1408: Horror and Structuralism

This may be a bit of a jumbled post, but I will try to keep it clean and orderly.

First, this fits into my theories on horror as social criticism. More particularly it fits into criticism of societal structures. My thoughts on Paranormal Activity and Constantine had to do more with criticism of particular things within society: antagonism and influence peddling (and the treatment of those who can see it). This one is a bit more abstract in that it is a critique of society itself. By abstract, I mean that it is not a critique of a particular society, but rather the  inherent possibility of evil in society as a structure, the fact that it is possible to make constructs that, in essence, do the evil for one so that one can keep one's hands "clean."

The actual evil itself is not specified, other than that it drives people to madness and suicide. The point is that whatever the evil is, it has been done through a structure called society. Society is basically a construct ... a constructed concept of group identity.

The basic device here is that it is a room, and in literature rooms can often stand in for the idea of structure, and thus societal constructs. Now, one could accuse me of "eisogesis" here, of reading this in. But I would argue that there is a focus on the fact that it is particularly a room, an emphasis on it. When Cusack is getting the key, he makes a crack about whether or not he will be scared by their phantom/spirit/specter (all words are used). Jackson's character particularly latches on to this comment to make an emphatic clarification of his own that he NEVER said anything about a specter or a ghost etc. He then offers a most emphatic (all the more for the clandestine delivery) definition: "It's an evil fucking room." (22:30 ff). The point is too emphatic to be casual - the filmmaker is saying that we are not here dealing with traditional personalist singularities such as ghosts of individual people (or even impersonal singularities like a poltergeist). We are dealing with a structure. The emphasis is set off even more clearly at one point elsewhere by Cusack's own contradictory comment, "it's just a room" (circa 29:00). It may contain or trap ghosts, but it, the actual antagonist, is, ironically, just a room (although a very different kind of room than Cusack thought).

It is clear here that were are examining a structure, not, to put it in Cusack's words, "Ghoulies, and Ghosties, and Long-Legged Beasties" (or, in the vein of literature, individual persons or types of individual persons they might symbolize).

The fact that it is in a hotel is another structural element. This is brought into focus by Cusack's tape recorder commentary when he first enters the room. He does some esoteric commentary on the purpose of hotels, playing off of Jackson's comment that the appeal of hotels was fertile creature comforts, but he thinks they are really for "reassuring platitudes, a prosaic sense of the familiar" (29:50 ff). I will touch on the aspect of comforts, or "coping," as I will call them, again later, but for here the salient point is that the film-maker is here emphasizing the societal role of a hotel room ... keeping members of society comfortable or reassured.

A further consideration, if we are talking here about evil/violence done (a key subject in social criticism), is that rooms are made of walls. This might sound a simplistic or condescending (to the reader) observation, except that in this film specific things happen to the walls and with the walls, and thus the issue of walls specifically becomes a justified investigation. I will examine the instance of the post office walls below under a different heading, but for the outset here, the most direct and pertinent image is the blood coming through the walls (54:30 ff). This is an image of violence, one which the basic components of a room (societal structure) try to keep hidden, but eventually cannot contain it.

(In my post on Paranormal Activity I discussed horror, or at least horror done well, as apocalyptic in the technical sense, that is, revelatory)

One final note for this intro section: this is literature and it knows that ... it knows it is a structured story. When Cusack starts to hear his daughter's voice again and wig out, he says "you're losing the plot ... you're losing the whole structure." (47:15 ff). One thing that many people often don't think about is how the way we actually think is not static, no matter how much we try to tell ourselves it is. When we conceptualize our society, we don't think of a static picture, we think of something with a history (not to play with words too much, because this really isn't a pun, the connection is much more natural, although we're often too "scientific" to understand that ... but what we "conceptualize" is something that was born, that had a conception in the copulative sense). "Story" is the backbone of societal structure. Of course, one of our earliest childhood tendencies is to internalize so we don't have to suffer experiencing the existential angst of having to doubt the structures of protection: if Daddy is weak enough to succumb to mean thoughts, too weak to protect either of us from himself, then he must not be strong enough to protect me from "ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties" outside ... ergo, it must not be his fault that he gets mad, it must be mine. Cusack starts to tell himself this very kind of thing at this point ... he explains all of the phenomena he is experiencing in psychological and psychosomatic terms ("psyhco-kinetic fibrulations" and "hallucinations"). He tells himself it's just his own personal plot unraveling, not the plot of society (the room).

