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The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon

Nicolas Winding Refn

Drama • 2016 • 1h 50m

Reviewed by Beatrice 27. June 2023

Young interchangeable bodies.

Colors from magenta to purple, intrusive music.

Glitter mystifies nothingness.

Blood is bloodless, aestheticizing, beautiful, indelible.

Hypnotic design.

Lights pulsate on bondage bodies.

Jesse's skin is as luminous as she is, fresh from Los Angeles; she has no one but conquers all.

Jack Mc Arthur will make her a star.

She is 16 but will have to say she is 19 all the time, because 18 is suspicious: "people believe what they are told"...

She lives in a motel and is constantly threatened by other presences.

The makeup artist prepares her and the imperative photographer chases everyone away , forces her to take off her clothes and asks her where the problem is; he turns her around and starts sprinkling her with gold dust.

He is not to be trusted who makes so many promises and especially not to be alone with him, it is always better to have a friend to call.

Models in lingerie in aseptic environment, there is a need for fresh meat that inevitably expires at 21.

Measurements, humiliations.

People notice only Jesse while the others become ghosts.

In the morgue, lifeless bodies are made up; death is made beautiful while in room 214 is a 13-year-old runaway, a true Lolita.

Plastic surgery is a duty: without beauty what value do we have!

What you say doesn't matter, you are nothing, beauty is the only thing.

Jesse doesn't want to be like them but they are the ones who want to be like her.

Her mother always told her, "you are dangerous"; Jesse knows what it looks like but doesn't understand what's wrong with that.

Girls stop eating and get injected with anything to look like her.

Knife-blade fornication, cannibalism, necrophilia: beauty eats itself.

Carnal conjunction with death that makes itself beautiful and welcoming.

Persecuted and haunted beauty is a lifeless shell.

Beauty devours itself while the dead/living body joins the earth in a lunar and menstrual intercourse.

The instantaneousness of momentary lives is combined with the mors tua vita mea that justifies the end by any means.

At twenty-one you just have to put seal grease on your face.

Body fetishism becomes capital to be consumed to accumulate profit through the surplus value of disvalue.

Body becomes commodity to produce money that consumes the body/commodity to become surplus money.

Body becomes commodity to produce money that consumes the body/commodity to become surplus money.

Capitalism of absence and emptiness generates sacrificial bodies, generates bodies to degenerate to the point of nausea and pangs that spew inhumanity, releasing fragments of self.

The swallowed eye travels through the body and becomes sight denouncing the invisible.

The essentiality of sophistication denounces the De Profudis of the sodomy of a surface devoid of the most superficial depth that devours any beauty by engulfing its most insignificant proportion.

The system rapes the feminine, forced to be only body/involucre, container body, absence body.

The art of genericity is celebrated that consecrates the disavowal of singularity by decorating with creativity the fetishism of bodies; the scar, the keloid of a social mutilation; the sheer objectification, its artificial fabrication.

There is nothing harmless anymore, the shirking of the responsibility of thought is willful blindness.

Beauty lies only in the gaze that stares at horror, stands up to it, and in the irreducible consciousness of negativity, considers the possibility of the impossible.

The neon demon is a speaking, accusing daimon that highlights with a noble, inert, colorless gas the degree of coarseness, dullness, and violence necessary for the exercise of domination.

All collaboration, all humanity of relationships and participation is but a mask for the tacit acceptance of the inhuman.

Feminine genocide is carried out at the female hand, a handmaiden of the system's direction.

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