Cabin in the Woods, or, How to Deconstruct Tropes While Still Adhering to Cliched Gender Roles

(Forgive me, I am late to the party on this one—I didn’t get to it until the movie made it to the dollar theater, so, yeah, this post is closer to the DVD release date than the theatrical release date.  This is what it’s like to be employed, but still pretty broke.)

(Also, you know, spoilers.)

It takes a lot to get me to go see a horror movie.  I’m not particularly a fan of the genre in general, mostly because the films tend to be poorly written and incredibly trite. But Joss Whedon could write a movie about a throw pillow, and I’d probably go see it and think it was fantastic, so, for The Cabin in the Woods, I made an exception.

The horror genre is one rife with tropes, and if there’s anyone you who’s willing to turn tropes on their ear, it’s Joss Whedon. And that’s what he does with this film. Almost every horror trope still appears, but each one is twisted or, in the least, explained as part of a larger plan to appease a group of divine beings that will destroy the world if they don’t get the required sacrifice before the deadline. Everything from the choice not to Stay Out Of The Woods to Jules’s Death By Sex is explained with drugs that alter brain chemistry or pheromones pumped into the air or some other outside force concocted by a bunch of people in an office with Ominous Multiple Screens.

It’s certainly refreshing to see what are frequently clichéd and easy screenwriting techniques given actual purpose that’s defined by the main conflict of the plot, and one has to respect the details included in both the writing and directing of the movie. But there’s one thing that confuses me.

In all of this effort to turn tropes inside out, it seems like one important cliché was overlooked.

Traditionally in storytelling, there are two female archetypes that are used over and over again: the virgin and the vamp. The virgin embodies purity and "traditional feminine values"; the vamp is a woman of questionable morality—meaning she is a sexual being, and unabashedly, even aggressively, so.

The Cabin in the Woods, likewise, bases its main characters in traditional archetypes.  The five guests in the cabin—three men and two women--are placed explicitly in the roles of Athlete, Scholar, Fool, Whore, and Virgin.

I’m sure it surprises no one that the two females filled the Whore and Virgin roles. In fact, it didn’t really surprise me. Though I don’t agree with it, I do understand that there are certain archetypes that the average viewer will always expect to be female and, while I think that’s a narrow view and, more importantly, sends messages to movie-goers that really don't need to be encouraged, movies are, at their core, produced so that they can make money, and most of that money comes from average viewers.

The thing that really puzzles me is that women were cast in only these two archetypes. Like I said, I'm normally a big fan of Whedon, and Whedon has a pretty good track record with female characters—Buffy and Zoe come to my mind, and there are certainly many others—which, I suppose is why I was disappointed that the film (which, on an only slightly related note, failed the Bechdel Test, unless you count The Director as a name, and even then, it's a very brief interaction) didn’t branch out. Why couldn’t the Athlete be a female? Or the Scholar?

            For a film that was supposed to be subverting, deconstructing, or at least poking fun at tropes, sticking to conventional gender archetypes feels almost like a broken promise.

            I shouldn’t complain. Even stuck in traditional roles, the women in the cabin, or at least Dana (poor Jules didn't last too long), were active participants in the story, and the women working with Sitterson and Hadley, though they were only shown briefly, appeared competent and professional. As far as representations of women in film—particularly in horror films—go, this one did pretty well.

            But it could have done better. It’d have been nice to see some ladies in major roles that weren’t defined by the amount of sex they’d had.

            And I don’t think that’s asking too much.