Every March I find myself scrambling to watch all of the Best Picture nominees in time for the Academy Awards. This earnest endeavor typically begins with my best attempt to adhere to a stringent viewing calendar and ends with me watching five movies the week of the ceremony. 

To mark my foray into the Oscar marathon season, I recently watched Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia” (2025). The comedy-thriller centers around the abduction of a high-profile CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone). Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), kidnap Fuller, believing she is secretly an alien responsible for humanity’s demise.

“Bugonia” is not marketed as a commentary on gender and socioeconomic privilege, but I was struck by the film’s representation of girlboss feminism while watching. A “girlboss,” as defined by businesswoman Sophia Amoruso in her memoir that coined the term, “is someone who’s in charge of her own life. She gets what she wants because she works for it.” 

While Amoruso has clarified that you don’t need to be a corporate leader to be a girlboss, the idea that hard work equals instant success is inherently capitalistic — hence the adoption of girlboss feminism by many businesswomen. In “Bugonia,” Fuller is, by all accounts, a capital-G Girlboss. 

By becoming the head of a major pharmaceutical company, Fuller disrupts her industry’s gender norms — but occupying this role grants her the ability to inflict harm on consumers. In the film, it is revealed that her company, Auxolith, produced bee-killing pesticides along with medications that rendered Gatz’s mother comatose.  

Ultimately, Fuller’s affluence and elite status outweigh the marginalization she may experience due to her gender identity. Her exorbitant wealth renders her unable to truly connect with anyone poorer than she is and her focus on profit prevents her from fully realizing the harm she and Auxolith perpetuate. 

When attempting to negotiate with the cousins, she is unable to relate to them for precisely this reason — she cannot possibly fathom how their trauma has motivated them to join an echo chamber espousing belief in an Andromedan species. When juxtaposed with Gatz’s paranoia and violence, Fuller is seen as a voice of reason due to her intellect and privilege. 

If Fuller represents the archetypal millennial girlboss, Gatz is the red-pilled conspiracy theorist. His obsession with the extraterrestrial is all-consuming, completely isolating him from the rest of the world. Although he believes alienkind is to blame for all Earthly evil, he is particularly harsh on Fuller, who is only one of many supposed Andromedans. This is because she is everything he has been manipulated by conspiracy theory media to resent: the elite extraterrestrial. 

The girlboss believes she can solve any problem she encounters, as long as she pulls herself up by the bootstraps. The conspiracy wants to blame all of his issues on external influences, from the individual to the systemic, including oppressive power structures. 

“Bugonia” illustrates that when this conflict turns physical, the girlboss loses the meager upper hand she may have from her prestigious college degree and arsenal of buzzwords. Her can-do attitude or her affluence cannot save her from the patriarchy or even guarantee her safety. Participating in high-level capitalism doesn’t protect her from social violence — it makes her even more of a target. 

Fuller yields significantly more influence than Gatz, yet she becomes completely helpless when he ties her up in his basement. The system that claims to support the girlboss will abandon her when given the opportunity, as exemplified by the police’s negligence in locating Fuller. Although corporations are quick to espouse support for female representation, men still comprise 71% of C-suite leadership in the top 100 publicly traded companies. 

When Fuller does manage to defend herself against Gatz, her strength is fueled by deeply classist beliefs. The extent of her narrow-mindedness is revealed in an angry outburst: “You can’t beat me because you are a loser, and I’m a winner!” Fuller is incapable of accepting that she cannot reason her way out of being kidnapped. 

Without spoiling the film’s ending, the plot twist leaves viewers feeling as though they, like Gatz, have been manipulated into supporting a piece of sensationalist propaganda. We’re not sure whose side we’re truly on in the girlboss vs. conspiracy theorist  battle. 

Gatz unfairly takes out his anger on Fuller, who is just one cog in a multi-layered machine. But Fuller — and the system she represents — are in fact responsible for many of the issues Gatz raises. So who’s right? The short answer is neither. 

“Bugonia” reminds us that both archetypes are unfortunately more prevalent in real life than we would like them to be. We can’t finger-point at alleged aliens for causing all of our problems, just as we can’t ignore the role that corporations play in supporting widespread exploitation. 

As we deal with our own chronically online conspiracy theorists and self-serving girlbosses, all we can do is prevent ourselves from falling into either extreme as we make sense of the noise around us.  

Fiona Feingold is a junior writing about women in the entertainment industry in her column, “Femininomenon,” which runs every other Friday.