(Or do they?) Kimberley French/Twentieth Century Fox Bad Times at the El Royale traps a bunch of strangers in a hotel that might be a stand-in for purgatory A salesman, a priest, and a singer walk into a hotel. Technically, it’s set in a hotel that straddles the Nevada-California state line, but the otherworldly air at the El Royale gives away the game: This is a movie about purgatory and judgment, and whether anyone really can earn their way out. And, of course, it all happens while we’re gazing at them, too, judging them by the choices they make.Īll of these themes converge in Bad Times at the El Royale, an ambitious and kind of bizarre movie about religion, salvation, and who we really are. That’s what these films are best at exploring: They show how people perceive one another and what they do to shield themselves from the gaze of others. There’s not much to do on a single set other than talk, argue, and manipulate one another. But when they do - in, say, Twelve Angry Men, or Rope, or The Hateful Eight - they often take on those same sitcom qualities. Movies rarely allow their characters to stay in the same place for long. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark Stick a bunch of humans in a mostly enclosed space - an apartment, a newsroom, a bar called Cheers - and watch them bounce off each other, fall in love, drive each other crazy, and maybe learn some lessons about the nature of being and goodness for several seasons. I’ve often theorized that all sitcoms, or at least all ensemble sitcoms, are actually set in either purgatory or hell and try to do roughly what Sartre did in No Exit. As humans, we rarely stop viewing ourselves through others’ eyes - and that, to Sartre, was hell. That’s their eternal fate.Įver since, one of the work’s most enduring cultural contributions has been the oft-misquoted phrase “hell is other people,” which isn’t a mantra for misanthropes or introverts, but a rumination on how we can’t escape the gaze of others. They slowly realize that they’ll never escape these people. Each member of the trio snipes at the others, experiences hatred and obsession, and drives the others crazy. In his 1944 play No Exit, the French existentialist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre trapped three strangers together in a drawing room and called it hell.

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