| Fear-1:
loss of the illusion of control
Early on in this latest addition to what I’m beginning
to feel is the best movie franchise ever made in the history
of like everything, the lead doughboy tells our protagonist
that what’s really scaring her is not the possibility
of an abstract death hunting down mortality draft-dodgers
but a loss of control – that is, her premonition of
doom wasn’t enough to save her boyfriend from death
by rollercoaster, so her obsession with decoding the contingencies
of her own demise is a compensatory manifestation of this
loss of the illusion of control, which I’ll refer to
as Fear-1 (see above).
What’s
unexpected is that the movie then takes this soap opera psych
and transposes it from an individual to a nation. First it
contemporizes it in a discussion on the 'signs' that predate
a catastrophic occurrence: among the photographic evidence
of such visual prophesy is a picture of the World Trade Center
with a shadow of a plane on the side of one of the towers.
As if, public excuses to the contrary, the governmental surprise
was due not to a lack of precedent, but to a lack of paying
attention (to U.S. interference in places Not-US [in this
instance Afghanistan] and its inevitable 3rd law of thermodynamics
repercussions – quoted by a character in the movie:
"for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction").
That less than four years ago movies like Spiderman were
digitally erasing any inadvertent reference to the WTC makes
this seemingly crass maneuver all the more startling and effective;
compare it for example with Spielberg's similar use of the
towers in Munich (the second installment of his 9/11
trilogy, the first being War of the Worlds and the
third not yet released – maybe his untitled Abraham
Lincoln project?): both are using the towers to connect temporally
disparate events and make a commentary on U.S. complicity
with its own state of fear -- but only Final Destination
3 has the gall to do this while also exploiting a national
tragedy in the service of some cheap point in a horror movie
series already on its third leg,[1] whereas Munich
is pretty straightforward Symbolic Commentary. The difference
between the two (besides FD3's tonal layers) is that
Munich extends 1970s Israel/Palestine/NY on upward
to the present, while FD3 extends post-9/11 fear
all the way back to the American Revolution, as if to suggest
that fear has motivated the American way of life since its
inception (which includes that inception). If you’re
the kind of fuck who thinks such things you might be wondering
if Hollywood’s been reading Agamben’s State
of Exception in between Variety and The
Hollywood Reporter. The answer is probably not, and neither
have I. What I did instead was watch the shit out of FD3
with Franke, Harris, Cinema
de Merde himself (&Co.) and a whole theater of
opening night human beings as the movie linked presidential
assassinations to the collective backdrop of Fear-1: with
a portrait of Lincoln, a school and a character both named
McKinley, and subway stops named after Booth and Oswald (I’m
sure there are more references I missed), FD3 goes
after the psychological safeguards in place to protect us
in case of an actualization of Fear-1: even if we lose our
personal illusion of control, there is still some larger illusion
of control in place, that of the mechanisms of American society
and the President in the symbolic driver’s seat. So
that when a presidential assassination occurs we’re
thrown into a reality in which no one’s driving the
car -- or the truck, as the case may be (in the movie), the
awareness of which so dislocates us that we find ourselves
suddenly on the outside, confused, trapped, and panicked,
turned around in horror at the sight of the out of control
vehicle now barreling straight for us. One could even construe,
what with the implied call for Dick Cheney’s death during
an outburst at a funeral and the use of a reconstructed American
Revolution as the context of the dramatic climax (not counting
the coda), in addition to its implied logic that the only
way to fuck up death’s plan is to kill someone "out
of order", that the movie is hypothesizing if not out-and-out
hinting that a presidential assassination might not be such
a bad idea. Isn’t the movie’s characterization
of the mundane particulars of life in the U.S. (drive-thrus,
home depot, automobiles, tanning booths, amusement parks,
weight rooms, etc.) as potential vehicles of a truly horrifying
death a suggestion that our immediate surroundings, not a
distant unknown Other, is what’s really trying to kill
us? Except the movie knows that any escape is only illusory,[2]
since even a reorienting of our lives is a reorientation in
relation to death, which brings us to Fear-2.
Fear-2:
straight-up fear of oblivion
The
Final Destination franchise is a distilling of the slasher
genre to its irreducible core: stripping death of any personified
avatar and trimming off all moral[3]
and thematic
justifications for the horror and terror the movie inflicts
on its characters, FD is all about the inevitable confrontation
with mortality that predates death itself, the ruin this confrontation
makes of what’s left of our lives, and the absurd spectacle
this awareness makes of an event that might otherwise pass
by trivial and unnoticed. We, not our loved ones, are the
mortified audience of our death. So that the seemingly gleeful
mockery with which it announces itself is transferred (and
sublimated) into the characters themselves, whose paranoiac
navigating of reality is not unlike the exciting (when I was
10 years old anyway) escapades of Encyclopedia Brown, hunting
for clues, piecing together evidence, hypothesizing about
the criminal’s methods and intentions. Except with death
as both the context and substance of life, there are no red
herrings – what the characters suffer from is sign overload,
in which everything means something and everything can kill
you. This implicit linking of meaning with death parallels
the movie’s (and life’s) inherent nihilism, since
each evasion of death is just a postponement of our return
to nothingness. For the heroes of the Final Destination franchise,
life, through a process of evasive elimination, becomes a
search for which sign will be your undoing. In the case of
meanspirited goth McKinley, the sign that kills him is his
name – literally, a giant sign bearing the high school's
name, which he shares, comes tumbling down and smashes him
like a cockroach. That he is snuffed out by his own name is
given further significance by his earlier taunting of the
protagonist, in that he dared her to commit suicide so as
to break the linear cycle of death. But FD3 differs
from its predecessors in its casting aside of the false remainder
of hope: death is not a linear cycle, but a linear unfolding
of a closed circle, so that there’s no escaping it,
not even in the movies. What’s worse is there’s
no escaping the fear of death either.
_________________________
[1]
It’s worth noting that just as a plane started off the
franchise (hence the titular pun), so did a plane (or three)
initiate our current geopolitical situation.
[2]
This is discounting what an escape from the American way of
life might mean for suffering in other parts of the world,
but the movie’s sphere of awareness is America’s
impact on Americans – any concern with the rest of the
world falls between the “America’s” and
“Americans” of that clause.
[3]
Or the moral justification is taken to its absurd extreme:
we are punished for not being dead already. Our sin is life. |