It’s difficult to talk about The Cabin in the Woods, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s much-delayed, highly mysterious horror without spoiling it altogether. And while I’m not the world’s most spoiler-averse person, I am going to hold off on discussing the film in any specific detail, though this post will affirm that certain elements are present in the movie, until it’s in theaters, and I’ll revisit it once folks have had a chance to see it. This post is spoiler-safe if you are only concerned about specific plot points. But if you don’t want to know anything about the movie whatsoever, hold off.

In very general terms, it turns out I was right that the movie is about the bureaucracy of evil. And in a lesser way, it’s a sustained exploration of another major theme in Whedon’s work: the beauty in evil.

Over the course of Whedon’s career, he’s shifted from writing purely about the people who escape from bureaucracies and started to spend more time on the people who participate in running organizations, some of whom commit significant evil in the course of their work. We see the Watchers largely from Buffy’s perspective, and the ones who are allowed to have stand-alone stories, and whose perspectives and growth we have access to, are apostates. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is fired for incomepetence, and Rupert Giles defies the council before he is dismissed. Maggie Walsh is murdered as a direct result of her manipulation of the Initiative beyond its original parameters. Riley’s struggles against the Initiative, first as a reformer and then a flawed revolutionary, are as important an aspect of his character arc as his relationship with Buffy. He finds peace when he finds a role that suits him within the government, and that new organization becomes not just the source of his job, and his family. In Firefly and Serenity, we see the same pattern again: we see the agents of the Alliance through River Tam’s memories, or through their encounters with the crew of the ship. And the Operative is redeemed when he accepts the truth about the creation of the Reavers and calls off the agents of the Alliance.

Dollhouse, however, spends substantially more time with the agents of both the U.S. government and the Rossum Corporation, tracing the damage that they do to other people and that participation in the system does to them as well. Corporations, it seems, are self-replicating machines. And fully half of The Cabin in the Woods is spent with and told from the perspective of the movie’s bureaucrats. They get to be just as quippy as the average teenage Whedon hero or heroine, and they get to be tragic in a way that’s compromised and adult.

That’s not the only way the movie feels like it’s different in degree, if not in kind, from Whedon’s past work. It’s also got some of the best monster design in his ouvre. Whedon’s always been very good at creating novel monsters—the Mayor’s demonic form, the gods breaking through from Glory’s ritual. But often, he creates unease by implanting monstrous behavior and worldviews in extremely beautiful human forms. We’re disturbed by seeing David Boreanaz, James Marsters, or Clare Kramer behave in ways that are horrifying particularly because we’re taught to equate physical beauty with goodness. The monsters in Cabin in the Woods can, at times, be much more foreign than that. The loveliness in some of that moster design is impressive, an inverse aesthetic subversion. I found some of the monsters genuinely moving. And for someone who suffers from unusually bad nightmares and has low tolerance for horror, that’s saying something.

Yesterday, Blue Collar Comedy front man Jeff Foxworthy endorsed former Wall Street investment banker Mitt Romney for president, and announced that he plans to campaign with him at several events in Alabama and Mississippi. In honor of this occasion, we’d like to suggest several Foxworthy-appropriate jokes for the campaign trail:

• If your wife drives “a couple of Cadillacs,” you might not be a redneck.
• If you think $374,000 in speaking fees is “not very much” money, you might not be a redneck.
• If your tax return is 203 pages long, you might not be a redneck.
• If you think it’s a problem that billionaires aren’t allowed to give you all the money they want, you might not be a redneck.
• If your earliest memories include looking down upon the people of New York from a helipad with your CEO father, you might not be a redneck.
• If you think “cheesy grits” from a Hilton hotel is down home southern cooking, you might not be a redneck.
• If you only hunt “small varmints, if you will,” you might not be a redneck.
• If you help your son set up a business by fronting him $10 million, you might not be a redneck.
• If the business is named after the place where your “ski mansion” is located, you might not be a redneck.

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A programming note: posting’s going to be a bit slow for the rest of my time at SXSW. There are just too many panels to go and people to see. Thanks for being understanding. I’ll keep the content coming as best I can.

“In Hollywood, the douche is louche. The douchebag, as opposed to the meathead or the jagoff, is a viable hero in cinema,” Slate’s Dan Kois said at a panel on SXSW on Sunday. “Usually, a douchebag could only be a hero if he was redeemed, usually by the love of a good woman…[But now we have] Iron Man, the world-historical first superhero douchebag franchise…[In The Hangover movies]Bradley Cooper plays an unrepentant douchebag who is terrible to his friends.” The panel didn’t entirely get into it—instead, it devolved into one of the more committed piece of performance art I’ve ever seen at a conference—but it’s an interesting question. What does it say about us that we’ve got so many movie heroes who disregard everyone around them in pursuit of their own interests?

There’s something Randian about the perspective that Kois and his fellow panelists, Robyn Sklaren, P.E. Oppenheim, Eliza Skinner offered up. “We’re all animals. We go after our wants and needs,” Skinner said, arguing that in a moment when we put a premium on authenticity, “A douchebag feels so much more authentic that anyone else. A douchebag is honest about the fact that he wants to fuck that girl. Everybody wants to fuck that girl.” Kois said that Michael Mann’s movies have thrived on the fact that “they all demonstrate the charismatic amazingness of douchebags.” And Skinner suggested that, in contrast to your everyday deeply unpleasant person, “you have to be charming to be a douche. People have to want to talk to you.”

The thing is, most people don’t actually meet that charmingness threshold. And most people don’t possess the other attributes, like insanely good looks or extreme wealth, that allow them to ignore the wishes, needs, and even rights of others, and still compel people to continue interacting with them, much less fulfilling their needs. Being able to be utterly impossible and still get everything you want isn’t a remotely obtainable fantasy for almost any of us. For all that romantic comedies get blamed for feeding unrealistic conceptions of what love and relationships look like, it’s more plausible that flawed people will make accommodations for each other than that the average person can get through life being entirely anti-social without ever once being called effectively to account and forced to alter their behavior to get something that they want.

Because I think the truth is, conditioning or no, most people actually want certain levels of interconnection. At worst, that manifests as a desire for credit for being compassionate and thoughtful, which means you’ve at least got to go through some of the motions. At best, we crave actual intimacy and emotional interdependence. These things are messy, and strange, and not uniformly rewarding, but we do often want them. Fantasizing about wanting interactions without the possibility of experiencing pain may not result in attractive fantasies. But it’s a rational response, if not a classy one, to great fear, and great want.