Teddy’s conspiratorial thinking therefore exposes, in its excesses, the leaps of faith required of all belief, especially those related to the future.
Every one of us believes in something. Whether religiously inflected, scientifically based, altruistically inclined, or nihilistically oriented, a belief system undergirds our perspective of the world. But when do these beliefs turn reality itself into a subjective construction verging on delusion? Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia sketches a subversive and unsettling portrait of the contingency of one’s worldview through the story of a disenfranchised assembly-line worker, Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons). Before we learn about his day job loading boxes at pharmaceutical megacorp Auxolith, we are immersed in his inner world, where a delusional self-empowerment steers his life and that of his autistic cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis). Facing the soul-crushing grind of capital, Teddy and Don have attempted to make sense of their unfair living conditions by subscribing to an ornate conspiracy theory—one that understands the world as we know it to be controlled by an alien race called Andromedons. In an attempt to wrest control both for his life and for the world, Teddy has kidnapped the company’s CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), who he believes is an Andromedon leader disguised as a human.
Almost benevolently intent on ridding the world of its incumbent “death spiral,” Teddy has committed his down-trodden life to YouTube rabbit holes rationalizing the existence of these extraterrestrials. An unconscious rectification of the injustices he and his family have faced at the hands of Michelle’s pharmaco-fascism, Teddy externalizes his personal indignation toward a more universal plight by torturing and holding her captive. His own perceived mental clarity due to a deliberate chemical self-castration allows him to see through “the bullshit,” identifying Michelle’s biochemical autocracy as alien in and of itself—its symptomatic exploitation is, to him, something that could not be of this world. In response to the Auxolith CEO’s perceived global wrath, he hopes to teleport with Michelle to the Andromedon mothership to negotiate her and her fellow aliens’ removal from earth.
By setting these narrative gears in motion, the latest Lanthimos installment (produced by Ari Aster) directly asks us to take conspiratorial thought seriously—not in order to humanize the often-discriminatory plight of the Right, nor to condescendingly sympathize with someone that cannot identify confirmation bias. Instead, we are asked to approach Teddy as a subject stripped down to the bare bones of needing meaning, someone desperately reaching out toward a semblance of something, anything, that would explain away the tragedy of having their life stolen by extractive capital gain. Bugonia details its protagonist’s descent into conspiratorial echo chambers that serve not only as a distraction from the perils of his everyday life, but also provide him with the hope of another possible world that makes more sense to him. This drive for change reaches its apogee when Teddy and Don entrap Michelle, which we later discover is their response to the exploitative Auxolith medical trial Teddy’s mother participated in (unsuccessfully) for financial compensation. Firm in his belief of Michelle’s literal inhumanity causing the death of his mother as well as the downfall of the human race at large, he demands that her species depart from Earth so everyone can go back to living without the chaos and suffering he attributes to Andromedon intervention.
Teddy and Don’s equation of a domineeringly evil girlboss with a surveillant alien matriarch is absurd, yes, but the conviction with which Teddy pursues his belief is of particular interest to me, more so than debunking the credibility of his claims. Focalizing Teddy’s conviction rather than the content of his conspiratorial beliefs only intensifies the intriguing quality of the film’s ending, which (spoiler alert) reveals that Michelle in fact was an alien all along. In this way, the confirmation of Teddy’s conspiratorial hysteria escapes a rather facile dismissal of echo chambering thought, internet-based theorizations that deviate from scientific fact, or the confirmation of one’s outlandish biases. Instead, when Teddy ratifies his own heroism by holding a vital piece of information that would have saved humanity (yes, all humans on Earth die in the film’s end), we are left with the notion that conspiracy is perhaps in closer proximity to our lived experience than we would like to accept. Put differently, if you believe in something enough, the very metric by which truth determines reality becomes ontologically fraught. Teddy’s conspiratorial thinking therefore exposes, in its excesses, the leaps of faith required of all belief, especially those related to the future. This especially includes the perceivably empirical pursuit of pharmaco-capitalism that undergirds the “reality” of Michelle’s company. If Michelle, like Teddy, is able to convince herself that what she is doing is right for society, even after the multi-millions in profit at the cost of risky medical trials on disenfranchised workers and their families, maybe our very own humanistic epistemologies geared toward trusting a greater good are not so far from conspiratorial formations.
