The Box Movie Explained- Mr. Steward, The 3 Gateways, The Garden Of Eden, Jean-Paul Sartre, And Alien Conspiracies

Richard Kelly’s The Box is a polarizing movie. For fans of Donnie Darko, it is another enigmatic masterpiece in the land of the deeply weird. For others who prefer their stories more linear and sensical, it is a nearly two-hour-long slog through confusing plot beats, dropped threads, and haphazard resolutions. I’m a Kelly fan, so naturally, I enjoyed the bizarre reimagining of Richard Matheson’s Button Button. Love it or hate it, by the end of The Box, you undoubtedly had questions. Here’s everything you need to know about the three gateways, the box, Mr. Steward, potential alien experimentation, and the Garden of Eden.

Norma(Cameron Diaz) and Arthur(James Marsden) are a married couple with one son. Their son Walter is approximately ten years old and attends an expensive private school in Richmond, Virginia, where the couple lives. Norma works as a teacher there, and Walter’s tuition is subsidized as a result. Arthur works at NASA as an engineer but hopes to be the next astronaut to Mars. We first meet them during a rough period. Norma is humiliated during class by a student who makes fun of her foot. It was deformed due to a doctor’s negligent X-ray, and she was later informed that Walter’s scholarship would not be continued the following semester. Arthur is rejected from the Mars mission because he supposedly failed the psychiatric evaluation.

The financially strapped couple is in trouble and desperate. A package is left on their front porch in the middle of the night. Inside the package is a box. A mysterious man named Mr. Steward offers Norma a choice. Push the button and receive one million dollars but condemn someone she doesn’t know to death or refuse, and nothing changes.

After thinking about it and discussing it with Arthur, Norma hits the button and immediately regrets it. They try to take back their decision, but Mr. Steward, who seems to magically know they hit the button, arrives and tells them it is too late. He gives them the money and leaves them in shock and fear. From that point on, things go downhill. They have financial security now, but strange things keep happening, and their guilt plagues them. At a wedding rehearsal, people stare at Arthur and make Norma and Arthur uncomfortable. He opens a gift that should hold a candle stick or gift certificate, and instead, it has a picture of Mr. Steward. It feels like everyone is peripherally involved in whatever brought Mr. Steward to their door. Even the babysitter that Norma hires for Walter acts strangely.

The ending of The Box

After a series of strange encounters, they are both shaken. Both Norma and Arthur have independent encounters with something otherworldly. Norma is told by a woman while shopping that it is always a married couple with children under forty. She is further told the NSA is involved. Arthur finds a picture with Mr. Steward, leading him to the same library Norma is in. He finds a book called The Lightning Book instead of the Human Resource Exploitation Manual, which he had been expecting.

While at the library, Norma encounters Steward, who is genuinely surprised when Norma tells him she feels love for him because she empathizes with his facial scars. He explains that when he was struck by lightning, it allowed him to become more than human. He can now communicate with other beings who want him to carry out their experiments on humans. A woman tells Arthur that he must choose between three different gateways. Two will lead to damnation, and one will lead to salvation. He chooses Gateway Two, presumably because the waiter at the rehearsal dinner subliminally influenced him to choose two by flashing the peace sign. That can not be confirmed or denied, however.

The entire family is kidnapped, and Norma is taken to the motel where Arthur dropped off the babysitter earlier and told the pool would judge her. Arthur is taken by a man whose wife also pushed the button. He had to shoot her to save his daughter. He also tells Arthur that Steward is something other than human now but believes he can be killed and all the boxes and experiments stopped. Before they can devise a plan, their car crashes and Arthur is taken back to NASA.

When everyone returns home, Steward explains that Walter can no longer see or hear, and they once again have a choice. They can keep the money and do nothing, and Walter will stay as he is, or Arthur can shoot Norma and go to jail. Walter will have his hearing and sight restored, and the money will go into a trust he can access when he is 18. Norma begs to kill herself, thus preventing Walter from having to grow up without parents, but Steward tells them Arthur has to pull the trigger himself. In the final moments of The Box, Arthur shoots Norma just as another woman somewhere else in America pushes the button. The implication is Norma became the person that the new button pushers “did not know.” The button pushing becomes a cycle that can not be avoided unless it is never pushed.

