Derrida's Destination

March 28, 2021 ● George Bergstrom

Films are a great microscope into looking at societies and peoples greatest fears, whether direct or indirect, they can expose what we feel whether we know it or not.

The German Expressionists cloaked their fear of the beginning of Fascism in various different tales, utilising the Horror genre to exhibit and hint at the fear of the population. The Final Destination films are all about utilising fear but in a wholly different way than the popular form of horror film that dominated the genre around that time.

The slasher genre is a type of film that presents a physical and real threat to the characters in the form of antagonists like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees or Mike Myers. The Final Destination films do essentially the same thing in narrative and have the characters killed off one by one in various grotesque scenarios, but the real threat of Final Destination (2000) is time, fate and the inability to change the world around you.

Final Destination’s plot involves a group of teenagers. Whilst they are about to embark on a field trip abroad, and just before they take off, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) experiences a vision of them all dying in a horrible plane accident. He rushes his friends off the plane and his premonition comes true as they witness the plane exploding. They believe they have evaded death, however, they begin being killed through grotesque accidents. As I mentioned before, whilst Final Destination closely resembles a slasher film in terms of how it's structured, it doesn't have a slasher. The slasher is invisible and doesn't operate under a motive that the characters are tasked with solving, the film challenges them to accept death and the fact that they are operating past the point of when they were supposed to die.

For a moment I'm going to talk about Jacques Derrida's book "The Spectres Of Marx". In the book, he frames Marx as a tragic figure who has been denied his truth through the collapse of the Soviet Union and 'the end of history'. Whilst those celebrate the victory of Neoliberalism over Communism, his spectre haunts the world, he haunts through the past, the present and the future in those three voices. Derrida highlights these voices as out of joint with themselves and their position within reality, they exist as premonitions reminding them that communism is never gone and this is justified through the constant failure of capitalism and its inability to deal with crises.

Japanese horror films such as Audition (1999), Pulse (2001), One Missed Call (2003), and Ring (1998) utilise this theory of voices, disjuncture and premonition. Mark Fischer Highlights this as the "Eerie", or the feeling of being confronted by an event yet to take place within the present and with viewing something disjointed with one's own present reality. The uncomfortable feeling comes from the surreal element of being confronted by time; it defies linearity and destroys ones understanding of the world.

Final Destination's first scene opens on a premonition of a false future that is yet to take place. The film opens with a group of students heading on a school trip, the usual archetypal characters that would usually place themselves in a typical American high school comedy film lures the viewer into a comfortable position. Its cinematography and aesthetics don't strike something or connote anything particularly sinister, or hint and foreshadow that something bad is going to happen. However as the scene goes on, the typical comfortability is broken, the sinister nature is revealed, the plane begins falling apart and ultimately explodes as the comfortable aesthetic is proven to be false.

The premonition represents the underlying fear of the American population at that time, which is the future. America's libidinal fear of destruction can be seen in various other Hollywood films surrounding this time, such as Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), Deep Impact (1998), and Armageddon (1998). All of them have a morbid fascination concerning the destruction of America. This partially came true with 9/11, an event of which Final Destination is eerily prophetic of.

Final Destination represents the destruction of one of the main ideological points of Neoliberalism, which is individualism. The idea that under this iteration of capitalism, someone operates within their own complete sovereignty and free will. If they fail they are completely to blame, not the system they live under. Final Destination hints like the German Expressionist's did, at the fear of losing their own "freedom" to fate or an event they have no control over.

Alex in this film represents the fear of the future voice of Marx and the fear of Neoliberalism's inability to cope with fate that is inherently built into it. Alex throughout is unable to stop the people he is trying to save from dying, fate is claiming them one by one and he can't stop it from happening, most obviously mimicking how capitalism deals with its failures, which for example can be 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 Financial crash, and most recently COVID-19. Even the end of the film represents the cyclical failure of capitalism with the façade of a seemingly happy end, supposedly bringing everything back to its normal equilibrium, Alex experiences another premonition that ultimately kills him. The red herring happy ending represents capitalisms fake sense of security of happiness whenever the system is thought to be 'working', and in fact, the fake feeling of security is before everything collapses once again through fate.

The Neoliberal system is incapable of dealing with fate, which is a feature, not a symptom. What Alex experiences is the neoliberal dysfunction reaching out with a warning. That fate is here to claim the comfortability and to destroy the Neoliberal lie with the truth of fate of what was denied in the past, coming back to haunt the present.

George Bergstrom ● Writer

Twitter: @Bosstoevsky

English Literature and Film student and writer. Passionate about anything Cassavetes and Mishima.