As one of those movies that has so much psychological buildup surrounding it before one even goes into the theater (or rather, if one goes into the theater at all to watch movies), Beau Is Afraid has as many things working against garnering audience attention as it does attracting it. In the latter column, of course, is that it’s directed by Ari Aster, the writer-director slowly but steadily being groomed into a modern auteur by A24. Then there is the cast, an impressive coterie of actors, including Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan and Parker Posey, led by Joaquin Phoenix. But there in the “repelling” column is that the movie comes across as “weird”—deliberately “off-putting.” Especially to the layperson. This, of course, is compounded by the two hour and fifty-nine-minute runtime of the film. In effect, Aster is saying, “This movie is not about people-pleasing.” Some would be hard-pressed to see it as being about anything at all. Those people have perhaps never suffered from the crippling anxiety and paranoia involved in simply leaving the (semi-)safety of their abode. In that sense, one can look at the first portion of Beau Is Afraid as being like What About Bob? on steroids, complete with Bob’s (Bill Murray) extreme phobia of leaving the apartment. Except that, in Beau’s case, that fear is entirely merited.
Living in the fictional city of Corrina, CR, it reads visually like a combination of New York and San Francisco (and yes, SF gets far more flak for its violent, erratic homeless population than NY—though perhaps NY simply has a greater number of ass-kissers at its PR disposal). Beau’s apartment building is situated next to a sex shop called Erectus Ejectus and across the street from the Cheapo Depot, a bodega run by a take-no-prisoners proprietor who isn’t liable to give you any kind of discount when you happen to be short on the amount just because you’re a regular. After all, he can’t afford such niceties in a hostile climate like this. One that, in the end, seems entirely manufactured by Mona Wasserman (Patti LuPone), Beau’s corporate maven of a mother. The type of woman who far exceeds a cutesy, demeaning term like “girlboss.” This is a woman who puts all previous known masterminds and manipulators to shame. To this end, Aster, born into a Jewish family, can now easily be characterized by this film as the proverbial self-hating Jew. No longer a title that Woody Allen alone can claim as a result of his affirmed cancellation in the film industry (essentially capitulating to that cancellation by admitting his next movie would be his last…until backpedaling on that statement soon after).
As such, Aster’s presentation of a Jewish mother as so overbearing and controlling that she would go to such lengths to hyper-manage her only son’s life definitely one-ups any self-hating depictions Allen ever offered (see: Annie Hall, Deconstructing Harry). Or Allen’s nemesis, for that matter: Philip Roth. And yes, there are plenty of Portnoy’s Complaint elements in the mix here (chief among them the giant penis locked in the attic intended to represent Beau’s father).
It would also make one remiss in their cinephilic tendencies to overlook The Truman Show as a major influence on this particular work. With that “I’m being watched” kind of revelation occurring in Part Two of the movie, as Beau finds himself in the “care” of a sinister couple of means named Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane) after being mowed down by their truck while in the midst of running through the street outside his apartment naked. This occurring as a result of the homeless population outside finding their way in as a roundabout result of Beau’s keys being stolen from his door. After they party all night with Beau watching from some scaffolding outside, he awakens the next morning to find his apartment empty. Or so he thinks. However, upon taking a bath after learning of his mother’s death from a UPS guy (voiced and briefly cameo’d by Bill Hader), the sight of another crazed “unhoused” person clinging to the ceiling above him ultimately sends him running outside in his birthday suit. Oh yes, and there’s also an errant serial killer in the neighborhood called Birthday Boy Stab Man, likely dubbed as such because he “operates” in his birthday suit. And, of course, he ends up stabbing Beau a few times after he’s rendered immobile and barely conscious due to the truck hitting him. Therefore, all of Beau’s worst fears and anxieties are realized—and then some.
