I appreciate dystopian fiction; this may be another reason I’m
just an overgrown adolescent. I don’t much care for “horror” films,
particularly “torture porn” films like Saw, and so I watched Cabin in the Woods (2012) more because
of its producer, Joss Whedon, and its good critical reception. I knew Cabin was something of a
“deconstruction” of the horror genre, and I was not surprised to find it working
as a metaphor for filmmaking, but I was not expecting it to be a play on
dystopian fiction as well. The connection between this film and dystopia has
drawn relatively little comment in online reviews, and so I want to explore it,
but this requires working through the metaphor for filmmaking. In the end, I
will argue (at unnecessary length, perhaps) that it fails as a dystopia because
the filmmakers violate that genre’s positive aspects even as they lampoon
others for cheapening the horror genre.
If you haven’t seen Cabin in the Woods and don’t want to
know about the ending, stop reading now.
AKA “SPOILER ALERT.”
There would be no plot and a lot less humor without the
stuff of horror movies; specifically, the group of young people—the Good Girl,
the Alpha Male, the Stoner, the Scholar, and the Whore—who head out to a remote
location to be slaughtered by an unholy terror. But ultimately, The Cabin in
the Woods belongs in a category with The Matrix and The Hunger Games even more
than with Scream or other meta-horror fiction.
The priority of the dystopian layer over the horror layer
is established in the very first scene, when a pair of apparently non-descript
workers—Balding Guy and Married Guy—chat about mundane, everyday things (trying
to have a baby) in a sterile building that might be a science Facility (actually
the British Columbia Institute of Technology's Aerospace building). I view this
as deliberate; director Drew Goddard and Whedon could have chosen the path of
slowly revealing that something more organized and sinister lay beneath the
“cabin in the woods,” but instead they begin in the Facility where this
horrible experiment is manufactured. (Consider also that the college students’
inane discussion of leaving their books behind centers around texts on the
Soviet Union).
Opening with the Facility is also a good dramatic choice,
because the filmmakers tease the audience with hints about the Facility’s motives
and only slowly peel back what is truly going on. The mystery created by the
Facility’s outsized surveillance of five apparently ordinary college students
allows the filmmakers to play the typical horror mechanisms of foreboding
(creepy camera angles, an unpleasant local man known as “the Harbinger”) for
laughs.
A Metaphor for Filmmaking
In short, what may at first appear to the young
protagonists as a nightmare encounter with forces beyond human reckoning is in
fact heavily manufactured and carefully planned. All of this is a metaphor, of
course, for filmmaking; horror filmmaking in particular. The various
departments mimic the various teams required to make a film. All of these
departments at the Facility bet on a big white board about which monstrous
force will be unleashed—what will it be this time? Zombies? Witches? Giant
Snake? Clowns? Sugar Plum Fairy? Kevin? The young people who are to die make
the choice themselves, through a hilariously extensive set of creepy artifacts
in the cellar of the cabin in the woods. One can imagine a group of movie
producers sitting around and asking one another: what horror do the young
people want this year? Zombies are the new thing; oh, wait, they are passé.
What’s the next zombies?
There’s a running joke about how one of the two heads of
the Facility always wants to see a merman be chosen, but it never is. (And when
did you last see a merman in a horror film? Me neither). Our young protagonists
end up with “redneck torture zombies,” which is “a whole different species”
from regular zombies and is a dig at the current “torture porn” trend in horror
movies. Whedon commented: “The things that I don’t like [about the horror
genre] are kids acting like idiots, the devolution of the horror movie into
torture porn and into a long series of sadistic comeuppances. Drew and I both
felt that the pendulum had swung a little too far in that direction.”
http://www.totalfilm.com/news/joss-whedon-talks-the-cabin-in-the-woods
The bad writing in horror movies appear in the film as
deliberate interventions of the Facility. None of these college students is the
required Whore? The chemicals in one girl’s blond hair dye slowly seep into her
brain, causing her to act that way. When the Alpha Male (an appealing Chris
Hemsworth, aka Marvel’s Thor) sensibly says, “From now on, we stick together,”
he is gassed into confusion which prompts him to say, “No, wait, we should
split up to cover more ground.”
The Audience as All-Demanding Gods?
