Underwhelmed By Cabin in the Woods, or, Why I’m the World’s Worst Nerd

(But first, happy birthday to my Aunt Marilyn!)

Let me get one thing out of the way: it’s not that I actively dislike Joss Whedon or his work. I recognize that it’s above par in a lot of ways. It’s clever, the banter is snappy, there’s an individualistic touch of whimsy, he challenges stereotypes, and he uses old ideas in ways that don’t often get seen in mainstream media. Those are all neat things. Likewise, if people ask me to watch some Whedon with them, sure, why not?

Let me also say that I haven’t watched all the Whedon canon. I’ve seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and the first two episodes of Firefly and now Cabin in the Woods. I know there’s a whole lot of Buffy and Angel out there that I’ve never encountered. I know I’m basing my assessment on a small subsection of the Whedonverse. The thing is, based on that assessment, I don’t think further exposure would be the best use of my time — evaluated in terms of personal enjoyment, and not, you know, the fact that instead I’m sitting here in my pajamas writing things on the Internet. The sad truth is, Joss Whedon’s work just doesn’t float my boat.

Before I explain why not, I should clarify: I don’t mean to say that these shows and movies should’ve been different to accommodate me and my tastes or that there’s anything superior about me for not liking something everyone else loves. Joss Whedon should create the stories he likes — obviously there are plenty of smart, talented, and cool people who enjoy what he does, and that’s awesome. I am happy for all the smart, talented, and cool Whedon fans and colleagues to continue to be so as long as they derive pleasure and inspiration and new ideas and all sorts of other exciting things from it.

But… although Dr. Horrible and Firefly and Dollhouse and the rest obviously chatter enthusiastically to the people who like them, erudite with wit and insight, to me, they’re silent.

To explain what I mean, let me use the example of Cabin in the Woods, the film Whedon co-wrote with Drew Goddard, who also directed it.

Many reviews of Cabin in the Woods, to avoid spoilers, describe it like this: five college students go to an abandoned cabin in the woods. This is a horror movie, but if you think you know what happens, you don’t. But the reason I think I didn’t enjoy it as much as many of my equally intelligent friends is that I thought I knew what happens… and it did.

Again, please note the phrase “equally intelligent.” I’m not trying to say that I’m super-smart and they’re naive, and with my preternatural brainy powers, I saw through the narrative feints and zoned in on the true plot. Nor am I better or worse read than are my friends — of course we sometimes like different things, but I’d say we consume narrative at equal rates and overall, we enjoy similar types of stories. The fact is, many of them also figured out what was going on in the early moments of the film, but it didn’t matter to them the way it did to me. Mine is not to provide a reason why, except to say that people’s minds work differently, and mine, apparently, veers in a direction that makes Whedon’s stories and characters feel bland.

(vague spoilers follow — if you haven’t seen the movie, you will probably not find this coherent)

For one, my mind runs on meta-fiction. I guarantee you that one of my first reactions to seeing/reading a story I like is to wonder what would happen if the characters found out they were in a story — how they’d react, whether they’d behave differently, how it would make them feel — and what kind of second-level story you’d need to make the conventions of the first-level story make sense.

For instance, one of the plays I wrote in high school was about a bunch of actors who were pretending to be campy supervillains in order to train a couple of Adam-West Batman-and-Robin superheroes as protectors of their city. There were ultimately too many plotholes for it to work — and also I didn’t feel like the characters had a strong enough emotional journey — but it started from: what if all the silly things that happen in the 60’s Batman TV series happened on purpose? What would it take for them to make sense?

Similarly, if you look at my plays page, you’ll see that two of my grown-up completed plays are meta-fictional. In the one I like best, Murder Mystery, I give my take on Agatha-Christie style we’re-stuck-in-the-manor-house-and-the-murderer-is-one-of-us cozies. In the other, a series of short scenes examine the rules of fictional worlds ranging from Bond movies to sitcoms.

Again, I want to be clear: I’m not arguing that I’m a better writer than Joss Whedon. For obvious reasons, my writing speaks more to me than his does, and those reasons have nothing to do with quality. But by considering those examples, you can see what meta-fiction means to me.

First, no matter what the story’s about, I need a character to latch onto, one I care about who’s going through a traditional hero(ine)’s journey. I know what what appeals most to me are characters who have to learn to trust/love other people or themselves, or characters who struggle with being a good person. Whedon’s characters, from what I’ve seen so far, just don’t appeal to me in this way, whether they’re Dana and Marty from Cabin in the Woods, Dr. Horrible, or Mal Reynolds. Why? I dunno. Third base.

But second, and most important, when I look at my work (and my thoughts and daydreams, etc.), I see that for me, meta-fiction is about examining power and value, and especially about taking power and value away from characters, entities, and ideas that normally have it and giving that power and value to those who normally lack it.

What happens to a character who thrives on power — a Dr. House or a Sherlock Holmes — when it’s taken away? What happens when a character discovers her power and her choices are illusions — that the grown-ups have been letting her win the game because it amuses them? How does she reconstruct her sense of self-worth? Contrariwise, what happens when a character discovers she has the agency to change what happens to her — that she doesn’t have to be a heroine, victim, villain, or what have you?

And what happens to the balance of power when the rules change — is Alicia Florrick still a worthy protagonist by the standards of YA fantasy? If Harry Potter lived in a legal procedural, could he remain the Chosen One? How does the value dynamic between characters from a world of sweeping good-vs.-evil change when they’re plunked into a universe where the rules say there are no black-and-white answers?

I know Whedon sometimes deals with these questions within the narrative; the most obvious and famous example is his challenge, What happens when you take the helpless blonde girl who dies at the beginning of every horror movie and let her take her fate into her own hands? (answer: Buffy). But he poses these questions within the narrative in ways that for me, personally, don’t go far enough down the rabbit hole.

For example, in Cabin in the Woods, the reason we’re given for all the tropes of the horror genre is essentially just “stories all the way down.” Instead of slasher films being the way they are because of what they mean to us, the audience, in the context of our culture, they’re what they are because of what they mean to other, in-story audience-replacements. We don’t have to examine just why it is, for example, that we like it when the leader tells everyone to split up, and we don’t get an explanation as to why the in-story audience likes it either. In the end, Goddard and Whedon leave me with the sense that the laboratory characters are taking an awfully convoluted way to do something that ought to be relatively simple, and I still wasn’t sure why the rules were the way they were, other than the fact that they were, y’know, THE RULES. (Also, I never figured out why the lab folks  fitted out their workplace with a lot of why-do-we-even-have-that-lever?!s.)

That’s another part of the power dynamic that interests me, by the way: where is the moral responsibility of the audience? Why is it OK to find it cool when a pretend person’s head explodes but not OK when that person is real*?

So maybe my problem is, I don’t just want to examine genres. I want to tear them apart. I want to vivisect them and shove everyone’s face into their twisted little hearts beating up close and bloody. And I want to have to face the fact that all this blood exists only because I’m the one who wanted to have an operating table.

Rolling Stone‘s review suggests that Whedon and Goddard made Cabin in the Woods by killing the thing they loved — the horror genre. Well, I agree that you can never go wrong with Oscar Wilde. Furthermore, it’s beyond me to say how Cabin in the Woods forces the horror genre to meet its demise — a bitter look? A flattering word? The hands of Lust or hands of Gold?

The one thing I do know is how it doesn’t. And, unfortunately, I’m a sword-loving kind of gal.

* To be fair, Whedon and Goddard touch on this during their scene where the laboratory folks are partying as, on the screens behind them, a main character is getting torn apart by one of the monsters. But it felt like a one-time aside, too fleeting for something in which I’m really interested.