Snakes & Planes & Nicolas Cage
Life is pretty boring. On the whole, this suits me just fine because I don’t to be surprised when I order a meal, or step out of my house. I mostly want things to go as precisely to plan as possible. Covid has been one hell of a surprise, and look how that turned out.
This presents screenwriters with a problem. Life is allowed to be boring, but movies aren’t. There’s a lot riding on movies. They’ve got hundreds of names in the credits, and millions of [insert denomination of choice] behind them. They can be big, brash and bold, but never boring. At least not intentionally.
What’s that solution? One could explore the nuances of modern ethics and the human condition… or just throw your hands in the air, and camp it up. It’s the latter I’ll be looking at in today’s topic: Snakes & Planes & Nicolas Cage.
Snakes on a Plane (2006); directed by David R. Ellis, story by John Heffman and Sebastian Gutierrez, screenplay by John Heffman and David Dalessandro.
A gangster knows a witness is being flown across the country to testify against him. What’s the easiest way to stop it? Flood the plane with killer snakes. FBI agent Samuel L Jackson must save the day before they all go down in a blaze of scales and venom.
Technically Samuel L Jackson’s character has a name, but you’d never know it. The big bad gangster who’s behind the attack has less than two minutes of screentime. The witness? Entirely forgettable. But none of that matters. The reason this (entirely believable and sometimes too subtle) premise works is because this plane full of snakes is a Sam Jackson vehicle.
The film goes out of its way to explain that snake pheromones onboard are causing the snakes’ hyper aggressive behaviour. Why don’t the snakes stay down in the hold, canoodling with and killing each other? What makes them hunt down humans? These are not questions we ask in the universe of Snakes on a Plane. And anyway who are you to argue with Samuel m*****r¹ L f*****g Jackson, b***h?
Con Air (1997); directed by Simon West, written by Scott Rosenberg.
A plane full of convicts being transported to a new supermax prison is taken over by America’s most dangerous criminals. Nicolas Cage is going to put things right and still make it to his daughter’s birthday on time.
Nick Cage’s character is honourable to a fault. A former US Army Ranger, he goes to prison after admitting to the manslaughter of a knife-carrying drunkard. On the day of his release he gets caught up in the takeover of a prison transport plane, and gives up his chance to walk away in order to save the life of his diabetic friend and a prison guard.
Apparently the supermaxees are working for a drug baron who eventually double-crosses them. We never see them, but that’s fine because we only need to know they exist. Just like the big bad in Snakes on a Plane, this drug lord is only as present as he strictly needs to be (i.e. not at all).
It’s no coincidence that both these films’ big bads are shadowy gangsters. These movies are both high-concept action films with a similar problem: to disrupt the humdrum of life enough to serve you up 90-odd minutes of drama. Flying is so reliable that the easiest way to disrupt it (to make space for enough drama to justify a Hollywood production) is via the criminal.
For this double-bill crime is sudden, violent breaks from the expected. The witness in Snakes on a Plane is riding his bike through the Hawaiian countryside when he happens across a murder in progress. Nicolas Cage’s character in Con Air is picking his wife up from work when someone pulls a knife on him in the parking lot.
But these traumatic disruptions of the everyday aren’t just limited to the plots’ inceptions. The passengers of Snakes on a Plane suffer indiscriminately in the attempt to bring down the plane. In Con Air the police, prison guards, and even the public risk death proportional to their hanging around the central cast for too long. One character dies after getting stuck in the landing gears; later used as a grim memo pad, dropped from a mile up so that Nick Cage can get a message out. The corpse lands on the bonnet of middle class couples’ car as they go about having an otherwise perfectly bland day in their perfectly bland life.
As most people experience it, ‘the criminal’ is a catastrophic intrusion into the mundane. ‘The criminal’ is these movies’ superpower to lift their stories into a storytelling space. The Hollywood world of crime is used as though it were a shadow reality, existing on the flipside of normality. This makes it ripe with storytelling potential.
Snakes on a Plane or Con Air take… ‘creative liberties’ with logic and consequence. But that’s ironically what makes them so effective. Personal crimes (vandalism, robbery, assault, etc.) aren’t experienced as links in an economic chain of events, nor as the manifestation of abstract social failures. They’re an intrusion into your life that leave you scrabbling to get back to normality. They’re the kinds of acts where you think you’ve found a quiet moment to read, only to find that someone’s written “f**k you” in your copy of Catcher in the Rye.
Buried within these films’ stories is a singular truth: that we collectively contain warring desires of humdrum and drama. The easiest way to satisfy them, and suspend disbelief for a couple of hours, is to keep them at arm’s length; be it through crime or superpowers.
___________________________________________________________________
¹If you don’t think this is worth censoring, then you aren’t reading it right.
This piece was written to accompany the podcast Bigger Pictures season 3 episode 2 “Snakes & Planes & Nicolas Cage”, available here and through your podcatcher of choice.
