Attraction and Repulsion: Last Night In Soho and the Ambivalence of "Problematic" Art

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (2021)

Dir. Edgar Wright

Written by Edgar Wright and Krysty Wilson-Cairns

Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terence Stamp, Diana Rigg

I like Roman Polanski's REPULSION. At the same time, I very much don't like drugging and raping 13-year-olds. The same Roman Polanski who made REPULSION also drugged and raped a 13-year old. And the same 60's and 70's counterculture which produced so much provocative, challenging art I love also produced a culture of hedonistic, celebrity-centered boundary-pushing that made him think he could get away with it. And there's very little space to "separate art from artist" when it's so obvious that the art in question is the direct result of both the specific person and the the specific culture from which it sprang -- and not always even from the more admirable qualities of that person and culture. So what to do with the fact that these things I love are also inextricably interwoven with things I find repugnant -- and not just repugnant, but things that I think need to be actively, forcefully repudiated, not just for abstract moral reasons but because they remain active and dangerous forces in the modern world? 

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO is Edgar Wright's attempt to grapple with those questions, essentially by making a vague REPULSION riff* that very self-consciously brings to the foreground the less savory aspects of the director and the time period, forcing the confrontation between our fetishization of the nostalgic past and the grim reality of that past that we sometimes conveniently overlook. The movie does this in the most literal possible way: by sending a somewhat brittle Zoomer 1960's fangirl (Thomasin McKenzie, JOJO RABBIT) back in time, where she discovers in no uncertain terms that beneath the alleged glamour and liberating social loosening of the era, there was some rampant misogyny** that somehow she never gleaned from a lifetime of consuming an apparently unadulterated diet of nothing but 60's media. (Not to be an asshole, but, like, the first thing she sees in 1965 is a huge marquee for THUNDERBALL, a not-particularly-obscure film which, uh, has some pretty strong hints that gender equity in 1965 was not exactly up to the standards of today. It kind of makes her seem like an idiot for being surprised, but as we will see, being an idiot is at least a pretty consistent character trait for her). So it's basically MIDNIGHT IN PARIS if it was in any way self-aware. 

This is all reasonably successful, as far as it goes, but it's also a little disappointing it doesn't go further. For a movie taking aim at such a fraught topic, its insights are ultimately pretty shallow and prosaic. At the end of an extremely unrushed 116 minutes (including an entire opening act that is almost wholly useless deadwood), the only thing the movie has been able to articulate with any clarity is "boy, there sure was a lot of misogyny in the 60's, huh? But those clothes and pop songs sure do rock!" an observation which is not only a little underwhelming as a central thesis, but one which has already been fully explored by the 50-minute mark (which sounds like it's late in the movie but, in fact, marks the first glimmering of any actual conflict -- I told you it takes a long time to get going!) and will not be expanded upon a single iota during the film's remaining 66 minutes. 

This disappointingly banal answer to the movie's rather more complicated questions is not just reflective of a lack of intellectual rigor, though it is that too, but is also the inevitable result of Wright's stylistic choices, which have the effect of limiting any possibility that the film might expose something genuinely revealing. The problem is that in trying to explore our perception of the past, the movie never creates a real, tangible place. It's all as blunt and exaggerated as possible, presenting the 60's alternately as a giddy fairy-tale fantasy or a cartoonish nightmare, and consequently never really interrogating its central dilemma with any nuance. In theory, the movie probably thinks it's trying to balance our cozy nostalgia with harsh reality, but since both "good" and "bad" versions of the past are ultra-stylized caricatures, it never really feels like a search for truth, more like a battle between two opposing and equally phony reductive fantasies. 

