What you never have to doubt in the process of figuring out a Lanthimos movie are all your conflicting feelings about almost everything that happens in it. Especially when Lanthimos goes for one of those overarching, all-consuming metaphors that come off as prophecies that will come to true no matter what path is taken circumstantially. Bugonia is one of those decidedly nihilistic projections of a future that is doomed because it was always meant to be doomed. But you’d only believe that once you completely immerse yourself in the choices made by all the key players in this apocalyptic science-fiction flick that’s seemingly written off mankind itself. So let me try to help you with that.
Spoiler Alert
Why does Teddy think Michelle is an alien?
We know Teddy Gatz through actions, exposition, and discovery. And I think that’s about as much spoonfeeding about a character and the backdrop of his headspace and instincts as you can expect from a Lanthimos film. At least we’re not working with crumbs over here as we try to unpack everything that’s wrong with Teddy and where exactly things went wrong in the first place. Teddy certainly didn’t wake up one day and decide to believe that the world was controlled by Andromedans, and that he was the only person who could do anything about it. And yet his actions and convictions serve as a wildly effective cautionary example of the darkest corners of a mind that only runs loops of conspiracy theories that it picks up along the way. And because conspiracy theories are everywhere, if someone like Teddy really wants to find a sense of belonging in a space where all the “freaks” are welcome, our hobbyist apiarist has no scarcity of niche “knowledge” about the others–aliens and such. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that Teddy relies only on QAnon podcasts and platforms to make his mind up about the powerful Andromedans who he believes are here to destroy mankind. He’s quite the basement scientist himself with his research on chemical castration, the Andromedan spaceship, signs to look for when identifying an Andromedan, and what to do when you capture one. All of which, while exceedingly exciting, are questionable prospects for Teddy’s cousin Don. The fact that Don is on the spectrum is undeniable, and because we can see the state of Teddy and his lives–forever running on empty and dealing with their issues the only way their extreme poverty allows them to–we can assume that Don hasn’t had the privilege to understand why he feels so untethered from the world. His only tangible connection in life is to Teddy, and that’s something that Teddy is crazy exploitative of when it comes to his “heroic” mission to save the world. From the get go, it doesn’t quite sit right with Donny that Teddy plans to kidnap Michelle, the CEO of the local pharmaceutical giant, Auxolith. But he goes along with every step of the plan because, for the lack of any other option, Teddy is the only person he trusts. They’ve got quite the Dwight and Mose thing going with the way Teddy stunts Don’s growth and demands unconditional trust and loyalty without ever really making sense at all. But why Michelle, of all people? Is it only because he is sickened by the effect the neonicotinoids her company produces have had on bees? Like most conspiracy theorists who have indisputable truths at the foundation of their nuttiness, Teddy is right to be bothered by the effects Michelle’s company has had on the pollinators responsible for keeping the planet alive. But that’s hardly the complete extent of Teddy’s personal grievances over the way Michelle and her company function. Through feverish flashbacks quietly observing one of the worst periods of Teddy’s life, we get to know that his mother, Sandy Gatz, was turned vegetative in the trial run of a medication to fix addiction. And who approved that trial run, paid off the families of the victims when it backfired, and moved on in a hurry? That’s our celebrated CEO whose face is on all the top magazines revering her as a sparkling example of women empowerment. The haunting metaphysical imagery where we find a younger Teddy holding onto the ropes tying his mother down as she floats away–that’s Bugonia’s way of telling us exactly how Teddy feels about what happened to his mom. Since we do know that Sandy was an addict, we can only imagine how hard it must’ve been for Teddy to raise himself all alone. In one of the early flashbacks, Sandy seemed to be just as inadvertently manipulative toward her son as you’d expect someone in her position to be. She must’ve hated going through the treatment, and she never skipped a turn to remind Teddy that she was only going through that