Feature • Medium Exclusive
Scratching the Surface of SOCIETY
… 30 years later, have we been looking at Brian Yuzna’s cult gross-out movie all wrong?
If you’re any kind of horror buff and you haven’t seen Society (1989), then it’s safe to assume you’ve at least heard about Society. And if you don’t really know all that much about Society, then surely you at least know about the last act of Society. Right? I’ll give you a minute to Google it, and I apologise in advance.
A strange thing happens when we whittle a movie down to its most infamous moments: we tend to forget about the rest of it. The subversive rom-com imitating of Audition (1999) was amputated by the terror of ‘Kiri Kiri Kiri’. The gorgeous pie-in-the-sky idealism of Jeffrey and Sandy in Blue Velvet (1986) dissolves into the oil-black darkness of the night and Frank Booth. And so we end up discussing a film’s most horrific scenes rather than the movie as a whole. Society’s wild and grotesque coda has since come to define it — how can it not? — but as the film celebrates its 30th anniversary, perhaps it’s time to look at the film as a whole… before that scene.
Society keeps its story simple: Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) is a troubled 17-year-old from a rich Beverly Hills family, whose belief that he doesn’t belong (and that there’s something very wrong with his family) sets him on the path to discover his relative’s monstrous secret.
What’s odd about the film positioning Bill as an alienated outcast is that he never really looks or feels like one, which is one of its big flaws. One could substitute Bill for virtually any blandly handsome protagonist from any 1980s teen horror and it wouldn’t make much difference. It’s not particularly helped by the fact that Bill’s given very little motivation or momentum, other than his vague anger and dread. Once those are established he isn’t developed much further. His troubled emotions lead to sleepwalking episodes and visual hallucinations, which are nicely atmospheric and creepy, but herein lies another issue with Society: it’s a film filled with outstanding moments, but with thin connective tissue.
That surely comes down to the fact that Bill is so unexplored as a protagonist. An obvious antecedent to his character is Benjamin Braddock from The Graduate (1967), but while Mike Nichols’ film reckons with Benjamin’s culpability in the soul-sucking game of mousetrap in which he finds himself, Bill’s righteousness is never meaningfully questioned in Society. There are some interesting moments in which he questions whether he is delusional or not, but we are so aligned with him that we believe him all the way. The questioning of reality doesn’t seem genuine.
There is an unexplored avenue that could’ve provided something more substantial here: people who are aligned with evil never believe they are implicated in that evil. Bill’s incestuous, murderous bourgeoisie family raised him, but he maintains throughout that he’s not one of them. “They don’t even look like me!” he protests. And again, he’s proven correct by the end. The film has told us that he is not one of them, that he’s one of the good guys. But I wonder: how is he not one of them? He drives a fancy car, lives in a mansion, and doubtlessly wouldn’t give the time of day to someone he considers lower-class. A more interesting version of Society might explore Bill grappling with his own descent into the fused-flesh mass of depravity that is Society, rather than being proven right, getting the girl and driving into the sunset in his $11,000 Jeep.
Even though the film isn’t quite sure of how to deploy its great ideas in service of a great story, it has moments of excellence and clarity. “You’re a different species, a different class. You’re not of us. You have to be born in the Society,” Judge Carter (David Wiley) tells Bill. A statement that uncannily captures the hopelessness of assimilation. It’s an expansion of what many teen films of the 1980s discussed, a sort of extreme-logical-conclusion of the class tension in The Breakfast Club (1984), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987).
Yet, Society does share in common with those films a lack of willingness to really dive into what it means to be ‘other’. The ‘80s teen set might’ve talked about sexual mores and class a little more than audiences expected, but time after time, the protagonists were white, straight, wealthy (or at least well-off) and rarely, if ever, represented the ‘other’ that such films tried to discuss. It’s frustrating to see so many films tackle alienation and isolation but from such similar points of view, and Bill’s one marker of ‘otherness’ in Society — his class — is negligible. The only thing that makes him different from his family is that he keeps saying that he is.
If the film is soft when it comes to addressing this, at least it’s not so polite everywhere else. It’s admirable to see director Brian Yuzna’s lack of restraint when it comes to high society, and there’s something brilliantly satisfying in its ruthlessly grotesque portrayal of the rich. This is where, in absurdist fashion, the film really excels.
