If you've spent much time in the past few weeks, you've probably heard of Snakes on a Plane. If you've even talked to someone who's spent much time online in the past few weeks, there's a good chance you've heard of Snakes on a Plane. As of early 2006, the Internet is utterly and totally infested with airborne snakes.

If you somehow haven't heard of Snakes on a Plane Mania (or if you feel like reading a quickie recap of the phenomenon), here's the deal: Snakes on a Plane is an action movie scheduled for release this summer, involving (prepare to be shocked) a bunch of poisonous snakes placed on an aircraft to kill someone. The movie has an unusual real-world backstory. Supposedly, it was just some unnamed action screenplay with "SNAKES ON A PLANE" written on the front as sort of a description; Samuel L. Jackson got hold of it, thought it was hilarious, and agreed to make the movie. The studio tried to give it a real name (Pacific Air Flight 121) and Jackson threw a fit, said that it really, really ought to just be called Snakes on a Plane because that's the perfect title-- as soon as you hear it, you're 100% sure as to whether this movie's for you or not. The studio caved, ordered up some re-shoots to amp up the Awesomeness factor, and modified the script a bit. The emotional climax of the movie, allegedly, is a sort of one-line summation of every onscreen persona Jackson has ever adopted: "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"

Like most of the people I know, my first reaction when I heard that a movie called Snakes on a Plane was actually being released, my reaction was simple: AWESOME. Further revelations about Jackson's love for the title, and about his motherfucking snakes line elicited a further reaction: MOTHERFUCKING AWESOME!

Clearly, I was not alone in this. The motherfucking snakes are everywhere. Everywhere. And for a couple of weeks, I was a happy passenger on the motherfucking bandwagon—the endless permutation of Snakes jokes, and then the ongoing stream of DIY Snakes material, provided me with lots of laughs and the usual Internet in-joke feeling of being in on something hilarious that none of the squares have heard about.

This glow fades, inevitably, whether we're talking about Snakes on a Plane or All Your Base or Saluting our New X Overlords or whatever the humor's supposed to be in that goddamned Yakov Smirnoff "In Soviet Russia…" construction. The in-joke that you delighted in dropping turns into something that makes you cringe when you see some undignified n00b throwing it around in a desperate attempt to show they're in. A new joke comes along that you and the n00b both throw out, affirming your mutual hippitude. The circle of life continues.

But that's not quite the way Snakes on a Plane has shaken out for me. Instead of slowly getting sick of the joke, I had a moment of sudden, intense revulsion. Remembering my Lenin (in Soviet Russia, Lenin remembers—aw, fuck, just kill me), I started wondering who profited from this Internet-wide frenzy over a movie that wouldn't be out for months. And it only takes a few seconds for that train of thought to go to bad places: we're all just taking part in a spectacularly successful viral marketing campaign. The whole All Your Base thing didn't help move any extra copies of a long-obsolete video game; I doubt Internet infamy has done much for Yakov Smirnoff's career. But there's no question that this particular fad/meme/whatever is going to make a lot of money for some people in Hollywood, and, well, that's disconcerting.

It may or may not have been intentional; if there's any truth behind the creation myth behind Snakes on a Plane, it was Samuel L. Jackson and not some shady marketing person who championed the name. But even if that's true (and not itself part of the marketing campaign), the studio at the very least noticed that some buzz was happening and went to great effort to help it along.

In fact, I'm almost sure that's what happened. I don't think that there's a sinister cabal infiltrating the media, working fiendishly to make more and more marketing campaigns align with my aesthetics and sense of humor. Instead, I think that the natural passage of time is filling marketing departments with people who happen to think the same things are funny that I do. Some 30ish guy who spends a lot of time online and thinks Kingdom of the Spiders was awesome happened to be in a position at the studio to say, "Snakes on a Plane. Yes! We've got to run with this!" And, as my/our cohort moves further into middle management, it's only going to get worse. The attitudes and references I/we thought were our own private things are going to be spending a lot of time in the mainstream.

In a way, I suppose that sounds gratifying, but if I think about it at all, I just feel queasy. I don't want my tastes validated by marketing; I'd rather gloat over them myself, in private, even if it means that I'm really just kidding myself about how private they are (to a certain extent, I'm cool with that kind of self-deception. There's an older Simpsons episode (and the total ubiquity of the Simpsons is another example here—I remember the days when peppering your conversations with "d'oh!" put you way out on the lame-o cultural fringe) where a traveling self-help guru convinces all of Springfield to adopt Bart's attitude, leaving Bart feeling disoriented and unfulfilled, until Lisa correctly points out that Bart's self-definition as a rebel leaves him without an identity when the things he used to rebel against start emulating him.

I don't really think of myself as much of a rebel, but I feel like Bart. My outlook's been co-opted, and I don't know how to deal with it, and all I'm sure of is that I want someone to do something about these motherfucking snakes.