The first time I saw Nicolas Winding Refn flash the sign of the horns on the red carpet (it was sometime in the 2010s), I thought it was cool. It was the last gesture you expected from a prestige filmmaker. But then Refn not only had a distinctive aesthetic but, it would seem, a rather outré set of values. On the surface, he looked so civilized and Danish, but on the big screen he’d become a punk transgressor who flouted narrative conventions, not to mention the rules of good taste. By the time he brought the loopy slasher revenge opera “Only God Forgives” to Cannes in 2013 (I was there at the premiere showing where it was roundly booed), the fact that he’d made a movie this purple and garish and brazenly solemn in its pop vulgarity became part of his mystique. He dressed nicely, but he had shot past respectability, or even the desire for it. Maybe the devil made him do it.
Then I started to notice something. At every photo op, Refn would flash the sigh of the horns — and each time he did it, it was less cool. Your allegiance to the devil wasn’t supposed to be a brand. But Refn’s performative mischievousness (he also liked to pose in a boxer’s stance) was all of a piece with his films. He was turning into the movie-director version of a punk showoff.
