With the 2010s' candle burning out, I thought it worth looking back on
my favourite movies of the past ten years. It may have been a relatively
uninspiring decade for mainstream cinema, but even the weakest year had
a few standout releases worth celebrating. This post covers the third placed movie.
#3: THE NEON DEMON (Dir: Nicolas Winding-Refn, 2016)
What
happens if a film is less interesting on the terms set out by its
creator than for themes and ideas it might have inadvertently stumbled
into? In an interview with the Independent, Director Nicolas
Winding-Refn stated that his film is about beauty as a class system and
how female beauty has enormous power over men while also being exploited
by them. While Neon Demon is visually
striking and viscerally evocative no matter what its creator's thematic
intentions, I find it a less interesting and cohesive film on the basis
of what Refn claims he meant to say than more complex and original
themes he might have elicited by accident.
As a look at the power
of female beauty and its exploitation by men, Neon Demon works well
enough, but is more memorable visually than thematically. Refn may
present his criticism of the beauty industry in a way which potently
contrasts the awe-inspiring aesthetics of the high fashion photoshoot
with predatory ugliness on the human level, but such criticisms cover
well-trodden ground and are not strong enough to justify necrophilia and
cannibalism for much beyond shock value, despite the symbolism
technically holding.
Even if it were the director's intended
reading, such an interpretation of The Neon Demon seems surface-level
and hyper-literal, never looking beyond the cards laid out by the film
from the beginning. As I saw it, the film is about the intersection
between beauty and horror and how we experience two seemingly
antithetical feelings in the same way. To react to both great beauty and
horror is to react to an extreme out of the ordinary, an alien presence
creating a sensation of awe out of step with our expectation of the
world. Think of the feeling of wanting to squeeze something adorable as
hard as you can, potentially destroying it, or being unable to look away
from the sight of a disaster, like a crashed car or a murder scene, out
of almost primal fascination.
To take it to an extreme, recall
the image of the planes crashing into the twin towers on 9/11. It is an
image of inconceivable awfulness, from the evil of the act to the scale
of the death and destruction it caused. Yet the image has become iconic,
played over and over again every year. The intention might be grief and
remembrance, but is there not also a kind of addiction and veneration
in its wilful repetition? Might we not want to admit that our reaction
to the extraordinarily macabre is psychologically rooted in the same,
almost obsessive, place as our reaction to extraordinary beauty? Where
does boundary lie between fear and worship?
In that context, The
Neon Demon becomes a bigger, more invasive experience. It questions the
distance between two aspects of human existence - the love of beauty,
the loathing of horror - accepted as diametrically opposed because to
imagine otherwise is to invite notions too destructive to contemplate.
Can violence be a bastardised form of love? Can love and empathy be not
only as destructive as hate, but also a form of hate? What does that
say about our conceptions of morality?
Without dissecting the
film piece-by-piece - irony noted, for those who've seen it - this
interpretation of the movie makes its extremes more tonally and
thematically cohesive as a statement not only about the outward
exploitation of beauty, but our processing of it through worship and
horror simultaneously. Nothing Refn says in his interview(s) explicitly
cancels this interpretation and it's possible he was simply providing a
basic framework by which viewers could begin to rationalise his film's
abstract presentation.
Given how much his films leave to interpretation,
it is well within the boundaries of likelihood that his statements were
not intended as definitive. Either way, should I judge Refn's stated
version of the film, or mine? Was it the pretentious, needlessly violent
trash that critics tore apart, or the masterpiece I saw gaze into the intersection between hatred and adoration? Maybe it was
both. Maybe somewhere between their hate and my love lies the truth.
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