Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(8)

And this is surely even more true when we have been told, and believe, that the prohibition is for our own good. We spend our lives trying – consciously or subconsciously – to protect ourselves from harm. Most of us would never dream of sticking our hands into a flame, because we know it would hurt. But if a waiter wraps a cloth around his hand before placing a dish in front of us and warning us that it is hot, we are almost compelled to touch it. Why? Do we doubt the man? Are we testing whether his judgement of heat tallies with our own? Are we trying to prove to him or to ourselves that our hands are made of sufficiently asbestos-like material for the pain not to hurt? Why wouldn’t we simply take his word for it and look after ourselves, the way we do most of the time? Who tests the unknown heat of an object with their skin? It is an undeniably perverse response. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I know I have never in my life wanted to eat anything so much as a sachet of silica gel, on which someone has stamped the words ‘Do Not Eat’.

This compulsion is sufficiently widespread to have become a film and television trope in its own right. Perhaps the purest example is a 1986 episode of The Twilight Zone, called ‘Button, Button’, based on a story by Richard Matheson from 1970, and remade in 2009 as a feature film, The Box. Norma and Arthur live in an apartment and are beset by money worries. One day, a mysterious box is delivered with a button on top, and a note saying that a Mr Steward will visit them. Steward arrives when Arthur is absent (are we meant to think of him as Epimetheus, carelessly ignoring the warning of the note?) and tells Norma the deal. If she and Arthur press the button, they’ll receive $200,000. But – and it wouldn’t be The Twilight Zone without a catch – someone they don’t know will die. The couple discuss the proposition: is every life as important as every other? It could be someone who is already dying of cancer, it could be a peasant whose life is wretched. Or, Arthur says, it could be an innocent child. And almost as difficult for them to comprehend as the ethics are the physics of the deal. They open the box, and discover no mechanism within. No one would know if they had pressed the button or not. Arthur throws the box out, but Norma retrieves it. Eventually, the temptation is too great for her, and she presses the button. Like Hawthorne’s version of Epimetheus, her husband doesn’t stop her, but is upset just the same. The next day, Steward arrives with a briefcase containing the promised money. He removes the box and explains that it will be reprogrammed and offered to someone they don’t know. The sting in the tail is never spelled out more explicitly than that, but we are presumably meant to infer that Norma’s life now depends on the choice made by the next recipient of the box. An ungenerous person might wonder if Arthur has done quite well out of this exchange, since he will presumably get to keep the cash and might lose a wife who has already provoked in him a visibly angry response. Maybe he won’t even miss her.

Like so many Twilight Zone episodes, the story interrogates the darker side of human nature: what would you do if you were desperate? Or not even desperate, but just poor and getting poorer? How much do you value the lives of people you don’t know? We might think we would respond differently to the offer, but we all ignore the traumas of strangers every time we watch the news. How else could we survive? We can’t care as much about every single person alive as we do for our loved ones. And there is an ethical difference – isn’t there? – between ignoring a stranger who needs help, or money, or a kidney, and actively killing them. Neglect isn’t the same as animus. But to the person on the receiving end of no help (no medicine, no food, no kidney), the death they face is awfully similar to the one they would face if you deliberately assassinated them.

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The portability of a box with unknown contents somehow adds to its desirability. The great pithos which Pandora has in Hesiod’s poem is infinitely less compelling than the jewelled casket she is holding in Rossetti’s painting. The need to open it, to find out what’s inside, only increases as the size of the box decreases. There is no sense of jeopardy in the BBC’s 1984 adaptation of John Masefield’s novel The Box of Delights, when the mysterious old Punch-and-Judy man, Cole Hawlings, opens the box for Kay Harker. The programme’s title implies that the box is – incredibly unusually for any version of the container-of-a-mysterious-unknown trope – a good thing, and that its contents are nothing to be feared. There are plenty of other things to be scared of in this world: the deeply sinister Abner Brown, his clergymen-henchmen who seem to turn into wolves or foxes, the crazed Arnold of Todi who first created the box hundreds of years earlier. But the box itself is not something we have to fear; only its temporary loss will cause us to worry later on. Instead, it is a passport to wonder: the first thing Kay sees emerge from the box of delights is a phoenix, which he knows doesn’t exist. He can travel through both time and space using the box, and into adventures that are improbable but wonderful. In the final moments of the final episode, we discover that the whole fantastical story has been a dream as Kay travels home for the Christmas holidays. His sleeping imagination has morphed the people on his train into villains all intent on acquiring the magic box. Perhaps this reveals an important truth about how we view an unknown quantity, like the contents of a mystery box: the compulsion to know what it is isn’t remotely diminished by the rarity of it turning out to be something we want.

This is never truer than in the astonishing 1955 noir movie, Kiss Me Deadly, starring Ralph Meeker. The film has a terrific premise: detective Mike Hammer is driving along a quiet road when he picks up Christina, a desperate hitchhiker on the run from a lunatic asylum. They are soon being chased and find themselves in terrible danger: she doesn’t survive the journey and Hammer is nearly killed. He pursues the mystery of where Christina came from and why she was being chased. The twisting plot is everything we love about noir: every suspect seems to end up dead, every lead becomes a dead-end. Finally, Mike finds the secret Christina was trying to tell him about. It is a Russian doll of a Pandora’s box – a box within a box within a locker in a private country club. When Hammer touches the box, he can feel it pulsing with an inner heat. This is an unexpected development in a noir film: we’re expecting it to contain diamonds, or stacks of dollar bills, or ideally a Maltese Falcon. Suddenly, the film seems to be entering the world of the supernatural, which sits oddly against the noir tone. But we soon discover that the box contains far more earthly terrors: it is full of highly explosive radioactive material (a reflection of the time in which the film was made). The box would have exploded sooner or later anyway, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Hammer would have been less at risk if he’d resisted the temptation to find and then open the elusive box.