by Lawrence Pearce

Something happens at a certain point as you’re watching Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, and when you realize what’s just happened, you’re so embarrassed, so ashamed, that you're kinda mad at yourself for not being able to predict the trap Refn’s set for us. You’re shocked and weirdly elated that a director who has previously only been known as a magnificent film stylist in his films leading up to The Neon Demon was able to pull off something so clever, so dastardly. If you’re like me, when this realization hits you, you laugh and say to yourself, "Wow, Nick… You REALLY got me! You bastard. You’re a real filmmaker now."

Some might miss it while they’re busy rolling their eyes out of their skulls at all glittering mise-en-scène, at all the meta post-film school jacking off that Refn is admired and hated in equal measures for. Some may notice but won’t care since The Neon Demon is definitely another one of those films which, a lot like Beyond The Black Rainbow, inspires yawns as well as heated post-viewing debates regarding its dubious visual genius, the sort of dubious genius which will most likely look amazing projected on the wall of some goth nite five years from now. Others, like me, will eat it up knowing fully well what Refn is basically up to, but will nonetheless be taken by surprise due to our film literate complacency that has blinded us to the seemingly simple twist awaiting.

[SPOILERS AHEAD] The part I’m talking about which, for me, is Refn’s "crossing the streams" moment, his big giant gushing solo that vaults him out of cinema air guitar land if not forever, then just for a moment of Tumblr thumb flicking is this:

Elle Fanning’’s character, Jesse (an All-American name for girls and boys, incidentally), is beautiful by any standard. Yet the way they’ve made her up in the first half of the film, she’s not quite "beautiful" in the way the other otherworldly Heather-ish gift mädchens are "beautiful." So much so, we really begin to wonder to ourselves why all the characters around Jesse keep uttering to her in breathy, longing, post-orgasmic whispers, "You are sooooo BEAUTIFUL." What is the big deal about Jesse, anyway??? Is she really "all that"???

(Wait for it…)

So, finally, when Jesse IS made up like all the mannequins come-to-life around her (my favorite of the coven is Abbey Lee who even though is the perfect super model type with her Egyptian cheekbones, jurassic legs, and weird teeth, has this devastating, nightmarish, unforgettable gaze about her… she’s like an alien mesmerized by an aquarium in every scene she’s in), Jesse really IS as beautiful looking, maybe more, than the other creatures.

But this isn’t the big twist! The thing that punches you in the gut is the realization that Refn has manipulated us into being JUST LIKE all the creepy douchebags in the film who circle around Jesse like The Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys, swooping around waiting to rip her apart like The Scarecrow. We’re just like those creeps rolling our eyes, inventing little snarky things to say on Twitter or Instagram as we watch Refn’s Instaopus, thinking up clever retorts for when we debate with our friends after the movie about all the hovering triangles, white girls with corn rows, mirror FX, and all the other irresistible and equally annoying cliches which dominated our Tumblr feeds 5 or 6 years ago, all the stuff that is "soooooo 2010." He’s made us those people. Refn’s tilted the black mirror towards us, and perhaps made a film about something beyond the megatons of style and film references of his previous films even though there’s tons of fallout and ash from cinema’s past in The Neon Demon too. Don’t worry. You will get irradiated (and probably a little irritated too, maybe.)

So, has Refn really become "that good" in the way Kubrick could be "that good," or Bergman was always "that good"? Has he made something more than a feature length Tumblr account with an expectedly rad arpeggiated synth soundtrack? Is he more than an articulate, precocious film nerd whose films (like Tarantino’s) are more about bragging about all the films he’s into which you’ve probably never seen than telling a story? Is he approaching the level of genius of someone more like Godard or De Palma who were also enchanted by the complexities of surface and who quoted and stole from their favorites just as Refn does and is lambasted for? Is Refn more than that guy who wears red-colored designer glasses more because they look cool than because he's actually nearsighted? The guy who boasts that he’s colorblind, can’t see mid colors, only primaries, and this is why his films look the way they do? The guy who will debate with you all night long that Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter is an undeniably better film than Godard’s Breathless? Is he The Neo De Palma whose films like Carrie and Dressed To Kill smashed us over the head with his film literacy while still taking us on the ride of our lives, soundtracks set at 11, blood squirting out of eyeballs, boobs, butcher knives, love, death, sex and everything in between (De Palma’s classic films divided and irritated know-it-all film dorks just like Refn’s movies do, so did Kubrick’s when they first came out)? Is he like a new sort of Instadystopian Cronenberg who often stumbles (like in Cronenberg's wildly uneven Crash, or the Golden Globe purgatory of his recent banalities), but who we still root for because of the gorgeous, if failed, conceptual ambitiousness present in the effort?

Well, yes and no.

YES… because The Neon Demon does indeed work mostly as a film in a way that’s not quite present in Refn’s past films, a way that’s apparent when you see the film in an actual theater instead of at home or on your phone in a million Instagramized and Tumblrable posts.

