in. Even so, the visual parallels are unavoidable and, given Guillermo Del Toro's pop-culture savvy, possibly intentional.
Nightmare Alley is Guillermo Del Toro's first film set entirely in the real world without supernatural elements. The only monsters in this movie are humans, and they look to be quite monstrous indeed. Set at a seedy carnival in the 1940s, it stars Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman and David Strathairn. The novel was previously adapted into a movie in 1947, but Del Toro has said this is not a remake but an entirely different adaptation.
To discover why Bradley Cooper is recreating the "This Is Fine" meme, watch Nightmare Alley in theaters starting December 17.
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