The Bed: The Foundation of Society

So, that's a pretty big claim about beds ... that they are the foundation of society. But the claim is not without its own foundation in the Western canon of literature. The primary place is the bed of Odysseus in the Odyssey. It is made with a living olive tree as one of its four posts, and it is commonly agreed upon by scholars down the ages that it is the symbol of the "home" and safety that Odysseus yearns and works so hard to return to. The olive tree is the anchor of the bed and the bed is the anchor of the home and the home is the base of society.

So, what about the bed in 1408. First there is what I call a tip-off line. Cusack is wandering around the room narrating his comments the way he wants to write them for his review, and one of the first things he says is "how many people have slept in that bed before you?" "How man of them lost their minds?" (35:35 ff). Notably, this monologue section starts of with a renewed focus on room-ness, "hotel rooms are a naturally creepy places, don't you think?" and even a grave reference in the "sarcophagal chambers" line. Later on in the film, of course, where do his and his daughters graves seem to be? Where the bed was (under the painting "The Hunt", 1:20:25).

When the room is examined with the UV light, the bed reveals the highest concentration of blood. But the most telling thing, for me, is that when Cusack decides to take the room down, to fight back, he takes only two actions: he Molotov cocktails the bed and then, once the blaze is going and has depleted a lot of oxygen, he throws the ashtray through the window for a backdraft to finish it off. the bed is the first to be attacked. The more something is a symbol of stability in a society, the more damage it will do if abused. Thus his first line of attack to combat the room, is to attack the particular bed in it.

Communication and Technology

As I demonstrated above, I have no qualms with arguing from the way certain words are related, flowing from the same root even when most of us think it is obvious that the various forms have parted company enough that there is no point in looking at the common origin. Here the words I am thinking of are community and communication. The first can often be a synonym for society. The second is not only what goes on between two people, it is, in some ways, the basis for society. Community has the ability to communicate with each other, not only linguistically but physically (as in communicable diseases).

And there are a number of communication images in 1408. The webcam call to his wife is important, because it is the only thing where we know something made it outside the room (unless you count the adapted ending where Katie's voice makes it out in the recording, but that's not the original ending, and, as I will discuss below, I think is actually more depressing than the original ... there is a third combo ending in which the manuscript he sent the publisher while "out" of the room actually made it to the editor, but I can figure no coherent way for that to hang together; I think it was just a clumsy attempt to see if another ending suited both their own and an audience's needs).

And this is a very telling scene, because in the act of communication the room distorts the communication in a clearly evil way. It tries to suck his wife in too. Notice that the self-picture window in the IM interface is blurry until the room takes over, then it enlarges and give him the evil grin and wink. Communication gets twisted. Even communication with self gets twisted: he remembers recording himself while looking out the windows, but when they become bricked over and he listens to his recorder again, he hears himself saying, "strangely the room has no windows" (59:50 ff)

As a sort of subsidiary image under this, we have the phone towards the end (1:31:00 ff). It tells him that his wife will be sent up when she gets there. Then the voice slows and warps as it says "we have killed your friends; every friend is now dead." Phones are a very common symbol for communication in literature written after their invention.

Along these lines, somewhere between 67 and 73 mins (1:07:00 and 1:13:00) he receives his daughter's dress via fax.

