Day 3: Helter Skelter

Day 3 of Calloween Movie Month


Recommended?: Yes.

Content warnings: misogyny, fatphobia. medical/surgical imagery, eye trauma, sexual content, sexual assault, self-harm, drug abuse

Spoilers and discussion of any and all these topics below, you have been warned.

You know that lyric in Mitski's best song Brand New City where she says "If I gave up on being pretty I wouldn't know how to be alive/I should move to a brand new city and teach myself how to die"?

Yeah.



Helter Skelter is about the trials and tribulations faced by Lilico, a popular model who's had plastic surgery done on her entire body.

Just from hearing the premise you can probably already guess what themes and topics this film concerns itself with, but that's not a bad thing. It knows what it wants to say and do and succeeds with flying colors, and it tackles it subject matter with such depth and understanding that it's absolutely worth watching even though you probably already know what it's trying to say.

It absolutely delves into some of the deepest pits of human depravity and the horror of celebrity that it's equal parts beautiful and stomach turning through out it's lengthy runtime.

Asada, the prosecutor looking into the shady clinic Lilico got her surgeries from, describes her akin to a spoiled piece of fruit. Beautiful and delicious looking on the outside, but when you cut it open you realize it's rotten and full of bugs. That describes this film as well. On the outside it's gorgeous and glamorous but the farther you get into it the more ugly and skin crawling it becomes.

Speaking of bugs, a strong piece of imagery seen throughout is butterflies. Lilico has a butterfly tattoo on her ankle, she wears butterfly jewelry on TV, she has butterfly paintings on her walls, there are butterflies around her and her "ugly" sister as they talk for the first time in years, and most notably she hallucinates butterflies swarming her when she has her worst mental break.

They're everywhere, I didn't even note all the examples I personally noticed and I'm sure there were more I didn't see. Butterflies often symbolize beauty and metamorphosis. It's not hard to draw connections between this and the literal and figurative details of the movie's plot, but I want to note when they specifically show up the most obviously. During said mental break.

They swarm her. She swats them away but no matter how hard she tries they keep coming back and even multiplying. The thing that represents her beauty and transformation into said beauty is overwhelming her, leading her to spiral farther and hurt herself and the people around her even more.

Something I also noticed a lot of, though not as much as the butterflies, was religious imagery. Most important for my analysis is the side-by-side paintings of Jesus and the virgin Mary with their eyes covered in censor bars. At first I thought these were just odd background details showing how extravagant and eccentric her presumably expensive taste in decor is, but it clicked in my head as something deeper.

Mary represents the divine feminine. Pure, beautiful, untouchable, unreachable. Jesus of course represents violence, persecution, resurrection. Lilico is a mix of Mary and Jesus, their halves making up her whole. She is simultaneously the feminine ideal and the martyr rising up from a bloody execution. Their eyes being covered calls forward to her eventual self destruction via stabbing her own eye, but we'll get to that in a moment.

A significant difference between her and Mary is that Lilico is far from a virgin. She is both the Madonna and the whore in her own complex. She is very sexually promiscuous, but not because she's seeking pleasure. Sex is one of the many tools in Lilico's box to both boost her own ego and to get whatever she wants. She has sex with her boyfriend who compliments her constantly. She sleeps with a married producer to get more pictures of herself in a magazine. She has sex with both her assistant and her assistant's boyfriend, multiple times, until she can make them do whatever she wants with ease, taking advantage of their mutual obsession with her image.

Unfortunately for Lilico, all she is is her image. As Asada once again says, she lives as a series of images, as an ideal for everyone to aspire to. To the eyes of the public she is the closest a living breathing human can get to an object. She's a still frame on the cover of a magazine or a briefly moving doll in an ice cream commercial, and that's all she'll ever be to them. She doesn't have anything else to give but beauty. She's not particularly kind, smart or talented. She's only good at manipulation because of her bewitching appearance, and even that has it's limits. What she needs is love.

Beauty fades. With time, with knowledge. But love is long lasting, eternal, even. Love will keep you alive forever in the hearts and minds of the people most important to you, and it's the one thing beauty won't give her. Her fans don't love her. She's not even a person to them. After the details of both her body wide plastic surgeries and her past as a sex worker are revealed, all the girls that wanted to be her and the boys that wanted her turn on her. They laugh. They call her a pig, a fat hooker, they say she's all pork. One of them even posits that she was just an A.I. That Lilico never existed even as a mask.

Kozue quickly takes her place as she falls out of favor, and her sister seems to have gotten a similar procedure done to her. The cycle starts over again. It will not stop, it will not end. There is only pain in beauty. And beauty is contagious, passing itself on and on like a plague to the minds and bodies of every person unfortunate enough to have an F on their birth certificate or anyone strong enough to assert their existence as a woman with a body not deemed deserving of the title.

The film ends on a strong note.

Lilico is her own undoing. In front of the endlessly flashing lights of the paparazzi camera, instead of addressing any scandals and feeding the rumor mill about her past, she takes a knife and plunges it into her eye. Destroying one of the few parts of her that she could say were solely her own that was left. She stains her pure white dress, wrapped around her ever so delicately, with her own blood. She lets herself fall, spreading her feathers and by proxy the virus of beauty even farther. We see a little while into the future. Kozue is doing well in her career as a model and her team celebrates by taking her to a skeezy sex club. She sees Lilico's assistant making her way to a backroom and follows her.

Who else awaits her but Lilico herself, beauty queen of the gutter. She sits triumphantly, looking down on her with a smile, and the credits start to roll.

I'm left in awe of this masterpiece. The writing, directing, and cinematography are all top notch. The performances are great all around, but the film is carried by Erika Sawajiri's multifaceted, duplicitous, beautiful, and deeply broken take on Lilico's character.

And what a better note to end on but that. Helter Skelter is, in a nutshell, multifaceted, duplicitous, beautiful and deeply broken. Like a beautifully polished apple with worms and maggots eating at it's rotten core.