THE NEON DEMON
Which better city to showcase the emptiness of the fashion industry than Los Angeles? THE NEON DEMON (2016) shows the Boulevard of Broken Dreams at its best and infinite worst.
The thriller opens with Jesse, a 16 year old wannabe model who has just moved to LA, on a fashion set. After a successful shoot posing as a gorgeously blood-daubed corpse – neatly foreshadowing the final scenes of the film – she arrives next day to audition in her underwear at a modelling company. She’s put on the books, and from here is flung into work in a whirlpool of insidious, beautifully manicured evil. She encounters the fashion world’s obsessive self-love crossed with self-loathing, and endless plastic surgery masquerading as healthy self-care (“Everything worth having hurts a little,” as one model says of her own extensive “work”). It’s all elegantly shot and exquisitely evil, showing that, unlike in another LA classic, LA LA LAND (2016), nice guys really do finish last. It’s the siren call of shallowness – we know we shouldn’t listen, but we do anyway.
NEON DEMON flirts with every cliché in the LA book and looks beautiful while it does it. There’s sexual shenanigans, sumptuous cruelty and perfect hair and make up. The film’s bad guys and girls live in a world of a seductive haze of pollution, and swap cryptic oneliners with picture-perfect moonrises in a nightscape background. Director Nicolas Winding Refn creates an endless session of cameo shots in a world where no matter how dire your career prospects are, you’re still able to afford a devastatingly cool car to drive along the coast and feel unspecified angst on your way to a modelling shoot. The audience is drawn into this seductive world, a riot of hyper-bright colour and surreal imagery of rose petals and finding a mountain lion in your hotel room, while hating its shallowness at the same time.
Watching Jesse as a young woman surrounded by grown adults attempting to exploit her for their own monetary or sexual ends, the viewer’s skin crawls. However, Refn creates Jesse as supposedly an innocent abroad but then gives her the throwaway line, delivered in a deceptively childlike voice: “I’m not as helpless as everyone thinks I am,” showing there’s something else going on behind the apparently defenceless façade.
At one point, she mentions her blossoming modelling career is based on the ability to stand still and look attractive rather than actually do anything: “I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t write... no real talent. But I'm pretty, and I can make money off pretty.” This is devastating and completely accurate, as she admits she’s untalented, but knows she still can make a living from just being good looking.
Jesse's comment reflects the uncomfortable truth that some people don’t have to do or achieve anything, just stand still and look beautiful, and sums up the fashion industry, and possibly most of LA, in one sentence. As the film’s tagline says “Beauty isn’t everything. It's the only thing.” You don’t want to agree…but you’re seduced by the perfectly made-up shallowness.
Nina Romain