Bugonia: ironies between academia and restriction

Good day to everyone. Today’s episode took a very long time to arrive because… I don’t know if you remember, but in the previous episode I mentioned that I wanted to implement some changes in the podcast format… well, I’ve gone through a huge crisis in this transformation, I’ve thought many things… so listening to you might help me, if anyone has any suggestion or idea, it is super welcome…

So well, after this small parenthesis, we are finally going to delve into this film, which to be honest I thought a lot about making an episode on because when I walked out of watching it a couple of weeks ago… I must admit that I didn’t like it. But in general Lanthimos’ cinema is not my type of cinema overall…

Alright, the clue is there. Clear as water… today we are talking about Bugonia and the music of Jerskin Fendrix, a young English composer.

A few weeks ago I was talking with someone about how I hadn’t liked this score that much… but I think it has several conceptual edges that are worth exploring.

First of all, the creative process is interesting. Through the method of restriction, Fendrix generates the entire universe of Bugonia. Let me explain a bit more, although I think many already know this detail. For the composition of the music of Bugonia, Lanthimos only gave Fendrix three words on which to write: bees, basement and spaceship (well, in Spanish they are four words).

This method of restriction is not new in art, but it is uncommon in contemporary commercial cinema. Limiting the starting point does not reduce the creative universe; on the contrary, it concentrates it.

In this case, the absence of a script is not a deficiency, it is a stance: the music does not respond to the image, it precedes it. And that radically changes the hierarchy of the cinematic elements.

To thread these three words and create the fabric that is Bugonia, the composer turned to research trying to find something that connected these concepts. And yes, it is the magic of academic concepts and the thoughts that reside there. Fendrix united these concepts under the narrative of the questioning of the basement of the universe and the layers of reality, the geometric forms that bees construct and the hypothetical formlessness of spaceships.

Now then, in addition to all of this, the fact that the composer was explicitly asked not to see the script before composing tells me something quite clear: music weaves the cinematic world… that is, music gives meaning to something long before that something has meaning. Before the image, there is music. And after that, there is the image, with the music… it is through music that the image comes to life, so to speak.

The color of what we feel, the connection, the emotional interrelations of its key themes, are given by the music and, in this case, the music is sustained by academic thought and its relationship with the world. In the third piece of the soundtrack, Star Saliva, for example, it is based on the idea that honey was once believed to come from space and that bees would arrive at doors, suck it and return it to space… as if it were literally saliva or dew, in a more poetic way, from the stars. Therefore, bees were the channels between heaven and earth.

This weaving seems extremely brilliant to me.

In the score, we can begin to hear the piece “Bees,” where the proposal of bees as the delicate creatures that begin the story is captured… there is an instrumental use of the wind section that draws a certain delicacy and purity, like the narrative in its initial moment, the first layer of the fabric, the first stitch.

Then, in “Basement,” there is an excessive use of synthesizers… which invites us to think of this idea of the basement as a layer of unknown and shapeless reality, once again, like the development of the narrative… something incoherent but within its quality of incoherence, an inherent component of that specific layer of reality. Here, through philosophical theories, irreverence becomes texture and that atypical association of concepts makes discomfort and strangeness position themselves as scale. And, if we think about it well… that is also a political decision of sound: to force the viewer to remain in that strangeness. Music is more than atmosphere, it is a vector of containment and it is the element that keeps the audience in a determined state.

Finally, in the piece “Spaceship” we have a strongly orchestral piece that gives that aggressive and grand character to the imaginary “otherness” on which the film revolves.

These three great pieces condense the core motives of the film and interweave its emotional meaning. Through academic research, the music originates, which originates the root of the work that is Bugonia. Finding meaning between apparently disconnected vertices is the freedom of creation and emotional exploration that, once again, music offers us and music here reminds us that feeling is also a way of thinking.

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