The Greatest Sin of The Neon Demon
Stephen Romano
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*WARNING! Mild Spoilers Ahead!*
I don’t usually review movies anymore here or at my website. So this is not a movie review. I just felt moved to point out something really disturbing, and it happens to be in a movie, and the movie happens to be The Neon Demon by Nicolas Winding Refn. And of course this is a movie that’s been getting lots of ink recently for being “disturbing.” So I guess I’m jumping on a bandwagon in some weird roundabout way. (Then again, depending on when you read this, the wagon may have long since trundled into the sunset, so perhaps that’s another bit of irony?)
It’s always a bit fun to watch when the really-real critics line up in force to dogpile on Mr. Refn, as he unleashes his latest. I ofttimes picture the poor guy mangled and broken at the bottom of a suicide tackle from hell, buried under a slew of punishing critical attacks and odd left-handed raves. Since Drive, mister Refn appears to be trying to inspire the unfettered wrath of such football hooligans. And guess what? They are all probably right. The guys who love him and the guys who hate him, I mean. Art means something different to everyone who sees it.
For those who might not know, The Neon Demon (review) is a “horror movie” which concerns a beautiful young girl (played by Dakota Fanning’s younger, hotter sister), who is fresh in Hollywoodland and trying to make her mark in the modeling biz. Her contemporaries are all cold-as-ice robo-babes who are over-the-hill at 27 and instantly jealous of the new blood—so jealous, in fact, that they end up killing and eating her. I guess that’s what happens.
See, it’s also kind of an art film or something. There’s a lot of cold posturing and weird symbolism. The “directorial vision” of Refn is SO icy and aloof, in fact, that most of the biggest “jokes” and/or “messages” might sail over the heads of your average card-carrying horrorphile while he/she is squirming in his/her seat and/or eying the “EXIT” sign, and guess what? They’re all mostly Hollywood in-jokes. (See again: Dakota Fanning’s younger, hotter sister.) Some of the gags are smash-your-face-in-with-a-mallet obvious: The stunt-casting of Christina Hendricks, for example, as a well-heeled modeling agent who discovers the young ingénue and persuades her to lie about her age so she can get work. (Oh how cute, right?) I counted at least four other winks to the audience like this. The one most buried in the mix, which only a truly obsessive film nerd would ever catch, is the most disturbing moment in the movie—for me anyway. See, at first I wasn’t even sure it was a wink. Then I realized whose film I was watching.
Nicolas Winding Refn is a bit of a cold robo-babe in himself: A new-vogue weirdo-arteeste who lives in a sleek house with bare walls, dresses in the same white shirt every day, and enjoys watching comic-con journalists squirm when he gives elliptical, transparent answers to obvious questions during on-camera interviews. He always seems to have this half-bored quasi-smile on his face when he does something like that, as if he’s aware of something mere mortals are not. Or maybe he just enjoys fucking with people, who knows? In that way, this guy might be the purest artist working in film today. Or the biggest fraud on the planet. That he could be both all at once probably automatically classes him as one of the great film directors of all time. (And, yes, he knows this all too well.) Say whatever you like about his movies, the guy himself is a fascinating case study. And he has made some of the sickest, most disturbing post-modern films of his generation.
Guys like this can go too far however. And it’s never the kind of “too far” that you expect. For example, I found the most upsetting and disturbing image of David Lynch’s entire career to be the rather telling moment when he cast Richard Pryor in his dying years as a motor mechanic in Lost Highway. This was shortly before Pryor’s death, when he was wheelchair-bound, twitchy and unintelligible with multiple sclerosis. The movie is not about Richard Pryor. He’s not even a supporting character. He’s just a visual cue in a few throwaway shots. Whether or not this was intended initially to be some sort of ghoulish Hollywood in-joke, the implications could hardly have eluded a smart observer. And if some people think this was NOT the intention, I put it to you that David Lynch is far too intelligent a man not to understand what he was doing. Filmmakers don’t just toss these things off like a writer pitching funny phrases and weirdo observations into the abyss. (Cough, rolls eyes.)
The hard truth is these guys live with their movies for months, sometimes years, before they release them to the public. During editing they literally watch their own films dozens and dozens of times. They completely understand every implication of every frame of what they do, even if the art of a lot of it is not completely intentional. I happen to know for a fact that even the guys who make really awful movies are that aware of their process. So I believe it was absolutely intentional: Lynch cast a major Hollywood movie icon in his film because the icon was now a shell of himself and Lynch wanted to disturb people with the image. Because disturbing images are Lynch’s stock in trade. Because it would have been impossible NOT to disturb people with that image. It’s the equivalent to putting John Wayne in your movie, wearing a diaper and a colostomy bag. It’s one of the sickest things I’ve ever seen in a major motion picture. Sick, in that it exposes a callous anything-for-the-art sensibility that transforms an eccentric visionary filmmaker into a common bully, mocking the once-great like some asshole jock tearing down a crippled kid’s underwear in a high school hallway.
