Hours of Wax

There’s a great deal of twinning present in 2005’s House of Wax. The film presents us with two sets of twins: Bo and Vincent, the film’s antagonists, and Carly and Nick, the two protagonists. Nick sets up a classic twin dichotomy by quipping that he’s the “evil twin”, while the film’s opening sequence shows us two young children (Bo and Vincent) who seemingly embody a similar concept: one is quiet and well-mannered and the other is rambunctious and uncontrollable. What becomes clear, however, is that Nick is not so bad and neither of the antagonists is exactly “good”; certainly Carly’s last-ditch attempt to convince the “good twin” Vincent not to kill her amounts to nothing. The real twin pair is the protagonists and the antagonists (who we learn were born conjoined, in other words, as one).

Wax sculptures, which dominate the film’s visual imagery, are another way of twinning, creating a lifelike representation of a real person. Classically, wax sculptures a form of uncanny representation, lifelike but never quite real enough to avoid being unsettling.

One of the most horrific scenes in House of Wax occurs when Wade (played by Rory Gilmore’s worst boyfriend, Jared Padalecki) is turned into a wax sculpture by Vincent. Paralyzed, shaved, and covered in molten wax, Wade becomes his own representation, later placed in the macabre wax museum whose other figures, with this revelation, become grim potential victims.

But what’s more at issue in the transformation of Wade into a wax sculpture of Wade is the collapse of the traditional relationship between original and representation. Bo and Vincent preside over a town thought initially to be real; in actuality, it’s not just the House of Wax but the entire town that exists as a wax representation. The town is a fitting depiction of what Jean Baudrillard suggested was “the map that precedes the territory”; what vestiges of reality remain — the childhood chairs, for example — are remnants of, in Baudrillard’s famous phrase, “the desert of the real” [1].

Wade himself is not twinned, as in the case of the creation of a wax replica, but becomes his own replica, a reverse twinning. He is not himself but he is not strictly a representation of himself, either. Through the wax transformation, Wade has been erased, transfigured into something more than simulacra but less than real.

The small town of Ambrose at the center of the proceedings is, like Wade, a wax representation of itself. Ambrose is a kind of twisted amusement park, full of automated wax sculptures (probably built on top of live bodies, like Wade) and other illusions of liveliness.

Jean Baudrillard wrote on Disneyland in Simulacra and Simulation:

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real [2]

Ambrose, in this instance, is a kind of twisted, inverted mirror of Disneyland. The cobbled-together illusion of a small town falls apart easily once the film’s characters begin to investigate; the illusion of reality is less important than the uncanny sensation that it could be real. From an audience perspective, though, Ambrose is very much Baudrillard’s Disneyland, “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” when in fact all of the supposed “real” is just more Ambrose.

The human-wax automata of Ambrose are doomed to repeat the same moments over and over again: a woman opening a window; mourners at a funeral; theatergoers watching What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ad nauseum. These hours of wax are themselves replicas of time spent and lost to a town that is both illusory and something more than real.

[1] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, p. 1

[2] ibid, p. 12