When a number of factors in a situation go wrong with enough precision to maximise damage, we tend to call it a perfect storm. Pay attention and you’ll hear it all the time; a few days ago, the lack of social housing in England was blamed on a perfect storm, similarly America is currently bracing itself for a perfect storm of election chaos, and outer space recently enjoyed a perfect storm of solar activity. The term, of course, was also the title of a 2000 film where George Clooney sailed a boat in a hurricane.
However, I would like to propose a change. From now on, instead of calling something a perfect storm, I recommend calling it a Daddio. This is a real election Daddio. Wow, the social housing in this country is really Daddioed. Did you see the sun Daddioing the other day?
I wish to propose this, because a fault on a recent Qantas flight resulted in every passenger being forced to watch Daddio, a film that has an erect penis in it.
You may have already read the story. If not, here’s a brief recap. On flight QF59 from Sydney to Tokyo, a technical fault meant that passengers were unable to choose their own individual movies from the in-flight selection. However, the fault allowed every seat to be shown the same movie at once. According to Qantas, staff then polled the passengers on which film they would like to see. The winner was apparently Daddio, a new drama starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn.
However, Daddio contains a few spicy sequences, which means it is not suitable for all passengers. Unfortunately, the fault meant the screens couldn’t be paused, dimmed or turned off. And, to make matters worse, passengers couldn’t avoid the scenes by simply removing their headphones either, because all the sequences take the form of sexting. Someone texts “Help me cum” and “Cock so hard” before, that’s right, sending a photo of their penis. Eventually Qantas saw sense and replaced it with a children’s film, but clearly the whole affair was a Daddio of epic proportions.
Now, obviously, mistakes can happen. If the Daddio incident reminds me of anything at all, it’s the time that our science teacher accidentally let us watch a VHS of the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Timecop at the end of Year 9, only to slam it off in a bluster of red-faced nervousness during the scene where a fully naked woman writhes around on a satin bed. So this sort of thing does have precedents.
However, the question remains: why Daddio? The Qantas in-flight entertainment selection contains a number of big hitters, including Inside Out 2, The Fall Guy, A Quiet Place: Day One and Bad Boys: Ride or Die. These are all big, mainstream films with a varying range of broad appeal. And yet the passengers apparently chose Daddio.
In truth, despite the sexting, the headlines about the Daddio incident were a little misleading. While it’s true that the film is inappropriate – there’s no way to look past the penis – for the most part, it is extremely boring. The entire film takes place in a taxi travelling between an airport and a city, and is just one long dialogue between Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. There are a lot of pauses, plenty of meaningful glances. It’s fine as an experiment, and perfectly decent if it’s something you sought out yourself.
But this is a film that was apparently chosen by the majority of an entire airliner. Hundreds of people, when asked how they would like to spend a tedious nine-hour flight, apparently responded by singling out a ruminative, dialogue-heavy two-hander over something fun like The Fall Guy. Who on earth are these people? What sort of ridiculous pathology causes a majority of passengers to decide that, to silence the niggling thought that human flight is a betrayal of God’s wishes and that only a thin sheet of metal separates them from an unimaginably horrible death, they should watch one hour and 41 minutes of Dakota Johnson mournfully gazing through a car window?
It doesn’t make sense. It’s entirely troubling to me, and I don’t think I can rest until I get concrete answers. Forget the penis, this choice was the real Daddio.
