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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.
The strange, compelling and unpredictable nature of Pandora’s box has inspired musicians as well as artists and film-makers. Love to Love You Baby, Donna Summer’s 1975 album, contains easily the best song with the title ‘Pandora’s Box’。 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released a different song with the same title in 1991, with a music video full of clips of Louise Brooks in the 1929 silent film Pandora’s Box. Pandora isn’t mentioned by name in the song （though it does reference a ‘dangerous creation’， which could easily be read as Hesiodic by the enthusiastic classicist）。 In the same year, Aerosmith also released a compilation album, Pandora’s Box, whose title track dates back to 1974. One interview suggests a theme of women’s liberation inspired the lyrics, but, to the untrained ear, it sounds a lot like Steven Tyler has the hots for a woman named Pandora, whose box is euphemistic rather than metaphorical. Though perhaps I am being unfair, and there simply isn’t anything which rhymes with ‘proud’， other than ‘well-endowed’。
Even when it isn’t explicitly named as an instance of Pandora’s box, we know the trope when we hear or see it. In 1994, cinema-goers flocked to Quentin Tarantino’s cult hit Pulp Fiction. It grossed more than $200 million, which is unusual for a film which also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The film has many iconic moments, not least of which is the briefcase which acts as a MacGuffin: we never know why the characters want it, but our desire to know what it contains is only heightened by other people’s responses to it. It is valued so highly by characters we believe in that we in turn believe it must be valuable. Yet we never find out why. We only know, as with Kiss Me Deadly, that when the box is opened, it contains something which emits light. Fans have speculated on what this might be, but the film never tells us and nor has its writer-director. In 1995, Samuel L. Jackson told Playboy magazine that he had asked Tarantino what the case might contain, only to receive the reply: ‘Whatever you want it to be.’22