This is Not an Exit: Participation and Parable in Beyond the 7th Door
Art & Trash, episode 18
This is Not an Exit: Participation and Parable in Beyond the 7th Door
Stephen Broomer, October 27, 2022
Beyond the 7th Door is a parable. It bears a simple lesson for living justly, as one would find in folklore’s dusty tomes. Boris is a flawed hero, a newly released convict who seeks the mysterious treasure of Lord Breston, a wealthy man living in seclusion. In order to gain this treasure, Boris must pass a gauntlet of fiendish traps, all while being taunted by a recording that challenges him to reflect on his own morality. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses the ways in which filmmaker Bozidar D. Benedikt develops this story as a work of moral instruction, how he casts an illusion of participation on the 'escape rooms' of Breston's castle, and where authorial moralizing and viewer agency diverge.
SCRIPT:
In composing tales of moral instruction, storytellers have often drawn upon common tropes: a clarity of lesson, ironic reprisals, the hero’s endurance across decades and distance. It is by these characteristics that fables and parables gain what such stories inevitably seek: to become a kind of cultural shorthand, to gain a widespread assent even across cultures, the kind of assent that circulates like a virus. The oral traditions of the ancients were viral in this sense, and these characteristics followed into the Biblical and Quranic parables and the Hebrew mashal. The roots of fables and parables, like myths and legends, are embedded with themes, visions, symbolic figures, entrenched in distant, even biological memory; they are universal in their meaning and effortless in contemplation, ensuring their translation across settings and eras. Fables are precise in their sense of moral instruction. The great template of the modern fable comes from the French poet Jean de la Fontaine, whose late seventeenth-century collections of fables expanded the legacy of Aesop, with striking humour and irony. But what causes such stories to become embedded in culture? Is it cleverness, or is it the sense that the listener is participating in these journeys? The wit of the fabulist becomes the wit of the listener. It is by this that stories become the primal scenes of the listener’s literary imagination.
Beyond the 7th Door is a parable. It bears a simple lesson for living justly, as one would find in folklore’s dusty tomes. Boris is a flawed hero, a newly released convict who seeks the mysterious treasure of Lord Breston, a wealthy man living in seclusion. In order to gain this treasure, Boris must pass a gauntlet of fiendish traps, all while being taunted by a recording that challenges him to reflect on his own morality. Beyond the Seventh Door was the first of two feature films that Serbian ex-patriate filmmaker Bozidar D. Benedikt made with his countryman Lazar Rockwood in their new home of Toronto. At the time of its production, Benedikt had a long history as a writer of popular fiction and as a filmmaker, beginning in the 1960s. He has described his work as adhering around the theme of the betterment of the human soul, a theme that operates across various genres and that prizes moral instruction.
Beyond the Seventh Door demonstrates Benedikt’s persistent theme through the figure of actor Lazar Rockwood, whose angry, nervous energy suggests a state of moral entrapment. His Boris is a thief who does not cling to any nobler purpose than taking what he feels entitled to. Regret and guilt are beneath his contempt, but he remains, in spite of this, an object of our compassion, as a man who knows no other life. Rockwood has a striking, mannered style, an emulation of James Dean that emphasizes the particularity of his own features: bony cheeks, piercing eyes, and staccato, fearsome delivery. The film has a peculiar staginess about it, made clear in an early scene, in which Boris meets with his ex-girlfriend Wendy and learns about the stakes of the heist. Actress Bonnie Beck’s crisp, stage-voiced delivery is in sharp relief to Rockwood’s, which pierces through his accent. The words often come out strange and scattershot in broken English. Rockwood’s delivery has been a point of derision for the film’s cult audience, but it’s also a large part of what makes the film and his performance so fascinating: Rockwood’s approach is one of physicality and intonation. In this he succeeds where with language he fails: the clarity and meaning of what he’s saying matters a great deal less than the conviction with which he is saying it. This intensity is also broadcast by his distinctive appearance: he commands the moment with his fervent, searching eyes, an affect of bewilderment and frustration.
