Kazan (character)

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Kazan is a character in the 1997 Canadian sci-fi/horror movie Cube, directed by Vincenzo Natali. An autistic savant, he at first in the movie serves only to slow down and endanger the other characters in their attempts to escape the cubic prison they are trapped in, but when it is discovered he can almost instantly perform prime factorization, which is required for solving the prison's mathematical code, he becomes the most valuable member of the group and integral to their escape. Somewhat ironically, he is the only person who escapes; the others are killed by the mad cop Quentin, who then gets killed himself, just as they are about to escape. Kazan was played by Andrew Miller.

[edit] What happens regarding him in Cube

For a good deal of the first half of the movie Kazan does little. He is first discovered by the other characters when they come to a room which has trapped rooms on all sides and below. Quentin checks the doorway to the room above them, and through it falls Kazan. He is mentally handicapped with autism and Savant Syndrome; randomly making honking noises and stating what color the room he is in is, banging his head against walls, and not seeming to understand what is going on or able to communicate with the others. Holloway, a doctor, is sympathetic for him and insists that they take him with them. His slowness, inability to understand things and incessant honking and hooting slows down and greatly annoys the others, particularly Quentin. Also Worth, who is often tasked with babysitting him.

Quentin's dislike of him reaches its pinacle when they come to a room with a sound-activated spike trap. As he will likely make noises, and trigger the trap, Quentin and the others want to abandon him and claim that they will come back for him. Holloway, who has desperately tried to protect and care for Kazan knows this is a lie, and is disgusted at them that they are selfishly abandoning a helpless person even though they are still human beings. Therefore, they have to take him through the spike trap room. Ironically, Kazan does stay quiet, and although he climbs down to the wrong side of the room, and gets his pants snared on the lever that opens the door below him, he, and the others, manage to make it through. Quentin is the only one left to get through, and just as he has almost done it, Kazan makes a noise. Spears come out of the walls and Quentin narrowly avoids death. Quentin furiously grabs and starts to fight with Kazan, but the others separate them.

Later on, after Quentin has gone mad and killed Holloway, it is discovered that the rooms in the cube change their positions over time and that the numbers engraved in the crawlspaces between the rooms show what spaces the rooms will be in as they progress through the cube. Via this, they are able to work out where the exit to the cube is. It is also discovered that the rooms with traps are those whose numbers contain a power of a prime number. In order to determine which rooms are safe, they must perform prime factorization of the numbers. This is a vastly difficult task that Leaven (the girl who had up until now been doing all of the maths to solve the cube's puzzle) is unable to do. It is then discovered that Kazan, who was formerly useless, can do such factorization almost instantly; he recites the number of prime factors of the numbers the second they are read to him (this is quite plausible; some real-life autistic savants can indeed instantly perform prime factorization among other amazing mental feats).

Using him, they are able to quickly safely navigate the cube to where the exit is. They open the door to the exit, and are about to leave, when Quentin (whom they had earlier fought and abandoned in a room due to his murder of Holloway) catches up to them. He kills Leaven, and appears to kill Worth as well, and then goes to exit himself. He approaches Kazan, who has entered the exit, and is about to grab him, when Worth, using the last of his life and energy, hangs onto his leg, and Quentin gets sliced in half as he gets caught between the exit and the room, which is moving back to its original position. Kazan is the only person to get out. He walks alone into a bright light, disappears, and the film ends.

[edit] Personality and Themes

Among the compulsions and disorders caused by Kazan's mental illness include twitching his fingers constantly, making moaning and honking noises, and a general inability to communicate or understand what is going on. He also seems to have a fascination with colors; he states that "This room is green." when the others first meet him and that he wants to "go back to the blue room.". He asks for gum drops from the other characters, and states that he doesn't like the red ones. In order to lure him nearer, Quentin, at the end of the film, shows Kazan his blood-stained hands and says "red Kazan". Kazan does, however, seem to innocently respond to what the others tell him to do (such as be quiet in the spike trap room) like a child, and have a friendly and non-harmful temperament overall.

An important theme of him is that people are not always as they seem. At first he only annoys and slows the others down, and the others (especially Quentin) consider abandoning him. When it is discovered that he can perform prime factorization and that he is key in cracking the cube's code, he becomes the most important and most valued person of the group, and Worth and Leaven are terrified when they nearly lose him when the cube he is in moves away and Worth must go and fetch him. This theme applies to other characters in the movie; Quentin at first is the hero who leads the group, but he then becomes the villain who goes mad and kills everyone, Worth at first is a nobody with no purpose who acts only as dead, unwanted weight, but he then not only turns out to be a designer of the cubular prison, but he becomes a leader who saves Leaven and Kazan, Rennes at first is a skilled and knowledgable escape expert who knows about the traps and sensors in the cube and is the most likely to survive and be instrumental in the other's escape, but he is killed within minutes by a relatively simple acid trap. This theme can be coupled with the theme that everyone in the cube has a purpose.

Kazan also, due to his odd habits and eccentricity, serves as very slight comic relief.

[edit] Wynn

In Cube Zero, a prequel to the original Cube movie, there is a character called Wynn; he is a technician who oversees victims who are placed in the cube. When he falls in love with a woman victim in the cube named Cassandra, he, against rules and regulations, ventures in himself to rescue her. He manages to save her, but gets caught himself in the end. He has surgery on his brain, mentally handicapping him, and then gets placed back into the cube. The last scene of the film has him meeting with some others; and the dialogue in this scene almost word-for-word mirrors the exact same dialogue that is exchanged between the characters in cube when they first meet Kazan. This has led to several beliefs. The first is that Kazan, like Wynn, may have been a technician who broke a rule, got a lobotomy, and was placed back into the cube with mental disabilities. Some others belief in this a step further, in that Kazan IS Wynn. Their names, the cube prison they are in, and the other people they meet with are all different, but this could be due to not being able to get the original actors and sets, and is possibly intended to be the same thing. In addition to the word-for-word dialogue, there are also scenes in Cube Zero in which other characters recite to Wynn the code of each of the rooms so he can decipher where they are; this is very similar to the characters in the original Cube reciting the numbers to Kazan so that he can tell them the prime factors.

An ironic thing to note is that if Kazan is Wynn, then even though Wynn was placed back into the cube with mental disabilities, likely to be disposed of, Kazan gets out again; the only one to do so and even with his mental disabilities. Another thing on this note of them getting out is that in Cube Zero, those that make it to the end of the cube are asked the question of whether they believe in God (answering no to this results in them being killed. What happens if they answer yes is unknown.) Kazan gets out at the end of Cube, but due to his mental disability, it would be unlikely that he would be able to understand if asked whether he believed in God or not, so therefore what would have been done with him is not known.