To Serve Man

What should you assume when the girl boss CEO from the longhouse says her goal is to serve man?

Joss Whedon famously got the idea for Buffy, The Vampire Slayer by contemplating an ironic reversal: what if the girl being followed into a dark alley by a monster turned around and thrashed and slayed her attacker. In Bugonia, Emma Stone and her frequent director Yorgos Lanthimos (and writer Will Tracy) contemplate another ironic reversal in this remake of a 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!: what if alien abduction is when aliens were the abducted, not the abductors.

Stone is the abductee, a high fashion, Ivy educated, slick, female CEO, abducted by two low income, blue collar, uncredentialed, unschooled, unkempt, almost unemployed white male cousins, one of whom has a mom (Alicia Silverstone) in a coma due to faulty medical treatments sold by Stone’s corporation. Stone’s the girl boss from the longhouse so much debated recently by conservative lady writers like Helen Andrews and Peachy Keenan. The low income son, Teddy Gatz (Breaking Bad’s Jesse Plemons, Mr. Kirsten Dunst) is also a low wage worker in an Amazon style warehouse owned by Stone’s firm. Potentially a somewhat MAGA movie, with the white males (and probably the black males too) left behind in the new DEI economy.

The film begins with the position that the white males may be crazy. Teddy and his autistic cousin Don believe the world is controlled, not by the Jews, or George Soros and the Tides Foundation, or the Rockefellers, or (a human) Big Pharma, or communist infiltrators, but by aliens among us. The white men are uneducated, as Sandy Cortez from Westchester would say, getting all their (mis)information from the dark web, with no Nina Jankowicz in power to protect them from the worries of their pretty little heads.

Stone is abducted, her auburn locks shaved and then burnt (because these are alien antennae that would allow her to call her ship for help), her body rubbed with an anti-histamine cream to neutralize her powers, and chained up in a basement. Her lead captor, Teddy, who has Trump’s hair and skin coloring, wants her to organize a meeting with the leaders of her race (from Andromeda), to demand they withdraw from Earth and leave humanity alone. According to him the Andromedan ship will pass near Earth in 3 days, when it will be undetectable because of a lunar eclipse.

Emma Stone

In a nod to Buffy, Michelle actually beats up her two captors with some expensive self-defense training moves, once when they first capture her and again in their basement, in the latter scene telling Teddy she will always beat him because she is a Winner and he is a Loser. This is actually a theme in Stone’s career. Her second appearance on TV was on Medium, set in her real life hometown (Phoenix), where she played a young woman raped by her own politician father, who then faked her death to escape and leave him as the most likely culprit in her disappearance. In her 2023 Lanthimos film Poor Things she plays a girl killed and resurrected as a female Frankenstein, who then metes out revenge on those who have wronged or attempted to control her. In her best movie, Cruella, she plays a slightly psychopathic Estella/Cruella de Vil, who uncovers her origins and dispatches a homicidal Emma Thompson.

The audience is gradually moved to poise between the idea that CEO Michelle (Stone) is a human kidnapped by white trash kooks and Teddy Gatz’s belief that she really is an ET. After Michelle tries for a day, with some deliciously parodic vacuous corporate PR speak, to convince her captors that they will suffer least if they call the cops, confess, and let her go immediately, she then adopts a new strategy, agrees to their hypothesis and begins to explain how Andromedans are here to help, including with things like a cure for Gatz’s comatose mom. As Stone paints a picture of the Andromedan civilization, bits of The Man Who Fell to Earth are suggested, curiously another film starring a red haired, near albino, mega-talented actor as a corporate titan who could be an ET. Also the Alien franchise film Prometheus, and the myth of Atlantis are invoked, slightly higher cinematic and literary fodder than Gatz’s worldview, which resembles the 1988 cult classic They Live. According to CEO Michelle the Andromedans are here To Serve Man. But with or without some clarified butter?

We don’t know until the very end which view is closest to the truth. In promotional interviews some of the cast members almost suggest the movie is saying something about contemporary politics where people hold extreme views in which those who disagree are “alien,” and if there isn’t some moral equivalency of all factions who do this. If so, the skills and artistry of the cast, crew and director do not allow them to succeed at presenting that. Bugonia costs $45 million to make, but only earned $4 million in its opening week - though that is the most a Lanthimos movie has ever taken in its first week.

It’s a well made, well cast, attention gripping movie. But like some of the previous Stone-Lanthimos collaborations, it has a profoundly malignant sense of life. (Perhaps as the interstellar object 31/Atlas “rockets” past earth, thescientific debate on whether it is acting more like a spaceship or a comet will generate a whole genre of “alien or not” fictions.) It would be interesting to see what Stone and Lanthimos could do if they tried to make something edifying.

A shorter version of this was published earlier this week at SpliceToday.