As the movie unfolds, we learn that the secret behind this elaborate “experiment” is actually a modern, high-tech version of the traditional virgin sacrifice. (Nevermind that the “good girl,” Dana, isn’t really a virgin. “We make do with what we have,” someone from the Facility explains). The ancient gods demand this elaborate ritual or they will destroy the earth, and the Facility is just there to appease them. If the horror is carefully orchestrated, then underneath it is an uncontrollable chaos threatened to be set loose. These “Ancient Ones,” as they are called in the film, are a callback to one of the progenitors of modern horror, H.P. Lovecraft.
As blogger Jason Colavito observes, “It takes little imagination to see in
this the Old Ones of Lovecraft, who wait beneath the earth for the stars to
come right again, though in their August Derleth-derived form as emissaries of
evil. Nor is this the first time
that Whedon has used this trope; in Buffy:
The Vampire Slayer the Old
Ones were the progenitors of the first vampires and also waited beneath the
earth for the time when they could reign again, etc.
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2012/04/on-josh-whedons-cabin-in-the-woods-h-p-lovecraft.html
The fact that these Ancient Ones have such a demanding
specification for how the ritual sacrifice is performed—the other four college
students must be killed before the virgin, who is allowed to survive so long as
she has suffered—has led many to rightly observe that the Ancient Ones are a
metaphor for the horror genre audience. (A particularly clear explication of
this comes from a blogger named Nordling at http://www.aintitcool.com/node/54997)
In this reading, the individuals in the Facility are the filmmakers, and their
cynical manipulation of the events in the woods is an obsequious kowtowing to
what they think the audience expects—the arbitrary and often ridiculous
strictures of a genre.
In the final act, the ridiculousness of those strictures
are amplified. Stoner and Good Girl descend into the lab, where they find that
all of the supernatural creatures that appeared earlier on the big white board
are trapped in glass elevators. They find a way to release these creatures, and
the various evil beings tear through the Facility killing everyone in sight.
And yet, despite all this bloodletting, the gods are not appeased. It has to be
the Stoner who dies.
This is also brilliant as metafiction. The characters,
disgusted at how they have been treated by the filmmakers, turn on them.
Artistic death comes to filmmakers when the creations of imagination—the ghouls
that they cynically employ to obtain their success—turn on them and devour
them. For instance, it’s the merman himself who kills Married Man. The final
killing of “the Director” comes from one of the “redneck torture zombies,” who
personifies those worst trends in horror filmmaking.
Cabin in the Woods can be interpreted on this level as a
peon for horror filmmakers and artists more generally to “free” their audience
(represented by the gods) by not sacrificing their stories, characters, and
ultimately their own creativity to meet a perceived market demand and instead
to risk what will happen if they simply do what they (the artists) think is
right. In fact, the film itself can be seen as such a “releasing” by refusing
to follow genre conventions; and despite its flouting of convention, it was a
critical and financial success. At the very least, it iss a criticism of the
flippancy with which artists use scary and disturbing images to make money with
little regard for their human value; there is an indelible scene where the Good
Girl is in mortal danger on the screen, but the crowd in the Facility is too
busy partying to an inane pop song to pay proper respect to the horror of what
is happening.
While much of this interpretation of audience is warranted
(how could this film not be a metaphor for moviemaking when the Married Man is
congratulated for orchestrating a “classic denouement”), it would have been
less ambiguous if the film had ended as I began to expect; that the Ancient
Ones would be satisfied without the carefully prescribed ritual, or that some
other way of defusing their threat would have presented itself. When the Bald
Guy’s dying words were “Kill it,” I thought that there would be a way to kill
the Ancient One. Or the Ancient One could have expressed pleasure with the
Stoner and Good Girl’s actions, somehow. After all, who is this supposed
audience that has to see the Stoner die? Plenty of horror movies have more than
one survivor, even in the slasher category, do they not? Why was the Facility so
surprised when the Stoner’s apparent death turned out to be an error—I’ve seen
few horror films, but even I knew to expect the sudden reappearance of someone
thought to be dead.
I expected them to either kill the Ancient One or satisfy
it another way because I am accustomed to the belief, expressed often in
fiction, that ultimately many of the ways we sacrifice our morality are
unnecessary. Call it the “A Few Good Men” hypothesis. Instead, the final scene
of the movies shows one of the Ancient Ones rising up. The implication is that
the world as we know it will be destroyed. It seems that, perhaps, the Bald Man
and the Married Man were right. Perhaps there is a grave danger if we were to
refuse the ritual sacrifice found in horror films.
