• DOI:10.1177/1470412915607923
• Corpus ID: 170279080

Design Terminable and Interminable: The Possibility of Death in Final Destination

@article{Brinkema2015DesignTA,
  title={Design Terminable and Interminable: The Possibility of Death in Final Destination},
  author={Eugenie Alexandra Brinkema},
  journal={Journal of Visual Culture},
  year={2015},
  volume={14},
  pages={298 - 310}
}

• E. Brinkema
• Published 1 December 2015
• Art
• Journal of Visual Culture

The tautological, deterministic, elegantly straightforward premise of James Wong’s Final Destination franchise (2000–2011) supplants horror’s antagonistic monster with the certainty of death – the ineluctability of dying is what ultimately brings about deaths. The givenness of the violence of ontology is routed through formal schemas of design, list, plan, and schematic, and paranoically interpreted in relation to signs auguring the approach of a death that is less figure than function. The films’ staging of ‘death’s design’ formalizes a confrontation between the finitude of beings whose end ultimately arrives and the infinitude of aesthetic possibility, whose end is precisely endlessly deferred.