The imagery in Society (created by SFX maestro ‘Screaming Mad’ George) is uniquely unreal and disturbing… in the way stop-motion animation doesn’t need to look life-like to be terrifying. While the film might play its hand too soon by heavily implying The Society’s nefarious activities around the 20-minute mark, it succeeds in building nauseating anticipation by withholding full-on terror until the end, while sprinkling moments of dream-logic weirdness. The distorted spectre of a back-to-front body seen through the clouded glass of a shower is legitimately upsetting and implies a wrongness rather than hellacious violence. Meanwhile, Yuzna uses the performances to bolster some more sickly unease: Bill’s father, Jim (Charles Lucia), maintains a lecherous closeness to his daughter Jenny (Patrice Jennings) that has a Trump-ian grossness that no special effect can out-icky.
Yuzna is smart enough to recognise the humour in the story and exploit it. In the WASP-y Reaganites, Yuzna parodies a passiveness, a quintessentially 1980s selfishness, and even an indifferent to violence. When Bill tells Shauna (Heidi Kozak) that he’s just found Petrie (Brian Bremer) with his throat cut, she casually responds with “poor baby, I hope he didn’t make a mess”. As with Stanley Kubrick’s blood-drenched upper-class elite in The Shining (1980), and John Waters’ suburbanites obsessed with the gory details of local killings in Serial Mom (1994), there’s a blackly-funny lampooning of the way in which the wealthy treat violence in Society.
After Blanchard (Tim Bartell) is killed in a car accident, a troubled Bill returns home to tell his family the news. They already know, have gotten over it (if they ever were bothered by it), and are more interested in discussing tonight’s party. “What are you going to wear?” Jenny asks. “To the funeral?” Bill responds. Jenny laughs. “No, you weirdo. To the Ferguson’s party”. Funerals and parties, violence and celebration… what’s the difference? These elements all lead us to the same place. They call it ‘The Shunting’.
So, Society reaches its climax with a feverishly depraved SFX-fest orgy of heads pulled out through back-ends and flesh fusing as the rich literally suck the life-force out of the poor. And it’s kind of brilliant. It has the distorted grotesquery of a Ralph Steadman cartoon and the charming rubbery aesthetics of Beetlejuice (1988). One man’s head is suddenly replaced by a giant hand, while his mother walks along on a pair of giant muscular arms. All this while Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” plays and Judge Carter (shot in claustrophobic Do The Right Thing-esque close-ups) explains to Billy how Society works. It’s hard to tell whether you’re watching subversive surrealist art or B Movie schlock, but the brilliance is that, of course, it’s both.
Bill, it turns out, was adopted from a working-class family, and has been raised to be eventually fed upon by The Society, in a free-for-all of excess and violence and indulgence, where the champagne might as well be blood.
However, the sickliest moment in the entire sequence is Judge Carter breathing heavily, sweat or oil pouring off of him, a cigar with its chewed up end stuffed in his mouth, his face inches away from ours, bathed in unnatural oranges and reds. It’s a powerfully rancid shot that underlines Yuzna’s ability to make people — sans gooey FX — the scariest thing of all. They’re not aliens, as they tell us. They’re from Earth and they’ve been here forever.
It ends with Bill escaping with his friends and, finally, a joke from Judge Carter after a promising young member of Society is literally turned inside out: “Well Dr Cleveland, it looks as though I may have an opening in Washington next summer.”
It’s not hard to see why Society is remembered by these scenes: they’re not only its most shocking, but they’re its best. The Shunting’s best achievement is that it recontextualises what came before it. Suddenly it feels as if this slightly nasty teen horror has been carefully leading us towards something we believed would be exciting and perhaps a little scary, only to swerve at the last minute and drive full speed into the dream-like and surreal. And the very, very gross.
Even the policeman seen at the car accident earlier in the film is there and joining in the revelries. Of course, he works for the Society. You’re finally let in on the joke, only you’re the butt of it. It feels like a trick, perhaps like a magic-eye picture: you’d been looking at this awful thing all along, hoping it wasn’t real, but it wasn’t until you were shown it from a different and strange perspective that you could see the full picture.
The film presented ‘The Shunting’ to you in the opening credits, but it was abstracted and slowed down so that it was hard to make out what you were seeing, other than something vaguely horrendous. And it sang it to you, too, but in a ghostly voice that was hard to fully hear:
“Only the poor get poorer, we’ll feed off them all the same. We’ll all sing together: Society waits for you”.
