After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years, I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at conspiracy theories, shared irrational beliefs, the needs they meet and their consequences.
We really don’t like the unknown. From a survival standpoint, what you don’t know CAN kill you. So we look for pattern, for meaning, as much as possible. It’s wired into us, this need for things to make sense. Part of what makes horror films so scary is the extent to which they deal with the unknown, unknowable, uncertain, or unavoidable. All of the things that resist our attempts at making meaning.
But the flipside of that- the lengths to which we go to make meaning where there is none or where meaning is obscured - is equally a source of horror. This is where conspiracy theories begin - with an attempt to impose meaning on events which elude it. Sometimes, shit happens that is just too horrifying, traumatic, or too big to really get your head around, and one way people deal with it is to tell themselves a story that makes sense of it, even if that story requires you to believe in vast networks of secret organizations controlling every aspect of life. Bizarre though it might be, for some people it beats the alternative.
Which brings me to Bug - an intense, nightmarish treatment of folie a deux, psychological disintegration, and the things we’re willing to believe to keep our lives from feeling entirely out of our control.
Agnes is a cocktail waitress in rural Oklahoma, and as the film opens, she’s dreading the return of her ex-husband, Jerry. Jerry just finished doing a bid for armed robbery, and he’s set on reuniting with Agnes - well, moving into her motel room, taking money out of her purse, and beating her when she gets too uppity, at any rate. Turns out they don’t really enforce restraining orders where Agnes lives. They used to have a son, and they don’t anymore.
So this is Agnes, lonely and worn away by tragedy and abuse, living in a squalid motel room in the middle of nowhere, her only comforts the occasional night out with friends, booze and cocaine. It’s not much of a life, and with Jerry back in her life, there’s fear now as well. And then one night her friend R.C. brings over Peter, a guy she just met not too long ago. He’s tagging along with them to a party. He’s shy, and quiet. Sort of awkward, but he seems nice. And they get to talking, and one thing leads to another. A moment of tenderness and grace in an otherwise bleak existence. He isn’t cruel, he isn’t callous.
He’s just really preoccupied with bugs.
And so as the film moves on, we learn more about Peter, about where he’s from, what he’s doing, how he sees the world. He sees bugs everywhere. He sees secret organizations behind every event in his life. There are people experimenting on him, and that’s why he had to escape from the hospital. They were turning him into a zombie assassin, just like they did
Timothy McVeigh. But Agnes doesn’t freak out or run away from this. Oh sure, Peter has some weird ideas, but he doesn’t slap her around or steal from her. He’s a buffer between her and Jerry. And for someone in Agnes’ situation, that might just be enough. And in Agnes, Peter has someone who will listen to him, who takes him seriously and doesn’t call the cops when he starts going on about the bugs in his bloodstream. These are two people clinging to each other like the other is their life raft in a cold, incomprehensible world. Just as Peter isn’t Jerry, Agnes accepts Peter for who he is and what he believes, and so it becomes very easy for Peter’s explanation of the world to become Agnes’ as well. It becomes a story they tell each other about each other. one that allows each of them to feel like the horrible shit that has happened to them has an explanation. For Peter, the world is a vast machine manipulated by the military, by governments, by secret societies, and on some level, For someone who’s been through the wringer as much as Agnes, it makes as much sense as anything else, and it keeps Peter close to her. Playing along turns into belief soon enough, and it’s not long before we get a sense of just how deep Peter’s damage really runs.
The whole experience is grimy and claustrophobic - there’s maybe one sequence that doesn’t occur in Agnes’ motel room, which also illustrates the limits of her life, and the segments with Jerry exude menace. This room is almost her entire world, and Peter becomes part of that. People come and go, and as the film moves on it becomes more and more difficult to tell how much of what we’re seeing is actually happening and how much of it is Peter and Agnes’ shared delusion, punctuated with cutaway shots to hatching insects and the rush of blood through veins and arteries, as if their obsessions are invading our experience of the film itself. In this sense, this film is really good at playing with the same vagaries of perception that fuel conspiracy theories. We see and hear what we see and hear, but meaning isn’t made by eyes and ears, it’s made by the brain, and so perception is subjective, contingent on memory, our assumptions about meaning, the most accessible information we have, motivations, and biases. We see and hear what we want to see and hear, what we expect to see and hear.
In this instance, the results are devastating. The dialogue is a little stagey at times (betraying the story’s origin as a play), but not enough to be distracting. It’s expertly paced, beginning on a note of unease, with Jerry stalking Agnes, and ticking along surely, Peter’s delusions moving more and more to the forefront the more time he spends with Agnes, who is all the more willing to believe them because Peter is, to her, the best thing that’s happened to her in some time, which is as much indicative of how bleak her life is as anything else, until the whole thing erupts into something almost operatic in its horror, the two of them finally collapsing into gibberish as their shared delusion reaches a fever pitch, two people moving further and further away from reality in an effort to make sense of their traumas.
From the outside, it doesn’t seem plausible, how one person could believe in vast, faceless conspiracies to the degree that Peter does, let alone rope someone else into it. But spend enough time on your own, isolated and fearful, and anything that make sense of it starts to become attractive, because it makes the pain go away, and a lot of times that’s what people want. If believing some weird shit makes the pain go away, they’ll believe it. And it’s complicated by the fact that conspiracies do exist, albeit not at the scale of something like the
Bilderberg Group or mind-control chips spread by viral transmission. Peter uses the existence of the very real
MKULTRA and
Tuskegee experiments as support for and justification of his own beliefs, and the appearance of a military doctor in the third act underscores this. We know Peter is delusional, but…well, just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
Agnes and Peter are scared, in pain, and don’t feel like they have any control over their own lives, and if building an elaborate shared fantasy is what it takes to make the pain go away, well, that’s what it takes, and it ends badly. There are a lot of people out there who are scared, and in pain, and don’t feel like they have any control over their lives, and all it takes is a community of like-minded people who are all engaged in building
an elaborate shared fantasy to make the pain go away, to make things make sense. As Peter says to Agnes, “you’re never really safe.” That’s a hard way to live, and so Agnes and Peter burrowed down into fantasy, burrowed so far that everything they used to be completely disappeared..
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