During class today, we discussed the idea of ideology and how present it is in every aspect of our lives. Directors have, and will continue to voice their own ideologies and opinions through their films.
There were two things I wanted to talk about today, both stemming from this morning’s conversation. We also touched on conspiracy theories and how, though extreme, they can reinforce current beliefs or stem from past experiences.
Spoiler warning for Bugonia.
Bugonia, which I watched last week, is a movie oozing with ideology. Teddy, a rural bee farmer, manipulates his mentally disabled cousin, Don, into helping him kidnap a pharmaceutical CEO. He believes the CEO, Michelle Fuller, is an Andromedan alien sent to destroy Earth.
At first, I felt Teddy’s methods were outlandish and cruel. He was so insistent that Fuller was an alien, he went at lengths to prove it. For example, he shaved her head and even lathered her in antihistamine cream to prevent her from “communicating with the mothership”.
But as the film goes on, we start to understand where he’s coming from, and even sympathize with him a little. We realize that Auxolith, Fuller’s company, was developing a medication to fight opioid addiction. Teddy’s mother was a voluntary test subject for this product and was sent into a coma as a result. Multiple other childhood incidents are mentioned throughout the movie offhandedly, often through a single line that never gets addressed again. Teddy mentions how he and Don have been “chemically castrated” by Auxolith while talking with Fuller. The town sheriff (also Teddy’s childhood babysitter), Casey, continuously tries to befriend Teddy, apologetically referencing a sexual assault he had committed against Teddy as a child.
All of this childhood trauma acts as a weight on Teddy’s shoulders. As far as we know, he never sought any assistance for his presumably unstable mental state. Trying to figure out why all these things are happening to him, Teddy turns to the internet. He falls into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, and because of internet algorithms, finds himself in an ideological echo chamber. This echo chamber feeds him more and more conspiracies, ultimately turning him into the man he is today.
What’s interesting to me is as weird as this film’s premise is, Teddy’s conspiracy theory transformation happens to people every day on a smaller scale. Because of past experiences and their interactions with other people, people’s worldviews change (albeit usually not as extreme as Teddy’s).
Bugonia’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, even talks about this himself in this interview (https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/bugonia-interview-2025) with film critic Roger Ebert. He says how he’s ” always interested in the ways people’s interactions with themselves or others affect their nature.” He also says this about Teddy: “…he’s someone who has created a story, which is, by the way, not entirely untrue–but I think he’s someone who, like a lot of us, has not been told a better story that’s true from the powers that be…He’s been abused by the system that keeps talking without doing anything–or at least doing anything that’s helping him in some way.” This film could also be Lanthimos heeding us a warning about the slippery slope of politics, and how one can easily find themselves in an echo chamber and alienate themselves from the other side of the political spectrum.
All-in-all, Bugonia is a wonderfully bizarre film about how one’s past can shape their current worldviews. It satirizes the modern internet-conspiracy culture and is hilariously unpredictable at times.
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