The Neon Demon: a spoiler-filled chat about the year’s best or worst movie
Is Nicolas Winding Refn's latest really good or really bad?
5Here at The Verge, a small contingent of us have been more than a little preoccupied with the most important question in cinema in 2016: will Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon be the best or worst film of the year? When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the latest film from the director of Drive, Bronson, and Only God Forgives was met with a chorus of boos, which can be as much a damnation as a sign of quality. (It’s been reported that the festival-goers even booed Refn’s thank you to his wife in the end credits.) In the case of The Neon Demon, whose eye-popping trailer looked like a high end perfume commercial for triangles (triangles!) it seemed to be a sign of a love-it-or-hate-it type of movie.
The film follows Jesse, played by Elle Fanning, a 16-year-old newcomer to Los Angeles who hopes to break into a career in modeling. Her youth and beauty prove irresistible to everyone she encounters — agents, photographers, fashion designers, a skeevy Keanu Reeves, a skeevy Jena Malone, and even a rogue mountain lion. She is declared an It Girl, much to the chagrin of two older former It Girls and her dopey "good guy" boyfriend. Jesse’s ruthless careerist side starts to come out, making her a target for everyone suffering in her shadow.
That would be an innocuous enough story as a made-for-TV movie on Lifetime (but probably Freeform), but this is Refn here, whose films up until now have dealt almost uniformly with over-the-top masculinity and stomach-turning ultraviolence. What would he have to say about the experience of an image-conscious teen girl? Would a Refn film about fashion self-implode from its own stylishness? There was only one way to answer this question: see the movie, and then talk about it on the internet.
Warning: this article contains major spoilers for The Neon Demon.
Emily Yoshida: There’s a kind of corny press release email that’s been going around with all Neon Demon-related materials lately, in which all the cast members answer the question "what is The Neon Demon?" Bella Heathcote, who plays the pettily-named LA model Gigi answered, "The industry and the city. It’s glossy and shiny but it will eat you alive." I now see what you did there, Bella!
Maybe it’s best for us to start out with our expectations going into this movie. The optimist in me wanted this to be a highlight of my 2016 moviegoing year. From the trailers, it appeared to have all my favorite things: Los Angeles, evil teens, the American Cement Building, and a huge debt to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Had it been coming to us from any other director (say, a female director!), I would have let my hype go completely unchecked, as opposed to the cautious sniffing out I found myself doing around every new interview and review. But this is Nicholas Winding Refn at the wheel here (or NWR, as his Saint-Laurent-esque monogram dubs him,) a notorious idiot savant, who, like Ryan Gosling’s pretty cipher in Drive, can stumble into greatness when he’s not making words. I had little doubt the imagery would be swoony and campy in equal measure. Its commentary on the shallowness of the "Los Angeles modeling scene" I had less high hopes for.
My biggest complaint about this movie ended up having nothing to do with its purported "shallowness," which every critic seems to be bending over backwards to point out as if to distance themselves from the fact they’re even writing about it. It was that it ended just as it was getting good! But I know a lot of people have complained that it drags on too long, so I’m curious as to what you guys think. Also, is it possible that NWR could be our foremost bad director of nonetheless interesting films?
Kaitlyn Tiffany: The trailer reminded me of a lot of things that I like as well — Spring Breakers, Vanderpump Rules, Black Swan, Twin Peaks — but more than that it seemed like it would be a conversation movie. I love a good internet conversation! Love to follow a backlash cycle! I had visions of a New Inquiry free supplement. I also had high hopes that this movie was going to be transparently about the life and times of Gigi Hadid, which turned out not to be the case, even though there was a character named Gigi. In hindsight, that was sort of an irrational hope as I don’t think Refn would ever admit to knowing who Gigi Hadid is. Also, I googled it, and it’s loosely based on the life and times of Elizabeth Bathory, a countess who killed hundreds of virgins in the late 1500s and bathed in their blood! That’s a huge spoiler.
