Cult-TV Movie Review: The Cube (1969)

NBC’s Experiment in Television -- broadcast February 23, 1969 -- is as avant garde and challenging a work of art as one is likely to find in the medium.

In fact, it’s difficult to believe that prime-time network television programming from that homogenized era in mass entertainment could have produced something so individual, so singular, and so surreal.

Jim Henson’s The Cube is a fifty-four minute drama that takes place largely inside of one room (the titular cube), and is about nothing less than the nature of reality itself.

In particular, The Cube is the tale of one man (Richard Schaal) who finds himself inside a room-sized cube, and who -- over time -- is confronted with various characters, various escape options, and competing views of reality.

For example, our protagonist is visited by a handy-man, the manager of the “entire establishment,” a scientist, a prospective lover, an escapee, and even a rock band.  He also meets a doctor, and family members that he doesn’t recognize.

Significantly, not one of these individuals appears to understand his burning, desperate desire to leave the cube and get home. No one can help him in any significant way.  

They all come inside the cube to visit him, then turn around and leave…and seal the doors behind them, making him a veritable prisoner. 

“No one is trapped. Some people are content to stay,” notes one visitor to the cube. 

But that information -- like so much of the data available to the prisoner -- is woefully limited.  When he attempts to just walk out a door, for example, the protagonist is informed he can’t get out that way. 

He must find his own door if he wishes to depart. 

This is our first clue that the cube isn’t concrete, in some sense, but rather a manifestation of the prisoner’s thoughts, attitudes and philosophies.

Accordingly, throughout the hour, the man inside the cube is repeatedly asked to gaze at his existence inside the white-walled chamber from a variety of different viewpoints.

Is he on a TV show, literally a projected image that others are watching? 

Is he actually dead, and living in some kind of hellish, Kafka-esque after-life? 

Is he experiencing another quantum reality?

Has he had a psychotic break?

The answers aren’t what you might expect, and The Cube, accordingly, is quite disturbing. 

The man in the cube, for instance, is visited by people who claim to be his wife and parents, and call him “Ted.” 

Yet he doesn’t recognize them or remember them. From their example, he might recognize that he is the “object” in their particular “realities,” rather than the subject in his own reality. It’s a powerful disconnect, and at times, a baffling one.

Similarly, it’s important to consider that we never see the man wake up or enter the cube…he is just there when the story starts.  It’s as if he’s always been there.  The first shot of the production is of his head in shadow, as if we are inside his head, his brain.  He steps back, and we are in the cube together.

In other words, we assume -- given our understanding of reality -- that this character has come from another place and become trapped here, in this strange realm, especially because he appears to want to leave so desperately. 

But is this assumption correct? 

Is there, even, a world outside the cube at all?

Well, not if the cube is actually engineered by his mind; and represents his understanding of reality. 

The contextual clues suggest, perhaps, that our protagonist doesn’t have a life at all outside the walls of the cube. All the various and sundry visitors are, therefore, avatars for his warring thoughts; for points of view about the nature of reality.  Sometimes those thoughts are hopeful; sometimes (as in the case of the weird comedy act clowns) they are disturbing.

In this sense, the visitors are not "real" people at all (objects to his subject, as it were), but perhaps manifestations of his thoughts and ideas. 

One of those people talks to him about science; about quantum reality and the “elemental structures” of existence. Another confronts him with the concept of aging, going from beautiful young woman to aging crone in a matter of minutes.  One person asks him, specifically, if “it has ever occurred” to him that he has died and that the cube is “what death is?”

When the man protagonist asserts that life in the cube is a nightmare, he is informed that he can “turn it off.”  But later he is told not to “struggle” that death is “nothing.”

So what does it all mean?

I would suggest that the teleplay subtly raises the idea that all of human life is actually a construct, one that we create for ourselves as a kind of self-limiting box. 

Life is a version of the Matrix, essentially, with doors leading to other matrices. Unfortunately, we can't travel through those doors. Instead, we remain trapped in our own Matrix by the limits of our identity, and our own sense of individual perception.  We carry those things with us, no matter what. 

We are ill-equipped to do otherwise.  We are incapable of seeing "reality" through the eyes of another being.

Thus, we are prisoners to our sense of reality and its limits, unable to visualize life outside the confines we construct and so rigorously maintain.

That’s what the cube is: the prison we erect around ourselves. The “visitors” in the cube are those we interact with on a daily basis who come and go through our sense of reality. In the end, however, they can’t stay with us, because reality is as we shape it, and we are the only ones who live inside our version of the cube.

