The neon demon screenplay online series#

The Neon Demon was no exception to this rule for the Cahiers, Refn offered an “absolute antithesis” (or counter-image) to the supposed ‘Cannes doctrine’. These films were characterised by a more expansive, brazen and often exhausting mise en scène. On the other, to the Cahiers, stood a cinema which openly acclaimed the splendours of the digital image, offering films that embraced rather than rejected our artificial present.

On the one side, they claimed, stood the latter-day partisans of a socially committed cinema, driven by realist dogma. The magazine went on to draw up an easy dichotomy. The French Cahiers du Cinéma were quick to give a riposte to this public dismissal, siding with Refn in his opposition to the supposedly ‘Bolshevik’ honours list of the festival. Not everyone agreed with the hostile judgment, however. At the Cannes festival, the film was initially booed after its first screening. Perhaps these characteristics also made The Neon Demon vulnerable to controversy. Both The Neon Demon and Lolita present themselves as an assault on reigning bourgeois sensibilities, and seek to instil a ‘sense of shock’ in the viewer – whether desired or not. Like Refn, Nabokov saw himself as an unburdened formalist: “style”, as he put it, “is my first and last possession To me, a novel owes its existence to the fact that it can provide what I shall, rudimentarily, call an ‘aesthetic pleasure’.” 2 Finally, both works also exist by grace of a certain sensationalism. Refn’s visual gymnastics find their equal in the inventive language games of the Russian Master, whose merciless attention for syntax set him apart from even the greatest of his contemporaries. Both Refn’s film and Nabokov’s novel are minutely composed, and deploy exuberant forms. Both also testify to a certain formal insolence. Both works tell of an enchanting, prepubescent girl, reluctantly drawn into the adult world – a world fascinated by youth, and, most importantly, by virginity. “Real Lolita-shit,” the owner of the motel mutters, overcome by his own sense of excitement.Īs a formalistic feast, Nabokov indeed seems a well-chosen reference point for The Neon Demon. The owner of the motel where Jesse has sought temporary refuge, informs her boyfriend that some other ‘young things’ are being housed in his highway-mansion amongst which, a thirteen-year old runaway. In one of the most revealing scenes of the film, Refn decides to disclose some of his artistic sources. The film has the compositional feats of a picture book: each scene is as a neatly chiselled miniature, populated by a set of fairy tale characters and playful stand-ins. By way of an abundant aestheticism, the director gives us a contemporary horror tale, which can ‘didactically’ inform us of the murderous character of the contemporary fashion world. On first sight, Refn’s film appears a grand statement. Like Cannes, it is a city obsessed by the promises of youth. The Neon Demon, courtesy of Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, tells the tale of Jesse, a young fashion model stranded on the sun-stricken beaches of Los Angeles. In June 2015, a work that also presented itself as that of a ‘conjurer’ premiered at France’s infamous Cannes Film Festival. Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book, has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interaction of Inspiration and Combination – which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.” 1 “Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What is the author’s purpose?” or still worse “What is the guy trying to say?”.

This handbook, as he saw it, would finally dispense of the idea that Lolita was a book which needed a handbook in the first place, since, as Nabokov put it, “Lolita is about Lolita” a point met with the usual sense of apprehension on behalf of literary scientists: Nabokov saw himself forced to supplement his ‘book’ with a ‘handbook’. What did he himself make of the many, many crimes accumulated in Lolita’s three-hundred pages? Clearly, Lolita required an extra declaration of intention on his behalf.

The neon demon screenplay online series#

After a series of sensational lawsuits in several Western countries – in which the book had been deemed ‘obscene’ and even ‘sacrilegious’ – Nabokov found himself in an ever more problematic predicament. In 1957, the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov decided to set the record straight on his recently published literary masterpiece Lolita. Everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself.