Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or if there even is such a thing as a thing to say.
– ‘How to Become a Writer: Or, Have You Earned This Cliché?’, Lorrie Moore
Sam Levinson is a second-time director and a third-time writer. In interviews, he wants you to know, also, that he is a husband and a father: while his wife was pregnant, he philosophised about children and the future, and then conceived of Assassination Nation. In interviews, he wants you to know, by the way, that he has done his homework: Assassination Nation is (a bit) about the way in which adolescents interact with their MacBooks and their iPhones, so he lurked on Instagram and the like, for research. More than anything, though, he wants you to know that with Assassination Nation, he has a thing to say.
In a story copied directly from the headlines of today, data of around half of the people in an American town is leaked by an anonymous hacker. Salacious browsing histories and felonious photo libraries exposed (almost all Lolita-centric), scandal is superseded by chaos, in a rapid chain reaction. Set somewhere by the name of Salem, the explosive violence of Assassination Nation is inflicted on two witches of the 21st century. Lily, played by Odessa Young, is hunted as a ‘homewrecker’ and a ‘whore’, following an affair with a much older married man (in the grossly misogynistic trope of the sexy babysitter, Lily once took care of his daughter, too). Bex, played by Hari Nef, is almost hanged for transgenderism. Other than an enviable ability to take an aesthetically attractive nude, the only sorcery of the high-school girls, here (on the cusp of consent), is exploration of the unknown: their aberrant, nascent sexualities. In a far cry from a film like Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), which displays a real affection for the eponymous enchantress, Assassination Nation eventually dismisses Lily and Bex, instead congratulating Lily’s little brother: with the revelation that he mined all that incriminating information “for the lulz”, he steals a gleeful ending.
Assassination Nation poses, beneath a modish banner of empowerment, as a #feminist revenge flick – complete with ~iconic outfits to source now, in time for Hallowe’en. But before it allows the girls guns, and a viral video, too, we watch titillating image after titillating image of Odessa Young being beaten, of Hari Nef being humiliated, as men ashamed of their spilled secrets go rogue to torture the girls. Unlike Paul Verhoeven’s rape revenge tale, Elle (2016), in which the image of Isabelle Huppert as a victim is limited to the prologue, the image of Odessa Young as a victim, of Hari Nef as a victim, is fetishised again and again. If the armament of each character at the movie’s climax is intended as a victory for women, then, as a victory, it is pyrrhic – won at too extortionate a cost.
Not that we were not alerted to the temper of the movie, however. At the start, “a few trigger warnings” – roughly twenty-five – flash up in the font of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). Watch out! There will be racism and sexism. Watch out! There will be homophobia and transphobia. Watch now! An illustrative montage accompanies the trigger warnings, thus undermining them. And so ‘swearing’ comes with a fun utterance of fuuuuck, and so ‘abuse’ comes with someone striking a girl across the face, and so on. To lighten the load, though – because isn’t bullying and stuff a drag? – the odd woke buzzword (‘the male gaze’) and a gag (‘giant frogs’). Hence the list of trigger warnings – a provocative poking at and promise of trauma – succeeds in rendering the notion of trigger warnings ridiculous. In a manner most redolent of Angela Nagle’s sneering, sensationalist writings in Kill All Normies (2017), Assassination Nation depends excessively on contemporary colloquialisms and shock statements for a cheap thrill, a cheap thrill masquerading as critique.
Like Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017), it acts additionally as a parody of mob mentality, in which the tools of critique comprise the accelerated escalation of mob mentality, itself. I would take no issue, were it not for the fact that each parody pivots on the brutalisation of the bodies of women, in the service of spectacle. I find neither immersion nor imitation inherently flawed (I adore, for instance, Lana del Rey, an avatar via which Lizzy Grant ironises femininity in various, varying incarnations, with care and heartfelt sentiment) – however, Levinson’s parody, like Aronofsky’s, operates vampirically on the bodies of others. He has not earned this parody, himself.
How, then, to become a writer, a director of the extreme events of the present? As Childish Gambino, Donald Glover in ‘This is America’ (2018) caricatures America’s fascination with black-on-black violence graphically, gruesomely, but, crucially, positions his own body within the frame. That is, he does not outsource the risks of satire; he carries the risks, himself. Meanwhile, Aronofsky and Levinson throw women under the bus to deliver their sermons on society from a safe distance – in control, behind the camera. In spite of all his philosophising, all of this homework, then, Levinson’s parody veers very quickly away from critique, into complicity. As such, Assassination Nation is not the critical, feminist movie it thinks it is – it is post-critical, post-feminist, in the worst sense of each term.
Laura Staab is a PhD student in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her current research entails reading the moving image for forms of the feminine, via the poetics of Hélène Cixous.
