Chewed Up (Thoughts on The Neon Demon)

 

Whoever said money can’t solve your problems

Must not have had enough money to solve ‘em.

                                Ariana Grande, "7 Rings" (2019)

 

 

“The Neon Demon (2016).” IMDb, Amazon Studios, 2016, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1974419/mediaviewer/rm143201792/. Accessed 3 Dec. 2020.

 

This post contains spoilers for The Neon Demon (2016) and both versions of Suspiria (1977 and 2018). Consider this a content warning also for brief discussion of sexual assault and necrophilia and for general unpleasantness.

                There’s media we interpret, and then there’s media that asks us to interpret it. Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016) is one of those pieces that asks. It’s constructed in such a way that it clearly announces its intentions to operate on both a literal and symbolic level. It’s an off-putting stance for many, and The Neon Demon’s mixed review scores speak to that. It can’t be said, though, that the movie is coy about what it is. It begins with a drawn out sequence where we see the protagonist Jesse (Elle Fanning) glamorously and gruesomely reposed as if dead from a slit throat, and then the camera pulls back and back and back and back as we slowly start to realize this is a photoshoot and not a crime scene. The blurring of the line between the two is thematically relevant to the film’s specific focus on the fashion industry, and the scene sets the mood for the rest of the film in general—It’s unhurried, glitzy, bloody, and self-obsessed. Vain. The Neon Demon has sequences like this first one where it just holds on a moment and, in holding, demands that the audience think about what they’re seeing. For some, this is the call to interpret, and, for others, it’s a big middle finger to their desired film-watching experience (to be entertained in an immediate sort of way).

                In this way, The Neon Demon clearly positions itself as a film in the vein of other modern horror films with Something To Say. Horror has always been a genre ripe for interpretation (see the symbolic kills of one Freddy Krueger, for instance), but a certain strain of contemporary horror films, including 2018’s Suspiria remake, are clearly begging to be seen as something more than just a delivery system for bare breasts and gore (and sometimes both at the same time). I was ultimately surprised just how tame the violence in The Neon Demon actually is. I’d read a synopsis beforehand and had imagined something much more visceral, but its most disturbing violent acts are only implied rather than outright seen. Maybe this is further proof that the film wants to be taken seriously as art, though there is nothing mutually exclusive about artistry and gore. For some viewers, the lack of in-your-face violence may be the biggest disappointment of all even aside from the sluggish thoughtfulness of the pacing, though there are disturbing things to be seen, including what is arguably the movie’s big shocker of a scene where one character gropes, makes out with, and sexually assaults a corpse in a morgue.

                Where interpretation is concerned, The Neon Demon’s theming can be seen as fairly trite. It has a big, obvious message about the consuming nature of the fashion industry in particular and, arguably, also Hollywood more generally. Its main argument is that these industries prey on young women. There’s literal consumption in The Neon Demon since it’s a horror film, but there’s also less hyperbolic “eating.” Men with power in the film, such as Keanu Reeves’ skeevy motel owner and Desmond Harrington’s wan photographer, appear in threatening sequences with Jesse where they present more real world threats of sexual assault. Reeves’ character operates a cheap motel where, presumably, young women from poor backgrounds like Jesse might rotate through as they try (and likely fail) to make it big, while Harrington’s role as a photographer means that he always literally has new women in his sights. They’re both in the business of managing and controlling and consuming women in one sense or another.

                There’s a very loaded line early in the film when Jesse first meets the women who will eventually eat her where the ringleader, Ruby (Jena Malone), outright asks Jesse, “Are you food? Or are you sex?” The line is ostensibly in reference to the conversation the women are having about how lipstick is always named after either food or sex, so Ruby seems to be asking Jesse her preference, though the phrasing obviously can also be twisted to be about Jesse herself. Those are her two options in the industry symbolically—to be food or sex. It’s also a line that foreshadows her fate in the movie. I came away wondering if Jesse would have died if she hadn’t refused Ruby’s advances (if she had chosen to be sex instead of food).

