Both Sides Now
On the reversibility of action in "Knock at the Cabin" and three films by Hugo Fregonese
In M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, a seven-year-old girl and her two fathers are vacationing in the woods, when they are taken hostage by four strangers who confront them with a terrible prophecy: In order to prevent an impending apocalypse, the family must voluntarily choose to sacrifice one of their own. If they fail to make a choice, the world will end. They will survive, they are told, but will be the only ones left to walk the earth. Convinced that the intruders are delusional religious fanatics, the family refuses to choose. Each time they refuse, one of the four strangers is summarily executed. The family is then shown apparent evidence of catastrophe striking the world: first a devastating tsunami, then the spread of a deadly plague, then planes falling out of the sky.
The compelling story setup, ported over from Paul G. Tremblay’s 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, allows Shyamalan to pursue his Hitchcockian ambition—the aspiration is there, whatever one makes of the results—of setting up identification traps for his audience. On its most fundamental level, Knock at the Cabin presents a decisive action—a terrible sacrifice—in relation to two opposed situations. In the first, a young girl and her two gay dads are taken hostage by four delusional (and possibly homophobic) zealots and asked to devastate their own family. In the second, four well-intentioned emissaries—a second grade teacher, a line-cook, a nurse, and a meterman—attempt to convince a family to make an unimaginable choice in order to stop an impending apocalypse. The magnitude of the prophecy’s consequences serves as a counterweight to its sheer improbability: for however unlikely it is, if it is true, then it should have the effect of turning this extremely sympathetic family’s refusal to choose into a selfish, even monstrous act.
Knock at the Cabin, though, does not just present two situations with an extreme disparity in magnitude (one family versus all of humanity). The film also presents an extreme disparity in the representability of each situation. In the first situation, the sacrifice would have a direct, causal consequence (a death within the family), whereas its causal connection to the second outcome (the salvation of humanity) is unrepresentable, and can only be taken by belief. It is relatively easy to show the stakes of the first situation, the loss of a family member, when the persons involved are fully present; but the loss of the entire human race takes our limited capacity to identify with fictional crises to an absolute limit. The flashbacks that drop us into significant moments of the family’s life are crucial in this regard, for they serve to reinforce an already extreme gap in representability: Every minute spent showing us the stakes of the first situation is a minute spent not showing us the stakes of the second. With the exception of these flashbacks, Shyamalan keeps to the spatial limitations of the cabin, so representations of the apocalyptic situation are initially relegated to images on a television, which can be, and are, doubted. It’s as if the film itself were contriving to represent only the first, local situation, while disclosing the other, global situation only through obscure indices, whose inferences are shrouded in doubt, darkness, and ambiguity.
If all the great action-film genres are, on some level, just duels between opposed forces, Knock at the Cabin presents a conflict of opposed situations, with all the magnitude of the consequences on one side and all the immediacy of representation on the other. The twist endings of Shyamalan’s other films are meant to get us to see, in addition to the primary situation, a secondary situation that is much more difficult to represent, but whose consequences are of such significance that, when recognized, they cannot but reverberate through our understanding of the primary one. If Knock at the Cabin can dispense with such devices, it’s because the film foregrounds its symmetry and reversibility from the very start. Shyamalan strands us between two reversible situations—poles apart in magnitude and representation—and forces a decisive action. Hence, the film’s tagline: “Save yourself or save humanity. Make the choice.”
Still, I don’t like the film much, mainly because I think that the premise, by introducing the zero-or-infinity odds of Pascal’s wager into the equation, does not leave much room for interesting formal play. It is possible that no treatment of Tremblay’s novel would satisfy me, and that Shyamalan has realized the best possible film version of it. But when one is working with all-or-nothing stakes, no subtle shifts in probability or identification are really possible.
In any case, I take the time to discuss Knock at the Cabin not to lambast it, but because, oddly enough, its limitations helped clarify my appreciation of three films by Hugo Fregonese: Apache Drums (1951), Black Tuesday (1954), and The Raid (1954). Like most action-genre films, these are constructed as conflicts between forces, as duels between opposed groups. But all three are unusual in both the symmetry and reversibility of their setups, the intense extremes to which the stakes are pushed, and the daring plays with identification that result.
