The Box (2009)
Darko Entertainment / Icon Film Distribution DVD

d. Richard Kelly; pr. Richard Kelly, Dan Lin, Kelly McKittrick, Sean McKittrick; scr. Richard Kelly; stry. Richard Matheson; ph. Steven Poster; ed. Sam Bauer; m. Win Butler, Regine Chassagne, Owen Pallett; prod d. Alec Hammond; cast. Cameron Diaz, James Marsden, Frank Langella, James Rebhorn (115 mins)

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Arthur C. Clarke)

Richard Matheson was one of the most influential writers and screenwriters of science-fiction and horror oriented genre fiction beginning in the 1950s. 

After writing the cult novel I am Legend (filmed three times – as The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man and I am Legend with, respectively, Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith in the leading role) Matheson began two screen associations which would transform American genre cinema.  His working relationship with independent creator Rod Serling on the seminal television show The Twilight Zone enshrined him as the show’s most distinctive screenwriter; likewise his association with AIP (American International Pictures) producer-turned-director Roger Corman led to an acclaimed series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations with Vincent Price – amongst them The Fall of the House of Usher, The Raven, The Oblong Box and Premature Burial. 

When The Twilight Zone was re-launched in the mid-1980s (with a revamped musical theme by The Grateful Dead) Matheson’s short stories became regular source material.  Likewise, his wrok was adapted as the romantic Christopher Reeve classic Somewhere in Time.  Among these was his story “Button, Button” a complex and thought-provoking morality tale which, like the best of Matheson’s writing, sought to evoke Christian mythology only to debunk it and rework it as science fiction allegory – rationalist ethical mystery.  His work was epistemological and he repeatedly evoked Christian belief not as the absolute certainty of human knowledge, but a limitation which must be transcended for the human individual to progress towards an ethical humanism inherent in Matheson’s delight in the scientific rationalism that often underlay the science vs. superstition dualism underlying his mythic revisionism – taking as its starting point no less the complete denouncement of Jesus Christ as saviour in the film version of The Last Man on Earth.

There’s a progression here in Matheson’s thinking – at least as it emerges in the film and TV adaptations of his work, filtered through the sensibilities of some of the genre’s finest practitioners, the latest being Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly on The Box, a big-screen, big-budget adaptation of the “Button Button” story with Cameron Diaz fresh from her recent career best work in the Jodi Picoult adaptation of My Sister’s Keeper. 

The renunciation of Christianity as myth rather than fact that infiltrates The Last Man on Earth and The Omega Man (before the Will Smith version of the tale sought to restore an un-Christian analogy back into the Christian faith) posed an implied problem – moral relativism.  Without the absolutism of a God-given “good” in the universe and conversely without any actual prospect of eternal damnation, humankind was essentially free to choose, free to make moral choice according to the dictates of its own circumstance: what might be right for someone in a given situation might be wrong for someone else in the same situation – morality was not absolute, but relative. 

Within this morally relativist framework, it was philosophy, not religion, that offered ideals of human ethics, one of the foremost philosophers to reckon with moral relativism in the absence of God being the pioneer of “Existentialism” Jean-Paul Sartre.  In his genre work, Matheson explored this theory of moral relativism – still considered abhorrent to Christians who try to suppress it from being taught in schools (where it is a part of the contemporary push towards secular humanism) or even explored in art and cinema.  “Button Button” was his head-on confrontation with the implications and ambiguities of moral relativism and its philosophical implications for Theist belief as a challenge to a Judeo-Christian moral heritage; and it is this aspect of his genre fiction that director Kelly seizes upon most astonishingly in the critically dismissed but totally fascinating The Box. Yet in this, The Box is not alone; it is indeed the latest film in a decidedly post 9-11 trend in Hollywood genre cinema to examine, subvert and re-contextualize Christian notions of morality and ultimate judgement into morally relativist / secular humanist allegory. 

In such recent films as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Knowing and Angels & Demons Hollywood has turned its attention to the ideological scrutiny of Christian morality (and its attendant pseudo-science of the last judgement, known as eschatology) and the results have been polarized.  The Day the Earth Stood Still for instance is a silly, banal Biblical analogy, stupefying in its moral simplicity while Angels & Demons uses the pretext of a supposedly modern ideological clash between science and religion to ultimately capitulate to orthodox Catholicism rather than challenge it. Knowing, on the other hand, sought to imply that the superstition inherent in such pseudo-science as eschatology (accepted as fact by both The Day the Earth Stood Still and Angels & Demons) is merely a myth which lends itself to sci-fi speculation about superior forms of technology and morality, beyond that which is limited to Christian moral principle.

In this, The Box follows Knowing rather than the feel-good Christian propaganda of its peers – it challenges and defies Christian morality, evoking it only to relocate such concepts as salvation and damnation with an existential frame of reference

(the film is replete with references to Sartre’s play No Exit, also used ironically enough as the basis for the seminal porno chic movie The Devil in Miss Jones, which also subverted Christian orthodoxy albeit through hardcore pornography – an inherently atheistic discourse) through which to examine the implications of moral relativism as an innately human predicament with profound ethical implications in a civilization founded on the absolutist beliefs of Theism.  Although The Box becomes somewhat confusing towards its conclusion it is for most of its length contemporary American genre film’s finest confrontation with the ethics and ambiguities of humanist moral relativism and its subsequent placement of humanity within what might be termed a universal ethical responsibility – topics also examined in the recent sci-fi hit District 9.

