Cabin in the Woods

[2maggie2]

local_max has a great post up about it here.

It took me a while to figure out my exact problem but it's this: Joss has given in to nihilism.  It'd be interesting to go back and re-listen to his Harvard talk on Humanistic Atheism, where he tries to affirm that value can be found in a godless world.  But in Cabin, well -- it had to end the way it did; but that

Comments

[local_max]

Thanks for the rec! :) I responded to the question of the movie's nihilism back over there.

[simonf]

He may given into nihilism when he wrote the script, but it was written around 2007/2008. Had the movie actually come out when intended (2009), it would have made a more pertinent companion piece to Dollhouse.

[2maggie2]

Good point about the timing. I'd love to say if I think DH is nihilistic or not, but it all got too incoherent for me to make any sense of one way or the other.

I liked a lot of this meta stuff in Buffy, but it was counterbalanced by a really rich understanding of interpersonal dynamics and seemed to me to say important things about the human condition. But Joss does seem to be shifting to the meta, and I don't think he's an interesting enough philosopher for that to be compelling.

[simonf]

I got the Official Companion today and the book quotes Joss as saying it was written before the 2007/008 writers' strike. That's coming in at the tell end of his wilderness years and around the same time he wrote Dr Horrible.

[penny_lane_42]

Huh. I'm pretty much the opposite of a nihilist, so I wonder if I'll hate it, too. Now I'm even more anxious to see it.

[2maggie2]

I look forward to hearing what you think!

[rahirah]

I've thought Joss has been a nihilist for quite awhile. In retrospect, I wonder if that's not why I've always had trouble with "Chosen;' the 'happy ending' he felt obliged to give the characters feels forced and false because he didn't believe in it himself. It's notable that he reneges on the basic premise of "Chosen" in S8 - all of Buffy's attempts to change things are futile, temporary, or lead to bad things happening.

I think the end of AtS is far more what Joss really believes in: Life sucks and then you die, and the best you can hope for is to take a few of your enemies with you when you go.

(On the other hand, it does strike me that CiTW is a sort of a sideways commentary on the walking away from Omelas thing - if the world is ruled by gods that demand evil of man, then perhaps the most moral thing for man to do is refuse to play, even if it means being destroyed.)

[2maggie2]

I hear your other hand. I just don't inhabit that universe, and so I have to read with the question of what must a person think to imagine that such a scenario is even plausible.

Pretty much it's just a fundamental disconnect. It accounts for my systematic misreading of the man! I had read him as being inconsistent on his nihilism in interesting ways, but at the end of the day maybe not.

[rahirah]

Well, I don't live in that world either - but Joss has always struck me as the sort of atheist who's still angry at God for not existing.

[aycheb]

I think Joss believes the universe is indifferent to us but his response to that realisation is not nihilistic. He doesn't say that we should celebrate the fact that nothing we do matters or give up getting out of bed every morning but that "if there is no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world." Ultimately the old gods rising up Carrie-like to devour everything is less important than two strangers sharing a moment in the very moment the world ends.

[2maggie2]

IIRC, they decide it's probably better that humans get erased during their kindly moment, which reads to me as the essential verdict here. That kind moment isn't enough to justify us.

[aycheb]

I haven't watched the movie but had understood from reviews that at the point they share their moment it's already too late to save their world. Which is a horror movie world where everyone is either victim or monster but still the decisions that doomed it are being apologised for not justified. “I’m sorry I let you get attacked by a werewolf and let the world end.”

Dana and Marty aren't heroes, they're ordinary, fallible, people, the Final Girl (who only saves herself) and the Fool, thrown into an impossible situation and failing to win a game that was rigged from the start. I think the thing that makes this movie humanist not nihilist is that when push doesn't come to shove, instead of dancing on its own grave or raging against the inhumanity of its universe, it uses its final moments to forgive its young,not strong enough or wise enough protagonists because they, like us, are only human.

[local_max]

I like this comment quite a bit. I'm not sure how to resolve the contradictions between a narrative wherein there is no solution in which the world can be saved, and one which I do think is genuinely and impressively forgiving to all its characters and their (considerable) fallibilities. In the genre of suspense-comedies that end in the end of the world, it's much more forgiving than something like Dr. Strangelove, also about a mad, logical system from which there's no escape.