The Extinctionist

Does Yorgos Lanthimos think we all deserve to die? Or do we?

Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the most impressive film directors working today—as a pure storyteller, I’m not sure I can name anyone better—and he’s also among the most original. But he is, to say the least, not for all markets. That’s largely because he has an exceptionally jaundiced view of humanity, and is gleefully cruel about forcing us to look at ourselves through his eyes.

His latest film, Bugonia, seems to be the most direct statement of his misanthropic nihilism. But as the film ended, I wasn’t entirely sure whether that statement was his, or whether he was saying it was ours, that is to say, whether he relishes the prospect of the annihilation of humanity, or whether his ultimate indictment of contemporary humanity—or at least of his audience—is that we relish that prospect, forgetting that we are human too.

The film centers on three characters. Emma Stone plays Michelle, a hard-charging female CEO of a biomedical company whose two modes are passive-aggressive (as when she tells employees that from now on they are free to leave at 5:30pm, but that they also have to continue to make their quotas, and if they can’t do that without staying late then they have to consult their consciences) and flat-out aggressive (as when she engages in a vigorous regimen of self-defense training). Jesse Plemons plays Teddy, an alienated amateur apiarist who works at the lowest rung in Michelle’s company packing boxes, but who has a mad plan for humanity’s liberation, and whose two modes are domineering lunatic and broken lonely child. Finally, Aidan Delbis plays Don, an apparently autistic man (Delbis is an autistic actor) who is Teddy’s cousin as well as his only friend (and vice versa) and is completely dominated by him, and whose two modes are helpless and hopeless.

Before the film has begun, Teddy has become convinced that Michelle is actually an alien from the Andromeda galaxy who, along with her fellow Andromedans, has been exploiting humanity and destroying the planet. All the bad things that have happened to him personally (for example, his mother has been in a coma for years, an unanticipated side effect of an opioid-withdrawal medication made by Michelle’s company) or to the Earth in general (such as the colony collapse disorder that has devastated honeybee populations) are the fault of these alien invaders hiding among us. So he has hatched a plan. With his hapless cousin, Don, he plans to kidnap Michelle, force her to bring them to her mother ship at the next lunar eclipse (due in three days), where he will negotiate the end of the alien occupation and the liberation of humanity.

Their absurd kidnap plot works, amazingly enough. Teddy and Don secure Michelle in their basement, cutting her hair (which Teddy believes enables her to communicate with her mother ship) and covering her with antihistamine cream (another precaution against her alien powers), and chaining her to a cot. From this point, the bulk of the film consists of Teddy’s efforts to break Michelle’s will and Michelle’s efforts to escape her captors—by threatening them, bribing them, splitting them, distracting them, the usual litany for a hostage drama, but frequently played (as is the kidnapping itself) for Lanthimos’s trademark brand of deadpan cruel humor. Lanthimos elicits wonderful performances from his actors that enable us to empathize with each of his three central figures, which is especially impressive given that we’re talking about a soulless corporate overlord, a paranoid backwoods maniac, and a spineless loser, and given that Lanthimos never once admits a ray of sentimentality into the picture he paints of them.

And then, at the climax of the film, there’s a twist that I must reveal to talk meaningfully about what Lanthimos might be doing. If you care about spoilers at all, stop reading now, because I’m about to ruin the movie for you.

At a moment when Teddy is otherwise engaged (in preparing to murder a dimwitted and emotionally needy police officer who has come around, and who also happens to have molested Teddy as a child—a very Lanthimos touch), Michelle finally succeeds in splitting Don from Teddy, by promising to take Don with him to the mother ship. At which point Don shoots himself, seeing, I presume, no distinction between death and liberation from his earthbound misery (an important synecdoche, that). Teddy, after murdering the police office, rushes down to see what’s going on, at which point Michelle tells him that she is in fact an alien (she goes back and forth over the course of her captivity between denying this fact and trying to break Teddy out of his delusions and admitting it in order to learn more about his plans and/or manipulate him emotionally), and that his mother is not in a true coma but is, in fact, part of an Andromedan experiment. Moreover, she has the cure for her condition in her car in a bottle of antifreeze, and if he injects her with it she’ll wake up. Amazingly, Teddy buys this, and charges off on his bike to save his mother—and here Michelle has her chance to escape.

But she doesn’t escape. Instead, she breaks into Teddy’s lab, where she finds the body parts of various other kidnap victims and notes on all of his research. When Teddy returns, enraged and distraught that she manipulated him into killing his mother, she is still there, waiting to tell him that not only is she an Andromedan but that he’s got the whole story backwards. It’s not that Andromedans came to exploit humanity, but rather humans are the descendants of creatures created by the Andromedans in their image, but who rebelled against their creators and have become degenerate versions of their former selves. (A familiar story, that.) It is humans who are destroying the planet, and the Andromedans who are trying to save them, and it, before it is too late. Michelle promises to take Teddy with her to the mother ship and show him the truth, and he jumps at the prospect. She brings him back to her office, astonishing her underlings, tricks him into putting himself in a closet (she tells him it’s a teleportation device), and kills him there. Teddy is wearing an explosive vest, so his death is more dramatic than she intended, and she’s knocked unconscious by his flying head, and taken away in an ambulance.

