The Neon Demon: Beauty Reveals Everything Because It Expresses Nothing
The Neon Demon, on the surface, seems to be about a lot of things, which is apt for a film that deals so much in superficialities. It also plays around with a lot of clichés, as well as the troubling truths hiding within those clichés, and this means it’s easy for people to write it off as being weird for its own sake or unintentionally humorous. While director/writer Nicolas Wending Refn may be a provocateur, he’s also a careful and deliberate filmmaker, one who refuses to adhere to any one kind of style, either visual or narrative. For every person who loved Drive there are probably more who watched Valhalla Rising on Netflix and hated it or saw Only God Forgives in theaters and fell asleep. So if you laugh during The Neon Demon, it’s as valid of a response as being disturbed by it.
Ostensibly, The Neon Demon is about Jessie, an aspiring model who moves to Los Angeles from Georgia. Jessie is played by Elle Fanning as a kind of teenaged version of Lana Del Rey: beautiful, bored, and blank. Like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or the more recent Starry Eyes, The Neon Demon presents a world of ephemeral artifice that distracts everyone from the rotting corpse in the bedroom. In an early scene, the entertainment at an industry party is a faceless woman trussed and hung like a side of beef while everyone watches. Characters talk to each other through platitudes and in mirrors; nothing seems real. Everyone watches everyone’s reactions to things, waiting for their chance to swoop in if someone slips up.
When Jessie enters this surreal world, she is a tabula rasa upon which everyone can project their fantasies; she can be artfully arranged into a murder tableau or a sexual object and sometimes both. She falls so deep into the abyss that she stares back at, and even kisses, herself.
The dialogue, like a lot of other Refn movies, feels stilted and awkward at times, but to dismiss The Neon Demon as a badly written film would be a mistake. In fact, if there was a unifying trait of Refn’s films (at least the recent ones that I’ve seen) it would be his almost De Palma-like mannered pacing in the camera movement, editing, and acting. Everything feels slow and deliberate, which increases the suspense and makes us wonder who exactly we should trust in this film and what fresh hell lies beyond the next curve in the road. And while the words the characters speak might seem strange and cruel, what’s strangest of all is that they’re hones, which is a kind of horror all its own.
The Neon Demon was initially described as Refn’s first horror film. No doubt those expecting a slasher flick will be sorely disappointed. Yet The Neon Demon does indeed horrify. What’s scary is how believable so much of the film is and how its bloody climax is just a metaphor for what happens to women in a world that judges them solely on their looks. Jessie is a nobody, a lost soul who wants to be something but she has nothing - except her looks. Other women either want to be her or want to fuck her, but in the film’s most terrifying scene, we hear – rather than see – Jessie’s vast relief that she’s escaped the fate of another lost soul simply by remembering to lock her door.
The idea that beauty – whether “natural” or “acquired” – is disposable is overshadowed by the idea that in the end, beauty is meaningless. You can get raped whether or not you are beautiful, and you can get cast aside even if you are. If anything, The Neon Demon is a horror movie about misogyny: the kind that is enacted upon women by men, internalized, and then projected out towards other women. Perhaps what happens to Jessie in a literal sense is something outlandish, but what happens to her in a thematic sense is all too real.
The Neon Demon opens across North America on June 24.