Deadlights: Girls' Night

Women have been the horror genre's subject of choice for centuries. The titular purring lesbian vampire of Joseph Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla, the hunted and ignored sorority girls of Bob Clark's Black Christmas -- women are horror's most insidious monsters and its most vulnerable, exploitable victims. This preoccupation with feminine transgression and suffering sometimes veers into a pulling-the-wings-off-of-flies species of misogyny best exemplified by the work of directors like Dario Argento, whose interest in women seems to begin and end with drooling over their sexualized death throes. Far from being artistically inessential, though, even this type of viciousness is a lens through which we can inspect our society's conflicting attitudes toward women and womanhood.

The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn's film--co-written with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham--about the languid technicolor nightmare of the L.A. modeling scene, delves into this territory with unsparing insight. In touching on narcissism, our obsession with youth, and the arbitrary cruelty with which we declare women beautiful or useless it locates the infected veins which pump those prejudices through all of us. The misogyny that animates some of the cheapest, dumbest horror ever made is shared not just by the men who jerk it to scenes of blond sexpots getting eviscerated by Jason Voorhees but by the women who indulge in the cannibalistic death cult of measuring their own bodies against the bodies of others, or who blame other women for their oppression rather than following the trail to its inevitable end at the feet of men too powerful for them to harm. The call, as it were, is coming from inside the house.

Winding Refn's movie takes a slow, unsentimental look at what women mean to other women, at what the need for validation, for affection, and for attention from men does to circles of feminine friendship when those needs are uncoupled from empathy for other women. Ruby's sexually predatory protectiveness toward Jesse, Gigi's envy for the younger woman's effortless natural beauty, Jesse's brush with the abstract incarnation of her own "perfection" in the eyes of the world around her -- these emotions come from a place of profound disregard for other women. The Neon Demon's characters look at one another and see not people but collections of "inferior" traits they can disregard or "superior" ones they are compelled to covet. These standards are dictated from above by designers and photographers whose genius is taken as a given.

In trying to understand womanhood we too often focus solely on individual empowerment and positivity-oriented ideas like "everyone is beautiful," seeking to ameliorate the toxic fallout of our culture's obsession with beauty rather than to attack the problem at its roots. The Neon Demon knows that beauty is a commodity, that a woman's femininity is bestowed from without and will inevitably be stripped away without a second thought by the same people who awarded it in the first place. It knows that all attempts to disrupt this order from a place of violence between women are doomed to immiserating failure. Women have been horror's subjects since its inception as a genre because our vulnerability and exploitation render us already exposed and wounded in the way horror requires its victims to be. The Neon Demon is a film about the ways in which we conspire with our oppressors to make sure every one of us is pierced and slowly prized apart by the cruel hooks of internalized misogyny.