A Demon's Embrace
From Louise Brooks to Mikey Madison: A transgressive path to destruction
Count me as one of the people who believes we're seeing a “new age of romanticism”. I think Ross Barkan put it best when he said we're witnessing a revival of the search for meaning and authenticity and that “there are at least a few similarities between today’s upheaval and what came in the early nineteenth century in response to technological alienation and institutional failure.”
Another sign? 19th century literature is so hot right now!
Through all of the swooning, I found Pride and Prejudice to be a story of the younger generation coming together to uphold the best of tradition and forge a better path, despite unfair societal norms, small-minded common people and pedantic and corrupt aristocrats.
But did you know that Pride and Prejudice has an evil twin? It's Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1871 political thriller - Demons.
For the past month I've been working through Demons - which I had randomly placed next to Austen on a shelf of 19th century novels. Now Austen's England was by no means a perfect society, but unlike Dostoevsky's, it did not descend into homicidal tyranny.
Reading these two books - you can begin to see why things turned out the way they did.
Yet, the parallels are uncanny. Both feature societies in flux with anxious elders pushing children toward advantageous marriages. In Pride and Prejudice, Darcy and Bingley represent the best of young England. Demons' Stavrogin and Verkhovensky are their dark mirror images.
Demons' young men are similarly privileged in Russian society, but scoff at traditional values as outmoded, pursuing "freedom" through empty sensation and transgressive acts. Even more telling: both books feature a "Liza" or Elizabeth courted by the most eligible bachelor (Darcy & Stavrogin respectively), but while Austen's Elizabeth triumphs, Dostoevsky's Liza is destroyed.1
Both novels confront corrupt institutions but move in opposite directions: Austen toward love and reconciliation, Dostoevsky toward murder, degradation and societal ruin.
It’s a pretty dark book!
From Novels to Nightmares on Screen
So what does this have to do with the movies? This is a Film Society journal!
Well - as Americans, we've been raised on Austen-like narratives of redemption. But have you noticed that our contemporary narratives of success and romance have become increasingly err… Russian?
Cinema has a way of revealing these all too-human narratives in both an unmistakable pattern and with visceral force. Reading Demons, imagery kept dancing into my mind from Weimar-era expressionist films like G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box" (1929) and Joseph Von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" (1930), but also contemporary masterpieces like Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" (2018) and Sean Baker's "Red Rocket" (2021) and "Anora" (2024).
Dostoevsky writes in Demons that "ideas have people".
They seduce. They are transgressive. They are thrilling to watch — even as they put us ill at ease. They possess us, moving through history and taking hold of new hosts in each generation.
And they're right there in the movies if you know where to look.
Seduction as Progression
In Demons Pyotr Verkhovensky's circle expands by thrilling people with what contemporaries immediately recognize as trolling. They begin with mere mockery and humiliation of vulnerable people:
"They sought out adventures, even got them up themselves, simply for the sake of having an amusing story to tell. They treated our town as though it were a sort of Glupov. People called them the jeerers or sneerers, because they did not stick at anything."
Their "pranks" quickly grow more destructive, targeting marriage, religious figures, and the dignity of ordinary people, culminating in treating death itself as mere entertainment. The group learns about a 19-year old boy who has committed suicide in a local hotel after squandering family money entrusted to him:
"At once the suggestion was made that they should go and look at the suicide. The idea met with approval: our ladies had never seen a suicide. I remember one of them said aloud on the occasion, 'Everything's so boring, one can't be squeamish over one's amusements, as long as they're interesting.'"
After this ghoulish tourism, Dostoevsky notes: "The general merrymaking, laughter, and playful talk were twice as lively on the latter half of the way."
As Pyotr's trolling breaks society's foundations, his co-conspirator Stavrogin uses his cold seductive power. Stavrogin destroys lives merely because sensation temporarily relieves his crushing boredom.
