If Brevity Is the Soul of Wit...
Some short stories aren't meant to be made into full-length movies. It doesn't matter how many really serious subplots you add; they don't really work unless they're short subjects.
Richard Matheson's “Button, Button” is one of those short stories. The original short story worked best as a brief entry in the John Collier “Gotcha” School of Storytelling. The premise was simple: a stranger presented a married couple with a mysterious box one day. They were both told that they have only to push a button on the box and they would get a huge cash reward but in return, someone they didn't know would die. The couple debates the morality of this offer until one half finally gives in and pushes the button. Afterwards...
Well, actually the original short story didn't talk much about what happened afterwards. It just presented the reader with a quick “betcha didn't see that coming” ending and then faded out. And no doubt that's how it should have ended. Any longer than that and the story just gets too pretentious. Moreover, it loses any real suspense since the longer you draw out the answer to key questions, the less the average person actually cares about the resolution of said questions.
Any argument to the contrary can be disproved by the 2009 movie The Box, which is based on the same Matheson short story. On one hand, the movie deserves props for being more philosophically ambitious than what usually passes for science fiction nowadays. After all, it just doesn't want to be yet another cheap thriller about mysterious men in black who want to manipulate us into doing God knows what; it wants to be the ultimate version of such a thriller. And it doesn't hurt that the movie never really answers the obvious question concerning who created the box. Was it God? The Devil? Aliens? The movie never really says and yet it gives us a lot of evidence to support each theory.
And yet because the movie draws out its storyline so much, it ultimately seems less than satisfactory. It doesn't want to upset the women in its audience by implying that they're all sociopathic button-pushers and yet its attempt to imply a similar thing about men doesn't quite work either. Instead of coming away with some big lesson about the nature of human morality, we're instead left with a story which pretty much implies that both sexes would push the button under the right circumstances and that there's no point in expecting better of mankind because we're all a bunch of selfish losers anyway.
Granted, it's hard to watch the evening news at times and still convincingly argue against such a worldview. Then again The Box is hardly the first movie to present such a pessimistic view of mankind and it doesn't even present it in a particularly original way. Which makes me wonder if the real test lies in how we respond to this movie. Do we say, “Yeah, those mysterious box-makers got us pegged, all right. So why bother?” Or do we prove them wrong? Personally, I'm siding with the “prove them wrong” faction but then that's just me. And it's not like I have a box.
Some short stories aren't meant to be made into full-length movies. It doesn't matter how many really serious subplots you add; they don't really work unless they're short subjects.
Richard Matheson's “Button, Button” is one of those short stories. The original short story worked best as a brief entry in the John Collier “Gotcha” School of Storytelling. The premise was simple: a stranger presented a married couple with a mysterious box one day. They were both told that they have only to push a button on the box and they would get a huge cash reward but in return, someone they didn't know would die. The couple debates the morality of this offer until one half finally gives in and pushes the button. Afterwards...
Well, actually the original short story didn't talk much about what happened afterwards. It just presented the reader with a quick “betcha didn't see that coming” ending and then faded out. And no doubt that's how it should have ended. Any longer than that and the story just gets too pretentious. Moreover, it loses any real suspense since the longer you draw out the answer to key questions, the less the average person actually cares about the resolution of said questions.
Any argument to the contrary can be disproved by the 2009 movie The Box, which is based on the same Matheson short story. On one hand, the movie deserves props for being more philosophically ambitious than what usually passes for science fiction nowadays. After all, it just doesn't want to be yet another cheap thriller about mysterious men in black who want to manipulate us into doing God knows what; it wants to be the ultimate version of such a thriller. And it doesn't hurt that the movie never really answers the obvious question concerning who created the box. Was it God? The Devil? Aliens? The movie never really says and yet it gives us a lot of evidence to support each theory.
And yet because the movie draws out its storyline so much, it ultimately seems less than satisfactory. It doesn't want to upset the women in its audience by implying that they're all sociopathic button-pushers and yet its attempt to imply a similar thing about men doesn't quite work either. Instead of coming away with some big lesson about the nature of human morality, we're instead left with a story which pretty much implies that both sexes would push the button under the right circumstances and that there's no point in expecting better of mankind because we're all a bunch of selfish losers anyway.
Granted, it's hard to watch the evening news at times and still convincingly argue against such a worldview. Then again The Box is hardly the first movie to present such a pessimistic view of mankind and it doesn't even present it in a particularly original way. Which makes me wonder if the real test lies in how we respond to this movie. Do we say, “Yeah, those mysterious box-makers got us pegged, all right. So why bother?” Or do we prove them wrong? Personally, I'm siding with the “prove them wrong” faction but then that's just me. And it's not like I have a box.
Labels: Cameron Diaz, La Caja, Películas de Ciencia Ficción I, Películas Nuevas III, Ricardo Matheson
posted by Tonio Kruger at 10:09 PM
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