The Cabin in the Woods is a supernatural genre-bender penned by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard. It is a bizarre story that grows odder as it goes, but there is a focus on character, a decent atmosphere, success in keeping a young and handsome cast from becoming mere plastic eye candy, some intelligent dialogue and a few inspired approaches to scenes. There was enough skill involved in its creation to make a fine work. It had me at the opening; it kept me as events unfolded; it lost me at the end.

To summarize the plot past a certain point is to risk ruining a first viewing. At the beginning, five college students go to a cabin in a woods to spend a weekend drinking, playing games, and committing acts that many religions proscribe outside of matrimony. It is safe to share that the students are being monitored and manipulated, because this aspect is revealed from the outset. From the conversations of the monitors we piece together that the students are going to be put through some sort of gruesome trial, and that these students will, unwittingly, determine the nature of that trial. Beyond that I prefer to say only that beneath this bizarre surface is a whole lot more story to be uncovered.

There are a number of things the movie gets right. Despite the fact that the nature of the cabin is explained early on, there is still a mood of enigma about everything. The monitors become the mystery, rather than the cabin. The dialogue, despite Whedon’s continuing penchant for corny one-liners at the wrong moment, is streamlined, full of character, and delivers just enough information without talking directly to the audience. Tantalizing phrases suggest a deeper plot, hints of which are continuously doled out to us. Even one aspect that seemed initially disappointing, regarding the trite order in which characters must die in a horror movie, is given a surprising yet sufficient explanation later on.

The script demonstrates thoughtfulness in the way it approaches things. There is a basement that figures large in the story, but the way Whedon and Goddard get the kids in the basement is imaginative. They are playing a game of truth or dare, and when it is the turn of the less sexually adventurous of the two girls, another character ventures her answer for her: truth. She gets irritated when he explains that whenever she chooses dare she always goes back and says she would rather do truth. To show him up, she reluctantly picks dare, but the game is interrupted by the discovery of the basement. After staring into the dark depths for a while, the other players decide that the girl’s dare will be to explore the basement.

I had a handful of minor issues, many of which might be cleared up on a later viewing. However, at this point they seem illogical and contrived. By way of example, there is a one-way window between two bedrooms. On one side, it is a mirror, on the other side translucent glass, but it is covered by a painting. One of the boys removes the painting due to its macabre subject matter and gets a view into the room of one of the girls. She starts to undress and after a quick debate, he tells her to stop and shows her the mirror.

As far as I can tell, there is no logical reason for the one-way mirror to be there. Because the nature of the trial awaiting the lodgers is to be determined, one might argue that the mirror is there in case a particular trial is chosen, but I feel like that gives a free excuse card to the screenwriters for any implausibility they stick in the movie. Either the students should have encountered something in the cabin that would have to do with the particular trial they end up with, or they should have discovered all sorts of architectural and decorative oddities that would at first baffle the characters but whose use the audience could guess at (they do find in the basement many items, each relating to a different scenario, but this is not what I am referring to). As it is, the mirror, chilling though it is when first discovered, ultimately feels like a convenience to help show the chivalrousness of one of the male roles, who will soon become an amorous interest of the girl on the other side of the mirror.

Notwithstanding the few minor issues, I was sold from the beginning until near the end, whose nature I prefer not to describe here. Suffice it to say that it goes from bizarre to outlandish, and does it in a very short period of time. Where before mystery had been heightened and questions answered at a judicious pace, now everything started spilling out all at once, while I felt there was still more mystery and revelation to tease us with and plenty of time to do it. Restraint is cast aside in favor of slapping the viewer over and over with excess, and the final effect is a silliness that does not sit well with the established tone.

A moviemaker should, to my way of thinking, treat the viewer like a woman. He must court her, slowly, never pushing too far but neither missing an opportunity to advance his cause. Whether the courting takes place over a month or single evening, there is a pace she will accept and a pace that will lose her favor. It is different with every woman, but there are certain approaches that work with none of them. If you find the pace and approach that makes her eager, she very well may, to borrow a phrase from Dangerous Liaisons, perform quite eagerly acts that one would hesitate to ask from a professional. But you cannot whip out your manhood in the restaurant over dessert. That would be revealing too much too soon, and that is precisely how the last act of the movie felt.

The Cabin in the Woods is worth seeing for its uniqueness, and it certainly is not a bad movie. I was considering adding it to my collection until the last part made my decision easier. A $10 movie ticket might be too much for some, but a Netflix rental does not seem like a bad idea, especially for one who likes supernatural horror and a little genre-bending.

I do not expect to see another movie this good until December, unless recent trends are bucked. It is far more than a harrowing survival tale. It is also a very thoughtful piece, something made not by a technician, but by an artist. To be perfectly honest, after seeing Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team, I did not think that Joe Carnahan had it in him. But he has crafted a very effective bit of cinema, something that can appeal to someone looking for some subdued tension and sudden thrills as well as a movie-goer more sensitive to metaphors and in a more introspective mood.

The opening shots of the movie are arresting in their austerity, atmospheric in their composition. It quickly becomes apparent that time will be spent creating a character to care about. Liam Neeson, playing John Ottway, is a man who is burnt out on life, who has, in some undefined way, lost the woman he loves. He puts the business end of a loaded rifle in his mouth, and only the howling of a wolf distracts him from his suicide. He misses the window of opportunity, the moment of resolve. I was intrigued, but it was not until after the plane crash that I was sold.

