© 2017 by James Clark
Filmmaker, Nicolas Refn (b. 1970), has, in his works, always resorted to sensational violence as apparently appropriate for his motives. He could be described as an expert in the ways of violence. Those who assume that comprehending the phenomena of violence is readily accomplished by reason of conventional morality tend to regard our helmsman as a clever but stunted practitioner, someone who, if not emotionally deranged, settles for lucrative crudity.
His most recent film, The Neon Demon (2016), has elicited abhorrence remarkable even for the routine complement of bounty hunters hoping to put him out of business. Though grudgingly acknowledged to be a master of optical sensations, only very few would recognize his persistence as painstaking investigation at a very high level.
In their rush to display what they seem to know about the bankruptcy of LA and the fashion business—by which to fault Refn as lacking sound judgment to be touching it—they tend to refer to a battery of earlier works of his devoted to crime. There is no one, though, whom I have seen who recalls, if it comes to a most telling link, the kick-ass Norse gladiator with a world of woe and wit in Refn’s Valhalla Rising (2009).
However, I think we are well advised here to leave in a subsidiary role those off-site matters and take a close look at what The Neon Demon actually presents. One thing it offers is a stream carrying the opening credits, constituting a big picture demanding far more attention than the products of the snack bar. We are, with this listing of names, offered the keynote of the action, before the residents of planet Earth get down to their penchant for butchering it. Since no one ever cares about those names and positions anyway, why not, our movie decides, bring forward the surfaces of distant, stony bodies in outer space, undergoing rich and changing color touches—red, purple, blue; shaped by the interstices of those inert entities—and a sonic rain of urgent percussion: pulsing, tinkling, resonating, as periodically interrupted by the rattle of machinery. On the heels of this inducement to ditch immortality, there is a shower of what resembles glitzy casino chips not entirely able to shroud the look and the sound of something priceless. The film title accompanies the neon-forward, distressed light, and from there we meet our world as represented by Jesse, the young protagonist, positioned on a sofa in the manner of a blood-drenched victim of an assailant bypassing all those lovely and loving reasons just on display.
We are, briefly, left to make what we can of a figure in a blue velvet dress on the order of the blue moment of that outer space (and where the flooring with its nap comes even closer to what we just saw). There is a slice from her jugular with blood (presumably) streaming down one arm and feeding into a large pool on that once-pristine blue surface. Her foot upon the variegated carpet is bathed in the rich red of a murky room. Her frozen-still face and frozen-still eyes resemble a doll or a manikin—a conveyance of a static state from an otherwise dynamic phenomenon. (In the preamble, we had the stasis of the asteroids or dead planets, rippled into life by the optical and aural initiatives.) The movie camera pulls away and there are flashes from a still camera confronting a photo studio. Here the bird’s-eye (or space-craft) perspective carries nothing of the sublime. In fact, the novice has been given the dumbed-down task of adding to some kind of portfolio of slick sensations for all occasions.
Countering that inertia, there is someone, Ruby, a studio cosmetician, who recognizes that the very young nobody deserves being approached as more than road kill. She helps her clean off the fake blood and tells her she has beautiful skin. Then she offers encouragement which might not bode as well as she imagines. “That little deer in the headlights thing [you have] is exactly what they want.” Ruby’s warm solicitude induces Jesse to disclose that she lives in a Pasadena motel and that her family is “not around any more.” (That, and the fact she soon indicates she has a car, but not a high school degree [“I’m still working on that,” she fools no one], strongly suggests she is not the recent arrival to LA that she maintains to Ruby and a couple of other fashion hopefuls later that day. Another of her declarations, “I’m not as hopeless as I look,” proves to be, from one angle anyway, more sound.) The one who has introduced herself as, “I do makeup,” invites her to a party that night. Having heard that gambit, perhaps very frequently, before, she asks, “What kind of party?” Ruby’s way of saying, “A fun party,” puts the stranger at ease. And though “fun” may not be the right word, the moment does come our way as a fertile antithesis of the blood bath just finished and the one as yet to come. Some lighting designer in the City of Angels has a purchase upon what the City of Lights would love to have, namely, a frenzied blood-red acceleration unit as giving way to a snow-white barrage, both cutting into absolute darkness at such a speed of on-again/ off-again that those being peppered are recipients of being both party animals and party high-flyers, soaring individuals and soaring streams whereby the customers are no longer merely themselves. Jesse smiles over to Ruby, intuitively transformed (but little more than on-again/ off-again).
