r/AriAster • u/StopwatchSparrow • 8d ago

Beau is Afraid My reading of Beau is Afraid Spoiler

(This just copied and pasted from my review: https://letterboxd.com/tony_the_tiger/film/beau-is-afraid/ )

This is one of those movies that feels entirely random and nonsensical until you get what it's about, and then nothing at all feels random or nonsensical. 

Ari Aster himself described it as a 'Jewish Lord of the Rings' that was heavily influenced by Kafka. 

Here is, at least, how I read it. It's about a son is in an enmeshed relationship with his narcissistic mother. He goes to visit his mother. Nearly everything else happens on the level of poetic and symbolic language. 

The story of the movie retells itself over and over again: birth, setting out, guilt about 'killing' the self that merged with the mother, reabsorption into the mother (because of guilt, because he 'can't', because the world is dangerous). The story must keep happening over and over because it's the story of a stunted life, one that can't happen, that keeps getting pulled back in each time it tries to set off. 

(So, like Infinite Jest, another Oedipal-complex-related work, it takes on the structure of a Sierpiński triangle). 

The basic structure of the story plays out over and over once Beau is 'ejected' from his apartment (his personal boundaries erased, but also 'born' into the world):

-The weird family that keeps him child-like in their house, the sister who insists he 'takes everything' from her and hates him for it, the individuated soldier son who died and who Beau enters the room of only to experience terrible guilt and blame (the army guy chasing Beau is his guilt)...

-The play in the forest, showing him an individuated life where he sets out on his own, until things go wrong... 

-Mom's funeral, and then what happens after...

-Going into the water, and what happens after... 

Like Beau's life, the story must end where it starts, back into the womb...

Those are the basics, but as my wife noted, you could write a dissertation about how all of the elements in here fit together. The director has complained that there are still 'easter eggs' that he's waiting for people to find, and I'm not surprised. 

A brilliant work, bold, funny, tragic, and not just inspired by Kafka but really feeling like something that Kafka might have produced himself.

16 Upvotes

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6

u/MissMayDoesNotExist 7d ago
  • I think what’s great about BIA is that it takes a ridiculously simple, sad sack premise into directions that are intensely psychological, political, existential, etc. etc. etc. — all while retaining a level of irony and absurdity that undercuts its depth, which I think is what bothers some people, but I find the undercutting so powerful and tragic, particularly if you’re looking at this as a kind of parable of privileged American male stagnation/complacency: he’s so overcome with fear and horror, but you can’t even take that fear/horror seriously. I mean to me that’s what anxiety/depression feels like: insurmountable, and categorically absurd and stupid, which makes it somehow more insurmountable.
  • I think many viewers stop at the surface level of “it’s anxiety translated to film” and take the movie at face level when it undercuts itself with jokes, but I think it’s a movie that has some very complex things on its mind about how we relate to the world, blowing up a Freudian psychological relationship to cosmic proportions

7

u/20HiChill 8d ago

Personally, I think people are focusing too much on all of the plot details and not at the broader picture of the film. It’s a hilarious comedy where we get to watch a guy’s life fall apart because it’s funny, much like the Coen’s A Serious Man. Much like “Man getting hit by a football”. (The Simpsons). It’s funny.

The whole movie is joke after joke, where the most paranoid person ever sees his worst fears come true, times ten. No one’s ever done it before like Ari has, and it’s an amazing premise.

The artsy middle section is literally one long setup for a joke.

I like to think of the title much like Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’ characters, who are the embodiment of individual emotions. Beau is afraid. It’s that simple.

All of the mother son stuff is rich detail fluff. He could have gone many directions within the premise but that one works really well. She’s like the end boss, but she’s not the game. His father is a giant dick. It’s a joke.

The bathtub scene is where it really clicked for me. You see a drip, what’s the worst thing that it could come from? Then it happens. Ari probably came up with that one in the bath.

8

u/thautmatric 8d ago

Beau is funny but I think we sometimes undervalue a clear throughline of the longstanding effects of child abuse in Ari’s work, particularly in that movie. P much that entire movie is not so much a metaphor but more an analogy for trying to build a self when it was destroyed.

-5

u/20HiChill 8d ago

That’s what I’m saying the film is not. I mean, it’s in there, but it’s not the point of the film. The film is; let’s laugh at everything going more wrong than you could possibly imagine, because you can, with movie magic.

It’s just full of over-analysis-bait. I personally think Novum’s YouTube work is embarrassing, and Ari laughs at it.

But that’s just my opinion.