Copyright /FILM
Spoilers for "Bugonia" follow. The teaser trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos' "Bugonia" depicted Teddy (Jesse Plemons) flipping on a radio to play Green Day's "Basket Case." The following "Bugonia" trailer showed emotionally detached pharma CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) singing along to Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" while she's driving. These are some odd needle drops since Lanthimos' movies are typically scored with classical music. That music, mixed with his trademark fisheye lens shots and off-kilter characters, adds to the alienation. So why use punk rock and pop music in "Bugonia?" Stone told MTV UK that she suggested "Good Luck Babe" for the movie, while "Basket Case" reflects Teddy's characterization. Teddy and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap Michelle because they think she's an alien invader out to poison the Earth. First, they shave her head to prevent her from "contacting" other aliens. (Without her hair, Stone's big doe eyes look sinister and, well, alien.) Then, Teddy takes it up a notch. Not satisfied with Michelle's compelled confession, he hooks her up to an electroshock torture rig and flips it, and "Basket Case" on. Teddy turns the voltage so high that the lights in the house (and the signal on the radio) flicker. Lanthimos keeps Michelle just out of frame, but we hear her muzzled screaming, and it'll make you squirm. Heartless CEO or not, she's still a semi-innocent woman in horrible pain. "Basket case" is an often insulting (for Green Day, self-deprecating) term for someone whose neuroses and anxieties keep them from functioning "normally." Read the chorus of Green Day's "Basket Case" below: "Sometimes I give myself the creeps. Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me. It all keeps adding up. I think I'm cracking up. Am I just paranoid or am I stoned?" The phrase absolutely fits Teddy. "Basket Case" comes off of Green Day's third album, 1994's "Dookie." The band formed in 1987, called "Sweet Children" before a name change to "Green Day," inspired by local California slang for a lazy day spent smoking weed. "Dookie" was their breakout hit; it's the album that cemented Green Day as one of the defining punk rock acts of the 1990s and the early aughts. In turn, "Basket Case" is the most famous song off "Dookie." Arguably, it's the most famous Green Day song, though in a tight race with "American Idiot," "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," and "Wake Me Up When September Ends." Green Day lead singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong wrote "Basket Case" about his experience living with panic attacks. On an episode of the podcast "Song Exploder" that discussed "Basket Case," Armstrong said: "[I'd] had panic attacks since I was about 10 or 11 years old. But that was in the '80s, and no one really knew what those things were. I guess they would call it mental health now, but back then it was just like, 'You're having a panic attack, wait till it's over.' [...] One way of dealing with it for me, was, you know, writing lyrics about, you feel like you're going crazy, but you ride it out, and you're not." Armstrong's musical therapy turned into a hit. The lyrics might be about living with mental illness, distrusting yourself, and being unable to find help from others, but "Basket Case" is also loud, fast-paced, and energetic. Like "Dookie" as a whole, it spoke to the disillusioned and young while also being a great song to nod along or rock out to ... even while you're electroshocking someone. The "Basket Case" music video (viewable on Green Day's YouTube channel) ties its setting to the song's theme. It takes place in a sanatorium that looks like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" colored by Andy Warhol. The band's instruments are in the middle of the hospital's recreation room, attended to by nurses, making for a surreal image. Armstrong plays his guitar and sings as bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool get wheeled in on a gurney and wheelchair, respectively. The video includes inserts of the three bandmates acting as patients of the hospital, such as Cool getting pills from a Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher in "Cuckoo's Nest") lookalike. The setting for the "Basket Case" video adds another layer to how "Bugonia" deploys "Basket Case." Electroshock therapy is an outdated practice in asylums like the one in the video. In "Cuckoo's Nest," Ratched has Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) subjected to electroshock. In "Bugonia," it's the unwell person, Teddy, who administers the "therapy." "Bugonia" screenwriter Will Tracy told Dazed that, in his script, the torture scene featured the song "Good Morning Starshine" from the musical "Hair." Lanthimos made the call to use "Basket Case" instead, which Tracy supported. "['Good Morning Starshine'] was too screenwriter-y, on the nose, and literal about an actual conversation between Earth and the stars," Tracy said. Lanthimos instead chose a song that reflected Teddy and how he's, indeed, "cracking up" throughout the film. The difference, though, is that the narrator in "Basket Case" is aware of his problems and what a mess he is. Teddy may be "neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it," but he thinks he's the only person sane enough to recognize Michelle as an alien. "Bugonia" is currently playing in theaters.