This parity between both Michelle and Teddy’s utopic approaches opens up my wider point about what Bugonia shows us regarding the structure of belief and its relation to truth. Bugonia illustrates the shifting nature of the very grounds upon which we assume truth to be stable, causing our systems of meaning-making to slip and fall at any moment. Lanthimos leads us here through a structural emphasis on dialogue: the film’s two central protagonists attempting to convince one another of their respective positions. Teddy presents his version of the truth to Michelle, who feigns bewilderment, recognizing that she must accommodate the insanity of his claims in order to escape captivity. She reasons with him, pointing to the resources at her disposal that could leverage a negotiation until she realizes Teddy’s underlying motive. Teddy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone) was a participant in Auxolith’s clinical trials for a drug that left her indefinitely comatose— whether or not Teddy will explicitly acknowledge it, Michelle’s capture is retribution for this traumatic moment. When Michelle later wields this information to further exploit Teddy’s trauma, eventually convincing him to poison his mother to death with antifreeze disguised as an antidote to her unconscious state, Michelle leans into his fabrication of the truth further by embracing the role of the alien carved out for her to destabilize his argument from the other side.
To escape Teddy’s basement, Michelle masterfully manipulates the situation by playing into Teddy’s beliefs. In turn, her perceived acceptance of his conspiratorial reality heeds his delusion and confronts him with a threatening “what now?” With Teddy visibly disoriented by the newfound accuracy of his once clandestine argument, Michelle has gained the upper hand, proving that Teddy did not think she would reveal herself this early, if at all. He hesitantly moves forward with phase two of his plan (the ascent to the mothership), which Michelle explains happens through teleportation via the closet of her Auxolith office initiated by a 58-digit code punched into a calculator. But the moment Teddy is supposed to get beamed up, a bomb he secretly strapped to his own chest activates. It is unclear whether it was triggered accidentally or if Teddy detonated it on purpose. Either way, the bomb was meant to ensure Michelle didn’t trick him, even if at the cost of his own explosive dismemberment. His grisly death (or is it suicide?) mirrors the death of his co-conspirator Don earlier in the film, who shot himself the moment Michelle convinced him that he would be brought to the spaceship with her.
Bugonia’s conflation of leaving Earth with death or suicide is arguably one of the only anchoring “truths” we are offered as viewers of this film. Though outrageously impractical, the means by which Teddy believes the mothership is accessed are followed through with a deep conviction: both his own and on the part of the film. He is indeed on the precipice of departing the planet, finally, but not in the way he desires. There is no ascent to a galactic spaceship, but there is a departure from an earthbound form of existence—that is, his own death. The conundrum we face at this point in the narrative is an ambiguity surrounding the agency of the killing, unsure whether it was accidental or intentional on behalf of Teddy. For me, his increasing anxiety as he gets closer to beaming up speaks to an unanticipated unraveling of his plan—the destabilization produced by finding out that one might have been right all along. With Don now dead, he starts to acknowledge and realize the silliness of Michelle’s spaceship activation, which reveals to him the earlier interpretive leaps he had to make in order to sustain his own belief.
What I read from this moment is that Teddy’s encounter with the unraveling of his own conspiratorial certainty pushes him to die by suicide rather than return to a place of contradiction or uncertainty. This importantly adds color to the film’s characterization of belief: when belief is stretched so far out of proportion that one cannot recognize the absurdity of an office calculator serving as a remote activator for an astral teleportation device, the situation at hand clearly goes beyond rational thought. As such, when Teddy closes the closet door, cutting the audience off from the visible anxiety he wears on his face, I believe there is a moment in which he concedes to the frailty of his conspiracy, using death by suicide to make permanent the world he built for himself and Don, as well as the vengeance he sought for his mother.
Death here, therefore, sets into relief the stakes of the film’s rather ambiguous relationship between reality and belief. But what remains consistent throughout this ambiguity is the very fact that we are all going to die, whether you are a staunch realist or a flouncy ideologue. The inevitability of death operates within the nexus of the true and the false as a temporal boundary that must be exceeded in order to sustain one’s version of the truth—in other words, ideology, as that which subtends conspiratorial belief, requires a commitment to something abstract that expands beyond the material conditions of the body. If you believe that there is something more to the life you are living, you might then consider the fact that death operates as a kind of confirmation of your belief by forcefully cutting off your access to anything that could materially and substantially convince you otherwise. Relinquishing the constraints that prohibit a full ascent to one’s ideology (something akin to transubstantiation) is the logical result of a belief pushed beyond the limits of reality. When Teddy brings along Don’s deceased body to the teleportation machine, he demonstrates just how convinced he is that life is different up there, so much so that it exceeds the physical terms of life down here. His commitment to his mythology transcends any rational, fact-based logic that would render his life on Earth sensible.