Eight survive the disaster, but one of them is injured and bleeding profusely. He calls out for help, close to panic and yet in disbelief that his end is near. Ottway approaches him and tells him with a direct yet gentle sincerity that he is going to die. He tells him to be calm, that death will slip gently over him. He tells him to think about the people he loves in his last moments, of the good times, and to accept what is happening.

We have seen a thousand scenes of wounded men who know they are about to die; I have never seen something quite like this one. It convinced me of the merit of the film, but I did not realize just how important that scene was to the movie’s theme until later.

There is very little complexity to the plot. The Grey has only a few linear episodes, all straightforward with no intricacy of subplots and turning points. But each episode is staged masterfully, often in the dark, and sound is used as effectively as I have ever experienced it. After the men leave the wreckage, they make for a forest in the distance and build a campfire upon arriving. In the glacial dark of night they huddle around its warmth, and they hear the creaks and taps and groans of the forest around them. Once in a while they hear the howls of wolves, or see their eyes — and nothing else — reflecting back the glow of the firelight. At one point, the wolves seem to go into an unseen frenzy. Ottway tells the others that a rival wolf has challenged the alpha wolf and been put down. This anticipates what will happen among the humans only moments later.

It comes out that Ottway, and one other, are agnostics. While some of the men see divine providence in their rescue, and cannot believe that they would survive the crash only to die in the jaws of wolves, Mr. Neeson’s character sees only chance and an indifferent universe. Later on, Ottway calls to the impenetrable gray of the sky above, telling God that now would be a good time to do something. He will, he declares, believe in him until the day he dies if only he will be moved to help him now. The sky, of course, does not respond, and Ottway mutters, “I’ll do it myself.”

That is the movie’s theme in a nutshell. The sky evinces no sign of caring or even being able to hear; anything that needs doing we must do ourselves and always we live with the uncertainty of not knowing what lies ahead. Enjoy what you have while you have it; this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.

It will come as no surprise to anyone with a passing familiarity with modern cinema that The Grey, so intent on its metaphors and the personalities of its characters, yet has action more gripping than any thousand summer blockbusters put together. Nothing feels rehearsed, everything is realistic, the laws of physics are obeyed, we are invested in the characters and the camera shoves us right into the thick of the action. That a movie only secondarily concerned with thrills should arouse so much more than a legion of movies concerned with nothing but should serve as a wake-up call to movie makers.

As must happen with every film, the credits finally roll, this time on an ending as wholly appropriate to this particular picture as one could hope. The Grey will not revolutionize cinema, nor will it take a place in the pantheon of masterpieces. But it is a fine movie, and perhaps marks a turnaround in a director as pleasant and unexpected as happened with Michael Mann when he, against the current of his career, suddenly gave us The Last of the Mohicans. It would be unduly optimistic to think that a suitable replacement for The Grey will be forthcoming when its run in theaters ends, and even if there is, there are some shots in the movie that demand a big screen to fully appreciate. I recommend the film without reservations, and that the reader not wait for the DVD.

In this third generation version, a young, good-looking scientist is asked to come to Antarctica and given no clear reason why. She is only told that it is important. When she arrives, she discovers the scientists stationed there are excavating an alien spacecraft buried in the ice a hundred thousand years ago. They have found a creature, also buried in the ice, that they believe came along with the ship. It is nothing more than a blurry form under the translucent surface, and next to nothing about it has been discovered.

They dig out a block of ice containing the extraterrestrial but, because this is sci-fi/horror, it escapes and is so unfriendly that people start dying. The rest of the movie is a desperate fight to survive in the most inhospitable environment offered on this planet that still has breathable air. For those keeping track, yes, there is a black man in this movie. No, he doesn’t make it. And that’s not a spoiler, either. As soon as I reported the monster’s escape from its prison you knew no black man was going to live long enough to read the credits.

A lowly film such as The Thing is always beset by problems, and the litany of sins of omission and commission afflicting it is pretty standard. The director, for instance, is nothing more than a technician, if he is even that (given the nature of the director’s job, it is not always possible to say who on a movie set is responsible for what and to what degree). He fails to do anything of interest for the entirety of the picture. After the prologue scene, he immediately embarks on a quest to bore you into a coma with blocking fit for a third grade Christmas play and camera work to match. A soap opera would have done no worse.

Never does he take adequate time to set anything up, to let us get to know the setting, the situation, the people. He does only enough to be able to say he filmed a first act and not be called a liar. It is the second act, when the monster is loose, that interests him, but if he wanted it to interest us he failed to do the proper prep work. We enter the second act indifferent, waiting for the carnage that at least will bring the relief of movement for our eyes to follow.

There is no real attempt to explore any aspect of a character. The principal one, we discover right away, digs up extinct vertebrates and studies them. A little attention to the details of her science might have yielded something of interest, as well as germinated ideas for themes and plot points later on. No role has more than one distinguishing feature, of which arrogance is the most interesting and black skin the least. Those roles that do have a salient feature are caricatures; those without are scenery.

