Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the award-winning 1972 Spanish short film “La cabina,” directed by Antonio Mercero, written by José Luis Garci
and starring José Luis López Vázquez.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And last week on Weird House Cinema we talked about the nineteen eighty four fantasy short film Quest, directed by Saul and Elaine Bass, and that was a real good time. If you haven't heard that episode yet, I recommend you go back and check that out. But this week I kind of wanted to stick to the theme of short films, especially weird short films. In the thirty minute run time zone, that's about how long Quest was. So today we're going to be talking about a picture that I've had on my list for a while, the surreal genre Defying nineteen seventy two made for TV Spanish short film La Cabina or The Telephone Box, directed by Antonio Mrcero. Now, much like Quest, The telephone Box you can really do in a one sentence plot description. It is very light on plot machinations, not a lot of dialogue, not a lot of information to process except for weird little images and things to kind of wonder how you should read as the situation develops, but instead of a plot per se, this movie really does have more of a situation, and that situation is a man gets stuck inside a telephone booth and he can't get out. And warning, before we say anything else, this movie does have some major twists and surprises, and we're going to be talking about all of that. So if you want to watch it unspoiled, you should pause here and go do that. The film is available to stream for free online, including in what looks to me like an official upload on YouTube by the television station that owns the rights to it, which I think is RTVE out of Spain.
Yeah, yeah, RTV Archivo. That's how I watched it. And outside of that, I'm not aware of an actual physical release for this film, though of course sometimes short films like these do get included as extras on the release of full features, but this seems to be the best, if not only, way to watch it right now, at least internationally.
So again, the situation that takes place in this film is a man gets stuck in a telephone box and he can't get out. Now, what's really interesting about this story is the way the situation develops, both in terms of tone, and I would say, ultimately in terms of genre. I said at the top this was a genre defying film, and I think you could quite reasonably ask how one would classify it if you were going to have to shelve it at the video store. Where does this go? I've seen write ups that do classify it as a comedy and write ups that classify it as horror. I think it's a lot easier to say it is horror if you had to pick one, but a lot of writing about this notes that it is both. And while I think it certainly is both, I think it would be quite misleading to call Lacabina a horror comedy. That would give the wrong impression, because horror comedy is a well established hybrid genre. But in thinking about this question of what to call Lacabina, I realized that almost all so called horror comedy movies are built the same way, and that is, the bones are horror and the flesh is comedy. So in a horror comedy movie, the plot, the setting, the characters, and situations will almost entirely be those of the horror genre. And then what makes it a comedy is that we get ironic reversals on the expected imagery or tone, maybe through dialogue or the behavior of the characters. You will get changes that twist the basic horror situation and make it funny. When I make a mental list of horror comedy movies, I think this basic format applies to all of them, all the ones I can think of Evil Dead, to Grimlins, Grimlins to Sean of the Dead, Cabin in the Woods, etc. It's really hard to think of a movie that people think of as horror comedy that doesn't basically work like that, built like a horror film, but then furnished and decorated with comedy.
I think Trimmor's is a great example of this. Tremors is a film that doesn't do anything in its structure and plot that really screams comedy, but the characters are fun and funny yes at times, and therefore you get plenty of chuckles in there, and you can, I think, accurately call it a horror comedy to some degree.
I think that's a great example, and I think there's a reason that horror comedies are usually built like this. Comedy by nature works by subverting expectations. So I think the laugh moment in a comedy routine comes from your brain recognizing some kind of incongruity. I think that's not how that works, or that's not what's supposed to happen, or that's not the right way to respond, and so forth. So when you merge comedy with another genre of storytelling, the script to follow is pretty clear. You change or subvert the expectations of that other genre in amusing ways. So maybe you play with the tone like it's a horror situation, but the moment, the moment where things would normally be very serious, something silly happens. Or maybe you satirize the genre itself, like you invert horror tropes in a way that reveals something about the reason that writers invoke them, which undercuts their power. So in you know, this is what you get more of in movies that are satires on horror itself, like Happin in the Woods. So I think that's the way it almost always works. The other element in the genre hybrid, be it horror or fantasy or whatever, is the setup, and then the comedy is by its very nature. The twist on that. The short film we're going to be talking about today is I would argue the extremely rare inverse of this blueprint in lack of beina, the bones are comedy and the flesh is horror.
Yeah. I think that is a very valid point. Yeah, because everything about the premise even just screams comedy. You hear it and you're like, all right, I'm ready to hear this joke. You don't know that the joke's punchline is going to be so bleak and horror centric. But it initially seems to have the structure of comedy, the structure of.
A joke exactly right. So it's a comedy situation. In fact, we could explore more about this as we go on, but it feels to me like a very old, classic, almost silent film era style of comedy situation. It makes me think of Charlie Chaplin.
Oh absolutely, yeah, it's very mind too, of course, like this, the mind act is oh, I'm stuck in a box, and that's the basic plot here. Yeah. In fact, I believe the filmmakers when they were casting it, initially one of them was pushing for them hiring a mind like let's get somebody who can who can do that level of wordless pure body acting.
And the main actor that is cast in the film is the guy who gets stuck in the box does have a lot of mimelike skills. So the setup of the plot is an absurd, humiliating physical situation where there's like a mechanical problem to solve. Again, this is like a Charlie Chaplin scene. So you're stuck in a box and we watch various stereotyped characters come along and try and fail to solve the problem in amusing ways. However, if this movie had just been a comedy that delivered on that premise, I don't think it would be all that well remembered. Not like the comedy elements are not good, but it just wouldn't stand out in the way that it actually does. This movie made a big impression on a lot of people. We can talk more about its cultural impact in a bit, but I think it is the horror twist that really makes this movie memorable to people and is what makes it kind of masterful. So as the comedy scenario drags on, there is a very gradual, almost imperceptibly increasing tone of menace and despair, and moment by moment, the situation just becomes less funny and a little weirder. And more ominous, until by the final moments we are in full throttle nightmare territory. And I honestly cannot think of another film that pulls off this kind of revolution in genre and tone across its run time. It's a really interesting project, has a very unique effect on the viewer, and I can't think of anything else quite like it.
The only picture that's coming to my mind that does something even kind of like this is Terry Gilliams Brazil with of course it's actual ending, not the fairy tale ending, but the right bleak ending that that we get in that picture, which is one of the things that makes it so memorable. Like there's so much in Brazil that is, you know, stupid and absurd and outright comedic, but we land in a very dark place, in a very contemplative place, and I think it's one of the reasons that Brazil resonates so strongly with everyone.
I think that's a really good point of comparison, though I would say it's different because I think the bleak and ominous stuff is there from the beginning in Brazil, but throughout the runtime it's also like earlier on especially, it's a lot funnier, and then it just ends in like its bleakest point, whereas this is a movie that starts it's not scary or bleak at all at the beginning. It starts off completely lighthearted and then ends where it does.
