Nicolas Winding Refn: The Color Pornographer
The idea of authorship (or auteurism) is often measured in time and iconicity. In his essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Andrew Sarris names his list of top twenty auteurs and states that the list is “somewhat weighted toward seniority and established reputations.” He explains that the auteur theory “emphasizes the body of a director’s work rather than isolated masterpieces.” This seems to indicate that an auteur is a director who not only has a distinct aesthetic and style, but also has historical presence and significance. It would seem to follow, then, that the Hitchcocks and Welles of the world would not be considered auteurs had they only produced a few movies each. However, there are more recent directors and filmmakers who have a very distinct style and are being hailed as modern auteurs, though they have yet to stand the test of time. I submit that they do indeed count as auteurs, just in a different way. One such case is Nicolas Winding Refn.
Refn’s debut feature was Pusher in 1996 (later turned into a trilogy), which was not widely released in the United States but was critically well-received. His first film that garnered mainstream attention and acclaim in the United States was Bronson in 2008, starring Tom Hardy. A few years later, in 2011, Drive started to cement what a “Nicolas Winding Refn film” meant aesthetically: highly stylized, meticulous staging, blocking, and lighting, extravagant yet purposeful use of colors… His second project with Ryan Gosling, Only God Forgives, in 2013, had all of this and more, with more violence, corruption, and human depravity. Thus his thematic style emerged. He enjoyed putting his characters “through the wringer,” so to speak, emotionally and physically, and fetishizing everything that came out of that. In 2013, in an interview, he said “it’s like pornography. I’m a pornographer. I make films about what arouses me. What I want to see.” (x)
Refn’s most recent film, The Neon Demon, released in 2016, was seemingly the climax of these stylistic elements. His obsession with human depravity and the corruption of the soul was elevated all the way to the horror genre, whereas his previous films had mostly remained in the (admittedly intensely violent) crime and drama genres. His highly stylized aesthetic was turned up to eleven in this film that is overwhelmingly saturated with color in every single shot, which is used as a narrative element. His total control over every second of the movie, both seen and heard (which is how many actually define auteur), means that every shot, every word of dialogue, every action, and every musical cue is planned by him and developed with the other people in the production.
The first thing that most people will notice about Refn’s style is his intense use of colors. This characteristic became evident in his Gosling-led movies and completely brought to the forefront in The Neon Demon. Refn uses colors to indicate character progression and explain states of mind. He has stated that he is actually colorblind and cannot distinguish mid-tones. He explains that that is why his films always have such stark and intense contrasts between intense primary colors, so he can actually see it. This adds to his auteurism and personal style.
In The Neon Demon, a sixteen-year-old girl named Jesse moves to Los Angeles after the death of her parents to pursue a career in modeling. In the beginning, she is innocent, naïve, and has a “deer-in-the-headlights” look according to Ruby, the makeup artist who becomes obsessed with her. The two meet for the first time after Jesse’s first amateur photoshoot, where she wears a blue dress and is surrounded in a blue light, but with a red light visible in the background as the camera zooms outward, indicating something ominous approaching. Ruby takes her to a party for other people in the industry, and the scene is completely permeated in blue light, with subtle hints of purple in certain areas. Then, when the scene changes to the bathroom where Ruby and Jesse are talking to Ruby’s two model friends, Gigi and Sarah, the scene is purple. Jesse’s innocent and pure blue is starting to mix with or be corrupted by Gigi and Sarah’s aggressive and sexual red. However, in this scene, they are still being somewhat friendly to Jesse, so it remains a soft purple. Ruby then physically pulls Jesse into the Demon Dance sequence, which is lit in a strobing red light towards which she starts to walk, indicating the start of her acceptance of this life.
The next big shift comes with Jesse’s golden photoshoot with Jack, the renowned photographer. When she walks in, she is obviously very nervous as Jack is intimidating and frightening. Ruby does her makeup and brings her out, and when Jack pulls her onto the entirely white set, there is a visual illusion where it seems that they’re retreating into the whiteness, as if they were the only two people in the world. The pure white makes them seem to retreat from reality. Jesse is still nervous and fidgety, placed against an all-white background, being observed and judged by a man wearing all black. She feels alone and vulnerable. However, when Jack turns the lights off and paints her gold, she becomes the golden sun against complete darkness. As the movie turns slow-mo and the diegetic sound fades out so we only hear the hypnotic soundtrack, she changes and grows (stunningly well portrayed by Elle Fanning’s incredibly emotive face). When Jack steps off into the darkness to take the pictures and she is left alone, golden, against the black, she faces the camera with a new confidence. She knows she is the sun (as referenced later by Sarah).
The most important shift comes in the runway scene in the middle of the movie. Jesse is chosen to close the show, and as she starts on the runway she is surrounded by a neon blue triangle and darkness, interrupted by flashes of light (most likely camera flashes). This entire sequence is in slow-mo with no diegetic sound but with the same hypnotic soundtrack. As she approaches the end of the runway, she sees the triple-triangle mirror and contemplates her own reflection. Her face is bathed in blue light, timid, shy, and a bit confused. Her reflection starts to look a bit smug and turns to one of the other two reflections and kisses itself on the mirror. Suddenly, the light shifts entirely to red. Jesse has accepted how beautiful she is and knows what her appearance means. Her face is no longer timid and confused, but confident and fierce. Her reflections continue to kiss each other a bit more and then she turns around to walk back. She is entirely red; she has completely rejected her past innocent self and accepted who she is and what she looks like. From that moment on, she wears much more makeup, more provocative clothing, and acts like a completely different person. Where previously she claimed she was confused as to why people acted the way they did around her, she now says things like “I don’t want to be like them. They want to be like me.” Her persona’s transformation is complete and is done essentially by means of color.
