Superman was invented in the 1930's by a couple of suburban Jewish sci-fi geeks. Jewish. Nerds. The Depression. That's like three cherries on the disempowerment slot machine. But instead of tooling-up with tommy guns and laying waste their high school, these kids invent a primary-colored, illegal alien immigrant from another planet. And this embodiment of every delta-male-bookworm's desperate desire to smash the bully into bloody dog food can not only leap over skyscrapers and run faster than a speeding bullet but—get this—actually uses these science-given superpowers to smash Nazism.
Like, wow. Superman was a cultural atom bomb. The Enlightenment with fists. Anti-fascism with x-ray vision. The Sex Pistols with a jet-black quiff and shiny red knickers. But this new movie? Excuse me while I chew my knees to stop myself from yawning.
We don't need another Superman movie. And we superspecially don't need one where the Kryptonian klutz doesn't grow up to be a war-monger-slaughtering, screaming atheist superliberal. Or a transgendered Mexican biker-porn movie star capable of ejaculating semi-sentient born-again Christian-killing supersperm. Or, indeed, anything other than a brain-rottingly dull 2006 update of Rock Hudson in shiny all-weather underwear.
Snakes on a Plane is a better movie. Because it's not Superman Returns. Because it's called Snakes on a Plane. And because Chuck Klosterman doesn't get it.
In his latest Esquire column, Klosterman slags SoaP for being the ugly, spavined, mutant-bastard love child of the Internet nerderatti and a Hollywood elite determined to shove cardboard flavored krill-bricks down the shrieking beaks of the lowest common-denominator-addicted, mindless American masses.
When SoaP was still at the writing stage, news of its existence leaked and immediately excited the modern equivalents of the anal-retentive pencil-necked freaks who invented Superman. These are the people Klosterman fears and despises. And he is wrong. The only folks we need to pity in this situation are the tedious ubernerds who, like Klosterman, pretend to no longer find the title, idea and concept of Snakes on a Plane knicker-wettingly exciting.
And these disingenuous dullards are legion. They have slithered forth in their embittered numbers to sibilantly dis SoaP. Their only motivation being that particularly sickening hipster pathologism: knee-jerk antipopulism.
The phrase Snakes on a Plane still cracks me up every time I hear it, and I am a dead cool genius. And my mate Tommy Udo—a former pro wrestler who once followed Morrissey on tour in a van with huge speakers, through which he blasted the queuing vegan scum punters with Napalm Death and AC/DC—has just speed-read the SoaP novelization and informs me that it's the best book since his own 2001 teensploitation classic Vatican Bloodbath.
Look, SoaP is like the all-female cover band Lezz Zeppelin. Or the Art Brut song "We Formed a Band" ("Formed a band! We formed a band! Look at us! We formed a band!"). It is conceptually immaculate. It is beyond criticism. And it certainly doesn't cease to be utterly amazing because a cabal of heterosexual middle-class white boys suffers an anti-proletarian hive-mind spasm. Like when have these bland bastards ever been right about anything?
You should always judge a book by its cover, Grasshopper. Only then will you begin to understand the truly exhilarating nature of early 21st century superculture.