At thirty thousand feet above sea level, Snakes on a Plane is a basic Hollywood movie: exciting stunts, goofy one-liners, campy performances, gratuitous sex, unneeded violence, and serious pre-release hype in search of a foregone market conclusion. The movie itself does little to advance cinematic aesthetics, and it squeaks by with a semblance of entertainment value. It is a Hollywood B-movie, period. However, at ground level, the movie is something else altogether: a vehicle with wide open windows staring straight into the post-9/11 American mind—a mind plagued by existential fear and phantasmic preoccupations.

The movie easily compares to the events of September 11th: the snakes equal terrorists; the plane in the movie equals the planes of 9/11; fear of snakes equals our fear of terrorism; the movie’s evil mastermind equals the likes of Osama bin Laden; the movie’s F.B.I. action hero equals our governmental and military heroes; the anxiety of the movie’s passengers equals our own anxieties; etc. These basic comparisons are obvious, but there is more to the story. We begin that story with America’s obsession with fear.