In 1992, the late author Thomas M. Disch wrote a controversial essay on science fiction for The Atlantic entitled "Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills." Among other criticisms of the genre, Disch noted, by way of a quote from T.S. Eliot on Poe, that it often appeals to a sort of arrested development in readers—not just the 12-year-old’s heroic fantasy fulfillment of Star Wars or Star Trek, but also the puzzle-box nature of harder, more intellectual science fiction such as 2001 and Blade Runner.
Himself an SF writer, Disch's implication was that us geeks love clockwork stories full of hidden messages and structural tricks, so much so that the puzzle-solving nature of the narrative is as much a draw as the subject or ideas. For example, we tend to focus more on Blade Runner's hints as to whether or not Decker is a replicant than the film's larger ideas about what it means to be human.
The Eliot quote Disch referenced could just as well have been describing contemporary SF film maker Richard Kelly. Said Eliot of Poe: "The forms which his lively curiosity takes are those in which a pre-adolescent mentality delights: wonders of nature and of mechanics and of the supernatural, cryptograms and cyphers, puzzles and labyrinths, mechanical chess-players and wild flights of speculation. The variety and ardour of his curiosity delight and dazzle; yet in the end the eccentricity and lack of coherence of his interests tire."
Kelly, the writer-director of the beloved mind-flip Donnie Darko, the glorious cluster-mess Southland Tales, and now The Box—seems to embrace Disch and Eliot’s criticism proudly. Kelly’s films are intentionally, intricately, and maddeningly constructed to baffle and even frustrate, to leave more questions raised than answered. As a result, they tend to draw cultish devotion from those who enjoy working their way slowly and laboriously into Kelly’s cinematic puzzles (like Darko’s extra-dimensional poetics), or complete sneering dismissal from those who find his films full of silly, pointless pretension. (Even I, who kind of admires the bat-snot insanity of Southland Tales—you have to read the prequel comic book to even begin to sort out the plot—can’t fully defend it as anything but a weirdly noble, nearly unwatchable misfire.) The Box is already drawing both reactions.
Based on both the Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) short story “Button, Button” and the mid-‘80s “new” Twilight Zone TV adaptation of that story, The Box opens with Matheson’s simple moral premise. A mysterious man delivers a black box to a young, financially struggling married couple with a pre-teen son. Push the device's red button in the next 24 hours, he explains, and you receive $1 millions in cash, tax-free. And someone you do not know will die. So, would you allow a stranger you’ll never see to be killed in order to make a better life for your family?
Kelly sets his version in 1976 in Richmond, Virginia, where the father Arthur (James Marsden), is a scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. (Like Kelly’s own dad, he helped land the Viking probe on Mars.) His wife Norma (Cameron Diaz) nurses a slight disability—a hidden disfigurement that both adds to the film’s immediate level of oddness and comes to play a major thematic role in the film. Arlington Steward, the mysterious stranger who shows up on their doorstep to explain the offer of the box, is played with terrifyingly elegance by Frank Langella.
From the moment we see Steward's face, we know Kelly has layers upon layers of secrets wrapped within his film, some to slowly reveal, others to keep to himself. As in Donnie Darko, a mood of fatalistic gloom settles over The Box, of seen and unseen things that are not quite right. That sense you are at the mercy of spooky action at a distance.
With every narrative step The Box deepens its mysteries and for most viewers there will probably come a point in the film where he or she simply throws up hands and says “oh come on, enough.” The Hitchcock flavor (including a Bernard Hermannesque score by the Arcade Fire) gives way to David Lynch strangeness, and we find ourselves right back in the dimensional fluid dynamics of Kelly’s familiar Darko-verse.
But that said, The Box is a much more straightforward story than Darko (and certainly more so than Southland Tales, though the transcript of an acid-fueled rap session with Crispin Glover and Joaquin Phoenix would make more linear sense than Southland Tales). If you pay attention, most of the answers to The Box’s mysteries are there in the film. Maybe way, way OUT there, but they’re there.
All of this worked for me because yes, Thomas M. Disch had my number: I love books and films that draw me into strange mysteries that have at their heart carefully constructed existential puzzles. Kelly makes a big deal of Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law–that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic–and builds his script accordingly. As much as he piles on the increasingly cosmic mysteries, he also erects wild-but-detailed explanatory frameworks behind them. The result plays like an X-Files episode written by Jean Paul Sartre (who gets his own numerous shout-outs) and winds up in similar philosophic other-worldly Sophie’s Choice territory as this past spring’s Knowing.
