Bug

"What an excellent day for an extermination, wouldn't you agree?"

William Friedkin’s Bug is the kind of film that would have benefited greatly from a Greek Chorus: It chronicles two characters whose fate is so utterly inevitable that it seems preordained, and we watch the proceedings prepared for the worst, hoping for the best, and pretty riveted by the characters’ interaction—not because of their predicament, which is obvious, but by the ways that they choose to play along with each other’s individual paranoia. The ultimate message is that combining certain needy people is just plain deadly, especially when they’re surrounded by inflammable liquids and bug spray.

The film has been compared to Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and I think that’s fair. Both begin with careful setups that follow the daily lives and complications of their characters, and then kick into terrifying high-gear somewhere around the start of the second act. In this case, the main character is a drugged-addicted thirtysomething named Agnes, who is played effectively by Ashley Judd as the kind of woman who simultaneously wants to be left alone yet constantly craves affection and love. Though straight, she works at a lesbian bar—perhaps because it offers her easily attained, non-committal affection—and lives in a cheap motel room. Her only friend is R.C. (Lynn Collins), a fellow waitress who detects Agnes’ needs, sincerely cares about her, but cautiously keeps her at a distance lest she grow too drained from her friend’s constant need for attention. Complicating Agnes’ already miserable existence is Jerry (Harry Connick, Jr., in a wonderfully sinister performance), her abusive ex-husband recently released from prison. He is a dangerous man, not only for his violent actions and words, but because we detect that his anger is fueled by some dark secret that penetrates far deeper into Agnes’ troubled psyche than his punches and curses.

Into Agnes’ life arrives Peter (Michael Shannon), a quirky but apparently harmless fellow whose simple articulations and gestures seem to be at a right angle to his rather complicated thought process. He’s the kind of guy who will state something with the purity of a four year old (“I’m very sleepy.” “I would like very much to be your friend.”), and then transition into a monologue that reveals stirring contemplation. He has an observation toward the end of the first act about each person’s “private centers” that “should never be penetrated,” and if you haven’t seen the film yet, I’ll go ahead and let you know that it is dialogue to which you need to pay very close attention in order to understand exactly what goes down between he and Agnes throughout the course of the picture.

Agnes is at first weirded out by Peter, but finally won over by his gentle charm and straightforward nature; it is good to have a man around, she reasons, and anyone who can offer protection from Jerry has earned the right to sleep in her bed for at least a night or two. Peter is kind to her, at first not indicating any traces of danger or harm. They make love, and Friedkin shoots the tender sex like it is water being desperately consumed by people who have been walking through a desert. Things finally seem to be looking up for Agnes, who is no longer alone and has met a man who, though decidedly quirky, can meet her needs and sympathize with her lost-soul temperament. But then, Peter wakes up in the middle of the night and begins to complain about invisible bugs that bite him…

This is the part of the write-up that is difficult for me, but I don’t mind: It’s a tribute to Bug’s cleverness that I feel like I’m walking on eggshells as I try to decide what I should or shouldn’t reveal. Obviously the title indicates that the film is on some level about bug infestation, but this is not a younger brother to Arachnophobia. Peter believes that bugs are in his blood, injected by the government and now infesting anyone who he comes into contact with. At first Agnes probably believes he is crazy but keeps these opinions to herself, playing along with him because she so intensely wants to have someone around her.

And so we eventually are left with two desperate people who feed off each others’ needs: A schizophrenic who needs to be believed and who needs to protect others from his “sickness;” an abused divorcee who needs to be cared for and protected from…well, everything. Between these two bouncing their unhealthy psychoses off each other, we realize that we’re finally watching a portrait here of vulnerable people who have allowed the wounds of their life experience to drive them crazy; they now use each others’ madness to confirm their “sanity.” A terrible, inevitable road to destruction ensues: By the time the abusive Jerry shows back up and tries to bring clarity to the situation, we surprisingly find ourselves rooting for him—and that’s a bad sign.

All but two or three scenes take place in the confines of Agnes’ living quarters, in which characters can barely move without knocking over empty bottles or getting a whiff of cocaine. Friedkin shoots from tight angles that create a claustrophobic feel so suffocating that sometimes we want to stop the film and walk outside, just to suck in some fresh air. The set is a masterstroke, because it confirms the isolation that Agnes and Peter feel; whether the rest of the world is really going on outside or not, they are too trapped in their own paranoid world to notice. The final third of the film finds the room transformed into a do-it-yourself prison against (unseen) genetically-altered aphids, complete with bug-zappers and every wall and piece of furniture covered with tinfoil. It’s a superb example of creepy set-design that would seem absurd in most any other film, but Friedkin earns it by keeping us trapped inside this room with these characters and allowing their unrelenting fears to provide perfect justification for their, erm, renovations.

In a film that moves forward by characters and their words to each other, the writing and cast are everything. Bug is based on an acclaimed play by Tracy Letts, who also scripted the film; he demonstrates a natural knack for using dialogue to slowly unveil the hidden layers and even tenderness in often difficult characters. We already know that Peter is hopelessly schizophrenic by the time he unleashes a long soliloquy about the origins of this disease, but it’s a brilliant connection of the dots that sounds like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream, throwing in references that start with genetic mutation and touch upon the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Jonestown, and Timothy McVeigh. We accept that he’s mad, but we can see how in his jumbled mind his logic makes a kind of sense and why Agnes, in her desperation to be wanted, goes along with it and creates a theory of her own far more intimate but just as absurd. And all the cast members are in top form, particularly Judd and Shannon as two people who don’t love each other so much as they love feeling loved when together. Brian O’Byrne also has an effective scene as an eerie doctor who looks for Peter and only finds Agnes. He is quick to size her up and adjusts his strategy with her in a way that would be deplorable if it wasn’t cunningly effective.

Bug has been billed as a horror film, perhaps so that the ads could rationalize the tagline, “From the Director of The Exorcist!” Horrifying moments abound, but I am hesitant to say that it fully fits that label. Horror films deal primarily with making unknown dread familiar, and conversely turning the familiar into hostile environments that mean us harm. Bug doesn’t accomplish either of these requirements; it is first and foremost a careful psychoanalytical study of how dangerously needy people can react to, expose, and ultimately confirm each others’ weaknesses. We have absolutely no doubt that in our minds that Peter is crazy and that Agnes goes along with his shenanigans because she is more terrified of being alone than the thought of government-controlled bugs taking over her body. We also have no reason to suspect any potential last-minute twist involving real conspiracy theories and genetically-altered aphids; rather, we watch the couple’s descent into madness in a way that presents their rapid spiral into doom as quite inevitable. We never react to the characters’ own fears: We’re horrified at them as the last of their sanity fails and extreme actions and behaviors begin to reveal themselves, but we are certainly never horrified with them.

But the film works beyond its mere visceral level. What’s primarily engrossing here is the way we are allowed to see these disturbing minds function without necessarily playing along. As a psychological case study, Bug is a revealing exercise and an extreme metaphor for the way people justify staying in abusive relationships, regardless of how extreme the mistreatment might be. In the face of such madness, does it really boil down to the fact that somehow, even in the violence, certain needs are still being met? Bug is bold for asking this question, and even bolder for answering it.

Cast:
Ashley Judd: Agnes
Michael Shannon: Peter
Harry Connick, Jr.: Jerry
Lynn Collins: R.C.
Brian O’Byrne: Dr. Sweet

A Lionsgate production. Directed by William Friedkin. Written by Tracy Letts, from his play. Rated R, for language, gore/violence, sexuality/nudity, and drug use. Running time: 102 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: May 25, 2007.