Now we've mentioned absurdity a couple of times, and I think absurdity is also key to understanding The Telephone Box. I think it makes wonderful use of absurdity in multiple ways, and I think we are generally primed to in interpret absurdity in terms of comedy, at least at first. Maybe there's some sort of scenario though, where if absurdity, if you're continually bombarded with absurdity, it eventually becomes horror. I'm not sure, but I think one of the film's great merits is that on the whole as even though we have an absurd premise, from the get go, it's pretty much played straight. We have some goofy moments, some physical comedy, but even those goofier moments I think are played with a realistic air and deliberately avoid going full cartoon on anything. And we'll touch on some examples of this when we get into the plot later, and then of course at the center of it all, our unfortunate man, our gray man trapped in the phone booth played by Jose Lewis Lopez Vsquez, who we'll get to here in a minute, is portrayed just very believable, very relatable. It has this quiet dignity and frustration and embarrassment that just steadily gives way to these darker emotional states.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right, And I think I'm not the first to point this out. You know, people have written before about the kind of surprising overlap between comedy and horror and the way I think they can both stem from absurd situations that you know, the genres do have a lot in common, Like they both deal with the with the building and then the release of tension. That's the structure of a joke, and that's the structure of a scare in a horror movie. And as you were just pointing out, with like the situational absurdity in the film, a lot of times the difference but like the same events could be shown as comedy or as horror, And really all that it takes to make a difference between the two is your perspective.
Yeah, absolutely, So.
Another thing I wanted to bring up about Lacabino or the telephone Box is that this is not an obscurer movie. Actually certainly not obscure within Spain. You know, we on a weird House. We cover stuff most people have never heard of, and we cover stuff that's pretty well known. This is actually sort of both because I think many English speaking listeners will probably never heard of it. But in Spain, I think lots of people saw this on TV, certainly back when it came out. Lots of people who are adults now saw it on TV when they were kids, having no idea what it was, and it left a powerful impression on them. This is one of those movies where there's like a lot of Internet search traffic of people asking what was the horror movie where the guy gets stuck in a phone box? And then they come across this and find these web pages about it. Yeah.
I think, as we've discussed before, that's one of the brilliant things about broadcast horror television is that so many of us watched something or part of something and it just stuck in our heads and we had no idea what it was. And it's only much later via the Internet that were able to find out. Oh yeah, I was, that's what it was. It was in my case like Nasaka, it was Nasica or various horror movies that I saw parts of.
We may have mentioned this on the show before, but I remember having a conversation with my dad about this where he was remember from when he was a kid seeing something on TV that really scared him, and just talking through it, we were able to figure out what it was, and it was an episode of Boris Karloff's thriller that was an adaptation of the story Pigeons from Hell. Oh yes, yes, the short story by Robert E. Howard. But anyway, coming back to the telephone box, something quite interesting about this was that it was something of a cultural sensation. It was kind of the talk of the town in Spain when it first aired in December nineteen seventy two, and I was reading an article about this movie called Lacabina Creating Horror from the Absurd. This was published in an online magazine called The Artifice, written by a contributor just called Amius. I guess that's like a pseudonym or something. But in this article, which is definitely worth a read for a lot of the background on the film. The author talks about how the movie gave rise to so it was not only talked about a lot, it gave rise to a kind of urban legend in Madrid. Basically, I think the idea was that people in Madrid were becoming trapped in phone boxes and later being kidnapped by sort of agents in shadowy uniforms, and nobody knew where they were taken, and so this actually would cause people to be afraid. And maybe whether or not they'd actually seen this short on TV, maybe they just heard about the kind of rumor of this thing happening secondhand, and so they go into a phone box to make a call and leave their legs sticking out to keep the door from shutting.
I love that they made phone boxes scary, which we should. This would probably is probably a good point in the podcast to mention for our younger listeners high zoomers. A phone box or a telephone booth is a is a compartment, sometimes open on one or more sides, but sometimes it can be sealed with a door, and there is a pay telephone in there, a telephone that you would put money into in order to place calls and could receive calls if you've watched enough older films, especially like noir films, you know, payphones off and feature into the plot. So I'm half joking and having to remind everyone what it is. But I also found it an interesting experience to watch this film that is so centered around a phone booth and really asking myself, have I ever actually used one in my life? And I'm not sure that I have ever used a fully enclosed phone booth before.
Yeah, I'm not sure I've used payphones when I was younger, but I don't know if they were ever the kind that were enclosed in a glass box.
Yeah, there is something just unique about the idea that I must seal myself into this space in order to then have this disembodied conversation with another place. There's almost kind of a magic act going on there, which I think they're tapping into a little bit here.
Well, you want privacy for your call, but I mean, does it feel private when everybody can see you from all sides?
I don't know. I mean I nowadays with everyone. I mean, it seems like this was a national expectation for folks. People are gonna have phone calls out in public. They want privacy, but now we know they don't really want privacy. People have all sorts of hyper sensitive phone calls out in front of tons of people. So it turns out it really didn't matter.
Okay, I got another bizarre cultural legacy of this movie. Also mentioned in that same article on the Artifice, in what seems to me like a quite bizarre marketing choice, there's a Spanish telecom company called Telefonica which actually released TV ads after this special that were a parody of it, using the star of the movie in the ads. That will seem even more bizarre to you after we discuss the whole plot.
Yeah, as that Artifice article kind of gets into, it's really kind of brilliant. It's like, uh oh, they've made telephone booth scary. What do we do? We embrace it, We turn it into a commercial. Even though from angles that seems a little tone deaf, it actually reminds me of some of the Severance branded ads out there right now for stuff like zip Recruiter, where they're just like, Yep, Severance, that's great, let's attach our brand to that. When Severance is in many ways like a really cutting look at workplace culture and and you know what it does to us and what we do to ourselves there.
So I'm a surfboard company. Let's make a Jaws themed commercial.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know, But then again, I guess any publicity is good publicity, so they go for it.
Now. Actually, the story of the ad for this telephone company gets even stranger because that article talks about how the movie itself, the short film may have been in part inspired by a telephone company ad that aired in the nineteen sixties and also had the star of this film in it. So, so there was a phone ad, and then the guy from the phone ad was in a movie that turned a telephone box into horror, and then the telephone company made another ad that was a spin off of the horror movie.
Right, And I think there's also some possible connection to a nineteen sixty spy movie that had somebody in a phone booth in the phone booth gets put on the back of a truck, that kind of thing. But the ultimate finished product here goes in original and terrifying directions.
Yeah. Also this in the not obscure category. This movie won awards. It won an International Emmy in nineteen seventy three for Best Fiction. This was apparently the first Emmy ever for a Spanish director.
Yeah, and as we'll get into, many of the people involved in this picture were top notch professionals who were recognized certainly within Spain but also internationally.
Yeah, so major cultural legacy. There's some kind of there was, at least at some point a kind of campaign to get a monument put in place that's like a phone box, you know, in Madrid, to recognize this movie. There's like telephone booth graffiti that people have found for somebody like illustrates the man from the movie being trapped on the inside of a phone booth.
Yeah, and it's rather telling. The article points out that Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame was inspired by this short film, which should tell you everything you need to know about the ultimate trajectory of this piece.
This is very nineteen seventy two Black Mirror. Okay. Now, we would normally play some trailer audio here, but I don't think this thing ever had a trailer, at least as far as I can tell.
Not that I could tell. So in a lieu of a trailer, go watch it. Just go watch it and come back, or if you know you're not going to watch it, or you don't like to go into films without full spoilers, then carry on and watch it later. Joe, what's your elevator pitch?
