Bugonia: Queen Bees and Wannabees at the Oscars

Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Politics and the Movies, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Oscar Nominated Films for best picture 2025

This week, at our local movie house, we are watching 10 films that have been nominated for best picture.  Actually, I missed one that was only being shown during the day, and we’ll see if we make it to the other nine.  Movies pack a lot into two hours (plus or minus).  The binge watching we have become more accustomed to pushes us along a known track, creating a craving at the end of each episode.  A movie introduces us to a whole world, the way a novel does, walks us through it, and then wraps it up with a bow and delivers us back to our own world.  It is a more intense ride.

Bugonia was a particularly intense ride.  With no background or expectation – other than having seen Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things a couple of years ago – we were introduced to her not as the suicide survivor who was struggling to come of age in an era when women were thwarted, as she was in that film, but as Michelle Fuller the powerful CEO of a company who has little empathy with the poor things who work for her and bring her and the corporation fantastic wealth as a result of their unending labor.

Simultaneously, we are introduced to Jesse Plemons’ character, Ted Gatz, a struggling, loner who keeps bees with his mentally challenged cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) and is concerned about the welfare of those bees as they face Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD as he calls it in his dialogues with Michelle Fuller).  The corporation he works for as a shipping clerk, loading boxes, we learn is also the corporation that Michelle Fuller heads, and it is a pharmaceutical company that also manufactures the pesticides that he blames for CCD.

At this point, after having set up the dynamic, I want to try to step out of describing the plot.  I want to avoid describing the plot for two reasons: partly because it is wacky – a little like Donny Darko, Everything, Everywhere All At Once, or a host of other seemingly low budget, science fictionesque films that use science fictiony ideas as a device to expose something uncanny about our experience of life.  I was not surprised to learn that this is a remake of a 2020 Korean film.

The second reason that I want to avoid describing the plot is because this is a well-crafted movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat.  I was uncertain about just what was really happening as it pivoted from moment to moment and I was constantly reassessing my own reading of the basic plot – so if you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to steal that from you.  That said, I should warn you that there is a great deal of violence, and, though it is not gratuitous in that it is, I think, necessary to the plot, the violence is graphic and while even, at moments, over the top and blackly comical; it is considerable in both its quantity and graphic depiction.

So I will, in effect, try to interpret the latent content of this movie/dream without referring too much to its manifest, observed content.  In doing this, I have a sense that I may be anticipating the “collection” of Oscar nominees for best picture.  This film (and we also saw the Brazilian nominee last night, The Secret Agent) seems to be struggling with the craziness that the world is currently experiencing, even though it has been being planned for over the course of the past five years.  It feels as if Hollywood knew that we would be perched on this precipice.

One theme that is right below the surface in this film is that of toxic masculinity.  Not the type of toxic masculinity that is being modelled by people like Trump, but the toxic masculinity of some of those who voted for him.  There is the sense that competitive women – the women who are no longer taking their place in the kitchen where they belong – are destroying our world.  They are Queen Bees that the men now work for – but in Colony Collapse Disorder, they are the Queen Bees that the workers abandon in droves.  Ted Gatz personifies the disaffected worker who is tired of working for the Wo-man, seemingly forgetting that this trope was defined by masculine mores about what it takes to get ahead, and he has not seen, as we have, that Michelle Fuller is working at full tilt to get ahead and stay there, both mentally and physically, just as, or perhaps, more aggressively than a man would have done.

He also doesn’t quite see the stark emptiness in her life, living in a modern, stripped down, sterile home, surrounded, not by a family, but by well-manicured but lifeless lawns both at home and at work.  Her worker bees are not supportive and warm, but efficient, awed, and a bit scared by her and her power.  She deigns to know them by name, and to grant that, as a new policy, they can choose to leave work at 5:30 if they really have nothing additional to work on – and this will not be held against them, perhaps.

