100 Things, Week 25: Cabin in the Woods
One quarter of the way done already?!
So, this past week, in addition to CLAMP Expo work and a lot of stretching to make my back work properly again, included two events of significance -- one good, and one bad. On the bad side, my budget from now through the end of October came up too tight to be able to afford the fabric for the Halloween costume I want to do. Next year! Singing, dancing Minmay! I'll make it work! The good event was that, while I was ill,
sumeria rolled me out the door to a friend's house so said friend could show us Cabin in the Woods, which I had somehow managed to miss in theaters.
::dies laughing:: That was an extraordinarily well executed movie. Thumbs up, Joss.
Now, to review it, and get back to finishing the current chapter of BUYO so I can marathon through the last three chapters in November. This entry is cut for spoilers. Congratulations, people: we've now hit a story on this series of reviews that contains a twist original enough that I actually don't want to spoil it for first-time viewers -- but if I don't go so far as to mention it, there won't be much point to this review. Although the reveal happens significantly in advance of the end of the movie, it's still a twist, and what I write below will expose it.
100 Things Blogging Challenge, Week 25: Cabin in the Woods (Lionsgate/Joss Whedon, 2011).
When you're watching a horror movie, generally there's someone you're rooting for. Maybe you're watching something with a strong protagonist who ran up against unimaginable dangers and you want him/her to scrap his/her way out alive. Maybe you're watching the kind of stereotypical movie this film lampoons, and you're rooting for the monsters to win -- mostly because the heroes are too dislikable, idiotic, or characterless for a viewer to grow invested in their continued existence. Cabin in the Woods takes a great deal of trouble to create characters on both sides who are equally human, equally flawed, equally interesting, equally sympathetic, and equally guilty of murdering their fellow men. There are monsters, yes, but they exist only as tools in the hands of humans, and no matter who unleashes them to kill their enemies, they do so with the corrupt detachment of a Roman arena master releasing lions on gladiators. Of course, the organization responsible for manipulating the five young sacrifices into position takes its job very seriously, and they honestly believe that this is a necessary evil to save the world. Five lives to save five billion, even if they're technically just a failsafe in the unthinkable event that the Japanese team fails to deliver on their sacrifices. The fact that there's a betting pool on the subject of which monster the sacrifices will summon is, in its own way, more horrific than the army of nightmares, but it's also exactly the way blood sports have been played throughout all of human history. It's equally true to form for human history that the technicians in their underground lab kick off the sacrifice ritual where they'll get their vicarious thrills from watching people killed by a monster they control -- but only for the greater good, you understand! -- with a man declaring, "Let's get this party started!"
This thrill at causing destruction without feeling guilt, however, doesn't only apply to the antagonists' institution. The movie's heroine uses the exact same line when she releases the army of nightmares into the building using a "Purge" button, bringing about the deaths of the organization's staff much as they tried to bring about her death and that of her four friends. Both sides are willing to kill to preserve themselves. Neither side is willing to do it personally. The one member of the organization makes reference to wishing for the good old days, when you could just throw a girl into a volcano, but nothing about their organization is set up to allow it. They hide behind an invisible curtain, spraying chemicals and pulling strings, to trick the sacrificial candidates into doing something stupid. They claim that this ritual murder to appease the dark gods involves a requirement that each sacrifice be "guilty" and earn their punishment by willfully choosing to enter the danger zone of the cabin, and willfully choosing to pick up a dangerous artifact that will summon their doom. But where is the option to send in a team of their own people, trained with the skills necessary and having the conviction necessary to drag five teenagers to a sacrificial altar? If they really believe this has to be done for the good of humanity, why aren't they willing to get their hands dirty like the Aztecs of old? Even when it comes down to the wire, there's no sniper team as insurance. Their last ditch effort, when the heroine gets her hands on a gun, is when the Director of the organization tries to talk her into using it to kill her friend. Here's a tip for people who want to form covert organizations dedicated to arranging staged mass sacrifices once a year to appease Chthulu, Kronos, or some other god from the pit: be armed, and be willing to shoot someone yourself just in case your flawless plan happens to fail.
