Fear and Groaning in the American City
On Beau Is Afraid and paranoia-as-infantilization
Beau, ever a man of the times, is afraid. The third feature film from Ari Aster, the A24 golden boy whose first two (ostensibly) horror movies helped launch the production company into its pole position afront the moodboard-industrial-complex, follows a bumbling, pathetic Joaquin Phoenix across an internal odyssey that lands somewhere between sincerely entertaining and unacceptably navel-gazing.1 Beau Is Afraid is ambitious, even if it does not chart an entirely untread course. Unlike Hereditary and Midsommar, it will not lend itself to readymade memeing, group Halloween costumes, or universal acclaim. It’s something new for Aster - not prestige horror, an aesthetic that has well run its course, but a psychoanalytical sprawl most obviously in the tradition of a Charlie Kaufman. It’s more realized than Kaufman’s widely-loathed I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, but similar enough to earn its fair share of dismissal.
Beau Is Afraid is a personal film - if this is not made apparent through its flashing Oedipal markers, then it will be through Aster’s equally obvious press tour. It remains worth engaging with because Aster’s - and by extension, Beau’s - psychoses and paranoias are not solipsistic. The movie is best at its outset, no matter Aster’s intentions. It’s far more interesting to watch a paranoiac wrestle the world around him than his mother.
Aster’s stand-in, Phoenix’s Beau, is a pathetic man. He appears to have amounted to nothing, despite the fact of his mother being a CEO at a wildly successful medical corporation.2 His only acquaintances seem to be his therapist, his mother, and his landlord, each of whom resent him for different reasons and to different extents. He is sexually impotent at least in part due to his belief that his father died at the point of climax, a trait he has been led to believe is a genetic curse; he keeps a polaroid of a young girl he met on a cruise in his bedside table; it’s all very sad. Perhaps most importantly, Beau lives in a comically shithole apartment in a caricature of a shithole city.
One of Beau Is Afraid’s earliest and most impressive successes is its rendering of the modern city to a paranoiac. Beau, like any adult dependent entirely upon their mother for care, connection, and money, is afraid. We meet his fear in the city. Beau’s block is a hellhole - think Mad Max meets the old Times Square; think what Michelle Tandler imagines she sees walking through the Tenderloin. Beau appears to be the only character other than a stern bodega owner who is not hopped up and manic. Danger is lurking. Naked men dance in the streets; a man tattooed to his eyeballs chases Beau into his apartment complex; a serial stabber is identified on the local news first and foremost by being circumcised. To Beau’s left, people fuck as if out of obligation at an establishment called “Erections Ejections;” across his window you can see a quite sincere abolitionist artwork amidst the pity of it all.
Aster’s city is horrifying, which makes it important that he plays it for laughs. Beau bumbling through this city from hell - a saga that sees the masses crawl into his home and desecrate it and which ens with him being stabbed and hit by a car - is perhaps the most enjoyable sequence of the film’s three hours. Aster tells us that Beau is a whimpering mess at his therapy appointment, but he shows it far more effectively in how Beau sees his city. Beau’s is a uniquely modern, uniquely liberal pathology - he lacks all of the right wing, libidinous Taxi Driver rage, but is rather the butt of a sad slapstick, the sap who thinks all the right things but is rendered too afraid to leave his apartment lest he is violated. To Beau sex is rendered deadly, desire ravenous, care tucked away in a mansion in the suburbs. The only thing standing between him and escape are the monsters around him and his mother’s credit card being mysteriously declined.
Beau, like anybody afraid of the city, retreats to suburbia. He appears, like many before him, traumatized and without any recollection of how he woke up in a bed surrounded by K-Pop posters. Beau’s surrogate suburban parents live in a picturesque and brilliantly tacky home, where they guzzle pills, foster the objects of their guilt (both Beau, whom they hit with a car, and Jeeves, a bulldog-cum-veteran alight with PTSD from having shot his entire troop in Caracas), and obsessively remember their son who died at war. Beau’s suburbia, too, is a hell, albeit one marked by a different set of pathologies. Beau’s suburbs are overmedicated, surveilled, uncannily aestheticized, and haunted by the war machines that sprung them into existence. His time in the suburbs is best marked by his relationship with the women around him: his adoptive mother, Grace, who begins something of a tense flirtation with him in a clearly de-sexed attempt to recreate her son, and Toni, his adoptive sister who torments Beau one eyeball and shriek at a time. In Toni, the pathetic Beau meets a person who has fully internalized that which the suburbs have to offer - a teenage girl who has accepted as the horizons of possibility a life marked by bullying, driving around aimlessly, and getting fucked up.
Beau is exiled from the suburbs when Toni, she who understands the vacuousness of suburban life, destroys herself. Like anybody who no longer belongs on an idyllic cul-de-sac, he is chased out by brute force. It’s there that the sad sack meets a saintly pregnant woman who leads him to her traveling theater troupe living in the forest. With the Orphans of the Forest, Beau is invited to a a third way of being for the modern, impotent paranoiac: the fantasy of self-reliance, of living from and with the land, of a life simple in possessions and rich in meaning. As for any paranoiac, it is a life that Beau can’t even imagine himself leading. Beau begins to fantasize, upon watching the troupe’s performance, that the play is about himself - it’s notable in a film that may all be neurotic delusion that this is the only sequence that is animated rather than acted. Beau envisions a sort of tragic destiny in which he marries the pregnant woman, leads a life with her made meaningful for the work that goes into it, builds his own home, lives off of the land, and raises a family; Beau’s destiny becomes tragic when he learns that he will be separated from his family by a storm, that he will spend his entire life searching for them, that he will live in exile. Finally, in Beau’s dream, he encounters as an old, weary man the play-within-the-play-within-the-film, where he reunites with his three boys. It’s a beautiful dream, but one that shatters when they ask where their mother is - Beau, even in his dream, realizes these young men could never be his because he has never had sex. His impotence renders even a fantasy of self-reliance untenable; when Beau snaps back into reality, he can only, one imagines, wish that he were the one in his pregnant companion’s womb.
There’s another half or more to the film, a web of flashbacks to Beau’s childhood on a cruise, dreams of a punished twin, and a final third act face-off with his mother. It’s there, as with any part of a psychological film that attempts explication, that the film loses steam - where the movie becomes more about Beau-as-Beau (or rather, Beau-as-Aster) than about the paranoiac in his endless need. Where Beau Is Afraid succeeds is in the impersonal moments, as a document of the modern paranoid mind that has never known a father’s discipline and protection and seeks only its mother’s protection - a mind too impressionable for the city, too human for the suburbs, and too cowardly for life on its own terms. A mind, wandering and self-pitying, that hopes only to return to a mother who will tell it that things will all be alright. Beau’s hell is that his mommy will not.
I seek no quarrel with the type of person who lacks appetite for a three-hour movie beginning with a point-of-view childbirth scene into a therapy appointment with the guy who plays Thufir Hawat in Dune.
The end of the film sees a lot of Beau’s perception of the world - specifically, his world as mediated through his relationship with his mother - disintegrate. It would be fair to question whether anything presented to us as Beau’s world is “real,” but it seems a safe enough bet to accept the reality we’re initially presented with as more or less stable.