FINAL DESTINATION

"You can't cheat the big bad mac daddy Death!" undertaker in F.D.

"Thus death reveals itself as that possibility which is one's ownmost, which is nonrelational, and which is not to be outstripped."

Martin Heidegger

"laws – prosaic laws – free us, perhaps – from the Law by substituting for the invisible magesty of time the various constraints of space."

Maurice Blanchot

It's becoming difficult for me to go to the movies now. Everything on the screen becomes an expanding scrim (and scrimmage) of semiotic possibilities heading inexorably into wider territories. The most banal movie sequence, the most pedestrian movie can become a simmering cauldron of omens and signs, an illustrated concordance to where we, collectively, are–or at least to where SOMEBODY is, some subjectivity, as equal in importance to themselves as I am to myself. We, each of us whether we want to or not, have incorporated the bits and pieces of the life and lives around us....just as we have incorporated (indeed, embody whole) death. Just as life is now taught to us by our professors as an uncanny concatenation of events which lead to a 'me', an evolutionary sequence, a certain probabalistic vector of circumstances which can always everywhere along the length of the vector be concluded as an 'I am', just so then death must also have such 'indeterminate determinations'....an eventfulness of the most extreme import–-which yet must immediately become of NO import as soon as it 'happens'. And so, death must always happen to the other.

In the movie 'Final Destination' we are treated to what has become a genre in and of itself: teen-age catastrophe; a glimmering, soon dispelled adults are always telling them, of disaster, of their own 'far off' end, as in this movie, or of the approach of adultness and authority as radical cultural Otherness, as in 'The faculty' or of the sheer immanenitized terror of 'ordinary life' as it itself comes under the assault of technological transformation in movies like the 'Scream' series and the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' series, both leading into vertiginous 'endings' of self-referentiality. Thus the technological horror on the screen opens a crack into the real world at the end of the movie, much as Cronenberg did in "eXistenZ".

In accord with our earlier formulations me might say that these are attempts to elude the 'detecting' or 'policing' mechanism which, as we've tried to point out, is the central motif in western technotheoculture. The reading and detecting of patterns must lead inevitably and inexorably into two, perhaps not entirely opposed directions: the most social that detection can get is the juridical, the law, that is, a final (law/judgement) and finally enforced (policing/implicit and explicit violence) reading of pattern and evidence; the other direction being Natural Law.

Invariably the more social a reading, an interpretation, a pattern of evidence becomes, the more that 'policing' must be invoked (this seems true no matter what end of the political spectrum one inhabits) as a way of 'dotting the i's and crossing the t's.' That is, a way of concluding what would threaten to become a continual drift of meaning. This closure of patterning, of evidence, can only take place within what seems to be an infinitely expandable 'now' and 'the everyday,' both concepts (well, we can almost not even consider them as 'concepts' anymore, their borders having become so distance and far-reaching and hence almost invisible) working in convoluted ways as the social and the scientific begin to mix. (The affront to the dignity of 'the everyday' caused by new concepts of the quantum will soon be addressed as the concept migrates into technological devices. Thus a 'pavement' of deviceness is created but one which is created of cracks basically, at least as far as 'the social' is concerned. These 'cracks' must invariably express themselves as paranoia as we will see later, as paranoia is a necessary concomitant of a pattern recognition that occupies inchoate border regions.)

okokok you're wondering where the movie went. It went like this: a group of high school students, together with two of their teachers, board a plane headed for Paris. At the very beginning, the camera lingers on one student at home making preparations for the trip. More specifically, the camera lingers ominously on the objects surrounding the student: a model airplane looms out of the dark of the bedroom, stray air currents take on a life of their own. The whole aura is slightly uncanny, even daemonic (in the original Greek sense of the middle region between the gods and humans), although we are not entirely sure why. The drift of the camera work, in conjunction with the music, seems to imply that the room itself is alive, the environment almost takes on a personality, a face. (By the way; some day I'm going to write something on the CONTINUAL and OMNIPRESENT factor of the revolving fan or fan-type device, as in airplane propeller or rotor, in contemporary horror films; it is truly astonishing how universal an emblem it is. Needless to say that the filfot, spiral, swastiki, etc. has an incredible mythological history behind it, and one whose filmic representations invariably invoke the daemonic and the uncanny; if one had to pick ONE symbol for 'engine', of whatever sort, mythological or technical, certainly that would be it.)