                I used the word “trite” earlier to describe The Neon Demon because it basically demands to be read in this way. It all but beats the audience over the head with its symbolism. This presents a contrast with the Suspiria remake, which is toying with so many different ideas (post-World War II Berlin, Nazi Germany, motherhood, and art, likely among still other things) that it presents many avenues for interpretation. I’m pairing the two because I recently re-watched the 2018 Suspiria as well, and while watching The Neon Demon I was struck by their similarities and differences. Interestingly, The Neon Demon is almost more similar to the original Suspiria than the remake in the broad strokes of its plot.

                The 1977 Suspiria tells a more traditional final girl story with a “too good to be true” bent about a young dancer who is admitted to a prestigious dance academy, only to ultimately discover that the school is run by witches who plan to kill her. The Suspiria remake leads with the knowledge that the school is run by witches and ultimately flips the script on them—The new girl in the company, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), is too good to be true in this version of the story. She’s a chaste but also surprisingly carnal young woman who happens to be a huge fan of the work of her new mentor Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton). She’s a natural who already knows the choreography for the school’s current performance and is willing to fill the lead role, which also makes her the next candidate to be used in the ritual to prolong the life of the coven’s leader, Mother Markos (also Swinton). In the end, though, Blanc realizes too late that Susie is too good to be true. She is actually one of the coven’s ancient goddesses come to stage what is essentially a hostile takeover of the company. Even without seeing the original Suspiria, the remake is a fun subversion of horror movie expectations. It seems innocent and predictable enough at first, but the hints about Susie’s true nature start to pile up as the movie progresses. Meanwhile, The Neon Demon is about a young woman’s meteoric, too-good-to-be-true rise to prominence in the fashion world before she is killed by a trio of possible witches who cannibalize her corpse to (it seems) fuel their own careers. It’s not an exact match with the original Suspiria, but I was struck by the broad similarity.

                Writing about the 2018 Suspiria alone was something I never felt qualified to do since I’m not enough of a historian to make much of anything from its political and cultural associations, and my fixation has been on the “too good to be true” angle. Similarly, I wasn’t sure I would write about The Neon Demon unless I could find a new angle to approach it from that wasn’t focused on the critique of the fashion industry. I don’t personally have the experience to comment on it, and it is such an obvious critique that everyone has already done it as the movie has been reviewed. It’s such an obvious critique, in fact, that it strikes me as a little like the equivalent of a man yelling at young people to get off his lawn. I don’t think it’s unjustified, but it’s obvious and old. Credit where credit is due, I didn’t find The Neon Demon as insufferable as I thought it would be. I thought it would reek of women-as-written-by-a-man given its fixation on old criticisms of old industries, but I didn’t feel that way about it in the end. Only after watching the movie did I find that Refn had two female co-writers, which may have helped. I ultimately enjoyed it, though, as I suggested above, it is very clearly a movie meant for people who like this particular sort of movie. It’s easy to lord over one-star reviewers that blame the movie for being “boring” by claiming those people are just not intellectually curious (or are too obsessed with jump scares or something), but, in all fairness, The Neon Demon is definitely not a movie that is overtly entertaining. And not every movie needs to be a crowd-pleaser—I just can’t necessarily fault people for not liking it. It’s a movie that’s probably best viewed knowing what you’re getting yourself into in advance.

“Suspiria (2018).” IMDb, Amazon Studios, 2018, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034415/mediaviewer/rm3476322816/. Accessed 5 Jan. 2020.