The fact is, whether you kill someone by unleashing a horde of nightmares to attack them in their cabin and/or underground outpost, or whether you put a bullet between their eyes, you've killed them. If the primal drive behind a horror movie is to examine a scarier side of human nature, whether in the actions of a human maniac or in the analog form of a monster, then the exposed unpleasantness here is not about some repressed vice hidden deep in our subconscious minds. It's about casual detachment in ordinary people, something we can't root out in ourselves because the ability of an ordinary person to detach themselves from their awareness of awful things that occur is critical to moving on with life. A surgeon may lose a patient and feel guilty, but must be able to put that feeling aside and face the next patient with a clear mind and conscience. If he or she can't, there's considerable additional risk of losing that next patient because guilt or fear will adversely affect his or her reactions. Compartmentalizing and putting guilt behind you, getting used to the harshness of reality, is an important life skill of people who succeed. Actually, the lack of ability to separate oneself from the consequences of one's less savory actions and move on with life once got me bad marks in a science class in college (we had to study chicken embryos, with the necessary consequence that chickens who were no more than a beating heart on a yolk, no more than a tiny red spot unless you were using a microscope, would die, and the reality of taking a life with my own hands caused me to have a complete mental breakdown in the lab, for which my teacher had some gentle reprimands come end-of-semester reviews). But this very capacity to detach ourselves from situations we find upsetting, as necessary as it is to survive, is what makes the situation in this movie absurdly believable.
The ancient gods this organization seeks to placate do have some demands for what constitutes a proper sacrifice, clearly. If any five people could die in the specified area and thus avert the apocalypse, the heroine's slaughter of the site staff would have counted. There were far more than five people dead in that building -- but they weren't the right five people. The oddity here is that the ritual isn't consistent. We see different setups around the world, with the one presented as the main contrast being the sacrifice in Japan -- again, a hackneyed horror movie premise is enacted, but with a traditional Japanese specter in a room full of schoolgirls. While it's entirely possible that the schoolgirls there could be sorted into the categories deemed necessary by the Director (the Whore, the Athlete, the Scholar, the Fool, and the Virgin), it's stated outright that these categories are basically arbitrary anyway. The form of the ritual itself is uniquely suited to the society that enacts it, and the gods underground don't seem to care which version of the ritual succeeds so long as one of them does succeed. The death of marked victims seems to be all that the gods here require in order to stay asleep. The forms of those deaths, the rituals themselves, are constructed by and to suit the humans who enact them. These forms and trappings that create an artificial barrier between the members of the organization and the act, such that they can go home without considering themselves murderers, may very well be for the sake of the humans involved -- because they aren't the sort of people who feel comfortable with just putting a bullet in someone's head. None of them are the kind of monsters we call "murderers". The heroine from the group of chosen sacrifices is exactly the same kind of person -- able to unleash a nightmare horde to slaughter hundreds of people without the least hesitation or consideration that remorse might be an option, but minutes later wracked by guilt and indecision when told to shoot one person in the head with a gun she holds in her own hand.
There's no clear indication whether the trigger for the feeling of remorse here is an issue of scale (understanding the personhood of the man she has been asked to kill for the good of humanity, because he's an individual whose name and personality she knows, makes his death an issue of more weight than the abstract concept of the world ending, whereas the organization gives each of her sacrificial party cookie-cutter labels to dehumanize them before the sacrifice takes place) or one of personal responsibility (allowing someone to die from a monster attack they theoretically brought upon themselves, whether by triggering a mystical artifact or by collecting a menagerie of nightmares in the same building as their cubicles, versus actively killing someone with a weapon in your own hands). It may be either. It may be both. It may not matter. The effect in this movie, however, is that the audience doesn't find themselves with a clear "side" to root for. The organization is responding to a real threat in the only way they know how, and while it doesn't make them good people, it does mean that if our heroes live, the world will face Armageddon. They're just as much work-a-day, fighting-for-our-lives, imperfect humans as the five students who head up to the cabin in the woods despite due warnings that they're heading toward certain doom. In fact, either side could "win" in the end, and the only difference it would make to the plot is that one ending is fundamentally neoclassical satirical comedy and the other ending is bleakly hopeless and quietly tragic. No one is a potential "winner" at any point, so the question of "who will win" becomes irrelevant to the enjoyment of the movie. And no, I have no intention of telling you which ending the movie went with.
