Film Review: The Neon Demon
“Let me tell you a little about demons. They love pain and other people’s misery. They lie when it suits them and don’t see anything wrong with it. They corrupt and kill and destroy, all without conscience.” -Brenna Yovanoff
There exists a three-part relationship and conversation when it comes to art. First is the relationship between the artist and the subject. Second is between the object and truth. The third is between the viewer and the object itself. This three-part relationship affects how we discuss and study art. The first part lends itself to trying to understand the artist. The latter is understanding the art itself and the viewer’s relationship with it. Good art elicits a response from the viewer, be it emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and the like. Because experiencing art is so personal, it should not come as much of a surprise that controversial art is, well, controversial. The Neon Demon is a very controversial movie that will offend the tastes of some viewers so much so as to label it a piece of vile trash. There are other viewers, myself included, that find the film seductive and mesmerizing. The film is dark and disturbing, and the final 30 minutes are vile and profane, indulging in necrophilia, murder, and cannibalism. The whole point of the film is to disturb and challenge the audience. It challenges questions of identity, innocence, beauty, art, and novelty. This film is a thriller that, at its core, exposes the dark (and perverse) ways we approach the erotic and the pornographic, gradually becoming more depraved and fetishistic; chasing novelty and the next emotional and sexual high. Behind the breathtaking cinematography and the preposterousness of characters, certain scenes, and final act, this film is a clever (almost too clever), critique of pornography and the relationship between viewer and art.
The plot of The Neon Demon follows Jesse (Elle Fanning), a young girl from Georgia trying to enter the world of fashion modeling in Los Angeles. Through her first photoshoots, she meets Ruby (Jena Malone) a makeup stylist who befriends her and introduces Jesse to other models and the model social circuit. Jesse’s youth and innocence make her shine in comparison to the other models. She quickly gets signed to an elite agency and sent on shoots with exclusive photographers, and fashion shows for high-end designers. Her meteoric rise and natural beauty inspires intense jealousy from the other models, and the rest of the film follows her attempts to survive and thrive in the, literally, cutthroat environment of this film’s modeling world. This is just a brief outline of the plot, but in order to dissect the film and its themes will require more detail which could be considered spoilers. So, SPOILERS AHEAD.
The first theme The Neon Demon grapples with is the corruption of innocence. When Jesse first arrives in LA, she tells her agent that she is only 16. In order to work, she fakes a signature on a parental consent form and lies about her age to anyone else that asks. Jesse firsts meets fellow models Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee) at a party after her first shoot, and the girls proceed to interrogate Jesse. Ruby comments that, when it comes to lipstick and cosmetics, brand names are either based on food or sex in order to entice women to buy them. One of the girls mentions her lipstick color would be Pink Pussy. Sarah answers that her lipstick would be called Fuck Off. When they ask Jesse what her lipstick is, fruit or sex, she is unsure. Sarah proceeds to tell her and ask her about her sex life. “When a pretty girl walks into a room, and everyone looks her up and down, they ask the question, ‘Who is she fucking? Who could she fuck? How high can she climb and is it higher than me? You do sleep with men don’t you?” Jesse is clearly shocked by the abrasive and intrusiveness of the question and uneasily answers that she sleeps with men all the time. Later in the film, Jesse reveals to Ruby that she lied about having sex and that she has never been intimate with anyone, which Ruby follows up by making advances to Jesse herself. The theme plays out visually as well as Jesse’s clothing and appearance goes from young and innocent to more mature, revealing, and provocative. Her freshness and innocence made her shine out and be noticed by everyone around her. As she entered further and deeper into the modeling scene, she lost that innocence and her initial goodness. By the end of the film, though she is not as depraved as those around her, her virginity is what ultimately sets her apart and leads to her end.
The second major theme deals with dangers of envy and desire. Beauty and looks can be highly deceiving, but such a premium is placed on them that the characters in the film are willing to do anything to achieve or maintain it. Gigi comments multiple times throughout the film that she has had extensive plastic surgery to achieve her appearance. She brags about it, because she is convinced that everyone hates the way they look and would do anything to be beautiful. A fashion designer (Alessandro Nivola) contrasts the appearances of Gigi and Jesse during the third act. Gigi, in his eyes, is fine. Not beautiful like Jesse. Jesse’s beauty is natural. In his mind, you either possess beauty or you do not, and anyone can tell the difference. “Beauty isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” Everyone in the film desires Jesse’s looks because they want the attention that she brings, and the work that comes with it. In the final act of the film, Gigi, Sarah, and Ruby murder Jesse, bathe in her blood, and eat her. This recalls back to the legends of Elizabeth Bathory bathing in the blood of virgins to maintain her youthful appearance. Beauty so highly praised engendered jealousy and desire, and has something of a mystical quality that the others were so desperate to possess that they would literally murder and cannibalize it. It is a visually striking chapter in the film and disturbing, if perhaps a little on-the-nose. If this all sounds like terrible, violent and meaningless imagery, you are not completely off base. Director Nicholas Winding Refn has made a film that is a beautiful, visually engaging, violent, and seemingly meaningless satire of the fashion industry with bizarre and mixed messages on youth, beauty, and competition. However, this film has less to do with the reality of the fashion world and everything to do with the world of pornography.
