I think Hellraiser 2022 is one of those movies that gets better the more you reflect on it.
While watching it, I found the initial pace a little slow, and in its earlier part it resembled the two better noirish straight-to-video films in the franchise. But it transcended those insofar as the director was trying to express something profound and with respect to the inventiveness in the new cenobites, the third act twist, and the Cronenbergesque bonkers ending.
Anyhow, with respect to the profundity I think the movie is trying to be to addiction what the recent Cosmatos/Cage vehicle Mandy was to revenge. I still don’t know if it was as successful though. . . [SPOILER ALERT for what follows.]
This movie’s final girl, Riley, only survives in the end because even though she is in the position of being able to petition the cenobites for a boon (in the reconfigured mythology, one does this after sacrificing six victims to them, something she has done inadvertently), she does not ask them for anything. But then, according to Pinhead’s closing homily, in not asking for anything Riley has chosen life, which according to the Pinhead is actually a kind of damnation of regret, which is a bent version of one of the six boons after all.
There’s a deep point here that one finds both in twelve step programs and spiritual traditions. A certain kind of suffering (one, according to this kind of thinking, implicated in all of our addictions, even relatively anodyne ones such as to caffeine and sugar) comes from human awareness plus ego (which is the repository of what Buddhists call the three poisons: attachment/aversion/ignorance).
Addictions are an attempt to minimize suffering by dampening awareness while leaving the ego untouched. In Hellraiser 2022 even though Riley is a recovering drug addict, her nemesis Roland (a billionaire oligarch willfully sacrificing victims to the cenobites in pursuit of more, more, more)is a purer embodiment of attachment and aversion.
In the relevant wisdom traditions, enlightenment is the opposite of addiction, awareness without ego (which, again is the repository of aversion and attachment). However, the most difficult paradox is that one can’t be free of that suffering if one is averse to aversion or attached to non-attachment. This is why grace plays a role as early as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra and why twelve step programs talk about a higher power. *You* (that awful attached, averse, ignorant I-me-mine narcissist inside you) can’t attain enlightenment because *you* (your ego) are the problem. You have to let go of yourself, but this isn’t something that *you* can do. Your own enlightenment just becomes one more grift run by your ego, which is capable of turning everything to shit.
The way this is handled in Hellraiser 2022 is maybe a little bit hamfisted. The character Roland is revealed to have gotten the boon for pleasure, but ended up getting torture. At the end all of his machinations allow him to trade up and he gets a boon for power, but this results in him at the end of the film partially flayed and eternally crucified in the center of the God Leviathan. This is all played just a little too on the nose I think. I mean it’s not that interesting if the cenobites just give people the exact opposite of what they promise.
I feel like I’m missing something here. It seemed to me too much like a bad literary portrayal of Hell where everything has a dumb little bend. There are great basketball courts, but the balls don’t bounce! There are olympic swimming pools in Hell, but the water is made of jello! Feh. But there is a deep point here about how ego turns our pursuits into their opposites. The person who wants to be a good person gets addicted to feeling superior through judging others and in the process becomes monstrous. Etc. Etc. Etc. But just having the cenobites lying to people obscures the point. I’m not sure if that’s what is supposed to be going on though.
When Pinhead is talking with Roland she tells him that he didn’t really want pleasure after all, but power. And that convinces him to change his boon at the end. But then why did the wish for power render him powerless? Maybe there’s a platonic idea here that when we do messed up things we don’t really know what we want?
Or maybe Roland really does after all want apocalyptic levels of suffering? To what extent are alcoholics actually addicted to hangovers, that blissful period of torturous incapacitation where you are not responsible for anything and are suffering appropriately for all of your sins? Maybe that’s the point the movie is making with Roland? It’s more interesting than cenobites just being liars, but I don’t know if that was intended.
Contemporary conservatives neurotically deny their own karmic place sitting atop a mountain of skulls (a place every one of us inhabits), while contemporary liberals neurotically try to expiate that guilt with meaningless gestures like recycling. Maybe it’s a virtue of the portrayal of Roland that one can see both neuroses in his fate. I don’t know.
Nonetheless, the film scans beautifully at the end where Riley accepts that she can’t ask for the resurrection of her brother, even though she blames herself for his death. Pinhead’s final soliloquy clearly states that in choosing life she is choosing the agony of regret.
I think that this is how the director and writer are thematizing non-attachment to non-attachment, non-aversion to aversion. If suffering comes from a combination of ego (attachment/aversion/ignorance) and awareness, and addiction is the result of dealing with suffering by repressing awareness, then the only way to be free of suffering is to free oneself from the ego. But one can’t do this as an act of the ego.
Twelve step programs recapitulate the spiritual notion of grace by talking about giving it up to a higher power. In the Hellraiser universe the higher powers are the cenobites and awful god Leviathan. Interestingly, in the character Roland’s diaries he referred to the cenobites as angels. But Riley only gets her boon, life (non-addiction), by not petitioning the angels. Again, I suspect this is a deliberate comment on the notion of grace by the filmmakers. Religious people think that if they accept some history lesson then they have done what they needed to prepare themselves for grace. But that turns grace into a work, and so wouldn’t really be grace.
I think in the world of Hellraiser 2022, and maybe in our world too, the only way to square the circle not being attached to non-attachment is to find yourself in a different relationship to pain, in this case whatever pain she was medicating away with pills but also now the pain of moral regret. In this view, the path to salvation lay through sadness.
[One more note. Michael Ardoline has the idea that horror itself is more about radical transformation than about the fear of unknowability or monstrous impurity. I think reading Hellraiser as parable of recovery makes it a good example of this. Ardoline and I are going to read L.A. Paul while rereading Badiou, Graham Priest, and David Roden to try to thematize this with respect to H.P. Lovecraft’s canonical works.]