Why do we keep feeding kids into meat grinders, metaphorically and IRL? It's a simple little trope that Whedon deploys, but he's not interested in the metaphor...he's interested in the meta-discussion. Rather than manipulating the audience, Whedon seeks to expose the manipulation.
Rarely does anyone bother to ask why our culture resonates with fetishized violent retribution for sex and/or freethinking. It's never pointed out that using this bloody awful theme so often, and so rigidly proves that it's gone beyond narrative storytelling.
It's fucking ritual. Whedon is suggesting that it's as-if we're appeasing The Ancient Ones. I wonder, at what point is there a difference btwn appeasing gods and appeasing billionaires.
You want a connection to RigInt? Men in control rooms making people die for reasons we can't understand, and won't ever be given the opportunity to understand. They watch monitors and finger controls that rain death down on people halfway around the world, and then go home to weekend BBQs, office pools and NBA playoffs. Oh, and btw, those men in control rooms manipulating drones are already here in the US. It's as dystopically clean and twisted as it gets. And what's even more dystopic is that nobody is asking what these men are doing, or why they are doing it. We're supposed to play along...nevermind The Harbinger. Nevermind the crack in the matrix.
At one time in history the global killing game at least gave the pretense of being a "real war." Not anymore. GWOT changed that. The mask is off. Count me as fully on board with the notion that the global killing game at this point in time (bug splat) resembles ritual way more than any sort of geo-political strategy. So, Whedon is on point...he burned down the temple of bullshit.
If Hollywood movies are too bourgeois a medium to ask questions about men in control rooms killing kids, what then would be a more acceptable medium? Essays? Novels? Internet forums? Why the inherent contempt for
*popular* subversion? If it's
popular it can't be saying anything important,
right? Only film with limited distribution can possibly have anything relevant to offer.
Actually...now that I think about it, i like it better this way. Better that popular subversion isn't given credit for being subversive. That would subvert its subversion. So, Hush
Nothing to see here.
http://www.epinions.com/review/The_Cabi ... 6774187652
Joss Whedon: Genre Slayer
SPOILER WARNING: This review discusses the “twist” premise of The Cabin in the Woods, which is alluded to from the first scene of the movie and laid out fully early on. If you don’t know what it is, and don’t want to, this review is not for you. The review does not, however, reveal the entire plot, who lives / dies, or the ending. Joss Whedon has destroyed the backwoods cabin slasher flick, forever. It’s gone. There may be other cabin slasher movies made, but none of them will be seen the same way, ever again.
That’s probably a good thing.
Joss Whedon, master of meta-genre, loves to turn familiar sci-fi and horror tropes on their respective heads and give ‘em a good spin, especially the stupider ones. He created Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the premise that the petite blonde girl always screaming and getting torn to shreds in monster movies should turn the tables, and become the thing that monsters fear. Then he put rebel cowboy underdogs in space in Firefly because … well maybe that was just to show it could be done.
Now he’s gone and written a movie that doesn’t just reference a horror genre – the cabin slasher flick – he destroys it. We all know this one. The carload of horny, debauchery-minded kids, driving off into the wilderness for a weekend of beer and pot and campfires and sex. There’s a scary gas station, with a scary attendant, along the way to let them know that Something’s Wrong, but they ignore it to their inevitable doom. From 1980’s Friday the 13th to Wrong Turn in 2003 (coincidentally starring Eliza Dusku of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dollhouse) our culture is seriously hung up on this idea of young, good-looking people going somewhere they shouldn’t to do things everyone does but isn’t supposed to, and being brutally killed by hideously deformed creatures as a result. It’s about as strict and predictable a genre as we have, and thus overripe for subversion.
Another Whedon collaborator, the amazing Alan Tudyk (Firefly, Dollhouse) starred in one recent takedown of the genre – Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, in which the scary backwoods guys are the victims of crazed, quasi-suicidal college students. It’s hilarious, and terrifying, and you should see it if you haven’t, but it didn’t destroy the cabin slasher forever.
In Cabin in the Woods, Whedon takes the whole damn thing down, exposes it, ridicules it, and tells it to go to hell, with a simple, delicious, subversive premise: The whole cabin is an elaborate set-up. The kids are being lured, trapped, and slaughtered as a sacrifice to the “elder gods” in order for humanity’s powers that be to maintain the status quo. There is a huge subterranean complex, under the cabin, for this purpose, with a fleet of NASA-style workers with ID badges, electric scooters and office equipment, busily monitoring everything to ensure the sacrifice goes well, because if it doesn't, the elder gods will be angry.
And it's not going well.
It’s a beautiful conceit, and it’s a lot of fun watching Whedon, and director Drew Goddard (a writer on both Buffy and its spinoff Angel) spin out the implications.
The premise and feel is a lot like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, particularly the season in which Buffy's college campus turned out to house a secret underground military complex, tasked with capturing and exploiting demons to turn them into weapons. The underground lab full of white coated workers zipping around in carts as part of a high-tech, governmental enterprise secretly engaging the supernatural world will feel very familiar to Whedon's fans.
Acting highlights include The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford as a high-powered Ivy League-style team leader “managing” the cabin in full bureaucratic crisis mode as the planned sacrifice begins to unravel. The scene with the demonic “Harbinger” repeatedly demanding to be taken off speakerphone is emblematic of the film’s comic sense, and fully hilarious. Fran Kranz of Dollhouse is also terrific as he carries most of the load for the doomed campers with his characteristic nerdly fatalism.
As far as acting goes though, it's all sharp and on-target. In undermining the genre he's going after, Whedon makes the jock character reasonable and kind, until he's gassed with some kind of Alpha Male spray. His "dumb, promiscuous" girlfriend is intelligent and well-mannered, until her poisoned blonde hair dye turns her into a crazed, firelight dancing siren. Similarly the stoner's weed is sabotaged to make him stupid. But they missed a bag ...
The special effects are solid, although again, played just a hair on the funny side. Pop-horror references such as The Grudge and Hellraiser abound, and the scene of an endless underground monster dungeon should be fun for fans to check out when the film comes out on Blu-Ray.
Like the picture of the cabin on the promo-poster, with its various hidden levels spinning around, The Cabin in the Woods also goes deeper on further reflection. Its premise is hilarious, but all good humor is based in truth. After the whirlwind of special effects and punch lines fades,this film is really asking what is going on with our culture where we still insist on symbolically murdering archetypal young people -- the athlete, the prostitute, the jester, the virgin – with these endless movies about kids “going off the main road” and being gleefully, savagely dismembered for it. Are we still afraid of the elder gods? Do we make and watch these slasher flicks to warn everyone that the young must not explore too far, or taste too many forbidden fruits, lest they be dismembered with saw blades and garden trowels?
Whatever the answer, any future slasher flicks will now be forever haunted by the idea that they are a setup; a symbolic nod to sacrifice and ancient fears, undercut by the image of Whedon's whispering Harbinger, still waiting to be taken off speakerphone.
Four Stars. One star must be sacrificed to the elder gods.