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/93670.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
So, this past week, in addition to CLAMP Expo work and a lot of stretching to make my back work properly again, included two events of significance -- one good, and one bad. On the bad side, my budget from now through the end of October came up too tight to be able to afford the fabric for the Halloween costume I want to do. Next year! Singing, dancing Minmay! I'll make it work! The good event was that, while I was ill,
sumeria rolled me out the door to a friend's house so said friend could show us Cabin in the Woods, which I had somehow managed to miss in theaters.
::dies laughing:: That was an extraordinarily well executed movie. Thumbs up, Joss.
Now, to review it, and get back to finishing the current chapter of BUYO so I can marathon through the last three chapters in November. This entry is cut for spoilers. Congratulations, people: we've now hit a story on this series of reviews that contains a twist original enough that I actually don't want to spoil it for first-time viewers -- but if I don't go so far as to mention it, there won't be much point to this review. Although the reveal happens significantly in advance of the end of the movie, it's still a twist, and what I write below will expose it.
100 Things Blogging Challenge, Week 25: Cabin in the Woods (Lionsgate/Joss Whedon, 2011).
When you're watching a horror movie, generally there's someone you're rooting for. Maybe you're watching something with a strong protagonist who ran up against unimaginable dangers and you want him/her to scrap his/her way out alive. Maybe you're watching the kind of stereotypical movie this film lampoons, and you're rooting for the monsters to win -- mostly because the heroes are too dislikable, idiotic, or characterless for a viewer to grow invested in their continued existence. Cabin in the Woods takes a great deal of trouble to create characters on both sides who are equally human, equally flawed, equally interesting, equally sympathetic, and equally guilty of murdering their fellow men. There are monsters, yes, but they exist only as tools in the hands of humans, and no matter who unleashes them to kill their enemies, they do so with the corrupt detachment of a Roman arena master releasing lions on gladiators. Of course, the organization responsible for manipulating the five young sacrifices into position takes its job very seriously, and they honestly believe that this is a necessary evil to save the world. Five lives to save five billion, even if they're technically just a failsafe in the unthinkable event that the Japanese team fails to deliver on their sacrifices. The fact that there's a betting pool on the subject of which monster the sacrifices will summon is, in its own way, more horrific than the army of nightmares, but it's also exactly the way blood sports have been played throughout all of human history. It's equally true to form for human history that the technicians in their underground lab kick off the sacrifice ritual where they'll get their vicarious thrills from watching people killed by a monster they control -- but only for the greater good, you understand! -- with a man declaring, "Let's get this party started!"
This thrill at causing destruction without feeling guilt, however, doesn't only apply to the antagonists' institution. The movie's heroine uses the exact same line when she releases the army of nightmares into the building using a "Purge" button, bringing about the deaths of the organization's staff much as they tried to bring about her death and that of her four friends. Both sides are willing to kill to preserve themselves. Neither side is willing to do it personally. The one member of the organization makes reference to wishing for the good old days, when you could just throw a girl into a volcano, but nothing about their organization is set up to allow it. They hide behind an invisible curtain, spraying chemicals and pulling strings, to trick the sacrificial candidates into doing something stupid. They claim that this ritual murder to appease the dark gods involves a requirement that each sacrifice be "guilty" and earn their punishment by willfully choosing to enter the danger zone of the cabin, and willfully choosing to pick up a dangerous artifact that will summon their doom. But where is the option to send in a team of their own people, trained with the skills necessary and having the conviction necessary to drag five teenagers to a sacrificial altar? If they really believe this has to be done for the good of humanity, why aren't they willing to get their hands dirty like the Aztecs of old? Even when it comes down to the wire, there's no sniper team as insurance. Their last ditch effort, when the heroine gets her hands on a gun, is when the Director of the organization tries to talk her into using it to kill her friend. Here's a tip for people who want to form covert organizations dedicated to arranging staged mass sacrifices once a year to appease Chthulu, Kronos, or some other god from the pit: be armed, and be willing to shoot someone yourself just in case your flawless plan happens to fail.
