Why do people believe the Earth is flat? Why do people believe that vaccines are some kind of conspiracy to pollute the human genome? Why do people believe airplanes are spewing “chemtrails?” Why do people believe climate change isn’t happening or isn’t caused by human activity?
The fact is, humans have known the Earth is a sphere since antiquity. Vaccines have been the greatest lifesaving invention in history, and the biggest reason why infant mortality is now a shocking event instead of a common tragedy. Those long, white trails you see in the sky are made of water vapor condensing in the wake of passing airplanes, mixed with some carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. No, they’re not mind control drugs; yes, they’re contributing to global warming, which is real and getting realer all the time.
In the case of our final example, some people don’t believe in climate change because they’re the targets of a multi-decade-long program of disinformation and propaganda funded by oil companies. The oil economy has enabled much human progress and produced some of the richest companies and people in human history. But continued use of their products is causing great harm, and a global catastrophe is possible if we don’t wean ourselves off of oil. So the oil companies took a page from the tobacco companies’ playbook and used their vast wealth to muddy the waters and sow doubt. The campaign, now in its fourth decade, proved so effective that the same techniques and channels were pressed into service for other political propaganda means. Not believing in climate change became a marker of identity for people, just like not believing vaccines work, or not believing the Earth is round. Ironically, the propaganda campaign itself contributed to its own success. People understand they’re being lied to, so they don’t trust anything. This is the ultimate goal of propaganda. As Voltaire said, those who believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities.
There have been a slew of movies in the past few years which ask why people believe weird things. Eddington, for example, zoomed in on one rural community torn apart by suspicion and disinformation during the height of the Covid pandemic. Now Yorgos Lanthimos tackles the issue with Bugonia. The picture, a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, reunites the Poor Things director with Academy Award-winning star Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, who played three roles in Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness.
When we first meet our stars, they’re living very different but weirdly parallel lives. Stone is Michelle Fuller, the CEO of Auxolith, a major pharmaceutical company. She lives by herself in a giant, modernist house and drives a severe-looking Mercedes SUV. Plemons is Teddy Gatz, who lives in a huge house in rural Georgia and drives a broken-down station wagon. His day job, we will find out, is in Auxolith’s fulfillment center, but his passion is beekeeping.
(Calling shipping warehouses “fulfillment centers” is one of the most visibly dystopian features of our current late-capitalist hellscape. But I digress.)
Both Michelle and Teddy practice yoga and martial arts; Michelle with videos and private instructors, Teddy with his developmentally disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who lives with him. Michelle is preparing to launch a corporate damage control campaign to make up for some hideous misstep. Teddy and Don are preparing for something, too. They’re visiting the hardware store for locks and chains, because they’re going to kidnap Michelle. Teddy goes one step further. He belittles Don into taking chemical castration drugs, to insure that Michelle’s feminine charms will have no effect on them. They must achieve “maximum focus,” explains Teddy.
The pair stake out Michelle’s house, where they ambush her while wearing Jennifer Aniston masks. Things don’t go as planned. Michelle’s kung fu skills prove to be a nasty surprise for Teddy. But in the end, the power of sedatives wins, and Teddy and Don load an unconscious Michelle into the back of her SUV. On their way back to Teddy’s place, Don shaves Michelle’s head. When she wakes up, disoriented and chained to the bed in his basement, they tell her the reason for the radical haircut. Michelle is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy who uses her long hair as antennae to communicate with her mother ship hiding on the dark side of the moon. In four days, a lunar eclipse will provide the opportunity for Michelle to return to her ship, at which time Teddy intends to use her as a hostage to force a negotiation with the alien emperor over the future of humanity.
Michelle protests. She is obviously not an alien from Andromeda. In fact, she is a very important person for whom the police will spare no effort to recover. But while her monologue is as coherent and convincing as Teddy’s is paranoid and nonsensical, it does not work. In fact, her cold, logical delivery, born of business school and years of cutthroat corporate negotiations, only serves to reinforce Teddy’s belief that she’s not human. A test of wills ensues between hostage and captor, while a farcical police manhunt closes in.
Bugonia is essentially a two-hander between Stone and Plemons, who are both at the top of their game. They spend most of the movie talking past each other. As they build toward the story’s bizarre climax, Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy (a former editor of The Onion) reveal Teddy’s psychosis with subtle hints of traumatic loss and references to some of the wackier and scarier internet subcultures. Michelle, meanwhile, is a purely transactional creature who has found great success in the world by saying whatever it takes to get her way — which also means that Teddy, sensing her inherent insincerity, believes none of it.
Bugonia is ultimately much more successful than Eddington in addressing our problems distinguishing truth from lies, mostly because Lanthimos nails the ending. Sure, it’s one of Lanthimos’ signature surrealist dark comedies, but it’s also a window into the comfort desperate people feel when they believe weird things.
Bugonia
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