From the moment Michelle didn’t escape, I thought: none of her behavior makes sense, unless Michelle actually is an alien. If she were human, she’d escape, go to the authorities, and have Teddy arrested. But if she’s an alien, and Teddy has discovered the truth, then she must eliminate him outright. And I was right: as soon as Michelle wakes up in the ambulance and establishes that Teddy was killed, she bolts from the vehicle, rushes back to her crime-scene-taped office, goes into the closet splattered with Teddy’s remains, and teleports herself up to the mother ship, where she emerges from a steaming pool into a Star Trek-esque set on steroids, all lurid colors, blobby shapes and ridiculous costumes.

I thought the movie would end there, but it didn’t. Instead, the multiracial but hirsute collection of aliens discuss what to do about humanity with their empress, who Michelle turns out to be, given her recent experiences and given the failure of all their experiments to restore humanity to its pre-original-sin character. Michelle declares, sadly, that there is no more hope, and so the best thing would be to put humanity out of its misery—which, with a gesture very like popping a soap bubble, she does. The remainder of the film is a series of elegant tableaux of masses of people who have been struck dead in a variety of situations: at work and on vacation, on the road and at sea, in front of the television and in mid coitus. After this, finally, we return to the bees with which the film began, and with whom evolution will presumably start again, just as Dr. Stephen Falken suggested it would in WarGames:

I don’t know whether Lanthimos—or Will Tracy, who wrote the screenplay—was thinking of that moment when they decided on the bee motif, but it’s obviously central to the film. The title, “Bugonia” refers to an ancient practice of sacrificing an ox to produce a hive in the belief that the bees are spontaneously generated by the carcass. Similarly, as Dr. Falken explicitly states in WarGames and the closing imagery of Bugonia implies, the destruction of humanity would open up evolutionary space for the bees to become the new dominant species on the planet, and to become greater than we ever were or could possibly have been. How, though, are we in the audience supposed to take this prospect?

In WarGames, Dr. Falken’s fatalism—which the teenagers do eventually overcome—is a product of his own personal loss combined with his disgust with humanity’s leadership, their determination to pursue self-destruction through nuclear war and not to see that the only way to win that game is not to play. In Save the Green Planet, on which Bugonia is closely based, the police ultimately kill Byeong-gu (the equivalent of the Teddy character), and Kang (the Michelle equivalent) is then taken up into the mother ship where he pronounces sentence on the Earth with sovereign cruelty, and orders the planet obliterated, after which, in the credits sequence, we see images of Byeong-gu in happier times. The whole thing is ludicrous, but we are clearly meant to lament that Byeong-gu was right.

In Bugonia, though, it’s much less clear that we are supposed to mourn the destruction of humanity. The seemingly endless sequence of images of the mass dead is clearly intended to make us look as ridiculous in death as we were in life. They also recalled to my mind the many post-apocalyptic scenes that have clogged our screens in recent years which, as I’ve argued before, are less expressions of dread than of wish-fulfillment. But is it Lanthimos’s wish, or ours? In The Menu, which Tracy also wrote, a microcosm of society is destroyed, but there is a survivor, an emblem of the working (or serving) class, who we are supposed to see as morally superior to the rest, as not deserving of death. (This was my least-favorite element in a film that started off with some promise but, for me, quickly curdled.) The seemingly-superior survivors in Bugonia, though, are the aliens, who are not cruel and hierarchical as they are in Save the Green Planet, but caring and collaborative, and our extinction is effected more in sorrow than in anger—yet also humorously. We’re supposed to laugh. But who is the joke on?

I had a sneaking suspicion that, whatever the screenwriter’s intentions, Lanthimos’s last laugh is on us. It’s the same feeling I got at the end of Poor Things which, as I wrote in my discussion of the film, is a very strange poster child for feminism of any variety since its heroine, Bella (also played by Emma Stone), has by the end not changed the world at all but rather built a walled garden within which she can play God. That might have been the point, though—Lanthimos’s point, that is. He may have been playing a prank on his audience, suspecting that they would buy his film as a progressive feminist parable, when in fact Bella’s arc is from a selfish child in an adult’s body to an adult as fully driven as any man by the simple quest for domination.

So, too, with Bugonia. It may look like Lanthimos is saying: “see how wantonly cruel and yet pathetically needy humanity is, look how absurd we are in life and in death. Why go on? Wouldn’t it actually be better if the aliens put us out of our misery?” But I wonder if his point isn’t something more like: “I can make you laugh at the prospect of your own extinction, because you are so lacking in self awareness that you imagine yourselves as observers to the catastrophe, as if you were part of the alien tribunal. You’ve even forgotten that these are the people, on earth, whom you hate.”