The movie, however, fails more for what it does than what it neglected to do. What it does is hurl common sense out the window. There is little sense of character in the movie, and what little we have is tarnished by the idiotic things people do to advance the plot, or by the farfetched plot points. Characters survive when we thought they were dead — and indeed must have died if the story were at all constrained by so much as a hat tip to reality — but then commit some act of utter stupidity so that they can be made to die. Even the monster itself cannot bring itself to act in its own best interest if such an act would mean killing a character the screenwriter decided was going to live another ten pages or so.

After all the silliness and stupidity and tiresome scenes are considered, one is still left with a creature so wholly ridiculous it could ruin a masterpiece like Alien were it to take the place of the creature used in that superior project. Its capacities are implausible as far as can be judged, which is not far because it is never entirely clear what it is that it does. Whatever it is, it’s damn sure retarded; I have gleaned enough to determine that.

The Thing is not an unremitting assault of awful. There are times when the creature is not onscreen, the characters are not talking, and we are left with some sound effects — a remote environment and a desperate plight with a good dose of creeping around in ignorance of what is around the corner. Even this director, whose name I will not utter here, cannot botch those moments. He has botched enough of the others, which form an overwhelming majority of the film, to prevent me from recommending this one.

Jake Hatcher has moved out to California to lie low for a while, working as a bouncer at a bar. Despite his precautions, he is found by people who want his services. He winds up entangled in a plot where nothing is as it seems, a demonic apocalypse is at stake, and no one can be trusted. Plot twists abound, as do action and fighting sequences, a little sex is sprinkled in, and the resolution is anyone’s guess right up until the end.

There are some areas in which Diabolical is an improvement on Damnable. Though the first novel had some inspired chapter hooks near the beginning, Diabolical saves its best twists for later on. For this reason, as well as a smoother flow that eliminates a little dead weight found in the first book, the second novel reaches its climax in better fashion than the first. In particular, Schwaeble does a good job of keeping the reader guessing about certain characters. Whereas in the first one there was a general blanket of uncertainty covering nearly everything, in the second the author takes you through highs and lows, at times fabricating a specious certainty that is ripped away, only to be brought back again. If the novel were a marionette, I would say the puppet master has grown more adept at pulling the strings.

Another point where the sequel improved on the founding work was in the character of Jake Hatcher. There is more time spent on his sins, on the mistakes that haunt him. No man can torture for the government and not be touched by it unless he is a sociopath, which Hatcher is not. Furthermore, he is constantly fighting, wounding, crippling, damaging, gouging, breaking, lacerating, smashing, gashing, and pulverizing a wide assortment of individuals. A person cannot live a life like this without damaging himself, as many former hockey players, after careers spent as “enforcers” are now discovering. In Damnable, Hatcher was bothered by his past only a little more than Super Mario is by jumping on and crushing turtles. In Diabolical, we finally see a human side to Hatcher, a hint of a conscience with a pointy edge. This internal struggle is not the main theme of the novel, and it is not developed and explored like Crane did for Henry Fleming, but it is something.

Though I would say Diabolical was a step up, it still had its foibles — ones nearly identical to those in Damnable. Jake Hatcher still possesses an improbable ability to read clues correctly, with the exception of the villain’s master plan which, again, fools him right up until the end. He can interpret from, say, a person’s body language exactly what they are up to and take decisive action based on it, despite the fact that such observations could conceivably have more than one explanation. In Diabolical, Hatcher goes so far as to point a gun at a man and pull the trigger, supremely confident that it is unloaded. While the hints he observes during that particular confrontation might plausibly lead him to believe his opponents are bluffing, it does not follow that they simply must be bluffing, that they can be doing nothing other than bluffing, nor that, in bluffing, they must have left the gun unloaded.

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In addition to Hatcher’s psychic powers, the villain’s plot is, again, overly complex. Like before, all the villain needs is to trick Hatcher into performing one solitary act, and the reader is left feeling that there are simpler ways to do it. Indeed, given Hatcher’s past history with the villain, his distrust could have been used from the outset to manipulate the man and all might have been accomplished in chapter one. Instead, a fabulously intricate scheme is put together.

It is not as if getting to the heart of that scheme were boring. It was a fun ride and I am glad it did not wrap up in chapter one, but when one finally gets to the big reveal and discovers how unnecessary most of it was, one is left with a mild disappointment. It was sort of like preparing a great feast for a party and only having one friend show up: even if one does enjoy the cooking, it is deflating.

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The first book in the series might have been a standalone novel. This one deliberately leaves open the possibility, no, the necessity, of a sequel. Having enjoyed the ride so far, complaints notwithstanding, and given the indications of a mild upward trajectory in the author’s mastery of his subject, I may just pick the third book up and check it out when it is finally released.

Steven Soderbergh

Comparisons will be made to Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak, but beyond the subject matter and big name actors, they do not much resemble one another. Contagion is either a well-researched and realistic movie about the response to a worldwide infectious disease — especially realistic at the level of government agencies like WHO and CDC — a carefully crafted fraud that makes you think it is, or a mix of the two. There are multiple storylines and it feels, at times, like a documentary. Outbreak is more fanciful and less earnest, investing little effort and less concern in realism but a good deal more in story. All things considered, I would say that Outbreak is the superior work, but Contagion is good in every aspect in which — one gets the feeling — it bothered to put in some elbow grease and is worth a viewing at the theater.

