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Beau Is Afraid

September 20, 2023

There is a sub-genre of Horror films categorized by surrealism. It could range between totally insane films like anything directed by David Lynch all the way to something like Mandy by Panos Cosmatos, where it is kind of surreal, but also doesn't actually ask from the audience too much in terms of figuring out what is going on. "Beau Is Afraid" is more toward the David Lynch category of surreal horror.

On the surface it is a movie about a socially awkward person trying to get to his mother. And the adventurous journey that he takes along the way. But reading the movie this way might not make too much sense.

Spoiler

For example, in the end of the movie his mother reveals to him that his father was indeed not dead, was not technically even a human, but rather a huge monster penis living in the attic of their house. That is not what the movie is trying to say for sure. It is a metaphor for something. And I will have to watch the movie more than once to understand it.

The best example of what I'm talking about is a Nickolas Winding Refn's movie "Only God Forgives" which could be followed by looking at what you see in the frame, but that will leave a lot of questions. And a lot of it is very silly unless you can figure out a deeper meaning behind all of it.

In some weird way, even though "Beau Is Afraid" is a horror film with a lot of gore, it is very silly. At some points it feels like a slapstick comedy. Even the main characterization of the main character is kind of silly if you don't think too much about it.

The movie opens with the birth of the main character. And one the first images we see is a new born baby boy with huge balls. And throughout the movie we are reminded that our main character has huge balls. Though the significance of it shits between multiple layers of meaning.

One layer of meaning that is offered by the direct reading of the movie suggests that Beau has some kind of testicular disease which makes it very dangerous for him to have sex. As his mother explains to him that his father and his grand-father and so on had all died during their first sexual intercourse, that just so happened to produce a baby.

Spoiler

This same reading of the movie is also confirmed by Beau finding a girl early in his life that has the same condition. And toward the end of the movie she actually does it with him and dies in the process. While he miraculously survives.

Though then we are almost immediately introduced to the giant penis monster that is his father. And this makes the whole thing read somewhat differently. And then also we are hinted at the girl maybe not being dead at all. So the whole disease thing is kind of a fabrication.

Another reading that I find quite compelling, which I formed by watching the movie only once, is that the movie is a story of how over-protection of children causes them severe anxiety from the world.

It would be more realistic to look at the stuff happening in the movie as something that goes on inside of Beau's head instead of in the real world. And as we learn almost in the beginning Beau is struggling with severe anxiety. So the over the top nature of everything that is going on is probably the way his anxiety makes him see the world.

And this anxiety comes, probably from the fact that his mother was protecting him way too much. To the point of him feeling like living in a literal prison. There is a line in the movie where she says:


Scared enough from the world? What? She was trying her best to make him be as anxious as possible and she succeeded. She made him so outright anxious that he can't live a normal life at all.

Spoiler

Which is quite interesting considering the scene where parents of both Beau and his girlfriend when they were kids reacting with utter horror when finding that they have a romance. To the point where literal Romeo and Juliet kind of drama plays between the two.

From the first reading you may assume that because both of them have a condition to die when having sex, the parents try to prevent death of their children. But then later it is revealed that this is not true and they don't die when having sex. Which makes the whole thing to be an example of over protection that I theorize the movie is really about.

And if it is true, the writer / director Ari Aster is actually on the side of freedom here, rather than a side of censorship. Because from one side you can argue that anxiety comes from over-exposure to bad ideas. And that is what she says she was doing, making him "scared enough from the world".

But from the other side it could be that anxiety comes from a more complex issue. When a parent doesn't want to loose control over the child to such an extend that any form of self expression is killed by some kind of story about how this or that is bad or dangerous. And sometimes these dangers are entirely fabricated. The main complaints the main character has with his mother for example are freedom related. Like the times he remembers trying to do something on his own only to get punished by her for thinking for himself.

If you think about it, the movie might just be a #RespectChildren movie.

In any case, the film is very graphic and in the same time very silly. It is very tense and very stupid in a good way. And I like it for all these reasons.

Happy Hacking!!!

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