‘Bugonia’ is a parable
Whatever you call it, Yorgos Lanthimos’s challenging film deserves its Best Picture nom
Oscars Homework
‘Bugonia’ is a parable
Whatever you call it, Yorgos Lanthimos’s challenging film deserves its Best Picture nom
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐💖
The cats & I review movies live over on BlueSky, and then piece those threads together with commentary to make our full reviews here on **Medium, before they then go, in abridged form, to [Letterbox’d](https://boxd.it/chDvZ) and [ReelRank](https://www.reelrank.net/user/KCookandCatsCo)**. Follow us anywhere you can for more of our shenanigans…
This time of year, we’re doing **Oscars Homework, so these will (probably) be briefer reviews than usual (for me), in the interest of finishing them all before The Oscars** on March 15.
Bugonia is an incredible film.
You’ve got to see it, and, to my mind, there’s a very specific reason why you’ve got to see Bugonia, and a very specific way I think you ought to watch it:
[embed]Here’s the BlueSky stuff. You should go follow us there at the end of this article, if you don’t already, but if you’re not currently on BlueSky, hold off on clicking these. Just glance, and then breeze right past them.
There is a lot going on in Bugonia. It’s one of the best-written and most-compelling screenplays I’ve seen committed to the screen in a long time, and having now seen it in full three times, I’m going to not only wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend it to you and everyone, but also recommend you watch it (either for the first time or again) with a certain lens or perspective in mind.
[embed]More BlueSky stuff. If you do already have a BlueSky, and you click this, it will jump you right to the specific bleet (I call them bleets) I’m referencing, and you can Like or Reply to it. Nifty! 🤓
I think Bugonia is either primarily intended as a parable or allegory, or is, at the very least, most profitably seen as a parable or allegory, whichever suits you better.
Now, what are those, again?
Allegorable. Parabolagory. God, portmanteaux are hard, aren’t they?
Well, they’re so closely-linked that they’re each other’s first thesaural result, and both speak more-or-less equally to what I think is the most-profitable interpretation of this movie.
And in order to discuss that, I’ve got to ‘spoil’ it.
If you know me at all (especially if you’ve read my Pluribus review), you know that I don’t believe any good story can be spoiled, certainly not by having any or all elements of its plot revealed.
A good story is more than its plot.
In Bugonia’s case, so much more. And I'll tell you for why.
Consider this your ‘spoiler warning’ if you need one, but also just know that if you ‘need’ a warning, I think you’re an immature coward, and you don’t properly understand stories. Grow up.
‘Bugonia’ as Allegory: Eat the Rich (No, Really!)
Mark his words. Every one of them is the truth.
I almost don’t even know why I put the divider and a whole, new subtitle and everything. This point should be pretty succinct.
I’m editing, and it wasn’t. Subtitle and line-break totally warranted.
First, you should know: every, single thing Teddy Gatz says about ‘the aliens’ (the Andromedans) throughout the course of the film is correct.
Teddy is never remotely wrong or off at all, no matter how crazy he might seem or sound at any given point. That’s one, big reason why I feel Bugonia is arguably better viewed through the lens of a parable (or maybe satirical-allegory) than as the narrative it might, at first, superficially seem to purport itself to be.
No good story is ever telling you precisely the story you think you’re being told.
Also, it counts for a lot that the very last time I thought of Teddy Gatz as ‘Jesse Plemons’ was when I bleeted, right at the beginning of my first watch, that Plemons was “weirdly hot in this” (true). My henceforth ‘forgetting’ that Plemons is Teddy is a testament to that magical, alchemical blend of good writing, acting and direction that we call ‘movie magic.’
Bugonia is magical to the point that I have personally ceased to think of Jesse Plemons’s performance as a performance, and think of it/him simply as ‘Teddy Gatz, that intense, weirdly-hot guy I know really well, who sadly and unjustly got his head blown off by his own homemade bomb.’
Not that it really mattered, of course.