The fact is, whether you kill someone by unleashing a horde of nightmares to attack them in their cabin and/or underground outpost, or whether you put a bullet between their eyes, you've killed them. If the primal drive behind a horror movie is to examine a scarier side of human nature, whether in the actions of a human maniac or in the analog form of a monster, then the exposed unpleasantness here is not about some repressed vice hidden deep in our subconscious minds. It's about casual detachment in ordinary people, something we can't root out in ourselves because the ability of an ordinary person to detach themselves from their awareness of awful things that occur is critical to moving on with life. A surgeon may lose a patient and feel guilty, but must be able to put that feeling aside and face the next patient with a clear mind and conscience. If he or she can't, there's considerable additional risk of losing that next patient because guilt or fear will adversely affect his or her reactions. Compartmentalizing and putting guilt behind you, getting used to the harshness of reality, is an important life skill of people who succeed. Actually, the lack of ability to separate oneself from the consequences of one's less savory actions and move on with life once got me bad marks in a science class in college (we had to study chicken embryos, with the necessary consequence that chickens who were no more than a beating heart on a yolk, no more than a tiny red spot unless you were using a microscope, would die, and the reality of taking a life with my own hands caused me to have a complete mental breakdown in the lab, for which my teacher had some gentle reprimands come end-of-semester reviews). But this very capacity to detach ourselves from situations we find upsetting, as necessary as it is to survive, is what makes the situation in this movie absurdly believable.
The ancient gods this organization seeks to placate do have some demands for what constitutes a proper sacrifice, clearly. If any five people could die in the specified area and thus avert the apocalypse, the heroine's slaughter of the site staff would have counted. There were far more than five people dead in that building -- but they weren't the right five people. The oddity here is that the ritual isn't consistent. We see different setups around the world, with the one presented as the main contrast being the sacrifice in Japan -- again, a hackneyed horror movie premise is enacted, but with a traditional Japanese specter in a room full of schoolgirls. While it's entirely possible that the schoolgirls there could be sorted into the categories deemed necessary by the Director (the Whore, the Athlete, the Scholar, the Fool, and the Virgin), it's stated outright that these categories are basically arbitrary anyway. The form of the ritual itself is uniquely suited to the society that enacts it, and the gods underground don't seem to care which version of the ritual succeeds so long as one of them does succeed. The death of marked victims seems to be all that the gods here require in order to stay asleep. The forms of those deaths, the rituals themselves, are constructed by and to suit the humans who enact them. These forms and trappings that create an artificial barrier between the members of the organization and the act, such that they can go home without considering themselves murderers, may very well be for the sake of the humans involved -- because they aren't the sort of people who feel comfortable with just putting a bullet in someone's head. None of them are the kind of monsters we call "murderers". The heroine from the group of chosen sacrifices is exactly the same kind of person -- able to unleash a nightmare horde to slaughter hundreds of people without the least hesitation or consideration that remorse might be an option, but minutes later wracked by guilt and indecision when told to shoot one person in the head with a gun she holds in her own hand.
There's no clear indication whether the trigger for the feeling of remorse here is an issue of scale (understanding the personhood of the man she has been asked to kill for the good of humanity, because he's an individual whose name and personality she knows, makes his death an issue of more weight than the abstract concept of the world ending, whereas the organization gives each of her sacrificial party cookie-cutter labels to dehumanize them before the sacrifice takes place) or one of personal responsibility (allowing someone to die from a monster attack they theoretically brought upon themselves, whether by triggering a mystical artifact or by collecting a menagerie of nightmares in the same building as their cubicles, versus actively killing someone with a weapon in your own hands). It may be either. It may be both. It may not matter. The effect in this movie, however, is that the audience doesn't find themselves with a clear "side" to root for. The organization is responding to a real threat in the only way they know how, and while it doesn't make them good people, it does mean that if our heroes live, the world will face Armageddon. They're just as much work-a-day, fighting-for-our-lives, imperfect humans as the five students who head up to the cabin in the woods despite due warnings that they're heading toward certain doom. In fact, either side could "win" in the end, and the only difference it would make to the plot is that one ending is fundamentally neoclassical satirical comedy and the other ending is bleakly hopeless and quietly tragic. No one is a potential "winner" at any point, so the question of "who will win" becomes irrelevant to the enjoyment of the movie. And no, I have no intention of telling you which ending the movie went with.
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/93670.html. Please comment there using OpenID.