Is Bug the Most Relevant Thriller Today?
If you want to know what is going on, you have to listen to me. You have to, because you don’t know the f***ing enormity of what we’re dealing with. May the twenty-ninth, 1954: a consortium of bankers, industrialists, corporate CEOs and politicians held a series of meetings over three days at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland. They drew up a plan for maintaining the status quo. It’s the way things are—the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They devised a plan to manipulate technology, economics, the media, population control, world religion, to keep things the way they are, and they have continued to meet once a year, every year, since the original meeting. Look it up.
Under their orders, the CIA had smuggled Nazi scientists into the States to work with the American military at Calspan, developing an inter-epidermal tracking microchip—a surveillance tool, a computer chip implanted in the skin of every human being born on this planet since 1982. An early test group for the prototype was the Peoples Temple, and when the Reverend Jim Jones threatened to expose them, he and every member of his church were assassinated. But it wasn’t enough to just to track people, to spy on them; they wanted control. They created the Intelligence Manned Interface Biochip, a subcutaneous transponder, a computer chip imprinted with living brain cells. They needed lab rats to test it, and they found us: me, in the Gulf, and another soldier working at Calspan at the time, Tim McVeigh.
You could be forgiven for thinking at first glance that I cribbed the above passage from a website dealing with contemporary politics—but no, it’s a section of dialogue from the climax of Bug, director William Friedkin’s unnerving and vastly underrated 2006 picture derived from the acclaimed 1996 play by Tracy Letts. The man who unleashes that torrent of conspiracy-speak during the film’s surreal climax is Michael Shannon, the intense and talented actor who repeats onscreen the role he had originated on the stage.
Shannon plays Peter Evans, a disturbed young man who may or may not be a Gulf War veteran—but he is not the main character of this tightly knit, small-ensemble piece. That role is occupied by Ashley Judd, who plays Agnes White, an Oklahoma cocktail waitress living in fear of her abusive ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr.). Residing in a run-down motel, Agnes is harassed by phone calls where a scary chasm of silence opens up after her repeated requests for the caller to identify himself. She’s certain the calls are coming from her ex, but there is only silence, over and over again. Angered, she issues threats of her own. There is no response. She is sick of having these one-way conversations, and fatefully, that opens her up to the influence of Peter, the quiet young man introduced to her by an affectionate coworker (Lynn Collins) at the bar where she works.
Having spent so much energy constructing a protective cocoon around her existence, Agnes makes the surprising choice of allowing this near-total stranger to spend the night. It’s easy to see, though, why these two characters would begin to bond. They are both wounded, isolated people. These are people whose lives have been damaged so deeply you imagine that the majority of their more well-balanced acquaintances long ago grew weary of their company. Too much pain on display. Too much of an obligation to support their weaknesses, eccentricities or grievances. To Agnes, Peter feels like someone safe—polite, willing to listen, perceptive about her. She thinks his self-described talent to “pick up on things,” things “not apparent,” is a gift.
Peter and Agnes’ ex soon meet one another, and it becomes clear to Peter that her loutish former spouse represents a physical threat to his new friend. After having spent a chaste night in her motel room on the couch, Peter returns to find that Agnes’ ex has knocked her around. Agnes gives herself over to Peter completely, and their night of lovemaking is the last gasp of genuine bliss either of them will know.
The morning comes, and Peter begins to notice an infestation of bugs. Agnes doesn’t see them, but he does. His certainty is enough to convince her. The problem grows worse over time, and Peter begins to piece together their predicament by manufacturing an increasingly dangerous new reality. Gradually shutting themselves off, the lovers take more radical steps to understand their hazardous situation and protect themselves. The result? They spin into a fever dream of paranoia, with violence and death the inevitable results.
Friedkin—best known, of course, for directing genre classics The French Connection and The Exorcist—doesn’t like to call Bug strictly a horror film, claiming that the oversimplified demands of a modern movie marketing campaign necessitated latching onto one aspect of the film to promote. Friedkin prefers to see the production not only as a horror picture, but also as an amalgam of melodrama, black comedy, romance, and adventure story. He’s right that Bug stubbornly evades simple definition, and he could have added “political satire” to his list of categories for how prescient the movie has become. “There’s a sucker born every minute” was coined in the 19th century, but P.T. Barnum’s admonition has rarely seemed more apt than now, when the cottage industry of rabble-rousing has enjoyed unprecedented expansions of speed and reach.
It’s tempting to see only Agnes as the “victim” of Peter’s monstrous acts, but the observant viewer will perceive that he deserves compassion, too. How did he come to this poisonous state of mind? He is obviously not an unintelligent man. How could a rational person become so violently unhinged? It’s vividly apparent that Peter believes what he believes; he’s no cynical manipulator. He walks the walk. At one time or another, though, we can imagine that he was probably in far greater command of his faculties, and a much better judge of what constituted objective reality. It’s likely he didn’t arrive at this state of unreason on his own. He was surely schooled to it—pitched a set of menacing ideas cobbled together from enough truth that they became as legitimate and self-evident as a child’s math equation scribbled on a chalkboard.
What’s truly frightening, indeed, is how readily you can pick out tiny nuggets of fact buried in his tapestry of threats. The movie shows us how it becomes possible for someone of reasonable intellect to fall prey to false visions of the world that sound like “common sense”—because everyday life is busy enough without having to perform exhausting due diligence on every story you hear from someone who convinces you they have your best interests at heart. Weakened and made vulnerable by the hard life, Agnes finds it easy enough to draw Peter close to her as a savior. Close enough for him to infect her with his peculiar brand of madness and drive her towards total destruction.
Bug is a brutal shocker that matters, and deserves attention from both discerning buffs of the macabre and anyone looking for daring cinema that has something to say about the way things are right now—about a genuinely chilling, new status quo that urgently needs breaking apart.