Finally watched Final Destination (as in, the original one) and had some random insights to share

BLOT: (19 Nov 2012 - 02:18:51 PM)

Finally watched Final Destination (as in, the original one) and had some random insights to share

While waiting for election results, now a couple of weeks ago, I watched Final Destination, aka: the film about the pretty young things who cheat death and no one cheats death, so there. I had never seen it, which sounds confessional, but really I had never felt a reason to see it. Having enjoyed Scream, even if it was sort of like the horror movie equivalent of a doctoral thesis about doctoral theses, and considering Urban Legend to be one of the biggest wastes of a good idea ever¹, I frankly felt filled up on the subgenre. Which I'll explain in a bit. Nothing in the trailers or the discussions for Final Destination made me think either that I would be surprised or thrilled or excited by it. Which is a shame, because, looking back in hindsight, not only would it have been nice to have had a crush on Ali Larter back in my early 20s, but it managed to have more of a sense of fun than many of its late-90s MTV horror brothers and sisters. Still, seeing it twelve years too late gives me some interesting insights into it and how it fits into the movies around it.

Start with how it fits in its genre niche. Let's call it the "Pretty Young Thing" genre²: a group of kids, probably related through education³ brush up against horror. There is an emphasis on "the rules" and pattern-matching and group-think that falls through and this leads to destruction. The PrettyYoungThings are chaste, mostly, and dress well. They are unconcered about the state of the world, outside of the pet projects, and they embody concepts like "geek" and "jock" without actually embodying it. Look at Carter [in Final Destination], bouncing back and forth between punk/rebel and jock without landing in either. Or Alex [ibid], who was meant to be a geek without much in the way of geekiness. It could be taken as a protest against labels, but it feels like a normalization of themes across types to appeal to as many as possible at once while only given token appreciation to outsiders and cliques. Breakfast Club was a [albeit cliched] overcoming of genre/niche thought to find common ground. The PYT equivalent would be to have five people, all with about the same attitudes and backgrounds, the not-jerk an not-punk and not-hot-girl and not-nerd and not-goth, pretending to be different just long enough that they can later stop and call it personal growth.

My brother once had an insight about PYT horror that bears repeating: it was when horror stopped the punk characters the goodguys. Late 90s suburban horror embraces ostracization as a legit punishment. The outsider is bad, unless they are really an insider (and, again re: Carter, often are). My brother complained that it got rid of the fun, since horror could no longer embrace a gritty, DIY attitude with know-how folks, but instead got swallowed up by see-pretties whose chief crime is that they failed to work together in a reasonable amount of time. This subgenre is basically the Reagan era youth ideal, more socialized and downhome and networkable and marketable, wrapped around date night bait. Perhaps most striking is that the erstwhile family stuctures in 60s-80s horror, with groups formed and reformed in response to the terror around them, are made redundant because these groups come pre-packaged. Makes you wonder if it would have been too complicated to explain letting outsiders in after the starting bell.

In this, Final Destination is entirely a PYT horror movie, albeit one with a bad guy that is not merely just one of the guys/girls dressed up because the boogie man is only a failure in the social contract to begin with. Strangely, by using a supernatural entity utilizing Rube Goldberg mechanics to kill off teenagers while parents and authority figures look on from afar, all because of some transgression that was not even the teens' fault to begin with—it is not like Alex actually demanded to get off the plane so much as got kicked off trying to explain why everyone needed to get off the plane—the thing becomes a basic remake of the more appropriately Reagan-era Nightmare on Elm Street. Right down to the suspicion being tossed back at one of the teens and "You thought you escaped!?" ending. But while Nightmare is about kids smoking and doing drugs and large amounts of caffeine to stay awake, angrily fighting the authorities that are letting them down, Destination is about kids trying to figure out how they can obey the letter of the law and not be punished for it.

As a curiosity, Destination also happens to be about an airplane disaster prior to 9/11, so it leads one to think about how the interrogation scenes would have been handled had it been made just a couple of years later? It already, thanks to it's X-Files connection⁴, has a feeling of men-in-black paranoia. How would that have changed, increased, or possibly excised? The sequels include three car wrecks and an amusement ride. In a 9/11-less world, how ingrained would the plane crash element have been? No way to tell. It just feels strange to look back at a movie from so close to that time, and to remember the paranoia and security theater and panics about airplanes, and to see what essentially is a gentle harassing that would have been Mulder and Scully had it been on television.

Speaking of the sequels, not sure if I am going ot watch them, but I probably will. I've watched nearly all of the Children of the Corn sequels, so I can't claim any real appeal to taste or time wasting or such. Oh well, somebody has to do it. ;)

1: All the while avoiding I Know What You Did Last Summer after the trailer told me, in very specific and repetitive terms, to avoid it.

2: As opposed to the "Sexy Young Thing" genre of the 70s and 80s. In which a group of friends went off some place, broke some rules and had sex, and then died in a shower of fake blood.

3: For some reason, "classmates" became the subgenre's primary justification for its victims to hang out.

4: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Destination (19 Nov 2012): "The film was based on a spec script intended for The X-Files, written by [Jeffrey] Reddick. X-Files writing partners [James] Wong and [Glen] Morgan were interested and agreed to re-write and direct a feature film of it..."

Horror

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: November 2012