It is the combination of their powers that truly embodies Dostoevsky's vision of possession in Demons. Pyotr and Stavrogin's progeny can always be found during times of societal decadence.
So it’s no surprise that in both Weimar expressionist films as well as contemporary masterpieces, these twin demons arise - with no consideration for time or geography or culture.
In "Pandora's Box" (1929), G.W. Pabst adapts Frank Wedekind's controversial "Lulu" plays, which had been censored throughout Europe since the 1890s for their frank sexuality and critique of bourgeois hypocrisy. The silent classic follows Lulu from her affair with newspaper magnate Dr. Schön through her trial for his murder, escape to France with his son Alwa (seducing him in the process), and her eventual encounter with Jack the Ripper in London's foggy East End.
It goes to 11 and then some.
American actress Louise Brooks, with her iconic black bob haircut, plays Lulu as Stavrogin's spiritual sister – not calculating but amoral, a force of nature who simply follows her desires without concern for consequences.
Brooks later wrote that Pabst instructed her to play Lulu "not as a woman who had no scruples, but as a woman who had no moral sense whatsoever." Unlike the expressionist acting common in German cinema of the period, Brooks brought a startling naturalism to the role that made Lulu's destructive power all the more believable
The film's most transgressive element is how Pabst makes viewers complicit in Lulu's seductive power. Her direct-to-camera gazes break the fourth wall, with Brooks' drawing us into her perspective despite the destruction she causes. When Dr. Schön discovers Lulu with his son on their wedding day, his attempt to force her to commit suicide backfires – she kills him instead with his own gun, a moment Pabst films with shocking intimacy.
Von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" (1930) offers a different but equally devastating portrait of seduction's power through Professor Immanuel Rath's (Emil Jannings) catastrophic infatuation with cabaret performer Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich). The film tracks Rath's complete degradation – from respected educator to humiliated clown in Lola's traveling show.
Von Sternberg constructs the cabaret as Dostoevsky might have imagined it – a space of suspended reality where conventional morality dissolves. Smoke-filled, chaotic, operating by different rules than the orderly academic world Rath inhabits, it becomes a visual metaphor for the breakdown of societal structures. Rath enters this space initially to catch his students in misconduct, but becomes entranced by Lola himself – a transformation von Sternberg captures through shifting visual language.
The film's most famous sequence – Dietrich's performance of "Falling in Love Again" – became cinema's quintessential seduction scene. Shot with expressionist shadows and revealing costumes, she sings directly to the camera while perched suggestively on a barrel, one leg extended. The song's lyrics – "Men cluster to me like moths around a flame / And if their wings burn, I know I'm not to blame" – echo Lulu's amoral destructiveness. Like Stavrogin, Lola doesn't actively seek to destroy; she simply follows her nature, indifferent to the ruins left behind.
What makes "The Blue Angel" so disturbing is how thoroughly it documents Rath's degradation. After marrying Lola, he loses his position, joins her troupe as a clown, and returns to perform at the very cabaret where they met. The professor who once confiscated postcards of Lola from his students now sells those same postcards to the audience. His final humiliation comes when forced to perform his rooster crow act at his former school, where his students witness his complete abasement. Von Sternberg shoots this scene with harsh overhead lighting that creates monstrous shadows across Rath's painted face – the visual embodiment of dignity utterly destroyed by transgressive desire.
Modern Demons: From "Burning" to "Anora"
Sean Baker's "Red Rocket" (2021) translates this seductive process into contemporary America through Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), a washed-up porn star returning to small-town Texas. Like Lulu, Mikey seduces not just other characters but the audience itself. Baker films him in persistent close-ups that draw us uncomfortably close to his performative charisma, making us complicit in his manipulation of teenage Strawberry (Suzanna Son). The film's most disturbing achievement is how it seduces us into enjoying this exploitation through familiar romantic tropes – warm natural light, intimate two-shots, and *NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" scoring their encounters.
