"The Cabin in the Woods": Negotiations with the Old Gods

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

We just set off, after a lazy Sunday morning, to see Joss Whedon's new film (as writer and producer), "The Cabin in the Woods," a film that gets odder in the aftertaste than in the viewing. Something like "Blue Velvet" is odd all the way through, both self-consciously and at the level of primary process. I often refer to that opening scene of the father's heart attack and the suburban lawn filled with savagely waring ants--that's so rich and apparent. But "Cabin" inserts or layers on the oddness at different points, and then in reflection; as I think more about it, its multiple and conflicting levels stand out more and more. It's an odd film.

At one level, it's a very clever wink-wink, nudge-nudge, postmodern deconstruction of teenager horror films (are there adult horror films? Heather says there's some: "They are much more psychological--that piece is a big part." So.). Its topic, at the apparent level, is the meta level of how these films are constructed and executed. The puppeteers who are usually behind the screen--the film makers--are put in the film, as an organization tasked with constructing these rituals of the punishment of youth, in order to keep the "Old Gods" from rising. It's a yearly thing that, in the modern context, is run by high tech, but serves the same purpose as tossing a virgin in a volcano. It doesn't then blow and ruin everything.

The ritual itself has become technological, and therefore bloodless, as the ritual priests (here, dressed in white like doctors) flick switches and watch on multiple screens, able to manipulate the characters to satisfy the rather rigid requirements of the Old Gods: one whore, one jock, one mental type, one joker, and one virgin (the virgin must be left for last, and her death is optional, not required). And they must be "punished for transgression," which seems to be a necessary form, though more honored here in inadvertent action than in intention of the characters. As the control room guard says (to paraphrase), "Isn't this a setup?" It is, and is supposed to proceed according to ritual form.

It doesn't. Surprised? It also doesn't come off at any of the other ritual sites in the different nations (though it seems it's more cultural groupings than nations per se), which puts pressure on the American team to pull through and finish the ritual. It is more or less on track until the three remaining kids--the virgin, the jock, and the brain--are driving out the entry tunnel, and it has not been, as is proscribed, collapsed. Some message never came through, and for some reason, "power was rerouted from upstairs," (as the explosives techs say later). Their escape is not sealed until the last minute.

So things are not going to plan, all over the world, with this ritual negotiation with the Old Gods. Then it gets worse as, at the celebration party at the ritual control room, they learn that the joker (a smart stoner kid named Marty) is not dead, and shows up to save the Virgin from the head Pain Worshiping Backwoods Zombie Family leader. They find a way into the complex of the ritual engineers, evade the guards, and when cornered in a control room, hit the Big Red Button and open up all the (clean, modern, stainless steel) containment cases, letting out humanities collected nightmares loose into the (clean, modern, stainless steel) innards of the facility. Blood and guts and horrors tear the place and its working stiff staff to pieces.

The dénouement has the Joker and Virgin in the bottom level of the facility, the stone room with the carvings of each member of the sacrificial band, that fills up with blood as they die. They are met by The Director, played by Sigorney Weaver. I don't know why, really. It works. But maybe just because she's in every other movie these days. But there she is, explaining the function of the place and their sacrifice, and why Virgin must shoot the Joker. The Virgin does seem about to do so, following the injunction of the maternal authority figure, but is attacked by a werewolf (shadow masculine?), allowing the Joker to attack the Director, who is then axed in the head by the one armed Pain Worshiping Backwoods Zombie daughter (her arm was eaten off by her family, if I remember right), and Joker tumbles them both into the void where the Old Gods are getting pissed. The two then sit back and smoke a spliff, deciding to let the whole thing go to hell (literally), and the last scened has a giant God Hand erupt through the cabin, fade to black, and end of human world.

Ok. Breath. Pause. One more breath. Ok, so, what was all this about, anyway?

What it was not was an exercise in postmodern meta-commentary, in the way that "Rubber," the film about a homicidal desert tire, was. It's not that clean. None of Whedon's productions are that clean or focused. "Cabin" seems to have levels of meaning and levels of the artists' understanding of those levels of meaning.

At the top is the exercise in deconstruction, the wry and ironic commentary-in-motion on the structure and function of modern teenage horror films. The archetypal characters are all presented, and put in the standard encounter with "objects from the past." I think the best reading of these genre films (and actually, much of genre film in general) is as the experience of modern minds and identity looking back at previous developmental levels and, not having yet stabilized the integrity of the modern mind (think here of WWII), looks on the last developmental level as a consuming, rapacious, heartless and cruel entity. How do you deal with the anxiety of this transition in the modern mind? In horror films, it's through and as these ritual sacrifices, tossing the young and weak to the monster, and leaving the modern aspects of mind to survive and conquer the evil. The Jock (life as physicality), the Whore (life as sexuality), the Joker (life as hedonism), and the Scholar (life as abstracted mind) are consumed, and the Virgin (who is often also sexy, physically competent, smart, and most important, heartful) survives.

