A lot of people have picked up new hobbies during quarantine. Some people have tried their hands at amateur woodworking while others have expanded their cooking skills. Sarah has taught herself how to crochet and now our 40% of our apartment is taken up with homemade blankets or cat couches (which are exactly what they sound like).

As for me, my new hobby is getting stoned and thinking about how every American movie released in the 2000's was actually about the Iraq War. 


ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM

The central character of this 2007 sequel to 2004's ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (which is not about the Iraq War, for the record) is Kelly O'Brien, a soldier returning home after a tour of duty overseas. O'Brien is explicitly named as a member of the US Army's 101st Airborne Division, the first unit deployed to Afghanistan in support of the American War on Terrorism and the unit led by Major General David Petraeus during the initial American occupation of Iraq in 2003. It would have been a simple choice for the filmmakers to leave O'Brien's specific assignment vague, but instead the character was assigned to a division that is inextricably linked to America's unjust and inhumane actions in the Middle East. This is a loaded name-drop, is what I'm saying.

The screenplay never make this explicit -- though a few minor tweaks would have easily done so -- but when the Predator descends on O'Brien's hometown and begins laying waste to her friends and family, the senseless and unstoppable carnage clearly echoes O'Brien's experiences in Iraq. It's almost as if O'Brien has carried the violence of war back home with her as a curse. This time, however, she and her neighbors are the one's whose lives are claimed as collateral damage in a battle between forces she has no relation to or clear understanding of.

This is not to say that the actions of the Predator or the Xenomorphs can be easily mapped onto a direct representation of the Iraq War. Indeed, it would be thematically confusing for any alien species to take the place of the U.S. government (even allegorically) when the actual U.S. government plays a major role in the climax of the film. Whether it is displaying incompetence in the form of the National Guard being easily defeated by the Predator or actively plotting to obliterate the entire town with nukes, the message from the filmmakers is clear: the U.S. government is not your friend and you shouldn't believe anything they say. 

And let's not forget the final scene of the film, wherein the armed forces essentially throw up their hands in defeat and outsource the conflict to the private sphere in the form of Ms. Yutani, presumably one-half of the planet-dominating Weyland-Yutani corporation from the ALIEN series proper. If one were so inclined, one could stake the claim that this indictment of the privatization of the American infrastructure (particualrly within the military-industrial complex) is a more compelling and interesting idea to inject into the franchise than anything Ridley Scott did in PROMETHEUS. I'm not inclined to do that, personally, but you definitely could.

FINAL DESTINATION 3

This one is a bit less direct than AVP: REQUIEM and requires a developed "feeling sense" to understand how it relates to the Iraq War -- this, by the way, is why being stoned is a prerequisite for this activity. 

The FINAL DESTINATION series began in 2000 with the first film and continued with FINAL DESTINATION 2 in 2003. Both of those films have interesting things to say about the eras they were produced in, but for our purposes, the important thing is to understand how the tone of the series evolved over the course of its first three entries, resulting in the unique blend of comedy and horror present in 2006's FINAL DESTINATION 3.

The first film is eerie and almost mystical -- death moves with a theatrical precision that is absent from the rest of the series. The whole concept feels more abstracted and alien, and why shouldn't it? This was 2000, still basically the 1990's in America, and our cultural understanding of death had been dulled by a prevailing belief that we stood at the end of history. The idea of an exploding plane and a dramatic, fiery crash being depicted as fodder for fun thrills & chills wouldn't have seemed strange to audiences then. For God's sakes, this thing started out as a rejected X-FILES script, and nothing says "pre-9/11 America" quite like THE X-FILES.

Death is a more practical matter in the second movie. It's still heightened and convulted to the point of amusement -- these movies are supposed to be entertaining, after all -- but it appears on screen as a simple fact of life. Dozens of people are killed in the elaborate interstate pile-up that opens the film, and the moment of death is never lingered upon, only the circumstances leading up to it. Americans were not phased or shocked to watch their fellow citizens die in a public event of massive carnage. The most we asked for is a brief moment before the blackness descended in which to consider and appreciate the dull irony of our silly, short lives.

By the time FINAL DESTINATION 3 hit the screen, the proceedings had taken on air of farce. Not only are the deaths even more elaborate and overtly comical, a new element is introduced in the form of a magic camera that provides coded warnings about who will die next. Unfortunately, the information that the characters have access to is extremely limited and very confusion, so much so that discerning the truth is practically impossible. They are left alone to fend for themselves in a dangerous world in which their friends are all dying around them for reasons that are never entirely clear to anyone involved.

