Early on in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, a makeup artist (Jena Malone) jokes to the ingénue, Jesse (Elle Fanning), that makeup shades are either named after food or sex, and that every girl must choose to be one or the other. She makes this claim after noting her lipstick shade is called “red rum,” which every good moviegoer should immediately know spells “murder” backwards. Thus Refn lays out a trio of concepts that animate the film: consumption, desire, and, lurking just behind them, murder.
This conversation takes place in the bathroom at an industry party, which Jesse was invited to by said makeup artist. The latter had taken an immediate interest in the young new arrival and introduces her to two model friends, Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee). It soon becomes clear to everybody that Jesse is somehow special, to the delight of designers and casting agents and chagrin of her competing models. That Jesse is imminently consumable is without doubt. At first, it seems the film is about another little-girl-lost who gets ‘eaten up’ by Hollywood. It seems obvious that between “food or sex,” she is nothing if not fresh meat.
The voracious appetite for Jesse might be bleak, but film’s ethics are not nihilistic. They simply posit an absolute value in beauty. As the tagline goes: “Beauty isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” Jesse is something like a gold standard – made literal when a photographer lathers her naked body in gold paint. She anchors a concept of value. She is the genuine article: immediately recognizable and intrinsically better than the counterfeit pretenders.
Refn, who is most famous for 2011’s Ryan Gosling-helmed Drive, is plagued by a reductive and arrogant treatment by critics. They tend to name-check a couple of obvious references (Lynch, Aregento), throw in a line or two about cinematography, and accuse it of being vapid. The Neon Demon is only as vapid as your reading of it is. Sure, the style is pronounced. Cliff Martinez is back at it with a techno-droning score; the screen is saturated in primary colors. But none of this is merely stylish.
This is prime L.A. noir. Refn doesn’t create chiaroscuro with a play of dark and light, but through the counter-points of complementary colors. (How else could you, in a setting so bleached in light?) And in true Lynchian fashion, the trope of the femme fatale is turned into an existential question – not a chauvinistic assertion. Ultimately, choice between being food or sex is not so simple or reductive. Is Jesse in danger, or is she dangerous? Is there a difference? Do you have power over her if you consume her, or she over you?
The conclusion makes sense as a theoretical exercise, based primarily on the question of consumption and value. In its most extreme moments, the film is neither silly nor gratuitous. But like Drive before it, it is hypnotizing and just plain fun.