Here? Well, if the tagline for Jaws was You'll never go in the water again, this is gotta be You'll never go in a phone booth again. Right.
I think that works. I think that works.
All right? We talk about the connections.
Yes, So let's start at the top with the director who also has a writing credit on this. As we mentioned earlier, it is Antonio Marcero or Marciro. I'm not sure which pronunciation is most accurate here, but he lived nineteen thirty six through twenty eighteen Spanish film and TV director whose work was well regarded domestically and internationally. His directorial work spanned from nineteen sixty through two thousand and seven and included such acclaimed films as nineteen eighty eight's Wait for Me in Heaven, about a man selected against his will to serve as Franco's double, nineteen eighty eight It's a Time for Defiance, a romance set during the Spanish Civil War, and two thousand and three's The Fourth Floor about seriously ill youths at a Spanish cancer ward. As for his other genre films, there's nineteen seventy five Bloodstains in a New Car, a kind of follow up to this film, I think in some ways has the same lead actor. Oh and then there is a nineteen eighty three kids monster mash film, a monster mash in that it has a franking stense monster, has a dracula, a were wolf, and so forth. It's titled good Night Mister Monster, and I'm glad to report that it does feature Paul Nashi as the were wolf. I'm also to understand that it is a disco musical with some rocky horror aspirations.
Oh wow, I gotta see that. Well, I should have thought of it when I picked this movie. But there have to be multiple Paul Nashi connections, right, We're gonna get several, aren't we?
There are yes? And also that's I mean, for better or worse, That's how I end up grounding any Spanish cinema. I'm like, okay, how many decrease the separation are we from Paul Nashi?
So I found a quote of Antonio Mercero's where he's trying to describe the themes of his own work, and he basically says in all of his movies there are three elements. He says, in all my works, I have used three consps, pain, love and humor. It's a strange cocktail, I know, and often I've asked myself how I could mix elements potentially so different from one another. But in practice they have been landmarks in developing my creations. And you know what, yep, that's they're all three are here in the Telephone Box less love than anything else, but there is a bit of love, and the bit of love makes the horror much more painful. And of course there's humor too, So check on all three, all right.
The other writer credited here is jose Lewis Garci born nineteen forty four, claimed Spanish writer and director who directed four films nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, begin The Beginning at nineteen eighty two and that one actually won Double Feature in eighty four, Course Completed in nineteen eighty seven, and The Grandfather in nineteen ninety eight. He's also credited with a handful of horror films from the nineteen nineties, but I couldn't find out much about these but he he's certainly best known for his dramas, his comedies, and his social commentary. Now our star really the when I say star in the short thirty minute film, he's pretty much like the I mean, he's the focal point the whole time. He is our gray man. He is the man trapped in the telephone booth. It's his performance within the telephone booth that is. And again we barely hear from him. He is mostly sealed in there. There is no sound. It's just a pure visual, mime like performance.
He has a few lines at the beginning, yeah, but almost no dialogue for this protagonist.
Yeah. This is again Jose Leuis Lopez Vasquez, who with nineteen twenty two through two thousand and nine a claim Spanish actor who's largely comedic work eventually shifted towards the serious during the nineteen seventies. He worked in theater initially before working his way into cinema with various odd jobs in cinema, and then his career really began to take off in the nineteen fifties. So today's film certainly emerges during a prominent part of his career when he's switching into more for the most part into more serious roles and finding a great deal of success there. Some of his most critically well received films are from this time period. In fact, he won two Chicago International Film Festival Awards for his performances in the early seventies, particularly two films of note, The First I've Seen It attributed to nineteen seventy and other places to nineteen seventy one, a film titled The Anchises Would, a well regarded folk horror film about historical Spanish serial killer and self professed werewolf Manuel Blanco. Roma Santo Vasquez plays a fictional character based on accounts of this individual from the novel by Carlos Martinez Barbito. It's a serious role and only his I think, second big non comedic role, following the Acclaims aological thriller Peppermint Frape. In nineteen sixty eight, The Anchises Woods earned him numerous nominations, and then in nineteen seventy two he was in a film titled My Dearest Senorita. This was a groundbreaking Spanish film dealing with sex change and intersexualism, in which Fasquez plays Adella, who becomes Juan. I haven't seen this film and so I can't speak for how well at Sinsibela sensibilities concerning sex and gender matchup with where we are today, but it apparently broke new ground at the time, especially in Spain, as such subjects had largely been banned under the oppressive Franco regime. And during this time there's like a sort of and this is also discussed in that article we referenced earlier, during this time period, there's kind of a breaking down of some of those strict rules concerning media as Spain is beginning to sort of reach out and try and sort of fit in with the larger European world around them. And so, you know, a few years earlier, film like this would not have been released, but Vesquez's performance here earned widespread acclaim, and the film itself was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the forty fifth Academy Awards. So these two films were instrumental in his shift to more dramatic work, including nineteen seventy one's The Garden of Delights seventy fives, Zorito Martinez seventy Six's Este Signor di Negro. But of course, as far as connections go, you might be wondering, Okay, did he work with any of the Spanish cinema mainstays from the time period that we've discussed on the show before, And the answer is yes, So Frank Bronna multiple times, Lewis Barbou multiple times, Helga Line, Yes, I think at least one or two pictures there. And indeed there is a Paul Nashi connection as well. So Nashi I think had an uncredited part in the nineteen sixty six film that Veasquez also appears in. But Vasquez definitely appears in a pair of Nashi written and directed films, though sadly they're from Paul Nashi's late period. So there's a family drama titled My Friend the Vagabond, and then that's from nineteen eighty four, and then there's a nineteen eighty five film titled Operation Mantis that is like a slapstick spy movie that I think was just negatively received across the board. He did all the genres, didn't they Yeah, at one point or another. I've got his horror box sets, but I don't see his slapstick spy movies. Yeah, I mean the horror I think is by most accounts, the best I think that's also where Paul Nashy's heart ultimately was, And some of these other genres are often things he was getting into later in his career when Gothic horror had lost its popularity in Spanish cinema. So yeah, these are generally not as well received and or are not as widely known outside of Spain.
I think that he's done at least a couple of movies about characters who are either actors or filmmakers and just want to keep doing universal style monster movies and there's pressure for them to do like action and stuff. Yeah.
Yeah, Now I can't speak for how Vesquez performs in those two pictures, but in fact, in any other picture. This is the only thing I've seen Vesquez in, But now I want to see more of him because he's so good in the telephone Box again, the quiet dignity in the face of all this inconvenience and embarrassment, the gradual erosion of his resolve as the situation steadily descends into panic and terror. You know, it's all They're all wordless and soundless within this soundproof sarcophagus, and we know next to nothing about his character, and yet we feel we know him so well by the end of it, you know, just based on the nuances of the performance and also some of these nice key supporting details, like you know, obviously there's as we'll discuss, like there's this love for his son, and there's this photograph of his family. But also I like, I really love the detail of his colorful tie. Yeah, it really felt like otherwise he's wearing this kind of you know, just boring business suit, but he has this really nice tie that makes him feel like a guy who has found this one small way to allow his individualism to burst free and shine, you know, and it's very much filtered and held back, but you can get a sense of his inner light. Oh.
I think the tie is a great detail. Not to contradict to you, but you described it as colorful. It is visually interesting, but it's actually rather earth toned. It's basically brown and black.
