Bug (2006)

 

Bug (2006)

 

“The love bug. It bites you, and like an infection the chemical in your brain hooks you in, it hooks the other person, too. Suddenly you’re in over your head. Granted, this can work out … But then there are the other cases, the ones where the symbiotic relationship of love doesn’t work so well; where it takes over and warps both people within the relationship into unrecognisable creatures.”

-        Critic C.H. Newell

 

There’s a wholly useless piece of dating advice I remember from when I was younger and believed it because I didn’t know any better:

 

“Never date anyone crazier than yourself.”

 

Well, first off, it can’t be applied, we build connections based on early impressions, so we can’t evaluate most people that way until later. Second, we mostly, automatically, date people exactly as crazy as ourselves, because crazy is as crazy does, so mostly, we choose those who can tolerate us, and they choose us because we can tolerate them, an equilibrium is reached between those you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole, and those who wouldn’t touch you for the same reason. That applies here, because it is as much a broken Love-story as a Horror film, where two Lost Souls find each other, but they don’t redeem each other. In their lost-ness, they just go to Hell.

 

“Folie à Deux" means “madness shared by two.” It is a rare, but well-documented, mental disorder in which a delusional idea could be shared among two (or more) closely associated individuals.

 

But is it really rare? We live in a country that it seems increasingly ripe, even beyond ripeness, rotten, with Conspiracy Masturbations. This film was released five-years after 9/11, when the “9/11 Truthers” were already a fact of our culture and politics. Now, fifteen-years beyond that date, the Truthers have not only not gone away, but (based on newspaper reports from September and October 2021) are in resurgence.

 

Meanwhile, eleven years after the film’s release, there was the emergence of a new one, QAnon, which led to an incompetent, attempted, coup at the USA Capital in January 2021, and Candidates who have sworn their allegiance to this Masturbation are expected to be numerous in the 2022 election year.

 

It’s pretty clear that these two delusions are merging. Both are wholly irrational, but both are also massive. It is multiple madnesses shared by more than two.

 

This film is based on a play of the same name (1996, so it pre-dates 9/11, though the film is post-) by Tracey Letts, who also wrote the screenplay. It’s Directed by the legendary William Friedkin. It’s got a small cast, is mostly a two-character drama, and the bulk it unfolds in only one motel room. Often, in tales like this, the camera-work is deliberately intrusive, as if the camera was one of the characters, perhaps indicting the audience for their voyeurism (for example “Hard Cany” (2005)) but here, until the crazed last few minutes, camera is more restrained, obsessed with close-ups, but not nearly obsessed with its own motion as it is in capturing the players degrading themselves (Cinematography by Michael Grady).

 

As the film is dialogue driven, and mostly trapped in a single room, Friedkin choose not to have a musical score, but exaggerated ambient, though sometimes hallucinated, sound (are those helicopters? or the buzzing of insect wings?). According to Friedkin, "The score is the air conditioner and the coffeepot." There’s also bizarre use color, especially in the last third, wherein the leads cover all the motel room’s walls and windows with tin-foil, making most within an artic blue. (The Sound Department lists too many names to repeat here, the Production Design by Franco Carbone). The story-time is short, only a few days, and the last third is shot in real-time, reflecting the play it was based on.

 

 

So, we have two protagonists. The focus is somewhat on the slightly-more-functional Agnes White (Ashely Judd), who lives a dead-end life as a waitress in the middle of nowhere, hiding how traumatized she is that her child disappeared years before, being a victim of Domestic Violence, and, most recently, her dangerous former spouse is now out-of-jail and stalking her (Harry Connick Jr).

 

The other is Peter Evans (Michael Shannon), a Soldier who later proves to be AWOL. He’s socially awkward, but polite, considerate, and undemanding, so Agnes lets him into the Motel room she lives in. He’s also seriously mentally ill, with his every movement eventually revealed to be directed by his delusions that he was the victim of a Secret Government Experiment regarding Genetically Engineered Bugs implanted in his body. But he’s neither physically or emotionally abusive, so sad Agnes sees him as a real catch. As Flannery O’Connor (an influence of Author Letts) wrote, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (short story collection, first published 1955).

 

As Agnes’ fragile world rapidly falls apart, she’s sucked into Peter’s delusion, and once she’s there with him, they destroy each other. There are scenes where Agnes and Peter are peering into a cheap microscope and seeing proof of their delusions, but we’re not party to what is actually captured by the lens. Elsewhere, there is quick-cuts of bodily fluids and insect imagery, representing the ideas infecting their minds.

 

Friedkin, "[P]eople who are vulnerable, lonely, and isolated -- which is most of us -- will hook up with somebody who's in the same boat and attach ourselves to their worldview. So when this guy comes on in the film and spouts out these theories, she believes them . . . because they make sense to her in the same way it makes sense to [all those voters were sure] that Bush knew [about 9/11 beforehand]."