That destination, like so many others in this strange craft, requires as much close attention to secondary factors as it does to the fireworks being a moment of truth. (Which is to say, the incidents of losing it are as absorbing as the [brief] “fun.”) The song playing as Ruby pulls Jesse onto the floor is “A Long Slide Down,” both a portent of a slide in our protagonist’s fate and a maintaining of the trapeze we all must perform with conviction or fear. It brings to the club a golden chance to take something home from the occasion that could make a big difference. To bring something else to Jesse’s windfall, there is a complement to the twosome, namely, two other recipients of Ruby’s fastidiousness, models Sarah and Gigi, well-established at the agency. These three will eventually murder Jesse; but the real drama inheres in their considerable generosity and balance going forward. In the powder room, all four pause to face the music. The two newcomers praise Jesse for her unspoiled surface sensibility. Gigi proudly mentions all the surgeries she has undergone to be a candidate for the variants of modelling. “My doctor calls me a bionic woman,” she adds. Demure and till-then-gentle Jesse goes, “That’s a compliment?” In a flash, the anti-missile systems go into action. “I hear your parents are dead. Who are you fucking?” Jesse’s not having a quip for that leads to the unfriendly iteration, “All she really wants to know is who’re you fucking… You do sleep with men, don’t you?” For want of any better move, a now seen to be quite competitive Jesse mutters, “All the time.”
Jesse’s remarkably, “all the time,” for a person having reached her 16th birthday only a month ago, is, when closely examined, a piece of work we all need to know, comprehensively, about. The morning after the trip to somewhere she not only delights in but has a blurred purchase upon, she has an appointment (Ruby, again, instrumental, no doubt) with a casting scrutineer, who tells her, in no time flat, “You’re going to be great! New York, here we come!” (Her approach to the new fan consists of a building with exterior buttressing, criss-cross design—earth-quake ready? —resembling, within the pan-shot, a bridge from one plateau to another.) Perhaps the real nugget from our perspective is her remarking to the expert that she found “just a guy online” (whom the talent scout calls “amateur hour”). “Be careful with that,” the sort of mature lady advises. The point being that she could get hurt from “amateurs” in a sea of creeps. Dean, the lesser, takes her for a drive that evening while the narrative proceeds to maintain that the “professional” sphere is just as dangerous. (That Jesse is well on the way to advanced fashion-savvy is clear in her response to Dean’s asking if his photos were a hit. “It didn’t come up…”) She goes on to tell us more about her modus operandi during the spin to that famous ridge affording such a breathtaking outlook upon the toilers of LA, a hugely anonymous profit centre. She begins, while a Palm Beach, De Palma, carriage-trade sound-track issues forth, conveying the smooth progress of the car, seen from the interior, a seeming lift into something abnormally welcome, as was the light show the night before; but we also find her struck with a rush of anxiety. At the lookout point she deals with that, as yet small, trouble. She paces along the boundary, looking over to him sitting on the hood with its firebird picture, in a little-girl-being-so-cute motif, lifting her weightless dress up to her knees and then, looking cityward, lifting her arms upward to a space and solitude she knows she should be attending to more meaningfully than just breathing in a bit. With the happy interview, and its promised “international success,” still buzzing in her ears, she takes in the moon and then tells us much about herself. She alludes to having felt “really small” in “Georgia” when confronted by such an immense and mysterious expanse. (She has no Southern inflection; but he does. The things you can pick up online!) He asks, “Do you feel small here, too?” Rather than develop that that magnitude continues to touch her, she, the apparently new star in the firmament, tosses back the disadvantage to him. “Do you?”/ “Sometimes,” he readily acknowledges. Her follow-up tale of (when she was a kid) sneaking up to the roof at night and finding the moon operating like a big eye prompting her to demand, “Do you see me?” discloses a strain—perhaps dominant—of self-aggrandizement. She tells Dean she’d often fall asleep, dreaming about, “Who I would be.” He’s interested in were she is going with this, and finds, after her cheerfully admitting not being a talented singer, dancer or writer [Did she ever try, after finding those possibilities did not come easily?], that she has a rather shallow intent. “And I’m pretty. And I can make money off pretty…” Dean tries to pull her out of such a wreck by noting, “I think you can probably do a lot of things…” She snaps back, “You can’t tell. We just met.”
