Only those initiated into Refn's filmography can forgive his apocalyptic vision; entering his brutally artificial and magically real world is a path that requires the surrender of understanding. It demands a consciously subjugating, supine if vigilant and resistant affiliation.

A sadomasochistic relationship between Refn and the viewer that allows no cathartic pause, nor reflection, as catharsis is not expected and reflection is inherent.

"A single long stream, not assimilable to the episodic structure," the director defines it " into which it is impossible to return; for the course is never the same and neither is the one who travels it the same," Heraclitus would say.

A river of images, of light, of beauty, of violence, of sounds, colors, horrors; "no permanent reality except change; permanence is an illusion of the senses" ( Heraclitus)

Too old to die young are Refn's men, too filthy to cleanse themselves, too compromised to redeem themselves; too corrupt to redeem themselves.

The police who are supposed to police and establish order are the Devil; All cops are bastards, rapists, Nazi-fascists and tirelessly horny. Martin is a psychopathic cop, vigilante of good and evil; he has an underage billionaire girlfriend, and encounters perversions of all kinds. He is guided by a very personal sense of justice and intervenes when faced with extreme cases of violence, with extreme violence. A former FBI agent in the employ of the mystic Diana, who wants to clean up America, becomes her mentor.

Meanwhile Jesus, a Mexican, son of the late drug patroness Magdalena, must avenge his mother and has for a wife the high priestess of death, the sublime Yaritza.

The story between the two is too Oedipal; she is a self-conscious Jocasta/Maria/Magdalena who carnally unites with her son Oedipus/Jesus, to relieve him of the fate that has taken his mother from him; an unsolvable complex that of Oedipus if his mother dies: the condemnation is to be trapped in the desire for unfulfilled incest and thus in an eternal psyche.

The same one she uses Yaritza by indulging Jesus' perversions; the high priestess of death must complete her mission:

starring in the administration of a death heralded by her conscious gender misanthropy.

Human abomination is unstoppable, and while defenseless gay virgins submit to auditions from which they will not emerge alive, perverts of all kinds impose their lurid dominion over bodies to be torn apart for the propaedeutic snuff movie. Training in live burial and group rape seem routine practices; amid severed hands and tortured bodies, truths to avenge come to the surface.

The grueling slow motion of the early episodes become the essential preamble to the visual and visionary training to which the viewer is subjected; an artfully practiced training aimed at fueling anticipation. A military, at times sadistic drill that procrastinates the immediate fulfillment of expectation by making the pause exhausting and unfulfilling.

An insidious induction to dependence on that sacrifice to which the series subjects..

A series of laconic and crass characters don the "clothes of evil" and move through a bipolar world where the Christian morality of mortification clashes with the economic morality of satisfaction.

"Democracy is my Bitch," shout Martin's cops/colleagues on his discharge from the force with the blasphemous ritual of crucifixion ( the Hanged Man) and communion..

An escalation of lucid madness in NWR episodes, where death is served with extraordinary music, blindness cured with magical rituals and incest depicted as an 'art installation.

Magdalena lives in Yaritza and Diana/Artemis sees and foresees:

"Ignorance will be exalted; hatred and rape rewarded; perversity will have its own dignity; incest, molestation and pedophilia will be praised...a few will have everything while most will have nothing."

A short list of human horrors foretells that "narcissism will no longer be fought but worshipped as a virtue; indulgence of one's impulses will become instinctive; our identity will be defined by the pain we cause; and pure genuine nihilism will be the only solution in the face of glorious death."

Everyone will have their own religion and "we will awaken the fury of the world...and as man implodes in a bath of blood and silence a new mutation will take place and that day we will herald the dawn of innocence."

While Diana anticipates a reality already present, Yaritza bursts in with the decisive pragmatism of the High Priestess of Death.

Photography, images, settings, music, piano-sequences and hypnotic slow motion; a spell of vision, a subversion of perception.

An installation art eludes all systems; immune to rigid interpretive framings.

NWR demands a participation that is sophisticated and indulgent, disengaged and alert, unprepared and lucid; a participation that indulges in the vision without shirking from the inquiry of the double gaze.

From the major arcana of the Tarot take their title the ten episodes of the TV series; but in reality there are 22 as the chapters of St. John's Apocalypse, and many of the arcana are indeed inspired directly by the Apocalypse; there were those who claimed that the inventor of the Tarot was "good and faithful follower of the Catholica and Christian faith" and that the order of the 22 Triumphs highlights "many moral teachings... to bite the bad et pestiferous customs widespread nowadays."

Perhaps a second series of 12 episodes would complete the number of major arcana and the many evidences linking names and happenings to the Holy Book of Jews and Christians.

Too old to die young confirms NWR's highly personal style in form and content: the Freudian Oedipus complex is as constant an obsession as the Lacanian impossibility of sexual intercourse; likewise, the dissolution of personality that characterizes the characters in the series is not even felt because it indiscriminately invests everyone, as it is a collective tendency from which the individual cannot escape.

NWR confirms itself as a careful observer of the existential dissolution of a world in which the madman is confused with the hermit, the lovers live in the tower, the priestess becomes empress, the Magician is hung and the one who triumphs is always, inevitably the Devil!

28-Aug-2023 by Beatrice