 

Though Peter is clearly crazy, this film is equally about how the insanity is encouraged by Powers and Authorities repeatedly lying to us. Though there’s not a single reference to Trutherism, it has Peter rant and rave about the very real The Edgewood Arsenal Human Experiments (1948-1975, part of the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA program) and the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” (that’s what the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps actually called it, and that real Conspiracy stretched from 1932 - 1972). With some realities being so insane, Peter’s delusions become almost normal.

 

Also, Peter being stalked by a Doctor Sweet (Brían F. O'Byrne) so even with everything Peter spouting being completely nuts, something did happen to him, but don’t expect this film to explain exactly what.

 

“Bug” is about how everyone one of us is continuously bombarded with disinformation, so everyone one of us is going slightly nuts. Author Letts said of the inspiration for the play, “The Oklahoma City bombing hit me hard. I was shocked that it was done by Americans. How far out of the matrix could you slip? The more I investigated paranoia, the more I saw how the connections feed on themselves and build out of control. What happens in this movie is that Agnes is leaping to catch up with Peter.”

 

The lead Terrorist in that 1996 attack, the worst in USA history prior to 9/11, was Timothy McVeigh, a decorated Army Vet who was drawn into White Nationalist Conspiracy Masturbations as he became increasing embittered with US Foreign policy and how Federal Law Enforcement handled the deadly sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992) and the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas (1993). McVeigh’s accomplice was Terry Nichols, more a weakling and loser. According to Investigators reviewing cell-phone records and other evidence, in the weeks or months before the Terrorist attack, they seemed to have been in contact with almost no one else except each other.

 

After the unparalleled success of his landmark Horror film, “The Exorcist” (1973) Friedkin went through a weird, sort-of, dry spell that has dogged him since. Masterpieces like “Sorcerer” (1977) were ignored, while garbage like “Jade” (1995) garnered a lot of attention and hurt his reputation. Also, unsurprisingly, as he got older, his output slowed, and this is only the third of five films he’s Directed since the turn of the millennium.

 

Like “The Exorcist” before it, Friedkin was telling a sensationalistic tale in a manner that, until near the end, is non-sensationalistic. I remember Roger Ebert praising how “The Exorcist” convinced you that these characters don’t know they are in a Horror film, and the same effect is achieved here. In fact, Friedkin insists it isn’t a Horror really, but a Dark Comedy, and was disappointed it wasn’t marketed that way.

 

With both leads, Friedkin secured his first choices. Regarding Judd his praise was exuberant, “[It] often occurs with a musician and a score … A score's a bunch of illegible notes on paper, and then Pinchas Zuckerman plays it and it breaks your heart. And Ashley does that."

 

In another interview, “I wanted Ashley for her intelligence. The actors have to be able to understand this movie. It can’t be explained to them. Her personal experience was a help: She grew up with her mother and sister, poor, living in trailers, she had some abusive relationships…she had some things in common with Agnes. I didn’t have to say a lot to her. We were on the same page.”

 

As for Shannon, Friedkin saw him on stage in this role. Maniacal Peter delivers multiple rapid-fire monologues of his lunatic ideas with perfect conviction, and because his conviction is so perfect, broken Agnes believes him. One gets the impression that she’s been told lies her whole life, and finally found someone not deceiving her. And on a certain level she’s right, it’s not a lie when the liar believes it, it’s something else, and even darker. Before it’s over, both actors cast aside all restraint, and their madness is so raw, and feel so powerful, that it can only mean they’re dooming themselves, and maybe sucking us into their doom.

 

Shannon is a veteran of stage, TV, and film, and had some interesting things to saw about the anxiety to do this role, already familiar to him, in another medium. Though on stage, you go straight on though, no cuts and retakes, in film there’s also one’s relationship with the blocking, the breaks, and the need to re-hype one’s self to the rhythm of the moment over multiple takes:

 

“You get nervous before those long takes. The scene I have outside the bathroom door, telling her my life story, I did it once and Billy said that was it. I said I wanted to do it again. He said, ‘What are you trying to do, make Eastman Kodak rich?’ He let me do it again. That time he said, ‘You did it all with your eyes closed. Now try it with your eyes open.’ The third take was like being shot out of a cannon. After it was over, it was all a blur. You have to trust the director.”

 

The film didn’t lose money, but wasn’t a success, pulling only double its initial budget. Never-the-less, it was done shockingly cheap given the heavy-hitters both in front and behind the camera, and Friedkin was able to secure a larger budget for “Killer Joe” (2011, and I haven’t seen it), based on another Lett’s play (from 1993) which was critically praised but, unfortunately, lost money.

 

Trailer:

Bug 2006 Official Trailer - YouTube