Nichols Winding Refn, much like Tarantino and Nolan, does not need more of my critical attention. However, he is partly responsible for restoring Satan in High Heels which is one of the greatest B movies about strippers ever made (this is available on Mubi in the UK btw, it has separate credits for the leather wardrobe and the shoes). Maybe next week I will do Satan in High Heels?
But I digress. Ahead of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance being shown at EIFF next month, and because a dear friend suggested this movie some months back, I felt it was time to rewatch The Neon Demon. Opening with a fashion shoot that does a great line in bejewelled dead girl, Ruby (Jena Malone) tells Jessie (Elle Fanning) that she has beautiful skin. ‘You’ve got that look’ she says, and she means that Jessie has an innocence, a vulnerability. But Jessie is also a girl who has marshalled her physical perfection in the marketplace
‘God I love this colour on me’, says Gigi (Bella Heathcote) but the lipstick is called Red Rum, and not named after food or sex but after The Shining because the longer I’m alive the more I discover queer people who love horror (and make up).
Writing this, I am wearing a lip glaze called So Pretty that smells like artificial raspberry. My lipsticks are red or pink, sheer or shocking pink, pillarbox red. Nothing in between these days, usually. I wear a lipgloss called Candy Darling, and I flick my eyeliner.
One woman says her lipstick would be called ‘fuck off’ and I wonder what shade this would be. I think it would be near black, and smell like red wine and black pepper.
‘Who’s she fucking? Who could she fuck?’ these are competitive questions that the women we meet in this film ask themselves about other women. Every fashion shoot in this movie smells like dry, hot air, or the artificial cold of air con, expensive texturising spray, cigarettes, and breathmints.
Jessie wears something jeune fille-like, but not a mall perfume. I would put her in something like Ponyboy by Jorum Studio, with pink grapefruit and pink lotus, and pink pepper, a poised teenager, who sees how things are.
Fanning is lovely, watchable, and her Jessie is convincingly shy without being prudish, inexperienced without being silly. At one point, she finds a mountain lion in her room, its fur, the stench of its breath, how it gets in her sheets. Is this real? Or simply a kind of animus manifesting?
Ruby would wear a scent that is not not too intrusive, but with a hint of formaldehyde, and I imagine her smelling like candy and death, as her predatory nature is revealed.
The photographer who closes the set, has Jessie undress, and then shoots in the dark, gold foil glittering on her face, as he smooths liquid glitter onto her skin, over her throat in a gesture that feels less like styling and more like domination. Lulled by this touch, she looks limpid and sleepy into the camera, the distant and somnolent sexiness of so many high fashion magazine images.
‘Who wants sour milk when you can get fresh meat?’ A comment on the narrow life’s cycle of the professional fashion model, both these flavours are divisive, forbidden, potentially harmful, and they describe women in states of vulnerability and age, the idea that one rots so quickly. To be sour milk is to be not necessarily unfuckable, but fresh meat is the taste of blood, giving on the tongue, paralysed by fear and trauma. Neither of these categories allows for a woman to exist in her own right, since they imply too little or too much experience.
‘People see you. They notice’ says Gigi as she licks the blood from Jessie’s palm, as if blood is what she eats all the time.
This is still a movie where women compete with one another for the power men give them through their beauty, while also accusing women whose beauty is mostly bought and manufactured.
Jessie recounts her mother telling her ‘You’re a dangerous girl’ but ultimately it is Ruby, Gigi, and Sarah (Abbey Lee) who are dangerous, a kind of cannibal coven on the make. Gigi vomits up a whole eyeball, which is almost surrealist and groans ‘I need to get her out of me’ as Sarah looks on, impassive at a scene of blood caked into sky blue carpet, smell of bile and suncream, body heat against hard leather clothes.