Destroyer is also keenly interested in Kidman’s body. But not just her body per se; how Kidman uses that body to move the story. The present Erin Bell has two registers: exhausted stillness or angry, violent whirlwind. The first demonstrates how events have left her physically depleted and psychologically hollowed. As the latter, Kidman tears through scenes with a primal, soul-searing rage. She takes swings at people, chases men and women on foot, pistol whips others and looms over suspects she’s beaten into submission like an ancient Fury. In several brutal fights, Kidman throws herself through space, seemingly disdainful of her physical safety, and attacks with a ferocity that belies her slightness. Rage of this sort is personal. It springs from an obsession carried over years.

Even Kidman’s delivery of Bell’s voice informs her body as story vehicle. She speaks with a suffocated rasp, certainly brought on by her drinking and hinting at a past cigarette habit. Mustering the energy to talk sometimes seems as if it is almost too much. She is nearing her end. But the way Bell’s voice cracks when she yells also suggests she’s spent hours simply screaming out her rage and trauma into the lonely desert night.

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During flashbacks, Kidman adopts the coolness of the femme fatale, always moving with deliberate grace, posed in ways that seem both detached and seductive. She is unashamedly attracted to Chris and tells him so. Yet she never loses the contained energy of a law officer, eager to do some good and rid the world of bad people. Even her walk is different, light and confident as opposed to the limping tread of her future self.

Guide

The typical city of film noir is a labyrinth of narrow streets, shadowed doorways and blind alleys. The atmosphere is one of entrapment, isolation and menace. Destroyer’s L.A. resembles not the maze of The Naked City or Where the Sidewalk Ends, but the endless sprawl of the late noir Kiss Me Deadly (unsurprisingly set on the West Coast) where highways and neighborhoods, bright and airy as they might appear, lack any distinction and stretch farther than a person can see or travel. No entry and no exit.

The hunt for Silas is a fraught journey through Destroyer’s minatory L.A., and Bell is the beleaguered, lonely guide. The camera either holds high, establishing a city-of-the-plain atmosphere or keeps close to Kidman, tracking just behind; following her line of sight, focusing on that battered and world-weary face. The interweaving stories of past and present build another maze-like structure.

The effect is claustrophobic, sticking to Bell’s blinkered and revenge-driven perspective — is she keeping her head down, forever wary of the unseen blow? Kusama makes Destroyer’s world feel like a series of poorly lit footpaths, even though most of the action occurs in the daytime. The film drops Bell into a specimen jar where the oxygen is quickly running out.

But while Bell is the traveler, she is also the center of the maze. Bell is the noir protagonist trapped by circumstance and fate, dwelling in a personal and physical inferno of her own accidental devising. The maze of her L.A. is the restricted psychology of the character. She is doomed never to find the exit in Destroyer.

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Labyrinth

Despite subversive themes and storylines, noir depicts individuals who fall into certain prescribed and recognizable types: the naive protagonist, the black widow, the criminal. Part of the fun of watching these films is seeing how the roles are interpreted, altered, expanded.

So, who is Destroyer’s Erin Bell?

Erin Bell is a tough cop. A loose cannon. A drunk. Her personal life is an arid wasteland. She’s an absent parent, consumed by work and booze and her own traumas. Her daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) — who lives with Ethan (Scoot McNairy), Bell’s estranged but still caring ex — scorns her mother’s attempts at parenting, probably in part because the advice is often delivered on waves of whisky breath.

Men have played this part for decades. Is Destroyer merely the distaff alternative? A permutation, toss in a dash of female issues for spice? That trick is mostly an excuse to show women engaging in a catalog of male anti-social behaviors and terming the exercise progressive, feminist. It’s easy to switch genders and call it a day.

Kusama seems too careful a storyteller to peddle something so simple, and her focus aims at a deeper goal. Kidman appears in every scene of Destroyer, and at one time or another, Bell embodies each noir archetype: dupe, good cop, gangster, femme fatale. She is the doppelganger, the double, allowed by human freedom to shift identities as the situation warrants. Each role is part of the other. And she is all of them at once because she is every one of them at some point.

Silas says to Bell, “I know who you are,” when clearly he’s unaware she’s a cop. Who she is are the choices she has made, and these choices — for love, for greed, for adventure — are the axis upon which her past and present turn. Free will, the sole source of meaning in the existential noir universe, gets the better of Erin Bell. She exists in a recursive interplay of past and present. She can’t find the exit because the labyrinth spins outward from her. The vision is bleak. In Destroyer, Bell is both the inhabitant of the maze and the maze itself.

Stefen Styrsky (@Stefen_Styrsky) writes short stories and film reviews. His work has appeared in Amazon’s Day One, the Tahoma Literary Review, Number Eleven Magazine, Litbreak and The Offing, among other places. He has an MA in Fiction Writing from the Johns Hopkins University and lives in Washington, DC. His website is stefenstyrsky.com.