"I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't write...no real talent. But I'm pretty, and I can make money off pretty."
This moment in Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon gives us insight into its heroine, Jesse (Elle Fanning), a small-town Georgia girl who travels to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming a model. Alongside her lack of real talent is a lack of anything passing for background or personality. Jesse's parents are gone (it's unclear whether they're wholly dead or not), and she comes to LA almost fully formed. She, like the other models she meets, is meant to be delineated into either "sex or food." And over the course of the film's near-two hour runtime, Jesse will quite literally become both.
