Snakes on a Plane

Whether it's a good movie or a dreadful movie is, to everybody except the bean counters at New Line Cinema, beside the point. Even they may be in on the joke, though: There have been no advance screenings of the $30 million high-flying action film, for critics or anyone else, not (the studio claims) because the movie stinks from the neck down but because what's most fun about ``Snakes" has been the Internet-driven hype that surrounds it. That hype comes down to one thing: the boneheaded comic purity of the movie's title.

In the year since a Hollywood writer named Josh Friedman posted on his Web diary that he'd been script-doctoring a movie of that title, the ``SoaP" meme has grown like Topsy. It's the latest iteration of viral marketing, an Internet kudzu that initially took on a life of its own against the wishes of the film's corporate keepers. And it's almost certainly the most visible example of a sensibility that didn't exist before the digital revolution: Mass Camp.

When word got out that the film's studio, New Line, had changed the title to the supremely bland ``Pacific Air 121," the blogosphere erupted in rage. The suits didn't get it: What was exciting people was the notion of B-movie junk that for once declared itself as B-movie junk. The original title pulled away the velvet Hollywood curtain of hypocrisy and called the thing for what it was: product. Such honesty was delightful, crass, and cheering, as if ``Jurassic Park" had been retitled ``Steven Spielberg Presents Very Realistic Dinosaurs Eating People."

The studio backed down. ``Snakes on a Plane" it was. Then things started getting strange.