A commitment to a belief that wards off the inevitability of death as such recalls what Kaja Silverman terms a “dominant fiction.” Construed as a representational system through which subjects create meaning, the dominant fiction is an ideological image or identity around which a sense of reality coheres. Other ideologies can exist alongside the dominant fiction and even counter it, but they vary in believability based on their perceived proximity to or distance from a primary axis of truth. This axis is reinforced at an individual level by a subject’s own sense of reality, even if that operates in opposition to a more collective dominant fiction that undergirds societal norms at a wider scale. If we understand Teddy’s belief in the existence of the Andromedon species to be the position of his own dominant fiction, we can see how the seeming farcicality of actions like shaving Michelle’s head and covering her body in antihistamine lotion do not matter to him. The inextricability of his dominant fiction from the axis of truth warps any sense of objectivity or rationality that would oppose this behavior. When an individual’s dominant fiction is oppositional or conspiratorial like this, it allows for a rereading of any intervening material through the rubric of that constructed truth.
The strength of the dominant fiction is not only its perceived alignment with truth, but its ability to move beyond substance—that is, it functions in an ideological realm that is decisively not material, which qualifies the practical means by which we try to reach an ideology as twisted, absurd, and irrational. The moment Teddy and Don are forced to confront the likely impossibility of their dominant fiction, the “unreality” of their ascent to space, they die to sustain their belief rather than reckon with the painful possibility that it is false.
But Bugonia quickly destabilizes that very reading by confirming that the entirety of their illogical behaviors and theorizations of alien life were in fact “real.” Beyond reinforcing the malleability of truth claims, how do we reconcile this seismic shift? At the end of the film, Michelle ostensibly ascends to the mothership by traveling through the office closet controlled by the calculator remote control. After arriving in the Andromedon throne room, she convinces her royal cabinet to eternally condemn the human race. So, Teddy and Don were “right,” but they do not live to see it. And, in the film’s end, all human life is destroyed anyway, deemed too self-destructive by the Andromedon court to be allowed to continue.
The final act’s whiplash illustrates the difficulty of choosing one’s own reality without succumbing to the traps of self-sabotage that come with the variable consistency of truth claims. How do you disavow someone’s argument when what they are offering sounds better than what you have now? Of course, I am not saying that we should all devoutly commit to whatever delicious conspiracy comes across our TikTok explore page next. But, rather, we could begin to consider how the nature of rational, logical, and “real” truth is itself contingent and is perhaps constituted by a mythological belief that there is always something better out there, even if there is not. This focus on a perfected future that is not here yet, however, is also the last nail in the coffin for humans who are too self-concerned to keep the Earth alive—cue all animals (and bees!) roaming freely at the film’s several closing tableaus of deceased human bodies sprawled about. The cost of our future-oriented beliefs is a destructive impetus that is not only turned toward ourselves, but toward the planet too.
Teddy and Don’s deaths can therefore be seen as absolute figurations of a devout commitment to one’s delusions, commitment to such an extent that the prospect of disproof is unbearable. When they are forced to reckon with this intolerability, they resort to an inter- and intra-personal violence that they construe as noble and revolutionary. Once confirmed that these delusions were in fact “real,” their plight points to the notion that truth is not something that can objectively stabilize an ideology nor its corresponding conspiratorial expression. Instead, the radically contingent nature of truth makes an infinite amount of realities possible, including one in which an alien race prevails over the future of our species. What I take from Bugonia is therefore not an endorsement of delving forth into conspiracy, but rather thinking about how the indiscernible positionality of truth can reconfigure how we extract meaning from a violently oppressive, hypercapitalist existence. In other words, maybe we can productively contend with the film’s suggestion that meaning can be drawn out through a devotion to one’s beliefs that verges on the excessive in order to conceal the inherent futility of being alive. There is a bliss, a jouissance, an ecstasy to one’s willful ignorance becoming an ideology—which in Teddy’s case, is the only thing that makes both living and dying worthwhile.
Marcus Prasad is a Ph.D. Candidate at McGill University focusing on psychoanalysis, sexuality, and their relationships to film theory and form. He is currently interested in a visual ethics of jouissance, and listening exclusively to Sabrina Carpenter.
Article Thumbnail Photo: A drawing of Alexander Pope in his grotto, ca. 1730 via Public Domain Review