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William Friedkin’s BUG

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By: DThompson | in: Movies |

I should say as a horror afficionado (or as my friends say, “freak”) I’ve seen most every horror film known to man, good, bad and ugly as well. The end result is that I just don’t get scared like I used to. Horror films have only so many tricks and when you’ve seen a few hundred (or in my case a few thousand) scary movies you know what’s coming and bye-bye terror. Oh sure, an unprovoked loud noise can still make me jump, but I’m talking the real deal – the heart pounding, just as soon leave the theater, who cares how it ends kind of sheer terror I first experienced at 12 with the original Night Of The Living Dead and last experienced at 21 with Sam Rami’s original Evil Dead. It could just be age. I’ve dwelled more than once on how, as I grew older, I was less and less likely to get a really good scare out of a movie. Perhaps, and this is a bit depressing, horror films are really the baliwick of the teenager, old enough to appreciate the story but still young enough to believe in it.

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Bug is definitely NOT a film for teenagers. An intense and unusual film, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. On the surface little seems to happen, other than a lonely, unhappy young woman, Agnes, meets a rather enigmatic young man, Peter. And they talk, and talk, and talk Bug is based on a stage play and director William Friedkin does little to open it up, which makes sense because Bug tells a fairly claustrophobic little story.

In the 70’s Friedkin was, as we say, da man. And, of course, it was The Exorcist that was his calling card. That head spinning, pea soup projectile vomiting extravaganza was widely regarded as the scariest movie of all time and was infamous for making audience members puke their own guts out. So, since 1972 every time Friedkin turns his hand to horror it’s big news. Now the last time was 1990’s The Guardian based on a novel called “The Nanny” and I’m here to tell you that Fran Drescher’s “The Nanny” is scarier than The Guardian. Friedkin’s latest horror film, Bug, is much more successful, but still no Exorcist.

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Seeing the previews you might have been misled , as I was, into thinking this movie is more of a traditional disgust-o-rama, Cronenbergesque kind of film in which people are infested and it’s all grotesque and vile. Bug is really more of an extended meditation on the allure of insanity. The movie is filmed in a disjointed, fragmentary style replete with seemingly unexplained and unmotivated shots. Horror begins, though you don’t know it, with Peter’s innocuous statement that people tend to dislike him because he sees things “not readily apparent”.
Indeed he does, or does he just see things that aren’t there at all? That’s the question at the center of Bug and it’s never truly resolved. The French have a term “folie a deux” meaning “a madness shared by two” and if Peter is crazy then Agnes is all too pleased to escape her miserable life by following along with him. We never actually see the bugs the couple are supposedly infested with and neither do any of the other characters (“They’re small” is the constant answer). So the audience is left guessing as to how much, if anything, is real. It’s the problem of the Unreliable Narrator and engenders not so much horror as an “Oh my God” attitude as the two characters go from quietly oblique discussion of their ruined lives to the least erotic love-making scene ever committed to film (interspersed with with shots of flowing blood cells and squirming maggotty bugs) to coating the entire room in tinfoil and hanging up about fifty bug zapper lights. The pair become covered with bleeding wounds either self-inflicted or, as they believe, from the tiny blood drinking bugs.

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Despite the fact that SOMETHING unseen is continuously getting zapped by those bug lights the true horror of Bug really seems to lie in Agnes’ willing acceptance of Peter’s behavior which everyone else sees instantly as insane. The scariest thing Bug has to offer is not a tale of infestation but the realization that you could grow so despondant, so unhappy with your own life that a patently crazy alternative would seem acceptable.

VERDICT: Say hello to insanity from the inside.


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Posted on June 13, 2007

Comments

3 Responses to “William Friedkin’s BUG”

  1. Rustycat on June 13th, 2007 9:49 am

    oooh looks nice.


  2. DThompson on June 13th, 2007 1:00 pm

    Friedkin deliberately (I think) uses super grainy film stock which only adds to the over all unhappy pall the film casts by making the settings seem that much more run down. It’s not a happy film, but it’s tightly edited and, for what it is, exceptionally well made.
    Here’s what happens when a company makes something original for once and doesn’t have the slightest idea how to promote it. Saying “Bug is not for everyone” is apparently a bit of an understatement. I was the only person at the screening I saw. Why didn’t they put this film into the art houses where it could find an audience? Instead they put out a misleading trailer and stuck it in the malls. Just stupid.


  3. The Plugg: Best Moments in Film 2007 : Maor Ezer on December 8th, 2007 6:12 am

    [...] • The small gasping “Oh!” Ashley Judd gives at the very end. Too late with her realization that death is the price of her current romance. Bug. [...]


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