Elon Musk was recently awarded a one-trillion-dollar pay package over ten years. “If Musk works a 40-hour work week with two weeks’ vacation, or about 20,000 hours for 10 years, that’s $50 million an hour.” Tesla “production associates” make $23 an hour. And 23 goes into 50 million approximately 2,173,913 times.

In Bugonia, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, two cousins, beekeeper-warehouse worker Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnap a successful, powerful corporate executive, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), in an act of revenge and hold her captive in their basement. They are not looking for ransom but for her to admit that she is part of an alien conspiracy (launched from the constellation Andromeda) to destroy the human race.

“You killed my family. You killed my community. You killed my co-workers. You killed the bees,” Teddy tells Michelle at one point. His allegations turn out to be significantly true.

In late August, Variety reported that Emma Stone told a crowd at a question-and-answer session at the Telluride Film Festival that she found “terrifying” parallels between the storyline of Bugonia and the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024.

“What’s really crazy, after we had shot the film–I live in New York–we heard someone was shot up the street. It was a healthcare CEO. …

“It was wild, because we had all just been in a basement [filming] together talking about these issues and the bigger meaning of everything. It keeps hitting you that the world is so deeply fraught and terrifying in so many ways,” Stone concluded.

In Bugonia, Teddy works scanning packages for a low wage at Michelle’s company Auxolith, a “cutting-edge” biotechnology firm that manufactures pharmaceuticals and pesticides (hence the accusation about killing off the bees). We later learn that his mother (Alicia Silverstone), now in a comatose state, was the victim of an unsuccessful anti-opioid drug trial by Auxolith.

In their basement, Teddy and Don shackle Michelle and shave the hair off her head (so she will supposedly be less able to communicate with the Andromedan “mothership”). Teddy greets her: “Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance. … I’ve done a ton of research on this. You’re killing our planet.”

Michelle reacts coolly, brusquely informing the pair:

In the next 48 hours, the police and the FBI will begin a statewide manhunt. I’m a high profile female corporate executive. I am crucial, in all humility, I can say that. Think of it like you abducted the governor, but worse. There is no possible scenario where you benefit from this incident.

Teddy remains steadfast in the face of Michelle’s arguments, denials (“At the risk of repeating myself, I am not an alien”) and threats. As he tells his cousin, “We’re saving Earth so it will be a good place to live again.” Teddy subsequently tortures Michelle, much to Don’s horror, in an effort to produce a genuine confession. She withstands the electroshock treatment so well Teddy becomes convinced she must be a high-ranking member of the Andromedan royal family.

Consequently, Teddy frees Michelle from confinement “down below” and allows her to wear more appropriate clothing. Over a spaghetti dinner, however, they argue sharply and Teddy attacks her. The conflict is interrupted by the arrival of the local sheriff (Stavros Halkias), Teddy’s former babysitter and apparently also his childhood abuser. Teddy takes the cop on a tour of his backyard apiary to get him away from the house. Returned to the basement, Michelle promises the despairing Don (for whom there’s “nothing here … If you are an alien, can you take me away from here?”) to take him to outer space, whereupon he shoots himself. She confronts the distraught Teddy about the other victims of his paranoia whose body parts she has come across and agrees to arrange a meeting between Teddy and the Andromedans at Auxolith headquarters. Events take even more unexpected turns.

There is a correspondence between moments or features of Bugonia and events or aspects of contemporary social reality.

Will Tracy’s script does not demonize the “conspiracy theorist” Teddy. “Nobody on earth gives a f—- about us,” the latter tells Don early on. Poignantly, he asserts, “All we’ve lost … All that’s been done to us … We’re setting that right again.”

Tracy told one interviewer, “Look, [Teddy] does some bad things and he’s not right about everything, but he’s right about a lot, and identifies a lot of symptoms correctly.” (Motionpictures.org)

In another conversation, the screenwriter remarked:

It was important to me to make both the conspiracy and the conspiracy theorist at the heart of this film, not to judge them with too much of a chip of ice in my heart, to treat them with some empathy, to treat Teddy in particular with some empathy as someone who has been legitimately abused by, broadly speaking, the system. But you could say big tech, big pharma, the police, local government, federal government, capitalism generally. He feels as though he’s genuinely been victimized.

Plemons’ intense and convincing performance does much to humanize Teddy. Stone is also compelling. Silverstone in a small role adds emotional and social weight.

Some of the film’s less grandiose moments ring especially true.

In one of Bugonia’s opening sequences, Michelle, who has a photo of herself with Michelle Obama in her office, is seen recording a video in which she blathers on about “diversity.” She has trouble, however, remembering her hackneyed lines.

I believe every company should strive to form a diverse table. To empower people of different skills and ... [Exclamation] Every time, what is it!? ‘To foster a new generation.’ Okay, let’s go again.