In the climactic moment of Bugonia, which is just a sumptuous feast for the eyes (and not just because I think Emma Stone is one of the world’s prettiest people, but, boy, do I), not only does the Empress of the Andromedans obliterate all human (and, notably, only human; we at **K. Cook & Cats, Co.* held our collective breath, and were prepared to fully turn on this film, until we confirmed conclusively that we saw both cats and dogs walking around a planetful of human corpses, phew*) life, but also, as she does so (pop!), we see that the Earth is actually Flat.
Like, literally.
Pop! 🫧
So, what does that mean?
It's a clear signal, I think, that this film, and particularly its script and story, are meant to be taken as an allegory or parable, and we're, therefore, meant to see that we’re all Teddy Gatzes now (in this economy), locked in a cosmic, life-or-death struggle with oligarchical powers that are so foreign to us and so far removed from the day-to-day lived-experiences of people like you, me and Teddy that they might as well literally be aliens. And, in this movie, they are.
I want you to key in on the fact that Emma Stone’s character, the Empress of the Andromedans, also is Michelle Fuller, the CEO of pharmaceutical giant, Auxolith (a clever, funny, very-allegorical-type name) which callously, brutally ran the Gatz family under its giant, medico-capitalist tank-treads maybe 15 or so years before the story takes place.
It’s worth noting that this alien empress didn’t body-snatch the ‘real’ Michelle Fuller. She is the real Michelle Fuller, and much like Batman is both Batman and Bruce Wayne, this alien-woman-Andromedan-ruler also just is Michelle Fuller, the oligarchical CEO who, when first kidnapped, brags to Teddy and Don in an arrogant deadpan, “Imagine it like if you’d kidnapped the governor, just worse.”
Every single, crazy accusation Teddy throws at her is proven incontrovertibly true by the script, one after another. It’s funny, because he’s set up as though he were a profoundly-unreliable narrator, and one, resultant good — nay, great — meta-joke in Bugonia’s script is that every fucking word Teddy says is dead-ass true, which I imagine was probably a real surprise to a lot of viewers on a first-time watch (I, in turn, had really hoped it was all true as I was watching the first time, and then it turned out to be, which really sealed my absolutely loving this movie).
Granted, Teddy killed, like, a lot of innocent people, because only ‘two’ of his many victims actually were Andromedans, so Teddy’s by no means a great guy or anything, but he is right.
In fact, whatever you think of his actions and ethics, he’s not wrong about a single thing he asserts regarding the Andromedans, and he’s so on-the-money that Teddy even has a perfect, to-scale replica model of the Andromedan spaceship that he’s (somehow) worked out and made, himself, and keeps down in his little, horror-show basement-room, a delightful touch upon a rewatch.
This movie is so tight, y’all. Bugonia is as tight as a snare-drum, and it’s so thoughtful and provocative.
Plus (and perhaps this has something to do with my personal and political obsession with [anti]-capitalism and [anti]-oligarchy), once I clued into this parabolic-reading paradigm, I started to really love Bugonia all the more, and get only more excited for and about it, including about it being nominated for Best Picture at The Oscars (hence it being part of **Oscars Homework** this year).
Bugonia deserves the nomination and the approbation, because it’s saying something Important and Urgent.
The movie is saying — and I think filmmaker, Yorgos Lanthimos, is saying — to us, the audience: anything goes.
Like it or not, we’re deeply-embroiled in an all-out war, and these are the stakes: everything, our whole existence and way of life, top-to-bottom, soup to nuts.
This is the whole ball-game, and the enemy has already been fighting dirtier and harder than you’d ever have thought they would, and they started long before you even knew you were playing, and also, if you lose or are wrong for even one second, you’re fucking done and we’re all fucking done.
We are living on the razor’s edge, and nothing we do to advance our cause (no less than saving the entire world from the oligarchical, tyrannical reign of any of these lunatic, billionaire idiots all explicitly trying to conquer us) is wrong or unjust or uncalled-for, even if it looks crazy, even if it seems absolutely and irredeemably insane to someone who doesn’t get why we’re fighting all of this so hard.
They just don’t realize about the Andromedans yet, you know? They don’t get it.