suffering for him. That implanted guilt would’ve been dark enough to mess him up just as bad. But it was only exacerbated when the treatment left Sandy brain-dead. And if that’s not bad enough, Auxolith seems to have run every other business out of the area and become the sole employer. That’s compelled Teddy to take up a blue-collar job at the very company that’s responsible for his mother’s condition, the death of the bees, and if Teddy’s intuition is right, the death of mankind. Even if all of that doesn’t make Teddy’s mission seem almost righteous, Michelle is hardly someone you’re likely to root for. She’s a loathsome paradigm of bloodsucking corporate dictators–more eager to subscribe to the appearance that her company is evolved than she is to actually stop exploiting labor. The whole business with Michelle telling her employees that they can leave at 5:30 while reminding them that they shouldn’t even consider that if they have any unfinished work, and her bringing up the word “conscience” in regards to how responsible her employees should feel about the company’s output–I mean–how do you not find her abduction a little justified? It isn’t, of course. Because as bad as Michelle is, Teddy’s a complete lunatic for attacking and kidnapping a woman he thinks is an Andromedan. And he’s absolutely villainous in the way he pushes Don to do very wrong things that he’s clearly not okay with doing. It’s heartbreaking to watch Don be misled into making awful choices in life, choices that scare him too. But you understand why Don follows Teddy’s orders like they’re the gospel when you acknowledge Don’s profuse loneliness in the world. The only person, however terrible, who says a few words of comfort and reassurance to Don is Teddy. So it’s really too bad that Teddy’s the last person that Don should follow. Because that leaves Don vulnerable to life-changing mistakes like letting Teddy chemically castrate him. Teddy’s done it to himself too. How else would he trust himself to stay focused on his singular goal of being the hero that saved the world from aliens? From being forced to shave Michelle’s head, to following Teddy’s orders and staying quiet as his cousin bullies a helpless woman for a cause Don is sane enough to be cynical about–everything that Don has to put up with to have a person he can call family hurts his heart. Teddy’s glaring selfishness and apathy to Don’s doubts and issues isn’t something you can find an excuse for, no matter where you look in his past. But that’s because Bugonia doesn’t want you to think that such abuse can ever be justified, no matter what someone has been through. Teddy’s an awful person for many reasons. But Don’s the only consistent victim of complete social isolation and Teddy’s manipulation, where these two issues aggravate each other in a never-ending cycle of misfortune. Acknowledging all of this doesn’t make it any easier for you to stop seeing Teddy as a victim, and that’s because he very much is. When there was still hope for someone like Teddy to get some help, that was the farthest thing from his mind as a kid whose dad had abandoned the family, and whose mom was an addict. He’s only seen decay and loss all around him, and as the person who’s been the face of his suffering for the most part, and for a long time, Michelle is the worst person (alien) in the world as far as he’s concerned. Teddy’s dealt with all his issues with a carefully curated regimen of denial and escapism. But where does a person with a hero complex and a personal grudge against the cruel powers running the world escape to? For Teddy, saving the world from aliens is the only sense of control he’s felt in a long time. And that makes him fall into the same bracket as all those people who need to shift their focus to ridiculous problems to avoid acknowledging the real ones. Enter all the self-proclaimed experts on extraterrestrial beings masquerading in disguise among the most powerful people of the world. So if you’re trying to figure out if it even matters to Teddy that Michelle’s an alien or not, the answer is pretty simple. The very fact that this is an experiment that Teddy’s willing to conduct on someone who’s able to feel pain and humiliation is an immediate sign that he’s psychotic. You didn’t imagine it when you thought you saw Teddy pause for a microsecond when Don had asked him if he was certain that Michelle was an alien. He did pause. Bugonia explores Teddy’s psychosis further down the line. But even before that, there’s been signs all along that suggest that no matter what Michelle turns out to be, Teddy’s a crazed maniac for thinking torturing someone can ever make him a savior.
Why does Don kill himself?
