Cinematic Collaborators

Sometimes, when a movie feels out of time, it's because it is a timeless work of art, a lightning strike from a future we didn't know we wanted, a prophetic message from the transcendent sublime. Sometimes, however, it's because the filmmakers don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia is definitely in the latter camp: the film was clearly meant to be released under a fully ascendant liberalism, the psychic atmosphere of a Harris admin. It feels like an attempt to understand Q-Anon/MAGA from the perspective of a past tense, a premature post-mortem, accidentally performed on a newly ascendant living ideology. You might argue that this simple mistaken coin flip, this basic error of prediction, is why the film is so unduly sympathetic to its murderous conspiracist protagonist, who it treats as a misunderstood every-man at the same moment that it reveals (and revels in) his cruelty and violence.

To be fair, with the timelines of filmmaking, where most Hollywood movies take between eighteen months and five years from pre-production into release, it's hard to make a film about current events, especially when the film is going to be made on one side of an election and released on the other, with confidence. Making political statements in Hollywood is difficult in the best of times, but under conditions of extremely accelerated historical development, like those we find ourselves in now, its almost a fools' errand.

This reflection is the final generosity I am going to offer Lanthimos and his new film Bugonia, a confused mess that, though it holds within that confusion the seeds of a more interesting film, lands in the end a piece of misanthropic fascist propaganda, a hearty dose of Trumpism for the art house set. It is, however, worth talking about, at least as an illuminating symptom of how a certain kind of liberal artist and their cultural production will serve the American Reich.