They’re still playing Earth Games with Earth Rules against fictional opponents we wish we had. We’re fighting Andromedans, though, and, guys, they don’t fight fair. So, consequently, fighting them might look pretty ugly, especially to someone who doesn’t know or won’t acknowledge that we’re fighting them at all.
And it’s okay if it looks ugly, too! What they’re doing to us is so ugly, we’re totally justified in being really pissed off and proactively-enraged about it.
It will get ugly, and it should.
[embed]Emphasis on ‘deceptively trivial.’ It’s all on porpoise, and it’s all good 🐬
Keep in mind, in the movie, Teddy’s never wrong. He’s not quite right enough, or well-equipped enough, to survive his brush with alien-oligarchy, but he’s never wrong about one thing.
And Teddy says, while torturing the Andromedan, “This isn’t torture. Torture is what was done to us.”
I think we’re meant to take that and apply it to our real lives, because that’s what you’re meant to do with allegories and parables.
Jesus allegedly told a lot of parables, and I’ve often stated that, for all my myriad issues with Christians (and they are legion, and well-documented), I don’t really take issue with any of what Christ is alleged to have said and done in the Gospels.
And that dude — who, whatever you think of Him, knew how to talk to people — was always speaking in parables.
Good parables land. They hit a little different.
Bugonia landed, for me. It fired me up.
That’s what I want from movies! Hell, I just trashed F1 in this very Cinemania Oscars Homework series, calling it the Worst Best Picture nom since Crash (2004), and it is, and you better believe it’s because it didn’t and couldn’t move me an inch.
So, let’s celebrate something good, and I urge you to not just watch Bugonia, but when you do, to try to see yourself as Teddy Gatz, and, as you do, think about what that might mean in terms of how you should move through the world going forward.
Wherever you land on that, it’ll be a profitable exercise, and the film is such a rich, substantive text that pondering it will bear you valuable fruit, regardless of what specific fruit that may ultimately prove to be.
Again, my conclusion from Bugonia was:
All bets are off, and there are no rules.
It’s the precise sort of thing to make one hope that Luigi Mangione’s lawyers get his arrest thrown out, and he walks out of jail scot-free.
Why not? There are no rules.
If there were any rules, then we wouldn’t be losing our health insurance and SNAP benefits and fighting for scraps as we’re tear-gassed and gunned down in the streets like rabid animals by fascist, jack-booted, illiterate thugs we never wanted or asked for in the first place.
If you still think there are rules, you’re simple.
And, believe it or not, you’re also represented in this film. You, too, have an analogue in the movie Bugonia. You’re Don (Aidan Delbis), who blows his simple brains all over Teddy’s basement wall with a shotgun, because he had, at best, a poor grasp of what all is going on, and also didn’t perceive a way to coexist with or defeat the opposition, as he’d been given to understand them.
In other words, according to the narrative, when you do start to get it, it’s going to blow your mind.
But, for the rest of us, like Teddy, we more or less get what we’re up against once we see it a couple of times. And, in so doing, most of us figure out pretty quickly that there are very-obviously no rules; it’s not that kind of war anymore, if it ever was.
Or maybe you think I’m just a bloodthirsty, hateful cynic, but, uh, so was Teddy.
And Teddy was right about everything.
Oscaround
As you may or may not already know, we’re using Oscaround to track our progress through Oscars Homework this year (and probably every year; we love it).
We’d seen Bugonia several times already before we commenced Oscars Homework with F1, but because this movie is so good, and because I see such a compelling angle or read on it, I obviously needed to circle back and write it up. As you’ve no doubt surmised, Bugonia is one of the year’s best films, as far as the cats & I are concerned.
I felt we needed to make sure if you’re following **K. Cook & Cats, Co.** at all, you know that we endorse Bugonia, and know, also, that we’re gonna knock all these Academy Award nominated films out eventually, so if you follow us here and/or on BlueSky, you’re going to be well-informed by the time The Oscars (and The Miaouscars) roll around in mid-March.
To that end:
Click to jump to Oscaround for yourself, and enter in your own Oscars Homework sylabus!