Not everyone is going to enjoy The Box as much as I did. In fact, if word-of-mouth, CinemaScore grades, and the mixed critical reaction is any indication, few do. Kelly is not a naturalistic director, and not every actor thrives under his sometimes cold, mechanical detachment. Marsden and Langella do just fine, but Diaz flounders: she’s never able to really connect with and present her thematically central character to us viewers.
It’s also easy to chaff at Kelly’s plot contortions through which both characters and filmgoers can seem like pawns in a larger, unfathomable game. Such narrative manipulations can come off as much contrived as compelling, with the director poking his audience to elicit a reaction just as the makers of the titular box randomly bedevil the film’s characters.
I’m the first to admit that everything Kelly tries to do in The Box dances along a fine line between creepy and laughable. And the eerie, foreboding stillness, that cloud of menacing “off-ness” that permeates the film can grind down into boredom for some viewers. But even as Kelly tries to spin a more accessible, crowd-pleasing thriller yarn, he can’t help making The Box into something infinitely weirder and harder to pin down, to understand, and to emotionally and intellectually digest. And I can’t help myself from being drawn into and admiring that sort of daring, dangerous—and yeah, maybe pretentious—filmmaking. I admit I have a soft spot for films that slip just outside their makers' grasp and hover just past the viewer's full comprehension.
Posted on November 12, 2009 at 9:49 am
I’m going to see this movie tomorrow, and now I have even higher hopes for it. Kelly is like a god to me, not a nice god, he’s a trickster more like Loki or Anansi, but a god none-the-less.
Posted on November 12, 2009 at 2:54 pm
That’s a good way of putting it, Locke. I think your taste and mine converge in this area. While you and I disagree on not a few films, I think we can agree that we both enjoy the intellectual and weird. I’m going to have to see this.
Posted on November 12, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Well, it looks like a great movie for the theatres. I might see it depending on reviews\previes\trailer because I need to know good or stupid it is. I might see it on Nov. 24 or a different movie, it just depends.
I’ll just let my friend who is also a moviegoer see it and then my friend can tell me you should see it or not see it. If I hear bad reviews from it, I will wait for rent at the Redbox. :)
Posted on November 13, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I have now seen the movie and agree it was very good. I might have to see it again to fully understand everything, but it didn’t leave the same ‘what the heck’ feeling I had the first time I saw Darko. For the record, I went with two friends and one of them loved it and the other hated it.
Posted on November 13, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Yes, Trevor, as I said, The Box certainly answers more of it’s own plot questions the first time through (unlike Darko, where not only did you need to see it a second time, but you really had to look at the “book” materials on the website–and later edited into the director’s cut–to understand WHAT was going with the whole time-travel plot… or, like I said, Southland Tales, where more than HALF the story’s plot was presented in a graphic novel that NO ONE heard of or read).
But The Box also leaves some nice tantalizing things dangling, such as [VAGUE SPOILERS AHEAD] the exact nature and purpose of Steward’s “employers,” what happens to Arthur at several points late in the film, why the cuffs are taken off a certain character at the end, what really happened to Mars and at Langley, etc. And I’m GLAD for those mysteries — after all, part of Darko’s APPEAL is that “what the heck?” feeling, that you can’t figure it all out on one viewing.
Posted on November 18, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I’ve seen Darko many times, and own the Director’s and Regular Cuts, have done the website…it’s crazy how many layers there are, and my girlfriend was instantly baffled and asked me a lot of questions.
Sad part was, I couldn’t answer them all…
Posted on November 19, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I’ll be seeing The Box tonight for my weekly movie review…Here’s to hoping my brain understands!!!
Posted on November 19, 2009 at 11:56 pm
I enjoyed it, there were a number of moments where I laughed at the sheer creepiness of what was happening.
I have my theories, and will need to reread the play that arcs the story to get a better idea of some of the actions.
Posted on November 20, 2009 at 11:20 am
Which play do you mean, Matthew? Sartre’s No Exit?
