The Neon Demon and Feminist Blasphemy, or, Why Lesbian Necrophilia Is Sometimes a Good Thing
Unpopular opinion time: The most brutal scene in Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film is not when Bella Heathcote, as embittered model Gigi, coughs up an eyeball. It’s not when Jena Malone (Ruby) assaults Elle Fanning’s cervine, ethereal Jesse. It’s not even when Keanu Reeves can be heard raping and/or murdering a 13-year-old girl through the walls of the cheap motel he runs.
The most brutal scene in The Neon Demon occurs after Jesse and Gigi finish a runway show for a famous designer. The designer urges Jesse’s young beau to compare Jesse’s “natural” beauty to that of older model Gigi — whom the designer describes, backhandedly, as “manufactured” and “false.” Through it all, Gigi’s expression doesn’t change, except to tighten ever so slightly.
When I was in college, we all sat around once as male friends debated whether the girls in our circle of friends were “cute, hot, or beautiful.” Some of the girls they discussed were sitting in front of them (like yours truly. “Cute,” for the record). The pros and cons of each designation weren’t stated, but they were obvious to everyone there: Cute girls were approachable, but ultimately disposable; hot girls were disposable but desirable; and beautiful girls, that rare breed, were desirable and irreplaceable but punishingly difficult to approach.
We girls were not invited to weigh in.
Why would we be?
Skin deep, or, women and the men who can’t write them
There is nearly, in The Neon Demon, a story about our hunger for beauty and the people-eating machine that supports it. There’s nearly a story about the way women are made monstrous by the expectations of powerful men — expectations the men in question float unassailably above — while the women rip each other apart.
You see glimpses of this story on the faces of Refn’s main actresses. Heathcote, when she realizes she’s being made the object of a joke but keeps her expression as composed as a suit of armor. Lee, when she smashes a mirror in frustration at losing a job and calls herself a ghost. Fanning, as she states matter-of-factly that while she has few talents, “I’m pretty. And I can make money off pretty.”
These women are all about transaction and survival. They know who they have to appease to get by. With the exception of Christina Hendricks’ modeling agent, women in this movie are in front of the camera, targeted and appraised at all times. When there is no camera, they appraise themselves, using every mirror as a panopticon or a dress rehearsal. The men are tastemakers. Even the lowliest of them has power over the film’s women, from Keanu Reeves’ sleazy motel manager to the young photographer who validates Jesse’s journey by asking to meet in person for a shoot. (His photos also serve as her currency into the world of modeling.)
I saw survivalism front and center in Bella Heathcote’s Gigi. Whether Heathcote was being specifically directed or just taking her character where she wanted to go, Gigi is both impeccably composed and simmering with resentment. She knows she’s at the mercy of men but takes out her anger on a woman. She glories, self-loathingly, in her thoroughly engineered face, remarking that though she’d initially gone in for a relatively minor treatment, her plastic surgeon “found a lot of other things wrong” with her body. She talks about plastic surgery with an air of challenge: go on, say it’s wrong. But on the other side of that challenge is a yearning for approval — so while she dares Jesse to call her shallow, she also appeals to Jesse to validate her choice. When she’s compared to Jesse in the restaurant, what can be keeping her silent but the desire for approval? To be a “cool girl” who doesn’t throw a fit over harmless conversation?
Yes, Gigi resents Jesse. But I’m not sure it’s for her youth and beauty as much as Jesse’s effortless ascent through the ranks of a system Gigi has vivisected herself to succeed in. Watching Heathcote’s face, sometimes I thought I was about to hear her say, “This was never what I wanted for myself. You all turned me into this.” Refn told Jena Malone that she was playing the Echo to Fanning’s Narcissus; I think of Gigi as a sort of Medea — betrayed by men, but venting the sharp edge of her anger on those too vulnerable to fight back.
From reading all this, you might think Refn made a complex feminist critique of the demands placed on women in the spotlight. But remember that bit at the top of this section where I said “almost”? He almost made that movie. We almost get to see Bella Heathcote as Medea and Elle Fanning as someone genuinely interesting. But there’s one small problem: Refn doesn’t understand his subject matter.
Things Nicolas Winding Refn Doesn’t Understand, In Order:
- Beauty
- Women
- The workings of the fashion industry (insert any other field for “fashion” — film, medical, shipping, journalism, you get it)
How do I know this? Because the only viable “villains” the movie gives us are women.
Yeah, the men are skeezy. They say mean things. But they’re portrayed as passive respondents to beauty, not its architects: when the film’s goriest climaxes occur, those men are nowhere to be found. They may evaluate beauty, but the women are the ones in the gladiatorial ring actually willing to spill blood for it. And while the occasional man inflicts horrific damage on characters so minor they’re unnamed and unseen, they’re not the main threats to the protagonist: women are. As a result, we get a film that criticizes its male characters, but doesn’t implicate them in the savagery of its female characters. In fact, by the end of the movie, men are nearly irrelevant — leaving us to conclude that the women are savage simply because they like it.