I have to stop at this point and note that the reluctant son is in his first year as an associate at a high-powered law firm.  He likes the law, he has worked hard in undergraduate and in law school and enjoys the work, including at the law firm, but even he is brought up short by the lifestyles of the partners at the firm – many of them rise very early so they can work out and be at work early – they leave to spend “quality time” with their families in the early evening, before getting back to work before lights out.  Even for my hard working son, this feels like a daunting life path to be treading.

Michelle Fuller’s life is contrasted with the home of Ted Gatz and Don.  Not only is it the place where unspeakable things were done to Ted when he was being babysat by a boy who became one of the local sheriffs, it is a rural home that is in obvious disrepair.  Ted’s obsessions with various ideas have led him to invest in tinkering, but not in a way that makes the house a home.  It is, instead, a particular kind of ramshackle man cave, and the bee hives out back are the least toxic components of the environment that Ted has created and the Don inhabits with him.

We are not surprised when Ted wants Don to join him in chemical emasculation so that his sexual thoughts don’t derail them from their mission of fixing the earth.  Ted’s feelings of paternal affection for the earth seem divorced from the kind of care that we would associate with generative paternal functioning.  From a toxic masculine perspective, women have taken over our space, we have defined ourselves not in positive qualities, but as the things that women – our mothers – are not.  We need to develop into a different space.  We do that, only to find that women have already occupied that space and we now have nowhere to live – so we abandon the community.  We don’t have a vision for how it should be, only dissatisfaction with how it is, so we want to destroy the changes that have led us to feel disaffected, isolated and lonely – but we recoil from acknowledging the soft feminine core of that desire for something that feels a lot like dependency and being a little baby - attachment.

For Ted, his retreat is into a very cerebral world.  He becomes obsessed with a variety of conspiracy theories and finally lands on one that he beilieves to be true, and he comes up with inventive ways to test the theory.  His abduction of Michelle is the final piece that he needs to prove it.  He may not have the resources of the corporation, or indeed much of a community at all, outside of the obeisance of Don, but he does have considerable smarts.  These smarts are read by Michelle (and us) as madness, and she works from within that framework to connect with him, but Ted, as crazy as he may be, recognizes her pandering ploy and will have none of it.  Her offers to connect are clearly a trap – whether she is offering sex or comfort and dependency he knows that this is just more of what he is trying to overcome and he and Michelle are stuck in a standoff.

Michelle’s effective strategy is to offer a solution – one that fits within Ted’s sense of her as both all powerful and withholding – and she offers what we realize is a fatal solution to the thing that he seems most to desire.  She dangles it in front of him, like bait, and he bites.  But even after he knows that it is bait, she still holds him in her thrall because she has the answer to his overwrought, paranoid fantasies about what has led to the upending of the world as we (used to) know it.  He hangs in there even after delivering the most horrendous betrayal any person could lavish on another because his curiosity is so powerful and has such a hold on him.

This view of human nature – that we are driven both by primal nearly unmanageable urges but that reason, the very faculty that we use to curb those urges, can be corrupted.  In current neuropsychoanalytic speak, the seeking urge, the one that leads to and is supported by higher cognitive functions, is also, for lack of a better word, primitive and can override those other urges that would save us, like attachment, to our detriment.  That is, the very thing that Ted is relying on to lead him out of the morass is what proves his undoing.  I suppose I have just described this as a classical tragedy, and the ending would suggest that we, as a species, have internal programming that cannot be overcome.  That which would lead us out will, in the end, be our undoing.  This is not black "comedy" at all.

Just to follow up on one more thread here, women, leaving hearth and home and inhabiting male roles, end up leaving their redeeming qualities at home – so their inhabiting the masculine space is not a solution.  That thread leads me to believe that this film really is, underneath it all, supporting a weird version of the toxic masculine discourse.  I’m not sure whether it is doing that ironically or unconsciously, and whether it is offering a reduction ad absurdum argument (you guys are crazy - women would not be ruthless as you imagine men would be in that position - and men need to be ruthless to protect our sanctuary) – or whether this really is a dim view of what we are capable of becoming as a species.

 

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.