You’d never catch Teddy owning up to his narcissistic tendencies. He takes all the credit for this freaky mission. And he even goes as far as to ask Don to not speak a word when they’re in the presence of their captive. Bugonia has an amusing time making it look like Teddy’s absolutely crazy for thinking Michelle is an alien. It doesn’t really help his case that he believes that the Andromedans communicate and track each other through their hair, and that their neural defenses are weakened when you slather antihistamine cream all over them. We’re totally with Don as he loses his faith in the mission with every passing moment. He’s seeing a completely new side to his cousin, a side he doesn’t care for. Teddy being entirely unbothered by Michelle’s miserable state and even hitting her when he’s frustrated–these only serve to disillusion Don to the idea of hope that he was only starting to buy. He’s also starting to see that Teddy doesn’t really care about him either. When Don goes to him with the side effects he’s feeling after Teddy gave him anti-androgen shots, Teddy’s completely unaffected. What Teddy fails to see is that in that moment, he’s really no better than someone like Michelle. Someone who puts her goals and wishes over the well-being of her trial patients. What Michelle realizes in the process of at least trying to talk some sense into Teddy is that he isn’t unaware of any of his issues. He’s in strong denial about them. He’s even protective of some of them. For sure. But he’s gone through all the possibilities of how he could be wrong in what he’s doing. And that is something we can only be certain about because Teddy himself insists that he’s not doing this because he’s been brainwashed by the internet. He’s stressing on this point so hard in his “dialogue” with Michelle because he’s terrified of being seen as a modern day basement dwelling tinfoil hatter. He wants to be seen as a hero. That’s why his demand is as atrocious as a meeting with the Andromedan Emperor aboard their ship, where he plans to negotiate their departure from Earth. I don’t know about you. But even if all of Teddy’s Andromedan theories are on point, a man who strikes a woman when she points out his glaring emotional instability is hardly the “hero” for the job. But violence isn’t something Teddy is new to. And Don has a rude awakening to that when Teddy, even after Michelle’s desperate admission that she is an alien, hooks her up to his homemade electroconvulsive set up and cranks up the voltage as high as it can go. The only person in the room disturbed by Michelle’s agonized screams is Don. And though it takes him some time to gather enough courage to disobey Teddy, Don does try to save Michelle. When Teddy exclaims that this has never happened before, he’s referring to the fact that Michelle could withstand that high a voltage. But all Don registers from this is that this isn’t the first time that Teddy has kidnapped someone and done crazy experiments on them. It doesn’t really make Teddy look any more sane when his experiment comes to the conclusion that Michelle is not only an Andromedan, but a royal one at that. Though I’ve got to admit that it is kind of hilarious, heartbreaking, and sweet at the same time how Teddy tries to give Michelle the royal treatment following this episode. But wait. You didn’t expect that it was going to be simple for you to take Michelle’s side on this, did you? She actually sits there at the dinner table and denies the effect of chemical pesticides on the decline of bee population. You can only do that if your corporation is manufacturing the pesticides. But what I find even more audacious in Michelle, especially considering her situation, is how she actually believes that her psych degree can help her play mindgames on her captor. The problem is, Michelle wildly downplays just how volatile Teddy is. From the tag on the dress that Teddy left for her to wear, Michelle’s come to learn that Teddy is son to one of the victims of Auxolith’s failed experiment, Sandy Gatz. When she brings up Teddy’s mom, and it immediately triggers him, Michelle shouldn’t have kept going. But that’s exactly what she does, because she thinks she can talk her way out of this. But she isn’t really lying when she apologizes for not compensating the Gatz family enough for what was done to Sandy. She’s just that done deaf. Teddy’s living situation is the thing that’s struck her so hard, because she’s absolutely detached from the reality of how her own minimum wage employees live. She also seems to be totally detached from the truth that she’s an awful person. Believing that financial compensation could even begin to make up for the loss of lives makes her the last person who should be running Auxolith. But that’s the terrible reality of the world that Teddy’s done making peace with. And there’s absolutely no amount of moral restraint left in him to stop him from pouncing on Michelle all the way across the