It is estimated by those who estimate that when the last 22-year-old male bottom has left the last cinema seat, with a moist sucking noise, Snakes on a Plane will have grossed something close to $40-million. Given that the producers found the script sticking suspiciously to a flyer for erotic massage artistes in a telephone booth, used sock-puppets for snakes and peopled their film with infomercial discards, this box-office must surely represent a profit of roughly $40-million.
In the real world that’s the sort of money that keeps one in erotic massages and sock-puppets for weeks, if not months; but Hollywood isn’t impressed. Already senior studio execs and lowly Variety writers are heaping scorn on the myth of ”internet buzz”, that populist wave of jubilation that was going to see Snakes shatter records. Don’t make me puke, son. Maybe that sub-culture bullshit goes down a treat in those communes where all you cyber-hippies hang out, but this is the real world. If you want to make money in this town, you’ve got to have films with integrity. Like Johnny Depp in eyeliner playing Johnny Depp in eyeliner playing Jerry Bruckheimer’s vision of what a homeless guy would look like if you ever got him back to your place, you know, maybe if you offered him 10 bucks, and then you did a nice base, maybe a little rouge, and a little colour in the lips, and then the curling tongs, and perhaps another 10 bucks if he objected to the Polaroids and the props. That’s cinema, son. That’s box-office.
They might have a point. The sorts of people who got excited about Snakes on a Plane do not buzz. They wheeze sporadically, a function of their failure to comb the dust-mites out of their goatees. But mostly they just sigh, and upload another charcoal drawing of arctic wolves onto their blog.
It would seem, then, that Snakes is a cinematic misadventure. And yet, one can’t help but be moved by the courage inherent in making a film about snakes on a plane, and then naming it Snakes on a Plane. That takes a special kind of auteur, the sort who doesn’t blink. Ever. Even when you staple his tongue to his nose. And if there is one, could there be more? Do we stand at the threshold of a new age in paint-by-numbers filmmaking?
Indeed, had he not been so invested in Mascara of the Caribbean, the fervently militaristic and ardently Republican Bruckheimer might even now have been shooting the incendiary Sheikhs on a Plane. And given the current vogue for remakes, how long would it be before Airport ’77 was tackled, the submerged Boeing of the original providing a terrifying playground for Hakes on a Plane?
The South African film industry has so far eschewed the action trope, and no doubt its first offerings in the new genre would be somewhat more esoteric. For instance, in Zakes on a Plane, a famous local novelist could be drawn into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as an escaped hamster threatens to eat his new manuscript before he can land and get it typed out by his publisher’s secretary. Of course it won’t all be art. There will be failures. Another local effort, Cakes on a Train, will be undermined by a basic lack of dramatic tension, the band of murderous lamingtons never quite convincing us of their motives as they take a tray of cupcakes hostage on the Trans-Karoo.
But man — and specifically the French — shall not live by suspense alone. European cinema will be slow to adapt, but when it does, its works will be sumptuous, discarding narrative, pace, character development and the bladder control of its audiences as it celebrates the awfulness of being. The lives of the misunderstood and the dissolute will be grist to its mill: a young Ernest Hemingway brawling and writing away his burning youth, decrying the poseurs who clog the streets of Paris in the acclaimed Fakes in the Rain; a nattily dressed Oscar Wilde drinking, stumbling and sobbing in Rakes in a Drain. At last even representation will be abandoned, with the triumphant Crepes in the Seine, a visual tone-poem about sex, loss, pancakes and jazz.
Box-office be damned. This is new wave of thought. Flakes on a brain.