Elle Fanning names her most divisive role: “People either loved it or hated it”
Elle Fanning seems sweet. Hollywood has watched her grow up, and that’s been the impression all along the way as the blonde-haired, big-eyed kid went from the shadow of her big sister, Dakota Fanning, to one of the industry’s most exciting new players.
Overwhelming, the way she’s perceived is the way she’s been cast. For a long time, she was always simply the kid – the sweet darling in We Bought a Zoo or Daddy Day Care. After that, as she entered her teens, she was cast as exactly that, a young girl becoming a teenager, whether that be through a growing interest in protest in Ginger & Rosa, or as a daughter of a star in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere.
You could almost always trust that if Elle Fanning’s character was in peril, she’d be fine, but then in 2016, as she made a clear move to break out of the typecasting, things changed.
The Neon Demon is one of those horror films that splits the crowd and has from the start. Scary movies tend to do that as people seem to fall into different camps for the different kinds of frights they like. Some love jump scares, some couldn’t think of anything worse. Some like a horror to be classically dark, ghostly, gory. Others like modern takes on the genre where daylight might be the scariest thing, like in Midsommar, or where horror is happening in the chicest of places, like the red-toned remake of Suspiria.
The Neon Demon falls into that latter camp as Fanning’s character, Jesse, is a small-town girl from Georgia, crash landing in the world of Los Angeles and the modelling industry. Only 16 and an orphan, she’s obviously vulnerable, but the new world of glamour is alluring as it is terrifying. That’s the basic set-up, and from there, the movie gets batshit crazy, tumbling through plot lines of assault, general violence, a bit of cannibalism for good measure and a good dose of satanism.
For some, me included, it was incredible. Jesse’s naivety set against the absolute carnage of not only the modelling scene, but the modelling scene with a dose of neon-toned gore, it’s a complete contradiction and one that works.
For others, though, it didn’t work at all, and Fanning recognised that, telling Vogue magazine, “People either loved it or hated it.”
However, here’s where her Hollywood upbringing seems to come in handy. Fanning is more than attuned to the fact that movies, and all art, are a divisive force. It’s all subjective, and she’s sturdy in that, as she added, “Nic describes it the best: ‘With art you can’t say if it’s good or bad, it’s about making people react’”, quoting the wisdom of the movie’s director, Nicolas Winding Refn.
Even more than that, when the role was clearly a mission for Fanning to break out of the box, she welcomed the conflict. “If people had, you know, just been like ‘Oh it’s good’ then it would be kind of boring,” she said. She was on a mission to cause that love-it-or-hate-it buzz, adding, “You want people to think about it and to talk about it.”
