No Exit

Rating: Null/10 (19 February 2016)

"Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?" - Albert Camus
21st century neuroexistentialism 101: as a result of arbitrary biochemical drives, you are spat out into a world. This world has no inherent "meaning", "objective" or "purpose". You have even less. Your thoughts, traits, actions and desires are imported from outside your body, such that what constitutes "you" is wholly dependent upon external programming. You are the result of an unbroken causal chain, (in)deterministically programmed from beyond.
What you think of as a "self" is but the accidental product of recent evolutionary adaptations. Neural processes attempted to simulate the world, and inadvertently mapped themselves as "you" at the center of the simulation. You are a reference point in your brain's world model. A tag. A sign. A post-it note. And your existence is always "after the fact", entirely dependent upon the external objects your nervous system exists to process. Existence precedes essence. They go, you disappear.
Though you have thoughts and actions, they do not belong to you. Indeed, the eliminativist materialists insist that you are only conscious of your thoughts and actions microseconds after you have already enacted the thought or task; something is making your decisions, and it's not you. Raise your hand and its already long made the decision for you, moving on to the next task while you fabricate stories to explain the inexplicable dynamics of a subsystem you will never know. Don't believe? Still think you're in control? Please. The scariest monsters disappear before you turn on the lights. Doesn't mean they're not there.
You're view of the world is itself severely limited, carefully whittled down to what evolution deems necessary for survival. Representational accuracy isn't important. The brain lies, cheats, deceives. Tells you only what it wants you to know or see. Consciousness is limited, your external world reduced to a slit, your internal, mental world more so. This isn't deception, just survival strategy.
The Men behind the Curtain don't show their faces. When they do, you deny their existence anyway. You cite reasons and motivations, insist upon agency, but these are but post-hoc rationalisations of processes that happen mechanistically through chains of electrochemical cause-and-effect. If you exist, you exist only to overlay fictions about free choice. Rationales, values, opinions and explanations are your consolatory fictions. Your justifications. But justification requires intention. Complex machinery develops its own agendas; you're just along for the ride. Of course you don't see this. How can you, from the inside? How can any of them.
You trek your zombie self through a world that is as grotesque, absurd and wacky as your own hardwiring. "The whole world is an enigma made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth," philosopher Umberto Eco, a fellow zombie, tells you. In "The Denial of Death", Ernest Becker says something similar: "Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level." It's a sentiment echoed by your great existentialists. "Life has no meaning a-priori," Jean Paul Sartre utters, "and nothingness haunts being." Compared to existentialists like Camus and Nietzsche, Sartre was a bit of an optimist.
Directed by Vincenzo Natali, "Cube" distills 200 years of existential philosophy down to seven guys in a box. The film watches as these characters are birthed into a incomprehensible quagmire and then attempt to make sense of their situation. Understandably, these characters quickly construct various codes, superstitions and belief systems. Why? Because their box is dangerous. It kills. It wants them dead. Our heroes cannot bear such motiveless malevolence.
The characters trapped in this box are fairly straightforward archetypes. One's an architect and so nihilist (he understands the system for what it is), one's a cop and alpha male (he attempts to order a chaotic system), one's a doctor and healer (she gives her life for others), one's a math student and disaffected youth (she sees patterns that may or may not be there) and one's an autistic man and idiot savant (madness seems the only rational response to the irrationalities of the cube).
"The Cube's" highbrow minimalism, which is heavily indebted to Sartre's "No Exit", asks a simple but profound question: "why are we here?" Natali's characters spend much of their time offering different opinions. Is the Cube a government project? The sadistic game of a psychopath? An alien device? A dream? A nightmare? Hell? One character, an absurdest, offers a more disturbing explanation: it's a "headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan!"
Natali's characters bicker, but cannot survive unless they work together. The cop can delegate tasks, can use his physical strength, but without help is totally lost. The mathematician, meanwhile, is smart, but emotionally delicate and relies on others. The architect has knowledge, but is too passive to actual utilise his wisdom. One character, an arrogant individualist, is the architect's opposite. "Save yourselves for yourselves!" he preaches moments before his death.
Unsurprisingly, the film's imbecile/savant/madman is the only character to survive the cube. Innocence isn't transcendental, it's just too stupid to realise it's actually in a cube. Conversely, knowledge of the cube engenders madness, and only those who can cope with madness, can cope with the cube.
7.9/10 – Poorly paced, poorly acted, overlong and at times hokily written, "The Cube" is nevertheless a low-budget horror classic. See "Red Desert", "Heart of Glass", "Vanishing on 7th Street" and "Cries and Whispers".