THE NEON DEMON: Skin Deep

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Writers: Nicolas Winding Refn, Mary Laws, Polly Stenham
Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Keanu Reeves, Karl Glusman, Desmond Harrington, Christina Hendricks
Runtime: 118 mins.
2016

Nicolas Winding Refn broke into mainstream consciousness with 2011's Drive, the Ryan Gosling action vehicle. If you've never seen Drive, the phrase "Ryan Gosling action vehicle" probably conjures all sorts of expectations, few of which would sync up with the experience of watching Drive. Audiences were so distraught, in fact, that one Michigan woman brought a class action lawsuit against the film's distributor for releasing a deliberately misleading trailer, as the end product bore little resemblance to something in the vein of The Fast and the Furious. The critics, meanwhile, by and large heralded Drive as a brooding thriller, and a fascinating deconstruction of the masculine hero figure.

Two years later, Refn released Only God Forgives, and this time neither audiences nor critics were on board. Sitting at a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, some excoriated the film for being laborious and impenetrable, while some lambasted it for being too on the nose. For my part, Only God Forgives was one of my favorite movies of 2013. It went even deeper down the rabbit hole of deconstructing Ryan Gosling's persona as part of its critique of the violence and perversion inherent in toxic masculinity. The central visual motif of the film is that of the hand: unclenched in supplication, clenched in violence. This commentary develops in glacier-slow sequences underpinned by Cliff Martinez's infectious score.

So it is to my absolute pleasure, and the distress of many others, that The Neon Demon is the perfect counterpart film to Only God Forgives. Whereas the latter follows violent gangs and the sex trade in Thailand to immerse us in toxic masculine culture, the former thrusts us into the Los Angeles modeling scene in order to put a lens on toxic femininity. The Neon Demon is Only God Forgives refracted through the prism of gender.


The film follows Jesse (Elle Fanning), a fresh-faced model trying to make an impact on the world of modeling. After a foot-in-the-door photo shoot, make-up artist Ruby (Jena Malone) decides to make the admittedly naive Jesse something of a personal project. Ruby and her plasticine modeling friends Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee) steer her through an increasingly meteoric career path, all the while prying into what exactly it is about this girl that makes her so desirable. Meanwhile, Jesse finds this success bewitching and embraces her newfound power.

Movies are a complex synthesis: you bring something, the creators bring something, and the medium brings something. It all mashes together into a sloshy cocktail of experience, and the infinitesimally complicated result triggers a knee jerk emotional reaction that generally causes us to sum up a film as Good or Bad. A film is a physical artifact in our world that is the same from person to person (putting aside the added wrinkle of viewing format and presentation quality), but in many ways it's more accurate to say that a movie is different for everybody. For example, if you're a viewer who considers plot to be equivalent to story, or at least central to it, you're likely to be put off by The Neon Demon. The film plays more as a grotesque dream than anything, with narrative threads stitched together like a Frankenstein's monster. Although the result is far more elegant that that simile suggests, plot-centric viewers will not find proper scaffolding to latch onto.

Those who bring a sense of moralism to the proceedings are going to have a bad time. The depravity portrayed is abrasive, with one taboo scene in particular causing walk-outs and outrage. Is the film tasteless by current cultural standards? Certainly. But it would be ridiculous to ignore that this is exactly the point. Refn has even gone so far as to call himself a pornographer. Not in the sense that he films people going at it, but in the sense that he is self-consciously exploitative of the power in taboo images, sometimes unabashedly toying with titillation.

Yet there are multitudinous layers beneath that surface, existing in a diegetic relationship with it. That brings us to our next type of approach: as a story so centrally fixated on beauty, the female form, gender roles, and the exploitation of women, The Neon Demon is just begging to be viewed through a feminist lens. So how does that shake out? Unsurprisingly, your results may vary. Some find the film misogynist because of the brutality and grotesquery at play. Some find these beauty-obsessed characters lurid and regressive. One critic I read even suggested that it was obvious the film issued from a man, and if a woman were to have made it, "The ending would certainly have been different - some likable woman, a type who simply doesn't appear in Refn's version, would have triumphed over something bad - but mainly the film would have been more campy, more violent yet also funnier, with blood pouring forth not only from its female characters but also from the men. I might not have liked it any better, but at least I might have laughed."*

*Putting aside the fact that a great number of women did make this film, including two of the screenwriters and the cinematographer, this is an example of straight-up awful criticism. Perhaps the most important function of the critic is a willingness to meet a work of art on its own terms rather than just imagining the story you might have written. It's okay to feel that you would have done things differently, but keep that nonsense out of your review and go write a screenplay instead.

