Crazy about Snakes on a Dahlia

Every once in a while, people feel the need to go out and do something crazy. In my college days, this might mean dancing naked around a fire, listening repeatedly to the Cranberries' "Zombie" song for three hours in succession, or going out on the rooftop and shouting "Yawp!" But as we get older and settled and eat vegetables regularly, the standards for what constitutes craziness might change. As they should. I think if my standards for craziness mandated a 24-hour marathon of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I would break down and forever despair of acting crazily again.

This past Friday night, we acted crazy. Not "acting" in the sense that we were the mere semblance of insanity: au contraire, we imbibed the very spirit of married craziness. It started off non-crazily enough, as insanity often does, while we were at our computers working. Several months ago, my wife took a twenty minute Blockbuster survey and was rewarded with complimentary Fandango movie tickets. The task of figuring out how Fandango works is an even more daunting task than a 20 minute survey, so we both ignored the ticket offer until Friday, two days before the offer would expire. Consequently, we decided that we would be just a shade of wacky: on Friday at 7:30 pm, we would see Black Dahlia (because my wife enjoys mysteries), and on the following day at 4:30 pm, we would see Snakes on a Plane (because I love guyness). Little did we know that the situation would soon escalate beyond our wildest dreams of wackiness.

Accidentally, when we ordered the tickets for Snakes on a Plane, we didn't change the request from "Friday" to "Saturday." As a result, we had tickets for a Friday 4:30 pm movie and a Friday 7:30 pm movie at two different theaters. What should we do? Naturally, our first thought was to think about serving others, and we sent out an email offering the free tickets to our graduate student friends. Inexplicably, two entire hours passed without any response, and my wife had to leave for an on-campus meeting at 3 pm. In that moment--faced with the possibility of two tickets to the dollar theater (a total value of three dollars) being lost forever--we resolved to do our part. Why not watch both movies? Were we wimpy? Were we frightened by a couple of namby pamby little movies, even if they were both rated R? No!

Now, we might tend to think that "crazy" people are people who have turned their rational faculties off. This is far from the case. As John Locke argues in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, crazy people "have [not] lost the faculty of reasoning .... Madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them." So, when we had the crazy idea, "We ought to watch both movies," we did not stop employing logic. In fact, we carefully employed strategery, plotting different scenarios: "What if the previews before Snakes on a Plane delay the movie and we're running late?" "We skip the credits and eat at McDonald's." "How can we get to Snakes on a Plane on time if I have a meeting on campus?" "I'll go on campus with you so that you don't have to drive back home." You see, craziness isn't just something that comes to you; you must be a careful steward of craziness, nurturing it so that it can grow into something beautiful, like a kumquat.

All in all, we were impressed by our craziness prowess. Sure, we did start to weaken sometime during Black Dahlia, but that's only because it's such a bad movie. Of course, so is Snakes on a Plane, but in a good way. Black Dahlia is a pretentious artsy film that, like Icarus, spreads its wings to fly too close to the sun, and tragically falls to its doom. Snakes on a Plane is an unpretentious movie that, like Icarus, involves a flying object; however, its flight ends in triumph. And with Samuel Johnson shooting a hole in the plane while it's still in the air. Awesome!