I interpreted it as kind of an orange, but.
Oh well, maybe it is kind of orange. I mean, but it's not like you know, rain the whole rainbow. It's like a kind of brown or orange and black. But it does have these very striking expressive designs on it. It's like these kind of watery swirls in a way.
Yeah, yeah, kind of ya waves.
Yeah, sorry, folks, we just had to scroll down to our screenshots to make sure we're describing the tie correct. I don't know they could so it is like black, but it is the other color, like could be brown or maybe orange or maybe gold. It's a little hard to tell in the light quality because it's like under a really bright sun, which is another thing about this character. He's stuck in a glass box in the middle of like right under this noonday sun. So he's like baking in there, but he's got this tie on and yeah, it's I don't know what you call this pattern, but it's like these kind of spirals or swirls that look kind of like, I don't know, dabs of paint almost maybe made with the fingers or something.
It's interesting, all right, More on the necktie in a bit, Okay that there There are other actors in the picture, but mostly it's a one man show, though I do want to mention the burly man, the sort of like heavy set strong man that comes to try and bust him out of the phone booth. This character is played by Tito Garcia, who lived nineteen thirty one through two thousand and three, I wrote ton Spanish character act whose credits include various westerns, also the Jess Franco film The Awful Doctor Orloff, and a pair of nasty films nineteen eighties Human Beasts, Oh, and nineteen eighty one's Night of the Werewolf, which we previously covered on Weird House Cinema. He's one of the two grave robbers that accidentally reawakens Voldemartininski.
Okay, I've seen both of those. Night of the Werewolf's a lot better. Human Beasts didn't love that one.
Yeah, kind of a nasty one and also but in very action oriented in its early goings. Yeah, but I have to say Garcia is good here. This could have easily been a real over the top, blueto stole performance, and I guess it is. But there are these nuances, you know, like this guy's trying to do the right thing despite of the onlookers, but also kind of because of the onlookers. Yeah, and it all comes off quite believable in my estimation.
I want to talk later on when we get into some of the themes about the way the film portrays the people who stop to help the guy in the box. Yeah, I think there's interesting stuff about the choices there.
Now getting into the music here. Early on in the picture, the subtitles generously refer to the music as jazz, and I'm guessing it's probably stock music. But it also kind of works perfectly because it feels energetic but lifeless, you know, it's this sort of humdrum modernity, like this is what we have done to jazz. And later on in the picture we have a rather kind of startling shift in tone. I mean, we've been building up to it, but there is this shift in tone, and we get a shift in the music as well, and suddenly we're utilizing the music of German composer and educator Carl Orff, who lived eighteen ninety five through nineteen eighty two, best known probably for Carmina burana, which has been used to great effect in many a film, including John Borman's ex Caliber. His music has also been used in such pictures as nineteen seventy Three's bad Lands by Terrence Malick. This film makes use of a cantata from his operetta Trianfo diafrediti.
Now, initially the use of this composition did lead to a legal dispute. Orf tried to sue Marso because he said that one of his compositions was used without permission. Marcero pleaded that it was an accident. He said he used it. He had meant to ask for permission and then forgot to, and he settled out of settled out of court with Orf. Apparently they met up and they watched the film together, and they came to some kind of agreement, and then Orf approved the use of his music. But initially that was a bit of a sticky point about this. Unclear to me if Marcero actually did just forget and it was an accident, an honest mistake, or if he was trying to get away with something. I don't know. Either way.
I do feel like the orph music is used really well here. He kept us the sense of the transcendent, the tragic, and much more.
Oh yeah, unimpeachable choice to use four effect in the film. And just wish he had wish he had gone to Orf at first.
All right, Well, let's get right into the plot.
All right, So you can kind of divide this movie into three parts. There's the opening that takes place in the phone booth within a plaza in Madrid. And then there's the middle part that's sort of a journey, and then there is the climax, which is when we descend and descend into the underworld. So the first third, as I said, takes place in a plaza in Madrid. It's a real place apparently called the Plaza del Conde del vaer de Sushil, And the credits play in this blood red typewriter font all lowercase over views of the city framed by tall, blocky apartment towers.
Yeah, apparently this is a rather nice part of Madrid, a traditional district with an aristocratic architectural flare, according to Torismo Madrid. So I take the word for it.
Yeah, it seems like an elegant part of the city. So as we first come in, we're looking up at the sky at the tops of the buildings, but then the camera pans down to the plaza, which is in one sense, yes, it is quite pleasant, like it is surrounded by trees, as this big yard where kids can play soccer. But in another sense, at least in the way it is framed, it's kind of claustrophobic because we see it boxed in on all sides by these nondescript high rises.
Yeah, I feel like there's a weird sense of balance here, an uneasy balance, but balanced nonetheless. So like the apartment complexes are modern and nice, thus pacifying. Apparently government pressure to include a sense of modern Madrid to showcase to the world. Yes, but on the other it's kind of like, well, okay, whatever you may have lost to these sort of stacked confines of apartment living, at least you have these nice green spaces and pluses.
Yeah, we should have mentioned this earlier. But yeah, as you said, showing off the beautiful modernizing Madrid was apparently a requirement to satisfy the government sensors, you know, the kind of ministry that they didn't know if this script was going to get a proove to be made a made for TV movie, And it did. But one of the conditions was, okay, you got to make Madrid look nice. You know, we got good stuff going on here.
Yeah, as we'll discuss, as is often the case, government mandates for the arts can often be twisted around and weaponized in very inventive ways. And then that may be what's going on here.
Yeah, there may be a kind of malicious compliance with the sensors. So at first when we come in, the soundscape here is chirping birds and the grinding of motors and machinery. It's early in the morning, and the first thing we see in terms of action is a dark green flatbed truck rolling into the plaza with a bright red new telephone box as its cargo. The truck slows down, backs up to the edge of the yard, and then four men in telephone company uniforms get out. They unload the box, carry it to the middle of the plaza, and efficiently install it. And I want to note that nothing really feels ominous at this point. There's no indication that this is a horror movie. The birds are chirping, the music is bright, almost whimsical. It feels much more like the opening of a lighthearted family comedy than a horror film.
Yeah, like we said, the sun is bright. You get the sense that there's no danger here because everybody's at work or at school, like, nobody's creeping about. It's just people here on official business. And especially given the nineteen seventies feel to everything, I was reminded of a lot of live action sesame street shorts. Yeah, I feel like I just needed a child's narration about telephones or the letter P.
This is how they make saxophones.
Yeah. Yeah.
The only thing that potentially registers as threatening to me, and it didn't when I first watched this was only upon rewatching. The only thing that is potentially threatening is the camera angle, because instead of watching this scene from the ground, we begin with the camera way up above, of surveying everything from a distance in the sky, as if we were watching like security camera footage or something. And this could allow to set in a kind of subconscious awareness of the scene in the plaza as being monitored by distant and unfeeling observers, which is a powerful kind of horror feeling to create within fiction when you take like a mundane scene or activity, something that is not unsettling by itself, but then suddenly give the impression that it is being watched unsympathetically. It reminds me of the excellent opening sentence of HG. Well's War of the Worlds, where he says, quote, no one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own, that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps most as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply and a drop of water.