Where did it put this elbow grease? In the shots, in the blocking, in the photography, in the acting, in the editing — everywhere but the script. As one would expect from a Soderbergh film, it is well shot. Everything around the story works at a higher level than what you usually find in theaters nowadays. It has a good solid skeleton, healthy skin, strong muscles, even a brain, but it lacks a heart.

Perhaps it is a bit unfair to say that no elbow grease was spent on the script. I do not mean to give the impression that the screenwriter was incompetent. It was, as I said, either a well-researched flick or a good facsimile, either of which takes some work and skill. However, the type of story it tells, and the time it has to tell it, limit how emotionally invested we can become in the characters, which in turn limits how engrossed we can be in the action, the obstacles, and the resolution.

It is not just that there are so many characters that we can spend too little time with them to care about them. It is also that the movie is so concerned about giving us a clinical portrayal of what would likely happen in the event of such a virus, it does not give us the satisfying story and character arcs we demand from a script. In Outbreak, when Dustin Hoffman was up in the helicopter pleading with the other pilots not to drop the bomb, it strayed from realism, but it at least obeyed the story mandate for a climax. One could argue, as I do, that it strayed perhaps a bit too far (it can be tricky to find the right balance to meet story demands and not make your audience roll their eyes), but at least it was a crescendo of action leading to an exciting resolution.

Real life does not maintain a consistent pace to keep audience attention, and neither does its action necessarily rise to the final climax. There is, many times, no final climax. Different story threads don’t always cross and recross and get neatly tied up by the end. While Contagion does a good job of pacing the advance of the disease, it has far too many characters to adequately explore in a period of 105 minutes, and it eschews any type of contrivance or coincidence to up the ante once in a while. Many storylines are abandoned half-finished, and the ones that do wrap up in the traditional fashion usually have not been explored enough, given quite enough obstacles to overcome to be truly satisfying when it is all over.

Spartacus handles a large cast of characters while not skimping on the story arcs, but Spartacus is three hours long, and takes liberties with the actual story. It does not introduce a character whom it is not prepared to see through to the end, and whom it is not prepared to fully flesh out as a human being. Sometimes, whether it is based on a true story or simply trying to be a plausible work of fiction, a less likely path must be pursued in the interest of developing characters and relationships.

For instance, in Outbreak, Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo are ex-lovers who must work together to fight the disease. While they fight the disease, their relationship evolves and… well, you can guess what happens at the end. It is entirely expected and traditional, but it is a tradition with a long history of success. In Contagion, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, as Mitch and Beth Emhoff, also have problems with their relationship. Beth, we find out right away, is cheating on Mitch, but it is not developed or explored. Opportunities for dramatic tension, interaction, and conflict are not realized, because it plays out how it likely would in real life. There is no arc and no resolution, no confrontation with the other man, nothing. This is not to say that the script should have delved into their marital problems more, merely that it might have and come away with something more satisfying. Somewhere, certainly, we needed more of that sort of thing, if not with Damon and Paltrow, then with Fishburne, or Cotillard, or someone.

In short, it is too realistic to be a very memorable tale, too focused on the progression of disease and the response of professionals and not enough on the people we are watching. Too much like a convenience store security video and not enough like a cop show reenactment. When I go to work in real life, I rarely have a dramatic interaction with my coworkers the likes of which would entertain audiences in a movie theater. A story about my life would have to play loose with the facts in the interest of audience interest. Something in between Outbreak’s flouting of genuine experience and Contagion’s dogmatic adherence to it would probably yield a pretty thrilling movie.

Contagion should either have worried about fewer characters or committed to being 150 minutes long and allowed some of its characters to push at the bounds of realism, just a touch. For instance, when Matt Damon’s Mitch Emhoff and his daughter are left without food, more could have been done than merely showing them wandering around and not finding any. A dangerous plot might have been hatched. This dangerous plot might have accidentally interfered with efforts to get the vaccine out. Emhoff might have met someone with important information that needed to get to the proper authorities and he had to decide between his quest for food and helping that person get out of the quarantined zone. All actions that, while not impossible, push at the bounds of what is probable, but not so much as to cause an audience to be incredulous.

Soderbergh would probably counter that this was not the kind of tale he was trying to tell. I believe it, because there is nothing in the movie to suggest that it got out of his control, nor has any other effort of his ever displayed such. But whether or not the movie was what he wanted it to be, it was limited in what it could do for an audience. None of the characters are memorable, and it is not because the actors did not get the job done. There was just not enough story to work with. Soderbergh no doubt hit the mark he was aiming at, but aiming at such a mark is unlikely to produce a classic film.

From the libertarian’s perspective, the movie was not as offensive as it might have been. For the most part, opinions about private vs. public and market vs. government are mouthed by characters who are proved neither right nor wrong. I never got the sense that Soderbergh was giving a lecture about it. The government agents are uniformly portrayed in a positive light, with no ulterior motives or nefarious intent, but what more can we expect? At least in one instance a man working in the private sector disobeys a government order. He complains that letting the government do the job would make it take too long, and he is able to accomplish a very important task because of his disobedience.

The worst aspect, as far as politics goes, is a lost opportunity to give a lesson on supply and demand. A vaccine is developed for the virus, but lots have to be drawn because the vaccine cannot be made rapidly enough to meet demand. Why this was the case is not discussed, but anyone with a passing familiarity with the pharmaceutical industry will suspect price controls and intellectual property right away. There are shortages of vaccines every flu season, it seems. It is disappointing, though not surprising, that this opportunity was missed.