In reality, the 60's wasn't just one thing; it was a complex, sprawling era that looked very different depending on where you were, who you were, and what you wanted, and the movie can't really explore it meaningfully when it presents the past in such starkly black-and-white terms. And because both visions of the 60's are so patently disconnected from any kind of real lived reality, the movie really struggles to link the dark side of the the 60's to the continued issues of the real-world present (in fact, I'm not even sure it's trying to, which is a serious issue for a movie that so strongly wants to posit itself as a moral arbiter). Bizarrely, the script places its only blatant modern-day misogyny at the very start of the movie (there's a very effective early sequence where our protagonist gets stuck in a cab with a sexually threatening driver), and then, content that it has established the present day as thoroughly unpleasant, sends its heroine back in time to her idealized 1960's, only to gradually disillusion her of the idea that they were such a great time for women. But wait, did she (or anyone) really think the 1960's were the halcyon days of sexual equality? This ordering of events has the strange effect of sequestering the problem in the distant past, and centering the movie's conflict on re-framing our images of history rather than seeing misogyny as a long-running continuity that stretches through the past into the present. Indeed, it almost makes the issue of misogyny itself independently unimportant, a mere stand-in for the ways in which we unwisely idealize the past, rather than an important topic in its own right (which would be fine if the movie had a lighter touch, but I seriously doubt that's what it thinks its doing, given how hard it pushes its themes of female persecution).  

And if its vision of the past more generally is more baroque fantasy than honest reckoning, its portrayal of actual misogynists is even worse. There are only two type of men in the movie: venal, despicable monsters or endlessly sympathetic saints (ok, there's only one of the latter), which is a thoroughly unhelpful way of looking at things. If it were that simple, it would be no problem, would it? One would think that a movie with Polanski so thoroughly on its mind would be more aware that misogyny is much more complex than the one-dimensional mustache-twirlers depicted here. After all, REPULSION, ROSEMARY'S BABY, and CHINATOWN, just to name a few Polanksi movies, are all acutely aware of women facing various kinds of misogynist violence and dismissal, and indeed are all rather more sensitive and closely-observed in their implied critique of the patriarchy than LAST NIGHT IN SOHO ever is. These movies suggest Polanksi enjoyed a more-than-superficial perceptiveness of women's exploitation at the hands of men... and yet, in the end, he was more than willing to perpetuate that exploitation himself, and to this day seems stubbornly insistent on rationalizing his actions rather than introspecting about them. That's the kind of misogyny that's truly insidious; LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, in its search of signifiers more than genuine provocation, has eyes only for the easy, obvious villains, who would have been roundly condemned by most of society even in the 1960s. What good does that do?

So as a reckoning with our relationship with history, and as a reckoning with real-world misogyny, the movie is well-meaning but depressingly superficial considering how effortful it is. But its more interesting angle is a more complicated one. By being both a tribute to and a tacit criticism of Polanski in particular and exploitation horror in general, the film isn't just reminding us of the dangers of blind nostalgia, it's openly asking the question what does it mean that we are drawn to art built around some extremely dubious morality, often made by some extremely dubiously moral artists?

Between this film, INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD, and HOTEL FEAR, I seem to have stumbled onto an unexpected run of quasi-horror films which are very self-consciously dedicated to the subject of women's' suffering at the hands of men who view them as objects upon which to act out their own desires and insecurities. Given the horror genre's --let's say uneven-- track record on misogyny, there's a level of auto-critique inherent in threading this theme into a genre movie at all, and consequently, when you're watching them there's the implicit understanding that these films are intentionally trying to right a wrong, to address the genre itself by reframing the conventional narratives in a way that challenges our assumptions. That they attempt to do this through essentially the same tools as a more traditional horror movie is at least theoretically provocative, particularly given that all three were directed by men (and with only one female writer between them, in this case co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns [1917, THE GOOD NURSE]). 

