Society (1989)

Society is inevitable. You become a part of it, an organ of the collective, like a limb or a growth, functioning to serve the higher body. Or you can “make a wonderful contribution to society,” as pseudo-therapist Dr. Cleveland tells his (rightfully) suspicious teenage patient, Bill (Billy Warlock) in Society. Ben Slack delivers the line with pitch-perfect WASPy condescension—the limited neoliberal imagination is at one of its peaks in the late eighties. He sounds like a farmer fattening up his pig for next week's chops. You're either a lucky insider, and you eat, or you get eaten. “There is no alternative,” Margaret Thatcher told the British people. She tried to distract them from how her mouth and lips had disappeared. The soft jaw, an abattoir of yellow, waxen skin, protruded outward, sucking a coal miner's vital nutrients out like a Kardashian juicer.

Marx famously compared capital's parasitic nature to a bloodsucker, “the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.” Bram Stoker's Dracula and Brian Yuzna's Society are intrinsically flawed works of art and that fact doesn’t matter. The sheer power of their social evocations and parasitic conceits overwhelm formal critiques of plot and character. Both Stoker and Yuzna were influenced by their nightmares, this uncanny logic evident in Society's tilted angles and melodramatic dread which builds into the last act's grotesque, disgusting excess. The worst dreams aren't easily shaken off.

The final scenes are flesh as wealth, liquid and liquidity, flesh as privilege. The Society's shunting rituals elongate, fuse, mold, pour, and dip into absorbent stretches of pale yellow meat. Bodies become a collective entity. The skins - plural - drip their glistening sweat across the screen, akin to Roger Corman's production of a Francis Bacon painting. Tongues grow six inches; limbs extend themselves and violate the autonomy of individual bodies, genitalia and faces swapping places, the therapist's mock-paternalism becomes a contorted Glasgow smile. Your family and classmates really were as awful and strange as they seemed. You're not paranoid. Sure, you might be a rich, good-looking jock, but almost everyone else is in on the same sick joke, and guess what? You're the punchline. 

Society is about the uber-wealthy and the way they exploit the unwealthy just as Dracula externalizes fear of sexuality and the European Other: it's right there within the text but the metaphor is elastic, it goes a million different directions. The story is the conspiracist's wet dream—there really is a diabolical cabal, a secret society of creatures hunting you!—yet it's easy to identify the experience of the Other in Bill's mounting unease. Even the guy handsome enough to work on daytime TV is an alien in this place where slugs receive more attention than plants and Oedipal urges get a physical, flexible workout. At least Bill gets to leave. What can you do? You never belonged. You were never going to. Cheer up: if you can't leave, at least you get to make a wonderful contribution to society. 4 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—C.M. Crockford