Beauty is The Eye of the Beholder

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Despite what some lesbians would have you believe, blue is not the warmest color... but it is the healthiest one. Look on any pharmacist's shelf and you'll see blue stand in for clean and crisp and good-for-you. So it's somewhat of a shock when Nicolas Winding Refn manages to make blue the sickliest color - he tinges it with just enough green, the sleaze of snot and bile, to expunge its natural sanguinity... and then for good measure he streaks it with, what else, swastikas. Occult or otherwise.

Feel sick yet? Good! Expulsion's the order of the day - nothing's gonna get you to that target weight faster, my friend. It's with the giggles of a little girl that Refn soaks his Woman's Picture in every damn goo you can imagine - sticky, translucent, substantive with ooze - but it comes in rivers, and it comes from anywhere. Red, blue, red. Legs, mouths, eyeballs. All the colors of the rainbow, glitter or gore, hosed off in a drainage ditch and plopped on butcher paper the length of a football field - pose for your life, bitches. This is your moment to shine.

Oh of course it's silly - it's meant to be. The dewy devil's ingenue realizing the power of her milky white coating - everyone keeps commenting: what lovely skin you have, what lovely skin you have. All the better to... well, live well, some say. Strut your hot stuff, baby, this evening, because tomorrow might never die but baby beauty sure as fuck does.

You could call The Neon Demon skin deep, but that'd be pushing it - its very horror comes from touch, from feel, from other people. The skin is glass, high up. It is as rarefied as a crystal urn on a very precarious shelf - please please please for the love of all things unholy look, look, keep looking until your eyes do things they weren't meant to do, but don't touch, don't touch, don't touch. If you touch it will dissolve under your fingers in a wash of hot pink and hair-clots. Well, you killed it. Good work, you.

So the surface, her face, as sure as your face reflected in a high sheen, matte gloss, the extravagance of extensions and injectibles and high-waisted platform holy robes formed from inch-thick auburn Indian rubber - corn-rows coiled down and out like cobra-tails and a model, squatting on a blue carpet, fangs beared... well, what else is there? I wonder, but I don't care. I feel pretty, goddamit. Pretty and whole and positively delicious.

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