Also, they're all teenagers. That's important. 

While the first movie was largely populated with high school students, this seems to me more a concession to the trends of the era as opposed to a real statement. The horror scene of the late 1990's was packed wall-to-wall with teen characters, almost all of them played by people who were either on DAWSON'S CREEK or looked like they should have been. Also, Devon Sawa slipped in there, somehow. 

FINAL DESTINATION 2 expanded the cast to include several adults, so the move to refocus the third move onto young people feels significant. These, after all, were the people that our government was sending to die in defense of the American empire. We did our best to obscure or ignore this knowledge, but in FINAL DESTINATION 3, the terror of senseless death comes home, disturbing the fragile peace of ignorance. Freud called this "the return of the repressed." I call it the role that fully established Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a successful and bankable film actor. 

FREDDY VS. JASON

I understand that this is the second franchise mash-up on this list, but what can I say? This sort of thing was everywhere in the early 2000's. Also, I just watched this one today, so cut me some slack.

The majority of the FRIDAY THE 13TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET films were released during the 80's, and while they both represent this anxiety in different ways, both franchises are primarily about the anxiety of nuclear annihilation by the USSR. Many of America's actions during the Cold War (at least the ones that were publicly acknowledged) were justified by the alleged constant threat of attack by our country's Communist enemies. This messaging was so prevalent and so deeply infused into the culture that it became a dark cloud of malevolent possiblity, hovering over us at all times.

This is why, at the peak of US/USSR tensions, teenagers (the true and appropriate audience of any horror movie, freaks and pervets like myself aside) responded so strongly to these films: both Jason Voorhes and Freddy Kreuger are agents of destruction and death, so powerful and inescapable that they feel almost inevitable. Kreuger holds a particularly strong resonance, as his very existence in these films is due to the actions of the main characters' parents. All of that stuff that the previous generation did, supposedly in the interest of protecting you? It turns out that it just made things worse, and now death is coming for us all and nobody can protect you. The Big One can drop at any time, whether you're prepared or not -- Jesus Christ, you're not even safe when you're asleep!

If Jason has less symbolic power, it's because he's actually a surprisingly slippery character to pin down. Each FRIDAY THE 13TH movie presents essentially an entirely new version of the iconic villain, taking into account the previous iterations but never truly beholden to them. Famously, Jason is not even the killer in the first film, but even after he arrives, it's not for another four films(!) that he takes on his most 'iconic' incarnation of an unkillable zombie wearing a hockey mask. Beyond the second film (where he kills as revenge for his mother's murder), he never has a clear motive beyond murdering anybody who happens to be within a five-mile radius of Crystal Lake, and by the end of the main franchise, he's expanded that area to the tune of several thousand miles and hundreds of years.

But still, the central horror of the first film -- that youth will not protect you from consequences, even if you didn't personally commit any crime -- lingers through the rest of the series. Even if the big scary Communists in the Soviet Union were so unknowable and foreign that you couldn't make heads nor tails of their motivation, that would only give their perceived threats even more of an impact. Like Jason, they don't care who you are or what you've done -- you're just in the wrong place, and you're going to die for it.

It took over ten years for FREDDY VS. JASON to make its way to the screen, and when you look at the characters through this prism, it isn't hard to see why. What use did American teens of the 1990's have for these characters? Only when mass death and war were at the forefront of our minds could these two titans of Cold War culture gain any purchase in our minds. 

Again, the characters' lack of knowledge or understanding is foundational to the movie. The adults of Springwood have gone to extreme measures to hide the existence of Freddy Kreuger, doctoring the historical records and imprisoning and drugging anyone who might let the secret slip. Pardon my reach, but it's not hard to connect this conspiracy of silence with the government's attempts to obscure the causes of and reasons for the Iraq War.

In the end, the joyously dumb tone of the movie creates a sense of distance from the supposed horror. Yes, Freddy Kreuger and Jason are literally tearing through the teenage population of Springwood, but it's more like an pay-per-view event wrestling match than anything truly scary. For most Americans, the Iraq War wasn't real. It was empty spectacle, a thing to be discussed and debated over, but there was never a feeling that anything happening over there could actually have an impact on anyone living here. 

This sense of distance is why none of the movies I've listed here (or the dozens of others that I could talk about) are capable of truly grappling with the impact of the Iraq war -- well, that and the fact that they're all genre movies that were intended to entertain and amuse, not to be held up and examined as political texts. But mostly the first thing.