I recently stumbled upon Ari Aster’s recent Beau is
Afraid while perusing Netflix in the increasingly difficult search for
something entertaining. In it, Joaquin Phoenix brilliantly brings the titular
hero, Beau, into vivid relief within a story-telling structure that never
admits any of its action could take place in the same world as any viewer. This
approach passes for surrealism while nodding to hyperrealism. Nothing in the
film offers a handle, and anything that might offer hope of a way into the
drama sets up failure. The viewer can trust nothing, not a scene, not a character,
not a mood, not a spoken word. The movie simply happens, and that comes in at 3
hours. Lasciate ogne Speranza. Nonetheless, Beau is Afraid remarkably
entertains, exasperates, abuses expectations and certainly challenges. Among
other things, this film is Aster’s presentation of hell, a time-honored theme,
and the last of the four last things that grates in the Catholic imagination
(death, judgement, heaven, hell). The final scene, in which Beau traverses his
Acheron and then faces his trial, judgement and sentence, certainly tempts the
viewer into a theological arena of thought.
Beau’s hell is knit together with incessant assaults,
both physical and mental. The perennial victim, nothing neutral happens to him.
A neighbor blames him for blasting music while Beau himself tries to get some
sleep before he must catch an early flight back home, where his mother awaits
his return so that they might share in his father’s Jahrzeit, the one-year
anniversary of his death. As he attempts to leave for the airport, his luggage
and housekeys disappear from the entrance to his apartment while he briefly abandons
them to retrieve a forgotten item. Even in a therapy session, his therapist
assaults him with the idea that he might wish his mother dead. No safe place
for Beau, ever, anywhere. He becomes a victim of violence when a serial killer
stabs him, and a truck hits him as he flees. Rather than calling an ambulance or
taking him to the hospital, the occupants of the truck take Beau instead to
their home, where they care for him during a convalescence that continues when
he leaves their house, which apparently doubles as an asylum.
He learns of his mother’s death by a horrific accident—a chandelier crushes her head into an indecipherable mess. Of course, dear old mom has faked her death, paying her loyal housekeeper to die in her place. I could go on, but the relentless sequences of misery must land in a viewer’s lap, where they can enter the experience of those beyond the fourth wall, a place made distinctly unsafe by the film’s treacherous landscapes. Nonetheless, mom's death heightens the imperative to return home, as Jewish observance, with its attendant ritual rooted in the Torah, requires a prompt burial, which mom has stated cannot take place in Beau's absence. These elements of Jewish practice open Beau's world to a strange theology, a godless one for sure, but a driver of the action.
Without further piecemealing of the plot, why “hell”
and not simply cinematic effect? Aster has created a very aggressive world, one
the film itself cannot contain. Every laugh (and there are laughs) indicts the
laugher. Everything that promotes the comic implicates the viewer, who must own
every response. This interesting effect underscores a key feature of hell,
ownership. The viewer knows she emerges from Beau is Afraid intact and
unscathed, precisely because she owns the emotions passing through this roller-coaster
ride. Beau remains in hell because he owns nothing, never has and never will. He
refuses complicity in anything, and he lives his life as sponge that soaks up
phenomena, content to experience only soaking. His shallow emotional
constitution has a short menu of responses: outraged, yes; enraged, not so much
(except for that one time with mom, and even that was castrating).
And that, I think, is what the brown recluse spider
thing is all about. A sign on a wall in Beau’s apartment building informs the
tenants that the creature lurks somewhere in the structure. We never really
know just where Beau lives, where he travels. Does the spider live in its
natural range, or did someone bring him into a region outside it? The fairly
famous arachnid gets an awful lot of blame for lots of injuries to people for
which it is actually blameless; how like the Oedipal thing Aster tries to pawn
off on the unwary viewer! Anyone coming away from Beau is Afraid with a smug
Freudian solution to the hero’s dilemma, has not paid enough attention during a
taxing 3 hours. Just too easy to blame the spider. Anyone confident that she
has actually met Beau’s mother needs to check again, as the cinematic ravings
of the film have lulled her into poor judgement. The fault, dear Beau, lies not in our mothers but
in ourselves that we have let life pass us by, even as we have allowed it to
bludgeon us at every opportunity.
A life untouched by ownership of self can plunge us to
the gates of hell, and all who enter there must abandon all hope. The human
person seeks authenticity or stays mired in the adolescence of irresponsibility.
Dante, not to mention Heidegger, was right, and so, too, Aster. Could there be
any doubt we travel guideless through hell after the grin on the therapist’s
face makes its appearance in Patti LuPone’s house, a grin that Mephistopheles
himself would die for? Man, did Stephen Mckinley Henderson earn his paycheck
for that or what? But that’s another piece…