My biggest complaint with this movie was the dialogue, which was incredibly painful to listen to both because it took everyone 40 seconds or more to respond to a direct question and because people said really inane things like, "It’s the middle of winter and you’re the sun," and "I used to yell at the moon, CAN YOU SEE ME?" and "Which are you, food or sex?" So I, too, enjoyed the last 30 minutes of the film the most, both because crazy shit started happening and because people stopped talking.
My favorite thing about The Neon Demon was that the creepy photographer named Jack was played by the same guy who played Chuck Bass’ creepy uncle named Jack on Gossip Girl, and he performed both parts exactly the same way. I really can’t wait for Lizzie to jump in here, because I can still see her lil’ jaw twitching with anger as we left the theater.
EY: That WAS Jack Bass! I definitely had the thought "that looks like Jack Bass" during the body painting scene. IMDB says the photographer’s name was Jack. If this movie takes place in the GG universe that would actually make a lot of sense.
Lizzie Plaugic: Well I guess Kaitlyn has already given away my ultimate reaction to this movie, which was: it was bad. I went in pretty hopeful that The Neon Demon was going to be campy and dark and weird, and it was, which is why I’m still kind of baffled it was also so, so boring. It took me a while to get to that final "bad" conclusion, by the way — mostly because the movie was a slow 117 minutes. While I, like both of you, thought the film didn’t really start to get interesting until the last twenty minutes, I have to admit I only realized that in hindsight, with 24 hours between me and the excruciatingly slow dialogue, fashion world clichés (sleazy bald photographers wearing all black!), and masturbatory self-seriousness (or was it a parody?!). When I was actually living through the last twenty minutes of the movie, the start of each new scene felt like torture — maybe the kind where a single drop of water hits your forehead every thirty seconds and you can’t brush it away. Watching The Neon Demon was like hanging out with a stranger on cocaine on a Monday night: fucking exhausting.
Like hanging out with a stranger on cocaine on a Monday
It’s difficult to pinpoint the most disappointing part of this movie, but the most jarring was its insistence that Jesse (Elle Fanning) possessed some kind of rare perfection that caused everyone in her immediate vicinity to inhale sharply or try to murder her. Because even within the Neon Demon world, Jesse was simple and dull. She was given almost no interiority, and no backstory other than a pair of dead (or vaguely absent) parents. She is a porcelain-skinned orphan virgin and that’s all I know. Maybe her captivating aura stemmed from her virginity, which, given how this movie treated sex, is not unthinkable.
EY: Elle Fanning has made a career out of being an avatar for purity and youth that older, more interesting characters can react irrationally to. It’ll be interesting to see how long that can last. It feels like there was a version of this movie where she flexed way more of her sociopathic Snapchat-obsessed teen demon muscles, or got a little more Sprang Break before her comeuppance, but for whatever reason, Refn and Fanning didn’t take the character that far. Even without a backstory, seeing Jesse turn truly dark would have given her character a little more to chew on. I don’t know what there was to lose by going full tilt — subtlety?
I don’t think it’s because Fanning couldn’t carry that kind of darkness; there are flashes of it here and there that are really chilling, especially as delivered in her dull, soft voice. I actually think Refn couldn’t fully embrace his own concept — that this pure, beautiful girl could also be a vessel for unbridled vanity, narcissism, and malice. He had to give those traits to the older, more hardened model characters. And Abbey Lee is especially great in vengeance mode, but that’s a way less interesting scenario, and makes Jesse the helpless innocent when the movie’s been arguing she’s anything but.
KT: I really liked the music that played whenever someone was admiring Jesse’s radiance. It was sort of like the forensics lab music in Law & Order: SVU, before the cool medical examiner lady got murdered.
It upsets me a little that Elle Fanning was 16 when this movie was filmed, and that a lot of her interview responses about the movie sound like they were scripted for her by Refn. She keeps talking about how worrisome it is that we’re obsessed with the "dead" images of Instagram that distort reality and don’t display real beauty. If I had to take a stab at it, I’d say this is Refn feeding her a defense of the scene in which Jena Malone has sex with a dead body that looks vaguely like Jesse. That actress' (corpse's) name is Cody Renee Cameron and her previous film roles have been "Topless Woman," "Hot Locker Room Girl," and "Hooker in a Tree #2." That IMDB revelation made me uneasy. Refn is critiquing (or backhand praising? This movie was constantly yelling "IT’S BOTH" so who knows) an industry that treats women like objects and gets to them at way too young an age. But his industry does the same thing, and he is doing the same thing. Maybe I’m being too serious.
