The Neon Demon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the first image the film shows you. A girl on a chaise longue, throat opened, blood pooling down her bare arm onto white satin. Then the photographer steps in to fix her hair, and you understand the blood is paint and the corpse is a pose. Jesse is not dead. She is being looked at, which in this film is the same act, only slower. Refn opens The Neon Demon on a tableau of a beautiful dead girl and tells you, before a word, that beauty here is something you hold still to be consumed.

The coarse instinct is to call this a film about "the gaze." True, but too vague. Deleuze gives us finer tools, and the film almost demands them, because it keeps refusing the one thing horror is supposed to give you: a sensory-motor circuit. People perceive and do not act. They watch. Jena Malone's Ruby paints Jesse's face from a photograph rather than from the living face beside her. Gigi and Sarah study Jesse in mirrors, never head-on. The whole modeling world, the dossier says, is "an industry of images replacing persons." That is, almost to the letter, Deleuze's crystal-image (the hyalosign): a circuit where the actual face and its reflection become indiscernible, where you can no longer say which is the thing and which is the image of the thing. Jesse's mirror fantasy on the runway — kissing her own reflected selves under a triangle of light — is the crystal seeding itself, the inner image crystallizing into the world. And because Los Angeles in this film has no outside (every space is glamorous and sepulchral, motel walls the color of dried blood, studios built like operating theaters), the crystal is what Deleuze calls perfect, or saturated: an enclosed mirrored world with no exit. Nobody escapes the image. They are eaten by it.

What eats them is the other engine of the film, and it is older and lower than the crystal. Beneath the couture and the neon runs what Deleuze called the impulse-image: a naturalism of pure appetite. The fashion world is the derived milieu, the polished surface; underneath it stirs an originary world of drives — hunger, predation, the will to take youth by force. Refn literalizes it with a directness critics called either audacious or sophomoric. The women do not envy Jesse metaphorically. They drink her. The finale's cannibalism, necrophilia, drowning — Deleuze would recognize the shape instantly: the line of slope, the irreversible downward grade toward exhaustion and death that every naturalist world traces. From the first frame's fake corpse to the last act's real one, the film is one long descent, and it never pretends the slope can be climbed back up.

Notice how the form serves this rather than decorating it. Braier and Refn use darkness as positive space — faces emerge from void, lit by a single neon source. That is the any-space-whatever, the espace quelconque: a setting that has stopped being a setting, fragmented into pure affective black so that nothing remains but the quality of a face in light. And the faces, mostly, do not emote. Elle Fanning plays Jesse as luminous and almost inarticulate, a held surface. Deleuze had a name for the immobile reflecting face that expresses a single pure quality — the qualisign, the icon of wonder. Jesse is one sustained qualisign: not a character acting but a quality presented for contemplation, which is exactly why the other women want to absorb her. They are not jealous of what she does. They are starving for what she is.

Then there is color, which the dossier rightly calls the film's grammar rather than its decoration. The cadmium reds, electric blues and magentas are pushed past naturalism into Fauve excess — Deleuze's colour-image, the affective color that absorbs the whole scene into a single feeling-tone, coding emotional states where dialogue refuses to. And the runway sequence stages something stranger still: Jesse stops moving while the triangular light moves around and through her, the world in motion while the body goes still. Deleuze called this the movement of world — the dance that absorbs the dancer. She does not perform the transformation; the light performs it on her.

The lineage is exact, and Refn names his debts openly. The saturated gel-lit all-female institution comes straight from Argento's Suspiria. The fashion-house-as-killing-floor is Bava's Blood and Black Lace. The triangle and the cosmetic-as-occult-rite descend from Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, where makeup is invocation. The doubling, mirroring, dissolving woman is Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. The camera-as-predator — looking fused with killing — is Powell's Peeping Tom. And the city that dissolves a young woman into pure image is Lynch's Mulholland Drive, the closest cousin this fable has. Refn's contribution is to weld giallo's color to the art film's dead time, and to let the crystal and the impulse run in the same body: the most beautiful thing onscreen and the thing most wanting to be devoured.

What did it do? It proved you could build a horror film with the sensory-motor circuit removed — no one to root for, no act that saves anyone — and still produce dread, by making the image itself the predator. That is the wager. Watch it again and watch what the camera wants. It wants Jesse exactly the way the women do. So, by then, do you.