I asked Chris if he could set up a dedicated thread for Cube and move over my previous post from the "Upcoming Films on UK TV" thread because I caught the film on late night television again over the weekend and ended up with some more thoughts that build on the comment from last year, which may have been worth giving the film its dedicated thread. At the very least following the train of thoughts got me excited and raring to write them down as soon as possible in case I forgot them, which I find is usually a good sign that the post could be worthwhile!
Anyway, this is probably not going to get into any new territory for those who have seen the film but while there will be
major spoilers following, I wanted to delve more into the ‘interpersonal group dynamics’ aspect of the film rather than its enigmatic grander mystery sci-fi plot. Although it could probably be argued that the plot of what/where/how the Cube came to be is just one big McGuffin
for the interpersonal group dynamics! But before getting into Cube specifically, I wanted to look forward to the later Saw series, and one of its entries in particular that I think really bears comparison to Cube and helped me a lot to clarify my thinking about Natali’s film.
Saw V is deep into the convoluted lore of that series. The mysterious mastermind Jigsaw is long dead and yet another of his imperfect acolytes (a cop) is imperfectly continuing the legacy of devious traps to teach bunches of despicable people moral lessons through pain and torture. Eventually in one of the more ironic twists to the series the cop himself will succumb to the temptation of building impossible death traps with no possible escape to them as a way of settling scores rather than occupying the lofty (albeit brutally wounding) moral high ground regarding those being tortured of the original figure. As an audience watching the fifth film in this series, we are well prepared for ironic inescapable deaths of those rotating expendable casts of characters in the ‘B plot’ of the film who are mostly there to show how the horrible torture devices work in graphic detail. Which means that Saw V comes as quite a big shock, because it plays the whole situation ‘straight’ for once.
The five people in the ‘B plot’ of the film start out having no idea of the connection between them. One of them gets ‘accidentally’ killed (or sacrificed by the others?) in the first trap through maybe just not knowing what to do in time. As the group collectively progress through the aggressively linear series of rooms (in comparison to the ‘victims’ in the other films in the series more usually being seen through the eyes of another figure existing ‘outside’ of the situation and being left to fail to save them) they keep being given the choice of acting together to work through the situation where they will all suffer a little bit, but all survive, or to choose someone to sacrifice to spare the rest from any suffering at all.
Inevitably the group choose the latter option in almost all cases, with one person from the group ending up gorily killed in each of the rooms! Though as the group progresses and becomes both more proficient with navigating the space but familiar with each other as well the dynamics shift too. The deaths of those failing each of the traps in the rooms goes from accidental (as in the first victim); to getting rid of any obvious bad guy who is wanting just to save himself to progress to the next room by killing someone – anyone – else (which is the ‘Hollywood’-style morality of the hero justifiably killing the obvious evil doer, with no need to feel guilty about doing so, since they were forced into that situation of having to choose anyway by both the circumstances and the person’s behaviour combining to make them the obvious choice to die); to the last two people actively colluding to kill the third person in the next room, before then progressing to the final room where they presumably will have to gladiatorial battle to the death against each other for one to come out victorious….
But there is an extremely ironic twist awaiting which makes Saw V one of the more classically allusive entries in the series as being more obviously a straight morality play rather than being that but with an added twist that those meting out the punishment are altogether corrupt as well (although at this point Hoffmann is perhaps keeping to the original ethos better than many acolytes did!). Instead of a battle arena which the two remaining victims are gearing up for, they reach a room with five Perspex boxes over separate table saws and are told by the puppet in the video (which has been assuming in its pre-recorded segments that they have been working together in the previous rooms) that all they need to do is make a blood sacrifice to fill up the container underneath the saws with enough blood to trigger the locked door to open before they are blown up by the bombs planted in the room. It involves a small cut into the webbing between the first and second fingers. It will be a painful and a permanently scarring reminder of their torture (and culpability for the moral failings they were all collectively responsible for in their past which turns out to have been a house fire that they were all involved with covering up), but because there are five of them all collectively responsible and all collectively contributing their blood to pay back the debt of their wrongdoings, they will survive it mostly unscathed.
Except of course, there are not five victims left at this point, only two. The other three were sacrificed either through accident at the start, bickering turning into violence in the middle, and actively premeditated murder by the end to reach this point. So the two remaining characters instead of making a little nick into their hands to leave them with a matching permanent scar of their experience, instead end up having to cut straight up the
whole of their arms in order to provide the equivalent of the blood of five from just two people in the time allotted.
That’s one of the very best ‘B plot’ arcs of the whole of the Saw series because it actually has a well thought through moral lesson to impart which the characters never learn but the audience goes away pondering (or at least
should go away pondering!), whilst also staying true to the essential darkly cynical philosophy of the Saw series that people never learn their lessons until it is too late, or fail to act in a way that hurts others as a consequence and were often already done for as decent human beings long before they ended up in a grimy industrial warehouse somewhere chatting to a puppet.
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So, to go back to Cube, which I argued a little in that previous post from last year feels like one of the ur-texts from which the Saw series, and torture porn subgenre in general, sprung from. Watching it again over the weekend I focused much more on the group dynamics and felt a real similarity to the ironic ‘failed team building’ exercise that would later be taken to the bloody extremes of Saw V.
