A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, October 4, 2025

Bug (William Friedkin, 2006)

Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon in Bug

Cast: Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr., Lynn Collins, Brian F. O'Byrne. Screenplay: Tracy Letts, based on his play. Cinematography: Michael Grady. Production design: Franco-Giacomo Carbone. Film editing: Darrin Navarro. Music: Brian Tyler. 

If Bug feels sometimes overburdened with subtext, it's probably not the fault of William Friedkin, never the most subtle or cerebral of directors. The sense that it can't be allowed to be just a psychological body horror movie probably comes from Tracy Letts, whose screenplay, based on his off-Broadway play, is rife with American malaise. Name-checking everything from the Tuskegee Experiment to Timothy McVeigh to Ted Kaczynski, it touches on sexual dysfunction and discrimination, the drug culture of the underclass, regional antagonisms, the military-industrial complex, the prison industry, political conspiracy theories, and ecoterrorism, among others. That it succeeds at all is due to the commitment of its lead actors, Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, who make the lost souls of Agnes and Peter visible to us. I suspect that on stage Bug was more of a dark comedy than it becomes on screen, though some of that still comes through despite Friedkin's tendency toward overkill and an apocalyptic ending that doesn't make a lot of sense. 

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