table when she brings up how hard it must’ve been for him to have had an addict for a mother. There’s a whole lot in his past that Teddy is too scared to look back at, and one of those things is how difficult it’s been for him to grow up without a father and with Sandy as a mother. Don doesn’t want Teddy to hurt Michelle, but when Michelle does get the better of Teddy, Don can’t help but save his cousin. It can’t be easy for Don to cope with this decision, especially after just having seen Teddy act like a raging madman. He also hates to have to grab the shotgun and hold Michelle hostage while Teddy takes care of a problem upstairs. You see, there’s another horror in his past that leaves Teddy all jittery; something else that he hates talking about. But the problem is, the babysitter who used to sexually abuse Teddy when he was a kid is now the town sheriff. So not only does Casey use his police car to stalk Teddy to offer him creepy apologies, but he also takes joy in the fact that his investigation into the missing case of Michelle has brought him to Teddy’s house. There’s this sense that Casey wants to be around Teddy as much as he can. And how Casey keeps bringing up what he did to Teddy back when he was a kid seems like his way to relive those days in a weird way. Does Teddy avoid holding Casey accountable for what he did to him because he is ashamed of it? Or is it because he’s scared that Casey would find a way to hurt him again? You can’t really blame Michelle for trying to get Don to let her go when Teddy is off giving Casey a tour of the apiary. She means no harm to Don. But when Don insists on believing Teddy’s idea of Michelle’s alien identity over her words, she plays along and reassures him that she will help him. Early in the film, when Teddy was bragging on himself to Don as usual, Don asked him if he was planning to take him along when he went to live on the alien planet. If it was a one time thing, you could’ve chalked it up to Don being wrong. But when faced with the option to betray his cousin and let Michelle go, Don only wants to know if Michelle will take him away with her. As someone on the spectrum who I can only assume is undiagnosed, Don must’ve had the hardest time finding a sense of belonging among people of his own species. He’s felt so alienated on his own planet that he would much rather live among actual aliens. Don hopes for a world away from his world, because he really needs to believe that something better than this exists. But when Michelle’s lies sound a lot like the lies Teddy told him, I guess Don figures that he can’t even trust the aliens. There’s no place across galaxies where someone like Don can run to for real love, acceptance, and comfort. So he gives up on his search for a better life than the one that he was born into by blowing his own head off in front of a horrified Michelle.
Is Michelle An Actual Andromedan Empress?
Even if there was a slim chance that Teddy would get away with all this, that changed the moment Casey heard the gunshot, and Teddy had to put him down. One less pedophile is never a bad thing. Teddy might’ve treated Don horribly. But coming back home to find him dead is definitely a blow to Teddy’s heart. A kneecapping just for good measure before Teddy blames Michelle for Don’s death. But even in extreme pain, Michelle manages to come up with a way to exploit Teddy’s emotional turmoil. She accepts her identity as an Andromedan with conviction this time, so much so that even without the alien language, Teddy believes her. She explains that Sandy was the first sample in an Andromedan experiment to change her genetic code. That’s pretty believable for someone like Teddy, even on a regular day. But because this is an especially bad day, Teddy actually believes Michelle when she tries to get him to go away by telling him that the bottle of antifreeze in her car is the cure for his mother’s condition. Teddy would do anything for a chance to wake his mom up. And he’s so deluded and overconfident that he really thinks that the best thing he can do for his comatose mom is administer something he can’t even identify into her bloodstream. By the time a wretched Teddy comes back from killing his mom, Michelle’s freed herself from her shackles. But why hasn’t she run? I get her curiosity to look behind the strange door and spend a couple minutes in sheer shock and horror. But why doesn’t she run after finding jars of human limbs in formaldehyde and a notebook containing all the details of Teddy’s grotesque experiment on over a dozen people. We’ve got a conspiracy theorist serial killer on our hands in Bugonia. But if I were Michelle, I think I would’ve made my way out ASAP. I definitely wouldn’t have stuck around to hold Teddy accountable for his crimes. But then again, I’m no Andromedan. Michelle is. I know that everything that happens from this point is pretty spooky and far-fetched, but I’m basing my conclusion on the simple fact that Michelle