In case you don't inhabit the blogosphere, the abridged story of "Snakes on a Plane" runs a little something like this: John Heffernan and Sebastian Guttierez write a script about an Asian gangster who, in order to stifle a witness' damning testimony, fills an airplane with pheromone-enraged snakes. They call their film "Pacific Air Flight 121." Samuel L. Jackson inexplicitly signs on to this project and objects to the 9/11-ish title; the film is renamed "Snakes on a Plane."
The title catches fire on the Internet. And New Line Cinema, seeing the blog community as a massive focus group, adds five additional days of filming to the already completed film, most of which consists of sex and salty language (including perhaps the most gratuitous boob shot in the history of cinema). All of a sudden, people are talking about "SoaP" as if it were co-written by Jesus and James Joyce.
So, "SoaP" is the next "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Spiderman" or whatever. Nope. Good news, Chuck Klosterman. Instead of signaling the end of quality cinema, "SoaP" choked on the hype. According to an article on www.slate.com, New Line Cinema fudged opening day tallies and included Thursday evening viewings so that their cold-blooded treasure would crown the charts. But subterfuge can only go so far. The fact remains that "SoaP" has made only $45 million at the box office, well below expectations.
It would seem that New Line Cinema fundamentally misconstrued the theory of the cult film. Reaching cult status is a rather dubious honor; the movie is either so bad or so ludicrous that it is resurrected and appreciated with a healthy dose of irony. What's important, though, is that to be considered "cult," the film must have had time to manifest itself in the society's consciousness. Moreover, those films almost always take themselves seriously. "Showgirls," for instance, performed miserably at the box office, but the combination of seeing Jessie Spano of "Saved by the Bell" naked and the utter humorlessness of the entire film has led to "Showgirls"' underground reincarnation. "SoaP," on the other hand, is merely a bad film. In trying to skip from point A to point C, "SoaP" succeeded only in shooting itself in the foot. Or, as Stephanie Zacharek eloquently defined the problem, "a self-parody of a concept that's essentially beyond parody, a joke we're all in on to the point where it really doesn't matter whether we've seen the movie at all."
"Snakes on a Plane" didn't satisfy the masses. No matter. Media that no one really cares about is the Academy's lifeblood. I can't wait for the inevitable vulgar theorization. It might go something like this:
"Is it a coincidence that the snake, the Original Liar and Temptress, terrorizes the passengers on the plane? Or that the snakes were thrown into a rampage by pheromones sprayed on floral leis? Or that the snakes' first victims were pot-smoking, smoking-hot surfers 'joining the Mile High Club?' Or that the medulla oblongata, the 'reptilian brain,' the center of the sucking and swallowing reflex, is the very seat of infantile psychosexual satisfaction? Freud said there was no such thing as a coincidence.
"I say that 'Snakes on a Plane' serves as an allegory for the insistence of the unconscious on the body in the form of a symptom. Each reptile is a reification of a repressed memory, each sting a psychosomatic wound. It is no wonder that the film's triumphant climax features the talking cure, par exemple; not until Jackson utters the taboo, 'I have had it with these muthafuckin' snakes on this muthafuckin' plane!' that the plane can be purged of (nearly) all snakes."
I smell a thesis topic. Or maybe it's just the pheromones.