The Neon Demon

I remember being in something of a minority regarding Nicolas Winding Refn’s last film ‘Only God Forgives’ – i.e. I liked it. Notwithstanding the welter of bad reviews, I was convinced that Refn had found the most brutal yet visually beautiful way possible of crafting a statement on the brutality and ultimate futility of violence.

At its most striking, ‘The Neon Demon’ is every bit as visually stunning as ‘Only God Forgives’, but that’s all it really deals in: surface sheen. Yes, there’s an argument to be made that the film’s subject – fashion, modelling, and pursuit of success in said milieu at the cost of everything else – demands nothing more than surface sheen. Let’s face it, if you want to satirise the fashion industry, all you’d need to do is point a camera at it and wait for it to become a parody of itself. Which it would do pretty quickly. In fact, you’d barely have time to make a cup of coffee and butter a slice of toast.

Yet ‘The Neon Demon’ always seems to be just a missing scene or another draft of the script away from being something more. The aesthetic ranges from Cronenbergian body horror to a Lynchian exploration of the how the internal landscape is mapped onto the external (or maybe vice versa), while the narrative is a complete mishmash, clearly wanting to evoke classic “rags-to-riches” and “rise-and-fall” stories but mainly chugging along at the level of ‘Showgirls’. If Verhoeven had thrown in necrophilia and cannibalism.

Ah, yes: the contentious stuff. I’d like to think that its inclusion is another indicator of the something else that Refn was striving for – at the very least, the most extreme juxtaposition possible with unnamed but Svengali-esque fashion designer (Allesandro Nivola)’s assertion that “beauty is everything” – but I’m more inclined to believe that it’s simply a reaction to the outrage over ‘Only God Forgives’; a case, in other words, of Refn thinking “okay, you fuckers, this time I’ll give you something to really get offended about”.

The offensiveness-o-meter registers its first blip when small town girl Jesse (Elle Fanning), just 16, orphaned and looking for fame and fortune in the big city, encounters Hank (Keanu Reeves), the manager of the shitty motel she’s lodging at. Hank’s an odious individual from the off; as the film progresses, Hank attempts to pimp out the 13-year old runaway in the next room to Jesse’s wet-leaf boyfriend Dean (Karl Glusman) – “some real Lolita shit” is how Hank delicately puts it. Later, Jesse ascribes an attempted incursion into her room to Hank, then hears him barging into the minor’s room and a lot of commotion ensuing that sounds decidedly unpleasant. At this point, terrified, she flees the motel and seeks refuge with make-up guru Ruby (Jena Malone).

Ah yes: Ruby. Jesse meets Ruby at one of her early photoshoots and utterly fails to identify her as a predatory lesbian, the single character trait that the script bothers to offer her. As well as seemingly doing every model in LA’s makeup, Ruby moonlights at a mortuary where she prepares cadavers, making them as lifelike as possible for their open coffins. This would have been the film’s best satirical hit, only Refn takes it that bit further … and by “that bit further” I mean straight through the barrier marked “good taste”, all the way down the dead-street signposted “if it was good enough for Jörg Buttgereit, it’s good enough for me” and up in flames as it goes barrelling into the concrete wall spray-painted with “way to go emptying the cinema like that, dude”. Said scene is the most thankless thing modern cinema has ever done with Jena Malone and that includes casting her in ‘Batman vs Superman’ and then consigning her to the cutting room floor. And even then, let’s spare a thought for poor Cody Renee Cameron as the other, uh, participant. Sort of participant. Ahem, moving swiftly on …

It’s also through Ruby that Jesse meets established model Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and aspiring model Sarah (Abbey Lee) – their characterisation runs to sullen with a tendency to bitchiness and sullen with a tendency to self-loathing respectively – and seems apprehensive of them right up to the point where Nivola’s predictably arrogant designer picks her on a whim to be the New Face of Whatever. Granted, Jesse’s transformation from sweet and innocent to not so, played out in a single scene, is the film’s equivalent of the “Club Silencio” sequence from ‘Mulholland Drive’ and lingers in the mind just as effectively.

To be fair, there’s quite a bit that ‘The Neon Demon’ gets right. It’s graced with good performances – Fanning is terrific; Malone, Heathcote and Lee all surpass the thin gruel they’re given to work with; and I haven’t seen Reeves this engaged with a role in ages. Cliff Martinez’s score gives the head-fuck imagery an unnerving aural accompaniment. And speaking of imagery, step forward cinematographer Natasha Braier. A lot of talent and a lot of thought – particularly around the symbolism in Jesse’s hallucinatory scenes – has gone into the production. It’s just that the end result seems so hollow. Had Refn’s go-for-the-jugular approach, rammed home as it is with such exquisite commitment to bad taste, been aimed at a more labyrinthine and multi-layered subject, ‘The Neon Demon’ could have been a visceral and essential work of cinema instead of a vaguely unsatisfying one.