It’s not a coincidence that all those fears and anxieties start to reach a crescendo after Beau has “rejected” his mother by telling her he’s not going to make it to the airport in time for their scheduled visit because someone stole his keys and he doesn’t feel comfortable heading out until the locks have been changed. But Mona has her ways and her machinations for coaxing Beau into an Odyssean journey to make it back as soon as possible so that her funeral can proceed. Because, that’s right, she’s faked her own death to inflict the amount of guilt she thinks he feels deserving of (and here, the trope of a Jewish mother’s guilt is on full blast). Per Mona’s lawyer, “Dr.” Cohen, she’s stipulated in her will that the ceremony cannot take place without him. Unfortunately for Beau’s guilt quotient, it gets upped by the fact that Jewish law dictates that a body must be buried right away. So it is that Beau is both a bad son and a bad Jew. A fate that seems irreversible to all male Jews, if we’re to go by literature and film. Grace and Roger, the epitome of a white-bread Christian couple, could never know Beau’s torment, even as they conspire to be a part of it. It’s not as clear whether their surviving teenage daughter, Toni (Kylie Rogers), is as “in on it” as her parents, who have been trying to fill the void left in the absence of their dead son, Nathan, a soldier that died in combat. Caring for his fellow battalion member, Jeeves (Denis Ménochet), an unhinged man requiring many meds, is the obvious way for them to “make up” for the loss of Nathan. But with the arrival of Beau comes a new opportunity to “nurture.” Even if it’s as smothering and oppressive as Mona’s version of “nurturing.”
Early on in the movie, some would immediately say the world Beau inhabits is cartoonish and absurdist—at one point literally becoming animated as he imagines himself as the protagonist of a play he’s watching. Or that all of his fears are a result of the kind of hyper-neurotic nature that Jews are frequently stereotyped as having (of course, who can blame them with anti-Semitism alive and well even after the extermination of six million of their kind?). But, in the end, the one fear he doesn’t think to have is actually not so far-fetched: being monitored constantly. For it’s not hard to believe that someone (especially someone with enough money) could track, record and/or film your every move, and then use it against you when they finally want to render you totally paralyzed by the paranoia you thought you had overcome. Worse still, use it to play into all your worst senses of guilt. After all, it’s no coincidence that the billboard outside Beau’s building bears the Big Brother-y tagline, “Jesus Sees Your Abominations.” More like Mona does.
And, talking of taglines, Beau has been part of Mona’s advertising campaigns for most of his life. She being the head of a multi-faceted conglomerate that has its hand in everything from pharmaceuticals to film production. With Mona’s company name for the latter being Mommy Knows Best. An eerie assertion from a woman who has her eye in every possible surveillance pie. This going hand in hand with “security,” for which MW (which stands for Mona Wasserman) also has a tagline: “Your security has been our priority for forty years.” Beau’s own age is forty-eight (same as Joaquin Phoenix’s) as we come to find at the end, when a god-like voice (Dr. Cohen’s) announces his date of birth as May 10, 1975. So perhaps the key root of all Beau’s issues is that he’s a Taurus. But no, it’s being born to a Jewish mother, if Aster would have us convinced of anything. It’s also a very deliberate word choice for Mona to use the phrase “claw your way out of me” to Beau during their ultimate showdown in what can be called Part Four of the film. For it is with that “clawing” out of her womb that Beau Is Afraid begins, with the audience seeing his birth from Beau’s perspective.
From the first moments of his existence, anxiety permeates everything as his mother frantically demands to know about the state and health of her child, who appears not to be breathing normally. But with a requisite slap on the ass, Beau is prompted to cry. This slapping cue turning more metaphorical as his repressed life wears on. For every time he is lashed in one way or another by his mother’s various cues, Beau snaps to attention and grudgingly “performs.” His life is not his own—it belongs to his mother. And this is made no more apparent than in her financial control over him. Indeed, Beau’s credit card is “mysteriously” deactivated after he tells Mona he can’t make his flight. Whether or not Beau was as willing a participant in his own infantilization as Mona is up to the viewer to decide. However, those with parents who have infantilized them are likely aware that being irrevocably handicapped by the crushing weight of “safety and security” eventually feels like an unavoidable fate rather than something that can be fought against. Surrender Dorothy, as it is said. Or, in this case, Surrender Beau. That’s what Mona, in the Wicked Witch of the West’s stead is undeniably saying. And she’s saying it because she knows she has all the resources necessary to take him down and debilitate him.