M Yeah, that's a good point. This may be ultimately because I had some sense of where things were going, but I also found it a tiny bit foreboding that the box is carried around via inserted staves, like it's the Arc of the Covenant or something, you know. I don't know, I just I don't see workmen carrying things around like this. Maybe this is accurate, or maybe it is kind of a nod to something strange.
I'm not sure. Yeah, with the poles inserted, it's like the Arc of the Covenant, or like a palan quinin which is especially funny slash disturbing when there is actually a person inside the box. So they're being carried like a king accepted as they're not being treated well.
Yeah. Yeah, And there are a number of visual comparisons that end up being made between the box and other things in the world. We'll discuss as we proceed.
So anyway, the phone company guys install the box. They bolt it down to the earth and they get in their truck and drive away, and we see the box just left in the middle of the square. It is the brightest object in the frame. The door is hanging open invitingly. It looks absolutely jolly. And after this we get a kind of slice of life of the residents of the local buildings. In the morning, we see a gardener out watering the plants in the plaza with a hose. Children running around, playing and chasing after each other before they have to go to the school bus. There are some nuns out on a walk. We see this cool guy, Rob. I've got a screenshop for you to look at. Here's a guy with a button up shirt with a big seventies collar and big sunglasses. I like his look.
He's got some books there. It has to return those to the library or something.
Yeah, I bet their books on the occult. They've got to be interlibrary loan for the Necronomicon. So eventually we meet our protagonist again. He is an unnamed middle aged man in a business suit with this seventies tie with the cool design on it. He is bald on the top of his head, with a horseshoe of dark hair and a mustache. And from what I've read, I think this guy is supposed to look like a sort of stereotyped character, a stereotypical urban businessman in nineteen seventies Spain. This is our gray man. And the gray man is not alone. He is leaving home in the morning with his son, who's a boy of maybe ten or twelve or so, and his son is out bouncing a blue soccer ball. So the sun is like kicking the soccer ball around and at one point he kicks it and it flies into the new phone booth because the door is just hanging right open, and upon rewatch. I was horrified because I forgot about this moment, but I remember at this part. The boy he goes into the phone booth to retrieve the ball, and he stops for a second like he's messing around. I think he's dawdling before school. And he goes to pick up the phone receipt and his dad comes over is like, come on, no, get out of there, and the boy does, and he never closes the door again. There is still if you don't know what's coming. There's nothing overtly frightening at this point. It's only on rewatch that this moment becomes tense. But the boy points out that the phone booth is new, and the father acts almost as if he would not have noticed that fact otherwise. So they walk off to catch the school bus. The father gives his son a kiss and says goodbye for the day, and then while walking back the way he came, the gray man stops beside the phone booth and he seems to remember that he needs to make a call, so he steps inside. And I noticed this also on rewatch. We never learn who he was planning to call or what he was calling about, never find out.
I mean, it was probably something mundane and boring, Like he's like, ah, I forgot I'm supposed to call about those tickets for the weekend, or I forgot to call about the laundry. You know, nowadays, we would stop halfway between point A and pot B pull out her cell phone and send that quick email or text message. And I assume that's just what's going on here.
But when the man lifts the receiver in the phone booth, he does not hear a dial tone, so he starts fiddling around with the phone, trying to make it work. Meanwhile, behind his back, the door to the box quietly folds shut. It's just like a venus flytrap closing on its prey. And still there is nothing yet to let you know this is horror. The man just keeps messing around with the phone to try to figure out what's wrong. Eventually he gives up and he tries to leave, but now the door is closed and it will not open, and he pushes and pulls and it is not going anywhere. And then he just stands back and folds his arms, like, oh brother, this is all I need very much. In the mime school of posture.
Yeah yeah, so at this point again, yeah, there's no musical sting to drive home what's happening. The ceiling of the phone booth is this low key and natural as can be. And initially it's just like, oh goodness, yeah, I've got one more thing now I have to do in my day, and it's get out of this phone booth. But you know, it seems like I've just got to figure this out.
Right.
It's like there's a latch or there's something. This will just take a minute.
Yeah, And so his initial struggles give rise to I think some of the most famous images from the movie, images you see clipped out around the internet, ones that are reproduced, and stills and graffiti and on the poster. It's just the man struggling in this situation. He looks around the inside of the box. He's probably trying to find some kind of release mechanism or something that he's pressing on the corners and searching up and down, but nothing. The door is locked and there is no apparent way to get out. So next a couple of men come along. There is a guy in a polo shirt and then an older man and a jacket, and they come along walk past the box, and the man in the box pantomimes to them that he needs help getting out, and so the two men stop to try. I think it's worth noting that in their performance they never seem to care all that much. They do not act like they are concerned for the man. They do stop to help, but for example, the first thing they do is they go to the man and they suggest that he try pushing on the door. Then when that clearly doesn't work, they start trying to pull on the door from the outside, but it's not moving, and then they declare, well, we're late for work, and they move on, leaving the man behind.
Yeah, the guys are basically like, look, we've done exactly as much as the Social contract Demand's office, and then they move on. And this is a vibe that's going to continue throughout the film, where different people attempt to help, their actions always very much within the neuro confines of what society and or their job requires of them.
And the thing I want to emphasize is it's true of them and basically everybody else who comes along. They do briefly stop to try to help, but it never feels like they see him or like they're concerned for him. It's just kind of like, oh, here's a little problem, eh, okay, can't fix it, see.
You, Yeah, And they never seem to appreciate any real danger. And of course we don't truly begin and our main character doesn't truly begin to understand the danger till later.
So in the meantime, while these guys are pulling on the door, several spectators sort of gather up around the scene. There are some adult women coming back from the store, they stop to look at him from a distance. There's a group of evil children who begin pointing and laughing at him, and they gather outside the door to the box. They're mocking him. They're saying, like, what's wrong with you? Man? And one of them says, should we throw you peanuts? And the children run in circles around the box, hooting at him, and they're just having the time of their lives. This is hilarious. Yeah.
How many Spanish films have we seen at this point where mobs of children mock an adults predicament. I think this is at least the third one.
That's the mainstay of Paul Nashy movies. Also, yeah, it's just mobs of evil children.
Yeah, I believe it also showed up in the Tomb of the Blind Dead film that we watch. It's like Spanish Spanish children in these movies are just out to shame and harass.
So I think it's kind of interesting to note all of the different characters who become part of the crowd around the man in the box. So there's a guy carrying an ornate cushioned chair on his head. I think he might he's supposed to be a mover maybe maybe somebody is moving into one of these apartment buildings, and he stops and he puts the chair down in the in the yard, just to watch the scene. And then there's a man who's or it's a young man I guess, going around selling pastries from a tray. He gets robbed. Later, a couple of movers are unloading a large, polished mirror that has like baroque framing on the outside, and they stop and they put the mirror down to watch what's happening. A few women nearby they sit down on a bench and begin knitting and they're knitting. That's when you really know you're in trouble. And so next we get to the large man, Tito Garcia. Here he's this big guy carrying an athletic bag. I think it's a Puma brand bag.
Yeah, Like I guess he's going to the gym or just came back from the gym.