I mentioned above, and promised to mention again (IE here) the scene in which the hotel walls are demolished and it is revealed that he is still in the room (1:21:20 ff). Here the PO is not only a symbol of actual communication, but also of the hope of communication. In fact, it is more a symbol of the latter than the first. It is not where our letters are read (although it is where we get the letters from others, but we read them elsewhere usually) ... it is where we send them in the hopes of them being read, in hopes of actually communicating. And it gets demolished, and it is revealed that he is really still in the room trapped, with only twisted communication possible when the room wants to use him as bait to snare others, such as his wife.

Finally, while the TV is not usually device of real-time two-way communication, it does play a role here in memory, and sort of falls near these others as "telecommunication" (and right now I have a few good observations but not sure where to put them and not enough time to work that out, so this seems like the easiest place, with the other technologies ... you would be surprised how many stores us this "it sort of looks like" logic). The TV has two important scenes. The first is when he sifts through channels, and while he doesn't watch anything, the only thing he really checks out titles on is the porn (circa 29:00). Oddly, the porn item in the menu is right next to the family item. The other item the TV gives is precisely that ... the video of him and his wife with their daughter. And here I would argue that some communication is at least hinted at, with the daughter actually in the TV. They don't do it for long, but I think it is there. This happens another time, when he speaks her name when seeing her in the hospital bed, she looks up. (circa 1:00:00). Below I will discuss what the room might be beyond just a symbol for societal structure gone awry, and it has to do with the daughter.

But for right now, the issue of porn provides a nice segue to what I want to examine next, which is ...


Coping Mechanisms

What do people do when down on their luck or abused in a society? Or even just alienated or only temporarily homeless? As I mentioned above, the hotel and hotel room are for creature comfort, whether physical or emotional. And what are these? In this movie the pointed ones are alcohol and tobacco.  Notice how many times throughout the film he picks up the bottle of scotch Jackson gave him at the beginning. Cusack even suspects the booze of being spiked at one point. When he gets back from the expedition in the air ducts, after he dusts himself off, he says one word "Alcohol" and goes for the fridge (1:06:00 ff). After thrashing  the fridge, ironically asking his own creature comforts what they want from him, he answers Jackson's last question: "I want my drink." As for tobacco, notice when we catch glimpses of the past with his family, his "go to" for handling stress is "I'm going to get cigarettes" before the door slams.

But, as above with what is attacked when he fights back (the bed), I think the how of the attack is equally import - the room does certain things and reveals certain scenes that show us concerns of the author, but what Cusack does in return is also revealing. It is important the he uses the booze as a Molotov cocktail. And then look at what the final blow is (literally, bringing in the backdraft) ... the ashtray as symbolic of tobacco, thrown through the window. Cusack's retaliation against the room, and the only one that works, is to throw back in its face the things that are offered as consolation.

Religion

Some (particularly Karl Marx) would say religion is a coping mechanism. I'm not sure I would say that the film-makers agree that that is all religion is, but I think that they do agree that it can be used badly that way. And when it is, it will fail one, and so Cusack, after saying "ok, you win," finally opens the Gideon's Bible, only to find every page blank. Within the realm of societal construct and criticism, this reminds me of William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury. For Faulkner, there is a valid religious experience, but it cannot be reached by those stuck in the antebellum southern mentality. Only Dispy and her family, the black servants, can really have Easter Sunday. Benjy, the 33-year old (Christ figure) can only visit with them, and then when the sermon and service gets loud, all he can do is wail. As a 33 yr old gelding I do not think Faulkner meant him to represent all of Christianity as impotent, but I do think he meant him to symbolize the impotency of a Christianity that allows itself to be trapped in the white antebellum southern mentality. I think the empty Bible works in a similar fashion here.

Interestingly, the Bible was full earlier (29:20). It's interesting because the passage he opened it to "randomly" (and nothing is random when crafted by a film maker) was 2 Samuel chapter 11 ... the story of David and Bathsheba. Contrary to popular belief, that story was not originally meant to be mainly about lust (although that is involved). It begins, "In the spring of the year, when kings go out to war ... David was walking on the roof of his palace." In other words, he was not going out to war ... but his men were. If he had been in the battle camp as he should have been, he never would have seen her. This is a story of abuse of societal structure (the power of kingship).