This in turn requires a certain level of meta self-awareness on the part of the film and the audience; we need to understand that the point here is to undermine our expectations about the way the genre will treat its female protagonists, and to do that we need an implicit understanding of the way female suffering has traditionally been used in the genre. After all, depicting female suffering is hardly novel in itself; even the most horrifically misogynist genre works traffic in images of violence against women that are at least nominally sympathetic (since that sympathy is necessary to drive narrative tension). The difference between standard horror and these more introspective efforts is supposed to be in empathy, in the humanity the film grants to its suffering women, and the degree to which it is able to contextualize their fictional suffering in a way that implicates, or at least interrogates, the complicity of the viewer, making for a premise that is necessarily involved in a conversation about the genre more broadly, and the characteristic assumptions it makes about how we will interpret screen violence against women. 

That kind of self-awareness is not necessarily a shortcoming; there is, at least, something kind of perversely interesting in HOTEL FEAR's profound awareness of how threatened the protagonist feels to have men constantly lusting after her, while at the same time the camera constantly lusts after her too -- and of course this tension can only come from a director who feels both concerned about the implicit ethics of exploitation cinema and drawn to its earthy thrills. Although obviously it would be valuable to have more female voices expressing their gendered experiences with male violence articulated vis-a-vis the conventions of genre expectations, men just as obviously need to be part of this conversation too, especially considering their oversized role in both perpetuating real-life violence and creating and supporting violent art which frequently dehumanizes women (if not outright fetishizing violence against them). The question becomes, then: what does it say about us that we gravitate to art which often presents suffering --and primarily female suffering-- as entertainment? 

As a quick look at my viewing history should make clear, I don't believe violence in art is equivalent to real-life violence, and I don't believe depiction is inherently endorsement. And in fact, believe isn't even the right word; I think there is overwhelming evidence that, at the very least, antisocial media does not directly produce antisocial viewers (if it did, I would surely be a serial killer by now). But I don't think it's responsible to simply brush off antisocial film as harmless fantasy, either. Screen violence and real-world violence are not directly linked, but they are intertwined in slippery, nebulous ways that deserve hard scrutiny, at the very minimum simply because violent art makes it very clear how vulnerable our brains are to uncritically interpreting stories through the framework a careful storyteller lays out. That, at least, should have profound real-world implications, because it's not only movies that seek to carefully frame stories to subtly delineate who does and does not deserve our empathy. If a movie can get you to laugh at a woman who gets horribly butchered, a news story can too. 

Still, I think that asking how stories affect people's behavior is not the most productive direction from which to approach this topic. Rather than asking "what does art do to people," the question should be "what do people take from art?" A subtle distinction, maybe, but a vital one. Fantasy, and even (and maybe especially) antisocial fantasy, is not inherently dangerous; indeed, I think it is foundational to the experience of being human. But we start to run into more trouble when we let particularly compelling stories begin to dictate the terms of reality for us, and begin to forget that stories --all stories, fictional or not-- are always fantasies, and we're most vulnerable to uncritically embracing the fantasies that are sold to us in the most insidiously seductive style, with the most flattering framing. This has more to do with the inherent psychological landscape within the viewer than within the art itself; the movie is an inert object, but the interpretation we apply to it is an obscure and abstract process of internal storytelling, whereby we synthesize all our understanding of the world into a prism that refracts the sounds and images into something with meaning. Consequently, the content itself isn't something which acts upon the psyche so much as something to be acted upon by the brain's endlessly complex pattern-seeking machinery. A healthy brain has the tools to establish context, letting us interpret potentially horrific content through the conventions of fantasy, and not as something which needs to be literally reflective of reality, idealized or otherwise. An unhealthy brain, of course, may struggle to do this, with potentially disastrous real-world consequences. But then, discerning how constructively your brain is processing things is not always an easy task.