The Neon Demon is an artistic dissection of the porn industry and pornographic films. Jesse’s story and journey is not about a young girl entering the fashion industry and being destroyed by it. It is the story of a young girl entering the adult film industry, and slowly being consumed by it. Jesse comes to LA to begin modeling when a man named Dean (Karl Glusman) finds her picture online, not unlike enticing any young and attractive girl to do nude modeling, and thinks she would make a great model. During the opening scene, her first photo shoot, Dean is almost leering through the camera at Jesse in a way that shows more lust than artistic vision. Her agent (Christina Hendricks) describes the photosets from that shoot as being very amateurish, and that if the professional photographer gets hold of her she would become a huge star. In other words, transition from amateur porn to established studio work. Jesse tells Dean during one of the few conversations of character development that she cannot sing, dance, or write, but she is pretty and can make money off of pretty. Her value is only in her youth and innocent appearance, not unlike the approach to starlets in the adult film industry. The adult film industry thrives off of fantasy and wish fulfillment, sexualizing any interaction and satisfying almost any fetish or desire. Jesse is told to lie about her age and say that she is 19, not unlike porn actresses in their 20’s lying to the camera and claiming to be 18. The fantasy of and fascination with the nubile but hyper-sexual youth is a staple in the industry. When Jesse and Sarah go to audition for the fashion walk, Sarah, the established pro that has walked for this designer before, is totally ignored by the designer whereas Jesse immediately grabs his attention despite being unexperienced. Her novelty is what makes her a success.
Through readings into the research of the adult film industry, including the marvelous and revealing essay “Big Red Son” by David Foster Wallace, novelty is a major factor in the fantasy factory model through which the porn industry operates. The younger and newer a starlet appears, the better. The average career for a female porn star is roughly two years. Consequently, age and over-familiarity are the major hurdles female performers have to overcome to prolong their careers. This can be achieved through surgery to maintain appearance or doing more and more hardcore work, or finding a niche to try and stay relevant and new. In the context of The Neon Demon, Gigi and Sarah, though both are attractive, are old news and less appealing than the new and natural Jesse. When Jesse’s career is cut short (by murder), Gigi and Sarah are left standing to take the final jobs in the film. The photographer in the final shoot notices Sarah sitting on a couch and wistfully looking out the window. He asks her whether he knows her at all, which she replies that he does not, and he immediately fires one of the other models and casts Sarah. Novelty is prized above all else, even beauty. This leads, inevitably, to chasing greater thrills and more depraved acts to satisfy the sexual obsession and thrill.
END OF SPOILERS
The Neon Demon critiques pornography further by taking on the characteristics of porn itself. The characters in the film are not particularly deep or fleshed out. They are shallow caricatures. Pornography at its basest level does not require deep and complex characters or storylines. Every shot is meant to add to the sexuality of the scene, rather than build characters or tell stories. Similarly, the cinematography in The Neon Demon has striking visuals framed and shot in such a way to resemble fashion shoots and close ups of faces and emotions in its performance pieces. Dialogue is not particularly important or a focus, instead connecting the scenes together loosely. The point is to take on the forms and tropes of porn, without the full on sex and with limited nudity. The actual nude and sex scenes in the film are quite vile, with the characters either interacting with a corpse or washing blood off themselves in the shower. The open eroticism is tied to violence and destruction of life and self. Put more directly, this critiques the reduction of persons into nothing but objects and lifeless puppets for sexual gratification. The filmmakers want you to be revolted by these scenes, and show beauty and ugliness simultaneously. It does not just critique pornography itself, it critiques the very nature of consuming pornography and hyper-sexual material for its own sake. It challenges that third part of the relationship in viewing art. The viewer has an equal part in the entire enterprise, for whom is art (and pornography) made if not for a viewer?
In conclusion, The Neon Demon is a very self-aware and meta-art film about the nature of viewership and art. Elle Fanning is ridiculously good as Jesse and watching her slowly transform and lose her innocence and goodness is deftly handled. The cinematography and the look of the film is amazing, and the synthesizer heavy soundtrack adds to the mesmerizing feel of the movie. The film is almost too mesmerizing in drawing the viewer into its weirdness, which is why I believe the meta-theatrical elements and critique are missed and have been missed by many critics. This is a movie you will either love or hate or perhaps even love to hate. But in my mind, that is good art. It was at times provocative, intoxicating, funny, seductive, preposterous, revolting, and horrifying in turn. There are tons of other things I could dive into and dissect in this film, but to note them all would make this review twice as long. Does everything in the film work? For the most part yes. Is it a perfect movie? No. Is it a worthwhile art film and thriller? For the intrepid viewer, yes.
3.5 stars out of 5.