The Value of Ritual Non-Sacrifice Sacrifice
What if horror filmmaking is necessary to modern society?
Rick McDonald, a medieval literature professor at Utah Valley University, ties Cabin in the Woods to the theory of
ritual sacrifice elaborated by Rene Girard. http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage36/McDonald.pdf
He quotes from the start of Girard’s seminal work, Violence and the Sacred, ““ In many rituals the sacrificial act assumes two opposing aspects, appearing
at times as a sacred obligation to be neglected at grave peril , at other times
as a sort of criminal activity entailing perils of equal gravity” (1). Both of
these aspects are evident in the worldview presented by Cabin in the Woods. The protagonists are right to regard the
labworkers with disdain. And yet, the Facility is right about what will happen
if the sacrifice is neglected—the Married Man will never have a baby, after
all; no one will.
The secret to ritual
violence is its substituting aspect: “society is seeking to deflect upon a
relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim , the violence that
would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it desires to protect”
(Girard, 4). The desire for such a sacrifice is attributed to the gods by the
people carrying it out, but Girard sees this as an (unknowing) projection of
forces are actually latent within the society and would destroy it if
unleashed.
Monsters, after all, aren’t
just fanciful creations. As McDonald observes, “Culture and horror are
inseparable; what exists at the border s of culture is horror and the
monstrous.” Monsters at their root express our fears and personify the dangers
that lurk without and within. Hence, there is a metaphorical level to the image
of our monsters locked up in glass cages, let out only occasionally and in very
specific situations. Modern society has pushed the habitual violence and danger
of all previous societies to the periphery, or so we would like to think. For
the majority of the modern population, violence has been ritualized in cultural
artifacts like the horror genre, while the purveyors of these genres rarely do
anything overtly violent or horrible themselves.
While Girard in his later
work opined that the notion of ritual sacrifice was overcome through the
non-sacrifice sacrifice of Christ on the cross, there is no hint of that in the
film’s world (unlike, say Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where at least some
trappings of Catholicism could fight off vampires). Instead, it is horror
filmmaking itself which is the non-sacrifice sacrifice. No one actually dies in
the making of horror films.
If this interpretation is on
target, then why all the hand-wringing about artistic integrity and characters
exacting revenge on their manipulators? One possibility is the crassness of the
commercial exploitation of such subject matter. Although the fear behind the
Facility’s actions is very real, the flippancy with which they arrange and
watch the deaths of the college students lacks a proper reverence for human
life. But simple sobriety cannot be the whole story; after all, Whedon and
Grossman have concocted a story in which they
kill off characters amid laughter.
Rather, the problem comes
when horror filmmaking (and art in general) fail by disrespecting their
characters and choosing exploitation over good storytelling. When art fails to
be art, it risks failing to perform its function, and there is a danger that
the evil forces—represented in the film by the various monsters—will escape
into the real world. In other words, unless violence is ritually contained in a
culture, it spills forth.
This may seem a
fantastically important role for art, especially “art” as flimsy as horror
movies. And yet there are concrete examples. Consider that Cabin in the Woods
touches on the fantastical horror genre—Friday the 13th and
Hellraiser and the like—but it doesn’t noticeably reference a related genre:
the serial killer flick. There are real serial killers, and at least anecdotal
evidence that they may be inspired by the fictional ones. While the film uses
“redneck tortured zombie” as a stand-in for “torture porn” horror, real
“torture porn” films (such as Saw) often feature non-fantastic protagonists and
settings.
But even serial killers
(especially the “exotic” variety) are a periphery phenomenon, killing anywhere
from 180 to 1800 people a year; it’s a terrible number to be sure, but nothing
like the consistent danger faced in areas of war and failed states. It’s not
true that art alone has contained our demons; it’s also true that the fantastic
nature of our artistically expressed fears are the cultural expression of a
society that has already used a measured amount of real violence to hold at bay
a world of uncontrolled violence.
If It Walks Like a Dystopia
McDonald thinks that the film refers to actual violence in
our actual society, not merely ritualistic cultural expressions about violence.
