Bugonia

[Review for Post-Credits issue 1] The art deco skyscraping valleys of jazz-age New York created Batman and the great noirs. The animist pantheon of Yayoi Japan was fertile enough for Miyazaki to reap an entire filmography. The bleak and monotonous cementscape of the Eastern bloc sparked from Tarkovsky the Stalker parable. The high-fever of 70s topsy turvy New York spawned the laments of Network and Taxi Driver—both so self-consciously political and angsty, heightening their context into fable. In Network, the media conglomerate morphs into a supra-national fiat-floating overlord, declaring: “There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. [...] There is no America. There is no democracy.” While kingdoms, pirates, and pyramids are more intuitive to mythologize, the march of history provides new fauna. The 70s happened on TV; presidents and prime ministers were downstream of a hormonal flux economy at best stochastic and often held for ransom by a foreign oil cartel. The impotence of leaders beamed into people's living rooms at 7 o’clock on the hour. Folks began to wonder who was really in charge; in such a time, it only made sense to create a monetary god—especially in an era of such high inflation. And so a myth of the 70s has a different god than Dante’s and is even slightly different from the absent end-of-history feeling in the 90s that you get in Fight Club (“We're the middle children of history, man”). Everything is material for myth, even the present moment. Paul Thomas Anderson and (more controversially) Ari Aster have both attempted to canonize our times this year. Aster’s Eddington focuses on the manic-fever of 2020, while PTA’s One Battle After Another (can you hear the best picture Oscar being engraved?) extrapolates an America a few paces deeper into whatever pit it is currently falling into. OBAO serves as the perfect manifestation of liberal doomscrolling circa November 2024. I don’t say this to critique the film. It is a feature of the film that it so accurately depicts the imagination of that moment—it is essentially a thought experiment of if ‘project 2025’ came to pass. Both OBAO and Eddington view the political landscape through a socio-cultural lens: concerned more about the differences between progressives and reactionary conservatives than those between amazon workers and Jeff Bezos (There are some nuances, such as polite WASP society not accepting Lockjaw due to his low station and Aster’s data center wrinkle, by and large, however, these films focus on political affiliation over class). Enter Yorgos Lanthimos’ new feature: Bugonia. This is a state of the union which takes a much longer view of our moment and in doing so, I believe, manages to create a myth sourced from the past 15 years of societal change. Importantly, Lanthimos does not try to personify the current political discourse. Stone is not a progressive activist and Plemons is not really an ethno-nationalist. Instead, he takes us back to 2016—where it all began. A CEO of the global elite, technocratic and institution-loving; the Ivy-League inheritors of America who, in their ignorance, created people like Teddy: provincial precariats ready to believe anything that might give them their life back. Watching Stone and Plemons cross-examine each other is watching the inciting incident of our times dressed as a domestic thriller. The myth of it all comes in the unforgettable third act. And we may think that we are out of the age of myth, that our world is too 'modern' and mundane for any tall tales. Our times are too ugly with our AI slop and leggings and alcohol-free beer and bubble sedans and draftkings. However, each era has its own trappings waiting to be codified. As we speak, indie folk stomp clap hey ho! Is being codified into our imagination of the 2010s, along with rio de janeiro instagram filter and skinny jeans. How lucky we are then to have Yorgos Lanthimos to do the mythmaking for our times. Yorgos assembles the architecture of our times both high and low—pristine airbrushed office spaces and cracked pavement plazas. G-wagons and red-light masks unaware that around the corner lies the world of the underclass in all its indignities. There is such precision in his eye—how he perfectly captures the narcissism and meritocratic coldness of the 2015 Davos consensus—pictures with Michelle Obama and front-page magazines provide moral cover for anything less photogenic done to keep ledgers in black—after all they are the winners and the rest are the losers, fair and square. The other stereo channel: paranoid nativist Jacksonian aggrievement, is rendered in equal clarity and hilarity. A tendency to violence, permanent victimhood, and a sort of viral schizophrenia all reveal themselves as we learn more about Teddy. The clash of these two dogmatic systems is messy; Stone argues that some species of bee are simply meant to die out—nature will take its course. Teddy wants to save what he feels is real humanity in all its ugliness, to stop the march towards a managerial homogeneity. Egos flare in this domestic gutterbrawl and mirror our own prodromic state. All the while an operatic score portends more—full strings auguring some world-ending drama. Every beat lands as we wind up to the myth of it all. This myth spun from a thread beginning in Roswell, Dallas, and Ground Zero. Material sourced in masonic triangles, bigfoot, flat earth, and the deep state. The American conspiratorial lineage has been fermenting since faith disappeared—faith in government and in anything beyond the individual. What’s left is belief in the self, suspicion of the rest, and a desperate need to make meaning from paranoia. It all leads to an absurd, ugly, and distinctly American myth. And I salute Yorgos for running through the ticker-tape, no punches pulled; the furthest extent of heartland esotericism depicted in zero-gravity. The final images deliver on the early promises of the score. The myth is complete, scratching our itch for doomsday. Also, Stavros is great in this.