BUG is not a horror film. At least not a conventional one. There is no masked baddie to outrun, no one to torture our heroes slowly. No plague, no undead, not even very much in the way of ill will. With the exception of an abusive husband, no one really means anyone any harm and everyone is trying to look out for everyone else. What’s the all encompassing dread that William Friedkin builds BUG around?
Loneliness.
Yup… That’s it.
But think about it. What do you fear more? The creature of the night that MIGHT have made the noise outside in the dark? Or the grim fact that you KNOW you don’t have anyone or anything worth really living for? Point of fact, maybe BUG really IS a horror movie, but it’s one for adults that know what the REAL scary shit is.
That means precious few will like it.
Ashley Judd stars as Agnes, a waitress at a lesbian honky tonk bar in Oklahoma. Her husband Jerry (Harry Connick Jr) did a two year stretch for armed robbery and makes a habit of terrorizing and bullying Agnes when he can. The son the two had vanished from a grocery store a few years prior.
One night after work, she’s talking to her co-worker and friend RC (Lynn Collins) and Agnes invites her over to the dingy motel room she’s staying in to hang out. RC brings Peter with her.
A shy and retiring fellow, is Peter (Michael Shannon). He’s courteous and articulate and a nice enough fellow, but there’s something about him that’s a little off. Nevertheless, his somewhat upfront and gentle nature (mixed with the fact that he has nowhere else to go) appeal to Agnes and she lets him crash on her couch for the night. They get closer the next day and they make love.
And that’s when the infestation starts.
She can’t see them at first, but Peter assures her they’re there. Little aphids biting at him. Pretty soon they start biting at her as well and then start burrowing under both their skin. The funny thing is, Agnes goes to the doctor and RC comes over… And THEY can’t see the bugs.
A spiraling and speedy descent into paranoia ensues as Agnes and Peter try with all their might, and ultimately fail miserably at maintaining a degree of sanity. They don’t leave the motel room, eventually stringing up flypaper everywhere. Flypaper gives way to bug-zappers, and that gives way to covering the place in tin foil to keep the bugs from transmitting signals to the outside world.
BUG contains the dreaded HYB banned term of (pardon me while I duck as WIL chucks an empty bottle at me) “social commentary.” But much like Spielberg’s MUNICH, BUG makes a comment on human nature at the ground level to make the grander point about everything else. The most telling and disturbing scene in BUG is when Agnes slaps RC in the mouth after RC tries to call Peter on being crazy, asking “Why are you trying to take away the only thing I have?”
And that’s how it starts, isn’t it? In Peter’s huge monologue, he brings up his theory that the bugs have something to do with Timothy McVeigh and Jim Jones. Funny those names are brought up. They’re no crazier than Peter, (or David Koresh or Randy Weaver or Marshall Herff Applewhite) but they had quite a large number of followers. Do you think that people followed these men because they happy with meaningful lives? We always wonder in these instances how these people develop a following to the point that death sometimes comes into play. BUG may be a small artistic piece of a very real puzzle.
The film is not without some minor problems, though. But it’s weird that one of them kinda cancels the other out. Agnes and Peter never leave the motel room, which means WE don’t leave either. BUG is based on a play, and I actually think I recognized the line they would have used before intermission. That means there is lots and LOTS of dialogue that, no matter how well delivered or staged, will present difficulties for today’s gnat-spanned (no pun intended) viewer. In fact, those who were antsy before the chase scene in DEATH PROOF will probably kill each other in the theatre to alleviate their broad definition of boredom.
Which is why I HIGHLY recommend BUG to those people. But anyway…
The fact that the film is set in a confined place comes mighty handy when considering the director. William Friedkin made a few damn fine movies in the seventies, and has since been so dumb he could fuck up a can of Pepsi. Being that we can’t leave means that Friedkin can’t indulge himself too much. It’s like the cinematic equivalent of a chastity belt. He can’t technically do anything wrong, though judging from some crazy editing dealing with the sex scene, Lord knows he tried.
But what elevates BUG from enlightening to truly disturbing is the performances by Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. I have never–and I do mean NEVER!–honestly believed an actor or actress had gone off the deep end while playing their parts until now. I’ve seen people play crazy before, but I’ve never wondered if padding was used on the set, lest these nutty people hurt themselves. Here Judd and Shannon actually appear to go FERAL while still maintaining the use of their higher faculties like speech and linear thought. The two shine at the very end, when Peter lays out what he thinks has gone wrong and the confused Agnes goes along with it, using his ideas to fill in the blanks in her own life with paranoia and suspicion. And a raging cacophony of lost hope and desperate insanity plays out before us in something we haven’t seen done this well before, and may never see done again. Who the hell would TRY after this?
There are several schools of thought pertaining to film criticism. One is “write whether the audience will like it or not.” Another is “write if YOU liked it and to hell with the audience.” I personally try to find the happy medium, relaying my own enjoyment while telling you whether or not a movie delivers on the promises of its posters and trailers. The fact that BUG is a tapestry of slowly mounting paranoia and dread doesn’t make it any less creepy, but it’s not the run-and-splatter our corporate masters have tried to Pavlov us into spilling our money for.
Know what you’re getting into.
3 out of 4
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