Would You Get Swept Up in Michael Shannon’s Delusions?
Examining William Friedkin’s ‘Bug’ as Folie à Deux
When you think of William Friedkin’s terrifying chamber piece Bug (2006), you probably think of Michael Shannon covered in sores, ranting about black site Army hospitals and hanging flypaper from the ceiling fan. Shannon’s character, Peter, has a way of sucking all the air out of the room, of drawing you into his madness, that works on us nearly as much as it does on Agnes (Ashley Judd). But Agnes goes on a journey as well, moving from loneliness and frustration to violent madness, all because a man came along and needed a place to crash for the night. What makes her descent into insanity so horrifying is how easy it is to understand. Her choices look like the ones we make every day, writ larger and with devastating consequences.
Agnes’s life pre-Peter is defined by loneliness and monotony. She tells him it’s nice “having someone around” because “it’s different.” In the almost unbearable opening scene, Agnes drifts from room to room of the fleabag motel, lighting cigarettes and putting them out, pouring wine, answering the phone and yelling into the silence on the other end. The only thing breaking up the monotony is a series of crank phone calls she assumes are from her abusive ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr.). She can’t stop the calls any more than she can stop him from breaking into her motel room and making himself at home. She’s not mentally ill, except for possible undiagnosed depression, but she’s completely isolated. Her only real friend is her coworker RC (Lynn Collins), who tends bar with Agnes at a lesbian honky-tonk. RC is presumably the only thing keeping Agnes where her ex can find her easily — she lives in a place designed for transience so she can avoid the illusion of putting down roots, but she can’t summon up the courage to leave either. Fear and isolation pin her in place and keep her miserable and inert, barely surviving each day.
Agnes takes a while to warm up to Peter, who seems socially awkward at first. His father was a preacher with no church and no congregation (raising the question of who exactly he preached to), and he homeschooled Peter because he “didn’t believe in schools.” It’s not a huge jump to wonder if Peter’s father had schizophrenia as well; the disorder has a strong genetic component, and social isolation is both a symptom and a frequent trigger. Religiosity is also a common theme of paranoid schizophrenia. Interestingly, Peter doesn’t portray his father as mentally ill or even as particularly unusual. In a young child, this would be understandable; children often normalize their parents’ behavior as a coping mechanism, especially if they don’t know any better. But Peter is either intentionally hiding the details of his upbringing, or he still sees nothing unusual about it.
Peter’s main delusion, of course, is that bugs are crawling on his skin and infesting him and the motel room he and Agnes live in. The condition, known as delusional parasitosis, is a common symptom of paranoid schizophrenia, and it unfolds slowly, bringing Agnes in gradually by mixing fact with delusion so that it all seems believable and palatable. Early in their relationship, they mistake the chirping smoke detector for a cricket, and Peter tells Agnes casually that she should get rid of it because it has a radioactive element. She complies, exclaiming “no wonder I feel so shitty all the time!” Blaming an external factor for one’s physical and mental malaise is a classic characteristic of paranoia — it’s easier for Agnes to believe she feels terrible because of a radioactive smoke detector than because she smokes and drinks and snorts cocaine, not to mention her ongoing emotional trauma. Peter’s delusion progresses rapidly as he begins “finding” tiny insects in the sheets, then on his skin. People with delusional parasitosis are known for interpreting any mark or sore on their skin as a bug bite and for gathering up “evidence” of the infestation in small containers like matchboxes to present to medical professionals; this is known as the “matchbox sign.” Both Peter and Agnes attempt to show their “evidence” to RC, with Peter shoving his microscope with slides of the “bugs” under her nose. When she responds the way anyone would, saying Peter caused his rash himself and that there are no bugs anywhere in the room, they are too far gone to listen and instead decide she’s part of the conspiracy.
The term “folie à deux” refers to a shared delusion between two or more people. Peter and Agnes fall into the “folie imposée” subtype, in which the “dominant” person develops a delusion and then imposes it on another person who would not have been afflicted otherwise (as opposed to the “folie simultanée” subtype, in which two or more people develop the same delusion independently). Shared delusions occur most often in groups of people who live in close proximity and are isolated from outsiders. Peter and Agnes aren’t trapped in the motel room, and the most obvious solution to their problem (not to mention the frequent intrusions by Agnes’s ex) would be to leave and go literally anywhere else. But isolation feeds the delusion, which in turn gives Peter’s schizophrenia an organizing principle and binds him to Agnes, who is dying for someone to need her.
One of the most chilling aspects of the story is Peter’s military history. He’s a Gulf War veteran who claims he was experimented on in the hospital and that the Army is searching for him. While there’s no official definition for the so-called Gulf War Syndrome, more than a third of its veterans have since been diagnosed with chronic illnesses, enough that Congress mandated reports on the unique factors these veterans were exposed to. Peter, of course, claims his condition was caused by these “experiments,” eventually performing horrifying motel dentistry in order to extract the tooth he thinks the bug was implanted into. But the film suggests Peter’s condition was caused by some combination of the conditions he was exposed to in the Gulf and his history of mental illness. This is where his delusions come closest to reality; the Army really is looking for him and is using unofficial channels to locate him, and the mental and physical malaise afflicting him is not uncommon among Gulf War veterans.
For Agnes, Peter’s presence is the solution to all her problems. She has a man around the house to break up the monotony and deter her ex-husband (at least in theory). But his delusion also gives her something to focus on, an activity to structure her days around, a common enemy to focus her anger and frustration on, and an emotional bond with Peter. She’s still grieving the loss of her child, who vanished ten years before, and in a heartbreaking scene near the end of the film, Peter coaches her into dreaming up a conspiracy theory about what might have happened to the boy, which she pieces together with the conviction of a TV detective reasoning through a crime scene. She has already accepted Peter as a force for good in her life even though, as she points out, “all we talk about is bugs;” so from there she has no choice but to accept everything he says as true. It’s easy to hear about an otherwise sane person succumbing to someone else’s mental illness and think of that person as a dupe. But you can’t be duped by someone who believes what they’re saying — you can only be drawn into the world they’ve created, or resist it. Peter genuinely believes he’s helping Agnes and protecting her, making the film a kind of love story, a romantic tragedy in which the protagonists are consumed by their love for one another.