There’s a lot of speculation that one can make about Refn (and plenty of film critics gleefully have): is he a misogynist? Is he totally overrated? But I’ve opted to mostly not do that, because for every clueless-straight-guy quote about women and power, he says something I find pretty compelling. There is, however, one quote of his I’ll share here, on the inspiration behind The Neon Demon:
Two years ago, I woke up depressed one morning. I wasn’t born beautiful, but my wife was. And I thought, “I wonder what it’d be like to have been born beautiful.” -Refn in an interview with The Village Voice
Thus Refn began his exploration of beauty: as an outsider looking in. And honestly, that’s where he ends it.
The Neon Demon is a visually confident film — everything about its aesthetics, from costumes to makeup to the actors’ expressions, is pretty near perfect. But aside from the aforementioned girls-club villainy, its pacing is weird and its dialogue is hobbled by labored pseudo-truisms like, “Beauty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” (A phrase displayed on several of the film’s posters, lest you think I’m cherry-picking.) And here’s where bad writing becomes bad politics: Elle Fanning plays 16-year-old Jesse as a beautiful ghost, a glittering virus infecting those around her. Cool idea? Yes. But when you put words in that virus’ mouth like, “You know what my mother used to call me? Dangerous,” the contagion imagery gets lost in favor of a more banal — and far more dangerous — cinema trope: the devious young girl who leads others astray.
Refn asks a lot of questions in his movie, one of which is whether Jesse is partially responsible for her own demise. Though posed as a new and interesting thought experiment, to most women it is neither: At my high school, freshman girls were asked not to wear miniskirts because we were “distracting the male teachers.” Child victims of rape are often depicted as knowledgeable beyond their years, and therefore complicit in their abuse. At this point, if you want to further discourse around women and beauty, you’ve got to bring more to the table than, “What if the real villain was the sexy teen?”
That said, I don’t see Refn as a misogynist, mostly because he prioritized the involvement of women behind the camera on this project. Not only was The Neon Demon’s cinematographer a woman, but two of its screenwriters were as well (Refn being the third). Instead, I think Refn asked questions he doesn’t know the answer to, leaving misogynistic cultural mores to fill in the gaps. He wanted to understand what it might be like to be “born beautiful,” but it’s clear he hasn’t cracked the obsession: instead, he (and we) are fogging up the glass, trying to articulate the world that Fanning and her character occupy on the other side.
For the record
For the record, here are some things I don’t have a problem with in The Neon Demon:
- Women wanting to be models.
- The fact that women are sometimes jealous of other women.
- Girl-on-girl cannibalism.
- Keanu Reeves maybe raping, maybe murdering a 13-year-old girl offscreen.
- Jena Malone’s entire character.
- Sort of encapsulated by the above, but just to be crystal clear: lesbian necrophilia.
I feel like I should point this out, because some reviews I have read posit that The Neon Demon isn’t feminist because it contains some (or all) of the above.
It’s an ongoing debate in feminist horror circles whether context (a female director, a type of shot, the arch of an actress’ eyebrow) matters, or whether some images are unrescuably unfeminist no matter how hard you try. The logic of “context doesn’t matter” is itself contextual: It holds that to live in our world is to inhale toxic messages. Art, therefore, has to be nuanced in its execution, or else we risk allowing the fucked-up fog of society’s ambient toxicity to turn (for instance) a critique of rape culture into a standing ovation. Actually, scratch nuanced, nuance makes it too easy to miss the point. To avoid complicity in the things we criticize, art needs to be as clear as possible.
As artists, do we have a “don’t try this at home, kids” responsibility to portray only those actions we endorse? Or, in other words, knowing we live in a fallen world, do we dare put potential weapons into people’s minds?
I’m in the Context Matters school, for a few reasons. First, I think context has to matter, or else we’ve eliminated the need for critical thinking in the discussion of art. If you can go, “Aha! A predatory lesbian. That is Bad and this is a Bad Movie,” then you’ve stopped thinking in favor of pattern recognition. Art’s supposed to make us feel, yeah, but it’s also supposed to make us think about the world we live in. Art’s supposed to challenge us. And you can’t be challenged if you refuse to think.
Second, context has to matter because it creates room for subjectivity — a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations. Clarity of message is not necessarily a virtue. In fact, demanding that an artist’s message be so clear it can’t possibly be misconstrued — by an audience we’ve already admitted breathes toxicity — imposes a tremendous burden on the artist: specifically, it requires that artists double as propagandists. Benevolent propagandists? Maybe, but once you hit propaganda territory, I’m not sure benevolence helps.
There’s a last consequence of insisting that art portray only those messages that we morally endorse. Replacing critical thinking with pattern recognition and subjectivity with mono-meaning is basically requiring art to assume the function of a church: to be a source of moral authority.
“Wait a second,” you may be saying to yourself, scrolling up and contemplating the back button, “didn’t you just talk about how Refn’s problematic portrayal of women plays into rape culture?”