Real Referent or Symbol

So, I have been talking all along about the room as basically a metaphor for structural societal evil. But I do think there is also a possible "real" referent. I should open this last section by noting that some of the reason I see it as able to do both roles is that I think there may be a connection, and not just thematically. It may be possible that a metaphor is more than just what we think of as a metaphor. We usually tend to think only of the analogy principle in metaphor. When metaphor is reduced to only this aspect it is an allegory, which has a legitimate use in literature, but a limited one. JRR Tolkien was known to some as being at least very cautious about using allegory too much. A French philosopher whom I have studied, Paul Ricoeur, has an entire 400 page, very dense, book dedicated to metaphor. His basic premise is to take metaphor beyond the basic analogical principle, because stripping metaphor down to just the analogical principle cheapens our understanding of it and thus what we can gain by studying or experiencing any particular metaphor. I can't really describe all of that here, but I will say that I think that what I am about to discuss does not have to be a competing interpretation to what I have discussed above. I don't think it necessarily even has to be simply an unrelated alternative. I think it is possible for the two to be intimately connected, but I don't have the time or space to develop that here (meaning that it's not only a matter of formulating it in writing ... I would have to work through it for myself even before that). So, I will settle for just outlining this possible "real" referent/s here.

There are two basic alternative endings to the movie, and my theory uses the original one, which is the ones the producers intended and I think makes the most of the movie. The original ending is used for the director's cut version on the second disc of the 2 disc release.

The key difference between the original and the changed endings is whether Cusack dies in the fire or not. In the original, he dies. The alternate ending that got substituted in the main version at least maintains that something real happened in the room. When he and his wife are later packing some stuff, they find the recorder and he listens to it. It is mostly garbled but at one point becomes clear, and they both hear Katie's voice from the scene with her in the room. So, since the wife hears it (dropping the boxes she is carrying when she does) we know Katie was really there.

(there is another ending where the wife does not hear it, and therefore we have no assurance that Katie was really there ... which, to me, makes it a completely inconsequential ending .... you don't know if he is just crazy hallucinating or not).

The official included ending (where the wife hears) depresses me. It means that Katie is trapped somewhere bad. We know this because in the scene we saw, she said the room won't let her stay, and she wants to stay. In addition, we have her voice other times in the room, and we have to assume that if the part that made it onto the recording was real, the other parts were real too. And in those other parts she basically says "Daddy, help me" (1:01:00 ff, for example). She is someplace bad. If this were all completely psychological analogy and we could say that her voice is his sense of guilt saying that he should have helped her more to be consoled when she was dying, rather than fighting with his wife, that would be one thing. Or if we could say it is kind of her memory saying "help me from being a bad memory for you, let me be a good memory," I'm not sure I would think that is a great ending, but it would not be depressing like the current re-done ending. In that ending, we know she was/is really there, because the wife hears the voice on the recording, and we know it is bad. Cusack got to make it out alive: great, hoorah and all that happy horse shit. The little girl is still suffering.

(Side note: the Katie voice progresses from playful to sad throughout ... at 46:30 ff it is playful in saying "Daddy, Daddy, where are you")

The original ending is, to me, much richer. First of all, we have a definitive statement that he did some good int he world of the living. He closed the room (as related by Jackson to the wife at the funeral). But we have more beyond that. The very last scene is Cusack's ghost walking to the window of the burnt out room and lighting a cigarette, sort of gazing out over that part of Lexington Ave. And then he hears the daughter's voice calling and says "ah ... yes" as if remembering something, and then turns around and fades as he walks into the room. Given the reality of her presence even in the main alternate ending (and we have to take it as real in this ending too, as he is a ghost figure appearing after a funeral), I take it as being that he not only closed the door of the room for the living, he also joined his daughter in the after life to protect her in whatever the dark place is she is in.