At its core, The Box poses an essential moral dilemma.  A man, his face scarred by burns (Frank Langella in marvellously mysterious form) presents a couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) with a box.  In the box is a strange device, with a button contained within a glass dome casing there to be pressed.  Langella informs Diaz that if she presses the button, someone somewhere (whom she does not know) will die but she will receive $1 million in cash, tax free, to do with as she pleases.  However, Diaz (and her husband Marsden) have only 24 hrs in which to press the button or return the device, which will then be reprogrammed and given to another person with the same offer.  They cannot tell anyone nor contact the police or the offer will be invalidated.  To complicate matters, Diaz and Marsden have each respectively heard news which now limits their family financially and plans they have made are now in jeopardy – the money would fix everything. 

Does Diaz press the button?  Would you? 

Money vs. murder: it’s on one level a decidedly indecent proposal which brings to mind modern sexual morality master Adrian Lyne’s film of Indecent Proposal in which a couple are offered $1 million in exchange for a night of sex with the wife.  But, pressing the button is not as simple a proposition as it appears.  Unknown to Diaz, but established at the outset of The Box, is the conspiratorial mystery of Langella’s character: a burn victim, he is associated with a Life-on-Mars project headed by NASA but now taken over by the NSA (National Security Agency) and his activities are both permitted by, and monitored by, these agencies.  Why?  Is this some kind of test?  The answers to these questions unfold tantalizingly throughout the film as Diaz and Marsden must face the consequences of their actions: moral decisions which could both place them at Langella’s “mercy” and at the disposal of NASA’s greater agenda – this is sci-fi political conspiracy theory at its most ethically confrontational.

Though at its plot level, a strict diegetic reading of the film may make it seem silly and convoluted (as indeed many critics have so far sadly dismissed it) The Box is an intellectual and emotional journey, a metaphysical confrontation with moral relativism and the importance of Christian concepts of salvation and damnation in dealing with the often horrifying truth that for humanity to be truly free, there is no absolute morality to fall back on.  Indeed, two central evocations given by other characters to Diaz and Marsden weigh heavily throughout The Box – one is advice to follow one’s conscience (for Diaz not a conscience founded on Christian belief but on her reading of Sartre – she teaches existentialism – which Langella can quote back to her).  The Sartre play referenced throughout The Box, No Exit, is itself a drama of human despair – of the lack of human communication and the inherent isolation of the individual in which the prospect of “eternity” offers nothing but entrapment.  Sarte too worked in a tradition in which God and Theism were irrelevant except as mythic solutions for the ethical dilemmas facing humankind alone in the universe.

Science fiction as a genre, through Matheson and others, since the 1950s and the sobering reality of Cold War nuclear obliteration, increasingly latched onto the ontological despair of Sartre as dramatist but, significantly, refused to accept that humankind was indeed alone in the universe. 

Indeed, alien intelligences and civilizations ran throughout sci-fi film and literature, often in concealed religious analogies in which the idea of God was replaced by an alien intelligence superior to humanity but ultimately not beyond its understanding no matter how it may regard it with superstition and fear at first.  Hence, the second evocation in The Box is Marsden’s continued repetition of a quote by noted science fiction author (and Matheson contemporary) Arthur C. Clarke, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, the film’s clearest indication (echoed in the contemporaneous Knowing) that what human beings account for by religious belief has origins beyond our understanding certainly, but are not divine by nature and nor are they indicative of Theist belief, no matter how analogues their use of technology may be and how they manifest themselves in seeming religious beliefs.

The Box is a puzzle of a movie: a reckoning with moral relativism that takes the viewer on a journey through the ramifications and consequences of the individual’s freedom to choose.  It’s core dialectic is between such morally relativistic freedom of choice and the ideal inherent in much philosophy that there exists an absolute or idealized set of ethical constants in the world (Theist absolutism being merely one such construct of ethical principles) – in The Box, altruism replaces theism as one such ethical concept constantly held up as a measure of superior human righteousness and an ethical decency that transcends the limits of human religion (however much an individual may still rely on religious interpretation of such for self-validation) and which, ironically enough, may be the governing principle behind the need for such concepts as salvation and damnation to reckon with the consequences of individual human choice.  The ethics of moral relativism, ethical absolutism not as religious (Christian belief) but as humanist philosophical principle and a captivating sense of mystery which updates otherwise hackneyed 1950s sci-fi and Twilight Zone conundrums into a dazzling contemporary style makes Richard Kelly’s The Box one of Hollywood’s most ethically provocative genre movies: thoughtful and contemplative entertainment.

Copyright (C) Robert Cettl All Rights Reserved Last modified: November 6, 2009