To everyone who has been delightedly posting about "Snakes On A Plane" for months now

[substitute]

This is the most successful "viral" marketing campaign since The Blair Witch Project. You bought the "internet rumor." You bought the "they wanted to change it but Samuel L. Jackson insisted on the title." You made your own media and distributed it. You posted about it on the Internet over and over and over.

Because you'll enjoy anything with a detached sense of superiority, you made yourselves part of the strategy. Because black people saying "motherfucker" is funny, and because cheesy horror movies that scare people inferior to you are funny, and because you've been neotenized by pop culture irony into being perpetually 12 years old, you got trolled into the street team for a midnight movie and made some Chads and Brads and Thads in shiny shirts very, very, rich.

You deserve the decoder ring, the glow-in-the-dark badge, and the build-it-yourself clubhouse now. You ate all four hundred boxes of Froot Loops.

Homage to springheel_jack for the phrase "consumer Stockholm Syndrome," which describes this phenomenon perfectly.

Comments

[jessef.livejournal.com]

I'm a little ambivalent, but I think I'm with this guy. I'd be an elitist to deny the pleasure of in-group exclusivity to the masses. One just has to accept that good jokes, (good songs, etc.), are likely to get run into the ground, especially now with everyone online; it's just things taking their natural course. I heard Hey Ya a few too many times in 2004, but it was an acceptable price to pay for a catchy-as-all-hell song.

Maybe it hinges on one's tolerance for Samuel L. Jackson. I used to think he was a phoney and a shameful, updated variation of minstrel exploitation. But of all things, my opinion of him turned around after seeing his performance in the underrated movie Changing Lanes. (That movie also turned around my opinion of Ben Affleck -- maybe I was just feeling generous that day.) Who has the true superiority complex: the guy ironically enjoying camp, or the guy who looks down on that guy? (This isn't entirely a rhetorical question -- I'm not sure if I know.)

(As with fimmtiu, this is all meant in good faith.)