Along these lines, and I am not sure whether this goes on the metaphorical level or the real or both, but I think the room is also a prison for the ghosts. They are trapped there, re-enacting their suicides over and over again, unable to go on. I'm not sure how tightly this could be pulled on the level of the real, but on the metaphorical level it could be said that the ghosts represent the memories of those dead and that they need to be set free from being remembered only as suicides. Maybe that is part of the social criticism ... the morbid fascination with everybody being able to know everything through news media. In truth, the news media can only capture so much - it can't relate the truth of who a person was, the happy moments they also experienced and how they uniquely experienced them. But the news media does last. And so, for the world to see, as Cusack sees in the micro-fiche of newspapers, the people are recorded forever, in a sense trapped, in their worst moment of despair, their gruesome suicide ... this point is emphasized when Jackson surprises Cusack with the details of the 22 natural deaths, which he did not know because "the newspapers don't print anything about them" (19:20 ff). Shortly after, Cusack says that his readers expect the truth, and Jackson retorts that they expect "grotesqueries and cheap thrills" ... that definitely has potential for criticism of media pandering to morbid fascination.

There may also be something of the ghosts, all ghosts, being saved from servitude to the living. When Jackson speaks from the fridge he states that the living believe in ghosts mainly to have hope themselves that there is something after death (1:07:00 ff). Maybe it should be the other way round, that the living seek to help the ghosts (prayers for the souls in purgatory and such), rather than simply being helped by the ghosts in the form of belief in them helping us cope with mortality. I would have to think about that one a lot more.

And there is also the possibility of some connection with Hell. a Number of references are made to Dante's circles. When Cusack is describing the paintings, he mentions somebody's comment on the banality of evil, saying " if that's true, then we're in the seventh circle of hell" (30:45 ff). He returns to the motif of the circles of hell as he lays freezing, burning the history file of the room for warmth (1:11:10 ff). I'm not sure who the "smart-ass" is he is referring to, who spoke of the banality of evil, but it is not outside the realm of possibility that he is referring to the epilogue to CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters, a toast proposed by Screwtape, the senior devil at a graduation of new tempters (many film-makers are far more educated than the common movie-goer gives credit for, and very well may have read the book, or at least listened to the audio recording of it done by no less popular a voice than John Cleese).

Of course, the movie is also a character study. As Jackson notes from the fridge, after his daughter's death, Cusack's Enslin character spent his efforts debunking ghost stories, stealing hope. And the movie really is a tale of him coming to grips with his own past in his daughter's death. As he says in his voiceover as he prepares to fire the room, "I have lived the life of a selfish man, but I don't have to die that way" (1:31:50 ff)

And Cusack does the drama very well. His face as he realizes what is starting on the TV, and how he watches it, and touches the screen, is very moving. The scene with her in the ruins of the room, as he at first is suspicious of her as another trick of the room and then goes to her and holds her, and then she crumbles, ripped my heart out. The manic energy he has is good too. In the commentaries Jackson and the director talk about how they needed a strong actor to carry the film because it is so much monologue/solo scenes, and they're right that Cusack pulled it off.

A Riddle

Finally, I'm not sure what to do with the fact that the room gave Cusack the answer. At various points once windows and walls are bricked in, you catch a glimpse of a scrawl on bricks that says "burn me alive." But I don't remember seeing any reports of any of the suicides being by burning. A little emphasis is added to the mystery when Cusack sits in the chair as he prepares the Molotov cocktail, he says, "This may all not be real; and I may not even be real; but this fire ... that's gotta be real " (1:32:05 ff) ... and it is - in all version endings.

Afterthought

What is a hotel room most symbolic of? It is a room, yes. But there are rooms in family houses too (with their own symbolic value). What is unique about hotel rooms? this comes from a thought on the comments of hotel as comfort above. They are comfort for the traveler, for the transient, in a way. We all are transient at least sometimes. We are traveling, and that is when we stay in those rooms. Maybe we want those comforts so we don't feel too transient. Otherwise we might start to think too much about how transient life really is, even when you own a house etc.