Of course, this color shift fits squarely with centuries of subliminal associations and stereotypes associated with gender and gender roles. Ever since Aristotle and medical theories of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, women have been defined as cold and wet while men are warm and dry (Galen theory). Throughout literature and the arts, women who did not conform to societal roles (temptress, prostitute, ruler) were associated with warm colors. Here, as Jesse sheds her blue past in favor of red, she is assuming this historically marked negative tint and fully accepting the lifestyle.
Finally, at the end of the movie, when Gigi and Sarah are at the photoshoot with Jack, after having killed and eaten Jesse, Gigi starts to panic at the sight of the pool. She feels ill and starts to retch. When she gets to the dressing room where she eventually kills herself, she is entirely surrounded by blue (wallpaper, carpet, even her underwear) and this is where she finally vomits out Jesse’s eyeball. Her non-natural (surgery-enhanced) body is rejecting Jesse’s purity, symbolized by the blue closing in on her.
Refn also plans his movie meticulously, with foreshadowing and references both visual and in dialogue. The very opening of the movie is a shot of Jesse lying apparently dead and bloodied on a couch. Only when the shot zooms out and we see the lights and camera equipment, and then Jesse wiping the fake blood off herself, do we realize that it was a photoshoot and not her actual death. However, this shot does foreshadow her death at the end of the film, in the pool, because in comparing the two shots, one notices that the poses are very similar in the way her body is splayed out. Additionally, when Jesse and Ruby are with Sarah and Gigi in the bathroom at the party, they discuss how lipstick for women is always marketed as either food or sex. Ruby asks Jesse “are you food or are you sex?” Gigi jokes “she’s dessert! Because she’s so sweet.” Later in the movie, when Jesse goes to stay with Ruby after the motel owner has seemingly raped the girl next door to her, Jesse turns down Ruby’s repeated sexual advances, unceremoniously shoving her off the bed and yelling at her. The next day, Ruby kills Jesse and eats her along with Gigi and Sarah. Jesse refused sex, so she became food. She was eaten towards the end of the movie, so she was dessert as well.
In a Q&A with Refn and Elle Fanning after the screening of The Neon Demon at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Ryan Gosling asked Refn “with your level of control and auteurship, it could’ve been anything… you can do anything you want, and yet with that kind of control, you went ‘no, necrophilia. That’s what I’m gonna do.’… Why?” In this particular interview, Refn says that it was just exciting to do it and that he was always interested in the connection between sex and death. However, in other interviews, he has stated that he believes film and creativity in general are all about reactions. It’s about provoking thought, not a judgment of good or bad. It is about experiencing what is on the screen. Refn’s way of thinking about his craft somewhat gives him leeway to really do what he wants to do and see. He has control over it partly because he has a different way of thinking about it. In his essay “The Auteur Theory” (1972), Peter Wollen states that “the director does not have full control over his work; this explains why the auteur theory involves a kind of decipherment, decryptment. A great many features of films analyzed have to be dismissed as indecipherable because of ‘noise’ from the producer, the cameraman, or even the actors.” In this case, however, it would seem that Refn, as an auteur, had full control over the work. He even seemed to have somewhat creative control over the music, written by composer Cliff Martinez, as there are many musical cues that coordinate to movements onscreen, such as an electronic slide at the rolling of Jesse’s eyes, or a bass beat starting when characters start walking.
Finally, it’s important to evaluate a film in its genre. The Neon Demon is Refn’s first proper horror film. He had done many thrillers and dramas previously, albeit with horrific elements, but no true horror films. As such, he definitely took the time to pay homage to the classics of the genre. For example, in the bathroom scene with the four lead women, Ruby says that the lipstick is called Red Rum. This is a reference to the “REDRUM” scene from Kubrick’s The Shining. Refn also references another Kubrick film, albeit not a horror film, when Keanu Reeves’s character says that the thirteen-year-old runaway living in Room 214 is “some real Lolita shit.” The climax of the movie, at the mansion where Ruby is house-sitting, was filmed in the same mansion as the climax of Scream 3, another horror film. The Neon Demon continues in the footsteps of many past psychological horror films, in that it places a disproportional amount of emphasis on style and images over narrative substance. These films are meant to make the audience feel something between uneasy and completely terrified, and most filmmakers try to do that with shocking images. In The Shining, for example, there is the unexpected shot of the two little twin girls dead, with the hallway covered in blood, in the scene where they ask Danny to come play with them. It’s all about the shock factor.
The Neon Demon is a film that proves Nicolas Winding Refn an auteur. He is sure of his intentions and approaches, he has a distinct style aesthetically and thematically, and he does exactly what he wants to do while rejecting the idea that all of it is to be judged good or bad. For him, creativity is about reactions and audience experience. He uses color semantically to show narrative elements that cannot be transmitted through dialogue, such as a character’s changing psyche. Even though he does not have an extensive body of work (yet) and he has not yet stood the test of time, he is a modern auteur nonetheless.