Yeah, he's a weightlifter guy. And he comes to the rescue and he's like, Okay, everybody, get out of the way. I'm the strongest. I'll get this thing open. And he tugs and he tugs, and it's played a bit for comedy. All he succeeds in is breaking the handle off of the door, and then he tries repeatedly ramming the glass with his shoulder like he's a charging bull, but to no avail. And this is all played for physical comedy.
Yeah, but you know, you do get the vibe that he is trying to do what's right, both in the eyes of the gray man inside, but also the crowd of onlookers, like there's a performative aspect of what's going on, even though as he begins to fail at this task, they begin to sort of mock him as well. But in the end, once more, there's only so much he can do and has to do in everyone's eyes, and it's kind of like, well, it is what it is. I gave it a good go, but I've got places to be buddy. Yeah.
Once again, I feel like he never seems to really see or be concerned about the man inside. He's just like, oh, here's a problem. I'm strong, I can get this thing open. And he tries and tries, and then he's humiliated and then last to leave. Yeah.
Yeah, but yeah, there's never a sense that he cares about the individual in the box. He wants to obey the social contract. He wants to sort of appease the crowd and perhaps himself in his own ego. But does he really see the gray man at all in a sense.
No.
Somewhere in here there's an interesting moment where the man in the box sees his reflection in the fancy mirror that the movers have set down across from him and on Rewatch. I thought this was kind of interesting because a few things happen here, for one thing, and the man sees himself in the mirror. He's clearly embarrassed, and he kind of tries to adjust his appearance in a way. But this is also the first moment where it felt to me like Vasquez's performance, where the man's demeanor shifts a little bit from frustration and embarrassment to worry.
Yeah. Yeah, And of course I love just the idea of bringing the mirror into this. It feels very borges esque, you know. And also the mirror is of course a person in a box sort and so the man in the box is now reflected and is another man in the box. And I think maybe now he's seeing himself from the outside, right, he's seeing what other people are seeing that he is this person trapped within and maybe less of a person, you know, he is just he is within something else. He he's no longer like this free part of the world.
I think that's right. Yeah, But then so we we're gonna get another attempt to intervene. So the guy who was carrying the mirror next tries to show that he he's the one who can get the box open. He's like, it takes not strength but skill, and so he pulls out his tools. He's got like a screwdriver. He has the tools and he has the know how. So we see him searching all over the box looking for the place where he can unscrew the door and get it open, but he finds nothing. It's like it was made not to be disassembled.
Uh.
And then he tries to pry the door open with his tools, but he can't get that done either. And then while the screwdriver man is working and the crowd is watching, Uh, the man in the telephone box, he like witnesses things happening outside. I thought this was so interesting. So everybody's watching him, and then he's looking out through the windows seeing things happening in the crowd. That other people are not seeing. He's like seeing what is not otherwise observed. So he like watches a man steal pastries from the pastry vendors tray and cram them in his mouth, and he walks. He sees a man walk by behind the crowd with multicolored balloons. He sees the mover who set down the cushioned chair, offering the chair to an elderly woman who is also there watching the scene, which is funny because it's like it's like a gesture of kindness, but not toward the man in the box, only toward another member of his unwonted audience. And then finally, uh oh, here comes the fuzz. So two uniformed police come marching up to the scene.
Uh.
And I've read other reviewers mentioning feeling at this moment when they watched it, like, oh, okay, the authorities are here, the situation is under control now.
But nope, Well, you know, given the sort of rule of three, right, if this were some sort of a parable, and it definitely feel it has more of the trappings of parable. I think when we tell listeners what's happening here, it feels like okay now, And then the third people that came and tried to solve the riddle. They were able to solve it because they had legal authority to do so. But, like you say, this is also not going to work, right.
So the cops here have an awesome way of dealing with the situation. They arrive and they tell the man with the screwdriver to get away from the box, and they tell the man stuck in the box to get out immediately, and then when he shows that he can't, they start barking threats at him and saying, didn't you hear me, I said, get out of there now? Yeah.
So, once more they follow procedure, they enforce their authority, but they are unable to help and gladly step aside to let some other authorized party jump in. And during this section of the short film here I thought quite a bit about the bystander effect in all of this. This is that psychological theory that I believe we've talked about in the show before. It states that the presence of others tends to discourage an individual from intervening. So in the more people there are, arguably the less likely any individual is to help. And this is not necessarily grounded in any kind of like state of innate cruelty or anything. If there is a conscious energy to it all, it is often something along the lines of, oh, well, someone more qualified, someone more official, or someone more just someone closer to the situation, they're going to jump in and do what needs to be done. I'm not that person. And this is why if you've ever taken any CPR classes before, they always stress that you don't say, hey, someone called nine one one, because there's too much room for people to say, yes, that's a great idea. Someone should do that, maybe someone closer to the situation or someone unless No, what you do is you point at someone and you tell them to call nine to one one. Because if you leave it open, then there's this there's a high likelihood that nothing is going to be done, or it's going to take far longer for some decision to be made.
Yeah, everybody assumes somebody else is doing it, or it takes them too long to figure out who's doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So when the when the police kind of run out of options, that you know someone else is about to arrive on the scene. It's the fire department and they're like, oh, well, good fire department will take care.
Of it, okay, see yah, So the fire department, it really seems like these are the ones who are going to solve the problem, right. So they've they've got ladders and axes and everything they need to get inside this box. So they get like one of the fire firefighters gets up on top of the box and it seems like he is going to smash the glass in.
And I was really thinking this was going to do it, surely like they had. Finally someone has the tools. It seems it's a little violent, but it looks like this is going to work.
But just then an even higher authority arrives, the phone company. So finally the right people for the job. The phone company truck parks and four men get out, I think the same fore men who installed the box earlier, and they One thing I thought was worth noting, we never get a very close look at any of the phone company workers, whatever they actually are, the people dressed up in the green uniforms who put the box there. But from a distance they all look vaguely like the man stuck inside the box. They're all like middle aged men who are balding on top with a horseshoe of dark hair.
That's a good point. Yeah, they're just very much bland, everyday men, they are, and we get far we get far less character from these. We don't get a sense of the same sort of interpersonal connection that we do with these other phases of helpers or would be helpers.
That's right. So the four men come and they unbolt the phone booth from the earth, they lift it up, they insert the poles to carry it, and then they carry it back to their flatbed truck, put it on the truck bed and drive away, all with the man still stuck inside, and everybody at the assembled crowd they're all cheering and celebrating, like this is what's supposed to happen.
Yeah, it's like somebody who knows what they're doing came something, so things are okay now.
But the guy in the box is like, wait, what what's going on? But from everybody outside's perspective, it's like it's absurd. But it almost is plausible that that is how a crowd would react, because it's now like by removing the man in a in a kind of weird psychological way, the people who were standing around can be like the situation has been resolved.
Yeah.
