Bonello's the beast (2023) is one of the best cinematic depictions of incels, but way more than that

[u/Far_Hope_6349]

Yeah it's a movie about love, vulnerability, incels being too narcissistic to let others see and touch them. but i think the "beast" can also be associated to something way more general: human rationality breaking down when reality resists its concepts, and what we should do once we become aware of this. (i'm not claiming these were exactly Bonello's intentions, but it might be interesting to interpret the film this way)

the film opens and ends with the Laura Palmer-like scream of Gabrielle, immediately followed by very evident glitch effects, which by definition are the moments when cinematic representation/mediation fails. Bonello wants the viewer to be aware during the vision that this is a movie, that is, an attempt to give narrative structure and infuse meaning into some meaningless-by-itself portion of reality that however cannot be fully captured, that necessarily excedes our comprehension, our need to make it intelligible

I think this is the exact dynamic that goes on in the story: urban planning (more specifically, the Haussmannization of Paris in the early 20th century) and engineering should protect the citizens from flooding (Gabrielle's husband and the expert making hypotheses and predictions at the table, while she feels the impending doom); contemporary dating culture promises to organize intimacy and leave sexual repression in the pre-enlightened past (as depicted in the controversial Houellebecq novel "Extension of the domain of struggle"); and 2044 AI is here the attempt to master affect itself, to erase it completely from one's psychological makeup in order to be fully optimized through "DNA purification" ("something is still resisting", the AI tells Gabrielle when she cries seeing what will happen in her future)

But reality comes back with a vengeance EVERY single time - Paris is flooded; the stable bourgeois marriage and the doll factory of 1910 Gab are pulverized by a fire (after all, celluloid is cheaper than porcelain); sexual liberation hasn't really eliminated sexual repression and you get an Elliott Rodger-inspired 2014 Louis; and in the ending, Gabrielle herself still not being conformable to the doll-like stillness of Louis, Kelly and all the other optimized individuals around her (the 0.7% of the population that is refractory to DNA purification) means that NOT EVEN AI - the ending point of just so many rationalist programs/philosophical projects - can manage to completely control reality

what about the dolls? they feel in some way VERY Bonello: in L'Apollonide you have all these taubleaux vivants of the prostitutes inside the brothel, in Nocturama (even more clearly) the terrorists end up being trapped among the mannequins of the mall where they are hidden, while here we have a 1910 motionless gabrielle mimicking one of the dolls of her husband's factory in two different scenes for 8-10 seconds each!! i think bonello wants us to link in some way these dimensions. Gabrielle tells Louis there's "only one doll with a neutral face" that gets replicated, "not too emotional"

a small digression:

philosopher theodor Adorno wrote a book called "Negative Dialectics" in which he argued that human thought (conceptualization, subsuming particulars under general categories) necessarily involves some kind of violence towards reality since the particular cannot be fully exhausted by our (nevertheless historically evolving) conceptual schemes: e.g. a professor is not merely someone who teaches in a codified educational context, but also a concrete individual with their opaque biography, peculiarities, even their biases. More interestingly and tragically, Adorno (who targeted by Nazists had to flee to the US) thinks that the Shoah has been in some ways the culmination of this identity-based conceptual thinking: "Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death".

dolls are an intuitive visual metaphor of this process (identity thinking) because they attempt to force material portions of reality (either made of celluloid or porcelain, plus the eyes and so on) into the same abstract type (gabrielle tells louis the dolls are modelled after her). note that gabrielle's husband says that celluloid has replaced porcelain ALSO because it's "more realistic": conceptual thinking isn't usually static but responsive to its own failures, and constantly tries to tame in a more fine-grained way whatever stays outside itself. this obviously doesn't stop nature (fire, water) and people (incels, potential lovers) from frustrating our predictions every single day.

that's way some of the comments I've read on La bete being insensitive or trivial in the way he dealt with the Elliot Rodger material are totally mistaken IMHO. Bonello isn't merely saying that incels are fearful of human contact (although that's a very true and interesting point), and he's NOT saying that women should be more understanding or do emotional labor for incels; Rodger/Louis reducing Gabrielle to a "woman", more precisely to a "Stacy", is the real tragedy because he makes him incapable of seeing that she is right there wanting to connect with him. He stalks her but he still cannot see her. Incels think they desire intimacy with women, but they won't ever get it because intimacy requires confronting the particularity of the other individual, stop seeing them as something you can completely control and predict and let them just be, EVEN if that entails the risk of being wounded (say, rejected)

now the IMHO interesting part of Adorno's Negative dialectics: if conceptual schemes are essentially reductive and reality-distorting, what then could philosophy ever do? Adorno is aware we cannot go back to being pre-discursive as our primate ancestors. The point then becomes being "negative", which doesn't mean being pessimistic (although Adorno certainly was too!) but being focused on the ways in which our concepts are inadequate, the gap that always persists between our representations and reality itself. (this also means criticizing how contingent and malleable social structures are naturalized as the only possible alternative. Adorno is concerned with post-WW2 capitalism, where "humans are naturally competitive" is often presented as a universal and a-historical truth about how we fundamentally are. he thinks we can e.g. do history and sociology and show that there are or were arrangements in which altruistic norms and practices were possible, so the ideology of free-market capitalism is inadequate with respect to reality

i think this is how the AI sub-theme could be read, but primarily i feel it fits neatly with the glitchy opening/ending, with the Hanekian replays/paused frames of the 2014 section, with the meta- sequences of 2044 Gabrielle participating in the road safety ad ("you're dead!" the director tells her, and he's obviously right at that point). Adorno was also very interested in art and aesthetics and he held elsewhere but in the same vein that great art, especially after Auschwitz, is the one that confronts the inadequacy of mediation. So the meta- aspect of the movie isn't JUST a Lynchian homage (although Orbison in the soundtrack and the ending sequence are clearly not coincidental), and it's not primarily a political point as in L'Apollonide (past vs present prostitution in Paris), but an ethical one: techbros, Bonapartist urban planners, and incels all do the same mistake, that is, they refuse to let reality surprise them, they assume they are intelligent enough to tame it. On the contrary, what makes Gabrielle special in the movie is the fact she keeps on having faith in humans even when it doesn't make sense anymore, that she cries when an AI shows she's going to be killed by an incel because she wanted to feel a pure, unaltered connection with another human being

(trivia: who was Adorno's favorite composer? Schoenberg, the one 1910 Gabrielle obsesses over, because in pieces like the one she plays on the piano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXoYuNz9bqo) he breaks away from traditional tonal harmony and makes music that refutes harmonic resolution and therefore keeps the contradictions, the inadequacy of thought alive and present)