                I, personally, was entertained by The Neon Demon and especially by certain specific things. First, The Neon Demon becomes a much funnier movie in some ways when you keep in mind that Jesse is sixteen. The women who eat her are all snubbed by or offended by Jesse, who is supposedly this great beauty and seems to have this intense, quiet self-confidence (which eventually becomes gloating outright narcissism), but she’s sixteen. Of course, not all teenagers are self-absorbed or attractive—I, for one, had intense body image issues as a teen and have always been average to below-average looking—but what’s sort of ignored for most of the movie, since Jesse’s age isn’t explicitly brought up often, is that she’s not even done growing in any capacity. Her looks and confidence aren’t really the result of magic or some innate superiority to women like Ruby, Gigi, and Sarah; she’s just young. What’s funny about this is the way that the women experience these outsized reactions to some snub or offense from Jesse without, I think, actually fully appreciating just how young she is. They’re getting mad at a teenager for being sexually unadventurous, pretty, and a bit self-centered. It’s darkly hilarious, for example, when Gigi tells Jesse that everyone hates their body, only for Jesse to reply that she likes hers with this sort of casual insistence. Gigi, who has a reputation for her frequent cosmetic surgeries, is obviously wounded by this exchange, but she’s talking to a teenager! I know I keep repeating this point, but Jesse is sixteen, and, again, hashtag Not All Teenagers, but I still have nightmares from the period of time where I briefly worked with kids Jesse’s age.

                Of course, it’s worth pointing out here that Jesse’s status as a minor is also likely intended as part of the critique of the industries of Los Angeles. The owner of the modeling agency Jesse signs with tells her with practiced ease how exactly to effectively lie about her age, and it’s therefore likely that the film intends for the whole world’s obsession with Jesse’s beauty to also be an obsession with teenage girls. As I noted above, though, her status as a teenager is not frequently mentioned outright, which means it can be easy to forget and that it is genuinely unclear how old the women who fall out with her think she actually is, and I think a lot of the humor in the film comes from keeping Jesse’s exact age front and center in your mind.

                Also funny for similarly understated reasons is the scene where Jesse, her sort-of boyfriend Dean, and Gigi are having drinks with a famous fashion designer who drags Dean into a debate that he’s having with Gigi about the inherent superiority of natural beauty. He demands that Dean assess Gigi’s beauty and then Jesse’s and then takes the younger man’s reluctant, underwhelming assessment of Gigi as staggering proof of his theory. Of course, the actual reason for Dean’s reaction is that he’s being asked to judge the beauty of a stranger in front of the girl he’s sort of dating. Of course he doesn’t want to offend either one, so he offers as positive an assessment as he can without outright offending either. That the designer just runs with this answer as an example of some Great Truth—and that Gigi is again deeply wounded by this exchange—is very funny when you sit down and pick it apart a bit.

                To pivot from humor, there’s another specific scene that really struck me while watching the movie. This one comes early in the film after we learn that Dean is the one who took the photos that allowed Jesse to get her big shot at modeling professionally. The two drive out of town up to an overlook where they park and talk about Jesse’s dreams and her reasons for coming to Los Angeles. During this exchange, Jesse claims that she has no other talents—She only has her looks. Jesse has no family, and she talks about how the sky in Los Angeles is like the sky back in Georgia since it can make you feel very small. This visual of the sky returns at the end of the movie when Ruby pushes Jesse into the drained pool, leaving her helpless and broken as the women approach to finish her off. In that moment, Jesse looks up the sky again. Presumably, she feels small once more. Maybe this is a little redemption moment for her as the girl from early in the film re-emerges after disappearing for a bit while Jesse was full of herself.

                The portrait that Jesse paints of herself at the overlook is one of a sort of upbeat desperation. The implications are clear—This is her one shot at making something of herself, and she only has one way to do it. What are her other options? Probably the same as most people’s options this day in age. Imagine Jesse the Uber driver or Walmart cashier or waitress (probably all three these days). I’m not sure this moment stands out to everyone, but as someone who has been feeling precarious in this world for years now, it spoke to me. I recently turned 30, and while my intent is not to imply that 30 is old, I’m well aware that it’s on the cusp of the period where more people start to run into more and more serious health issues. I have little in the way of savings and no retirement plans. I’ve been working the same part-time job for over half a decade now, with no living wage and no prospect of advancement. And I’m not special. I, and many others, have no capacity to weather any of the storms of old age. Cancer diagnosis? Forget about it. I have nothing. And now a lot of people have even less than I do because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The precarious nature of the world has been laid bare for many of us who had previously been somewhat privileged to be able to ignore the fact that once you start falling, there’s nothing to stop you from going all the way to the bottom. I’ve personally been aware of that precarity for years, but as news outlets report on the extremely high number of Americans who have “slipped” into poverty because of the recent pandemic, that fear has only been heightened as my suspicions are proven by the real world.