What’s the argument for this interpretation of The Cube?

Well, at one point the prisoner is given a telephone, but we don’t know who he attempts to call, outside the cube, or even whom he remembers, outside it. The only person he can reach is the handy-man, a denizen of another cube.

Consider that we don’t, in our own lives, make telephone calls outside the “walls of reality,” but rather to others within those walls.  So it makes sense here that the protagonist can’t call for help, or assistance from a life outside the reality of the cube. He can only communicate with people inside their own cubes (their own realities, essentially).

Watching The Cube, I was reminded, to a degree, of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944), the existentialist play that was a primary inspiration for the web series I created last decade (The House Between [2007 – 2009]). There, the idea was that Hell is “other people.” 

In The Cube, when you meet some of the visitors in the cube -- all spectacularly unhelpful -- you start to reckon very powerfully with that notion of eternal damnation as time spent with others. 

The Cube seems to have a view of people as spectacularly bad listeners, unable to render assistance because they don’t really understand what you need from them.  Yet again, this interpretation makes sense. No one can give you precisely what you desire, because your reality is your own, and their reality is different. The two don't line up perfectly.

But The Cube goes even deeper than that.  It ultimately comes to suggest that it is not the cube that is unreal, but the person inside it; the person who thought it up to begin with.  

At the end of the story, the protagonist makes a discovery about his very nature that calls into question everything, and makes one understand Jim Henson’s point about reality. We are responsible not only for the world we create around us, but for the identity we project to others as well.  

And that sense of identity is as changeable, as malleable, and ultimately as questionable, as the various and sundry panels of the cube, which move and shift at will, constantly re-shaping the nature of the room.

It’s the final revelation of “strawberry jam,” -- in the words of the teleplay -- that makes this surreal production such nightmare fodder for viewers.  

It’s one thing to imagine one’s self imprisoned, forever in an ever-changing prison shaped like a cube. 

It’s quite another thing, however, to reckon with the possibility that our very reality -- the things that make us who we are -- are as shifting and impermanent as those walls. 

If we can dream up our reality, and imprison ourselves in it, what is to say we didn’t dream up the other things we experience too?

Like consciousness itself.  

Have we -- as dreamers -- conjured ourselves at out of the same insubstantial star dust?

And if death is "nothing," can we un-imagine ourselves and our realities too?  Is that what happens to the man in the cube at the end of this story? Does he realize that he is the weirdest, most complex construct of all, and one that is no more real than the visitors he encounters?

Trippy and strange, The Cube frustrates every attempt to easily understand it, and that’s ultimately the point.  Like the man in the cube, audiences “try on” each new encounter, wondering what the cube might represent.  

Each attempt is a failure, until we reckon with the final twist: the man’s discovery about his own nature.

The ingenuity of this low-budget TV production is remarkable.  The central cube -- the set itself -- is paradoxically one of infinite variability and infinite entrapment. And the people who come into the cube are the most irritating, non-discerning character you have ever encountered.  

They aren’t real people, but two-dimensional symbols of points-of-view, from nihilism and religion to psycho-babble. They are, in short, the “noise” we hear every time we attempt to push our understanding of reality beyond its current configuration.  They are no more real to us than…well, strawberry jam.

Jim Henson is famous and beloved, of course, for giving the world the Muppets. But The Cube reveals an intellect far darker and probing than the one the pop culture has imagined for him. This "experiment" in television is actually a laboratory for understanding the precepts of Phenomenology. 

"Now you know what reality is," one character suggests, near the end of The Cube, but the answer our protagonist gets is such that you may want to close your eyes and conjure up a different reality, one far distant from the confines of this strange "mausoleum."

Ask JKM a Question: Jim Henson's The Cube (1969)

A reader named Ray writes:

“I thought I would ask you about an old, non-Muppet Jim Henson work I recently discovered by accident. 

Named "The Cube" and produced in 1969 it seems to be part of an NBC series of one hour T.V. movies.

Live action and very dark and strange.

I did a quick search of your site and found no mention of it but it seems like something you might cover. It's on YouTube and I was wondering if you have ever heard of it or seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4kEYg67Ujg

Thanks for the great site and the books you've published.”

Ray, thank you for such kind words, they mean a lot to me. I'm glad you found me, and I'm glad you brought up this subject.

