We’ve heard of Hollywood chewing people up and spitting them
out, but Nicolas Winding Refn thinks he’s found a new spin on the old metaphor
in The Neon Demon. Hardly the first
story of showbiz’s capacity to lure new talent with false promise, Refn follows
a pretty 16-year-old girl (Elle Fanning) freshly arrived in Los Angeles ready
to make her way in the modeling business. A coldly calculating agent (Christina
Hendricks laying down a fine layer of ice in her one scene) tells her to lie
about her age (19, because “people believe what they’re told”) and books her a
shoot with an intense famous photographer (Desmond Harrington). That’s just the
start of a skeevy journey up the ladder as she draws jealous attention from all
the older models (like Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee), lamenting their advanced
age (mostly mid-20s, but some are pushing, horror of horrors, thirty) and
staring at her with daggers in their eyes. If looks could kill, they’d tear her
apart limb by limb and steal back the work that’s always flowing to the
younger, the newer, and the more exploitable.
Per usual, Refn’s shallow approach is one of moody synths
and long, brooding silences punctuated by staccato bursts of dialogue traded
like hot barbs in flat tones. Sometimes this works for him, like the dreamy
artsy cars-and-gore Drive,
transcending its trappings to become a slick, woozy, romantic and muscular
homage to Michael Mann and Walter Hill. Other times this fails him, like the
gross and gaudy Only God Forgives, a
pointless exercise in masculine posturing and blacklight set design. Neon Demon is the midpoint between those
earlier efforts, bringing a swirling generalized menace to the long passages of
driving electronic music and pulsing strobe lights, fussily composed frames – Natasha
Braier’s coldly sensuous cinematography splayed out with high gloss, like
fashion spreads – capturing the entrapment of beautiful women in uncomfortable
positions. It effectively communicates the danger inherent for a young person
lost in the lower rungs of the entertainment business, trading her looks for a
chance at stability.
Refn isn’t a particularly original or deep thinker on the
topics at hand. Any insight the film has stops with simple statements like a
model coolly reporting “Anything worth having hurts a little” or a casually
dismissive designer’s snap, “Beauty isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” So
what we’re left with is a simplistic and repetitive exploration of tired old
themes. Refn, with co-writers Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, keep the plot agonizingly
flat. When not befriended by a nice guy (Karl Glusman) or a seemingly helpful
makeup artist (Jena Malone), Fanning poses and reacts in sequences that find
her surrounded by predators, sized up as meat and flesh, objectified,
commodified, and exploited. There are the agents, photographers, competitors,
men. Even a big cat somehow appears in her cheap motel room one night in a
sequence of surreal dread that almost seems like it must’ve been a dream until
someone casually mentions it several scenes later. But none of these moments or
characters have any life to them. They remain slickly photographed, but empty
and uncharacterized. Who are these
people? What do they want? Where do they come from? What are their inner lives?
It’s hard to say.
The movie’s derivative images (from Lynch, Argento, Kubrick,
and a host of directors from the avant-garde and music video worlds) turn on
conventional themes of greed, envy, and the lengths people will go to become
famous and stay young and beautiful. But it acts like that’s enough. It’s
totally fascinated with itself, an L.A. commentary made up entirely of clichés,
and a style made up entirely of posturing, grooving on its own pulsating aura
of unease and meticulous design. It’s also a dispatch from nowhere, hermetically
sealed with no relation, real or metaphorical, to reality. Refn envisions its
showbiz world as empty and depopulated. There are hardly any extras, and the
only way we know Fanning is moving up in the fashion world is that a character tells
us. The whole industry seems to be made up of our cast, and doesn’t extend past
the bounds of any given frame. The only spark of life is Keanu Reeves, doing
great, intriguing work in a couple scenes as a sleazy motel owner. He’s given a
Movie Star entrance, and digs into his character-actor role as if he’s walking
out of another, better version of this movie.
The Neon Demon visualizes
its tired observations from a stylish remove, passing itself off as profound
when it’s just played out. The endeavor is merely an exercise in animating its
sparse ideas through a slow molasses drip of art house trances goosed with a
dried-out straight-faced camp quality and a few effective horror movie
excesses. A scene of a murder heard through the walls – or is it another
nightmare half-realized? – has surreal chill. And the movie builds to making a
spectacle of itself in its final scenes for a long-delayed payoff with
ostentatiously preposterous, half-motivated, and grotesquely self-amused
violence and gross-out appeal. A corpse post-autopsy is given a sort of spit
shine, a nice girl’s fate is as the red mist in a softcore shower of blood on
two others, and a climactic eyeball gag is at once horrible and hilariously
audacious. By that point the movie has spilled over into the heights of its
ridiculousness, surprising and gratuitous, one of those movies that wants to
finger-wag society’s desire for flesh and blood while also relishing the
opportunity to stage some and lick it all up. I couldn’t help but laugh. It’s
like a small, nasty, pseudo-smart splatter picture stretched out to the point of
self-serious tedium.
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