Terminally Online Femmes in the Slasher House
Mimi Ssa exposes the gothic nature of disconnection within Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) within spaces occupied by youth growing up on the internet.
Halina Reijn's film, Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), oddly reminds me of Lorde and her song, "Buzzcut Season". Just something about her electropop chimes, her wistfulness towards sheltered suburban life, elicits a haunting memory of "all the girls with heads in dreams" who "live beside the pool" (Lorde). Bodies likewise opens and closes with a friend group's dizzying clamour beside the pool, though by the end, their body count falls from seven to two. This youthful recklessness gives way to the slasher horror genre. The film is about this friend group’s get-together where tensions escalate once they find someone, David (Pete Davidson), murdered in this casual game of whodunnit which twists into something not so fun anymore — ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’. As the drama unfolds, more of them die and only Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and her girlfriend, Bee (Maria Bakalova), survive. When the duo is eventually questioned about what happened at the movie’s conclusion, Bee only responds with “I have reception.” We are left with this seemingly trivial declaration. Yet, the disbelieving glances between them, their rueful gaze towards their questioner, conveys a deeper impression left by these events. Reijn problematises the rituals and norms of this generally affluent bunch of Gen Z influencers. Their frivolity is met with grave consequences.
Critical reception of the film often follows a commentary on social class and contemporary online subcultures. Despite their distress, fights, and dead friends, for example, Sophie and Bee still surface their sudden Internet access as most eventful. And maybe it is eventful. Their access to David’s TikTok video did reveal who the ‘murderer’ truly was. By the video’s end, we learn that his death was an accident — the result of a failed TikTok stunt. This revelation reframes the characters’ earlier horror, paranoia, and violence as self-inflicted by their use of digital technologies. Bee’s “I have reception” only confirms this over-engagement. She comes off as out-of-touch with the macabre events of the film. Here lies the twist Bodies proposes: in their connection to the truth, Sophie and Bee convey just how disconnected they are from reality. Critic Claire Cao expresses some dismay towards this ending. As she says, “[Reijn] builds a world where violence feels electric and real, but pulls back from letting her characters lean into these base impulses, rendering the final twist toothless.” (‘The Curse of the Terminally Online’) In a pivotal scene where the remaining survivors hurl hurtful accusations about the murderer’s identity, they do so through the filters of Internet-speak and identity politics. When backed into a corner, Sophie refutes her peers’ insults by pointing out their misogyny and racism. To which, Alice (Rachel Sennott) defensively replies, “I understand and I’m an ally.” The humour of Bodies is derived from this disjunct. They attempt to preserve their self-image amid a life-or-death situation. Even after Jordan (Myha'la Herrold) shoots Alice’s leg, she insists that she did not shoot her. Perhaps, like Cao, we wish to see these characters unmask and reconnect with their violent impulses. Yes, online subculture truly is harmful, isn’t it? This is, to borrow Cao’s phrase, the curse of the terminally online.
Jordan insisting she did not shoot Alice with a gun in her hand (“Bodies Bodies Bodies” 1:14:26)
My concern is that in reading Bodies as just another critique of class privilege and technology, we miss out on the nuanced desires of these characters. So, in the rest of my article, I turn to the lesbian gothic elements of the film — a reading unfortunately elided by many film reviews. Set within a secluded mansion and a wealthy friend group, their class privilege cushions them from structural and material discrimination. Though we may not relate to them, I feel their interactions do help us understand identities in the context of disconnected realities.
Lesbian gothic films, in my view, encourage us to notice moments of disconnect as well as the subjectivities that emerge from them. As Paulina Palmer explains, “whereas gothic narrative explores the disintegration of the self into double or multiple facets, queer theory foregrounds the multiple sexualities and roles that the subject produces and enacts” (8). Amid our mediated fragmented lives, they appropriate gothic narratives and queer theory to explore alternative sensibilities. While Sophie, Bee, and their friends stumble into the abject terrain of gore, murder, and betrayal, they remain desensitised from most of it. The site of the abject horror is not just within the mansion; it lies within their disconnection. This sets Bodies apart from other films of the slasher genre which often find their appeal in how characters respond to deathly encounters. In those films, viewers anticipate a collapse of social norms and identities. The emphasis is not on the murders themselves but on the reactions these murders receive. Characters must either indulge in their raw impulses and emotions or, as with the case of survivors, persist with their now fragmented sense of selves. In Bodies, however, Reijn denies these possibilities. After all, her characters were always fragmented to begin with. The reason they never fully unmask, it turns out, is because they do not disintegrate on screen. Rather, the characters we meet are already performing new subjectivities from the shatters of online subculture.