                In The Neon Demon, for part of this scene at the overlook, Jesse walks a small wall or barrier like a tightrope, the city behind and below her. You could see this as a symbol of her precarity. Jesse lives in a world that is ostensibly our own—just a few years older now—so, poor and alone, she’s staring down the hole at that long fall I mentioned. Her one shot at a big break relies on her looks, which can very well fade as she grows since she’s only sixteen. If she fails or falls, now or in the future, there is nothing to break her fall.

                That feeling of having what feels like only one shot at success in life is something that resonates with me. There have been times where I’ve thought about leaving this stressful dead-end job to try to find something else, but looking at what’s available out there has always curbed those feelings. There’s nothing out there that pays enough by itself. And, too, there’s the feeling of only being good at one thing. I sometimes feel like I don’t have the physical or mental health to work a “normal” job, and what I have is one of the only positions that seems to accommodate those things and to actually work with my particular ability set. It’s also one of the only jobs I can stomach the prospect of working, regardless of pay or of my ability. I cannot stand the thought of spending my whole life working for someone else’s profit exclusively.

                I mentioned before that I don’t have the personal experience to focus on The Neon Demon’s critique of the fashion industry, but I do have experience in another field with a similar consuming bent where youth is concerned. (You could make the argument that all industries are like this, of course. All of them are about using people up, and young people are easy prey with little to fall back on and lots of energy to exploit.) Specifically, I’m talking about academia generally and adjunct teaching specifically.

                While graduate students can be a diverse group with their ages, you’re generally looking at a much older, settled group of people—administrators, tenured professors—who rely on the labor of a generally younger, rotating group of people with dreams not unlike Jesse’s. I read a thread earlier this year on Twitter which now seems to be unavailable where people shared the physical and emotional toll of graduate work. Some mentioned running into dangerous health complications without even realizing it because they were so used to being ill and down that they didn’t even register something more dangerous than usual was going on. There were also, of course, stories of sexual assault. I feel lucky that I got by with just weight gain, some temporary trouble remembering things, and even worse anxiety and, likely, OCD which I had already been dealing with. It’s hard for me, as someone who was very open as an undergraduate about wanting to be a college professor, to not feel a little resentful toward the faculty I considered mentors who did essentially nothing to dissuade me from that goal, who didn’t even mention, if I recall correctly, that the market was in writing instruction and not literature. Not to mention that there really isn’t a market, at least not for full-time jobs. Everything’s part-time now, and you have MAs and PhDs (and even some high school graduates) all competing for the same relatively tiny pool of jobs, the vast majority of which are part-time. And you can linger as an adjunct forever. Several years ago, I read an article (linked at the end of this piece) about the lives of some “full-time” adjuncts—among the various stories were one who was doing sex work to make ends meet, another who was living in a car with their partner and dogs, and still another who was living in a trailer with very limited utilities. And if any of them ever finally quit and decided to do something else, they’d be easily replaced. There’s always someone else willing to throw themselves in.

                But quit and do what else? Imagine Professor Me the Uber driver or Walmart cashier or waiter (probably all three these days). My undergraduate work was entirely focused on teaching, and I never got any real world job experience because I was privileged enough to not have to work and go to school at the same time. Everything I have is in education. I have a certification in education that will expire in several more years that I spent four years, and quite a bit of additional money in certifying testing, earning. I went all in on this particular career path when I made my choices earlier in life about where to invest my time and money, and now those choices are probably literally going to kill me someday since I don’t make enough to live on. And, too, there’s the feeling of only being good at one thing. I’ve been chewed up by an industry that makes big promises—or at least allows you to have big dreams without dissuading you—and it would happily spit me out without a thought if I ever decided I couldn’t take it anymore.

