Re: Moyse: Bugonia, Inevitability and our Cultural Malaise
When I read Eli Moyse ’27’s column yesterday, I was surprised. “Bugonia” is not an easy watch. It is grotesque and unnerving, but it is not about the inevitability of our problems. In his piece, Moyse claims that “the most dangerous part of America’s current regime of power might be its eternal assault on positive senses of possibility.” While that may be true, “Bugonia” isn’t so much about the failings of humanity as much as it is a brutally honest attempt at explaining what has happened in modern-day America. It is a satire on polarization, but done with an elegance that shows the absurdity of what people driven by polarization are capable of. One side will annihilate humanity if it cannot perfect it, while the other, so far gone, would resort to suspicion, mistrust and the manufacture and belief of conspiracy theories. I’ll leave it to you, as director Yorgos Lanthimos somewhat has, to decide which is which.
The point of this letter is not to criticize or dismiss Moyse’s take on Bugonia. While I didn’t completely agree with him, I did enjoy reading it. However, I disagree with the idea that art must necessarily inspire hope. To make art that inspires hope isn’t the harder thing to do. Such art has always existed in stories of heroes or characters that warm you up. Perhaps we now require art that sketches our world exactly as it is, and that should haunt us. “Bugonia,” at its premise, isn’t all that far-fetched and provides a wake-up call. In today’s day and age, the existence of men who religiously believe in an absurd conspiracy theory of an alien invasion is as believable to me as someone willing to end the world for its imperfections.
Banksy says that art should disturb the comfortable, and I think that’s the point of Bugonia: to disturb a country too blind to the severity of its own condition. Real, difficult-to-define art in our time is not shy. It dares to say what’s true, in a time where far too many have chased after false utopias in the name of hope.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
