Useful Fictions

Bugonia (2025) by Yorgos Lanthimos

Among the classical myths of Greek antiquity is the story of the demigod Aristaeus. Known as the “pastoral” Apollo, he was celebrated for initiating a ritual often referred to as bugonia. It came about after Aristaeus noticed that his bees were slowly dying and asked the gods how to repopulate his hives. The answer required him to sacrifice several bulls, drain their blood, and leave their carcasses to decompose. Three days later, he returned to the altars and found new bees buzzing around the decomposing flesh. Such an ordeal was probably inspired by the ancient belief that living creatures could spontaneously arise from dead flesh – a notion that would only be disproven centuries later with the discovery of what was once invisible, microbes.

False beliefs and bees are precisely the subject of Greek director Yórgos Lánthimos’s latest, Bugonia, a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!. But unlike the ancient notion of bugonia – drawn from the direct observation of flies emerging from decaying flesh – the false beliefs of the film’s protagonist stem from the opposite impulse. For Teddy, a solitary worker and beekeeper, the world is not what it seems. Behind appearances lies a deeper truth, what he calls a “larger organizing principle” that explains everything: from his mother’s coma to the slow death of his bees. The cause of his despair is therefore outside of his control, in an economy run by large impersonal corporations. “We are not running the ship,” he told his cousin Don, “they are”.

But “they”, Teddy believes, are not just capitalists but aliens called Andromedans, who come from another planet to control humans. To negotiate the aliens retreat from earth, Teddy decides to abduct Michelle Fuller, the CEO of the pharmaceutical company he works for – and whom he believes to be a high-ranking Andromedan. Locked and tortured in a basement, she is ordered to arrange a meeting with the invaders before an upcoming lunar eclipse. The film then turns into a claustrophobic huis clos, formally intensified by the narrow ratio of the frame and the persistent use of close-ups during the dialogue scenes. The two characters clearly function as types of contemporary American society: a paranoid “deplorable” dressed in rags set against a successful, career-driven woman who is a master of public-relations doublespeak. He’s a “loser” and she’s a “winner”, as the film puts it. In this setting, communication between them is impossible. Teddy no longer gets his “news from the news” but from fringe websites and podcasts, while Michelle reads The New York Times and assumes he’s mentally ill. “I can’t change your mind”, she tells him, after realising that anything she says or does only confirms his conviction that she is indeed an alien.

The most surprising turn of the film comes with its final plot twist. In an unexpected turn of events, we learn that the aliens do, in fact, exist – and that what we had assumed were Teddy’s delusions, invented to cope with his tragic life, were actually real. Michelle, the character played by Emma Stone, is revealed to be the Andromedan Empress. She explains that her species created humankind, but that the “experiment” has clearly failed, given how violent and power-driven humans have become. The flaw, she says, lies in their “suicide gene”. To fix it, the Andromedans even tried to develop a treatment designed to rewire human DNA, the very same treatment that left Teddy’s mother in a comatose state. But after discovering that Teddy had tortured and killed dozens of other people, including two aliens, and that the project to change human nature had failed, Michelle returns to her mothership and decides to wipe out humanity.

The film obviously sets itself in a broader genre of conspiracy movies such as Alan Pakula’s 1974 The Parallax View, Philip Kauffman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and John Carpenter’s 1988 They Live. In such movies, aliens or conspirators are generally de-individualized so that they can function effectively as metaphors for “the system”. A way to see such movies is as an attempt to thematize conflict in late capitalism, meaning a contradiction that cannot express itself anymore in the terms of class war. For atomized workers, the conspiracy theory provides a “useful fiction” to understand the social totality itself. It is, as Fredric Jameson famously called it, “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age.” As Teddy himself declares in Bugonia, he is not an “activist” and there is no “movement”: he alone did “a shit ton of research” proving that “everything is linked.”

In an age when social fragmentation has dramatically intensified and the capacity of workers to act collectively has been radically undermined, conspiracy theories emerge as desperate attempts by powerless individuals to represent the abstract logic of capital. They are to be seen as a symptom of the fact that individuals are flooded with information yet lack a theory to make sense of the disparate set of events that shape their lives. As Theodor Adorno had himself observed while analysing the spread of astrology, advanced capitalist societies present “on the one hand, a wealth of material and knowledge, but the relationship is more one of formal order and classification than one which would open up the supposedly stubborn facts by interpretation and understanding.” Astrology, in other words, fills that void, offering a way to make sense of the “facts”. Jacques Rivette had once remarked that “the most crucial thing that’s happening to our civilization is that it is in the process of becoming a civilization of specialists”. “Each one of us”, he added, “is more and more locked into his own little domain, and incapable of leaving it”. In such a context, the task for mankind is precisely to work against this trend and try “to reassemble the scattered fragments of the universal culture that is being lost”. The conspiracy narrative in the movies of the seventies and eighties had from such a standpoint a double function: on one hand it represents a degraded form of class conflict in late capitalism; on the other, it indicates the narrative or film’s own attempt to rescue the very idea of totality. The hero typically assumes the role of detective, enabling the audience to imagine what it might mean to reassemble what has been fragmented. In other words, the film works against the logic of capital itself by allegorizing a sense of the whole.

But here is where Lánthimos seriously departs from such an ambition. The film’s structure inverts the usual logic: the final twist reveals that, rather than functioning as a metaphor for the social totality, the conspiracy refers only to itself – as an effect of the collapse of trust and the corruption of the public sphere by fake news. As Lánthimos told critics, “not much of the dystopia (…) is very fictional” but is rather “very reflective of the real world.” While the ending makes the conspiracy real, and therefore sets the movie within that genre, it ultimately serves an external purpose: to deceive the audience. Faithful to liberal platitudes about disinformation and polarization, Lánthimos uses the film as a moral device to confront us with our own prejudices. As he explained, it “challenges all these biases that we have about people, which is aided by technology and compartmentalization.” In other words, by making the conspiracy true, he wants us to recognize in ourselves the same psychological mechanisms that drive Teddy to believe in one. Thinking he was delusional exposes our own biases. But by doing so, rather than transcending a psychological account of our present (everything comes from our innate psychological biases and algorithms), the film embraces it.

Moreover, the opposition between Teddy, the lone character played by Jesse Plemons, and the alien serves an ambiguous purpose. On one hand, it clearly functions as a metaphor for class conflict in a demobilized society. On the other, Lánthimos undermines this very idea by depicting both characters as quite alike, in order to serve his own pessimistic message. Both are, in fact, cold-blooded creatures marked by a lack of empathy and remorse. Teddy chemically “castrates” himself to rid his mind of “psychic compulsions”, while Emma Stone’s character treats humans as mere lab rats.

The final scene – departing from the South Korean version where the whole planet is destroyed – shows a peaceful earth without living humans, accompanied by the 1962 song Where Have All the Flowers Gone? “When will they ever learn?” the lyrics ask, transforming what could have been a useful fiction about conspiracy and capitalism into a string of platitudes about human nature. Offering us a misanthropic yet incoherent ending as the very idea of a planet better off without humans is already a way to humanize it. In other words, to apply to it a properly human judgment. And here, perhaps, lie the true limits of Lánthimos’s cinema. His now characteristic aesthetic and commitment to the absurd generally functions as a way to conceal banalities one could buy at any airport bookstore. The visual overload, stylistic theatricality, over the top mise-en-scene hardly hide the fact that he doesn’t seem to have much to say. Extravagance is a poor alternative to originality.