Sucker Punch

Picture the scene: self and Paula settle down to watch ‘Sucker Punch’ (because nothing says “classy dude” like making your wife sit through a film predicated on fantasy sequences featuring a quintet of attractive twenty-somethings in mini-skirts) and the following exchange occurs:

Paula: So what’s this movie about?

Me: It’s a kind of layers-of-reality thing. Like ‘Inception’.

Fast forward 105 minutes:

Paula: So what the hell was that movie about?

Me: Buggered if I know.

And sitting down a few days later to write about ‘Sucker Punch’ – which, for all its flaws, has managed to lodge itself in the back of my mind in a way I can only describe as niggling – I’m buggered if I know how to approach it, where to start, whether to put the scalpel of my critical faculties to use and deconstruct all the ways it doesn’t work, or try to pin down why/how it’s managed to get under my skin in a way I almost wish it hadn’t.

Even the tried and trusted let’s-start-with-a-plot-synopsis approach seems redundant. ‘Sucker Punch’ is the kind of movie that dares you to sketch out a plot synopsis. You can, but you’ll soon find yourself wallowing in a gratuitous amount of incidental detail to try to explain exactly why a baby dragon with two crystals in its throat is so important to stealing a cigarette lighter from a fat guy and why that in turn is essential in an escape attempt from a brothel that’s doubling up for an asylum. Or is a representation of it. Or vice versa.

This leads you into a discussion of the brothel as one of the most sexless dens of inquity modern cinema has given us. Short of ‘Showgirls’, I can’t remember a film so packed with nubile young women that managed to be so unerotic. ‘Showgirls’ remains the worst offender, though, since it managed to make female nudity uninteresting. I am still at a loss as to how Paul Verhoeven achieved this.

I am also still at a loss as to how to approach ‘Sucker Punch’. I can’t even blame my stupefaction on unrealistic expectations of the movie (although, to be fair, you only need to glance at the poster and think “hmmmm, Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone and Vanessa Hudgens in the same movie modelling a nice line in sailors suits, I’ll have some of that, thank you very much” in order to cultivate unrealistic expectations) since I went into ‘Sucker Punch’ expecting an incoherent mishmash at best and a train-wreck at worst.

But I guess what was was expecting, at the heart of either the mishmash or the mangled remains of carriages and locomotive, was an exuberant and unapologetically cheesy action-fest. This, after all, was a movie I had it on good authority as containing a major set-piece featuring clockwork and steam-powered Germans circa First World War getting their trench-dwelling asses whupped by our foxy fivesome. A movie that featured samurai elements, sword and sorcery elements, sci-fi elements and feminist elements. That huge tranches of it take place in an alternative reality was a foregone conclusion this feminism certainly doesn’t equate to girls ‘n’ guns posturing in this reality. Certainly not when the girls have names like Baby Doll, Sweet Pea and Blondie. I’m guessing Germaine Greer’s services were not engaged during rewrites.

I was, in short, expecting a lightweight piece of fluff. Something fun. Surely it’s not possible to shove ‘Inception’, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Hellboy’, ‘D.E.B.S.’ and ‘Cabaret’ in the blender (along with a train full of killer robots) and come out with a movie that’s anything less than big dumb fun. Surely?

Zack Snyder manages it. How? He also shoves ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Through a Glass Darkly’ into the blender. He puts in bigger spoonfuls of these ingredients than any of the others. He plays out the big action scenes in the shadow of institutional miserablism. He depicts the burlesque atmosphere of the brothel in the shadow of the asylum. The threat of sexual violence hangs over his heroines in both realities. The only time they’re not in danger of being raped is when they’re battling steampunk Germans or gleaming robots – none of whom, I’m guessing, are packing a penis anyway.

(After I thought about ‘Sucker Punch’ for longer than necessary – and I guess I’d better throw up a SPOILER alert here, even though this is pure supposition – I came to the conclusion that the brothel is the top layered of reality, the asylum is how Sweet Pea has come to think of it, and ostensible main character Baby Doll is actually a figment of Sweet Pea’s imagination, an alter ego the introduction of whom into her fantasy world gives her the impetus to make an escape attempt. Please feel free to debate this theory in the comments section. SPOILERS/ABJECT GUESSWORK end.)

Maybe that’s why Snyder called it ‘Sucker Punch’ in the first place. It’s a movie that seems to promise a specific set of tropes, a certain vibe, a fanboy aesthetic of kick-ass action heroines and OTT spectacle – and to some degree lets you think you’re getting it – but continually challenges you with its unremitting returns to a milieu of incarceration, threat and depersonalization. Which denies you the payoff you want.

All told, short of painting his bizarro vision in the visceral palette of an R rating, Snyder seems to have made exactly the movie he wanted to with zero thought spared for commercialism, audience satisfaction or critical response. ‘Sucker Punch’ is a balls-to-the-wall exegesis of big-budget auteurism. And it frustrates the hell out of me that I’m unable to wholeheartedly embrace it the way I want to.