cosmology in a very interesting and subversive way.
The subject is actually never discussed or even alluded to until the last few minutes
of the movie, but becomes central to the big twist and climax of the plotline.
When the final reveal happens and the audience learns the truth, Flat Earth is front and
center of that revelation in an ingenious way.
Reading and listening to interviews, I haven't been able to find if Yorgos Lathimos is
a Flat Earther himself, sympathetic to the idea, or simply included it tongue-in-cheek,
but I found the way it was utilized in the film to be a great example of how this topic
can be effectively introduced and included in modern artwork.
If you haven't seen Bagonia yet and plan to watch it at some point, I recommend pausing
the video here as I will be discussing the plot including major spoilers for the film.
The movie opens with protagonists Teddy and his autistic cousin Don tending to their
hives of bees, doing their morning yoga routine, and plotting to abduct a pharmaceutical company
CEO whom they believe to be an alien, specifically a member of the malevolent species known
as Andromedans.
Teddy and Don are convinced that these Andromedans are killing off the world's
poisoning communities and enslaving humanity.
Throughout the film, Teddy and Don are shown to be lower-class, unkempt social misfits with
a checkered past, manic, confused, and heads full of conspiracy theories.
They are not presented as reliable narrators, and every claim they make sounds questionable
at best.
In contrast, we're shown the antagonist Michelle Fuller, CEO of Oxalith Pharmaceutical
Corporation, doing yoga in her modern upper-class mansion, having a morning facial, a private
self-defense lesson, and confidently strutting into her corner office.
Michelle is cool, calm, and collected, a rehearsed corporate kind of friendly, but seemingly much
more relatable and level-headed than our protagonists.
Ultimately, Teddy and Don succeed in kidnapping Michelle as planned and imprison her in
their basement.
Believing her hair to be telepathic antennas facilitating communication with her alien mothership,
Teddy and Don shave Michelle completely bald, then cover her from head to toe with an antihistamine
cream, which they insist will prevent her from sending out a distress signal to other Andromedans.
Teddy then explains that she has four days to negotiate a meeting with her emperor
before an upcoming lunar eclipse which will allow the Andromedan mothership to enter Earth's
atmosphere undetected.
Since Michelle refuses to admit that she's an alien, or confirm any of Teddy's wild assertions,
he proceeds to tie her up to an electroshock machine and torture her until she confesses.
Instead of confessing, however, she withstands the highest output the machine can produce,
which causes Teddy to completely change his mind and behavior.
He quickly releases Michelle from her restraints and apologizes, saying that her incredibly
high pain tolerance is evidence that she's actually part of the Andromedan royal family.
At this point, a confused Michelle is invited upstairs for dinner and now treated as a special
guest, where she strategically admits to being an alien and answers his strange
questions until she can escape.
I won't go into detail about the remainder of the plot, except to say that the film does
everything it can to continue setting up Teddy as being an unhinged, schizophrenic conspiracy
theorist with wild ideas about this one woman, and this one woman doing everything she can
to survive her deluded kidnapper's bipolar mood swings.
When Michelle eventually survives and escapes from Teddy, in the last five minutes
of the film, we the audience finally see Michelle aboard her mothership, confirming the fact
that she was really an alien the whole time, and Teddy's seemingly wild delusions were
totally correct.
Then she stands before a holographic model of a flat earth with a gaseous dome
firmament covering it.
She takes a pointed instrument in her hand and pokes the flat earth dome until it
pops, then walks away.
Upon taking this action we then see that on earth everyone has instantly dropped dead.
Several shots show deceased sailors afront a flat horizon.
One particularly interesting shot shows a room full of school children sitting
dead in their school desks with a prominent model globe earth hanging from the
ceiling.
Another shot shows a businessman sitting in his final resting place afront a
massive globe sculpture.
Bagonia was actually based on a 2003 Korean film called Save the Green Planet,
and one of the noticeable changes from that original version is this
inclusion of the flat earth.
In Save the Green Planet, when the Andromedan returns to the mothership
and destroys the earth, the earth is depicted as a globe and explodes
similar to the Death Star in Star Wars.
In Bagonia the flat earth, insects, and animals all survive, but by puncturing
a hole in the gaseous firmament only the humans perish.
Exactly what this means is open to speculation, but it goes to show how
important this truth could potentially be.
People love to scoff at flat earthers asking what does it matter
whether the earth is flat or a globe anyways?
The answer is that it's not so much about the shape as it is about the
scale of the lie.
If humanity is deluded by a lie of this magnitude, there are innumerable
varied and dire consequences for believing such a false cosmology,
especially when there's a group of people actively working to
indoctrinate the world with this lie.
By adding this flat earth element to the end of Bagonia, it takes
the viewer through a two hour experience of confirmation bias,
only to end in the same kind of complete cognitive dissonance
experienced by people who do their due diligence in researching flat
earth and finally realize that it's absolutely true.
You become like Teddy in a world that sees everything Teddy
knows to be true as crazy and delusional.
In that instant you see Michelle aboard her mothership.
You receive the emotional impact of believing a lie for the past
two hours and demonizing the protagonist in your mind because
to you he seemed insane and deluded.
Now of course this movie isn't going to convince anyone logically
of flat earth's veracity but it does do a few interesting and
advantageous things intellectually and emotionally.
Firstly, just having the flat earth model feature so prominently
in a big Hollywood movie helps bring the subject to the forefront
of consciousness. More importantly though, by having flat earth
be this big reveal as part of the movie's twist where the viewer
realizes their assumptions about the film characters have been wrong the entire
time, we are shown that we were also wrong about our assumed
cosmology the entire time.
We are given the experience of confident confirmation bias
ending in complete cognitive dissonance, the very thing that
happens within every flat earther as they awaken.
Due to our indoctrinations the very idea of flat earth sounds
ridiculous and impossible just like Teddy and Don's theories
about Michelle being an undercover and dromed in alien.
Most viewers will barely even consider the possibility that Michelle
is an alien just like most people who hear about flat earth
don't actually consider it a viable possibility and dismiss it
without any thought or research. By giving people this
awakening experience even through the lens of an entertaining
fictional movie, Bogonia successfully delivers the same
kind of emotional impact and intellectual reappraisal of
our assumptions about reality that every flat earther experiences.