Letters From A Brawd (Issue #3)

It must be somebody’s job to screen and select movies to be featured on flights. Somebody has to have this coveted responsibility.

I imagine this person sitting in a cubicle that is designed to look like an airplane, complete with overhead compartments, whirring white noise, a flip-down tray table, and access to a toilet that sounds forceful enough to take her in its flush and drop her somewhere over a large body of water.

Every morning she greets her colleagues and then buckles herself in, stows her purse, releases her office chair from its upright position, and begins to enjoy the inflight entertainment. Maybe a jealous coworker pops by periodically to shake her desk, therein simulating turbulence for a truly authentic experience.

I wonder why it is not this person’s top priority — nay, ONLY priority — to veto movies whose plots include an airplane crash.

Maybe this is just me, but when I’m caught in a metal tube that’s careening through the sky at 500 miles per hour at an altitude of 30,000 feet, pretty much the last scene I want to watch is of a character in my same situation where something goes terribly wrong. Show me war; show me horror; show me tragedy– just so long as the war is not with fighter jets, the horror is not engines failing, and the tragedy is not an unsuccessful emergency landing.

The particular movie I tuned into on my flight last week was not centered around a crash. No, the crash was only the inciting incident resulting in a slaughterhouse, the blood of which attracted a pack of ravenous and conspiring super-wolves that the survivors of the crash attempted to outwit for the remaining 60 minutes. I’ll give this much to the movie screener: the film did not focus on the catastrophe of the plane crash, but rather stressed that the preferable fate of the leading characters would have been to have died in the accident.

You would think that whosever job it was to handpick the movies available for viewing would have considered the emotions such a “moral of the story” might evoke in the 400 passengers trapped in Flight EI0109, all of whom now had no way of combating such a destiny. You would think that the movie screener would have passed on this film in Act I, as soon as the plane began to rattle. You would think, yes, but she didn’t. Who knows, we all make mistakes on the job. Maybe before calamity struck, the movie screener took a bathroom break and was sucked down the drain.

Unless….

Unless this cinematic choice was intentional — some twisted “how to” — a subliminal extension of the pre-take off safety demonstration:

In the event of an emergency, please assume the bracing position. If we land in water, a life vest is located in a pouch underneath your seat. If we land in the Alaskan wilderness, and you have the misfortune of living through the impact, poison is located between the armrests. Trust us, you’re better off.

What a sicko.