The Mad Americana of Sam Levinson’s “Assassination Nation”
“Assassination Nation” is an unhinged, violent, feverish mess, but also kind of brilliant. It is satire fueled by the times. A suburban town becomes a microcosm for all that is crude, rude, shallow and violent about modern-day America. It’s a provocative idea and director Sam Levinson conjures it with visceral images, striking moments and savage humor. With a more polished structure this could have been a great film, but Levinson’s style has so much verve and dare that it’s far from forgettable. Levinson has of course gained more renown as of late on television, with his Gen Z requiem “Euphoria” on HBO. While that show is itself bold and absorbing, missing is the anarchic freedom of this film.
Welcome to Salem, a town where the jocks rule and everyone lives in a nice, two-story house. High school senior Lily (Odessa Young), struts through the halls of campus like a devilish Lolita along with friends, Bex (Hari Nef), Em (Abra) and Sarah (Suki Waterhouse). Lily has grades and talent, with college being a sure thing. But she’s also a full spawn of modern pop culture and spends her free time partying, drinking and sending out naked selfies to a mysterious phone contact called “Daddy.” This is the kind of town where boredom is killed with risqué behavior and TV determines a lot of your worldview. A scandal erupts when a mysterious hacker leaks private photos and information on local Mayor Bartlett (Cullen Moss), exposing him as a crossdresser and bondage aficionado. The hacker starts striking all over the place, leaking everything on the principal, Turrell (Colman Domingo), and the rest of the town. A mob frenzy ensues and the girls aren’t immune from it as soon they become targets, not just of the hacker but of the town itself when suspicions arise one of them might be the culprit.
What Levinson attempts to do with “Assassination Nation” is take current trigger words and issues and filter them through a hallucinatory, satirical landscape. When the film works it becomes one of those violent assaults on cultural sensibilities like Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers” or Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” He films this town with a visual style that has gloss and neon, giving the environment the aesthetic of pop art itself but with a subversive spirit. There’s a music video aesthetic at times that captures a visual generation thriving on social media. There are moments of visual edginess that feel like a Satanic version of “Riverdale.” Lily and her crew flaunt their bodies in the way and dress style the culture tells them is sexy, they judge the validity of a relationship on whether the guy is willing to give oral or not. A moment where cheerleaders dance in slow motion as the town begins to fall apart feels apocalyptic. A girl stands in front of a great American flag holding a bat, ready to commit murder, masked men in trucks with giant American flags prepare to lynch someone once anarchy ensues. Levinson successfully takes the look of recent films like “The Purge” and does a better job realizing their potential. Because this isn’t a big budget studio movie, the filmmaker has a wider freedom to take chances.
More importantly, Levinson combines his bombastic visuals with biting, sometimes vicious commentary on a culture he sees as decayed, shameless and fatally shallow. The party scenes with Lily and the gang are shot with colors that pop, but the way his screenplay sketches the characters can be unsparing. The kids are trying to cover up their own loneliness with getting high, toxic masculinity is everywhere and the guys talk with language Donald Trump would surely understand. The hangover is displayed just as much as the revelry. Bex, who is transgender, has sex with a classmate who then tells her not to say anything to anyone. He’s got to keep his hetero-macho image intact after all. Lily is called into Turrell’s office over her drawings of nude women, but she wonders what’s the big deal when naked selfies litter the internet. The exposure of the mayor via the hacker leak is the first major crack in the town’s façade, and soon everyone’s dirty laundry is revealed to the world. Levinson seems to be saying that one major issue with U.S. culture is how we feign civility and old, Puritan sensibilities, but behind closed doors we are all hypocrites. The mayor could be Trump, Ted Haggard, Brett Kavanaugh or any other conservative figure exposed as having quite the blemished history. By the end the film isn’t a condemnation of Lily and her friends, but of the locals who put on self-righteous poses while condemning them for being improper.
It is in the third act when Levinson starts wobbling a little in the film’s execution, as he hurries to a bloody and violent crescendo. Once the town starts suspecting Lily, a lynch mob forms and following a savage, graphically bloody confrontation with an attacker, Lily and her friends find themselves armed, like Furies called forth by the pop gods. Here the film loses some of satirical edge, taking on the form of a messier, standard action movie. Although there is at least one tracking shot that would make Brian De Palma proud. But storylines can get lost, like Lily and her “Daddy” creeper, and other characters simply fade out or are abruptly cut. Yet the bloodshed isn’t completely senseless. Levinson shows a knack for that unique combination in satire of the grotesque and humorous. A cop looks at one of the girls and smirks, “you can’t shoot a cop,” before getting blasted away. This movie won’t be for everyone, but it lacks the timidity of many other recent films.
It’s hard to say how audiences will respond to “Assassination Nation.” It can fluctuate from despair to riotous humor. But even in its imperfections, it has something to say. It has the ominous tone of how many view the course of the country these days, it is a wild child of its age. There is a tracking shot in the opening and closing shots of Salem’s suburbia, and everyone looks like a zombie, moving along in a society ready for the ultimate explosion. This movie may not be perfect, but neither is America, careening towards economic uncertainty after a pandemic, with its denizens desperate to consume and shoot some more.
