A brilliant painter facing the worst creative block of her life turns to anything she can to complete her masterpiece, spiraling into a hallucinatory hellscape of drugs, sex, and murder in the sleazy underbelly of Los Angeles.
Bliss is the name of a drug that strung-out artist Dezzy (Dora Madison) takes, seeking inspiration to finish her new piece and salvage what she can of a crumbling career. Surrounded by seedy, lifeless characters, Dez herself is narcissistic and shallow and petty, and a fairly unlikeable person.
Characters like this always make me wonder: are artists always authorial self-inserts? The idealized or demonized face of the writer as protagonist, struggling with thinly-veiled metaphors for writer’s block and social isolation? If so, writer Joe Begos has written himself as an artist hopped up on a bath-salts-like drug that turns people into face-biting, blood-drinking, cannibalistic artists who create dark works while in a blackout blood orgy. As one does.
With each blackout, the painting grows. As does the death toll. Or does it? It is hard to tell what is real, as the flickering images and weird camera tracking make it clear that Dez is never sober once she takes the first snort of the black powder. How much is hallucination, how much is real, if any of it? “What is real?” is always an interesting question in film, the natural response to an unreliable narrator. Bliss reminds me a little of a murky and angsty Jacob’s Ladder or Neon Demon, but less subtle. More breasts.
There is a warning that “This film contains flashing images that may cause discomfort or trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.” Boy, take that seriously! I don’t think the movie ever stopped strobing.
And oh, my heck, yes, that is George Wendt you see at the dealer’s place!
What starts as an anti-drug cautionary tale even more hyperbolic than Reefer Madness! soon wends its way into Twilight Zone territory, where the moral is told through dark magic and unsettling, occult scenes of death and depravity. Whether the moral does its job depends a lot on whether you choose to believe the blood, orgies, and cannibalism are real or not. And I ain’t sayin’.
This film is for fans of blood, gore, breasts and sticking it to uppity artworld snobs and drug dealers, and can be enjoyable on that level. But there’s not much else there. It’s murky, red-streaked, and ultimately never seems to go anywhere. Kinda makes me want to get high, though.