By noticing disconnection and treating it as a site of meaning-making, I centre their terminally online selves in my reading. I wish to seriously take on their desensitised perspectives and reiterate their complicated desires and feelings. The progression of the plot seems to me like a parody of lesbian experiences. David is the first to die in the film. If we are to read his death in a disconnected way, his death is not corporeal but symbolic. He owns the house and reeks of toxic masculinity. The death of this patriarchal authority sets the events in motion. It brings us into a girl-only space where the only other male figure, Greg (Lee Pace), is also nowhere to be found. Everyone feels anxious in his absence and they start to look for him too. They mistake his ‘vet’ status as that of a war veteran when in fact, he is a veterinarian. He is next to be killed off, that too, by Bee. The five women continue to doubt one another and their bodies pile up gradually. Bee’s murder becomes a point of contention for the other women and they exile her, but she eventually returns. In some ways, their fear of Bee could loosely derive from internalised narratives of the masculine ‘psycho lesbian’ who annihilates men. Lesbophobic anxieties persist though the men are gone. In the end, only Sophie and Bee survive. They are the final girls, a slasher trope where a sole female survivor confronts the slasher and lives to tell the story (Clover).
Bee and Sophie in the clouded pool (“Bodies Bodies Bodies” 1:25:48)
Reijn’s decisive inclusion of a final lesbian couple makes me feel there is more to this. What happens during their closing confrontation? For one, they confront David’s TikTok video and realise that David had slashed himself in his attempt to emulate Greg’s bottle-opening stunt. At the same time, Max (Conner O'Malley) — who has been missing the whole movie — returns to the mansion. Just as patriarchal authority self-obliterates itself, the women in this system continue to turn on each other even without its presence. Solidarity is hindered not because of dramatic reactions to the murders; their disagreements arise from how they communicate their fragmented lives through specific modes, mediums, and codes. Consider identity politics, for example. The terms we use for our identities are made from the wastes of colonialism, patriarchy, and many other interlocking systems of oppression. Yes, the characters are desensitised by online subcultures, but they still relate with each other in mediated but equally material ways. A lesbian gothic reading situates our new subjectivities within the structures that made them, without dismissing them. Instead, it recognises that these subjectivities and disconnected realities carry meaning. These meanings flow out, despite the fact that patriarchal authority is reinstated with Max’s return.
Bodies thus points to the predicament that lesbians, especially femmes of colour, experience. It is not simply that digital technologies have desensitised us and directed our political concerns to superficial ones. Rather, a lesbian gothic perspective reads Bodies as a retelling of spaces amid these disconnected realities. The women may prioritise their self-image over survival, but does this not attest to their relative significance in their disconnected lives? We must account for the relations new technologies offer. We must notice that they mobilise our affects and subjectivities in specific ways — these ways matter. Bodies shows us how identitarian rhetoric in these spaces has led to internal divide instead of solidarity. How a consistent dismissal of pain and care bonds (yes, especially in how we talk about online subculture) has foreclosed solidarity. How we all desire love and approval, even in our most dissociated and desensitised moments.
“Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) has a hard exterior but she’s desperate for love and approval […] A lot of people are like that.”
— Herrold, Myha’la. “Bodies Bodies Bodies director Halina Reijn talks tits and that NYT scandal.” Conducted by Nick Chen
References
Cao, Claire. “Bodies Bodies Bodies and the Curse of the Terminally Online.” Kill Your Darlings, 2012.
https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/bodies-bodies-bodies-and-the-curse-of-the-terminally-online/ Last accessed 19 December 2023
Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws. British Film Institute, 1992.
Lorde. “Buzzcut Season,” Pure heroine. 2013. Genius, https://genius.com/Lorde-buzzcut-season-lyrics Last accessed 30 January 2023
Palmer, Paulina. “Introduction: Gothic and lesbian narrative” in Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive
Fictions. Cassell, 1999.
Mimi Ssa writes under a pseudonym.