The helpful, little suggestion at the top is telling us we should watch One Battle After Another next, to make the most progress on our Oscars Homework, but that movie is going to be a lot, we feel, so we queued up Hamnet next.
Fun fact: Eldest, flagship **K. Cook & Cats, Co. cat, [Bomani-Hamlet Cook](2) is named for the Shakespeare character, as is his younger sister, Imani-Ophelia Cook**, who has no socials, and hardly any photos, even, because she’s basically feral.
If you're keen, we’ve already started reviewing Hamnet on BlueSky, so you can jump into that live, or in media res (we’re currently paused for the night at about 12 minutes into its runtime):
[embed]I don’t know what it’ll be when you see it, but I’m looking at 2 Likes, and this is a huge, much-nominated film, so that’s crazy. Hopefully, it’s more by the time you come across it…
Closing Thots
When Peter Karlin tells you he has something…
[embed]Don’t mistake our gentle, good-natured ribbing for an attack (anyone, ever). We love Peter, and, truly, anyone who reads our stuff and weighs in. Peter is a thoughtful guy, and this is just funny to me.
… by God, he has it. Peter said he had an insane take on Bugonia, and he surely did.
It’s most-insane to me, I guess, because, from my standpoint: who gives a fuck?
I’m judging films based on their artistic merit, on how much they thrill or delight or move me, and then usually, more granularly, on how good or effective I think the script was (since I’m a writer) (hello, you’re reading my writing), so what the film did or didn’t make at the box-office is irrelevant to me, pointedly so, since I’m not looking it up to convey it to you, even now that it’s come up.
Peter (and the rest of y’all), that could all very well be true, but who cares? This is the rare film that took huge creative and narrative swings, and, at least for my money, absolutely crushed all of them into the upper deck, and even beyond that, had something substantive and worthwhile to say about the most-pressing problems facing society today.
There was no meat left on the bone, artistically speaking, not from where I’m sitting. Therefore, for me to contemplate putting it in anyone else’s hands is unthinkable.
This is not a perfect film. There is no such thing. But Bugonia is so powerfully-written, compellingly-performed and puckishly-well-directed that it’s exciting, challenging and might as well be perfect.
As to whether it could have made more money: yeah, almost certainly. Maybe if they’d cast Tilly Norwood as the lead instead of Emma Stone, it would have hit better with a certain, key demo, but that’d be a big compromise, wouldn’t it?
This film didn’t compromise, and it’s so the better for it.
I wouldn’t change a thing about Bugonia, and there are very few films about which I could or would say that.
Who’d Kay fall in love with this time?
[embed]To be honest, you probably could have guessed this one, if you’re a regular reader.
Sucked in, idiots!
I didn’t ‘fall in love’ with anyone watching Bugonia. I’ve been in love with Emma Stone since Easy A, and, not for nothing, it isn’t because she’s pretty (she super is, though), or because she plays a redhead convincingly and often enough to be a legit, contemporary Ginger Icon (👩🦰✊).
It’s because Emma Stone makes exciting and surprising choices.
I know, going into any project of hers, that I’m going to, at a minimum, enjoy her in it. No matter the material, how elevated it is or isn’t, Emma Stone has historically turned in nothing but compelling, engaging performances full of fun and/or interesting choices.
Acting is just making choices in front of a camera, and, for my money, Emma Stone does it as well as, or better than, anyone else, and she also picks fascinating projects. Her chemistry with everyone she plays off of in Bugonia, but most especially Plemons, is electric… so, yeah, obviously, I’ve got a huge crush on the lady. Why wouldn’t I?
I wouldn’t so much say I have a crush on Michelle Fuller or the Andromedan Empress, her characters in Bugonia. She/they seem cold and sharp-witted in a way that would cut like a whip after only a short time spent with her/them (I’d still chance it), so this violates my usual rule of: ‘I’m falling in love with the fictional character I know intimately, not the real-life human actor I don’t know at all.’
Well, I don’t know what to tell ya, bud! I just have a huge crush on Emma Stone, mostly because she’s one of the best actors of her generation (which happens to be my generation), plus she’s very easy (A!) on the eyes, so it kind of is what it is.
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