Self-awareness, then, is the key here; an honest accounting of what we're drawn to about antisocial art, and a vigilance about the ways it may be very subtly strengthening our unquestioned assumptions in way which make us less empathetic and less humble about life's infinite nuance. In that sense, I think antisocial art actually becomes incredibly valuable: the fact that we're drawn to it is a good reminder that we are, in fact, vulnerable to exactly the kind of nastiness it depicts. Nevermind REPULSION or PIECES or whatever, the very powerful personal attraction I feel from the odious charismatic chauvinism of THUNDERBALL's Sean Connery is a pretty powerful reminder that I have it within me to at least tolerate, if not outright enact, some ugly macho bullshit. And I don't even know that it's such a terrible thing that I do. I don't know that I'd want to root it out even if I could -- that little bit of nascent macho asshole helps me understand the world a little better, helps me glean some insight into men who more overtly embrace that ethos, who I may not like or respect, but with whom I have to share a planet and a culture. I don't think being a good person means stamping out every last vestige of temptation in one's soul, it just means acknowledging that those things are there, and they're part of you... but mostly not a useful part, and certainly not a part that should be handed the reigns in any unchecked way. But to guard against that, you need to clarify what ugly impulses inside you need to be guarded against in the first place, and that means an honest accounting of why we're drawn to create and consume art that reflects the darker aspects of human nature in the first place.

That, in my view, is Polanski's chief fault, and the one that LAST NIGHT IN SOHO misses, much to its detriment. He understood --and better than Wright does, I think, or anyway was better at depicting it in his movies-- just how oppressive and dehumanizing the patriarchy could be to women. He just refused to see it in himself, refused to see that even in his movies, despite --and in parallel to-- their obvious (and I believe genuine) empathy, there's also a subtle sort of sadistic pleasure they take in tormenting their female characters. In ROSEMARY'S BABY (spoilers for that movie) the Devil drugs and rapes the protagonist in one of the most horrifying violations in all cinema. Nine years later, Polanski himself did the same thing, yet he never saw himself as a Devil. Maybe if he'd been able to introspect just a little deeper about what that scene stirred in him, why he made it the way he did, why he was drawn to it at all... well, we'll never know. At any rate, I don't think Polanski was possessed of a uniquely deviant psyche (the fact that Wright and I enjoy his movies so much suggests we have more than a little in common with him), and after all, he spent much of his life as a victim himself (of the holocaust, and later the Mason family, just to name two egregious examples). But when it really mattered, he couldn't, or wouldn't, recognize that he had become the victimizer.

Still, although it didn't seem to help Polanski, I think there is value, and perhaps great value, in making and enjoying antisocial art. Far from seeding innocents with evil ideas, I think it helps people --most people, anyway, myself included-- connect with their darker sides, acknowledge them, maybe even indulge them a little, and consequently become more self-aware than they would be if they had to encounter these darker urges for the first time in the real world, in the heat of the moment. Of course that's not always the case for everyone, and we would be negligent to dismiss the people --a minority, I think, but who knows?-- who lack the tools or interest for self-reflection, and instead simply absorb the fantasy, use it to structure and validate their own antisocial internal narratives. This is not a problem lightly ignored, but at the same time I think our response has to start with the people in question, not with the art they misuse. People who lack the sophistication to introspect and distinguish fiction from reality are going to be a problem no matter what, even if we were somehow able to so studiously censor their media experience that they received only the most utterly anodyne, pro-social narratives. Fostering introspection and media savvy is simply a good idea all around, for everyone -- after all, it's not like deranged psychos are the only ones vulnerable to letting a manipulative fantasy subtly strengthen their biases and assumptions about the world. And indeed, I think films like the ones I'm talking about here, that encourage (or even require) a kind of meta-intercourse with our perceptions about genre and the assumptions it rests on, may be helpful, perhaps even necessary, to shape new generations to be more mindful of the ways in which they interact with media.   

...But probably not LAST NIGHT IN SOHO specifically, though, because I'm sorry to say that I think the commentary here just isn't really any good. I appreciate that Wright and co-writer Wilson-Cairns are trying to grapple with these issues, but unfortunately the movie simply never manages to satisfying address (let alone answer) its own questions, either about the dangers of nostalgia or its ambivalence about enjoying morally suspect art by morally suspect artists. To wit: though this is all ostensibly some sort of mystery-horror thing, the moral arc of the movie (or lack thereof) is best summed up by a dress. The protagonist, a fashion student, creates this dress after being inspired by the aesthetics of the 60's, but then freaks out and tears it up after learning that the 60's were actually not so great in some ways. But then at the end... she just happily goes back to it. Why? It's not like she experiences some great character growth which helps her find a healthy perspective on the past. She just flailingly vacillates between complete rejection and blithe acceptance, never meaningfully taking stock of what is so attractive to her about this resurrected signifier of the past in the first place, and consequently unable to grapple with the reasons for either her rejection or reconciliation with the style. Once again, the movie seems utterly unable to actually engage with the the worthwhile issues it raises.

