I’ve never really understood the fashion industry. I mean, I understand the need for clothing and I understand the concept of style, and I guess I can understand the idea of clothing as art, emphasizing form over function. I get it in the abstract, but the values and the priorities and the worldview that seem to attend it are utterly alien to me. If I were to be ungenerous, I’d say that it’s very superficial in its values and priorities and worldview, that it’s only concerned with appearance, and with some kind of idealization of form. Maybe there’s more to it than that, but the glimpses I’ve gotten certainly point to it being a world that is ultimately shallow and cruel.
And this is what makes The Neon Demon such a tough film to wrestle with. On the one hand, it perfectly captures a world that is vain and empty and soulless, all surface and nothing else. And in that sense, it works very well. But the same things that make it such a vivid portrait of callous superficiality are also kind of its undoing.
The film opens on a young woman, reclined on a chaise. She’s made up, stylishly dressed, wearing fancy jewelry. There’s something sleek and glossy about her, and there’s something sleek and glossy about the blood that runs from a slashed throat into pools on the floor. As she stares up at nothing, a camera clicks.
Cut to this same young woman at a dressing table, wiping off the fake blood. Her name is Jessie, and she’s just recently arrived in Los Angeles from small-town Georgia, looking to make it big as a model. Her prospects are limited, but she recognizes that she can make a living off her looks. Ruby, a makeup artist on the shoot, helps her clean herself off. Jessie wants to shop the photos from the shoot around to different agencies, but she’s acutely aware that she’s a novice at all of this. Ruby tells her not to worry, that “that deer-in-the-headlights look is exactly what they want.”
Jessie is all of sixteen years old.
On one level, it’s the story of the small-town girl who’s come to the big bad city to become a star, and that’s a story with its own stock characters and narrative. You’ve got the ingenue, the young man who believes in her and is the first one forgotten when she makes it big, the one woman looking out for the ingenue, the catty, jealous rivals and the predatory industry ready to chew her up and spit her out like so many before her. All are present and accounted for here. Well, I say on one level, but that’s kind of the only level there is here, because this is a relentlessly superficial, artificial film. Which isn’t necessarily a criticism – it’s a story about a world that is all surface, told in ways that are themselves all surface. Dialogue is sparse and typically delivered in almost robotic fashion, nobody in this film has an inner life, and everyone - the young man who believes in her included - has their own agenda. It’s the story of a girl - not even a young woman, a girl, not even done with high school - thrown into this environment and what’s going to happen to her, told through the hard sheen of the fashion industry. There are two worlds here - the glossy, stylish, designed-within-an-inch-of-its-life world of fashion, and the dingy, sordid world outside of that. There’s no in-between, no suburbs, no grocery stores or schools. Just shoots in glamorous locations, parties, and the shitty, run-down motel in Pasadena where Jessie is staying, fresh off the bus. Again, this isn’t a slice of life, and it all points back to a vision of Los Angeles as a dangerous jungle, reinforced in ways literal to the point of surrealism, where everyone is either a predator or prey. There’s an especially telling conversation about the names of lipstick shades (like I said, it’s a superficial film) that ends with Ruby asking Jessie “are you food…or are you sex?” And that’s the text - Jessie is a commodity, something to be consumed or used, nothing more than her body, nothing more than her flesh.
And as a film about surface, it excels - the segments in the “real world” are shot as drab, full of chiaroscuro and lens flare and the sickly glow of fluorescent lights. The world of fashion is sleek, modern, minimalist, sometimes awash in pinks and purples and blues and reds and neon, sometimes a completely white void, sometimes an empty black space studded with dressing-table lights and photography flashes. Runway shows are reveries, parties are luridly monochrome and strobe-lit (there are points in this film which would not be good for the seizure-prone), photoshoots are merciless exposure under burning lights, cameras clicking and flashing with an insistence that’s intrusive. It’s full of striking visuals, soundtracked with a score of lush, bright synthesizer, which does offset the enervated feeling you get from the dialogue and performance somewhat, so the end result is a film that’s wonderful to look at and listen to, with not a whole lot going on underneath.
Which, again, is exactly right for the subject matter - it embodies that empty superficiality perfectly, but that same emptiness, combined with a nearly two-hour running time, also makes the film an almost numbing experience at times. And this works against the horror of the world it portrays. As I said, this is in its broad strokes very much the standard story of a small-town girl who tries to make it big at a terrible price, but it’s that story told at the pitch of a horror film. Under the immaculate surface there is envy and desperation and raw hunger - hunger for more beauty, more youth, hunger for a party that never ends, and it’s rendered literal in ways that are, as individual moments, absolutely arresting, but don’t ever really gather much dramatic momentum. It’s catty small talk, and then it’s atrocity, and then it’s catty small talk again. There’s not much in the way of traditional story structure, and where the first act sets up a sense of quiet menace, this naïve little girl all on her own surrounded by wolves, the second act, which largely seems to be about her rise and transformation from small-town girl into next big thing and the monstrosities that come with that, feels more aimless and unfocused, so the feeling of menace, while not lost entirely, does drop away when it should be intensifying. The result is that the third act, striking for a relative absence of dialogue and reliance on individual images that almost turns it into an extended series of tableaux, doesn’t land with he impact that it could. There are still moments to make you gasp, but like so much that came before, they sort of exist in suspension, in isolation from each other. And the absence of any emotional heft or investment takes a toll here, where things that should be shocking become just another image (however horrifying) in an extended series of images.
There are moments here which even in mere depiction have a lot to say about the idolization of image, the costs it exerts, and the ways - often strange and ugly - people do whatever they can to get close to beauty, but the languid pace and superficiality with which they’re presented make it hard for them to really hit home. If it’s a film about the emptiness and ultimate horror behind the idea that beauty isn’t everything, but rather the only thing, and how it consumes and warps the ones who chase it, it does such a good job of submerging us in that world that its numb callousness ends up rubbing off on us.
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