Cabin in the Woods review
So I’m having the rare weekend of total, reliably uninterrupted privacy. 48 glorious pants-optional hours. SO GOOD. To celebrate, I had a big old fear-fest yesterday. I watched Bowling for Columbine, and then The Crucible which is still my favorite, and capped off this perfect day by finally renting Cabin in the Woods. It was legitimately a Dark and Stormy Night, I couldn’t resist.
One of the few things that sticks out on first watch and isn’t turned inside-out in retrospect was the investment in the idea that the sacrifices could bring it on themselves; that they were in some way choosing it. “We rig the game as much as we can, but in the end, they don’t transgress, they can’t be punished.” But the transgressions include - reading or figuring out what’s going on; not just sex but going to your own room for privacy. They find a way to rationalize what they do, and that means anything the sacrifices do will be construed as sin deserving of punishment. The hyper-modern structure is an extension of that old-time religion, even as the scientists giggle at Mordecai.
A huge part of that, of course, is how the movie deals with the female “roles.” I really like how this movie deals with femininity. Jules is the “whore” because of her happiness, the confidence of a young woman who aspires to be a doctor, made silly through the poisoning of the blonde dye. The beauty standard is what poisons her and dumbs her down, not the other way around. Feminist literary criticism has made some inroads, enough that we usually have the tools to point out a virgin/whore dichotomy when it exists, but rarely do narratives deal with the anxieties underpinning it. Jules “the whore” for being a confident woman, while her friend is “the virgin” for her more traditional power-disparate relationship with her professor. The virgin’s death is optional because she’s already disenfranchised and by and large scared into her place. (It’s worth saying that Holden and Dana could each fill the roles of Virgin and Scholar, even after the techs get to them.) The women's "roles" are about what challenge they pose to patriarchal society, as expressed clearly but not exclusively through their sex lives.
Marty might be the slyest of the ME awful nerds - he’s the Fool because he’s the one who’s allowed to point out the truth, but also because he messes with the audiences’ affection for trickster characters by not coming off looking good at the end. Buffy is fun and cathartic because Buffy is always allowed to have the most morally comfortable decision work out well for her. Angel ultimately copped out and cut away from the battle at the end, giving plausible deniability about the selfishness of Our Heroes’ last stand. Cabin in the Woods doesn’t give us that out. (One wonders how many Fools, Athletes, and Scholars did fight their way down just to give themselves up to save the world. If this has been going on every year for all of human history, Marty can’t possibly be the first unlikely survivor.) You can’t blame Marty for not trusting the Director, or even for not wanting to give up his life - why should he have to die to save everyone, it’s not fair - and still, it’s shocking that he decides the world is worth his lasting for a couple more minutes, along with the satisfaction of not giving in because fuck you, that’s why.
The technicians aren’t particularly admirable people, and “the story you think it is” does everything it can to make them look despicable. The obvious comparison is with The Hunger Games. If the young are left alone, and not hazed into “society” with fearsome coming of age rituals, the world will end, things will change radically in a way you can’t predict or control.
Of course, it’s a little hard to equate “the supremacy of the Capitol” with “the tenuous containment of murderous hell-gods.” In retrospect, the technicians are whistling past the graveyard as surely as Marty did. It eventually starts to look like the techs are being played in the same way as the kids are; in fact, they might be the real sacrifices. Surely there are five people frightened and killed somewhere in the world on any given night, without the interference from Shady Organizations. But the technicians who do know what’s at stake, and that they’re the ones closest to Apocalypse Ground Zero if they fuck it up? That’s some black tar horror, right there. The ancient gods have forever, and when they get bored they can rattle the chains of the techs enough to trip them up. Just as with the “transgressing” sacrifices, the techs are slightly implicated, and far from being reluctant heroes - one doubts they swoop in with humanitarian aid once another outpost makes a successful sacrifice - but that sense of being implicated which they project onto the youths, that their eventual doom will be Their Fault (no matter how much the deck is actually stacked against them), adds to the terror.
We are not who we are, not the archetypes and not the techs. I love deconstructive stuff not only for the intellectual aspect of it, but because there’s an extra joy in watching something that’s so clearly by fans for fans. We see the strings too, and it’s all part of a much larger conversation. Brad Whitford’s walk-and-talk rides again, coupled with Hadley’s running commentary about his family’s fertility problems. It’s tough not to compare Hadley (an ultimately powerless man who doesn’t take his job half seriously enough) to Josh (a man of massive importance in his ‘verse, who still manages to have an overinflated ego). The mockery made of Marty’s “fuck humanity!” last stand is self-referential to AtS, natch, but it’s also yet another indication that Joss ended up as lovingly aggravated with BSG as the rest of us.
I loved the idea of...being honest about the end of the world, at the end there. The point of this story is the story, and so it can afford to be honest about the idea of catharsis being brutal and ugly. And yet it cuts away from the real devastation, in the way the show spared us most of the torture porn visuals above-ground. We know what happened, even if there’s still a part of us there that’s as insatiable as the ancient gods and Dana alike, to see just a little bit more.