Andrew Tracy: Scratch That Itch

Scratch That Itch: William Friedkin's Bug
By Andrew Tracy
Cinemascope #28



To say that Bug is William Friedkin’s best film in 20 years might seem like faint praise, but his cunning and perfectly tuned adaptation of Tracy Letts’ claustrophobic play hardly needs comparisons to Jade (1995) to prove its worth. Of course, Friedkin’s rosier past will surely be invoked to defend Bug against the inevitable catcalls that will greet its release in North America, after it caused a stir at Cannes by picking up the FIPRESCI prize in the Director’s Fortnight. Friedkin may soon be “returning to form” in any and every publication near you, and you can bet there’ll be more said about The Exorcist (1973) for the umpteenth time than Bug—although the lazy social readings now inseparable from the former will surely be broken out once more for the new film. Indeed, how could they fail to be for a work which deals with the infectious spread of paranoia through the heartland, and whose stage original was playing in Chicago when 9/11 hit?

To write Bug off as an unchecked explosion from the contemporary id would, however, be something of an insult to its very traditional—in the best sense—virtues. Friedkin’s new film is timely to the extent that its construction and the deployment of its effects are, for all intents and purposes, timeless: how to orchestrate a performance, pace a scene, use the camera judiciously, calculate audience response the better to knock them off balance—in short, tell a story. The zeitgeist, where and whatever it may be, doesn’t eclipse several decades’ inheritance of dramatic craftsmanship. Letts wrote his play after the Oklahoma City bombing, which calls up a very different image of terrorist carnage than the brand which the media informs us is dominating our thinking these days. Yet even though Friedkin retains Letts’ references to Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynsci, there’s not a whiff of datedness to the film. Style doesn’t recognize new paradigms.

As zeitgeist fiends high and low troll through each new release, it’s been increasingly forgotten that these timely echoes are texture, not source—as David Bordwell puts it, culture doesn’t turn on the camera. Friedkin and Letts have taken exactly what they need from the world around them and plugged it in to their nasty little nerve machine, heightening and sharpening the pieces they select the better to calibrate their gut punches. If this sounds rather coldly engineered, I’ll take it if only for the sheer sensual pleasure of the mysterious opening. A brief shot of a bizarre, silvery room, which would look like the inside of a computer but for the unidentified corpse making a mess on the floor; a cut to black, a ringing, a telephone in close-up as it is picked up, a woman’s voice saying “Hello?” to silence; suddenly, a cut to a gorgeous helicopter shot, travelling across a desert to a small cluster of lights in the distance, as the sound of the phone being slammed down and the woman’s voice muttering “Bastard” calls up the film’s title. With a few simple machinations, Friedkin simultaneously disorients and intrigues, slyly plays on the typical “opening up” of a stage work on the screen by taking it to the furthest extreme possible, and enhances visually—cinematically—the theme which the play could only convey in words: a dark, threatening world pressing in upon people who have retreated into their personal fortresses to ward it off.

Those retreats, naturally, are as much psychological as physical, and the film’s tension hangs upon when these two realms will meet, and ignite. It’s this expectation of the inevitable that Friedkin and Letts so cannily play upon. The film’s first hour is a well-played and tautly written specimen of a very familiar scenario: Agnes (Ashley Judd), a down-and-out waitress imbibing vodka and coke (in powdered form) in her dirty motel room, nervously awaits the return of her ex-con ex-husband, Jerry Goss (Harry Connick, Jr.), who she assumes is the source behind the barrage of silent phone calls. Her lesbian best friend and co-worker, R.C. (Lyn Collins), brings over Peter (Michael Shannon), a passer-through she picked up at the bar. Polite, serious, and contentedly square (“I’m not a serial killer,” he calmly repeats after overhearing Agnes joking with R.C.), Peter begins to break down the bitter wall behind which Agnes takes refuge. After platonically spending the night and witnessing Agnes’ black-eyed “reunion” with Jerry the next morning, Peter’s remarks and behaviour start becoming darker and more enigmatic—especially when he discovers that a certain Dr. Sweet (Brian F. O’Byrne) has been asking questions about his whereabouts.

The explosion does come, of course, but not at all in the form expected. Instead of dropping the other shoe, Bug abruptly catapults into a deranged other dimension, where the finely shaded tones and carefully orchestrated tension of the first hour are exploded gaudily outwards, risking outright absurdity at every turn. That it never goes over the brink is due solely to the drawing of the film’s characters, which is to say that the demands placed upon the film’s actors are uniquely heavy. Camera, sound, editing, and all the fragmentary processes of cinema mean nothing in a film such as this without a unified ensemble of performances at the core. After a few false moves and flat readings in the early minutes, Judd hits exactly the right note of slowly eroding guardedness, her touching vulnerability becoming the film’s ingress to the horror that emerges. As well, her rather calculated deglamourization becomes both affecting and arousing—her casual kisses with R.C. are both wholly natural and genuinely erotic, light years removed from the sapphic salaciousness Friedkin exploited in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Connick’s brute is all the more intimidating for the intelligence and wit entwined with his brutishness, creating a palpable sense of violence by withholding it, flashing the mocking smile that reminds one that he could unleash it at any moment.

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