                What was I supposed to do, though? Move to Los Angeles and be an artist? In this world?

                So I relate to Jesse in some ways. I’m a young person with few useful talents who took what seemed to be their one shot at success and only found out after the fact that they were throwing themselves into a metaphorical woodchipper, and there’s a big line behind us waiting for their chances to jump into it too.

                And thus the Ariana Grande quote at the beginning of this post. There’s not a problem I have or ever will have that couldn’t be solved by being rich, and the same goes for everyone everywhere. What must it feel like to finally make it? I was looking at a screencap recently of the donations made to support a certain political candidate, and one of the donations was for a few million dollars. What must it feel like to have that kind of money? To be able to casually part with that much? It must be the best feeling on earth—to be secure and know that any need you ever have will be met, to be powerful and above suffering. There’s a lot of rhetoric out there, ranging from supposedly religious truisms to just folk wisdom, about how money doesn’t bring anyone happiness, but that’s obviously a lie, something meant to keep the poor and the ugly and unprivileged from ever wising up to the fact that they’re living precariously while their betters hang out in their own special club. If it wasn’t clear before, the unending scandals and naked criminality of the recent American political cycle of the past few years should have made quite clear to anyone here with doubts that power and wealth essentially make you immune to consequence as long as you don’t screw over your fellow upper-class colleagues (see, for example, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos). I’m essentially borrowing the words of others here, but there are two economic systems in this country—unwavering capitalist corruption, austerity, and deprivation for the poor and a sort of buddy-buddy socialism for the rich so long as they don’t dare to cross their own kind. That “wisdom” I mentioned before is meant to placate the oppressed majority of this world and make them feel like they actually have some sort of edge over the people with the shiny designer boots pressed firmly to their bended necks:

                You haven’t made it and never will, but don’t worry, those rich people are actually miserable, and breaking your back and dying in a gutter is good for you spiritually! Please feed the woodchipper quietly and die quietly.

                This post was originally supposed to go up in early December but got bumped because I was too busy being eaten alive to revise and edit it. At this point, it’s the start of a new year. A couple of hours ago (as of the time I originally wrote these words), the point that I had finally had enough of live television celebrating the start of 2021 was the point at which they aired a big lottery drawing where one family would win a million dollars. It was the point at which I got disgusted enough to just turn the TV off because that’s really the only way out of this mess—to hope to God that you’re one of the lucky few people to come into money, random-ass Publishers Clearing House-style, so that you can maybe escape this precarious hellhole.

                What exactly is the “demon” referred to by The Neon Demon? There’s some sort of occultish stuff in the film—maybe Jesse’s killers are witches and maybe not; maybe Jesse has magical precognition and maybe not—but there’s nothing that seems traditionally demonic. Like much of the movie, it operates on a symbolic level. It’s probably the city of Los Angeles, the glamorous industries, or, more abstractly, the desire that takes a young girl far from home and temporarily transforms her from a starry-eyed, desperate dreamer into a haughty monster before finally smashing and cutting her apart and consuming her. It’s the dream, the unquenchable desire to make it, to transcend the degrading drudgery of this precarious life that gets people to line up to be eaten by exploitative fields and industries. 

                To quote the owner of Jesse’s modeling agency, “I see twenty or thirty girls come in here every day. From small towns, with big dreams. Some girls crack under the pressure. You? You’re going to be great.”

                Put another way: Don’t worry—If you just work hard enough, one day you’ll make it! I’m sure everyone else who got chewed up and spit out was just too lazy to do what needed to be done or just couldn’t hack it.

 

Here is the link to the article I mentioned above, “Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars.” It touches on the specific cases I mentioned but also goes over others and in greater detail in a way that really makes clear the precarity of a career in this field: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/28/adjunct-professors-homeless-sex-work-academia-poverty