What is Mr. Steward?

Several times during The Box, it is made clear he is more than human. We are led to believe aliens came to Earth and implanted something in our brains to monitor and control us. That is why some people experience nose bleeds when around Norma and Arthur. When Mr. Steward intercepted the Viking transmission and was struck by lightning it allowed the aliens to use him as a middle manager of sorts. He delivers the boxes, brokers the deals, and hires all the “employees.” An argument could also be made that he manipulates the system, making people vulnerable. He acts genuinely surprised by Norma’s response in the library. He acts remorseful that he can’t help Arthur and Norma, yet he does nothing. Steward can’t because he is just as powerless as all the rest of us humans.

Steward may be able to control everyone who has a chip implanted in their brains, but he can’t control his own actions. He is given instructions to carry out and must follow through. Whether you believe he is an angel or an alien conduit depends on your perspective. There are multiple religious references and images throughout the film. Norma is judged in a pool while Arthur is told to choose a column of water to be saved or damned. Both are perversions of baptisms perpetrated by agents or angels or God or aliens. Extending the metaphor, Steward becomes Jesus and acts as a conduit for his benefactors. In this case, Martians.

Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden

Norma and Arthur are told that a couple is always given the box. Additionally, the wife is always the one to push the button. She becomes the living embodiment of Eve, who ate first from the Tree of Knowledge. That metaphor continues in the pool when she is judged and found guilty of sin and later when Arthur kills her. She is the temptress, the seductor, the original sin. She is always the guilty party even though she is necessary for life, i.e., the sons and daughters that are leveraged to ensure the button pushers are always controlled. If Arthur is right and they are in purgatory, they will see each other again. Their sins will be forgiven, and they will be reunited. It won’t be Eden or Earth, but in Heaven.

The box represents choices and perspectives

The experiment is simple. Reject greed, and everything will go on as it should. The world doesn’t end, humans don’t become extinct, and aliens don’t invade Earth and pillage our resources. The problem is, of course, that the deck is stacked against anyone who is sent a box. The children whose lives are ruined by losing both parents are also destroyed, further laying the groundwork for more doomed people. By looking for human flaws, the aliens ensured they would always find them. Like the Judeo-Christian Old Testament, God or the aliens are full of vengeance, anger, retribution, and pessimism.

Steward explains to the NSA agent that it is always boxes because humans live in boxes. The experiment begins with how we view our lives and what we are willing to do to escape our boxes. As a thought experiment or test, it is flawed. Humans are doomed to fail, and that failure creates more failures. It is also the slowest form of human extinction ever. There are far easier ways to kill us all if that was the plan. As explained, however, the aliens wanted to give us the chance to redeem ourselves. If enough people prove to be worthy, we will all be spared. Free will has all but been removed from everyone, though. The people with chips in their heads have zero autonomy and are essentially mindless robots, while those being examined are manipulated the entire time.

Although Arthur had to kill Norma, they choose to believe that they are in purgatory and they will be reunited in the afterlife eventually. It is the only decision Steward and the aliens can not take from them. Ironically, it makes the two of them probably the only two free people in the entire film. The babysitter confirms this when she tells Arthur that the man in the mirror is the only person who can save him now. She did not mean he could prevent what happened to him or Norma; he could only choose how he reacted to what he was forced to do. It’s an oddly optimistic note for the nihilistic ending.

One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was a philosopher, writer, and political activist known for his relationship with feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and his critique of the German occupation during World War II. He argued the German’s “correct behavior,” and the Parisian’s lazy acceptance of circumstance lulled them into accepting their occupation. Steward mentions the philosopher in the final act. He uses the philosopher’s teachings as proof that free will still exists despite everything the aliens have done, but ironically, he neglected to understand the parallels to Sarte’s essay Occupation. As a Marxist, Sartre believed societies could best be viewed by looking at them as arenas between the powerful and the powerless opposing groups. The aliens would be all-powerful, while humans would be powerless in this reading.

The Sartre quote Steward references means that all human actions are equal and we are doomed to fail. A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost. Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have. In other words, humans are mostly grasping greedy turds, and because we believe that to be true, it will always be true. The aliens have already formed an opinion of us, and since we mostly agree with the assessment, there can be no other outcome. What an optimistic worldview.