REVIEW: The Bodies and the Bees, Yorgos Lanthimo’s “Bugonia”

Photo courtesy AP News

REVIEW
The Bodies and the Bees,
On Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film, Bugonia

By Oliver Mackenzie

“I went down all the pipelines. Alt-light, alt-right, democratic socialist, Marxism… I was hungry and I bought the whole store,” says Teddy (Jesse Plemmons). He is the protagonist of Yorgos Lanthimos’ newest feature film, Bugonia. Sitting at the dinner table in his family home, he delivers this speech to his cousin and only friend Don (Aidan Delbis) and Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), Teddy’s employer/captive. He’s explaining his belief system, and how Michelle fits in, as she’s chained to the floor. 

Lanthimos’ movie, based on the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet by Jang Joon-hwan, centers on two cousins convinced of an alien conspiracy that inspires them to kidnap Michelle, CEO of the powerful pharmaceutical company Auxolith. As the authorities and their own deadline draw near, the two scramble to control their plot without letting Michelle, who they believe is an alien in human form, gain the upper hand. 

If Michelle seems inhuman at first, it is in her commitment to power and perfection. The morning of her kidnapping she treats her skin with red LEDs, practices martial arts, and downs supplements in a routine that must take hours. Her home is vast, minimally set, and meticulously clean. It is well staffed, each employee tasked with a specific part of Michelle’s upkeep and care. 

Struck by poverty, Teddy and Don are near opposites. They live out in the country on a bee farm too unproductive to sustain them. Their home is rustic and humble, and while it still retains signs of a recent homemaking touch, the men do not. They are ragged, dirty, and their hair is overgrown. They are a portrait of a forgotten, rural, working class. And yet, like Michelle, they begin their day with exercise and discipline, preparing body and mind for what’s to come. 

Meanwhile, the bees on their farm are dying of colony collapse disease. The formerly perfect little workers have become errant, fleeing the apiary for reasons unknown, dooming themselves and the colony at large. Order is collapsing. An easy allegory for contemporary class antagonisms, it’s also one that the two cousins fit like a glove. 

But the bees are not human. They see through fractal eyes, think in a hive-mind, and wield needles at their rear ends (syringes and needles are a repeated motif). They are as much the image of a dying working class as its alien future and they haunt the film with extinction–the cousins’, the climate’s, their own.

Teddy’s own beliefs originate online. He even names some of the YouTubers who “inspired” him and his research into the aliens and their enslavement of the human race. But if he is like the dying bees, it is hard not to see from where the animus of his righteous crusade stems.

Uncomfortably familiar, there is no doubt that Lanthimos and scriptwriter Will Tracy (writer and executive producer on the TV show Succession) have set out to dramatize the contemporary conspiracy culture that has become a tentpole of modern right-wing extremism in America and abroad. Teddy’s status as a poor, vengeful white man only centers him in those crosshairs. 

The aliens have come to Earth from the Andromeda system (Teddy calls them Andromedans) wearing human faces as a disguise. Michelle is one such alien, and everything bad about their lives, in one way or another, can be traced back to her. So they’ll kidnap her, hold her until the solar eclipse, then board the Andromedan mothership and use Michelle as a bargaining chip to earn humanity’s freedom. Teddy is committed, nevermind the costs. Don is just scared to lose him. 

The Andromedans use chemical weapons to induce colony collapse, says Teddy. The cousins are vulnerable to such chemical manipulations, too. Teddy says they need to stay fit, need to eat well, need to keep their minds pure. “That means no whacking it,” Teddy says, echoing sentiments of sexual purity common to incel ideology. He chemically castrates Don shortly after, reassuring his cousin that it is a necessary precaution, one he himself underwent. 

But while Teddy sees himself at the heart of an extraterrestrial plot for world domination, there is a much more familiar story at play: a young man whose community has been cast aside, rendered unwanted surplus in a system of accumulation that seeks to repossess and terraform whatever stands before it. Michelle may or may not be an alien, but she is at least representative of this system, if not more directly involved. 

Plemmons balances this well, showing Teddy at both his most human and absurd. In a grim reversal of Auxolith’s supposed DEI commitments, Teddy’s coworkers (none of whom look like him) are even more vulnerable for their race, gender, or immigration status. Plemmons fusses over them. He encourages one to make an OSHA complaint over a workplace injury she’d been previously told to ignore and brings honey to another, who otherwise may not eat. Don, too, has an intellectual disability and depends on Teddy. He sees himself as someone who works on others’ behalf.