Moreover, in one of the film’s better touches, the CEO informs an assistant:

I know you sent the email already, but I need you to let everyone know that they are free to leave at 5:30 from now on, starting today. No one is going to be overworked like in the past. No more unpleasant incidents. But of course, it’s not compulsory. And obviously, if people still have work to do, they should absolutely stay and continue to work. … Just remembering, you know, we are running a business here, so let-your-conscience-guide-you kind of thing. … New era!

Bugonia, based on the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan, brings out the sharp class divide in America. Michelle lives in a stylish home in a gated community, drives a Mercedes SUV, holds court in a state-of-the-art glass and high-tech corporate headquarters, dresses in the most fashionable clothes, works out and practices self-defense, treats herself to a red light mask session (“a non-invasive facial treatment using a mask that emits red and near-infrared light to improve skin health by stimulating collagen production, increasing blood flow, and reducing inflammation”) and sleeps like a baby (despite the various crimes that ought to be on her conscience).

Teddy and Don, who is autistic, live in a rundown house, which Teddy used to share with his mother. He rides a bicycle to work. He scrapes by, financially and emotionally. His clothes are grimy, ill-fitting, his hair greasy. His mother lies in a vegetative state, with tubes attached. However, Teddy shows kindness and concern to his cousin and others. He brings honey to work. He remonstrates with a fellow employee, whose arm was injured by Auxolith’s machinery, to file a complaint for some sort of compensation. But the worker is skeptical that either the company or the authorities care about workers like herself.

In many regards, as it turns out, Teddy and Michelle are different species. She may as well be an alien. 

She lets him know: “You can’t beat me because you are a loser and I’m a winner and that’s f——— life!” (Apparently, a Deadline critic tends to agree, referring to Teddy as “a disgruntled guy who blames the world for his own miserable life.” The melodious voice of the contented petty bourgeois.)

Tens of millions of people in the US are suffering terribly. Under the present conditions, it is no surprise that some react in a disoriented manner.

At the time of the United Healthcare CEO shooting in 2024, the WSWS noted the shocked response of the bourgeois media to popular sentiments. The Wall Street Journal, for example, headlined an article, “Manhunt for UnitedHealthcare CEO Killer Meets Unexpected Obstacle: Sympathy for the Gunman.” It commented, “From online forums and social media to the streets of Manhattan, people have been celebrating the suspect as a quasi-folk hero.”

Various mouthpieces for the oligarchy, the WSWS observed, expressed genuine anxiety about the level of hostility toward the billionaires “who are perceived to own everything, run everything and steal everything.”

The reaction by the establishment is an expression of a collective guilty conscience. The executives of mammoth corporations, who are busy putting new security measures into place and barricading themselves like never before, know they are despised. They can and must increasingly expect to come under attack.

The official political situation, dominated by two odious parties of war, violence and repression, could only work to increase horror and disgust.

These terroristic moods, born of pessimism and even despair, offer no solution. They stem largely from a loss of faith, or more realistically today, the longtime absence “of faith in the possibility of a political mass movement,” in Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase.

Bugonia, despite its sensitivity and occasional insights, is by no means a coherent examination of these problems.

Teddy claims to have gone down the “digestive tract” of political opposition, having tried, he says, “alt-right, ‘alt-lite,’ leftist, Marxist” and having found all of them lacking. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of what’s called activism is really personal exhibitionism and brand maintenance in disguise,” he tells Michelle.

As a partial portrait of a damaged, half-crazed victim of “the world,” Bugonia has its merits. But its “unexpected” and shocking final portion, including its unconvincing and for the most part unmoving concluding apocalyptic moments, is largely an evasion. In their schoolboy cleverness, Tracy and Lanthimos in fact take the path of least resistance. The unpredictability is predictable. The larger and more important drama, which would treat bleak lives like Teddy’s and Don’s in depth, is left incomplete.

After the admirable Poor Things, Lanthimos directed the deplorable Kinds of Kindness. The Greek filmmaker can’t seem to decide whether he cares very much about his fellow men and women or not. In Bugonia too he sometimes stumbles over his own self-conscious, “quirky” cynicism.

Are Lanthimos and Tracy expecting us to take seriously their musings about whether humanity is worth saving? If they wish to pose that question out loud, one can only refer to Heine, “And a fool waits for the answer.”

In any case, filmmaking seems to be moving to the left, in general terms, grudgingly or not. One sign is the increasing stigma attached to wealth, along with the desire for revenge against the very wealthy. As we noted in regard to James Gunn’s Superman: “It has almost become a commonplace at this point to portray billionaires in the darkest possible colors (Succession, Mountainhead, etc.) and to identify them with malignant inequality, political repression and violence.” One could add The Apprentice, The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness and now Bugonia.

A reminder once again, 23 goes into 50 million approximately 2,173,913 times.