Regarding The Cube…until you mentioned it (and directed me to it), I had never even heard of it, honestly.  

The information that I’ve discovered so far about it is basic but intriguing.  The Cube is about 53 minutes long (designed for an hour time slot in American television), and ran as part of the NBC Experiment in Television.  

It has aired only twice in history.  The first time was February 23, 1969.  It was rerun in 1971.

Uniquely, the program was shot at the same Canadian facility where The Starlost (1973-1974) was lensed, under the auspices of Glen Warren Productions. It also shares a cast member with that series: William Osler. He plays a scientist in The Cube, and was the voice of the Earthship Ark in The Starlost.

On your recommendation, I have watched The Cube, and to call it avant garde is a massive under-statement.  

The Cube is experimental, ambitious, and, in its final revelation, downright disturbing. I understand, from additional research, that many kids watched the program on its first airing, and were very frightened by it.   I can see why the program would stay with someone, especially someone very impressionable. The program is different from conventional or traditional television, both in its visual presentation and in terms of its concluding thought.

I loved seeing this piece of “missing” or at least obscure TV history, and I’ll post a full review of The Cube tomorrow morning at 6:00 am.  Thanks for asking this question!

Don't forget to ask me your questions at Muirbusiness@yahoo.com

Cult-Movie Review: Labyrinth (1986)

Although it bombed at the box office in 1986, Labyrinth -- director Jim Henson’s elaborate follow-up to The Dark Crystal (1982) -- is one of those films that, across the span of decades, has attained cult classic status. More than that, the film has found meaning and relevance for generation after generation of enthusiastic, imaginative children.

Although the film’s final act degenerates into unnecessary and ultimately uninteresting violence, Labyrinth finally deserves its longevity because it symbolically and effectively makes its case for female agency, for the explicit right of its fifteen-year old protagonist, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) to chart her own path as she reckons with maturity and the world surrounding her.

As is plain from any close analysis of the film, Labyrinth acutely concerns a young woman who is trapped between two worlds both literally and metaphorically. At fifteen, Sarah is no longer a child, nor precisely an adult. Instead, she is somewhere in between, and not certain where, precisely, she belongs.

Importantly, Sarah also resides at the half-way point between childhood fantasy or imagination, and real world responsibilities, as befitting her age. 

The film’s opening scene reflects Sarah's uncertain status of “in-between.” Labyrinth’s inaugural shot reveals Sarah dressed in a flowing white princess gown. 

She runs through a fairy-tale glade, an ivory owl perched in the composition's foreground. After a moment, however, the audience realizes that Sarah is not some damsel dwelling in Never-Never Land, but rather a modern teenager in 20^th century America, acting out a scene from a book (titled, not coincidentally, The Labyrinth).

Throughout its running time, Labyrinth sees Sarah go from world to world, from childhood fantasy to reality and back, making choices as she goes and reckoning that whether life is fair or not, “that’s the way it is.” 

Armed with this fact, Sarah must make decisions based on that knowledge, and that are true to her heart.

Many, many films of the 1980s (E.T. [1982], Invaders from Mars [1986] to name two) involve the trope that I call “This Boy’s Bedroom:” a peek into an adolescent boy’s world of interest. It is his sanctuary and lair, and a place of model kits, monsters, and action figures. Delightfully, Labyrinth provides us a peek at “This Girl’s Bedroom” for insight into Sarah’s psyche. There’s a case to be made that every fantastic event in the film is based, at least in part, on the inspirations we see in this domain, whether it be Maurice Sendak or M.C. Escher.

Furthermore, another item in Sarah’s bedroom -- a scrapbook -- helps audiences understand Sarah’s existential quandary. 

Delightfully, no dialogue points us towards this understanding, and the film allows us to draw conclusions about this hero’s journey based primarily on well-placed images.

“Things are not always what they seem in this place.”

Tired of babysitting her baby brother, Toby, the imaginative Sarah (Connelly) calls upon the Goblin King to take the child away to his kingdom.

Unfortunately, Jareth the Goblin King (Bowie) has been listening, and complies with Sarah’s demand.  

Now Sarah has just thirteen hours to navigate the king’s labyrinth, reach his palace, and rescue her brother. If she fails, Toby will be a goblin forever more.

On her journey through the labyrinth, Sarah encounters a variety of strange creatures, both helpful and treacherous, including Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus.  

