Beautiful Savagery: The Neon Demon

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Writers: Nicolas Winding Refn (story and screenplay), Mary Laws (screenplay), and Polly Stenham (screenplay)

Stars: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves

Music: Cliff Martinez

Release Date: June 24, 2016

Jessie is an aspiring model who has recently moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams. She is quickly befriended by Ruby, a veteran makeup artist, and models Gigi and Sarah. Jessie's natural beauty and youthful vitality propel her quickly into the spotlight. However, her newfound friends have sinister intentions. Beauty is an obsession that some people are willing to do anything to obtain. Jessie could never imagine the lengths to which her supposed friends are willing to go to achieve their ambitions.

“Well I think that if she wasn’t beautiful you wouldn’t have even stopped to look. Beauty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” states Roberto Sarno (Alessandro Nivola), a fashion designer who takes Jessie (Elle Fanning) under his wing. Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon offers a dark commentary on society’s obsession with beauty and is appropriately set in the world of modeling. Refn’s movies are known for their cinematography and The Neon Demon is no exception.

The movie is a sea of visual metaphor. One of the ways it conveys these metaphors is through the use of color. Ruby (Jena Malone) is a prime example of this. She is basically a physical representation of the color red. Her name being Ruby, her sexual attraction towards Jessie, in addition to her red hair she is always wearing something red. She represents all the most negative aspects of the color. Ruby is aggressive, ruthless, and brutal. Jessie, early on, is seen wearing pinks and blues, colors that represent her innocence and naivete about the world she is venturing into. In one scene, we see Jessie being asked to strip naked by a famous photographer, she reluctantly complies. The photographer then proceeds to smear gold body paint on her neck and chest in an intimate yet aggressive manner. This is representative of the masculine energy, egotism, and demanding nature conveyed by the color gold and portrayed by the photographer.

Refn not only uses colors to methodically convey metaphor he also uses cliches to lead people to false assumptions about certain characters. Dean (Karl Glusman), Jessie's love interest, is initially portrayed as a typical male doing anything he can to get her into bed. We first see him photographing her in a very macabre setting during the beginning of the movie. He is framed in such a way as to imply that he has impure desires for Jessie. The viewer is lead to believe that Dean's kindness is a falsehood. It isn't until the final portion of the movie that we learn that he is the only truly good character in the entire film. Jessie's "friends" Ruby, Gigi, and Sarah, are the true predators of The Neon Demon.

After a terrifying encounter at her hotel Jessie goes to stay with Ruby. Soon after her arrival Ruby sexually assaults Jessie. After the attempted rape, we find Jessie wandering around the large house in which Ruby currently resides. As she walks through the adjoining room in which Ruby was staying we see a taxidermied Cheetah in the background which serves as subtle foreshadowing. Having been spurned by Jessie, Ruby seeks to satiate her maddening lust for her by acting out in what is arguably the most controversial seen in the movie. Ruby works part-time at a morgue, using her talents as a makeup artist to bring a little life back to the dead. She proceeds to apply makeup to a female corpse so that it resembles Jessie. When she is satisfied she casually locks the door to the room, mounts the corpse, and makes passionate love to it. Even death is unable to stop our obsession with the beautiful.

My fascination with this movie is blatantly obvious, I enjoy stories with psychological layers and hidden meanings. If this movie has one major flaw it would be accessibility. Refn's The Neon Demon is very much an acquired taste, it is not for everyone. While that's not inherently a bad thing it will be a barrier of entry for many people. Most people don't want to thoroughly analyze a movie, they just want to be entertained. Refn is an auteur who tells the stories that he is passionate about and it is up to the viewer to keep his pace. We need more directors like him. He knows his audience and caters to them very well. His films aren't made with the intent of raking in hundreds of millions of dollars like your average Summer blockbuster (though I'm sure he wouldn't mind the cash). Refn is making art. To use another quote from the character Roberto Sarno, The Neon Demon is "A diamond in a sea of glass." If you admire cinematic artistry, then I cannot recommend this movie enough. If your tastes in movies is a bit more "vanilla" then you may want to avoid it.

#tristan #fisher #review #movie #neondemon