See this? He’s not acting.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s biggest sin in The Neon Demon is not quite as obvious, nor as egregious in a crimes-against-humanity kind of way, but it’s in the same basic ballpark. And, again, I believe the man is far too intelligent not to understand what he has done. In fact, in this particular movie—a movie that deals with this type of beauty-over-substance subject matter—once you see the sin, it is such an OBVIOUS sin that, yes, it classes Refn as the same type of high school bully. And what makes me all the more sad is that I stumbled across the sin totally by accident—a whole day after watching The Neon Demon. I had to watch a completely different movie before I figured it out.
I will now explain. I will be brief. I promise.
(Cough, rolls eyes.)
Okay… so there’s this other filmmaker named John Sayles. He’s a guy I truly admire. He was a novelist before he became a screenwriter. He wrote some of my favorite horror and science-fiction films before becoming a writer-director auteur. You know his work. You’ve probably even liked a lot of his movies. He’s the real deal because he truly tells stories and understands stories. (He even wears a white shirt most of the time.) John has rolled some real dice with what he’s done as a true artist. Which brings us to Limbo.
Limbo is one of John’s most experimental movies. It’s a film of low-blowing sucker punches. It’s even a horror film after a fashion. I never even knew it existed until recently, when I stumbled across this thing by accident while trolling for bad horror movies on the Amazon Digital platform. (They have LOTS of bad horror movies over there, FYI.) The film was 10 dollars to buy. So I bought it. I was frustrated, outraged and ultimately astonished by it.
This is a film of true life, but also a film of true horror. It features an aging Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as an aging nightclub singer, which would have been disturbing enough—but a lot of the film centers around her relationship with her frumpy, maladjusted teenage daughter. This plot thread reaches a boiling point near the end of the film when the daughter reads aloud from a journal found in the wilderness—but there is a sickly tragic twist to the whole thing. Such a twist requires a great performance. The performance is given to us with skill and sensitivity by a true revelation named Vanessa Martinez.
Martinez is actually amazing in the movie—an actress who’s learned her craft and brings it hard. It’s very obvious that she won the role through a long audition process and that Sayles—a master filmmaker at this point in his career—cast her because she was truly the best person for the job. Having been privy to this process from the inside many times, I can imagine what this must have been like for Martinez. Working actresses have that tough haul. Many of them who catch a break like this go on to great success in the biz. Others become waitresses.
Nicolas Winding Refn cast her as a waitress in The Neon Demon.
Worse still, he casts her as a waitress who serves the evil robo-babe supermodel monsters of his story. They smile and preen as they toy with the poor girl, making her recite the menu specials. When pressed by her nastier friend on why exactly she wants to hear the specials (“You’re not gonna eat any of it!”), the smiling monster to her left says it’s cute how these people “work so hard to memorize them.”
And Refn’s not done rubbing our faces in it. Especially if you know what a gifted and well-trained actress the waitress happens to be. And Refn does. Without a doubt. He could not possibly have missed Limbo. He had to know this was one of the key “themes” of his scene, that the fearless and more experienced actress is reduced to a throwaway joke amongst the “beautiful people.” His final insult is to keep Martinez almost entirely off-camera, never even giving her the close-up he actually needs to really sell the joke. That’s right… we never see what Vanessa Martinez looks like in this movie. She’s a phantom reciting menu specials just off screen with a crumpled resume in her back pocket and virtually zero street cred amongst the “cool kids.”
“The ordinary ones are so adorable, aren’t they?”
In all fairness, it is absolutely possible that Mr. Refn denies Martinez her close-up because she is simply too beautiful to come off pathetic compared to the monster models. (We’ll never know because we never see her face, though from the rear she definitely looks like she’s been doing her sit-ups.) But think about how much more poignant and layered it MIGHT have been if that actually were the case.
Here’s this really pretty girl (who might even be an out-of-work-actress) reduced to servitude amongst the robo-babes in a cold and unforgiving shithole city that (literally) devours its young. And for those who think I’m reading way too much into a throwaway moment in a horror movie, I say again that this is a director far too intelligent, self-aware and film-literate not to notice the grim irony of his sin here. In fact, it seems like he’s smirking again. Like he usually does. My sin is that I didn’t even notice this until I watched Limbo a day later and then Googled Ms. Martinez to find out what other films she’d been in. I was then told by the super cool guy with the white shirt that she was just in a movie I had watched—and guess what? She ain’t so cool no more. In fact, she’s invisible. And beauty isn’t everything—it’s the ONLY thing.
Obviously, I kid. But shit, man…
Nicolas Winding Refn, you make me feel bad. That’s the point, I’m sure. But please don’t stop making movies. I am genuinely interested to see what smarmy, horrifying in-jokes you hide in the next one.
Meanwhile, I found Vanessa Martinez on Twitter not long ago. She turned out to be really, really nice.
What the fuck is wrong with this world?
Categorized:Editorials News
