Now look out the window, think you see something amazing out there. Kristina is on the bed being photographed and attempts to smile. It doesn’t come easy. Smiling is cheap and a forgotten thing or maybe never learned.

The line of wannabe models looks like a worm full of you girls, the single-color room is full of these girls, a worm of girls waiting for their opportunity. One of them named Kristina swallowed a tapeworm in a pill ordered from dark web, tapeworm to keep her slimming down in hopes of a career abroad. Losing weight makes her smile.

Lithuanian movie Toxic (2024) directed by Saulė Bliuvaite does an amazing job at picturing Lithuanian youth attempting to enjoy life and leave the desolate place of whatever. The modelling school is a trapdoor in a place that feels sealed off: industrial, emptied-out, post-Soviet in atmosphere even if the specifics are contemporary Lithuania. The Soviet architecture leaves one hopeless as Soviet state of mind thinks: what is there to hope for, what is there to smile about? Legacy of Soviet Union is profound recognizable feeling of loss. Places look hellish, unrepaired, people left at mercy.

The long line of girls is like a neverending story. Two girls Kristina and Marija practicing their model walk on a scrap of asphalt, high heels clicking, is one of the more quietly devastating but humorous images: aspiration reduced to a short loop, procession that never advances, imitation that should work out there. Worms rule and cause pain. Dreams are powerful and everybody has the same ones.

Kristina and Marija train their catwalk outside where nobody cares and everything looks abandoned, back and forth on a small piece of asphalt like going somewhere.

Modelling as an option is a weird one and so few really succeed, to be noticed and to have a career in picture beautiful is a dream for many girls. What is the walk? What is the act of modelling? Modelling agency tapes their posters there where nothing happens is like a trap. Girls look at the picture and draw genitals with boys, stick cigarettes in the eyes of the model in a poster. In modelling you pay to play like in art.

The line there already existed in Soviet Union to grocery stores, maybe boys are more clever driving around in circles. Difference between the sexes stays the same. Girls are their looks, that is the currency and sellable object. Comedy in tragedy happens: we have seen this before and you are never skinny enough. Parasite inside Kristina grows and she loses weight. 

In parasitic world terms are one is to walk the line like models, do what is taught, go back and forth in a very small space in specific manner, pay the people who show you the ropes, maybe be in debt for it, a way to enter the world, into another kind of abyss one learns about by jumping in, dreaming, admiring those who made it or just go with a limp with which Marija is born, she says she was born this way. Wearing an oversized Marilyn Manson t-shirt with slogan Bigger Than Satan in the back, she sells flowers with her grandmother.

Let the world happen. To learn to exploit is the way of the world, to get what one wants, knowing you will be treated badly regardless, is learned via experience, you can be the bad apple yourself and do ill. Kids are cruel, I suppose, there is a meaning behind, which is learning. What cruelty hides in pretty pictures, in human brain: the unavoidable hurt. How much is pretty worth? What is pretty enough? Who wins? The one who exploits the worst those who can’t defend themselves.

Marilyn Manson is an interesting idol for young girls. His music is maybe cathartic and speaks to people with an edge, on an edge, a flaw in them, to those who feel out of place, who are not accepted as they are etc. have a lot of rage, pain and anger. He is a show and has shown theatrical satanic-like moves that exist in show business, acts of abuse and behaviour that have never left the arts regardless #metoo. He still thinks he is the victim. As a role model he is a very poor choice. I understand the appeal, nevertheless, the danger in him, the music and people who take things far for art’s sake and to have power over people. Art is powerful. To analyse Marilyn Manson in this setting, in Lithuanian light, post-Soviet landscape in the world of teens, who think elsewhere is better, Manson sings about the darkness of humans and what they do. There are things as dark web where one can buy a child, such are like a gigantic black cloud in a landscape. Hard to believe it exists, but its there: things that happen to other people. Manson as art maybe a warning, a rebel or celebration of evil: he has tattoos of swastikas, which is weird, so he celebrates evil in humans, hate. Teens prone to hating without much empathy as they need to win, is also a pattern, a fight.

I don’t know if modelling is a worthy dream for anyone. Eating disorders like bulimia already rule both Kristina’s and Marija’s life. Kristina eats her dinner in her room so she can toss the food out the window where it piles up like compost.

Girl’s life with a limp means she gets bullied, fat girls too. Fat is an enemy not Marilyn Manson. What qualifies as ugly here is the now and the expected normal life one must escape from. Manson’s theater is an escape of course, art of loathing towards banality. Kristina’s dad sells his car for Kristina to get away for modelling, so there is tenderness. Modelling is for teenagers the princess dream sold by predators, even though girls seem predators themselves. Do girls seek predators is one question to match their own cruelty? Competition is as violent as is envy. Every woman and girl who gets anything better or says no, is a whore and a cunt. 

Bliuvaitė has said the film was partly inspired by the 2011 documentary Girl Model and by her own early experiences around that world. The result is neither pure social-realist polemic nor pure body-horror. It stays close to the girls’ limited field of vision: the concrete, brickwalls, the fluorescent lights of the agency, clean space of practice for modelling and taking photos where distractions are cleaned away, the private rituals of self-punishment, the occasional flicker of genuine attachment between Marija and Kristina. Marija waits outside the house where Kristina goes to give massage. Kristina gives Marija the money for photo shoot her mother refused to aid with. That attachment is one of the few things that feels non-transactional, and even it is fragile and complicated by the same scarcity that drives everything else. Real friendship is precious. Pursuing one’s dream is rebellion, girls rebel by hurting themselves, which is also a repetitious pattern. https://youtu.be/9ObumccSuXA?is=x141WQxr4cixp2hv