Bugonia's conspiracy plot

Yorgos Lanthimos' new film Bugonia is the latest in a genre of post-Succession satires of the ruling class (think The Menu,Triangle of Sadness, and White Lotus). But Bugonia is also a conspiracy film, and in that capacity it presents a fairly persuasive argument that this is a theme worth exploring within the genre (Leave the World Behind and Murder at the End of the World could be seen as early attempts). Emma Stone, playing a CEO by the name of Michelle, strikes the perfect tone as a freightened but calculating captive who is sincerely trying to appeal to her captors' better nature. She, however, can only do so through an embarassing mish-mash of corporate lingo devoid of emotion. Often, she will shift from one mode to the other within the space of a sentence. The effect is so disarming that the viewer might start to think that Jesse Plemons' character (Teddy) is justified in suspecting that his captive is, in fact, an alien.

It is in these moments of dialogue that, I think, some of the more interesting ideas on conspiracy pop up. Especially the following exchange stood out to me:

MICHELLE: (gulps) I think you’re in a kind of echo chamber.
TEDDY: Echo chamber? Right now?
MICHELLE: Mmhmm.
TEDDY: Echo? Yeah, I read the same 5,000 think pieces about that, too.
MICHELLE: You’re consuming content on the Internet that is reinforcing this sort of warped, subjective idea of reality.
TEDDY: This is your best shot at me? Some “rabbit holes” bullshit you read in The Times? Come on. Come on.
MICHELLE: Can we have a dialogue, please?
TEDDY: Don’t call it a dialogue. This isn’t Death of a Salesman.
MICHELLE: Okay, can we talk, please? Or are-are you just gonna keep doing this?
TEDDY: We don’t need to talk.
MICHELLE: Yes, okay.
TEDDY: Because I know exactly what you’re going to say. You’re going to say that I’m in some kind of Internet-induced autohypnotic feedback loop, and-and gatekeepers, and-and norms, and all that weak hegemonic horseshit. But that is precisely the limp-dick rhetoric that you’ve been instructed to counter the human insurgency with. That’s the fucking hyper-normalized dialectic by which you’ve convinced seven and a half billion people that they’re not your captives. To keep us believing in these fucking false institutional, fucking “shyboleths.”

(Transcript from here)

Teddy mispronounces shibboleths and Michelle calls it out. In spite of getting all the actual purported shibboleths entirely right, he's made to look like an idiot for getting one tangential thing wrong. It's a clever little misdirect that draws attention away from the fact that he's actually got a pretty good point. He knows the theories about why people get into conspiracy theories; he probably even reads a variety of sources telling him all the ways in which he's wrong. Later on he mentions:

TEDDY: I ran through the whole digestive tract in… five years? Alt-right, alt-lite, leftist, Marxist. All those stupid badges. I went shopping hungry, and I just bought the whole store. (chuckles)

(Transcript from here)

If conspiracism is a sort of perverted form of Marxism (a totalizing explanation of the world and its inequalities), the latter is not an antidote to the former. There is something to conspiracism that is more ideological than what mainstream accounts suggest. The "thinkpieces" mentioned before tend to conclude that conspiracists are subjected to bad information, or that they lack the skills required to distinguish between trustworthy news and fake news. If only Teddy read the right things, he'd be able to deal with his problems in a more healthy way.

In fact, it's Michelle's lines that sound more like the product of an echo chamber (ironically, in an early scene she's angered by the number of times the word "diversity" shows up in her script). Teddy is impossibly outlandish, but he isn't rote. His words come from a genuine attempt to understand what's happening to him and to the world. The violence he inflicts on his captive and his cousin is more ideological than it is instrumental (a final act revelation from the cop brings home this point). Michelle is mechanical by comparison, runnning down the list of stock phrases she usually busts out at the negotiation table, hoping one clicks into place. It just never sounds quite like something a human would ever say.

Conspiracists watch the news; they just don't trust it, because the world it represents appears fake to them. And in many ways, that is most people's experience. Anyone knows never to take any media at face value, but we all have ways to sift through the stream of information and find what's important to us. We all trust certain people, certain websites, certain representations over others, and we change those assessments over time. We all know, either intellectually or instinctively, that information is not neutral and that it has to be interpreted. In this sense—and in the way it is represented in Bugonia—conspiracism isn't fundamentally different.

It is particularly satisfying, then, that the film accepts this equivalence without equivocating: Teddy is choosing to embrace violence while playing the hero. There's nothing tragic or unfortunate about that.