And that's a big, big problem, because it's even worse at doing the other stuff it's ostensibly trying to do, namely be a compelling mystery and horror movie. It's barely a horror movie at all; its sole horror image, of a group of faceless ghostly men, is not utterly without merit, but any potency it ever possessed is quickly dashed through merciless repetition (I'm not joking when I say there's only one horror image in the movie) and by being presented with confounding literalism, despite how stylized most of the rest of the movie is. And as a mystery, it's even more of a dire failure, hanging its entire whodunnit premise on shamelessly withholding key information and in several egregious cases outright lying to the viewer, and beyond that utterly crippled by a protagonist who's as frustratingly incompetent an investigator as I have ever seen in a movie. 

How incompetent? Her entire campaign to "solve" a murder she saw in a vision consists of what looks like an hour or two of fruitless library research, after which she runs away and never again makes the slightest attempt to turn up any clues (the only other proactive step of any kind that she takes is to go to the police and angrily demand they go solve the murder for her, oh, except she doesn't know the names of anyone involved or when it happened or have any relevant details because she saw it in a dream, and the movie acts like the cops are being some real macho assholes for not taking her seriously). If this were any other movie, I would have no choice to but interpret a female character this inept and hysterical as a shamelessly regressive stereotype of helpless feminine fragility. Obviously that's not what is intended here, but the mystery plotting is so lazy and haphazard that it's just kind of where we end up anyway. At one point, she accuses someone of being the murderer, for all intents and purposes, entirely on the strength of his being the one apparently pointless male character who is suspiciously played by a famous actor. There's literally no other reason to suspect him of anything, she has no evidence and doesn't even know his name or anything else about him except that he lived in Soho during the 60's. This should be roundly embarrassing, but the movie is so self-congratulatory about its feminist bona fides that it tries to play the fallout of this incident as a big shocking twist rather than evidence that its protagonist is a spasmodic twit. Yet another modern movie content to simply tell us it believes in strong women without actually making the effort to create one. 

And for a very performatively feminist movie, a movie which, indeed, sets itself very explicitly to the task of condemning the history of misogyny in genre movies, it's a huge problem that the female lead is such an incompetent, helpless baby. She knows, for example, that she gets psychic visions from time to time. These can obviously be quite disruptive and upsetting, but at the same time she knows this happens, she's lived with it apparently all her life and knows they're just visions and can't hurt her, and yet she just simply cannot restrain herself from screaming and freaking out as though this were really happening, at one point almost accidentally murdering an innocent bystander in her panic (!) and at another almost getting her one Black friend arrested, and at no point seeming to realize it's possible, and lo!, even desirable, to just grit your teeth and maintain some composure so that you don't look like an utter psychopath. Haley Joel Osment in THE SIXTH SENSE --a literal child-- does such a vastly better job keeping his cool, while seeing objectively more upsetting things, that you can't help but feel like LAST NIGHT IN SOHO actually has very little real respect for its female characters after all. It does not speak well of this writing, to put it lightly, that I can think of a dozen tougher and more complex female roles from actual 60's movies --and not even super-progressive 60's movies-- right off the top of my head. If you need to make your heroine this wimpy in order to make the patriarchy seem mean, maybe misogyny just isn't really much of a problem. 

