February 28, 1999

REVIEW: Cube

Cube Libré Productions, Feature Film Project. Director: Vincenzo Natali; Writers: Andre Bijelic, Vincenzo Natali, Graeme Manson; Producer: Derek Rogers

Five people—the cop Quentin, the criminal Rennes / The Wren, the high school student Leaven, the doctor Holloway, and the architect-engineer Worth—wake up in a room and noone remembers how they got there.

The cop is a fascist pig as narrowminded and blinkered as the criminal and as authoritarian. He is charismatic while the criminal is technical in authority. The cop begins recruiting and organizing blocs and alliances for God knows which war against what from the very beginning. In a world such as ours incapable of respect for and joy in the Other charisma is a worthless power coin unless it is backed by force. Force of character reinforced with fists.

The criminal’s narrowmindedness combined with his being driven in his former life by the pursuit of pure worth makes his paranoiac suspicion that the walls are watching strong.

A little girl Leaven leavens the loaf and is a powerful but unstable admixture. She represents youth which have witnessed umpteen thousands of murders, rapes, and beatings on television since birth just counting the local news. She possesses mathematical-technical competence in abundance and represents an algebraic expression besides; the formal signifier of the first corrupt-from-birth generation: X. The corruption comes not from an indeterminate valuation, but by guilt and remorse for the bad world for which she, like each of us should, feels responsible.

Worth is the only one who knows anything about their situation as it would appear from outside—the ostensibly objective mode of knowing —but instead of being paranoid is despondent. His despair is an expression of the poverty of objectivity, the paucity of the knowledge guaranteed by technological competence.

The doctor, who had been eating pirogues before her enclosure in the cubical room with six doorhatches, one on each wall, each leading to another cube room just the same, appears delusional, but her intuitions are far from being outrageous and on the contrary are quite understandable; her irrational fear is rational; her reason appears unreasonable only because of the stunning absence of data which to put into ratios, but it is her knowledge which is a prior one to her enclosure, a priori to her appearance in this film, antecedent to her interlocution with this group of four which leads her to induce, to weakly infer, what can only be put in terms of conspiracy. The knowledge of the idealistic trap into which a prioris fall, when history is taken for a set of foregone conclusions, should not prevent us from acknowledging that even Holloway’s suspicion of extraterrestrial kidnapping makes more of an attempt at truth than the fascist pig’s excluded uncertainty, his enforcement of the rule of empirical data which must remain ineffectual because there are no data to empiricize.

There is no immediate information; there is no data which have not been preprocessed; there is nothing which is not already abstract and conceptualized available to any of the four. They are trapped in a society which embodies, is, the processes by which it survives, a society which is the backhanded recognition of the principle of the end-in-itself, an organism which is what it is, the only goal of which is to do what it does.

The telos has not been subsumed, caught up to, by the creative, autonomous subject in the manner in which Hegel hypothesized; the telos has simply been subtracted, sliced out, and the end is the remainder, the dividend. The only new knowledge of the world in which the characters are trapped comes to them in numerical form. There are numbers inside the doorhatches which lead to the other rooms, which are all apparently identical except for the light and coloring.

The criminal, for all his technological know-how, is able only to keep straight ahead, to tunnel through like the boor that he is. Das Boot is his guide, and the fascist pig law-enforcement officer relinquishes control to the criminal upon the strength of the latter’s training.

It has been discovered that the rooms are not all identical except for coloring: Some contain automatic murder machines. There is no real leader of this pack, although it appears to be the scientist criminal-prison escapee, with the cop VP.

Everyone has something to give up to the cause. But only under conditions laid down by the leaders: Rennes / The Wren: “No more talkin’, no more guessin’—don’t even think about anything that’s not right in front of you.” The technologist dies immediately after speaking these words. A metempsychosis and Quentin the Cop finds the scepter in hand. “You can’t see the big picture from in here, so don’t even try.” To the question “Why?” from the doctor, one of only two questions ever worth asking, Worth answers what he thinks the room might be thinking: “One down, four to go.”

