When you think of William Friedkin, you think of big set pieces crammed with detail. The exorcism and the myriad ways in which a demonic force kicks back in The Exorcist. The car/L-train chase in The French Connection. The car chase that pretty much traverses an entire city in To Live and Die in L.A. Dynamiting the fallen tree in Sorcerer. These scenes sizzle with both tension and minutiae. It’s not enough for Friedkin to set out how high the stakes are; he continually reminds you how difficult it is for his characters to tackle the situation. Add to the mix his trademark obsession with how things work and it makes for fucking great cinema.
Which brings us to the big question: what are we supposed to make of Friedkin films that don’t have one of these big, swaggering, everything-to-play-for set pieces that practically beg us to become an expert in demonology or explosives or evasive driving. What do we make of Cruising, which has an interrogation scene that’s pretty compelling but nothing compared to Sean Connery and Ian Bannen going head to head in The Offence? Or Jade with its half-hearted car chase and lazily recycled tropes from Basic Instinct? Or The Guardian, in which … er … something, something, tree?
Bug is a better film than most of Friedkin’s later output, and it kicked off a two-film creative relationship with playwright Tracy Letts which culminated in Killer Joe – surely Friedkin’s last great directorial throw of the dice. When you think of Bug, you think of the performances, or the tinfoil-swamped production design during the last third, or the mid- and post-credits inserts that ramp up the ambiguity.
Bug either has no great extended set piece, or the entire film is an extended set piece. I’m not sure I could commit fully to either reading, but it makes for as good a starting point as anything in terms of getting a handle on the film. Bug takes place firstly in a shitty motel room, then in the increasingly disturbed mind of army deserter Peter Evans, then in the troubled mind of waitress Agnes White (Ashley Judd), and finally in both their minds simultaneously as they feed off each other’s madness, loneliness, guilt, self-hatred and paranoia – while all the time remaining within the confines of the shitty motel room.
Agnes is on the edge as the movie opens, terrorised by a series of phone calls from a non-verbal communicant she believes to be her violent ex-con partner Jerry (Harry Connick Jnr) and I have to pause here to admit that I almost didn’t bother with Bug, because I really can’t stand Harry Connick Jnr. As an actor or musician. Hell, even as a frozen one-dimensional entity in a photograph. On the other hand, Ashley Judd is the unsung heroine of Nineties and Noughties cinema who never got the respect she deserved from the studios or the critics, and holy crap am I glad I didn’t bail on Bug because it is unquestionably her finest hour.
Agnes, holed up in said shitty motel room, is working at a lesbian bar with her soon to be un-bestie-d bestie R.C. (Lynn Collins). She’s nursing a weapons grade case of anxiety at the prospect of Jerry showing up and emotionally flagellating herself over the disappearance, years ago, of her young son. One fateful evening, R.C. introduces Agnes to Peter whom she agrees to put up in her shitty motel room on a temporary basis.
In short order they hit it off, hook up, face down the abusive Jerry, fixate on a bug infestation and fortify themselves (and the room) against insects, radio waves, choppers, government agents and a far-reaching conspiracy to … um, something, something, bugs, experiments, Gulf War, implants. Cue: insanity, body horror and more tinfoil than someone on Agnes’s salary could possibly afford.
The tinfoil business in the last third is Friedkin’s most unsubtle visual creation in a film that wouldn’t know subtlety if it presented photo ID and a letter of introduction from a respectable member of the community. The film is about that peculiar strand of madness inherent in conspiracy theories, and Friedkin’s direction shitcans nuance in favour of complete immersion. This makes the final stretch a tough (and awkward) viewing experience – and more so if you were simply expecting a body horror opus à la David Cronenberg.
You do get body horror of course. Just like you get black comedy, political discourse (there is one moment, albeit short lived, where Peter’s ravings teeter on the rim of making sense), drama of wine-glass-shattering intensity and even something you might describe as a deconstructed love story. All of it packed into the demented excesses of a film that’s never happier with itself than when it’s screaming in your face and digging its fingers into your shoulderblades for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.
That it comes shudderingly close to losing control of itself and messily imploding shouldn’t come as a surprise. Friedkin’s direction, inspired as it is (there are frames within frames and a use of composition as subtext that makes Chan-Wook Park look like a bumbling amateur), seems hellbent on driving the production off a cliff edge. It often feels like a jet-propelled filmic suicide note.
What holds it together is the performances. Connick Jnr must have been cast with me in mind: I was booing and hissing and using unladylike language the moment he sidled on screen and his character deserved all of it. Michael Shannon had played Peter on stage and brings every facet of his understanding of the role to the table. Lynn Collins as the ultimately spurned voice of sanity gives the film a human centre. But it’s Ashley Judd who owns Bug. Her climactic monologue, during which Agnes is blindsided by Peter’s madness, then creates her own paranoid narrative, then injects it full strength into Peter’s by now completely fucked up mental state, is a tour de force every bit as visceral and terrifying as Isabelle Adjani’s in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession.
Bug never quite sidesteps its stage bound origins the way Killer Joe does, but it builds to a level of frenzy that most directors would have stopped short of. I have no critical framework whereby I could say with any confidence whether it’s an overlooked masterpiece or a hot mess redeemed by its lead actress. What I know for sure is that it exerts a crude but effective hold on the audience. And I can’t be the only person who scratched their arms red raw by the end of it.
Neil Fulwood
Leave a Reply