Later, as the students board the plane, our budding young Saul-on-the-road-to -Damascus above has an epiphany wherein the plane explodes on takeoff, killing everyone. Of course, he wakes up and freaks, fights to get out of the plane before it takes off and is thrown off the plane along with one of the counselors and four of his classmates. The plane takes off and blows up but rather than being confirmed as a hero, he becomes a pariah, another Ezekiel who threatens to contaminate the socius of the community by a no-appeal reference to Natural Law, a court which operates OUTSIDE the confines of the Everyday. (the only agency that is allowed to operate in that arena now is scientific enquiry, all other claimants are policed in various ways, by sanitation [otherwise called education], by encampment and extirmation [prison system, now up to 2 million in USA], or by the various micro-bio-power mechanisms which Michel Foucault attempted to elucidate, including the coils of a massive beauracratic administrative mechanism, articulated with an equally mammoth econo-technical apparatus, the domestic terminus and main instrument of which you are currently staring at).

So our two-bit prophet now begins to perceive other constellations form around him and around those who made it off the plane. His reading of the entrails lead him to think that Death has been cheated of its victims and is conspiring with the environment to bring about their untimely end.

Actually the bit about 'untimely' end is not true since they have gone far beyond what SHOULD have been their 'timely' end, that is, dying on the plane crash. We later learn that the 'evidence' may point to the idea that Death was actually only after our six protagonists on the plane ... so what's a few hundred innocent bystanders in any techno catastrophe (that is, increasingly: EVERY disaster)?! At this point 'fact finding' and pattern recognition must verge on, if not completely succumb to, a paranoiac vision of reality. One could even say that 'paranoia' is the bridge point between 'natural law' (a formation which is always OUTSIDE the human) and a phlegmatic everyday socius, the juridical of the now (a constellation which is perceived as firmly within the human). Like the scales of justice itself. the paranoid rendition of reality is hinged on a very small, almost nothing in fact, point de capiton; the dreadful secret of paranoia is that it wishes not only to unhinge the scales but to shift the hidden hinge point–THAT is what constitutes its paranoia and its radicality. In terms of this movie, it is our teen hero's attempt to 'cheat death,' to find the hinge point (i.e., 'produce evidence' of this hidden hinge, which of course in the real, pragmatic world is always suspect, invariably leading the phlegmatic personality to start hurling charges of 'occultism') and 'put the fix in' as gamblers say, on the swing of the pendulum.

At this point in the movie, Death is now reduced to using any number of Rube Goldbderg contraptions to get at our beleaguered teens, the whole environment flickering, rolling around, bumping into itself, knocking things over, all in an attempt to complete its mission while our hero skitters around trying to foil the plan of death by, literally, binding up the potential instruments around him at one point. (oh, and the official detecting agency of the FBI is long left behind in this caper...that's how we know that we are in the second prong, the Natural Law business, of my little makeshift theoretical contraption. The only thing a policing agent can do is bind up the subjectivities, the protagonists; from their point of view the best way to deal with an uncanny thief is to...have your possessions expropriated.)

ok, so now there are three left and it's six months later. They've finally made it to Paris, sitting on the Boulevard contemplating their success at having eluded Natural Law on its own turf. But then the sight-seeing visionary mechinism begins to open up again and the 'structure of accident' (i,e, that debil Death) begins to manifest itself, as a very large neon sign begins swinging ( a literal enactment of the aforementioned scales one might say), takes out our formerly nimble teen hero, then swings into us in the balcony audience and fades to black.

"The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact." Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the DIsaster