“Being civilized may seem to have exorcised the real violence from our society,
but perhaps that is merely a matter of definition.” I would add that it’s also
a matter of perspective; the main portion of contemporary society is protected,
but those on the periphery for whatever reason can be subject to dramatic forms
of violence. For the average person, represented by the Married Man with his
desire to have an uneventful ritual sacrifice and return to his wife and
conceive a child, it is easy to forget those who might be “sacrificed” by our
culture to obtain what we need.
It is interesting in this regard that the most enlightened
character in The Cabin in the Woods is a Stoner, someone who uses an illicit substance.
Not just any substance, but a “harmless” one that nevertheless accounts for
hundreds of thousands of arrests each year. The Stoner does not merely pick up
on the Facility’s surveillance; he espouses an anti-establishment philosophy
that longs to reach a place, “the cabin in the woods,” where he will be free
from “being globally positioned.”
Ironically, of course, the cabin is the most heavily
monitored place on earth. The Facility might be reminiscent of the military,
but the filmmakers seem to deliberately eschew such an interpretation by having
the Married Man and Bald Guy explain to a new worker they are “not the
military.” Instead, they seem more like a Homeland Security operation.
This presumed connection between the actual violence in our
society and the film’s Facility is stronger if we consider it a dystopia. As a
work of art offering a societal critique based on the premise of an
all-controlling, perhaps secret organization that views the sacrifice of a few
as necessary for the smooth functioning of society, I think it qualifies as
such, and also because it fits in certain ways.
One of the motifs of dystopian literature is “the One,” the
exceptional individual (typically a teenager these days) who can cut through
the lies of the culture and somehow finds a way to bring the evils of that
society down without destroying humanity in the process. (The other option, in
classics like Brave New World and 1984, the exceptional individual finds
it impossible to change anything). Despite the fact that those in control have
all of the weapons and knowledge at their disposal, the plucky “One” finds a
way to strike at the heart of the Power. The One is typically not the one who
first develops knowledge of the Power’s deception, however—there has to be an Enlightened
One whose societal critique precedes the One’s own awareness (think of
Morpheus, Gail in Hunger Games, David/Zane in the Uglies triology).
The Stoner, Marty, presents himself from his first
appearance as someone who sees through society’s structures. I guessed he
wasn’t actually dead because, by uncovering the Power’s existence, he was too
important to be killed off so quickly. He has just enough undisclosed technical
knowledge to re-wire the elevator that leads to the menagerie of monsters.
Meanwhile, the Good Girl has a preternatural amount of pluck, as Married Man
observes: fending off a zombie, escaping from the underwater van, etc. She’s the One in this dystopia.
And so, it is no surprise that inside the secret Facility there is an easy-to-access Big Red Button that unleashes all of the monsters at once, and that it is the Good Girl, not the Stoner, who pushes it. Furthermore, it is no surprise that the hell’s fury unleashed manages to kill all of the Facility’s security and workers but only mildly threaten our protagonists. They need to have the Confrontation with the Director who will explain to them “Why It Has to Be This Way,” which they will reject in order to overthrow the Power after facing a Classical Ethical Dilemma.
Hence, while Whedon and Goddard created something that
drastically subverts the horror genre, it would seem that they’ve done so by
plugging it more-or-less verbatim into another genre. Not entirely, of
course—recent dystopian fiction tends to center on a female One with two
potential romantic leads. We get this very briefly in Cabin in the Woods, but
in good horror movie fashion the two guys are quickly dispatched. And the
inexplicable ability of a protagonist to survive peril and reach the root of a
situation is everywhere in Hollywood action films and not unique to dystopias
(e.g., the Die Hard movies).
Where Cabin in the
Woods throws the whole paradigm in question is the very end, as I said above. The
Ancient Ones do rise, seemingly on the way to destroy the earth. Are the
filmmakers on the side of smoking a joint and letting the world end, rather
than perpetuating it through an immoral choice (shooting a friend)? Or, in the
Stoner’s words, “letting society crumble and not being afraid of what happens.”
As I mentioned above, most dystopias tend to end with the Power torn down but
the possibility of real society taking its place; even in the classics, which
ended badly, there is an implication that free society is possible, even if not
likely. Here, though, everyone will probably die (and the filmmakers confirm
that this total destruction was their intention). Our hope consists in:
Good Girl, “You were right…(dismissively) humanity…it’s
time to give someone else a chance.”