However much I wish it had been different, or could have been improved, it is still better than the average disaster on celluloid you get charged ten dollars to see. It is no great sin to miss it, but if you are headed to the theaters anyway, I cannot think of a better way, at the moment, to lose that ten dollars.

This is not to denigrate the work — or Bill Maher — but merely to put it in its proper category. As a story it is a modest success, not profound perhaps, but also without pretensions of depth and nuance. On the first page, a character muses, “Coffee was like pizza and sex — no matter how bad it was, it was usually still pretty good.” In other words, the author is decent enough to tell us straight away we will not be wrestling with complex ideas and weighty issues. When a zombie attacks a few paragraphs later, it is the author letting us know what we will be doing.

I enjoyed my time with the novel, which I believe is all the author ever wanted for his readers. I know I enjoyed it because I put my book mark in the sequel as soon as the last page was turned. The main character, Jake Hatcher, is something more than one dimensional, interesting from the outset. His situation is intriguing, his history morally ambiguous, and his abilities perfect for the action to follow.

We first meet Jake as a convict in a military prison. One of his jailors has it out for him, and Jake suspects his cellmate has been recruited to pick a fight with him, to get him in trouble so his term can be lengthened. There is also another trap his jailor has set for him, and while he tries to navigate these he gets a call from his mother telling him his brother has died, an event we saw in the prologue.

Jake is a former interrogator for the army. While he indicates to the reader that he stopped short of some of the grosser abuses of prisoners, there are also hints that he did not disdain to get his hands a little dirty. He has a keen eye for detail, a quick mind, and a very high level fighting ability. We have seen this before in action characters, but Jake does stand out for the particulars of his ethical uncertainty.

The book also benefits from a number of clever hooks at the end of chapters, particularly the early ones. I defy anyone to read the end of chapter one and not immediately start chapter two. This by itself would make it a page turner, and together with the interesting protagonist it has what it needs to win the reader’s good opinion.

There are some aspects of the book that could be improved, however. Nothing critical but not trivial either. For instance, Jake Hatcher is too successful at reading small clues and drawing precise conclusions. One evening, not long ago, I found myself watching some detective show where the investigators put together a profile of a serial killer based on conclusions they drew from how he operated. The super sleuths made confident predictions about where the murderer must live, what happened to him in his childhood, why he was doing what he was doing, what his phobias were — just about anything you could want to know about him. None of them were bad guesses, per se, but the problem is that they were not treated as guesses. Every prediction proved accurate, as if there could be only one explanation for why a killer dumped the bodies in a particular location, or why he used a knife instead of a gun. This does not bear even a passing resemblance to real life.

Damnable, though not as egregiously as that TV show, gives these same almost psychic powers to Jake Hatcher. And Hatcher always takes decisive action based on his conclusion, action the results of which could sometimes be disastrous if he is wrong.

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He never is, save in one instance where it furthers the plot. Even this case is an example of another character having these same, mystical psychological powers of prediction and using them against Hatcher.

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The story alternates between Jake Hatcher’s investigations and the villain’s machinations. I think it would be a big improvement to leave out the villain’s perspective. We would know less, which would make the investigation more gripping. Sometimes, the reader needs to be left in the dark for a while. The very little we learn from the villain that is profitable for the reader to know should be delivered in another way, and the scenes with him lack a little luster anyway. When we know his name, have a good idea of what he is after and know his methods, the mystery’s seductive quality is diminished. A fly on the wall in the villain’s quarters experiences a good deal less uncertainty, and therefore a good deal less excitement, than the reader ought to. Better to experience the story as Hatcher does, in my opinion. Ignorance can be a good thing.

There is also, towards the end, a brief period when the story goes slack. The separate threads don’t crescendo in unison, the result being a dead period that is filled with a pointless trip to the police precinct where Hatcher, who has already spent considerable time in an interrogator’s office, is questioned yet again, but this time for no important reason. Nothing is introduced, no new information given and the plot is neither advanced nor altered. It is just a bit of time-killing until five thirty p.m. so the plot can get started again. It doesn’t last long, but if the narrative were restructured to eliminate this void between plot points, the work would benefit.

My last complaint is the enormous complexity of the antagonist’s scheme. There is an Occam’s Razor for any plan: go with the simplest one. A convoluted design will have too many opportunities to fail, and in Damnable the villain’s plot could have failed any number of different ways. Somehow, he is able to guess exactly how his pawns will behave in each situation, or that they will be able to figure out a very obscure clue he leaves for them. It strains credulity to the breaking point. He even puts his own life in danger, dependent upon Hatcher doing what he predicts through his psychological study of him. No one is that predictable, and given how obsessed the villain was with his goal — how desperate he was to achieve it — one would imagine he would take the surest path to success. The very end of this plot features a trap of such complexity, complete with a villain monologue and ticking clock, that I actually sighed in disappointment.

Complaints aside, the book was entertaining. The author went in with some inspired plot twists and created the right protagonist for the story. There is a moral ambiguity to Jake Hatcher, as well as some unique particulars, that lift him above the level of a one dimensional, cookie-cutter character. A number of things could have been improved, but the heart of the story is strong enough to survive the flaws, like an automobile that still runs well despite a few fender-benders.

