Détournement ("rerouting" or "hijacking" in French) is a form of Parody in which existing material—especially advertising, Public Service Announcements, Very Special Episodes and Aesops of the more Anvilicious or paranoid sort—is co-opted or repurposed for a message different from (or better yet, completely opposite to) the one it was originally intended to give.
The Trope Namer is the Situationist International
movement, a French Marxist movement focused on the effects of mass alienation through cultural control. They asserted that people within a mass culture were manipulated by a constant mass-media / government / "religion of spectacle" proposed by Guy Debord in "Society of the Spectacle." Detournement was one way of bringing modern art into politics, since they rejected any 20th century art that removed itself from the politics of its time.
Not to be confused with Dénouement. See also Gag Dub and Gag Sub.
Examples:
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Film
- Teaser material for the movie Mean Girls involves PSAs about the grave issues of teenage life, with a mean twist:
Gretchen: Even in fancy countries like the United States and England, seven out of ten girls have a negative body image.Regina: Who cares? Six of those girls are right.
- ''Le grand Détournement'' is a 72 minute-long French film made of extracts of many Warner Bros. films. The story is more or less a parody of Citizen Kane, in which two journalists investigate why Georges Abitbol, "the classiest man on Earth", said monde de merde before dying. The alternative title La classe américaine means that this movie is also a tribute to the American films that director Michel Hazanavicius watched in his youth (those films "taught" him how to make a movie). The cast of this film includes John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Orson Welles, Lana Turner, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Charles Bronson, James Stewart, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Spencer Tracy, Lauren Bacall, Dino, and Clark Gable.
- Rather understandably, the films of Guy Debord, the founder of the Situationist International.
Live Action TV
- The Boys: In "Cherry", Translucent is being held prisoner in an abandoned restaurant, and Hughie Campbell sees a poster showing a baby covered in spaghetti sauce and the title Keep Your Hands Clean. At first it looks like he will wash his hands of this mess and do a runner like Translucent is trying to convince him to do, but it actually inspires him to turn Translucent into Ludicrous Gibs, likely because it reminded him of his own experience being splattered by his girlfriend who was accidentally killed by another superhero.
- Any MTV interviews handed over to "Weird Al" Yankovic for his "Al TV" specials get cut-and-pasted into absolutely bozo exchanges that make the celebrities in them look like complete idiots or lunatics.
- Old educational films were edited into wacky shorts for The Weird Al Show as well.
- In a similar format, MTV2 UK's "Ginger Bloke" shorts, where MTV interviews are cut-and-pasted to have the Ginger Bloke mocking them to their faces, or otherwise bizarre exchanges.
- The Soup does this as well, with results like Miley Cyrus being portrayed as a vampire.
- This is half the purpose of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. More The Colbert Report. Jon Stewart has said in interviews that he and his crew try very hard not to distort the message of anything they put on air unless it is clearly intended to be farcical.
- In general, when The Daily Show wanted to undercut something on political grounds (as opposed to when it was simply incomprehensible), they used a variation of this trope: making their own "version", and doing it very poorly.
- Sometimes happened in Mystery Science Theater 3000, especially when it was on Comedy Central.
- Not the Nine O'Clock News
- They did this with the rather threatening British television licence PSA campaign using the slogan "Get a TV licence - it's cheaper than a fine"; their parody showed The BBC instead staging plane crashes for people that didn't pay their licence fee and then having their houses bulldozed, with the slogan "Get a TV licence — it's cheaper than a funeral".
- They were also fond of mucking about with news footage: for instance the Queen inspecting soldiers on a Commonwealth visit being presented as her trying to identify the man who stole her handbag from a police line-up.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In "Beauty & the Beasts" a road safety poster behind Buffy says Most Women Aren't Attracted To Dead Guys, a Visual Pun referring to Buffy's vampire boyfriend Angel.
- Doctor Who. In "Oxygen", the Monster of the Week are artificially-intelligent spacesuits which kill anyone they can get their gloves on. Bill Potts gives a bitter laugh on seeing a poster: LOOK AFTER YOUR SMARTSUIT AND IT WILL LOOK AFTER YOU.
Web Animation
- The infamous G.I. Joe PSAs take on the And Knowing Is Half the Battle shorts from G.I. Joe, where the sound is overdubbed with bewildering dialogue and a Broken or completely absent Aesop.
Web Original
- This often happens with Chick Tracts - a somewhat popular pursuit is to take one and replace the dialogue so that it gives the exact opposite message, the original message in even more anvilicious terms, or something completely different.
- The webcomic Darths & Droids, which uses stills from the Star Wars films to tell a story of a group of tabletop gamers improvising the films' plots. It tells a story as wildly different from the original films as possible, while still being constrained to actual screenshots.
- The Snuggie Cult adverts all over YouTube.
- Photoshop Phriday on Something Awful.
- 4chan makes an online industry of taking comics, especially ones intended to instruct the young, and rewrite the dialogue. Be warned...
- French Mozinor, who often pays homage to aforementioned movie "Le Grand Détournement". Hugh!Salut!
- Some of the earliest viral videos on YouTube — arguably what put the site on the map — were the ones that simply edited select shots from movies into fake trailers that made them out to be a completely different kind of film, like the one that made The Shining look like a family comedy.
- One Drugs Are Bad segment from Star Trek: The Next Generation got repurposed and inverted into this YTMND.
Western Animation
- Space Ghost Coast to Coast rearranged whatever his guests said to make it look like everyone was as crazy as Space Ghost. It's safe to say that Ghost Planet, no, that entire Universe, is Cloudcuckooland.
- The climax of the early Daffy Duck short Daffy Duck in Hollywood has Daffy creating an insanely goofy movie by editing newsreel clips — actually live-action Warner Bros. stock footage — together and giving them absurd voiceovers/soundtracks. For instance, a zoo lion proclaims "Motion pictures are your best entertainment!" and jitterbug music underscores an elegant waltz. Some might say that Daffy Duck made the first YouTube Poop.