Yeah, So this gives rise to the middle section of the movie, where the man is still stuck in the booth and now he's riding around on the back of the truck. I did notice this earlier, actually, but I thought we've got to mention at some point, so I do want to mention here how hot it seems like it would be inside that booth. Was just like the sun blasting down through the glass and the doors are stuck. And apparently this was actually an issue during filmmaking that, like the actor in the box, it was quite hot in there, and they at some points had to like angle shots in certain ways so that you couldn't see that pains had to be removed from parts of the box just to allow some air to circulate, or it would get unbearably hot inside. But during this section of the short, the truck is driving around Madrid and the man is becoming increasingly distressed. He tries to get the attention of the workers in the truck, but they won't even look at him like that. It's not like they're menacing. They just eyes forward, driving, no acknowledgment of him at all other people on the road, much like the crowd earlier just do not seem to take him seriously, Like they stare at him, they're kind of amused, or they mock him and laugh at him. We see some young attractive people in a convertible like pull up next to the truck in traffic, and they're all pointing at him, and one of them jokingly, I think, asks if they can make a phone call.
Yeah, And this whole time too, we're driving past more high rise apartment buildings in various high rise buildings in Madrid. And this is another I think there's some great visual poetry going on here between the vertical phone booth and the vertical buildings, the idea of these towers of modernity in here, this sort of little tower of modernity in which our main character is trapped.
Yeah. And so obviously this section of the movie is where they were fulfilling part of their obligation to the Ministry office that was like show us Madrid modernizing. And so we get some of these views of the city, but I think a lot of them are sort of situated and edited together actually to make us feel some amount of dread. Yeah, yeah, because we see like buildings being constructed and so in a way all like construction, that's growth, that's modernizing this good, but we see kind of the bones of a building in a way that's a little unsettling, especially because we see them back to back with a moment where the truck stops outside of a church where there's a funeral going on and it's a funeral with a glass coffin.
Yeah, and yeah, the comparison there is obvious and rather foreboding. But but then also gave what you mentioned about the we see these buildings that are being built, and it is there's this kind of feeling like something modern and out of control is happening, you know, And that's what's happening on the micro level here with the phone booths as well, or at least that's the sense I'm beginning to get, like there's some sort of a process going on here. People you know, delivered one of these things, it trapped somebody, and now they're taking it away, and there's this feeling that nobody is at the wheel, or that's the the overbearing feeling that I got from it, like there are just machinations in process. They are completely unfeeling, nobody approved them, nobody's fighting them. It's just what's happening, uh, and you and you were just in the wrong place of the wrong time.
Will it connects to a kind of to a kind of real world horror that I think a lot of people will have some experience with the feeling of like when you are in some way to your detriment being the object of an institutional process something by like a you know, a big corporation or a government or some big institution, and there's no way for you to feel like you are getting a foothold with that organization, like they're paying attention to your needs. And that kind of experience can of course run the whole gamut from just like a very frustrating inconvenience to like severe oppression of a person's rights, and in any sense it feels bad, but it can go from much like this story does, from the inconvenient to the horrifying. Now right around here in the stories, the first moment where I would say the energy really seems to tip over when it crosses the threshold into horror, and that moment is when the truck pulls up next to a playground and there are children singing a kind of song where it's some kind of I don't know, old like nursery rhyme song that talks about like Easter and the Trinity. And the truck stops and it stops next to another phone company truck, on which there is also a red telephone box with a man stuck inside.
Yeah, and that's where we begin to realize this is not a singular incident, This is not maybe not that much of an anomaly, This is maybe happening all the time.
Yeah, And so the men are unable to talk, like because they're both stuck in the boxes, but they look at each other and you see them both like a kind of horror or dawning on them when they see one another. Also because they're kind of dressed the same and look similar, like they just like look like similar guys. And they see each other and they they're aware something frightening is happening, and they're both powerless to do anything about it. So you can see a it's weird almost to kind of like pity for each other but also a kind of resentment for each other in the like seeing what the other one means for them. Yeah. Another interesting moment, I wonder what you made of this was the part where the truck crosses paths on the outskirts of the city, Like there are these ruins a kind of collapsing old wall, and they cross paths with a group of circus performers. There are these guys juggling and in clown makeup sitting on this collapsing wall. One guy's holding a ship in a bottle. Oh, it's it's an unsettling moment. And I would say the men sitting there, like the circus performers do seem to kind of look at the guy in the phone booth with more recognition and pity than most of the other observers in the story do. But I'm not sure what was really meant by this.
Yeah, and I think, like everything in the picture, that they keep it vague so that you can have various interpretations. But I guess what I took away from this is maybe, like the circus performers here have a certain amount of freedom, like they live on the outside, and in fact they are situated in this shot on the other side of a wall that separates them from the truck in the phone booth, So you know, in a way they like pity his condition in his circumstance, but they understand it insofar as they have escaped it.
Yeah. Yeah. And then right after this comes I was maybe the saddest part in the whole thing, which is when the truck crosses paths with a young boy. There's like a young boy out playing with a ball, and the boy waves to the man. This is another point I guess where the man does. It does feel like somebody actually sees the man and kind of like recognizes his humanity and all that. But he when he sees this boy, obviously he thinks about his son, and he thinks about his son earlier, and he remembers the soccer ball bouncing into the phone booth that morning. And I think it's a wrong image because it implies simultaneously a kind of horror. This man's worrying about his own situation and worrying how he's going to get out of this and whether he's going to see his son again. But also there's a kind of relief in the memory, I think, because he realizes that his son could have been the one trapped in the box and he wasn't. Then after this he just keeps getting weirder. Suddenly there's a helicopter following the truck. Why the helicopter. I never knew what to make of that.
I think the helicopter just means like someone is watching. It's almost like the eye of God. But then it becomes it offers no comfort because in this situation, God is doing nothing. Whoever is in the helicopter, who's observing from the helicopter, they're not interfering with this, They're just I guess, documenting it. And again there's just this overbearing coldness to the whole scenario.
So the truck leads through some strange and amazing locations. At one point it goes down this mountain side road, zigzagging down, down and down into a valley near a huge dam. And then finally at the end of this road, we pass out of the sunlight, which has been beating down. So you might imagine you almost kind of feel a physical relief because this man's been under the glass under the hot sun and it has just been roasting him in there. And they finally pass into darkness. But things are not getting better. So the truck goes into an underground facility and it drives down a long dark road and a tunnel. There are little sort of utility lights all along the walls, and as it goes deeper, it passes more and more unsettling things. The man sees lots of empty red telephone boxes being cleaned and prepared by phone company workers. Again, if that's actually what they are, they're just men in green uniforms. We see trucks leaving the facility loaded with telephone boxes, and the tone markedly shift. There is no longer any ambiguity or any hint of comedy or whimsy. The music lets you know that things have gotten very dark.
That's right, Yeah, the carl Orf is in full swing here, and things that are beginning to feel tragic.
So the truck parks and uniformed men get out and the man in the box again. He tries to signal them for help, but they don't even look at him. They unhitch the box from the truck and then it is lifted away by a crane and transported to some deeper part of the facility, and the man becomes increasingly terrified and desperate. He's banging on the glass from the inside, but there seems to be no relief, and eventually the box is transported into some kind of dark back room. This big vast warehouse room where he is wheeled past other telephone boxes, and here just the nightmare reaches its apex, where he looks into the other telephone boxes and there are just dead men inside, dead men dressed like him, in various states of decomposition, looking like they've been in there for years or even decades. And finally he is parked next to one where a guy appears to have strangled himself with the cord of his own telephone receiver. The last image we see of the man is of his hand pressed up against the glass. Is he's just I guess, sinking down to the floor in despair? Ending doesn't get much darker than that.
