Sunday, March 21, 2010

Intelligent Dasein and Final Destination 2

The entire Final Destination series is a parody of Creationism and the "proof" offered by "Intelligent Design." Death is the negative theology of Creationism. Just like "G-d" death cannot be represented or even presented, anthropomorphized, personified, or embodied. Clearly, there is only Da-sein, being there, a Heideggerian post-Christian existing toward death to be confronted in these teen pics. There is no priest figure as in A Haunting in Connecticut or The Exorcist. There's just the black guy who works at the funeral home where he creates corpses. Final Destination is the most openly parodic, starting with the TV interview of a guy who has been marginalized who finally gets a chance to talk about "death's design." The guy turns out to be psychotic, as we can see very clearly when he confuses inference with proof, and the TV interviewer calls him on his bad logic. The psychotic's account of death's design is the inverted mirror of the Creationist one. The only difference is that the plot of each film proves the psychotic right. Death always makes a come back. You can't skip over your mourning; you death is pre-planned, and all you can do is da-sein your life unto death, meaning that you are back to Kirkegaard's existentialization, as it were, of Christinaity: lay people face up living out their sickness unto death by taking a flying leap knowing will be no safety net, no safe landing, just falling.

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