What's most unsettling about watching "Red Rocket" is realizing how much pleasure we take in Mikey's transgressions. His hustler's energy is infectious; his schemes exhilarating. We find ourselves laughing at moments that should horrify us, rooting for him despite ourselves, swept up in the sensory delight of his pink-hued world. We become like Dr. Schön or Professor Rath—seduced by what will ultimately destroy us.
But decadence is hardly unique to America. Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" (2018) is set in South Korea - but its characters are extremely familiar. The film follows Jong-su, an aspiring writer from rural poverty who becomes obsessed with wealthy, enigmatic Ben (Steven Yeun) after he begins dating Jong-su's childhood friend Hae-mi. Ben possesses Lulu's mysterious allure—beautiful, wealthy, seemingly free of conventional morality. The film's languid pacing creates a physical discomfort, a nagging feeling that something is wrong beneath the surface.
This unease crystallizes when Ben cryptically reveals his hobby of "burning greenhouses" every few months. The scene is deliberately ambiguous – does he literally mean arson, or is it a metaphor for something more sinister? When Hae-mi mysteriously disappears, Jong-su becomes convinced that Ben's "greenhouses" are actually women he seduces and murders. Chang-dong never resolves this ambiguity, leaving us like Jong-su, hypersensitive to details, searching Ben's impassive face for proof of evil.
The violence that erupts in "Burning" represents the same pattern Dostoevsky identified – transgression provoking counter-transgression. Ben's most chilling moment comes when he tells Jong-su to "feel your heart beat," inviting him to experience the excitement of destruction.
In Baker's Oscar-winning "Anora" (2024), we follow a Las Vegas sex worker who spontaneously marries the son of a Russian oligarch, only to have her fairy tale destroyed when his parents determine the marriage must be annulled.
The film operates through similar sensory seduction. Its first third unfolds as fairy tale with energetic camera movements and saturated colors borrowed from rom-coms and music videos. Vegas glitters with transformative promise, with Anora and Vanya's romance echoing the intoxicating allure of the Weimar cabaret—a space where normal rules seem suspended.
The film's physical impact shifts dramatically and memorably in a long and drawn out sequence, where Ani is left by her husband and captured by his family's goons. Suddenly time slows to an uncomfortable crawl. Ani's back in the real world.
The frenetic, pulsing energy of "Anora"'s initial sequences contrast violently with its conclusion in a frigid, airless, beat up old car.
We experience the seduction and then the brutal awakening.
What makes Baker's work so powerful is how he makes us physically feel these transitions—from warmth to coldness, from possibility to confinement.
These films don't just tell us about seduction—they make us feel it physically.
By the time we recognize the danger, we're already entranced, just as Dostoevsky's characters found themselves pulled into transgression one small step at a time.
A Cold Aftermath
I've heard more than one person call "Anora" a romantic comedy. But Jane Austen, it is most assuredly not. It's not even "Pretty Woman" for that matter!
I'd be hard pressed to find anyone smiling after they finish the movie.
But it does show what happens when an "idea possesses a person".
Across time and geography, Dostoevsky's demons feed on the same fuel – the commodification of human dignity and the absence of empathy.
What makes these works so powerful – and so disturbing – is that they don't just tell us about this pattern; they make us experience it. We feel the rush of transgression, the pleasure of mockery, the thrill of boundaries crossed.
We're entertained by Mikey's hustling, amused by Professor Rath's humiliation, seduced by Lulu's amorality, intrigued by Ben's mysterious hobby and easy, unexplained wealth.
We really, really want Anora to win!
But this just makes us more complicit. The demons, the ideas are already in possession of our souls.
Thankfully the lights always go up. Right?
Literally. By a mob, after she rejects Stavrogin’s marriage proposal, because he’s had his first wife murdered and nearly burned (or has he?) and she goes to see the crime scene for herself. It’s a devastating scene in a novel that is full of them. It’s a dark book!