It had not really hit me so strongly before that as well as everyone being given specific qualities that are necessary for all to get through the situation, that we are also seeing that process being immediately complicated through the death of Rennes, who the cop Quentin is able to recognise for being an infamous prisoner who has been able to escape from many maximum security prisons in his time. Maybe Rennes had been placed in the Cube to act as the safeguarding guide for the rest of the group whilst they figured everything else out, but unfortunately he is only about looking out for himself (and the boots of others!) to recognise that he has a role in the group, and ironically gets unfortunately validated in his fundamental distrust of others when having to stop and give them a lecture due to being annoyed by their bickering means that he neglects to check if the next room is safe before he sets foot in it!
That then in a blackly comic way leaves the group without the guide through the traps and places an extra burden onto them that was probably not intended by whoever had dumped them all together collectively into that place! And probably the lack of Rennes to take on that role is what drives Quentin into feeling the need to have to take over which results in his over authoritarian, abusive behaviour and eventual complete mental breakdown. In the ‘ideal’ situation likely Quentin’s role would have been to have ‘policed’ Rennes to keep him in check and from escaping the group whilst getting them though the trap rooms safely. With the removal of the prisoner to ‘safely’ police instead Quentin’s controlling behaviours go from being focused onto a single, arguably deserving of the gaze, person into wildly spreading out into personally threatening all the other members of the group in turn.
That itself makes me see the characters as being naturally broken up into mutually dependent pairs within the collective group of six: Rennes and Quentin are criminal and cop; Holloway is the doctor in danger of spinning out into wild conspiracy theorising that may just be the result of a brilliant mind eating itself up from the inside over the need to do something, anything, about the situation
until Kazan is introduced and she is able to shift her focus from that onto someone more specifically in need by understanding his condition, empathising with him and calming him down; and Leaven and Worth seemingly do not fit together as a good pairing at all until we get to the magnificent final scene:
“What is out there?”
“Boundless human stupidity"
“I can live with that”
, where Worth’s overwhelming to the point of inaction cynicism about the nature of humanity is contrasted against Leaven’s more youthful (dangerously naïve?) wish to keep going on anyway and not just lying down and accepting defeat. And the sudden loss of Leaven at the end is what gives Worth the last burst of righteous anger to defeat Quentin at the last possible moment (although you could also just as much argue that Worth giving into his cynicism about humanity at the last moment is what actually dooms them both by letting Quentin catch up to them all).
Every character is getting their equal and opposite figure to both contrast against them but also to in some ways balance them out too. Left unchecked they are all at risk of spiralling into destruction of themselves and others. While it does not mitigate his actions later in the film, that feels to be Quentin’s unacknowledged tragedy from the beginning of the film: that he has lost the yin to his yang that would have centred him as a character and is struggling to define himself and his role within the group after that loss, as if he is trying to contain both the ‘I’m out for myself’ criminal and ‘I’m doing it for your benefit’ cop aspects at the same time within a single person, which makes the whole façade of personality begin to crumble. Quentin isn’t ‘revealed’ as the monster he always was, he’s a human being destroyed under the weight of expectations, both self-imposed and from others, and in his frustration gets reduced to his basest element under that pressure. In a lot of these labyrinth tales (say, House of Leaves) there is no true minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth, which usually results in one of the human beings having to step in to take on that sacrificial monstrous role instead, as with Quentin here.
And maybe that is also why he lashes out at the others, because he can subconsciously feel them bonding better with each other whilst he has no one, which amplifies his behaviour in response, which makes them actively hostile to him in turn, and so on until the escalation into actual violence seems like an inevitable build rather than a shocking turn of events. The big ‘what if?’ of this story is what if Rennes had not died? Would everything have gone differently then?
Beyond Quentin, there is also the bookending irony at the other end of the film where just as Rennes is immediately taken out before he has a chance to even realise his role in the situation all of the other characters get pared away as they ‘fulfil their function’ in the story until only the mentally disabled Kazan remains to walk off into the white light and into the world – the one character unable to articulate what happened to him
and to understand the world he is going back to in order to take us, the audience, with him. So we are left behind inside the cube as much as the other five are.
I could imagine there being an alternate universe film there where everyone just stayed still and talked it over as a calm group, worked out what the numbers meant and that the room they woke up in and around was the one safe room they needed to remain in until it moved back to its ‘bridging’ position. But in a situation where calm level headedness and leaps of intuition were necessary to achieve that goal of maximum success, the more likely result is that people end up sniping at each other and retreating into their own specific views of the world as both a way to comfort themselves that there was no other possible option and to define themselves against others. Where everyone has a piece of the puzzle, but no one person has the full picture.
And that is why Cube is also a case study in how the over idealist nature of Communism, which does not factor in human nature into its calculations, or if it does simplifies it into insulting abstractions, does not really work in the real world without causing a lot of collateral damage!
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So anyway yet another viewing of Cube keeps showing that it is an entertaining and rich film that grows so much deeper on multiple viewings. It is one of those films that has been sitting at the back of my mind for decades now to occasionally idly pull out and twist and turn around like a puzzle box to see how it has changed in the mind’s eye, and I always find something worthwhile comes from doing that.