When Snakes on a Plane came out, Samuel L. Jackson told a story on the talk show circuit about how Snakes on a Plane was just the working title of the movie and it was supposed to be renamed something like \u201cTerror at 10,000 Feet.\u201d In Jackson\u2019s version, he\u2019s the one that convinced the producers to keep the name after he explained that anyone who wasn\u2019t ready to buy a ticket the second they heard \u201cSnakes on a Plane\u201d was not part of the target audience for the movie. Calling something else would just lose potential fans and alienate people who were not going to like the movie no matter what is was called. He probably threw a \u201cmotherfucker\u201d in there somewhere, but that\u2019s the gist.<\/p>\n
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Jackson was partially right. The \u201cjust what it says on the poster\u201d advertising definitely sold a lot of tickets to Snakes on a Plane. Unfortunately, once you get past the snakes and the plane, the movie is a pretty straightforward action\/horror flick with some comedy thrown in. It\u2019s fun to watch, but doesn\u2019t really deliver the kind of deeply dumb awesomeness that I was hoping for from a movie starring Samuel L. Jackson called Snakes on a Plane. They didn\u2019t quite want to admit that the entire appeal of the movie was in the title and tried to dress it up like something more –I don\u2019t know, maybe \u201crespectable\u201d or \u201cgrown up?\u201d–than it had any right to be.<\/p>\n
Hollywood\u2019s always making bad decisions like that because the whole system hates creativity, but the problem isn\u2019t restricted to Hollywood. Americans in general just aren\u2019t really comfortable with absurdity or even anything \u201ctoo weird.\u201d We always have to try to explain it or dress it up with logic or science or something that makes it seem \u201crealistic.\u201d Apparently a walking corpse that wants to drink your blood because of some kind of plague is somehow not as silly as a walking corpse that wants to drink your blood just because. Grant Morrison summed it up nicely in Supergods:<\/p>\n
\u201cAdults…struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it’s not real.\u201d<\/p>\n
For some things, we can accept that it\u2019s not real. We can watch Scooby Doo our whole lives without ever once wondering why the dog talks, because it\u2019s a cartoon. We can watch Sharknado and enjoy the hell out of it because it\u2019s a dumb Scify movie starring Tara Reid and the guy from Beverly Hills 90210. We don\u2019t care that these things are stupid for some reason, maybe because we don\u2019t expect them to be \u201cserious\u201d (whatever that means). If Sharknado had starred Jason Statham or Bradley Cooper and gotten a theatrical release, it probably would have been panned as one of the worst movies ever made (and probably would have been called something much less satisfying than Sharknado) because most people wouldn\u2019t have accepted it for the dumb fun it was. That (and a horribly misleading marketing campaign) is why Hudson Hawk is considered one of the worst movies of all times when it\u2019s not a bad movie, just a movie that isn\u2019t ashamed of its goofiness. Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello are singing cat burglars who get blackmailed into stealing pieces of Da Vinci\u2019s gold machine! What\u2019s not to love?<\/p>\n
Basically, we have a lot of trouble accepting that something can be both absurd and worthwhile. Because some random firing of neurons tells people that something is no longer just \u201cdumb fun\u201d and is now SOMETHING SERIOUS and they lose all ability to appreciate dumb shit just because it\u2019s entertaining. Suddenly the dumb shit has to grow up (unless they can label it \u201csatire\u201d or \u201cparody\u201d and pretend it has an ulterior motive) or rationalized until the fun is sucked out of it. I\u2019ve written before about how we had to deal with this problem constantly with QAGS. Since the rulebook has jokes, it\u2019s a \u201csilly game\u201d and we still run into people who are surprised when they find out that you can run a \u201cserious\u201d game using a rulebook that\u2019s fun to read.<\/p>\n
In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey, Jr. explains to Ben Stiller that \u201cyou never go full retard.\u201d I disagree. Maybe it\u2019s the result of too much Discordianism and Dr. Demento, but the switch in my brain that\u2019s supposed to tell me when absurdity is no longer acceptable doesn\u2019t work right, so I think that sometimes the best thing you can do is go full retard. Willingness to commit to a stupid idea without shame leads to things like the muppet episode of Angel and The Dumb Jousting Movie With The Kid From The Patriot and Machete 2. Of course, since it\u2019s not very polite to talk about going full retard, I like to think of it as \u201cembracing the stupid.\u201d That\u2019s why I write games about sharks and fratboys and Eris building a whole word because she wants some cheese. As a great man (Weird Al Yankovic) once said:<\/p>\n