NO… But not because The Neon Demon isn’t great in the ways that make a movie typically great, but because the old filmmaker paradigm of people like Godard, or Bergman, or Kubrick isn't really applicable anymore in an age where we’re delighted, beguiled, inspired, transformed, moved, destroyed, and upset on a constant, never resting basis due to that demonic little invention called the smart phone. Refn’s awareness of this in practically every second of The Neon Demon is exhausting and a little/a lot annoying, but somehow awesome and completely dazzling too. There isn't a single shot in the film that wouldn’t make a great Instagram post.

It’s funny to me that the people who are rolling their eyes hardest at the film are the smartypantses in the audience who the film is geared most towards, the same people who the film is really about. The movie’s a huge F-You to Hollywood and LA as much as it is a love letter: a very Los Angeles sort of paradox. "I love you, but I hate you… I hate you because I love you, but I only hate you so much because I love you so much." That’s Los Angeles, so it only seems completely appropriate that The Neon Demon should take on such a heavily deliberate, ultra self-conscious, mega hyper-awareness to its uber-stylizing, its calculated, minute appropriations of the films and aesthetics of past decades Refn is so in love with and the city which produces his most cherished fetishes. Is it deep? Well, no… But it totally is in a weird way because The Neon Demon knows what it is. Is it shallow? Well, no, it’s not exactly that either. The Neon Demon is more like visiting a museum in its referentialality than a pastiche; more collage than homage.

Dressed To Kill (Dir. Brian de Palma, 1979)

Living in Los Angeles is like living on the top of an ever cresting tsunami that, when you’re in the midst of a creative milieu or even the most underground and marginalized of artistic cliques, never seems crash to shore. It’s like you’re flying, oblivious to the entire world around you even though the tsunami seems high enough to see the entire world from.

So profound and intoxicating is this feeling that you actually think you’re really flying and forget that you’re actually on a tidal wave which will inevitably crash. Maybe not right now, maybe not tomorrow, but pretty soon at some point. And when it finally does crash, it’ll be hard. Some people smash ashore and say, "fuck it!" and walk away to another beach. Others get dragged back out to sea and drown. Some manage to hop onto that tsunami which was just starting to crest behind the one they were just on, forever riding high, but perpetually oblivious, always flying, never quite "getting it," never quite succeeding or failing, but always surviving. And then there are others who, though startled by what they’ve just experienced, survive the crash, dust themselves off, and realize the tsunami they were just riding on wasn't a tsunami at all, but a normal little wave… one of many, one of many more that will come and go as long as The Moon pulls at the Earth. Instead of moving to another beach, they stay, building sandcastles and watch, amusingly, as so many others try to get back up on their "tsunami" or die trying.

Thematically, as much as Refn's uber-hip, post-Godardian flipping through a 2010 issue of Vogue/scrolling through Tumblr style of filmmaking has "meaning," this is what The Neon Demon is really about. Like every Los Angeles movie from Sunset Blvd to Chinatown, from Blade Runner to Barton Fink, from Repo Man to Mulholland Drive, The Neon Demon is in some way about the feeling of being lost in all that city that isn't really a city so much as a gargantuan amorphous blob of melting golden clutter and blue screened sky that’s always the same because it’s always different. A place that offers something for everyone, but nothing really new. Mermaids, fake Batmans, tacos, and neon demons on every sidewalk and street corner. A place where themes and style can be the same thing. Style as mythos. Affectation as archetype. Cliches and tired notions of "originality" (itself a flimsy notion born from advertising and industry) become obsolete in Los Angeles, becoming interchangeable depending on context, driving many people mad. The occultation of context: fashion.

There’s two main conceptual spirits occurring in The Neon Demon which play off each other intermittently and simultaneously throughout the film, confusing and informing its narrative and style, mashing story and aesthetic design together to be unidentifiable from each other. One has to do with story, the other with pure visual aesthetics.

The first conceptual spirit is as old as fairytales, the idea of innocence (usually in the form a virginal young female character) being lost in a place and a situation that the character is terrified and uncertain of, but also strangely attracted to; the idea that, like Goldilocks, the supposed innocent woman isn’t really that innocent deep down because why else would they be drawn to this dark, dangerous world? As a basic premise about a film about a naive, innocent/not-so-innocent person coming to a big surreal city like Los Angeles and getting lost in a labyrinth of demonic characters and nightmarish situations (David Lynch pretty much did the same exact thing in Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet and practically every movie he’s ever done in some way) as Hansel and Gretel would wander into the spooky woods, isn’t exactly original. We know. But originality, like Los Angeles itself, as we also know, is a weird, debatable, dubious myth. Nothing is born from nothing. Something is always born from something else. Dreams may come true here, but there’s no such thing as miracles.

Blue Velvet (Dir. David Lynch, 1986) — Blue Velvet (Dir. David Lynch, 1986)

The other conceptual spirit in the film is a fairly new one which comes from avant grade, non-narrative cinema which gradually crept into mainstream culture in the form of pop music, their music videos, and the movies of people like Brian De Palma, Ridley Scott and his brother Tony, the idea that the movie viewing experience itself is its own world, its own painting that exists only in their own haunted fish tanks, their own little terrariums of themselves "as movies": movies about movies and other movies, not so much about the real world and real feelings (whatever those are), and certainly not about politics or saving the world. Self-contained movies. Style synonymous with substance. This type of cinema is what artists like Refn live off of. It’s their baby’s blood.