Did you feel like there were any real original critiques or defenses of fashion, narcissism, femininity, Los Angeles, tropical wallpaper, infrared lighting, or lipstick naming conventions in The Neon Demon?
Narcissism, femininity, Los Angeles, tropical wallpaper, infrared lighting, and lipstick
LP: Gee, um, uh, no. The entire movie played like Refn woke up one day and thought, "Being a woman is hard, but women are just so catty, and also selfies are bad... but kind of hot?"
Fanning said in an interview with The Verge that she was drawn to the script because it featured a largely female cast, but every female character is a winning combo of narcissistic, jealous, insecure, and deranged. The only normal ("normal") person in the entire movie is a man — Jesse’s older kind-of-boyfriend, who’s something of a white knight / savior character. He drives her around, pays for her hotel room damages, and is very insistent that Jesse is more than just a pretty face. (For what it’s worth, he still wants to have sex with a 16-year-old).
As Jesse’s ego grows, she becomes less and less interested in hanging out with this (admittedly very boring) nice guy. Once her male protector is out of the picture, Jesse’s safety starts feeling a lot more precarious. One night, while Jesse is sleeping, motel manager Neck Beard Keanu slips into her room and makes her deep throat a knife. This turns out to be a dream, maybe, but almost immediately after that, the manager breaks into the room next door and rapes a 13-year-old. Jesse dramatically holds her ear to the wall, listening to the girl’s screams, and does nothing. What was the intent here? To prove that men, especially men who run seedy motels and have neck stubble, are capable of rape? To show us Jesse makes strange decisions and is also still very young? That the world is bad? Or is Refn just using the rape of a girl we never actually get to see to kill time?
KT: Unfortunately I think the point was mainly "lol, what odd casting!" Keanu Reeves is always the good guy, and also a lot of my high school friends say my dad looks like him! So, that was weird for me. Speaking of odd casting, there was a mountain lion in this movie.
Despite heavy competition from Jena Malone (who was terrifying and had boob tattoos) and neckbeard Keanu and a mountain lion, I think Abbey Lee (the "who killed the world?" shouter from Mad Max: Fury Road) gave the best performance in The Neon Demon. I was simultaneously scared and oddly sympathetic towards her when she tried to slurp Elle Fanning’s blood out of her hand after a friendly mirror accident, and that scene could easily have gone south to Center Stage or Make It or Break It levels of dethroned-female-champion cheesiness. Later, a rando model asks her if she’s ever lost a job to a younger girl and if so, how she handled it. "I ate her," she says. She’s not lying! You have to respect a girl who is not lying. In the final scene, just after she swallows a vomit-covered eyeball whole, she curls her lip like Beyoncé in the "Countdown" music video. I loved her (blonde cornrows and all).
LP: The eyeball was good. I could’ve done without the 17 minutes of orgasmic dry-heaving that preceded the eyeball vomit, but no one’s asking for my edits. The final scene was also the most interesting to me on an aesthetic level, even if it looked like every high fashion poolside photoshoot in history. Abbey Lee staring at Bella Heathcote’s character as she yaks up a human body part was one of my favorite moments. The Neon Demon’s ending was legitimately campy, whereas I think the rest of the movie really struggled to decide if it was trying to be campy or convince you it was a high-brow art piece.
EY: I LOL’d very loudly at the line "I can’t keep her inside me!" More of that, please! Look, I don’t mind a superficial campy fantasia about Los Angeles where all the women are variations on sniping, conniving bitches. We’re all Vanderpump Rules fans here. Just don’t pretend it’s a new idea; that people haven’t been satirizing the horrors of Hollywood since The Day of the Locust. Refn went for some big hot pseudo-profound take about innocence and showbiz with the Jesse story, and that’s where his himbo film bro dumbness is laid the most bare. He should have just run with the story about the cannibal models. Not enough of those.
The Neon Demon is out now.
Loading comments...