Abstract
Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2017 film The Bad Batch is a nightmare of postmodern abjection. Set in a desert wasteland in Texas, the film depicts a quasi-futuristic society that starkly reveals the dark underside of contemporary society, here portrayed in two realms, both exhibiting the height of abjection: the cannibal town called the Bridge and the shanty town of Comfort, where a lone perverse patriarch impregnates all the women while doling out steady doses of LSD to contain the masses. Borrowing from Julia Kristeva’s description of the ‘deject’ in her work Powers of Horror, this analysis focuses on those characters who ultimately choose neither of these options. Having confronted and internalized the abject, these characters become eternal exiles, achieving a measure of liberation by assuming and embodying their partiality and by embracing ‘a weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant’ (Kristeva, J., 1982: 2).
Highlights
Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2017 film The Bad Batch is a nightmare of postmodern abjection
The twenty-first century no doubt has its own unique relationship to this popular ‘other,’ one that manifests itself in a recent film from director Ana Lily Amirpour: The Bad Batch (2017)
Touted as ‘the first Iranian vampire Western’ by Brooks Barnes of the New York Times, the film has been praised for its unique aesthetics and feminist themes (Barnes, 2013)
Summary
Perhaps one of the things about The Bad Batch that plagues critics and viewers alike is that it is difficult to locate a genre with which to associate it. Woodhouse, writing about Orwell’s Animal Farm, expresses it beautifully: The fairy-story that succeeds is not a work of fiction at all; or at least no more so than, say, the opening chapters of Genesis It is a transcription of a view of life into terms of highly simplified symbols; and when it succeeds in its literary purpose, it leaves us with a deep indefinable feeling of truth; and it succeeds as Orwell set out to do, in a political as well as an artistic purpose, it leaves us with a feeling of rebelliousness against the truth revealed. It explores the consequences of finding oneself in such a state; and the bare possibility of redemption therefrom
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