She also navigates dangerous terrain, encountering the cavern of helping hands and the Bog of Eternal Stench

Finally, Sarah must confront the Goblin King, and her own fantasies about adulthood as well…

“The way forward is sometimes the way back.”

Gaze closely at the scenes in Labyrinth set inside Sarah’s suburban bedroom, and you’ll detect posters, scrapbooks, and photographs of her (absent) mother.  

Her mother, an actress named Linda Williams, has apparently left the family behind for a love affair with an actor -- played by David Bowie. In the scrapbook, we read headlines of Linda’s on-again/off-again relationship with this actor, and see photographs of the couple together. 

In the same scrapbook, we see that Sarah has drawn hearts by the photos of her mother, and written the word “Mom” in red marker.  

Sarah now lives with her father, stepmother and baby brother, and has fantasized that normal existence as a sort of put-upon Cinderella-styled one. 

Her new “mom” reports that she doesn’t appreciate being cast in the role of “wicked stepmother," but Sarah persists in doing just that. She idolizes her own mother, who -- despite leaving the family -- lives in the glamorous world of romance and acting.

So, through visuals, Labyrinth establishes that Sarah loves her biological mother and misses her desperately.  But, at the same time, this imagery suggest her mother has abandoned that which is important: family.

The fantasy narrative of Labyrinth, in which Sarah must choose whether or not to abandon her baby brother, Toby, deliberately mirrors the choice her mother has made. And David Bowie doubles as both the actor who took away Sarah's mother (seen only in photograph form), and the Goblin King, Jareth, who entices Sarah to a life in which abandoning a child is okay...at least if fantasy and romance are involved.

The bedroom setting is vital to the film, not only for establishing the context of Sarah’s story (her first steps into adulthood) but also for revealing the direction of the eventual fantasy sequences. Virtually all of Sarah’s travails in the Goblin King’s world emerge right from the items we see decorating Sarah's bedroom.

In a long, slow pan, Henson’s camera falls across a strange, pink plush animal that later finds life in the Goblin world as the dancing fire gang creature (the one with the detachable limbs).

Similarly, Sarah encounters the gentle Ludo, who looks like he came right out of Where the Wild Things Are.  Accordingly, a Sendak book also seen in the same pan.

The same pan also reveals a music box in which a beautiful princess stands inside a golden pavilion or frame work.  Later in the film, Sarah becomes that princess, at least for a time, after eating the poison peach given her by Jareth. She is then depicted wearing the same dress that we saw on the music box figurine.  he is also viewed inside a bubble, and the world -- like the music box -- is most definitely a gilded cage.  

Inside that gilded cage, Sarah can live a life with Jareth as her romantic lover, but the price for such romance and lust is that she loses her brother, her family, forever.  

In real life, of course, this is the “illusion” that her mother has already selected.  Linda went off and romanced an actor, a figure who might be correctly described as being deceitful in a sense, since he appears to be one thing, but is actually another.  

In the fantasy world, standing in for that kind of "two faced" figure is not just Jareth, but several masked individuals. They cloak their real identities behind those masks, but it’s a lovely, romantic world on the surface.

The film's central setting, the labyrinth, is also foreshadowed in that early, detailed pan across the bedroom.

Even the film’s final confrontation, in which Sarah must make a choice between Jareth or her brother, Toby, we see a visual reference to Sarah’s bedroom.  

There, on the wall, in the film’s early scenes, we see a painting of an impossible labyrinth created by Escher.  In the climactic scene, Sarah actually inhabits that labyrinth, and attempts to rescue Toby.  It takes some time to reach him, because the world -- like adulthood itself -- is so confusingly rendered.

In The Wizard of Oz, every character that Dorothy knew in Kansas had a double in Oz, and in Labyrinth, virtually every item, book, or figure (including a Goblin King custom figure!) in Sarah’s bedroom also comes to life in the fantasy world.  

One thing that remains so delightful and affirming about the film and this symbolic approach is that Sarah is ultimately able to make a good choice regarding her future (and her brother’s) without surrendering her right to imagination. These things in her bedroom (books, posters, etc.) are part of her gestalt.  

After the Goblin King is defeated, Sarah begins to say goodbye to those who helped her on her quest, including Ludo and Hoggle. But Sarah realizes that they are part of who she is now, and that since she is the one with the power, she can continue to have them as guides, going forward, as long as she wishes.

To grow up means to think differently, but it doesn’t mean you forget who you are. That was the mistake Sarah's mother made. When Linda left Sarah behind, she sacrificed too much for a “fantasy” image of perfect romance.

