Friedkin’s film sucked much of the humor and twisted romance from the play, I realized, treating it as straight horror. Although I have some issues with the latest interpretation, directed by David Cromer (it veers hokey, and it is missing the feeling of the vertiginous, the fear that we might be at risk of falling into madness, too), the emphasis on the burnished union between Peter and Agnes resonated. Peter and Agnes have sex and go to sleep. A naked Peter wakes up in the night, complaining of a bug bite. He pinches at the sheets, urging Agnes to see the creature responsible, an aphid. And she makes herself see it. The folie-à-deux plot lurches into motion, the aphid spawns thousands more, burrowing under the characters’ skin. They claw and claw at each other, creating real rivulets of blood. By the time a man named Dr. Sweet, who may or may not be real, breaches the motel room, the logic of conspiracy has utterly taken over. Agnes’s final monologue is a torrent of sense-making, a grieving mother giving herself the answers that years of searching never could. Then, an ending that I’d forgotten, and one that, for the purposes of this column, I’ll need to spoil. (Here is your warning.)
Agnes and Peter strip naked and douse themselves with gasoline. Agnes proclaims her love. They light a match.
Immolation registers to us as ancient. Death in the American theatre is generally ruled by the precepts of Chekhov’s gun, a more modern invention. Hooked on the explosion at the end of “Bug,” I started to see Agnes and Peter as a kind of cultural Adam and Eve, ushering in a world order with their incendiary self-destruction. More pitiable people do not exist; conspiracy gave Agnes, a bearer of shattering loss, purpose. All of this is probably why I unconsciously chose to forget the ending of the play. It had been Agnes’s frightening monologue, her total conversion into Peter’s logic of conspiracy as a salve to her numbing grief, that qualified in my mind as the zenith of self-annihilation. My brain had suspended man and woman in the precipitous moment before sacrifice.
We are not actually flooded with cultural examples of self-immolation. The burning men of DeLillo, in “Players” and “Cosmopolis,” are fringe gadflies, and the 2018 film “Annihilation,” a recent mainstream American text on self-destruction, safely occupies the science-fiction zone. I could not forget the centrality of immolation in “Yr Dead,” the flinty and experimental 2024 début novel by the poet Sam Sax, because immolation is not merely the final expression of despair but the greater organizing principle, the novel’s framing vice. “I can feel the accelerant, heaving and sloshing, at the bottom of my bag,” our narrator, a twenty-seven-year-old bookseller named Ezra, tells us. The flippancy of the title evokes the internet as Purgatory. It is the Trump era. Ezra is a recognizable figure: a radical in New York showing up to this and that protest. On the morning that they decide to make their way to Trump Tower, where they will set themselves on fire, they see the Biblical portent of a goat; the novel is a kind of nonchronological aria taking place in that moment of protracted dying. In the tradition of the dead or dying narrator, memories—of radical Jewish summer camp, of pained queer awakenings—flood Ezra’s narration, as do hallucinations of family history. At times, Ezra invades the consciousness of their parents, their ancestors. The book doesn’t grapple with Ezra’s reasons for self-immolation, treating it almost as a fait accompli. Who could argue with Ezra’s disaffection with protest as an engine for revolution, that protest is no longer enough? As Ezra disintegrates, they find themselves “watching people turn my way with expressions on their face that I’ve never seen before, that I’ll never be able to name—not horror or awe, but something far older and strange.”
The indelible 1963 photograph of Thich Quang Duc, seated in lotus position in the center of a boulevard in Saigon, burning alive, does not exist by coincidence. Malcolm W. Browne, the photographer, later wrote that the night before a monk had advised him “to come to the pagoda at seven the next morning because something very special and important was going to happen.” After the image of Duc circulated, “The Burning Monk” was the name that stuck. Modern study of self-immolation in the West begins, so to say, with the Vietnam War; indivisible from the American response to Duc’s fatal protest was the feeling that the fire could catch Americans like a contagion.
And Americans, the supposed inviolable conscience, did set themselves on fire in despair at the Vietnam War. Before dousing herself with cleaning fluid on a Detroit corner in 1965, Alice Herz, then eighty-two, wrote, “I wanted to burn myself like the monks in Vietnam did.” Herz was a peace activist and refugee who had been denied American citizenship after she refused to promise to defend the country by taking up arms. Roughly eight months after Herz’s death, Norman Morrison, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker pacifist, self-immolated at the Pentagon. A week after that, a twenty-two-year-old seminarian, Roger LaPorte, burned in front of the United Nations.