The last gasp of this motivational agency comprising Dean occurs in Pasadena where her effects have been in place for some time. (The optics and precedents and a spiel at the bridgework, not to mention her telling the angry models in the powder room she “just arrived” in LA, tend to lull us into the cliché that Jesse is a small-town girl just beginning to go it alone.) Dean calls out to her from the motel parking lot to look at the moon as she heads for her unit along an open-air corridor. She proposes to go out again, and he’s delighted. But, on reaching her room (212) before setting out for a long and possibly tempering night, a sort of boiling point wells up for her (a follow-up to the stress en route to the scenic point and its big league) and she panics about the curtain moving and becomes embroiled in the manager’s spleen, completely forgetting Dean—his being so forgettable constituting a weakness in her and a weakness in him. To mark this moment of capitulation and its being chillingly (“internationally”) frequent, we have the first of a series of pop-up adjuncts, this one pertaining to the phenomenon of the grotty, cat-walk hallway where Jesse’s too-hot-to-handle headquarters radiates. In David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), from a motel corridor overlooking the parking lot, a duplicitous beauty (who can make money out of pretty) has tempered her cynicism and whistled out her love (brief but edifying) for a young journeyman. In Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a jaded entertainment figure becomes a rotting corpse in a multi-unit rental and ardent hearts are out of luck. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (a sub-human beauty with a lot on the ball) uses a filthy multi-unit rental hallway to attempt to kill a bravely inclusive, problematic investigator.
A Jesse who is too prone to jump to the wrong conclusions—imagining a cougar on her bed and an irate landlord (Hank, far from the menace of Blue Velvet’s Frank, though definitely a jerk) shoving a knife down her throat—takes up Ruby’s offer to give her shelter if she can’t stand the heat. That Ruby misbehaves in attempting to make love to her—a telling variant of Rita and Betty in Mulholland Drive—is one thing. That she carries from Jessie’s repulsing her a homicidal resolve to wreak revenge is something else, something closely coinciding with the crude collapse of self-control of her protégé.
In the acceleration to that smash-up, we are privy to (we get under the skin of) Jesse’s revealing embrace of the cheap, making her a prominent role model of the era. The arbiter of the “great” consigns her to “Jack,” a leading fashion photographer (she having ridden out the trauma of the night’s demons). Jack is an ascetic, hair-shaven, severe task-master in a black T-shirt and black slacks, resembling a less violent version of the music teacher, Terence, in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (2014). (On hearing of this step forward, Jesse smiles vivaciously, giving us a measure of her residual best.) Jack the Controller is struck for a moment by Jesse’s remarkable presence, enhanced by Ruby’s facial design strategy of golden figures, giving her the appearance of an ancient-era queen (her enabling reminding us a bit of Carrie’s Gym teacher). That look is far from lost on Jesse herself, now—in the fulsome silent pauses at the icy white studio—finding in “pretty” not only money but the power to leave creeps like Hank (and all the other Hanks she might have run into before the windfall that was Ruby) in her dust. Accordingly, we have a task-master who sort of minds his Ps and Qs, in fertile contrast to Terrible Terence. He demands she take off her clothes and when she hesitates for a moment what he actually says is, “Is there a problem?… All of it!” But what we fully receive is the rather soft ridicule, “You a Mormon?” That would be a pretty light expletive beside the music teacher’s routine verbal holocaust. And that constitutes a remarkably playful and useful structural flutter, in light of Hank’s little insult to Dean a bit later (the boy being brushed aside [as a Mormon] in his bid to put down the inhospitable hospitality guy shaking Jesse down on a pretense of being traumatized by the “cougar”). The gradations of venom here direct us to the film’s heart of tempering the many ways of violence; and the neglect of seriously tempering the resort to violence.