One of the most successful and symbolically-wrought scenes in Labyrinth comes soon after Sarah has rejected temptation and a life inside Jareth’s bubble or music box, symbolically rejecting the adult choice her mother made.

Next, Sarah ends up in a junkyard, and a junkyard representation of her bedroom.  A weird junk lady begins accosting Sarah with all of her old plush animals, all the toys she has outgrown. Sarah rejects the goblin's entreaties because she is no longer an innocent child. Those particular toys belong in her past, but the junk lady -- not unlike Jareth -- keeps trying to define her, keeps trying to tell her the things she “needs.”  In other words, if Jareth represents a negative "face" of adulthood that Sarah must avoid, the junkyard lady interlude represents a face of childhood that Sarah has outgrown.

Finally, Sarah defeats the Goblin King when she remembers a line from her book: The Labyrinth.  

That line asserts “You have no power over me.”  

This is Sarah’s ultimate recognition of her own agency, her own power and capacity to chart her path.  She is not bound by the actions of the junk goblin, who tries to infantilize her, nor seduced by the Goblin King, who wants her to believe that adulthood is, simply, an offering "of dreams come true.”

On the contrary, with adulthood comes Sarah’s reckoning that life isn’t fair...but that’s the way it is.  

The trick is to understand that fact (that life isnt fair) and plan accordingly, knowing the truth. Labyrinth is a delightful and valuable film because it suggests that adulthood is not about getting your dreams to come true, usually, or finding a fantasy love with an appealing, bad-boy figure (Jareth, and the actor who romance Linda).  

Instead, life is about holding onto who you are and your influences and beliefs even in the face of a world that is not always as you would wish it to be.

Even the film’s central idea of a labyrinth seems to reinforce this idea of Sarah’s heroic journey. She does not go through a maze, notably, but rather a labyrinth, which is a single path to a central location.  That’s what life is: finding the identity that is “central” to your personality.  Some might even call it your heart.

When I first watched Labyrinth many (many…) moons ago, I must confess I was disappointed with the film.  I felt it was a sort of creative pull-back from the uncompromising genius of The Dark Crystal: a film lighter in mood, with identifiable human performers at its center.  I felt that few of the creations here could rival the ingenuity or imagination The Dark Crystal put on screen in the form of the Skeksis, the Garthim, or Aughra.

I see now, as an adult, that I missed the point. By a mile. As much as The Dark Crystal charts a completely alien world, Labyrinth asks audiences to understand its “in between” worlds premise about Sarah, and make her journey to adulthood one we can relate to and understand.

And without making invidious comparisons to other films, the creation of Sarah’s fantasy world here is quite remarkable. The “helping hands” cavern is unforgettable, and Ludo seems to be Chewbacca by way of Where the Wild Things Are.

Yes, the final battle between Sarah’s allies and the Goblin King’s minions is largely unnecessary (especially the machine gun sequence…), but otherwise that the film ingeniously visualizes Sarah’s imagination, drawing “life” from the fantastic inspirations we see decorating This Girl's Bedroom.

I am also quite certain that, as a teenager, I entirely missed the idea that the Goblin King had a surrogate in reality, as the man who took Sarah’s mother away from the family. 

With full knowledge of this today, the metaphor underlying Labyrinth is all that much clearer.  Jareth is the bad boy and romantic promise of adulthood (sex, romance, dreams, adventure come true…) that allows the idea of sacrificing family even exist as a possibility.  What’s truly intriguing, too is the idea of Toby’s fate if left un-rescued. He will grow up to be a Goblin, to be a “family thief,” essentially, if raised by Jareth.  In other words, the cycle of raising "goblins" continues.

Labyrinth is by no means a perfect film. Some of the musical sequences seem badly-dated, and the pacing is a bit off in spots too. But nonetheless, this is a fantasy film with heart, and it features the relatively rare occurrence of a female hero driving and motivating the action. 

Labyrinth is also an implicit rejection of princess-ism, a true blight in our modern culture because it suggests that a woman has worth only by virtue of marrying a prince, or being born to a King. In other words, basically for a woman to be successful and special she must be connected to a powerful man in some way. In short...no agency of her own.

Sarah’s story, by contrast, is very much about her own agency. Labyrinth is about Sarah choosing her own path, and maintaining her own identity while she does so.

To quote the film: “that’s the way it’s done...”