And if empathy is the missing ingredient in so much of horror cinema, what does it mean to have not one, but two female protagonists here who are basically empty nothing characters defined only by their naiveté and their helpless suffering at the hands of men? Without interiority or autonomy, their suffering is really distinguished from standard genre-movie female victimhood only by the movie's hesitance to make any of it entertaining, which isn't really an improvement in my opinion. And ultimately even if they were compelling female characters lucidly decrying the patriarchy, it would all be undone by the excruciating final act, which makes utter hash out of even the bland, boilerplate anti-misogyny themes the movie has been loudly declaiming up to that point (the twist about the killer's identity should, in itself, be disqualifying for any movie that wants to claim it's feminist, and the movie's completely off-the-rails final moment is so psychotically misjudged that I can only interpret it as a tacit approval of serial murder). If one were to be charitable to the point of active ignorance, I suppose you might be able to make a case that the climactic twist is attempting to complicate the movie's otherwise fairly boilerplate themes, but considering how badly it already fumbles the boilerplate, you can imagine how deftly it handles "complicating" it. It's almost audacious in how stunningly misjudged it is, but unfortunately also too dull and hectoring to quite manage to to feel exciting in its fearless willingness to jump completely off the rails. 

So does that mean LAST NIGHT IN SOHO is completely worthless? Surprisingly, no! It's just worthless at being a meta-commentary about genre and nostalgia or being an entertaining or effective mystery or horror movie. Fortunately, although it expends a whole lot of very trying runtime on those things, they're not really what it's about. No, what LAST NIGHT IN SOHO really is, for whatever reason, is a ravishing throwback musical-fantasy, minus the actual "musical numbers" per se. Wright may like REPULSION well enough, but self-evidently what really gets him excited is gaudy, gimmicky music videos, and he indulges this fetish every single moment he gets the chance to, in the process turning out some genuinely ravishing sequences. The film's big signature setpiece, tellingly, has nothing to do with murder mysteries or faceless specters; it is a giddy one-take dance sequence where, using mirrors and slick choreography, McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy seamlessly double each other in-camera in a breathless whirlwind of joyful movie magic. This has not much at all to do with anything thematically; indeed, the whole complicated doubling thing is purely literal, simply reminding us that the two characters are experiencing this simultaneously. But it's also what the film is really about, as opposed to what the tedious script is about. If turning the 1960's into a gorgeous, rhapsodic fairy-tale fantasy is resolutely at odds with the movie's stated intent of an honest accounting of the past, the film is so slick and enrapturing about it that I'd happily give up every scintilla of tedious pedantic theme to keep it. If only the movie felt the same way.

I could never wholly condemn a movie with even one scene as blissfully transporting as that one, and LAST NIGHT IN SOHO has several, which is more than enough for me to ultimately feel glad it exists. And I genuinely appreciate the questions it raises, even if it does an objectively bad job actually grappling with them. But still, it can't help but feel like a real missed opportunity -- a film with style and technique and curiosity to spare, in desperate search of a script that allows those things to flourish. Which is, I think it needs to be said, a pretty apt description of every movie Wright had made that wasn't co-written with Simon Pegg, the one man alive who seems able to channel Wright's obvious strengths as a filmmaker into films that are as structurally sturdy as they are energetic and visually imaginative. I wish LAST NIGHT IN SOHO worked on all the levels its ambition is aiming for, but in the absence of anything else really like it, I'll take what I can get. Ironically, then, this film that wants so badly to try to address the legacy of REPULSION elicits a similar reaction in me (though for very different reasons): I like it... with some key reservations.

* Wright also claimed it was his attempt at a giallo, about which many of the same things could be said. But other than his use of vivid, monochromatic color and maybe some vague gestures towards excessive style, there's less of that in here than I was expecting -- so little that I don't know that I would have noticed it if I hadn't been told to look for it. 

** But nothing else; weirdly, despite having a Black character, the movie has not a single hint that there was any other kind of injustice in 1965 London (or today). Not that every movie needs to or can address every issue, but it does seem odd since the movie is so explicitly posited as a direct cultural criticism.