Yeah, there is no escape. That is the final statement here that we do get a little bit of a stinger that reminds us don't worry, there's more doom to come.
That's right. So we see a clean, tidy, new telephone box being deployed in the plaza, once again, just waiting for the next person to step inside. Wow. So that's the end of Lacabina. But several things I think I want to talk about because it raises all these interesting ideas. One is within the movie, did you ever detect any hint about what the point of the human harvesting operation was, Like, why are people getting trapped in phone booths and stashed underground? I'm almost certain this is intentionally left unanswered by the film. But did you pick up on any clues that I missed?
No, I mean, I think it's left ambiguous. I think if I were to supply, I think my own sort of headcannon for what's happening here is that just like some sort of uncorrected accident of design, and the overall view of the corporation and or the government and anyone involved is like, well, these things happen. It's unavoidable. There are tragedies and horrors baked into modern civilization, and I'm sorry, we can't really address these design flaws. It is what it is. I'm sorry it happened to you, or at least I feel obligated to tell you so. And yeah, that's that's what I got from it. I mean, I guess you could lean into the idea that the boxes are being put out there intentionally to catch and kill middle aged men in Madrid, But I like the idea that this is all just an accident of design and it's just not going to be corrected, not out of maliciousness or not individual maliciousness, but just sort of like the uncaring nature of the world.
Well, bridging off of that, I guess to go beyond the sort of in universe question of what these people are supposed to be doing in the narrative, there's something a lot of people have asked, which is, like, what is the meaning of the whole story? Is Luckabina supposed to be a metaphor for living under the Francoist dictatorship in Spain? This is something lots of viewers have inferred. I mean, I think it's quite reasonable to suspect that about it. According to the director, the meaning was not intended to be limited to that, so it's not any kind of direct allegory, but instead it was generally about a kind of confinement and unfreedom and the desire for freedom of all sorts. However, I think it's very worth noting that at the time of this film's production and release, Marcero may have believed he had to say that that he could not admit, even if it were a veiled critique of Frank Wist Spain, that that's what it was However, I think this issue is a little further illuminated by a couple of quote quotes that Marcero gave that are collected in that article in the Artifice magazine that we've been talking about. So, for one thing, Marcero, speaking after the film's release, said, quote, Jose Luis Garci and I recognize that when we wrote the script, we were closer to the world of science fiction and terror than any political theme. We also realized that our story had many readings, and that that was its richness and complexity. I would say then that Lakabina is this a parable opened all kinds of interpretations, and according to the sensitivity, culture, and formation of each one, it will be interpreted in a different way, and those multiple interpretations will always be valid. And then, apparently, in an interview to Rtve in two thousand and nine, looking back on the film, so this was when he was much older, he said, quote, all human beings have boxes that we have to get rid of. There are boxes of the moral type, there are boxes of the educational type, there are boxes of the mental type, economic boxes that imprison us. And I believe that life is a continuous quest for freedom from each one of these boxes. In order to be free, spontaneous, and happy, each person has to see which box imprisons him and try to free himself. That is our destiny. So, according to Mrcero himself, a political interpretation is not the only intended meaning, and I certainly don't think it's the only valid interpretation of the film. But I also looking at it and knowing a bit about the history, I would have to say it's certainly a reading that makes sense, especially in the way that it locks with other themes that are clearly there in the story. So there's this theme of unfreedom, but it also the theme of unfreedom connects to the theme of dehumanization, which is a core element of first the comedy and then later the horror. This thing we see over and over is that the man stuck in the phone booth is not being treated as a human being by those outside the booth. He gets mocked, he gets gawkeed at like just some amusing object. He gets absurd, nonsensical orders barked at him by the police, like things that would be impossible for him to comply with. People that do try to help him, most of them don't actually seem all that sympathetic to him. They're just like it's like a way to show off their strength or skills to the gathering crowd by getting the door open. And then eventually the man gets shelved inside an underground bunker to apparently die, with no one at any point other than maybe like the kid on the road, and maybe the circus performers seeming too much notice his humanity, like his pain, his dignity, his desire for freedom, his requests for help. It's really like, once he is stuck in the box, he is not a person anymore. And so despite the film's extremely bleak and horrifying ending, I think it actually functions as a rather humane and emotionally powerful warning against participating in that kind of dehumanization, either as a spectator or as a functionary of an institution stacking telephone boxes full of people underground. Like the person stuck on the other side of the glass is a human being, and tomorrow or the next day, maybe it is you according to this story, and so we've got to treat that person as a human being. The fact that they're stuck in the box isn't funny, and it isn't meaningless. It matters.
I think it would be easy to watch this film and just be left with a feeling of like, well, people will do what they can and what they have to do in order to help you, but beyond that, they won't. And you know that. It's not to say that the safety net of society and government is a complete illusion, but it will only get you so far. I guess where it challenges us and where you can get into that idea of the film ultimately being about freeing yourself from your boxes and all is by realizing that we don't have to be like the people in this movie, like this is a cautionary tale, Like we don't have to live in a society, in a culture that views the suffering of other in the predicaments of other people like this.
That's right. And so I think that that's one reading on which this weird, absurd, little horror short film actually becomes quite powerful. Like it's not just there to kind of chill you an innertain you. It's rather meaningful and it kind of puts a lesson in there that I think it's hard to forget. But I do want to acknowledge also that that again, that's not the only reading of it. People have interpreted this to mean all kinds of things, and so you know, there's what the director said about it himself, is this general like free your mind sort of thing. There are also all these weird other readings that came up in some of the articles we looked at. The one in the Artifice mentioned some people at the time apparently thought it had something to do with alien abductions. I don't get that much at all, but people take it all over the place.
Yeah, and they leave it open, and so you know, all interpretations are valid. All right. Well, there you have it. Nineteen seventy two's La Cabina the telephone Box, I say, still more of a downbeat film compared to last week's Quest, but they do have some things in common, Like they are both films, both short films about liberation or the for liberation, the desire for liberation. Whether that liberation is actually achieved within the runtime or not.
I guess it is up to us to imagine the sequel to Lacabino where the where the telephone box regime is overthrown.
But can you imagine if someone did a feat I think I've seen that kind of thing done before, where there'll be like some sort of a short, like perfect treatment of an idea. But if you expanded out into a feature, you've got to you've got to add all these elements that kind of take away the bite of the original piece. You know, you'd inevitably have to have that escape and perhaps some explanation of what's going on, and I think a lot of that would fall flat.
Yeah, best to leave that victory to the imagination.
All right, We're gonna go and close up the episode here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Had you seen the telephone Box before, what did you think of it? What kind of an impact did it have over you? Or are you like us new initians into the mysteries of the telephone box? If that is the case, we want to hear about that too. And if you have any reck mandations for other thirty minute films that feel like a perfect fit for Weird House, we would love to entertain those suggestions. Also, I want to note once more that we are really close to hitting our two hundred film selection here on Weird House Cinema. We've been receiving a number of suggestions for what we might cover and we might not listen to any of those suggestions, but we might. I'm very interested to read more of them, so keep them coming. A reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie here on weird House Cinema, and if you want to follow us on letterbox dot com, our profile name is weird House and there is in fact a list of all the movies we've covered thus far, and sometimes a glimpse ahead at what's coming out next.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest to topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
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