In this regard, Jacobin’s take on Mona as a cold capitalist machine that it would be impossible to receive any unconditional or pure love from is right on the money (no pun intended). Jacobin, too, points out certain similarities between Citizen Kane and Beau Is Afraid in that it’s “a character study of a boy whose ‘parents were a bank.’” Or, for Beau, “parent.” And what kind of love can really be received from someone who has to be clinical and cold enough to be able to make millions (or billions) of dollars? It bears noting that Jacobin’s critique of the film isn’t favorable, writing Beau off as the product of a writer who gets off on “trauma tourism”—but if he had really suffered from that much genuine trauma, Beau/Aster wouldn’t have the luxury of portraying it at all. Maybe, to a certain extent, this is a fair assessment. The people given a megaphone to talk about trauma still tend to be people who grew up middle-class, white and male. Read: Aster. And yet, as Bob Dylan said, “I’m helpless, like a rich man’s child.” This simile is not without its value in considering a being such as Beau, given a surfeit of tangible tools as a result of having a rich progenitor, but no real ones he could actually use to cope in a life outside of “the nest.”
And what could “real life” possibly be to a boy who ostensibly grew up in a fishbowl town called Wasserton (named after his mother), anyway? This, again, channels The Truman Show vibes, when it’s not also smacking of something pulled from the mind of fellow Jewish auteur Charlie Kaufman (think: Synecdoche, New York). And, like Kaufman, Aster is concerned with the futility of attempting to alter one’s preordained fate. Because no matter how we try to fight it or “rewrite” it (as the artist so often does in their work), in the end, “it is written.” That much is made obvious when we see Beau fast-forward through the surveillance footage of himself at Grace and Roger’s to the final scene in the movie. The final scene is his life. One that will be quite full-circle in terms of comparing it to the opening scene: his birth.
As for the mother-son dynamic that serves as the central anchor of the narrative, the classic Oedipus story is also constantly in motion, with Mona clearly wanting to keep her son’s love and desire all to herself—hence, the urban legend she scares him into believing about his father that keeps Beau as well beyond a forty-year-old virgin. With the epididymitis to prove it. That means huge, swollen balls, to the unmedically trained. Ironically, of course, Beau’s “big balls” don’t translate to the idiomatic version of that phrase inferring bravery and “chutzpah.” Quite the opposite as he spends most of the movie quivering and cowering in fear (the movie title is there for a reason). Not just of what could happen, but what has happened already. Which is where Aster’s knack for horror melds seamlessly with the psychological trauma of memory, and remembering. That’s all Beau does, as we seem to see him existing in multiple planes of time via perpetual reflection (such is the luxury of not having a job apart from existence itself).
In this way, viewers will be allowed to question how much of what happens is “just in his head” versus how much is “reality.” Which, as most know, is totally subjective. This being a large part of why Mona can manipulate Beau’s “reality” for her own controlling ends. Ends that appear to be more sadistic than altruistic, as she would like to tell herself. For example, when he’s born and arrives out of the womb in silence, her demand is: “Why isn’t he crying?” In other words, doesn’t he know how painful it is to exist (nay, for Mona to bring him into existence) and what the according reaction should be? This later translates to another question she asks of Beau: “Is he afraid enough of the world?” No? Well then Mona—rich Mona—will make it so. With this in mind, although Beau is firmly Gen X, we have an undeniable commentary on millennial-baby boomer relations contained in Beau Is Afraid as well. For was it not the boomers who wanted to give their millennial spawn the pristine, protected childhood that they never got? Resulting in the manufacture of a generation consisting mostly of scared, confused man-children just like Beau.
Initially billed by Aster as a “nightmare comedy” (like something in the spirit of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in which all the protagonist wants to do is go home, but his prewritten destiny has other tortures in mind), how the genre of Beau Is Afraid comes across is more about how the viewer themselves sees life: as a comedy or tragedy. Here, too, it’s hard not to think of “Jewish representative” Woody Allen, who based an entire movie on this premise—the subpar Melinda and Melinda.
For the seasoned neurotic and those accustomed to even the most basic of tasks in life being herculean to achieve without incident, the accurate takeaway is that it’s an absurdist tragicomedy. And so it goes without saying that any Marvel-loving gentile normies likely won’t bother with wandering into this film at all. And if they do, the criticism and balking is to be expected.