Like I said, I was ready for the sequel as soon as I finished it. I have to give it a passing grade on that account.

You can also read the transcript below:

In a recent conversation with a younger libertarian, I heard something that I found somewhat surprising and somewhat disturbing at the same time. But later, on reflection, I realized that what I had heard should not have surprised me, however much it may still disturb me. My young friend had said, and I paraphrase here, that he was surprised to learn that I thought of Objectivists as libertarians at all. Based on what he had seen of the positions they took on political issues, especially foreign policy, he had concluded that they were just another kind of neocon.

I refer to this younger libertarian as “my young friend,” but the fact is, he’s no kid; he’s in his early 40s, which tells you how long the situation with respect to Objectivism that I’m going to describe and deplore has been going on — that a man in his 40s cannot remember a time when leading Objectivists didn’t talk in such a way about questions of US foreign policy (and about other questions as well, as we shall see) that they become hard to differentiate from certain kinds of conservatives and hard to see as any sort of libertarian.

But before I get further into that depressing theme, there’s a new book I’d like to commend to your attention. It’s a novel entitled Hunter: A Thriller, and it’s the work of the prominent Objectivist writer Robert Bidinotto. Now, a word of caution. What follows is not properly a book review, because what I’m really interested in talking about here is not Bidinotto’s thriller in its capacity as a novel, an entertainment, a work of “popular art,” but rather what it can tell us in its capacity as a cultural artifact.

As Ayn Rand said, “The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture’s philosophy.” But of course, no culture has a “philosophy,” really, at least if by that we mean a thought-out set of principles about the central questions any thoughtful person must be led to ask about the human condition. What a culture has is an implicit philosophy, what Rand liked to call a “sense of life.”

Rand argued that it was the artist’s “sense of life,” his “implicit view of life,” his “generalized feeling about existence,” that “controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the subtlest details of style.” An artist, Rand argued, “selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant — and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents hisview of existence.”

Also, as we have seen, the artist, by doing all these selfsame things, holds up a “faithful mirror” to the sense of life that dominates the culture or subculture he best fits into in the society in which he lives. And it is with this in mind that I want to discuss Robert Bidinotto’s Hunter. It is, I think, pretty faithful in the way it mirrors the sense of life of the subculture we know as the Objectivist movement.

Hunter begins with Annie Woods, a recently divorced Washington, DC–based CIA agent engrossed in the case of a fellow agent, now gone rogue, who has been selling secrets to the Russians, outing US undercover operatives in the process and getting them killed. At a friend’s funeral, she meets a rising local journalist, Dylan Hunter, who specializes in writing investigative pieces about crime.

Through his new friend Annie and through the widow of the mutual friend at whose funeral they met, Hunter learns about a crime victims’ support group and attends one of their meetings. He then interviews the various individuals in the group who have lost loved ones to criminals, often only to see those criminals acquitted on technicalities or released early from prison sentences that had never been properly proportionate to the seriousness of their crimes in the first place.

Hunter begins writing a series of Sunday articles about these and similar local cases. And he attracts many readers, some of whom are, shall we say, more serious about what they read than others. Some of them, or so it soon begins to appear, are what you might call “deadly” serious about what they read. For someone — or some group of someones — has begun systematically tracking down each of the leniently treated criminals profiled in Hunter’s articles and killing them, leaving a copy of the relevant article pinned to the chest of each bloody corpse.

Meanwhile Annie and Hunter have become something of an item, though she is intermittently troubled by her inability to find any information at all on her new boyfriend that goes back any further than two or three years. Who is executing these criminals? And who is Hunter?

Bidinotto’s tale is very cleverly put together. It kept me reading on the edge of my seat, so to speak, for two full days. But, more to my present point, what does it suggest about the current state of the Objectivist subculture? What sense of life does it project?

I’m sorry to report that it projects a sense of life dominated by the emotions of fear and vindictive anger. It projects the sense that the individual is alone and, too often, defenseless in a scary, dangerous world in which other people are out to get him — out to take away from him what is rightfully his, and to assault and torture him just for the fun of it, and to kill him if that turns out to be convenient.

Some might wonder at this point just why these murderous people are so, well, murderous — why they are so intent on committing crimes of this kind. But in the world contemporary Objectivists see when they open their eyes and look around, it is vain to ask such questions. In fact, it is worse than vain; for any inquiry into the reasons — good, bad, or idiotic — that someone might have had for doing what he did implies (somehow) that there may be some excuse for what he did. These criminals do what they do because they are “animals” and “dirtbags.” It is in their nature. The only thing any decent individual can do is hope that these subhuman creatures are locked up in the darkest available hole and never let out. Or maybe they should just be exterminated like rodents or roaches.

It is clear from their views on US foreign policy that most Objectivists today live in the very same frightening world that I have just described. Bidinotto himself made the connection between these two issues, domestic crime and international peace, in a notorious series of attacks on Ron Paul back in 2007 and 2008 on his personal blog and in the New Individualist, the monthly magazine he was editing back then for the Atlas Society. Some people claim that Bidinotto lost his job as editor of the New Individualist as a direct result of these articles, which allegedly offended some wealthy Objectivist Ron Paul supporters.

