This is Not an Exit
On the latest episode of Art & Trash…
In 1986, Bozidar D. Benedikt wrote and directed Beyond the 7th Door, his first feature film and his first film in Canada, after a long career as a writer in his native Serbia. His intention was to make a simple morality play, built around the virtues and sins of a thief, Boris, as he attempts to steal the legendary treasure of the Lords of Breston. Despite being set in an anonymous, lonesome Toronto of the 1980s, Beyond the 7th Door bears an almost medieval spirit even as it suggests futurity in its technological booby-traps. The film is stripped down to two on-screen characters, along with a recorded voice and a corpse; for much of the film these characters, Boris and Wendy, occupy modular, drywall sets that trade out death traps and escape room puzzles.
In this video essay, I’ve dealt with the film in its broadest context, as an allegory that follows the myths, parables, fables of the ancients and of the Enlightenment. But I also see it as an accidentally prescient film, in that it anticipates the escape room and Clint Hocking’s concept of ludonarrative dissonance (a concept from contemporary video game theory, seldom applied to films, but then, films are seldom explicitly participatory). It presents life-or-death puzzles much the way many 1980s adventure films did—we’ve seen these traps before, in the Indiana Jones films, in Big Trouble in Little China—but those films never traded in the patience of educational television. As I demonstrate in an extended sound-up sequence (~11:30-13:30), this is a film that wants its audience to think very hard about simple obstacles, to meditate on them to a degree that’s comic and ridiculous (watch, with rapt attention, as actress Bonnie Beck slowly counts the number of letters in each word of the phrase “Count on your wisdom”). So many of what we term ‘trash’ films, films that come from outsiders who either haven’t mastered or have willfully rejected the universalized rhetorical shorthands of cinema, show their teeth in how they deal with time and pacing, so often rendered with an excruciating realism. Beyond the 7th Door finds a different time-pace, the stylized time of informational media, something slower than realism.
But of greater interest to me in all of this is the illusion of viewer agency that it suggests. Like contemporaneous examples of interactive movies—what became the controversial interactive video game of the 1990s—Beyond the 7th Door tells us that our decisions matter, but only to a degree. For something like Night Trap, our decisions stop mattering as soon as the action button is depressed whether at the right or wrong time, and agency is surrendered back to the apparatus. It’s all about where you look, but what plays out will play out regardless of whether you’re looking. In Beyond the 7th Door, we do not shape the experience, but there is a degree of hope given in a story that involves its viewers in puzzle solutions, that their endurance will ‘pay off’ in a happy ending. Beyond the 7th Door has no happy ending. It trades in doom and simple ironies and tarnished souls that can’t be recovered.
I also talk a bit about the actor Lazar Rockwood, who modelled himself on James Dean but whose wild hair, searching eyes, and eternally cool posture could never stand in for anyone but himself. A student of mine made a wonderful portrait of Lazar last summer, and I took heart to see he was still going strong, and what conviction and pride he took in his acting which has often been, I think, cruelly derided in this film because of the imperfections of his English (I’d recommend you instead consider the strange intensity of his performance, which means more than language accuracy, which is what I find so compelling about it—if that’s bad acting, I don’t want to see good acting). Try as I might I just can’t separate Rockwood and Boris; in my mind they’re the same. Boris’s plight in the dungeon of Lord Breston reminds me of a proverb, but not really, it’s actually just something Pablo Picasso said: “I’d like to live as a poor man, with lotsa money.”
I’ve given a lot of thought in recent days to the mission of Art & Trash. I see it as the serious critical re-evaluation of the obscure and forgotten corners of cinema, and if that means I’m using lofty intellectual and spiritual concepts to talk about lowly acts of creativity, we must have different definitions of the station of creativity and the value of creative acts. I’m not building alternative canons, nor am I a contrarian by nature, but I am interested in doing the unpopular job of defending the values of moviegoing experiences that society and mainstream cinephilies long to dismiss. This is especially true of the ‘trash’ side of the series (it’s pretty a porous line, of course). I have felt since my earliest experiences with films that when it comes to fiction, I’d rather watch costumed knights fighting paper dragons in cardboard castles than the more polished, accomplished spectacles of suspended disbelief that I grew up with (born 1984, my multiplex experiences were typical of my generation, the Amblin mill).
I don’t know what I was drawn to in films like The Giant Gila Monster or Robot Monster 3-D or The Dark Side of Midnight—the accidental comedy of them, sure, but also the honesty of them, or perhaps, the sense that I was watching people sort of like me, people who don’t belong, or rather, who do belong somewhere after all: they’re all stuck in the same sundry nowhere, passing ships. Some of them are arrogant and delusional, while others are just caught dreaming, but all of them are telling their own stories, or re-telling borrowed stories, often with elements they couldn’t control and themes that snuck in subconsciously and set pieces and acting styles that wink and let us know that the world’s a stage.
This ain’t a canon, it’s a fellowship.
In the next episode of Art & Trash, Escalators to Eternity, on Standish Lawder’s Necrology, a classic structuralist avant-garde film. What does it have to do with the Trinity tests at Alamogordo? What does it have to do with pine overcoats coming back from Viet Nam? What does it have to do with Gogol and Twain? Is it absurd? Of course it is. And so are we, here at Art & Trash. Till next time.