Society (dir. Brian Yuzna, 1989)
There’s a line in William Gibson’s 1986 cyberpunk novel Count Zero: “And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” It’s overwritten, but Gibson’s not wrong.
This sentiment would be literalized three years later in Brian Yuzna’s body horror satire Society. Billy Warlock (son of Dick “The Shape” Warlock) stars as Bill Whitney, the privileged yet alienated scion of a wealthy family and a member of the in-crowd at a Beverly Hills private school. He keeps seeing impossible bodily contortions in the people around him. When his sister’s ex-boyfriend provides him with a surreptitious recording that hints at incest and worse only to be killed in a suspicious auto accident soon after, his paranoia becomes justified. There’s a secret society among the elite that uses the police and murder to protect their interests. Everything comes to a stomach churning conclusion in a twenty minute scene directly inspired by Dali’s paintings “Autumnal Cannibalism” and “Soft Construction with Boiled Eggs (Premonitions of Civil War)” as the rich quite literally take the poor for everything that they are as Strauss’s “Blue Danube” plays over the soundtrack.
Society has its flaws as a film. The acting could be better. You will never see worse hair on the protagonist. It’s about as subtle as a brick through a Starbucks window at a anti-globalization protest, but so what? The 1980s saw the beginning of wealth disparity in the US and abroad that has only accelerated in the decades since Reagan. The “shunting” depicted in the film is as grotesque and effective a metaphor for the way the powerful interact with each other in opposition to the masses.
The only dated thing about Yuzna’s film is the fashion. In fact, it’s now impossible to listening to the loathsome “Eton Boating Song” that opens and closes Society to not hear the lyrics “When you’re tired of winning” without thinking of the men invoking those very words today.
October 9, 2018
oliveresque 