By Ben Fama
I watched the NY Times “Anatomy of a Scene” for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Neon Demon (2016) before I saw the film. I didn’t know “Anatomy of a Scene” was an ongoing feature, and part of me wondered if it was launched as a recuperatory effort to justify the film’s existence, a film that seemed like a long fashion editorial or music video.
Even after hearing terrible things about the movie, I decided to watch it. By the end I was dissociated and looking at my phone (sorry to that theater), but the song that played as the credits rolled brought me back: Sia’s “Waving Goodbye.” I loved the song, it’s chilly intro and coastline melodies. I started to ask myself … was that movie good? Or rather, what was this film good at? What does it want to be? And how could it teach me to watch it?
I met up with author Meghann Boltz on a co-watching chat platform so we could co-process. Admittedly, I was on a Coronavirus isolation spiral. I’m too shy for Facetime, so this seemed like a perfect way to spend time with someone. Plus, her writing aesthetic reminds me of this film. I’d hear poets go on about cozying up to both high and low culture, though in fact, you don’t see them go too low. Meghann is willing to go “as low as you can go,” and I believe her. She wrote a book called Rebel/Blonde that engages all of the deranged pleasure of Hollywood fanaticism and glamour magick that necessarily venerates the poetics of all of those things. When it comes to the silver screen, she’s a believer, like me.
Neon Demon features Elle Fanning, who plays Jesse, an aspiring model who moves to LA to make it—a tale as old as time. She lives in a motel in Pasadena. Her parents aren’t around anymore. Like Drive (2011), there isn’t much backstory, or interiority, at all, which keeps the visuals and soundtrack forefronted. They’re the horizon lines that generate meaning. They push the film along.
Neon Demon is a horror film after Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill, Carrie). Horror has an alluring textured visual vocabulary and a specific grip of sound. The most perfect example of this is the cinematography in John Carpenter’s Halloween. The mood, the styling--that middle distance shot through the window while a beautiful piano melody walks the high octave. Michael Meyers behind a bush, staring at the house. It’s these juicy scenes that keep me coming back to the genre; I think of them constantly, despite myself.
The photoshoot vignettes that compose the film work in the way Baudrillard argues Disneyland functions: to make us believe in reality by contrast to fantasy.When I say the film feels like a "long fashion editorial" I mean that even the parts that aren't explicitly photoshoots look like ads. It tricks us into questioning the reality of reality rather than the reality within the film. A feeling that seems something like the dominating mood this historical moment, where life is a social media post waiting to happen.
Watching Neon Demon is like reading W Magazine alone at a party, while a DJ mix shuffles through a lot of not-quite familiar songs, and the music gets louder the fewer people are in the room.
Meghann somehow knows who every actor and actress is, and what else they’ve been in. She knew which of the models in the film were actual models. Our running chat oscillating through the signifiers lent a new dimension to the sign/signified. “Kanye mentioned her name in a song,” she typed into the chat. “Which I think is what E. M. Forster meant when he said ‘Only connect.’”
Introduction From Our 2020 Curator
“Media Essay” by Richard Z. Santos
”In These Uncertain Times” by Sebastián H. Páramo, PhD
”A Series of Hong Kong Commercials” by Dorothy Chan