Posted on November 20, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Yes, didn’t know if that would give too much to readers who hadn’t seen film. I love the connections and intertwinning of elements from the play into the movie…like the valets.
And then the part that really made me scratch my head was the old couple that gives the Lewis’ really dirty looks when they get the present.
And yeah, all of your vague plot spoiler questions, are a lot of the ones I have.
[Begin spoiler alert]
The cuffs definitely got me thinking, but I think: Because his {father in-law right} was a cop, and gave him that courtesy.
Employers seems like God, or some entity of great power, and much like a flood cleansing the sinners, the thing around water doing harm or good.
What happened to Arthur though, is beyond me.[End spoiler]
Posted on November 21, 2009 at 11:50 am
Ha, Matthew — I’m not sure mentioning No Exit gives anything away, since even I’M not entirely sure how it fits in and echoes’ Kelly’s themes–though I have some vague, general ideas. (I need to re-read my Sartre, too!)
SPOILER ALERT: In a recent interview (sorry, can’t recall where–I’ve read a bunch of them), Kelly suggested that the cuffs were removed and Arthur was handed over to the NSA instead of the local police, the implication being that the NSA, controlled by Steward and his “employers” will put Arthur to work as part of the “larger tests.” Kelly suggested they would take care of Arthur, offer him some solace and purpose after all they did to him and his family.
MORE SPOILERS: As to who the “employers” are, this is where the Knowing comparison comes in–the implication is they are a superior alien intelligence that goes around “testing” civilizations and their inhabitants’ morality. One interviewer asked Kelly if these “employers” had performed similar tests on the past sentient population of Mars and found them wanting, and therefore wiped the Martian civilization clean. Hence they were “waiting” on Mars for human civilization on Earth to advance enough to reach Mars and then they would begin their testing of humans. A very similar concept to that of 2001 and its Moon and Jupiter monoliths.
Posted on November 21, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Thanks for the spoiler alerts, now I will know about what will happen. Thanks Matthew — and Locke Peterseim!
Posted on November 23, 2009 at 8:49 am
Makes sense Locke, I can agree with those ideas and see the validity in them. Though I don’t know what solace you could find after what happened.
[BEGIN SPOILER]
Though I think it very interesting is that the females are the ones who push the button and ultimately pay the heavier price for it.
[END SPOILER]
The greatest thing that makes a movie like this work is that your imagination is left to figure out what happened off screen during some transition sequence.
Like:
[SPOILER ALERT POWERS UNITE!!!]
When Arthur comes out of the hangar, right after you have the entire military squad watching the doors open, and then his friend tells him about the implications about what will happen, and you see the sheer number of people who are being used for this experiment, you wonder how long this has been going on.
[CONTIUNING TO SPOIL!!!]
I also find the reporter and valets a bit confusing with why they help Arthur (well, somewhat…) and how they got the knowledge they did. Of course it seems like anyone, anywhere could be affected…(That library creeped me out)
[END SPOILAGE]
Posted on November 23, 2009 at 1:52 pm
[GENERAL BLANKET SPOILER WARNING]
Yes, I certainly did notice that about the women, Matthew. Not sure what to make of it. I suppose some sort of Adam and Eve subtext, but even that comes with a pretty heavy whiff of misogyny.
As for how long it’s been going on, I felt it had only recently started, with the landing of the Viking probe and the subsequent lightning strike that burned (and KILLED) Arlington Steward.
With the reporters and valet, the implication was definitely that THEY were being controlled by Steward and/or his “employers.” So was the dean at the school Diaz taught at–he had a nosebleed too. Which suggests that the cancellation of her son’s free tuition AS WELL AS Arthur’s rejection from the Shuttle astronaut program were ALL controlled and manipulated BY the “employers” in order to put the couple into a more desperate financial situation, thus making actually SKEWING the results of their “test.”
Yes, I understood that the “employers” could control ANYONE anywhere–including the student in her class who asks about the disability and later gives Arthur the “two” sign–did asking Norma about her foot only served to heighten her desire to have the expensive surgery? The “number two” sign was the employers’ way of giving Arthur a hint, some help for when he had to choose a gateway. He chose gate two and presumably received salvation–hence he was “taken care of” at the end, but seems a VERY cruel sort of salvation, considering what he lost. (But you can argue that his loss was due to NORMA’S choice in pushing the button. He passed, she failed.)