The David Lynch influence upon The Neon Demon is important to note, particularly Mulholland Drive, for his movies definitely fall into the type of postmodern tendencies I’ve just described, and those who have proudly pointed out that influence are certainly not wrong. But the influence is only skin deep and a bit lazy. There’s a big, hilarious, very Americana, sometimes slapsticky, noirish camp about all of David Lynch’s movies, an on-purpose, laugh out loud, raunchy funniness about them that makes them "Lynchian." Eerie and disturbing, yes, but they’re also almost big-hearted musical comedies. Anyone could easily burst out in song in any of Lynch’s films, and any moment could explode into a musical number. Though The Neon Demon is definitely funny on purpose in many parts, it’s definitely not "Lynchian." And though many have described Refn’s film as "campy," Neon Demon’s camp isn't as winky or as obvious as Lynch’s. The camp could go either way: is Refn pulling our leg? Or is his film really, like he said with a straight face in the post-screening Q&A I saw with him after the movie, a rumination upon the idea of beauty, the corrupting forces of fame and the industry that feeds our cultural notions of beauty and our expectations of it, all channeled through the cryptic symbology of Aleister Crowley (he actually really said that out loud!)? Maybe we’ll never know. This uncertainty may add to the film’s longevity in years to come, and it may help its cultishness. But Refn doesn't strike me as a very humorous guy, so who knows? VIVA LA ENIGMA! (Jodorowsky voice.)

The whole tone of The Neon Demon feels a lot more in tune with Polanski’s dark daydream Chinatown with those eerie LA afternoons and characters peaking around corners all the time, and Blade Runner with all those opium soaked corridors, golden skylines, emerald water reflections on the walls, and hungover, cough medicine overdosed characters. Other important influences I sensed were Tony Scott’s eternal goth club projection masterpiece The Hunger with its hypnotized characters with perfect complexion who seem to lack the ability to blink, Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick’s most hated and debated film) in its profound, hair-pullingly frustrating pointlessness, Antonioni’s Blow Up with its molasses-like plot and swingin’ 60s hipness, Paul Verhoeven’s camp classic Showgirls with its overflowing outrageous "I can’t believe what I’m watching, is this thing real?" moments one after the other, and the Coen Brothers’ own lost in Los Angeles masterpiece Barton Fink and all its hypnotic wallpapers and overhearing of weird stuff through the walls. Those scenes with the characters gazing at the nightmare moon might be lifted from Philippe Mora’s kooky alien abduction video store classic Communion seeing as Refn is the kind of guy who went to the video store as a kid like the other kids enthusiastically went to the public pool or the soccer field. There’s even an important scene that takes place in an empty swimming pool that’s ripped right from the pages of a JG Ballard story (Ballard had a huge hard on for empty swimming pools.) And the Giger-like female titans with perfect cheekbones that creep around the entire film are most certainly related to the penis devouring demon in Species. Hell, they probably all hang out and listen to black metal records together.

But the influence that keeps coming back the hardest and most lovingly is the influence of Mr. De Palma, namely Carrie, Dressed To Kill, Body Double, and Scarface: his best films. Cliff Martinez’s music score sounds more like Scarface’s sexualized, synched up baroque dirges than Goblin or John Carpenter, names who the audience members were all too eager to drop during the Q&A. The purples, the reds, the oranges, the turquoises, the baby blues, that washed out perfectly "LA" sort of light as the mannequins walk around is so Body Double. Those wandery shots are right out of Dressed To Kill, as are those "I can’t look, but I can’t look away" moments of outrageous, out-of-nowhere shock and horror. Elle Fanning’s Jesse reminded me so much of Sissy Spacek’s Carrie White in so much of the film that I had to bite my tongue from yelling out at the screen, "THEY’RE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU!!!" And yes, there's even a slow motion sequence of women in a steamy shower with blood washing down their legs that I certainly hope Mr. De Palma is flattered by just how so many of his films are modified, up-to-date shout outs to Vertigo and Psycho which Hitchcock is reported to have been amused by too.

So what is The Neon Demon? It’s never made directly clear in any part of the film who or what "The Neon Demon" actually is. If, as Refn himself said after the film in his typically sorta annoyed, aloof, but Northern Europeanly coy, ironic, and understated way that "The Neon Demon" is just a title he pulled out of his ass to appease his financiers before he even started the film because he’s, "Dyslexic and needed something that he could remember which sounded like a horror movie… Also, I like neon a lot because I’m from the 80s, and neon is both old and new," then that’s sorta great because, like all great films, we get to use our imaginations the way we’re told old midnight movies like El Topo and Eraserhead begged us to use our imaginations. If not forever, then maybe just for a few flicks of our thumb on Tumblr for a few minutes.

Maybe I’m The Neon Demon.

Maybe you are too.

(Lawrence Pearce is an artist and electronic musician living in Los Angeles.)