Worth has no sense of self-worth, no reason really to live. He is just hanging on and hasn’t given in yet simply because of natural survival instinct, which is precisely what keeps the world going after it has lost its pretension to rational purpose in its processes. The new-agey MD is still the most sane of the bunch, considering that she has absolutely no idea what she is involved in. Worth does have an idea, but is as irrational and as corrupt as a robber baron, as poor as your regular everyday working stiff with no hope other than to pay his bills on time, die eventually and hope that someone will pay for a decent funeral. If only it were as easy as going by the numbers.

The techie, as the movie showed us, retains the illusion of superiority to brute force, but only with the protection or endorsement of that brute force: this is the organizing principle of the modern liberal nation-state, in which the army could at any time overpower the technobureaucrats, but chooses not to because it has no clue how to do what they do, and has no desire to run things in such a pussyfoot diplomatic manner, which is really just the result, not of refinement, but of the fact that as production grows more capable with complexity, the need for ruthlessness in the economic leaders grows less, the need for rational-within-profitable-limits coordination grows more, the division of labor eventually splitting the leader in two: implicit violence and day-to-day management. Each is dependent upon the other and often one hand really does not know what the other is doing or not; one often thinks the other is really in charge. Each side then rests in its contempt for the other. This occurs mostly in the suspicions of leaders of liberal states that the army of another state is really in control of that state, as if it were not the mode of production which encompasses both the “rogue state” and the “democratic republic” which is really in charge.

Leaven becomes the leader. The fascist pig worships her and would drink a gallon of her bathwater because he is a self-hating descendant of African slaves even if the movie was made in Canada; and she is a young, pristine, white high school girl with the scientific knowledge to bedazzle and wow him.

The grinding, groaning, and shaking of the rooms, of which there appear to be an infinite number, is regular. Worth is silent. Quentin thinks he can dominate Leaven with the force of his charisma, make her work for him, harness her talent and instinct for self-preservation, which have combined to figure out which rooms to go into and which to avoid on the basis of their numerical labels-the prime-numbered rooms are bad. In his gregariousness the fascist pig attempts to enlist Worth in the effort.

The four has become five now, with the entrance of Kazan, a mentally-impaired young man who seems unable to speak a complete sentence.

Doctor Holloway, phonetically “hallway,” is a path to empathic suspicion. The cop is offtrack, the least sane of the characters and with no clue as to why. He thinks it is as simple as a malicious practical joke. A rotten-apple-Rockefeller-psycho, a demon puppeteer, a devious God. “Single-bullet theory! Right on!” says Holloway. The path to truth is not as simple as nonprimacy. There is a dynamic involved: a calculus of cubic motion, whereas Plato’s Timæus asserts the cube to be the most stable form. We are faced with a static dynamic, a dialectic at a standstill.

Meanwhile the cop is reading Worth “like a fucking X-ray”: the cop’s expertise is in human nature—inhuman nature. But Worth’s cynicism can only be the result of a letdown; cynicism is an ablution for despair, a dissolvent of an illusionary soul-searching “will-to-live,” which can get you down worse when disabused of your so-called life. Cynicism confronts tyranny, and both are halfbaked; partial aspects with no independent tendency to truth. (But cynicism has knowledge of its partiality, which is why it could survive into the better future, if only to glimpse it from Mount Sinai.)

When the doctor improvises an answer to the question why, Worth pulls the intentionality of her attempt at meaning back out again; he again subtracts the telos: “I was contracted to draw up plans for a hollow shell.” A hollow shell is nothing other than the ultimate abstraction, the preeminent commodity, the ultimate tool, the emptiest formal signification. And with the confession of having been given and having completed such an empty assignment, Worth explicitly reveals that inside or outside, the intention must still remain hidden; if there is a meaning in their predicament, it cannot reside in intention: from outside it is hidden by the division of labor which keeps contractors in the dark. The truth of this small matter is that even the presence of an intention can no longer be guaranteed by the fact of subjectivity, the fact that someone had to create the death machine, that it had to be assembled at every stage, not even—especially, to this mode of thinking—the final one.