The film’s locations are distinctive to Toronto: the R.C. Harris water filtration plant, a landmark of brutalist architecture, stands in for a prison in the opening scene, and the exterior of the rich man’s home is Casa Loma, a strange new-world castle built by an eccentric millionaire, transformed by the 1980s into a tourist destination and events space. The only other location in the film is one cherished by Torontonians of a certain generation, Dooney’s Café at Bloor and Ossington. A relatively new establishment when Beyond the 7th Door was shot there, Dooney’s closed in 2018. Beyond the 7th Door embodies a number of characteristics particular to the time and place in which it was made: it is a film made by new Canadians in an industry that was in the waning days of its most rewarding commercial period; it uses settings that are distinctive and warmly familiar to Torontonians; it even features, in a bizarre cameo, an appearance by perennial mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, who ran again and again on a one-issue platform to promote his fix-all aphrodisiac, Cayenne Pepper juice. Despite drawing from such a distinctive set of regional citations, what little we see of its Toronto is a vacant, lonely, indistinct city; it is Toronto as Nowhere, an anonymity that it benefitted from for decades as a stand-in for the Great American Cities.
Beyond the 7th Door bears a resemblance to the structure of John Carpenter’s films of the same period, in that its setting is essentially claustrophobic: a small group of people are trapped within a contained space within an illusion of condensed time. In this it has its greatest similarity to Carpenter’s contemporaneous film Big Trouble in Little China, which used this same adventure structure to lead its characters through a subterranean world. Like Carpenter’s films, which offered adventure with a side of ironic misfortune and paranoia, Beyond the Seventh Door has a melancholy tone, from the reunion of these ex-lovers, to its final twist; the funniest and strangest, but also saddest moment in the film, finds Boris and Wendy making love in the sewers of Lord Breston’s castle, under the vacant stare of a corpse, mayoral candidate Ben Kerr; like so much of the film, their reconciliation comes in an atmosphere of desperation, pain and doom. Benedikt’s is a work of imagination that creates a mythic world unto itself, the castle of Lord Breston, a collision of gothic fantasy and modern technology, a labyrinth of loneliness, as melancholy as it is threatening. Lord Breston’s rooms are a template of the modern-day ‘escape room,’ enclosed by riddles and timed traps, solved by increasingly complex means. These puzzles draw the audience in, with the sequences paced to allow the audience enough time to solve them along with the characters, to stay a step ahead of the characters. In this sense Beyond the 7th Door is an uncommonly interactive film, and a padded one at that; it leaves uncommon gaps for contemplation as both the characters and the audience solve these riddles.
Lord Breston is an archetype particular to the tabletop fantasy game of the 1980s: he is a dungeon master. Unseen for much of the film, he controls the narrative in every sense, and his total mastery over these affairs make him godlike, a surrogate for the filmmakers. Participation and interactivity raise the stakes for an audience that makes them complicit in Boris and Wendy’s survival; it gives the viewer a sense of power over these affairs, but that power will ultimately be taken away from them in the service of the film’s true lesson. This is the great formal irony of Beyond the 7th Door, that it is a film that gives an illusion of participation and agency. If it is thus regarded as a kind of game, Benedikt’s film exemplifies some traits of what Clint Hocking has termed ludonarrative dissonance, a disconnection between the narrative and gameplay elements in participatory media. In playing this game along with Boris and Wendy, we are given the expectation that it can be won, much as educational media tells us that the language and math lessons on Sesame Street have an instructional purpose, we solve riddles, we learn from them, we win. But in Benedikt’s parable, to win is impossible: Boris is doomed. He is a doomed man from his first appearance. The path set for him is predetermined. It relies not on our ability to solve riddles, but on his character which will invariably act on desperation and greed rather than logic.
Like any good legend, Beyond the Seventh Door serves as an allegory: it is gradually made clear to Boris that the seventh door is an exit, that what lies beyond the seventh door is his dignity, his freedom to live as an “honest man,” to reclaim his humanity and reject his criminality. It is a cautionary tale: having spent the entire movie solving Lord Breston’s clever puzzles, Boris is faced in the final moments with a decision the viewer has no control over: to claim the money and perhaps live, for a brief moment, as a rich man, or to abandon the money and leave with his life. It is only after Boris forfeits his life that Wendy is revealed to be Lord Breston’s accomplice, a siren to lure thieves to a similar fate, and host to her own perversity. This revelation suggests many more runs of this gauntlet, to complement many that came before, and by that, it bears the story’s moral instruction, but also, a sense of futility. What does one do with moral instruction that resigns itself to the fate of all tempted souls? Beyond the 7th Door, like all parables, is peopled with archetypes. Here in the dungeon of Lord Breston, flaws define character, and Boris is condemned because his character is so entrenched—so authentic—so authentically irredeemable.
CREATOR’S STATEMENT
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.”