Contains spoilers (as it should).
Yorgos Lanthimos is among the latest string of Hollywood auteurs—Paul Thomas Anderson, Ari Aster, to name a few—who are waking up to fascism knocking on America’s doors, only to realize that the call is coming from inside the house!
In Lanthimos’ latest film, Bugonia, a girlboss CEO of a biotech company, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is kidnapped by working class cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) who firmly believe that Fuller is an alien species extracting labour from the human species and destroying the planet. Teddy and Don’s family were severely impacted by the biotech company’s experimental trials. As a result, the two cousins live isolated in a sleepy American town harvesting bees and researching conspiracy theories. What follows is two-hours of tight and gripping dalliance between realist hostage drama and science fiction.
Working class spiral into the world of conspiracies
During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, a conspiracy theory that the elites of the world are reptilians or “lizard people”—especially the Clinton-Obama political clans—was popularized. At that moment, progressives consumed that notion as a funny and harmless internet meme. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, and the COVID-19 pandemic, only underscored how much fake news and conspiracy theories had a chokehold on the American working class.
Bugonia stretches that aspect of internet culture into our contemporary moment, where the conspiracies are wilder, the economy is worse, and Donald Trump has openly declared war on truth. Teddy and Don represent a working class that have been so stripped off of their agency and subjectivity that they can only make sense of the world around them through the supernatural.
The film itself constantly plays with the truth of its own narrative—is the CEO actually an alien or pretending to be one to make peace with her kidnappers? Are the kidnappers delusional or are they onto something sinister? Will this new pharmaceutical treatment save or kill Teddy’s mom? Can we believe western medicine? Wait, are we going anti-vax or anti-capitalist here?
This narrative style mirrors the delirium one must feel navigating today’s charged internet scape and hints towards a political horseshoe theory that the far-right and far-left have more in common than we think. At one point, Teddy even says that he has dabbled with all types of political thought, “alt-right, leftist, Marxist” only to conclude that the best thought for him is free from any ideological root or commitment. Lanthimos paints a compassionate picture of the alienated worker in the post-truth era. And in doing so, exposes the dangerous contradictions that inhibit the class disenfranchised by the failures of capitalism and liberal democracy.
Human species vs Capitalism
The film opens with Teddy reflecting on bees, both as a key mediator for our planetary health and as a metaphor for how labour is structured in our society. The film starts off with this kind of astute observation about the system we live in, capitalism, marked with a sharp satire of corporate culture. Michelle (Emma Stone) embodies the typical “woke” boss who really wants to do good to society through pharmaceutical innovations. She will pretend to be friends with her employees, even call them family, but will not hesitate to discipline transgressions if it risks her company’s profits. Her company’s product has put Teddy’s mom in a coma, destroyed rural communities, and is literally killing the bees—and by extension, the planet.
And then, the film literally loses the plot. Pulled by the genre’s need for an unreliable narrator, Lanthimos loses sight of where to place the blame for all this destruction—only to land squarely and inaccurately on the human species. This type of political thought does not discriminate between the CEO of a biotech company and a low-paid warehouse worker of that company for rapid and aggressive ecological destruction, ignoring the organizing principle of capitalism that produces a hierarchy between these human actors.
The film’s understanding of how our current geological age is accelerating due to human species, and not the system, informs two key plot lines. First, it informs Teddy’s strategy to take down the aliens as an individual instead of building class solidarity and fighting the capitalist machine at the point of production and extraction. Teddy clearly says “this is not a movement” and he views all activism as “personal exhibitionism and brand maintenance in disguise.”
Secondly, it informs the conclusion of the film where the aliens deem all of humanity as irredeemable and so they must be exterminated. The aliens, a stand-in for the corporate class, are ultimately the ones who get to decide on humanity’s future—not Teddy, the stand-in for the working class, and definitely not the class itself. There are no politicians involved, no movements, no collective efforts that can stop this decision taken by a few aliens in their alien spaceship declaring that humans are simply too flawed.
Where have all the flowers gone, indeed?
Films concerned with ecological destruction are often plagued with this type of political fatalism and Bugonia is no different. First Reformed (2017) and Mother! (2017), just to name a few, are part of a lineage of psychological thrillers declaring that there is no way forward for the natural world to survive without destroying all of human civilization as we know it and starting all over again. With this film, Lanthimos is trapped in a pessimism rooted in the impossibility of imagining an alternative planetary future.
It is in the last moments of Bugonia, when the aliens decide to draw the curtains on the human species, that we see a glimpse of what is possible, against perhaps the film’s own wishes.
As Marlene Dietrich’s version of “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” plays to images of humans switched off, lying motionless on the floor mid-action or mid-event—getting married, reading by the beach, playing with their kids, falling in love—we are reminded of the beauty humans are able to hold in our existence. It’s the political and economic system that prevents us from doing so fully and completely. It is in these last moments that we are reminded that this planet is still worth fighting for, and worth fighting for collectively.
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