The Box

The Box, the film that nobody is talking about, is Richard Kelly’s third film as director and also his third film to commit apocalypse. This is quite a track record. Each film – the preceding two being the wet-behind-the-ears / water-on-the-brain debut Donnie Darko and the reviled closed-circuit new-media celebrity-TV-centric mindfuck Southland Tales – plots out the terminal cartography of a network brought down by a computer that takes itself out; each apocalypse revolves around a symbolic suicide. In each film one (or more) character(s) exist(s) through whom the whole grid’s frayed, spark-spitting wires are exposed, broken rebar juts out, a rupture is opened, and the metaphysical Open itself gapes. Suicide is traditionally the most efficient way for the individual to annihilate the whole world of others and objects. In Kelly’s films it is also always a kind of secular-humanist sacrifice with spiritual resonance played out on an ethical vector traversed by metaphysical currents (like in late Tarkovsky, whose final film, The Sacrifice, must be an influence and could easily be made to share its title w/ any of Kelly’s). The Box finds boyish Corvette-driving aerospace engineer Arthur (James Marsden) and pretty, deformed Sartre-misrepresenting English teacher wife Norma (a woefully accented Cameron Diaz) playing a game of freewill unto death in a preset terminal loop. Norma teaches No Exit to private school kids and comes to disprove Sartre’s hypothesis (and that is what it is) that hell is other people. The Box undercuts Sartre’s basic arrogance and psychotropically rebuts: hell is us – the self is contaminated in its very helixes. We are the embodiment of hell in our basic species activity, in possession of the opposite of grace: preordained extinction one computer, one vector, at a time. The Box embodies surrealist father André Breton’s notion of “pure psychic automatism” in its free-associative death-dream trip, it’s characters seeming to scuba dive through its berserker setpieces as in an aquarium that is the frame. There is no freewill in dream as in life – only the nauseating, floating inevitable. The Box ends w/ an extreme tenderness for all its incendiary bleakness: a death-embrace of mutual affirmation and stunted acquiescence, husband and wife intimately cooperating in the not-at-all-intimate succumbing of the whole world to the pathogen from which it can only be delivered by surrendering to total collapse. Though its narrative engine is asleep at the wheel (the film fundamentally abiding by oldschool surrealist tenants), the machinery of apocalypse is no less systematically consummated for its basis in a kind of monstrous catatonia. The Box will remain, in its twilit zone of mid-seventies digital-era-dawning art-direction (Donnie Darko style), one of the most messed-up and memorable films of 2009. You have my word on that.