Cabin in the Woods

I saw The Cabin In The Woods the other day. It’s very bit as bizarre as people say it is, and entertaining and funny. And being co-written by Joss Whedon, that’s to be expected. What’s interesting is the existentialist element in it. It struck me as being much less “post-modern” and “meta” and all that (yawn) as being old-fashioned modern—Six Characters In Search of An Author made into a sorta horror movie. If that’s overthinking it, then so be it. But the movie is really about free will, and its conclusion is straight out of the existentialist, free-will-as-defiance book. I think this is what accounts for the popularity of Whedon among Objectivists. Existentialism and Objectivism have some notable parallels; if you take “reason” out of Objectivism and replace it with “will,” you basically have existentialism. And as a result, Objectivists are often fond of existentialist things, with some qualms—Nietzsche, for example. The characters in Cabin In The Woods ultimately refuse to participate in a universe in which the gods demand sacrifice—or even to sacrifice one innocent to rescue the world from the gods’ perverse demands. That’s a beautiful and good message. But the universe is not like that, and it does not normally demand such choices of us. Life isn’t to be lived on conscientious-objector status. Rebellion must be followed up by creation, and the characters in Cabin In The Woods—like the characters in Firefly—are much better at the former than at the latter.