Back to the Terence lookalike, Jack applies a tan-colored cream to her upper body by way of embracing her from behind, an intimacy she would have not long ago found distasteful (though perhaps necessary). (She shies away from Dean’s kiss in the car at the end of the evening about feeling small. But perhaps there it is his career prospects not matching hers which leads to a brush-off. And yet she rallies to rejoin him, notwithstanding the washout.) She had entered the surgery-bright studio (with its maestro and a large group of acolytes looking on) as a rather anxious patient. She leaves as if Jack is a servant to her monarchy.
The summit of her reign consists of her promptly being chosen to close out an elaborate and prestigious fashion show. Two significant factors coincide within that event. There are the predictably over-the-top optics and sonics, made special by their failing attempt to be as convincingly cosmic as the sequence at the beginning of the film. And there is Jesse’s close-to-unhinged lapping up being a giant, where the moon and the sun have become her subjects. Prior to that intoxication, she meets Gigi in the dressing room, gets kicked out of the veteran’s regular chair and mirror; and she listens to another of that acquaintance’s obsession with manufactured allure. She closes her babbling with, “Nobody likes the way they look.” Jesse argues, “I do.” And with that she shows an expansive glimmer of true mystery and also a garbage-bin full of her own sense of superiority. (Between Jack’s shoot and the fashion coup, Ruby tells of Jesse’s meteoric rise, as directed to a less than pleased Sarah and Gigi. That protective insider brushes aside their peevish high-school logic with the mystical phrase, “She has that thing…” The question is, how much and how firmly does she have that thing?
Having to wait in the wings as the run-of-the-mill colleagues amble forth, Jesse indicates that her possession of being the star is far from steady. The sound-system has de rigueur eeriness and she closes her eyes and takes deep breaths. There comes to her a sort of coat-of-arms in the form of an inverted triangle changing color (as the early asteroids did) and gaining size; and also a blood-red diamond form from which she would emerge to meet the subjects/ buyers. (Reverie has come into play here to underline that “that thing” bridges the very intimate and the very universal. Jessie had fainted on Dean’s arrival to try to reason with Hank, and that triangle and diamond [which had insinuated themselves even deeper than the moon] were very present as a persistent residue of pure forms.) The corridor from which she would proceed is mirrored and shaped like a prism, affording her, as she nears the public with its nuisance-factor, many views of her regal image. With the moment at hand to prove she can prevail, Jessie is impelled to kiss her reflection, over and over again. At first the lighting is diffuse and her confluence with the reflection suggests a transcending event. But with each pause in darkened red light she increasingly stands out as one against the world. Subsequent endearments toward herself play out as a steamy but mundane self-satisfaction, with French kisses in the mode of cliché-celebrity “shock,” and being all about impressing one’s dominance over lesser beings. (In this, Jesse is off on a selfish tear, like “awesome” solo drummer, Andrew, at the end of Whiplash.)
The anti-climax of the after-party spells the beginning of Jesse’s “long slide down,” her loss of being seen to be magic. She brings Dean along and during the introduction the show-designer—who brags to Gigi that he’s a genius in all areas of art and design (we immediately catch up with him emoting to a rather dated Shakespearean text)—snubs the outsider with, “Your name is Bean?” More bitchiness from the Renaissance Man, this time dished out to Gigi: “You can always tell when beauty is manufactured.” The master of ceremonies puts Dean on the spot, seated at a distant booth with Jesse, by demanding how Gigi looks to him. “She’s fine,” is all he can think of saying, in a situation where he should never have been called upon to break his silence with snipers all around. More nonsense from the ringmaster: “Now look at Jesse. Nothing fake. A diamond in a sea of clams” [this assessment being only valid to a clown]. He goes on to a credo perhaps touched by truth but not functioning as truth. “True beauty is the highest thing we have…” Dean argues, “I think you’re wrong…” The boss sneers, “You mean to tell me about what’s inside? If she [Jesse] wasn’t beautiful you wouldn’t have looked twice. Beauty isn’t everything. It’s all that matters.” (But “inside” [intent] and [material] “beauty” may share a continuum.) Dean turns to Jesse and urges, “Let’s go.” A Jesse now far closer to old powers than new replies, “So, go…” (During her last encounter with him she declares, “You wanna be me…” With that, she trashes the windfall value of his modest reckoning.