A Pessimistic World View
The root of the difference between regular dystopia literature and Cabin in the Woods is a statement about how the world really is—on the view of the movie, those uncontrollable forces are really out there (or down there, you might say), and we can neither morally appease them nor afford not to. In the Hunger Games, there is real turmoil such as President Snow fears, but there is also real hope, at least for average people to be left alone and not have to actively participate in the evils of society. Here, though, there is no alternative.
Yet, the reference points
for who those victims might be are few—marijuana users, perhaps, but surely not
preppy college students, who were chosen due to the horror genre conventions
and don’t seem especially connected to actual societal victims. The filmmakers
could have thrown in a gay character, strengthened the ethnic identification of
the characters of color, or included a Latina or otherwise tried to make a
point. But perhaps the point is better made without any of these heavy-handed
incursions. The point is that our society does have victims; and this we know “deep
down, in places you don't talk about at parties,” that we want men like Married
Man and Bald Guy in places like the Facility, and need them there, and we don’t
want to know who they are sending into facilities from which those victims will
never emerge or emerge broken. If that’s all the case, the filmmakers aren’t
endorsing participation in that system, but they also don’t offer any other
escape.
McDonald takes a more
sanguine view of the ending. He traces the notion of violence from Girard to
the subtler forms of violence inherent in language and attempting to understand
and control the other, in Derrida and especially Levinas. For Levinas, there is
a solution; stop trying to grasp the other, control them, understand them.
Rather, let the other be other, and there is a chance of encounter and not merely
exploitation. “The only ethical response to existence is to just “be” without
violence, not unlike the behavior of the Japanese school children [who
cooperated to defeat a wraith]. We must await the face of other (who is often
God, for Levinas) with no hope of knowing god or subsuming her or him within
our existence.”
This is very reminiscent of
the ending of the film and perhaps the message of the film; let the other, even
the fictional other in our stories, be other. McDonald opins that “we, along with
Marty and Dana, can determine that God will have to do his own dirty work. We
can call God’s bluff. As we are waiting for the arrival of a disappointed and
angry god, there is nothing precluding us from hoping that, as with Abraham ,
God spares us as He eventually did Isaac. (After all , we actually never see
Marty and Dana die .)”
Such a positive slant would
have been more possible had the filmmakers taken the advice of a Slate
reviewer, who expressed the wish that “the film had ended a minute earlier,
allowing the audience and the protagonists to persist in a state of ambiguity
as to the ultimate meaning of” what happened. Instead, they make it pretty
clear that the Ancient Ones do rise, and they do destroy our protagonists and
everything else.
I don’t think Whedon and
Goodard really believe they know whether, at root, humanity is a collection of powerful
forces that ultimately cannot be dealt with in a moral way, or whether there is
hope. Whedon has continued to explore these kinds of questions within the
Marvel universe, so perhaps there is room to learn more. But within this film,
for its own sake, they ought to have left the ending ambiguous; here we see the
wisdom of Christopher Nolan in Inception, which simply left it to the audience
to surmise the real meaning of what had happened.
Why didn’t they leave it
open-ended? Perhaps it was to emphasize that, really, you should do the right
thing even at the cost of the whole world, as a kind of final paper for a
long-ago Ethics 101 course. But I think the real answer is simpler; the
filmmakers described the film as follows: “on some level it was completely a
lark.”
They didn’t give the film a
morally adequate ending (or in this case, non-ending) because the ironic
detachment of having an unhappy ending to such a tale of survival was too
enticing to pass up. A giant hand pushing out of the earth and crushing the
Cabin in the Woods is just too clever, too glib to omit from a film that is itself
a condemnation of being clever and glib. And given the weight of its actual,
dystopian flavored themes, it was the wrong choice. Even on the meta-level, it
leaves the viewers with the message: the real problem with failed art is not
its lack of respect for its own integrity, but that it just isn’t as clever as
us.
I’ll only add—I don’t write
too-long analyses of just any movie; this was still a fun movie to watch and to
critique; they just blew it at the end. Come to think of it, if I were to ever
publish a book of my thoughts on films, it could probably be titled, “The
Set-up was Great, but They Blew It in the End.”