Of the three, Apache Drums presents arguably the simplest structure. Set in a small town called Spanish Boot, the film opens with the mayor, Joe Madden (Willard Parker), turning Sam Leeds (Stephen McNally), a dishonest gambler, out of town—a justifiable, even just action that has the nice effect of leaving Joe alone with Sam’s girlfriend Sally (Colleen Gray), whom he clearly has eyes for. Sam soon returns with news that the town is threatened by the Apaches led by Chief Victorio. An attempt to send for help fails, and we eventually arrive at the film’s touchstone sequence: a thirty-minute siege during which the townspeople hunker down in a church as they are assaulted by the Apaches from all sides. No doubt with the input of producer Val Lewton, Fregonese renders the hellish crucible as an expressionist play of colour and shadow, while also paying off the wealth of character detail developed in the previous forty-five minutes, offering the viewer the spectacle of individuals facing up to near-certain death. The town’s only hope is the possibility that a band of U.S. troops, set to ride in on the morning of the next day, will arrive in time to save them.
The claustrophobia of the siege remains unrelieved throughout. Fregonese does not depart from the perspective of the townspeople, and the Apaches are represented only as attackers, entering the church through the windows, backed by an infernal orange glow. But the life-or-death extremes of the scenario, coupled with a few key symmetries set up in the script, force one to consider the Apaches’ corresponding situation, which is only indirectly conveyed via indices of action. The townspeople gauge the Apaches’ plans by the incessant but changing beats of the war music—and one might suppose that when the townspeople sing Christian hymns in an attempt to drown out the Apaches’ drumming, it becomes, to the Apaches, an index of the town’s morale. More significantly, an Apache messenger bears news that Chief Victorio is wounded, and that if a doctor from Spanish Boot can save him, then the Apaches will withdraw; but if he dies, then they will attack in full force. Though not a doctor, Joe goes to the Apache camp in a bid to stall for time. The gamble is that the U.S. cavalry will arrive before Victorio expires. Each side now has a countdown to total annihilation.
Thus, although our perspective remains restricted throughout Apache Drums, we remain acutely aware of the reversibility of the scenario. Crucially, this symmetry is established not simply by splitting our identification between two groups whose situations are equally articulated, but rather through a judicious disparity in what is represented. What we see is the sacking of Spanish Boot and the imminent massacre of its inhabitants, with whom we are identified, and whose survival we naturally hope for. But at the same time, we are made fully aware of the fact that to hope for the town’s survival is also to ask for the massacre of the unseen Apaches—which is precisely what happens at the end. In keeping with the rest of the film, where we know the Apaches’ situation only by inference, this conclusion goes unrepresented.
Black Tuesday presents a slightly more complex variation on this reversible structure—this time within the context of a prison break–gangster film. With his girlfriend orchestrating things from outside, Vincent Canelli, a notorious kingpin (Edward G. Robinson), escapes from death row on the night of his execution and holes up in a warehouse. In addition to Canelli’s people are a few hostages (a priest, a reporter, a doctor, and a guard’s daughter) and Manning (Peter Graves), a fellow death row inmate whose hidden stash of 200,000 dollars Canelli needs to make an escape. (Canelli had also freed three other inmates, but left them to fend for themselves before reaching the warehouse, effectively turning them into “clay pigeons,” as one of the men puts it.) In the process of retrieving Manning’s money, however, the warehouse hideout gets compromised, and like the townspeople in Apache Drums, Canelli and his men find themselves assaulted on all sides by the long arm of the law. In response, they issue an ultimatum, demanding that unless the surrounding area is cleared, a hostage will be killed every thirty minutes.
Scripted by Sydney Boehm, this superb setup not only mirrors the death row situation with the hostage situation, but also forces one to reckon with the unrepresented aspects of the former, while faced with the forceful immediacy of the latter. Canelli’s brutality and murderousness are unambiguous, and we are privy to it throughout the runtime. Manning, for his part, is not presented as either violent or vicious—but neither does he make any attempts to stop Canelli from killing the hostages. When one of the hostages Ellen (Sylvia Findley), the guard’s daughter, whose father was killed during the escape attempt, excoriates Manning for his indifference to their lives, he simply replies that no one helped him while he was on death row. Not merely a selfish justification, the response foregrounds all the forces that have largely remained unseen throughout: the courts and the criminal justice system, the prison complex, the death penalty, as well as politicking involving all of the above. (At the film’s start, we learn that the governor had offered Manning a ten-day reprieve if he would give up his money.)
The largely unrepresented past situation has the curious effect of maintaining sympathy for the gangsters, whose brutality is set against institutionally sanctioned capital punishment, and whose desperation to escape now just mirrors that of the hostages. For instance, before Canelli kills the prison guard hostage, he reminds the man (and the viewer) of what he had earlier told Canelli while preparing him for the electric chair: “Fine night for a burning.” Conversely, when Ellen promises to testify for Manning if he gives himself up, fully aware that it will do nothing for his death sentence, her action has the odd outcome of diminishing sympathy for her—quite something considering her status as a recently orphaned hostage. And the same goes for the doctor who suggests that the reporter, injured by Canelli in an earlier scuffle, should be the next hostage to be killed, his “practical” suggestion rhyming with Canelli’s earlier decision to use his fellow death row inmates as cop bait.