He wrote on his blog in November 2007, for example, that there was “an interesting parallel between [Ron Paul's] view of America’s foreign enemies, and the common liberal view of America’s domestic criminals.” For

the same sort of arguments advanced by many libertarians … to “explain” the anti-American actions of foreign terrorists, also have been offered by liberals to “explain” the heinous acts of common criminals. Read any sociology or criminology text, and you’ll find endless laundry lists of “causal explanations” for crime: poverty, neglect, poor parenting, lousy schools, poor “socialization,” inadequate pre-natal care, hunger, disease, bullying, racism, police brutality, social stigmatizing, untreated psychological disorders, victimless-crime laws … you name it.

To Bidinotto, back in November 2007, in what he now describes as “a post of which I’m particularly proud,” it seemed clear that these two positions were very closely related. “Just as many libertarians like [Ron] Paul treat the actions of al Qaeda and other terrorists as ‘blowback’ for the sins of American society against them,” he wrote,

liberal social-science professionals treat the actions of home-grown criminal thugs as “blowback” for the alleged sins of American society against them. These bloody acts are never the terrorist’s or the criminal’s “fault” (responsibility), you see; rather, they are all our fault, for “driving him” to do his dastardly deeds. You may remember that during the Cold War, precisely the same sort of “explanations” were offered by liberals and, later, by left-libertarians such as Murray Rothbard to lay the blame for Communist aggression at the West’s (especially America’s) doorstep. It was our imperialist provocations around the world that were “driving” the Soviet bloc to “respond” by conquering and butchering millions, building weapons of mass destruction, constructing the Berlin Wall, etc. It was our economic and cultural “imperialism” that was driving indigenous peoples everywhere into the arms of the communists. I defy anyone to draw a rational, meaningful distinction between such “explanations” for criminal or terrorist aggression, and “excuses” for it. After all, “causal explanations” for human actions aim at exonerating the actor for committing them, by treating those acts as if they were not under the actor’s conscious, volitional control, but as if they were instead deterministically driven “responses” to external provocations or “causes. ” Just as I reject the liberal “excuse-making industry” that denies volition and rationalizes the acts of criminals, I am totally fed up with the disgraceful foreign-policy perspectives of those libertarians who portray the United States as the causal agent of every evil on earth — thus rationalizing the atrocities of foreign terrorists and despots.

Well, I guess if I were assigned the task of composing a detailed reply to this indictment, I’d probably begin by pointing out that neither Ron Paul nor any other libertarian I’ve ever encountered, in print or in person, has ever said that the 9/11 terrorists — or anyone else in the Middle East — has ever been victimized by “American society.” Some liberals do make this claim about criminals, but no libertarian makes it about people abroad who have grievances against the US government. The US government is not “American society.”

One receives the definite impression that few if any of these leading Objectivists have ever met a war they didn’t like.

Further, neither Ron Paul nor any other libertarian I’ve ever encountered, in print or in person, has ever said that the 9/11 terrorists — or any other terrorists anywhere — were not responsible for their actions, or that “those acts … were not under the actor’s conscious, volitional control.” Of course they were. Of course the terrorists are responsible for what they chose to do. Does this mean it is useless to inquire into their reasons for choosing as they did?

Is it more useful, more helpful, to instead angrily denounce them as “savages” or “animals” and then attempt to blow up anything and everything within a radius of 50 miles or so from the spot where “we” think they may be hiding? Is making war really the best response to a terrorist attack like the one that took place on September 11, 2001? So one would deduce from the public pronouncements of leading Objectivists over the past decade.

One receives the definite impression that few if any of these leading Objectivists have ever met a war they didn’t like — or, at least believed, with the grim, firm-jawed determination they felt was appropriate to a Randian hero, was somehow “necessary.” A war is a campaign of mass destruction and mass murder carried out by governments. In what morally coherent sense could such a thing be deemed “necessary”?

Ayn Rand herself was never so simplistic about war as her followers of today are. “Wars,” she wrote in 1967,

are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.) When a nation resorts to war, it has some purpose, rightly or wrongly, something to fight for — and the only justifiable purpose is self-defense.

As I hope most libertarians of today do remember, Rand could see no such justification for the US presence in Vietnam. She called the war the US government participated in for nearly two decades in Southeast Asia “a war in which American soldiers are dying for no purpose whatever.” There was a sense, though, in which Rand saw the Vietnam War as no worse, no more blameworthy, than any of the other wars the US government had been involved in during the 20th century. “There still are people in this country,” she wrote in 1974,

who lost loved ones in World War I. There are more people who carry the unhealed wounds of World War II, of Korea, of Vietnam. There are the disabled, the crippled, the mangled of those wars’ battlefields. No one has ever told them why they had to fight nor what their sacrifices accomplished; it was certainly not “to make the world safe for democracy” — look at that world now. The American people have borne it all, trusting their leaders, hoping that someone knew the purpose of that ghastly devastation. The United States gained nothing from those wars, except the growing burden of paying reparations to the whole world — the kind of burden that used to be imposed on a defeated nation.

There was a dark, pessimistic side to Rand’s sense of life, certainly — think of We the Living and of the opening chapters in Atlas Shrugged — but Rand never seemed completely consumed by fear and vengeful anger in the way her contemporary followers do. And this is a tragedy, because Rand and Objectivism were such an important force for good in the early history of the contemporary libertarian movement. There was a time when it seemed that most libertarians were Randians. And even if that’s a slight (or more than slight) exaggeration, the Randian influence on the early contemporary movement was undeniably substantial.