That's the pattern. We are moving, culturally, and developmentally, towards more and more expression of what Ken Wilber calls the Integral stage of development, in which all these archetypal forces represented by the different kids are brought together and integrated in individuals. So the most integrated one, we want her to win and mark the way out of these negotiations with the old gods.

But that's the enactment. In "The Cabin in the Woods," the meta level is played out by literalizing this enactment. We see it as a conscious, and consciously presented, act, that has become so conscious that, within the film, it is seen as prosaic and an act of art, divorced from its bloody roots, and outside the film, is known so thoroughly that it can be represented (rather than simply enacted unselfconsciously) and its elements commented on, riffed on, and mocked.

But Joss Whedon can't seem to produce happiness. Every film of his I can think of requires a sacrifice. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series), love, relationship, and some major characters, are regularly sacrificed. In "Serenity," the ship pilot is crucified on a huge stake. "Dr. Horrible" has the sweet, wounded super villain killing his love object and actually becoming an embodiment of Evil. There's really no transformation or triumph in his work, or at least none that's not tempered by a blood sacrifice.

Down a level from the postmodern critique and fun is a kind of despair at the possibility of escaping and transforming the past. In "Cabin," the horrific past has been mollified through negotiations that ritually destroy life each year rather than literally destroy life (again, think of WWII). The Old Gods have not been understood and integrated, and thereby transformed and detoxified. Rather, they have been paused, and it's only time till they emerge and consume.

That's a bleak psychological model of human life. There has been development, of course, but only in the technological realm. From virgins being pitched into the volcano, there are now high tech rituals, sanitized and tightly controlled. There's something to be said for that, and for, given the alternative, keeping the catastrophic forces of destruction sedated. But it's not stable, and that's what the Virgin and Joker respond to ultimately in allowing the culture that's based on the consumption of its young to be consumed. Within the film, it makes its own sense.

But the meta to this meta film is this bleak picture of the heart of humans. Negotiation with evil, rather than its transformation; codification and sanitization of one's relationship to that evil, rather than integration and transcendence. Fuck it, the film says in the end, this is the system and it's all that's available, so let it burn.

At the end of the day, it's an adolescent's world view, which makes the Nine Inch Nails singing the endcap ("Last") particularly apropos. But there is an interesting strain running through the last part of the film, which adds to the oddness, because it seems to be an enactment, rather than a comment, meaning that Whedon and his director don't seem fully aware of it. Or maybe one is and one isn't and you're seeing the tension. "The world is shit!" "There is hope!" and they never worked out a resolution.

Because one wonders, why now, why are all the world's rituals failing during the same year? Why are the Japanese children able to, collectively, sing the evil spirit into a bowl of flowers and safely contain it in a cute frog? What did they do right? Did they find out, genuinely, how to transform evil in a way the ritual engineers can't conceive (there's a great image of Richard Jenkins telling the little girls on his monitor, "Fuck you, and you and you!"). These girls are not negotiating with the Old Gods, but rather, besting them. And then there's the oddly explained and not-explained failure to collapse the exit tunnel (until Jenkins manages it at the last moment). The implication is that someone or something prevented it. Why?

In other words, it's not as simple as, say, "Natural Born Killers," which Oliver Stone described as his "fuck shit up" movie. It's not simply glee in tearing down the parent's institutions and status quo, or a triumphant return of the body to what has become a bloodless (clean, modern, stainless steel) exercise that itself simply hides the awfulness of "the before." There's an odd, seemingly un-self aware, strain going through "Cabin" that reminds me a bit of the early Disney films, in which one group of artists tried to present life in the raw, and another life as we'd like to see it (watch Bambi and you'll hear Bambi's mother get murdered by men, and then it cuts to butterflies and lurid colors of Spring).

I have little tolerance for tragedy as a life view; as the astrologer Caroline Casey has pointed out, there's always a 4th act. After King Lear dies, life continues. Some peasant off over that hill has a great crop of lettuce come in, and celebrates with life-affirming orgasms with his wife. "Cabin" would be an adolescent throw away if it were only that, or if it were as left-brained in its deconstruction of the genre as "Rubber." Thankfully, it itself is not bloodless, and exhibits a rich confusion and dis-orientation in its own right that belies the preciousness of the conceit. There's something disturbing in the guts of this film, which mirrors the disturbance in the age we're traversing, and that's what makes it keep echoing out long after the popcorn is gone.