Though having allowed her modest reckoning to become a deadly wildfire, Ruby, like Dean, remains a person of interest for her having walked on a sort of wild side. Being a gal on the go, she has no fixed abode and thrives on house-sitting for multi-millionaires, her current abode being a vast mansion with lovely grounds and an early-20th century art and design hideaway—untouched by the aesthetics and physics of the two women having come to a showdown there. Another of Ruby’s sidelines is to frequent and lend a hand in sprucing up recently deceased oligarchs at an undertaker’s which, like the sprawling residences she fancies, resembles a morgue. She also avails herself of that facility to perform major cosmetic renovations, and we see her attending to Sarah’s general tone. While the latter is under anaesthetic, the fixer ravishes her in such a way that we feel worse for the rapist than the raped. Why do warm and expert professionals like Ruby and Carrie’s Gym teacher miss the boat? There is a metronomic series of cuts between Ruby’s love-making to Sarah on the operating table and Jesse’s love-making to herself on a sofa back at the mansion with, among other artistic considerations, a stuffed leopard (inertia having prevailed over kinetic verve). The now unwelcome guest has availed herself of a lovely red gown, and Ruby’s deep breathing with Sarah pervades Jesse’s various toils. Working girls at work on the prospect of singular powers. Jesse goes on to embellish her left eye-lid and eyebrow with cosmetic diamond aspects. A last, futile bid to capture the right stuff. After sampling the mansion’s purchase upon a palm-strewn Valhalla, she encounters the three fashionistas indoors and tells them that all she can see with her prosthetic eye are those “hoping to be a second-rate version of me…” Thus cornered by the trio, there is Ruby’s question to Jesse, “What are you doing?” Jesse, not only not knowing what she is doing and not sure she wants to live anymore under that presumably all-seeing moon, gives herself and her enemies an elegy which runs, “Know what my mother used to call me? ‘Dangerous. You’re a dangerous girl…’ She was right. I am dangerous…” Ruby, Sarah and Gigi, each carrying a knife, stab her and she falls into the dry pool, where much blood drains from her head—a very old-fashioned assassination for one who carried the wherewithal to be innovative.
In a coda, Jack photographs Sarah and Gigi by another pool, this one a certified LA blue. The girls are cued to look hyper-static, as if they’d died standing up. Gigi begins to break down (like her hyper- challenging relative, Pris, the near-human but short-lived robot in Blade Runner). The old-time name, Gigi (like Dean), having an emotive, empathetic dimension—far from innovative, but something to reflect upon. Her gut bursts into a bloody mess in the shoot’s bathroom, like Pris, when shot by Rick on that fateful, crude corridor. Sarah, who checks on her colleague, provides us with another angle upon the complexity of ambition. (She had, on being rejected for that fashion show, smashed up the site’s bathroom—a not quite human time bomb—and when Jesse had haplessly cut her hand on the wreckage, the angry model partook of her blood. She remarks to the new phenomenon, “What’s it feel like…to walk into a room and it’s the middle of winter, and you’re the sun?” [Jesse can’t resist saying, “It’s everything!” and she might have a point, at that time, beyond self-serving.]) Now having the advantage over both of her rivals, she eats the one of Gigi’s eyes which spurted out on the floor. (Don’t bet on increased vision.) Gigi, the so-called bionic woman, on finding that Jesse has a “real nose,” states, “Life is so unfair!” You got it, Baby! But how much of it did she get? Even those billions who have the organic component could never be mistaken for activating a real nose for the party.
The veer into Grand Guignol must not allow us to miss The Neon Demon’s study of a very mundane story. The thrills, the visionary joy, the heart-felt love and the betrayals are known to everyone. All of the accompanying films here serve to modulate choices recklessly taken. (We could even maintain that Jesse is like top-dog One-Eye in Valhalla Rising, while Dean is like the more circumspect boy who attaches himself to a figure with more potential than he first displays.) Refn constructs a brilliant field of endeavor which heightens the venom usually concealed by workaday and domestic conciliation. But the differences entailed in contemporary life have begun to include massive fractures, instilling desperate pressures upon large numbers of rather impatient sensibilities. I think it is this simmering agitation which brings Refn to a sharp conclusion, an exposure of a demonic predation upon a history which has barely begun.
Because I believe you can never learn enough about intent and its heartbreak, we’ll be following up with Kiarostami’s fervent vigil on behalf of the right stuff, namely, Shirin (2008).