Let's go back to my earlier assertion that The Neon Demon is Only God Forgives refracted through the prism of gender. If Only God Forgives is about toxic masculinity and all the ways men are awful, then The Neon Demon is about toxic femininity and all the ways women are awful. For a movie that goes to great lengths to show women destroying other women, that's an understandable reading, though not a particularly flattering one. This is an instance in which egalitarianism does not equal true equality. Asserting that men and women are equally awful in a misguided attempt at parity only serves to reinforce the oppression of women by disregarding the one-sided violence of the patriarchy and our continued cultural disparity across the gender divide.

Yet The Neon Demon is saying so much more than the puerile "women are BAD" angle of other exploitation films. This is made apparent from the very first scene post title sequence.** A woman, bloodied from the neck down, eyes accentuated by glittering rhinestones, lies splayed on a couch while the camera creeps towards her. She is still. The slow zoom is intercut with shots of a stoic man, face obscured by a camera, snapping shot after shot after shot.

**Worth mentioning that it is one of the best title sequences I have ever seen, and sets the tone for the movie perfectly. More movies ought to be inventive with their title sequences! Also, so that I don't pull focus elsewhere, I'll use this opportunity to mention the score. It is incredible. Refn and Martinez have got to be one of the best matched filmmaker/composer pairs in the business. Martinez's sinister synthy melodies carry this film; I want to buy the soundtrack and listen to it forever.

This opening encapsulates a great many of the film's themes. The scene exists in binary impressions, setting up a throughline of Madonna/whore commentary. Is she modeling? Is she dead? But perhaps the more important binary is that between the photographer and the photographed. The truly riveting image here is that of the bedazzled bebloodied model, but the film makes a point of giving equal time to the man who is capturing her image, forcing us into some awareness of how we are also complicit in her consumption. The film continues with this insistence throughout, not only showing us the beauty and all that is behind the beauty, but emphasizing the male gaze that structures this culture of laser-focused oppression. Just as the overriding visual of Only God Forgives is that of the clenched fist, the recurring image throughout The Neon Demon is that of the eye.

That is the great revelation of The Neon Demon. The commodification of beauty gives rise to a culture of women destroying other women, but this cannot be considered a true culture of women. Rather it is a culture of men injected into women. The power of sexism lies not only in the way men act against women, but in the way women internalize that patriarchal male gaze and redirect it towards each other. A fascinating choice of The Neon Demon is to populate the movie with men in positions of power, but give them very little ultimate bearing on the proceedings. The men may have invented this game of violence against women, but the women have perfected it. It is a self-perpetuating system. Thus The Neon Demon behaves more like a fable of our deepest and most unsavory forms of misogyny than yet another thoughtless example of it.

For all these reasons I am fascinated by The Neon Demon, but you don't have to approach the movie as a treatise on institutionalized sexism to appreciate it. If you're in it for the horror, there is plenty of bizarro atrocity to adore. You'll just need patience to get there. Or if you just want to bathe yourself in some of the best cinematography of the year, Natasha Braier's work here is absolutely unparalleled. The Neon Demon is a visual feast unfettered by plot or overmuch dialogue. Light, darkness, and color are all used in crafted excess to evoke an overwhelming mood. So much story is told by scene composition, especially in Refn's careful framing of reflective surfaces. Most movies might have a shot or two that get branded onto your memory, but there are countless images from The Neon Demon that have stuck with me in the weeks since I've seen the film. These are shots that are not only gorgeous, but are layered in such a way that they yield more rewards the more you turn them around in your head.

In any case, it's clear that this movie is not for everyone. But I know that in the years to come, I will be carefully selecting others to share in this experience with me. Partially because I can't stop thinking about the damn thing.

4 / 5  BLOBS