Dangerous Liasons

I can't stop thinking about Bugcrush. I knew almost nothing about this film prior to yesterday's pre-screening presentation beyond having seen (and being largely underwhelmed by) Carter Smith's debut feature The Ruins (2008), and so my expectations were about as neutral as one can reasonably expect when faced with an obscure arthouse short. And so but: Bugcrush floored me. I've grown accustomed to liking the movies we've been screening in a kind of distanced academic way, in that they're more interesting centres of discussion as products of a broader system, but Bugcrush was the first new film we've screened that I enjoyed on a totally visceral/emotional/psychological/gut level—I was actually kinda giddy walking home last night (and I had more than a little trouble falling asleep later). Whew.

Anyhow, there's a lot going on in Bugrush w/r/t teenage sexuality, both explicitly and metaphorically. I kinda see the movie's narrative thrust—our protagonist's descent into some mysterious and seamy world of pseudo-fantastic drugs and implied gang rape—as an allegory for the sensationalization of vague dangers facing youth. A major theme we've dealt with course-wide is the sense of fear and anxiety cultivated by concerned parents and perpetuated by media (mis-)representations, where social order and a system of traditional moral and ethical values seems perennially threatened by impending collapse. Bugcrush hints at some very basic dangers—substance abuse, sexual deviance, rape (presumably), and gang mentality—before supplanting them with fantastical alternatives. The insects employed as psychoactives represent a mysterious (and fictitious) extreme, standing in not for any specific drug (though the method of use and the eventual scarring share similarities with heroin injection) but simply the idea of dangerous, ambiguous drugs. The film as a whole plays on an enduring but vaguely-defined anxiety permeating the social consciousness of our generation: lurking beneath the surface of any pleasant suburban American veneer is the constant threat of being drugged, raped, and beaten half to death—as a danger it seems to grounded in media-hyped fearmongering to be a legitimate concern for youth, and yet the essence of those fears persists. Bugcrush makes actual just these sorts of hypothetical dangers, magnifying the 'Worst Case Scenario' until it resembles pure fantasy and fiction. If the film is frightening (and it is), it's because its eventual conclusion is so literally incredible. Horror films tend to resonate the most strongly when the extremity of the fiction begins to bleed into our conception of reality—when it starts to feel, even slightly, like possible reality—but Bugcrush takes the opposite approach: the film gets less and less credible as it continues on, building realist tension and dread to a conclusion that's totally surreal.