Neither creativity nor craft guarantees a meaningful creation. Worth: “You have to use it or admit its pointless.” Quentin: “But it is pointless!” An exasperated Worth: “Quentin, that’s my point.” Holloway: “What have we come to? Oh, it’s so much worse than I thought.”

Holloway realizes here the illusoriness of intentionality, as constituted by the isolation contemporary production processes require. Worth: “Not really. Just more pathetic.” Descartes’ evil genius, which is actually the agglomeration of individual production decisions, an invisible hand, combines with geometrical Cartesian coordinates, which mark the “order” of the random cuberoom system, to create a “headless blunder,” as Worth names it.

Speaking of headless blunders, the law of the jungle is the law of all out-of-control killing machines, including Quentin the fascist pig cop, who merely assumes that this law remains in effect, even as they are already in the belly of the killing machine par excellence. No Jonah-in-the-whale conversion story in him. There is, unfortunately, nothing to hang onto at the edge of the universe in which the characters find themselves. Everywhere may as well be anywhere else. There is even an indeterminable reason, an apparent but nonfalsifiable purpose, for the selection of the participants in this madness. It seems at first as though they were placed there for the purpose of better success in escape. But everyone in the cube does not have an empirically practical purpose. Worth and Holloway have no reason to exist other than as, not quite truthseekers, but rather propadeutics of truth. The theoretical aspects of why, which can make the group more discerning of how, are important. Of course, how important as compared to the number-crunching power of Leaven is as unclear as it has been.

Holloway also possesses compassion. She has a strong enough will to influence the group to take along Kazan. The fascist black man is there and here in the review to prove that suffering does not always induce compassion: in fact, prolonged suffering often debases and dehumanizes and brutalizes the sufferer, annulling before the fact whatever effect heteronomously transcendent moral claims of moral leaders might have been able to maintain, in an ideal world in which, presumably, moral leaders would be unnecessary, only in order for following generations to turn the transcendent, i.e., the heteronomous moral claim, into an argument against the morality maintained, as has happened in the United States with all efforts to free the slaves. Former slaves can hate; victims of genocide can be cruel. And this victim, Quentin, kills compassion. He throws Holloway out of the cube, into the black night of the shell, the space between Worth’s hollow-shell wall and hell.

Leaven, as I mentioned before, has given up hope of reconciliation with the universal; she is no more interested in the meaning of her experience than Quentin. She has resigned herself to partiality; unlike Worth, she did not hit the wall in her twenties or thirties, but at seven years of age. Pimpmaster pig wants to make her believe in him, although he is totally dependent upon her numbers. He is the embodiment of slavery, the principle of the master, recruiting slaves. His brutality is unsurpassed, even by the cube itself, which can nearly come to be seen as a neutral, second-nature indifference eventually. Almost benign, with the hypnotic power of Orwell’s Big Brother, who manages to inspire affection while killing the spirit which offers it; the cube is the hostage taker and we are the hostages overwhelmed with the immanence of its being, narcotized into delusive normalcy, believing that the world is indeed closed, and that things could be not much different, finally loving, delighting in, our cold and cruel environs. The law of the jungle. Kill or be killed. Do or die. At most, we hope to find a room which does not slaughter us immediately. But, then again, we are already dead.

What is the meaning of the numbers, the movie’s mathematical path? The numbers are ciphers, not only for the answer to why, of their finding way to survive (no hope of “to live”) in the movie; these mathematical figures are also nothing less than empty ciphers for us, the viewers of the movie. They mean the same thing to the characters as to us. Mathematical figures are codes, and the one thing which is true about all codes is that they all mean something. Codes mean something. Codes mean something. That is the numbered path’s meaning. Any given could only be cliché for us, although there are still actors who could make a character feel inspired.

Cube films movies