Word: bronson
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...throughout the performance, conducting himself like the ringmaster of some surreal circus. The stage, it seems, is Bronson’s fantasy, where he’s free to put his emotional world into order. When he’s first imprisoned, and finally alone, Peterson begins to cry; Bronson, on stage and in whiteface, by contrast, reveals that they are crocodile tears and the audience begins to laugh on cue. Here, the ego of Michael Peterson seems to recede, and the precarious balance between the id and the superego manifests itself in the bursts of violence that are calmly?...
However monotonous the subject matter could potentially be, Refn finds a way to constantly reinvigorate the contrast between Bronson and the world around him; he’s taken to the hole, then to the insane asylum, where he performs and sabotages himself in bombastic fashion. It’s with Peterson as a free man, however, released from prison for nearly 70 days in 1988, that the film offers up the closest thing to a sensible psychological portrait of someone who, up to that point and from that point thereafter, resembles something more akin to a force of nature...
...however these broad psychoanalytic gestures can be interpreted, they provide little in the way of a satisfactory theory for why the man is the way he is. Far from lionizing him, Refn isn’t interested in reducing Bronson to an animal, a rebel or a martyr. The film’s haunting final scene is certainly a moment of revelation in relief with the story that Refn chooses to tell, but it’s less a moralization than a confirmation of suspicions. Throughout the film proper, however, Bronson remains a living paradox: a submissive sadist, a free...
...moments on the outside—where the swaggering Bronson is, for once, ill at ease—the film is at its funniest. Flushed and shaking with rage, he manages to suppress a violent outburst when his sweetheart declines his marriage proposal for another man. Believing his fighting prowess would find him fame overnight, he complains to his handler that his most recent display was underappreciated “magic”: “Magic? You just pissed on a gypsy in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s hardly the hottest ticket in town...
...film’s final third, where Bronson begins to produce drawings and paintings for his prison’s art program, synthesizes the film’s content with its narrative frame without reducing the enigma of its subject. Bronson’s art is, from what can be seen, mostly cartoonish grotesquery more reminiscent of Daniel Johnston than Basquiat, but his final “piece” is executed with as much theatrical verve and visual splendor in a series of moments as the rest of the film offers in its entirety...