Among the myths of Greek antiquity is the story of the demigod Aristaeus. Known as the ‘pastoral’ Apollo, he was celebrated for initiating a ritual often referred to as bugonia. Noticing that his bees were slowly dying, Aristaeus asked the gods for a way to repopulate his hives. He was told to sacrifice several bulls, drain their blood and leave the carcasses to decompose. Three days later, he returned to the altars and found bees buzzing around the decomposing flesh. The ritual was probably inspired by the ancient belief that living creatures could spontaneously arise from dead flesh – a notion that would only be disproven centuries later with the discovery of what was once invisible: microbes.
Bees and false beliefs are the subject of Greek director Yórgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Bugonia. But whereas the ancient notion was a false inference drawn from direct observation – of insects seemingly emerging from decaying flesh – those of the film’s protagonist stem from deductions about what can’t be seen. For Teddy (Jesse Plemons), an isolated warehouse employee and beekeeper, the world is not what it seems. What he calls a ‘larger organizing principle’ is at work, lying behind everything from his mother’s coma to the demise of his bees. The cause of his various hardships is therefore outside his control: ‘We are not running the ship’, he tells his cousin Don, ‘they are’.
‘They’, in Teddy’s analysis, are not simply capitalists, but aliens who have come from the Andromeda galaxy to control humans. To negotiate their retreat from Earth, Teddy decides to abduct Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of the pharmaceutical company he works for, and whom he believes to be a high-ranking Andromedan. Tied up, interrogated and tortured by Teddy and his accomplice Don, Michelle is ordered to arrange a meeting with the invaders before an upcoming lunar eclipse. The film becomes a claustrophobic huis clos, formally intensified by the narrow aspect ratio and persistent use of close-ups. The main characters clearly function as contemporary US social types: a paranoid ‘deplorable’ set against a successful, career-driven liberal. He’s a ‘loser’ and she’s a ‘winner’, as the film puts it. Communication between them is revealed to be impossible: Teddy no longer gets his ‘news from the news’ but from fringe websites and podcasts, while Michelle reads the New York Times and assumes he’s mentally ill. ‘I can’t change your mind’, she tells him, after realizing that anything she says or does only confirms his conviction that she is an alien.
The most surprising moment of the film comes with a final plot twist, when it is revealed that the aliens do in fact exist – that what we had assumed were Teddy’s delusions, invented to cope with his tragic life, are actually correct. Michelle is revealed to be the Andromedan Empress. She explains that her species created humans, but that the ‘experiment’ had clearly failed given how violent and power-driven humans had become. The flaw, she says, lies in their ‘suicide gene’. To fix this, the Andromedans tried to develop a treatment to rewire human DNA – the very one that left Teddy’s mother in a coma. Recognizing that the project to change human nature was hopeless – only confirmed by the discovery that Teddy had tortured and killed several people he suspected were aliens – Michelle returns to the mothership and decides to wipe out humanity.
Bugonia belongs to a genre of conspiracy movies that might include Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). In these films, the conspirators are generally de-individualized so that they effectively function as metaphors for ‘the system’. Conspiracy theories, as Fredric Jameson famously wrote, are ‘the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age’, providing a ‘useful fiction’ to grasp the social totality. In an age of social fragmentation, when the capacity of workers to act collectively has been undermined, they can be understood as desperate attempts by powerless individuals to represent the abstract logic of capital. As Teddy himself declares in Bugonia, he is not an activist and there is no movement: he alone did ‘a shit ton of research’ to prove that ‘everything is linked’. The conspiracy narrative might therefore be said to have a double function: on the one hand, it represents a degraded, mystified form of class conflict; on the other, it is an attempt to rescue the idea of social totality. The hero of these films typically assumes the role of detective, enabling the audience to imagine what it might mean to reassemble what has been fragmented. In other words, the film works against the logic of capital by allegorizing a sense of the whole.
Yet here Bugonia inverts the logic of its antecedents. What could be a metaphor for the social totality only refers to itself – ultimately reduced to a symptom of the collapse of trust in the public sphere. Echoing the liberal consensus about disinformation and polarization, Lanthimos’s intention in making the conspiracy true is to confront the audience with its own prejudices: it ‘challenges all these biases that we have about people, which is aided by technology and compartmentalization’. Rather than reaching towards a totalizing account of the present, the film therefore embraces a psychological one: social problems are not a product of capitalist relations, but our prejudices and inability to listen to each other.
The film’s opposition between humans and aliens meanwhile serves an ambiguous purpose. Its role as a metaphor for class conflict in late capitalism is undermined by the depiction of the main characters as fundamentally alike. Both are revealed to be cold-blooded creatures, marked by a lack of empathy and remorse. It’s a pessimistic vision. The final scene – which departs from Save the Green Planet! (2003), the South Korean film which inspired it – shows a peaceful, beautiful Earth without humans, accompanied by the 1962 anti-war classic ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’. ‘When will they ever learn?’ the song’s lyrics asks, transforming what could have been a useful fiction about conspiracy and capitalism into a platitudinous statement about human nature. Here we observe the limits of Lanthimos’s cinema. Beneath the auteur trappings lie the kind of banal insights one could find in any airport bookstore. The visual overload, stylistic theatricality and over the top mise-en-scène can’t disguise the fact that he has little to say.
An earlier version of this article appeared in Sabzian.
Read on: Fredric Jameson, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, NLR 92.