You’re half-right in your recollection, strawperson reader. I believe that aspects of The Neon Demon do play into sexist stereotypes. But at the same time, I have no objection to complicated female characters who wreak havoc. I’m here for that shit! Give me Carrie, Ginger (of Ginger Snaps), Mary Mason, hell, gimme Marie from High Tension — which segues nicely into my next point about context.
Meditations on lesbian necrophilia
Aside from being in principle unopposed to The Neon Demon’s garish and gory excesses, some of them I downright liked. By that, of course, I mean the lesbian necrophilia.
Here’s the scene: Jena Malone’s Ruby is at her day job in the morgue/possibly funeral home, applying makeup to the dead. She’s just been rebuffed by Jesse (whom she tried to assault). As she rouges up the mouth of a young blonde corpse, Ruby starts to fantasize about Jesse; eventually, she sets down her tools, kisses and fondles the corpse, and finally mounts it while she masturbates.
I was not surprised to learn that The Neon Demon’s cinematographer was a woman, and if I had to pick a single scene to highlight why, this would be it. The scene is framed solely through Ruby’s desires, as twisted as they are. When Jesse appears as a fantasy, she’s lounging on a couch in a robe and nightgown; she touches her breasts through her clothes and makes bedroom eyes, but while she’s sensual, she’s not pornographic. Ruby too stays fully clothed. The corpse is not depicted as a sexual object so much as an object-object: You can practically taste the formaldehyde, you can’t possibly ignore the stitches that slash across her sternum, and it’s the polar opposite of titillating.
I found myself thinking something like: “This is fucking awful …………. get it, girl.”
This is not (I cannot emphasize this enough) because I have anything invested in the concept of necrophilia. It’s that most of the time in horror, men get to do the depraved and interesting shit. While we deconstruct their macabre methodologies, women have to stay grounded in the expected human reactions of screaming, crying, and cowering. Horror is an elevated genre in which demons and geysers of blood and alien parasites are as unremarkable as gravity, but within that genre of fantastic nightmares, women are often forced down into the mud.
And then, like a bad moon rising, The Neon Demon gives us Jena Malone: depraved, and undeniably interesting. Because horror is an elevated genre, I don’t view this scene as just “woman assaults dead body.” It is that, for sure. But it’s also a scene about a woman unapologetically experiencing a kind of pleasure the viewer finds disgusting. Ruby’s pleasure is not for us to consume: we can’t see her naked body, and every time we do see her it’s in relation to a corpse, dampening our secondhand desire. We can identify with her in objectifying Jesse, but that’s as close as we get. And there’s something empowering about a woman’s lust that’s so gory and weird we can’t get inside of it. Something I wouldn’t want to see scrubbed from the annals of cinema because it’s not “positive.” Something I find kind of … feminist. And honestly, forcing women into a set of positive stereotypes in the name of feminism is as tedious as forcing them into negative ones. Before they’re virtuous or debauched, women are people, and I believe Jena Malone successfully portrays a person.
This is already more words than I ever thought I’d write about lesbian necrophilia. We’re just about done here.
What I’ll leave you with
Stricken reviewers of The Neon Demon have one last case to make against the film: Is it necessary?
Is it necessary to have Jena Malone masturbate atop a corpse? Is it necessary to make Bella Heathcote yak an eyeball, to show all that blood and cannibalism — and what about the scene where Keanu Reeves makes Fanning deep-throat a knife?
I’ll admit, my first reaction to these questions is GET OUT OF MY HOUSE. Because on one level, of course absolutely none of it is necessary, but that’s not the point. Refn could have made a thoughtful documentary about the pressures of beauty in the internet age, but he made a horror movie, and by God, horror is a nation of bloody metaphors. My second reaction is to note that 97% of people who ask “is this necessary” already have their answer. However, these reactions hinder our collective ability to tell someone who has genuinely produced an id-riddled misogyny stew, “Dude no,” so here’s my best reply:
I invite you to consider that it’s impossible to create total consensus around what’s “necessary” and what isn’t, what’s “feminist” and what isn’t.
I’m not saying that to be dismissive. It’s scary. It’s really fucking scary to know that out there in America, white men are scheming to take away my right to my body and I can’t in good conscience tell you that images of cannibalizing a teenage girl are unfeminist. It’s scary to think that your conception of what’s feminist and mine might clash — which of us is right? Which of us is smarter?
Ultimately, I think Refn assembled a great team of women to explore big questions in an atmosphere of respect. I think what came out was a beautiful, horrifying mess that contained, at its core, the kind of earnestness that makes it linger. I can hook The Neon Demon right into my memories of growing up female and make sense of the world I’m in. I can hook The Neon Demon into my understanding of women and stories and watch said understanding shatter and reassemble itself. That makes it worth the cost of admission to me.
Is it feminist? Is it necessary? Probably neither. But as a feminist, I’m glad it exists.