When the Society for Individual Liberty did a study of Libertarian Party members in the early 1970s, they found that more than a third of them were self-described Objectivists. As recently as 2008, the Liberty Poll, conducted by Liberty magazine, reported that “the thinker who most influenced our respondents’ intellectual development was Ayn Rand.” And though, as I’ve said, her outlook on things did have its dark corners, Ayn Rand was basically an exponent of a bold, adventurous, confident sense of life, the sort of sense of life you’d expect to be associated with libertarian ideas.

Rand’s heroes weren’t generals or people in law enforcement; they were engineers, inventors, designers — people focused on what they could do with their lives, not people preoccupied with the supposed menace to all their hopes and dreams posed by a vast army of almost unimaginably vicious antagonists who seek to destroy them for no reason at all. One is reminded of Benjamin R. Tucker’s observation that libertarian anarchists of his stripe were just “unterrified Jeffersonian democrats.” If Tucker thought the Jeffersonians were terrified because of their determination to cling to the institution of government, what would he think of today’s Objectivists?

Of course, Robert Bidinotto and his fellow fear mongers will tell you that they’re terrified with perfectly good reason — after all, haven’t “we” been victimized by terrorist attacks in the last decade? Did not thousands die? But the events of 9/11 did not terrify the Objectivists. They were already terrified for no reason long before that; they merely use the 9/11 attacks as a pretext, in an effort to make their terror look less irrational and absurd than it actually is.

Bidinotto told me via email that he doesn’t advocate the sort of vigilantism that figures in his novel. He wrote (and I quote this with his permission),

The vigilantism in the novel is intended solely as a fictional device to highlight and dramatize the complete absence of justice in the current legal system. I deliberately crafted the [vigilante character] in the novel to hold a clear, specific code of honor regarding his illegal actions. He only kills killers; he does not target public officials with violence, but only with “poetic justice”; he takes no actions that will threaten innocents; and he would rather be arrested than use violence against cops. But in the real world, vigilantism would never be subject to such honorable constraints. Instead, it would degenerate into a violent competition of reprisals and vendettas unlimited by any moral or legal principle.

Does Bidinotto not see that this is an excellent description of exactly how his beloved “War on Terror” has worked out in practice — and of how it must work out in practice? The US government claims that its warmaking is “subject to honorable constraints,” and that it strives to avoid taking “actions that will threaten innocents,” but this is the real world, and in the real world, whatever high-minded platitudes politicians and military people may mouth, war is never anything but “a violent competition of reprisals and vendettas unlimited by any moral or legal principle” — a competition in which innocents are maimed and killed and their property is senselessly destroyed.

Can anything be done about this unfortunate development in the evolution of Objectivism as a movement and as a subculture? Perhaps not. In a very perceptive blog post, written just this past April, Bidinotto wrote about what he called the “form [in which] we really encounter and accept our foundational beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.” We first encounter and accept these “foundational beliefs,” according to Bidinotto,

early in life, and in the form of stories — or what I call Narratives. The myths that we learn in childhood, at Mother’s knee, in church, in schools, in films and novels, represent primitive, fundamental interpretive stories about our world: how it works, what it means, what is right or wrong, who are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. These Narratives are pre-philosophical; in fact, they are acquired in their germinal forms while we are still far too young to subject them to critical analysis. They thus actually tend todetermine which abstract philosophies, ideologies, economic theories, and political policies we later find appealing. These latter “feel right” to us largely because they mesh with the myths, fairy tales, parables, and stories we already absorbed during childhood. Moreover, the more deep-rooted the myth — either personally and/or culturally — the more desperately we cling to it. We cling to it even when it may sometimes be utterly false, and lead us over a cliff. We cling to it because to challenge or criticize it means to unravel a lifetime of investments in values, choices, relationships, careers, emotions, and money. And who wants to do that?

Who indeed? Not, I think, Robert Bidinotto. He confesses, in this blog post, that

I’ve found it to be increasingly pointless to argue philosophy, economics, and politics with most people. Why? Because we are talking past each other. You may prove a point with unassailable facts and irrefutable logic. However, the other person replies, “Yes, but…” Those words usually signal that you’ve reached the ultimate barrier to further reasoning and communication: You’ve challenged his Narrative. And in my experience, that is ground he’ll rarely, if ever, concede.

I think everyone who has read up to this point knows what sort of narrative defines the world for Robert Bidinotto. You can get a taste of it in his new novel, Hunter. It makes for an absorbing read, as I’ve indicated. But as a guide to real life and the real world, it is sorely skewed. It’s too bad, really. From what small dealings I’ve had with him, I’d say that Robert Bidinotto is a good guy. He’s highly intelligent, with a genuine knack for putting words together, and, on top of that, he has the good sense to grasp the truth about the importance of private property and free markets to civilization. It’s damned inconvenient for the rest of us in the libertarian movement that he and so many others like him are so damn terrified.

[This article was first published online as a Mises Daily article and is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Robert Bidinotto's Hunter."]

Jeff Riggenbach is a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he has written for such newspapers as the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines asReason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach has also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works.