Black Tuesday closes with Manning unexpectedly conducting an about-face, shooting Canelli before he murders another hostage, and then suicidally firing his way out of the warehouse. The ending was almost certainly a product of Code-era constraints. But like the U.S. cavalry charging in at the end of Apache Drums, Manning’s decision also functions as a kind of deus ex machina, resolving a reversible scenario in which there are only two possible outcomes: the death of all the gangsters or the death of all the hostages. Just as Canelli and Manning do at the beginning of the film, when deciding who is to go to the electric chair first, one may well just flip a coin.
If forced to compare the merits of the two films, one could say that Apache Drums makes more consistent use of restricted perspective, while Black Tuesday makes room for more complex plays with identification. The remarkable The Raid, made from another Boehm script, and possibly Fregonese’s masterpiece, achieves the strengths of both without the limitations of either.
Set during the American Civil War, the film opens with a prison break: a band of Confederate soldiers, led by Major Neal Benton (Van Heflin) escape from a Union camp and make their way to the Canadian border. The remainder of the runtime sees Benton and his men plan for a raid on St. Albans, Vermont, intending to sack the town as they plan for an escape into Quebec. Our perspective largely keeps to Benton as he infiltrates the town in the days leading up to the raid, masquerading as a Canadian businessman, not just developing relationships with the townspeople—particularly with a war widow, Katy (Anne Bancroft), and her young son—but even becoming something of a respected personage. Most of the runtime, then, we spend in the company of the inhabitants of St. Albans. Thus does the structure direct our identification toward the town and away from the Confederate soldiers. Thus do we anticipate the total destruction of all we see.
Like Fregonese’s other films, The Raid operates on a core opposition—this time between North and South, the Union and the Confederacy. The escaped soldiers see the raid as revenge for the sacking and burning of their own homes, presumably during the Savannah Campaign—and this is how Benton justifies himself to Katy during the climactic raid. But again, it is crucial that none of this is directly seen or represented, not even in flashback. As in the case of Apache Drums and Black Tuesday, it is crucial that this secondary situation is not immediately present to us, and only emerges through various indices—in this case war trophies shown at key points. What is immediately present to us across the film are the workings of a quaint New English town that our nominal heroes subsequently burn to the ground. A Union force rides in at the close of The Raid, but it is unable to prevent the destruction of St. Albans. Whether one sees it as arriving too late or just on time will of course depend on what one chooses to see as the primary situation. Then again, The Raid’s desolate finale derives its considerable force from the fact that one cannot, in the end, make a clean distinction between primary and secondary. No other film I know makes more inspired use of the intrinsic reversibility of action and situation.
The reversibility of these Fregonese films are useful for considering more general principles about the relations of action and situation in the cinema. In the eleventh chapter of the Poetics, Aristotle discusses recognition and reversal (anagnorisis and peripeteia) as characteristic of what he calls complex plots—as opposed, of course, to simple plots, which he regards as structurally inferior, and whose reversals he gives a different name (metabasis). Even without going into the details, Aristotle’s terms are so suggestive that one can see how they might be used to discuss the films we’ve just looked at, where we have reversals and recognitions aplenty, whether one regards their containing plots as simple or complex. But if these terms strike me as being limited in elucidating these films, it is mainly because their structural principles leave unstated (or implicit) their corresponding conditions of representation. The Poetics has much to say on what sorts of actions and situations a good plot requires, but has less on the representational requirements they entail. Put differently: Aristotle provides us with a means of evaluating how well an action or situation fits into a given narrative structure, but not with a means for determining what even counts as an action or situation to begin with.
As Knock at the Cabin and these Fregonese films make clear, however, such representational considerations are not matters of indifference in the cinema. Indeed, a consideration of them is arguably what any study of film cannot do without. A full understanding of this requirement runs throughout Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which, taken together, constitute an intrepid attempt—the most fully worked-out one I am aware of—to develop a critical framework through which we can conduct such analyses. For Deleuze, representational conditions are neither merely technical nor generic—though they are related to, and may encompass, both. Rather, as his titles indicate, these considerations are for him fundamentally rooted in specifications of movement and time—specifications that are, in a word, spatiotemporal. I have at this point no definitive conclusions to offer, only a conviction that whatever else it may be, a study of cinema cannot do without such considerations.