Ari Armstrong's Web Log (Main) | Archives | Terms of Use
Bugonia and the Rationalization of Violence
The film is about people becoming the monsters they imagine they pursue.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2026
If you enjoy Twilight Zone-style science fiction, I recommend that you watch the film Bugonia without first reading another word about it. Just let the film work itself out without overlaying any presuppositions.
My discussion here is spoiler-heavy. So don't read it if you haven't seen the film, unless you don't plan to watch it or just can't help yourself from reading spoilers.
I didn't know what to think as the credits rolled. The film seemed to downplay the genocide of the human race on environmentalist grounds. If that's what the film were about, then Dana Stevens would be right that the film expresses "disdain . . . for humanity itself." But that is just to misunderstand the film.
The two main characters are Teddy, a down-on-his-luck conspiracy monger, and Michelle, the CEO of a chemical and pharmaceutical company who turns out to be an alien, per Teddy's expectations. The acting, by Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, is first-rate, extraordinary.
Teddy, believing Michelle to be an alien responsible for harming honey bee populations and damaging his mother's health, kidnaps and tortures Michelle in order to compel her to arrange a meeting between him and other aliens so that Teddy can negotiate the aliens leaving Earth. Toward this aim, Teddy convinces his mentally slow cousin Don to help him and even to undergo chemical castration (as he also has done) to eliminate sexual distractions and seductions.
Teddy, we eventually learn, has kidnapped and murdered other people in an attempt to find the aliens among us, and he says that his victims included two aliens. So Teddy is a serial killer of both humans and aliens.
At one point, Michelle tells a story of humanity's origins. After the aliens caused the extinction of the dinosaurs by accidentally releasing a virus, the aliens created humans in their own image. But the humans, wanting to surpass their makers, manipulated their own genes and became violent, leading to nuclear war and their near-annihilation. Eventually all that are left are apes, some of which slowly evolve into modern humans.
We, the film's audience, are invited to take Michelle's account seriously, because Michelle is a wealthy and attractive CEO and also an advanced alien. The key to understanding the film is to realize that Michelle is telling a bullshit fantasy tale to rationalize the aliens' control of humans through business ventures and experimentation on humans to achieve a more manageable species.
Notice how Michelle's tale is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian tales about God creating perfect humans in a Garden of Edin, then humans being responsible for their own fall. This justifies God in nearly wiping out humans in the flood and moving toward an eventual apocalypse.
So Teddy and Michelle are mirrors of each other. Both create fantastic pseudo-morality tales to rationalize their own control of others and violence toward them. The film is a warning about rationalizing evil. It is an indictment of colonial mistreatment of native peoples, of totalitarian genocides, of religious wars of conquest.
Interestingly, Michelle admits that the aliens unleashed a prehistoric virus and experiment on humans, but she casts the first as an accident and the second as something for humanity's own good. She denies that her company's pesticides contributed to bee population decline, but her case sounds like a bullshit rationalization. (In fact, a type of mite seems to be the main driver of bee problems, but pesticides also hurt them. Honey bees, incidentally, are not native to North America but are human imports.)
Both Teddy and Michelle express admiration for bees while not having their best interests at heart. Michelle poisons them; Teddy smashes a tray of bees against a deputy sheriff in the course of murdering him.
Something the deputy sheriff says I think is revealing. The deputy is making a good-faith effort to look for the missing person (Michelle). In childhood, the deputy raped Teddy while babysitting him. The deputy apologizes and tells Teddy it was about exercising power of others. So he is a horrible person, but at least he expresses genuine remorse and sees clearly his past motivation. Teddy and Michelle, by contrast, abuse others while continuing to construct elaborate rationalizations to excuse their violence.
So what should we make of the fact that Teddy is a conspiracy monger who happens to hit upon a real conspiracy? I think the film treats this as a cosmic irony. Teddy constructs a conspiracy fantasy to rationalize his torture and murder of others, but the real conspiracy involves aliens constructing fantasy narratives to rationalize their torture and murder of humans. Teddy murders humans too, so we're not supposed to think that conspiracy mongering is a reliable pathway to knowledge.
The film also acknowledges that humans can be extremely violent as well as destructive of their environment. So the film is not excusing human misdeeds, but I do think it is saying that the misdeeds of some cannot justify violence against all. Demonizing "the other" is precisely about obsessing with the misdeeds, real or imagined, of some members of the targeted group, in order to rationalize violence against the group. For example, the perpetrators of the Sand Creek Massacre murdered women, children, elderly people, and peaceful people on the pretext that native peoples were violent.
The film is about people becoming the monsters they imagine they pursue.