Teddy is also an online autodidact with a vocabulary he’s not quite qualified to use. Plemmons is careful to struggle his way around it and while Don does not challenge him, Michelle does. When she pushes too far the façade cracks. Plemmons explodes into terrifying, uncontrollable rage. Chairs are thrown, guns pointed at faces, and when Teddy calms down, it’s clear by Plemmons’ face that he’s only more resolute in his cruelty. 

Stone plays to this well. Once imprisoned, Michelle condescends to her captors in the language of corporate conflict resolution, the kind typically reserved for troublesome employees. She criticizes Teddy, telling him he’s the victim of online echo chambers, and gets under his skin with ease. Although Stone acts out Michelle’s suffering to stomach-churning peaks, there is also an unflinching self-assuredness girding the character that allows her to play mind games on a much more protracted scale than Teddy can. 

Plemmons’ reactions to her victories are borderline slapstick. But the catharsis does not last long. As clever as Michelle may be, it is her who’s in chains and Teddy who has the gun. The camera is attentive to this, countering the moodily-lit close-ups of the movie’s stars with wider shots, where Teddy’s physical imposition over Michelle is on full display. These shots show an ugly, stark reality–an angry man has kidnapped a woman and imprisoned her in his basement.

And here is where the actual power behind his conspiracy theory makes itself shown. Instructing Don in the proper techniques to neutralize an Andromedan, the two shave her head, strip her, and cover her in lotion, a transformation which leaves Stone looking like a genuine extraterrestrial. When Don casts doubt that she really is an alien, Teddy points to the shapes of her fingers and toes as evidence of an alien in disguise, a moment sharply reminiscent of online transvestigation conspiracies which seek to “unmask” popular figures as secretly transgender. 

Make no mistake–Teddy’s castration only testifies to the sexual fault lines over which his conspiracy, and that of today’s conspiratorial climate, are built. While it’s unclear whether her Andromedan powers have been neutralized, Michelle is left violated and humiliated. Teddy reduces her from her role as CEO to her body and sexuality, which he literalizes as an alien and invading force. This is his window to exercise power over her where she once held it over him–at the heart of Teddy’s alien conspiracy is the logic of patriarchal violence, of which he is at least implicitly aware. The sexual contours are not just an odd coincidence–they are foundational to his worldview.

At their spaghetti dinner, after Teddy’s speech, another truth is revealed: Teddy’s mother is the victim of an Auxolith-produced pharmaceutical—meant to aid recovery from opioid addiction–that has left her in a coma. Michelle recognizes her name. It is implied, too, that amidst the neglect and chaos of his childhood, Teddy was sexually abused by his babysitter and local sheriff, Casey (Stavros Halkias). 

There is a continuity between his fantastical conspiracies and real life, even if Teddy only sees it in pieces: through workplace injury, pharmaceutical trials, and sexual dominion, power has played out on the biological, corporeal level. One’s body is only ever the battleground for someone else’s war. All that’s missing are the aliens. 

Echoing earlier Lanthimos films like The Lobster (2015), Teddy’s rebellion is blind to the systemic nature of his ruin. Instead he pursues the logic of that system, hoping to find himself victorious in it, or at least secure. In doing so, Lanthimos and Tracy plumb the psyche of the modern conspiracist–one that sees truth in pathological fixations and would rather keep its ghosts than exorcise them. Teddy’s actions are the monstrous continuation of a human exploitation that appears acceptable in offices like Michelle’s. 

The movie closes with a twist (albeit one that is not hard to predict)—Michelle really is an alien, but one sent to steward humanity, not destroy it. After her encounter with Teddy and Don, she changes her mind. Humanity must go and the film closes with a montage of mass death, set to Marlene Dietrich’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone. It’s a tongue-in-cheek finish to an otherwise bleak film and if there’s any vindication for Teddy, it’s hard to see where. The boss is an alien and the working man is gone, succeeded by a being both terrestrial and strange: the bees.

Oliver Mackenzie is a Chicago-based fiction and non-fiction writer. He has a BA in Creative Writing and German from Macalester College.

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