Escape Room and Societies of Control

By: Marlee Hargis 

Escape Room, released in 2011, follows the journey of six strangers who are invited to a mysterious building to complete an escape room for the chance to win $10,000. The characters quickly realize that the rooms are more than just a fun game, and they must solve the puzzles quickly in order to move on to the next room or die. In this post, I’ll discuss Gilles Deluze's theories of societies of control and Jeffery Nealon's “Intensity” and how they relate to the movie Escape Room.

Deluze explains that in disciplinary societies we are always starting again, while in control societies we are never finished with anything. Both are evident in Escape Room; the group is pushed from one room to another, having to restart their clock each time with a new set of puzzles. At the end of the movie, even though Ben won, he couldn’t escape, and the Games Master tried to kill him. After a short battle and Zoey coming to his aid the two managed to make it out to safety. After they get out, they plan to go after the organization and put a stop to them. The audience sees that Minos, the creators of the game, is planning another room for Zoey and Ben to be dropped into. They are never out of the game, the gaseous entity will always be watching and manipulating them; even when we think we are at the end of the ‘game’ we cannot escape it.

 

A big force in societies of control is the act of constantly being watched by a gaseous force that is mysterious and exists all around you.  This is where the term panopticon comes in. A panopticon is ‘a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed.’ This creates the feeling that you are always being watched, even if you aren’t, so you act as if you are constantly being observed. Deluze describes us being watched by the corporation who is acting as a “spirit, a gas”. The corporation or “gas” in this context would be Minos, the company that oversees the game. 

The panopticon is evident in Escape Room as there are cameras in every room. At one point one of the main characters, Zoey, notices that the point of the whole thing is that they are being watched and challenges the overseers by destroying all the cameras in the room and pretending to die when the containment workers get there. This leads to my favorite scene in the movie when the workers see the oxygen masks hanging from the ceiling and ask each other what she was planning on doing with them, she pops up from behind and says, “Breathe, bitch!” before BAM, whapping the workers in the head with an IV stand and stealing their gun. Breathe Bitch Scene

“Intensity” talks all about experiences. We, as a society, are no longer making anything new, so we must intensify our experiences and make more of the same. In Escape Room, the rich have become bored, so they put on this game to watch people solve puzzles for their lives. The Games Master explains in the end that they have been doing it for years and have needed to come up with better and better puzzles and themes, which leads them to the ‘Lone Survivors’ theme that is present in the movie; they want to see if luck had anything to do with the perspective contestants’ survival and thus seeing who among them would be the luckiest and get out of the rooms alive. The people watching are among the richest in the world and for a sense of entertainment bet on which player will survive the experience.

 

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