stayed. She had no reason to stay back and pretend to be an Andromedan unless she was suicidal, which she doesn’t seem to be at any point in Bugonia. When Teddy’s back, Michelle only seems furious over the fact that two of Teddy’s homicidal experiments were done on Andromedans. Her coldness to human death and destruction is quickly explained when Michelle claims responsibility as the creator of mankind. In Michelle’s story, Andromedans made mankind out of guilt after having “accidentally” killed off the dinosaurs. But the humans weren’t content with the qualities that Andromedans passed down to them. So they made more vicious versions of themselves, who’d be our ancestors, in an attempt to be stronger than their creator, the Andromedans. Michelle mourns the helplessness of watching “new” humans ruin everything around themselves with so much sincerity that you can see actual guilt over Teddy’s face. But she also acknowledges that, even having played the role of a human in the cold, corrupt world that they’ve made for themselves has stripped away her goodness too. There’s almost this sense in the ending of Bugonia that none of this could’ve been avoided. While everything that Michelle calls out about mankind and our self-destructive ways are true, even an Andromedan had to turn brutal to have a life she deemed worth having. Does that mean that the only way to have a comfortable life is to be privileged or corrupt? Doesn’t sound like such a big shocker when you say it out loud, does it? Michelle can justify tricking Teddy into killing his mother all she wants. She knew the worst possible outcome of what she was doing when she asked Teddy to inject antifreeze into Sandy’s IV bag. Michelle’s promise to take Teddy along with her to her mothership on the day of the lunar eclipse doesn’t seem real until it does. I mean, can you seriously expect Michelle to mean what she’s saying when she cuts through her shocked employees, takes Teddy right into her office, whips out a freaking calculator, which is supposed to be an Andromedan device, and punches in a seemingly endless code? But when Michelle claimed that the Andromedans were running experiments on people like Sandy in a last bid to see if there was any hope left for humanity, that was pretty believable, huh? Narcissistic alien overlords who deem themselves gods would obviously think of their creations as things they own and can toy with however they please. Teddy came prepared with a diy bomb vest and everything. He doesn’t trust the aliens to be all righteous like he is, after all. It totally does seem like a ploy to trap Teddy when, in the ending of Bugonia, Michelle gets him to go into the closet that’s supposed to be an intergalactic transportation area. Though it’s not really the most improbable outcome that before he gets to be “beamed up,” Teddy’s best explodes and sends his head flying right at Michelle’s. What a freaky way to be knocked out. And then comes the theory that everything that happens after Teddy’s death and Michelle waking up in the ambulance is a result of the delirium caused by a concussion. Sure you could believe that. But if that makes you question if Michelle really is an Andromedan Empress, at the risk of repeating myself, remember how she stayed in Teddy’s basement when she could’ve left? If that’s not convincing enough for you, what about her knee healing surprisingly quickly? I for one am a total believer of the explosive reveal that underneath all his crazy, Teddy was right about the Andromedans. He was also pretty spot on about their ship, their hair being crucial to their connectivity, and the fact that they are, in fact, about to destroy mankind. But even if the bomb didn’t go off and Teddy got to come aboard Michelle’s ship, do you really think someone like him could’ve convinced them to let mankind live? The tears in the Andromedan Empress’ eyes are very real as she pops the bubble around Earth, disrupts the atmosphere, and wipes out all of humanity in a quiet, tragic move. But the extinction of humanity isn’t so bad for the planet and all the other lifeforms that live on it. Because there’s no species as depraved and destructive as humans, there’s no denying that the planet’s better off without us. That’s the hopeless note that Bugonia hums as it metaphorizes the meaning of the title with the closing sequence. Google will do a better job than yours truly, but if you’re cool with a rough outline, Bugonia is a Greek folk faith in the birth of bees from the remains of a dead ox. An analogy for life that generates from death. True to the title, in the ending of “Begonia,” the bees come back. The shot of the giant dinosaur bone and the toy dinosaurs scuttling the mall floor also suggests that the Andromedans might try to bring them back. Or maybe nature will do it by itself. Since Bugonia believes that people came from the Andromedans, the Earth might only start to reach its full potential when they stop messing with it.
