28 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
are far from wild-eyed. He has pushed
the Party in positive directions—for
example, in the fight for a higher min-
imum wage. Biden has countered San-
ders’s Medicare for All by emphasizing
his own support for building on Obama-
care with a “public option.” If anything,
the outbreak of COVID-19 illustrates the
urgent need for some form of univer-
sal health care. The winnowing of the
field should not be a reason to narrow
those aspirations.
Indeed, the debates between San-
ders and Biden—the first is scheduled
for March 15th—will offer the candi-
dates a chance to make the case for
their proposals. (With Biden’s amiable
volubility and Sanders’s Brooklynite
polemical style, the two of them, both
in their late seventies, should put on
quite a show.) Beyond policy, when
Biden says, as he did last Wednesday,
that “character is on the ballot,” and
his supporters speak of the former
Vice-President, as Representative Jim
Clyburn of South Carolina did, as “a
real good man,” it’s important to keep
in mind that the true contrast, in that
respect, is with Trump, not Sanders.
And then there’s the matter of
money. Bloomberg, who has now en-
dorsed Biden, has a storied record as a
donor to progressive causes. He put
something like a half-billion dollars
into his own campaign—the amount
of money involved is unsettling, even
in the name of defeating Trump—and
has said that, if he didn’t get the nom-
ination, he would re-deploy his oper-
ation in the service of another candi-
date he liked. He doesn’t seem to like
Sanders much; during a debate, he told
Sanders that, in effect, democratic so-
cialism is the road to serfdom. Will
that message be included in ads that
Bloomberg buys for Biden? The race
will already be bitter; it would be best
to leave the Red-baiting to Trump.
Sanders’s divisiveness is a more worthy
target than his dreams, which are shared
by many Democrats.
There have been unexpected swings
in this race. Thirty-two states have yet
to vote, and probably about thirty-two
thousand more insults, epithets, and
lies are still to come from Trump, as
he attempts to distort the picture of
the candidates and of the country. Sen-
ate Republicans are revving up an in-
vestigation related to Ukraine and Joe
Biden’s son Hunter, too, which Sena-
tor Ron Johnson contends will be useful
to a “Democratic primary voter.” One
hopes that, amid all the distraction,
Biden and Sanders and their support-
ers will still be able to see one another
clearly. “What this campaign, I think,
is increasingly about is: Which side are
you on?” Sanders said on Wednesd a y.
There is an answer both for him and
for Biden: Trump is on the other side.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
SCARETOWN
EXPERIENTIAL
L
ast week was a funny week to choose
to be scared—there were so many
reasons to be scared involuntarily: a
deadly global pandemic, a careening pri-
mary season, a careening stock market,
a Supreme Court case that could set the
clock back decades on reproductive
rights, and a President happily stomp-
ing all over the machinery of govern-
ment (including those parts that respond
to deadly global pandemics) as if he were
Godzilla. So who would make an effort
to be scared, and—cough, cough; sorry,
just clearing our throat—in a confined
public space, no less?
That was the bar set for a lavish pro-
motional stunt that took place in SoHo.
The hype was for “A Quiet Place Part II,”
the sequel to John Krasinski’s 2018 hor-
ror film, in which mantis-like aliens that
can’t see (or apparently smell) but can
hear quite well manage to eat most of
humanity. Thus the film’s hook: to survive,
the characters have to stay quiet, even
though the plot has them doing things
like stepping on nails and going into
labor. The four-day promotion in SoHo
was an interactive high-tech riff on the
“Quiet Place” premise: participants walked
through a series of environments recall-
ing the new movie’s trailer, where they
encountered jump-scare sound effects
and increasingly loud hazards—a fritz-
ing electrical system, hissing oxygen tanks,
and a crying infant (played by a doll).
People had to figure out how to hush all
the fritzing, hissing, and crying, lest the
racket attract the hungry aliens.
Jasen Smith was in charge of the de-
sign and construction of what was offi-
cially known as the “A Quiet Place Part II”
Survival Experience. “Obviously, we can’t
really kill people,” he explained, “but we
wanted to create that same layer of anx-
iety and anticipation and awareness of
sound” that the films do. In case anyone’s
anticipation and anxiety and, say, heart
rate got out of control, there were liabil-
ity waivers to sign. But, on the first day
of operation, visitors were enjoying them-
selves; this was more theme-park attrac-
tion than C.I.A. black site. Marc Wein-
stock, a Paramount marketing executive,
hoped that about seven or eight thou-
sand people would go through the Ex-
perience, here and at one in L.A. That’s
a small number in Hollywood terms, but,
you know: influencers, fan engagement,
etc. Weinstock said that he expected to
be pleased with the return on the stu-
dio’s investment, which was less than a
million dollars.
The Experience is an example of
what’s known as “experiential market-
ing”—a slick millennial update on the
gimmicky, old-school showmanship ex-
emplified by the schlock horror-meis-
ter William Castle, who once stocked a
theatre lobby with a fake nurse dispens-
ing “nerve-steadying pills.” Smith, who
runs his own shop, the Experiential Sup-
ply Company, is a leading player in this
world. Four days before the “Quiet Place”
Experience opened—or “activated,” in
marketing lingo—he was supervising a
crew putting it together. Smith, who has
a genial, ready-for-anything air, got into
experiential marketing five years ago, by
cold-calling studios and brands with
ideas. At the time, the field was mostly
limited to building giant props for pre-
mières or sending out costumed “street
teams” to give away trinkets or samples.
Smith broke through with a pitch for a
“Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation”
obstacle course, which included an air-
plane wing that people could run across
like they were Tom Cruise.
In SoHo, the “Quiet Place” team was
putting finishing touches on the scenic
elements in a series of claustrophobic
