“It’s because I’m a pig isn’t it? … I did not get the nomination for best actress … can you  honestly say I am not Oscar material? … In this male chauvinist, non pig world, did you ever  think I even stood a chance?”  

Miss Piggy to Johnny Carson at the 52nd Annual Academy Awards.¹ 

I should begin with honesty. A very good place to start. I am not a Muppet fanatic. I have not  always adored Miss Piggy as much as I adore her now. I was, for a long time, much more of an  establishment Disney villain queer. A devoted worshipper at the shrines of Cruella De Vil or  Ursula the Sea Witch. That said, I can happily watch a Muppet film with a glass of wine and enjoy a  pleasant giggle. 

Something about Miss Piggy struck me more deeply than the usual queer coded Disney villains. It  could be the wig. It could be the dress. It is probably the karate chops. As a queer man, I am  constitutionally inclined to admire a confident female character who can karate chop a villain with  one hand and cradle her amphibian lover in the other. 

There is something irresistibly special about Miss Piggy. 

Her position in the public eye fascinates me. How could it not. 

Miss Piggy has been a still performing celebrity since her debut in 1974 as Piggy Lee, a parody of  the singer Peggy Lee, in a Jim Henson television special. ² Since then she has done everything. She has starred in multiple feature films including The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The  Fantastic Miss Piggy Show and The Muppets Take Manhattan. She has hosted, guest starred, sung  duets, delivered monologues and stolen scenes with alarming ease. 

Through all of this, Piggy has developed a distinct comedic persona, one that draws heavily from  the work of earlier comedic and dramatic female stars. She is a vessel for those classic feminine  sensibilities, preserving them, exaggerating them and carrying them forward into the present day. In  a strange way, she functions as both archive and performance. 

Miss Piggy does not age. She is, much unlike myself, unvarnished by time. 

Because she does not age, she is spared the usual indignities that accompany celebrity longevity.  There is no physical decline to be commented on, no descent into public cognitive fragility, no late  career unraveling that forces audiences to renegotiate how they feel about her. Unlike so many real  celebrities of the past, she does not become an awful person, nor is she reframed through hindsight  as someone whose opinions now make us wince. 

Stars of her era tend to fall into familiar categories. Some become venerated icons, endlessly  rehabilitated and re-contextualised, like Jane Fonda. Others quietly disappear into the fog of  nostalgia, remembered fondly but vaguely, like your Tallulah Bankhead or Lauren Bacall. Miss  Piggy exists in both spaces at once. 

She is a figure of nostalgia and an active character in the contemporary media landscape. 

She is a kind of immortal Carol Burnett, who fittingly appeared as a guest on The Muppet Show in  1980. 

Because of this, Miss Piggy acts as a bridge to the previous century and to older, conventional ideas  about femininity. She embodies them so fully that she is able to subvert them, twisting tradition into  something that still resonates with modern audiences. Her exaggerated glamour becomes  commentary rather than costume. 

Modern pop stars even echo her influence. Chappell Roan, for example, has been rumoured to  draw inspiration from Miss Piggy’s theatrical silhouettes and unapologetic excess. ³ This makes a strange kind of sense. Piggy understood the power of costume long before the internet turned  fashion into a language of identity. 

I am always interested in who Miss Piggy appears alongside. 

On the original Muppet Show, she sang duets with John Denver, Elton John and Raquel Welch.  Piggy is endlessly adaptable. She bends just enough to fit the guest star of the week without ever  losing herself. Her personality is strong but elastic, capable of surviving any context. 

In the most recent iteration of The Muppet Show, she appears beside Sabrina Carpenter. What is  striking here is that Carpenter subtly adjusts herself to fit Miss Piggy, rather than the other way  around. That alone says a great deal about Piggy’s accumulated cultural weight. By embodying  stereotypes and gleefully undermining them, she has somehow become a modern trendsetter. 

This is not something all boundary breaking celebrities manage. 

Plenty of stars who once seemed radical now feel awkward, dated or outright troubling. Scarlett  Johansson and Diane Keaton (until her death) continue to defend Woody Allen. Nicki Minaj has called herself Trump’s number one fan . Patti Lupone being Patti Lupone . ^{5 6} 

Divas age. They change. Often the media reacts badly to those changes, often unfairly. But Miss  Piggy avoids this entire cycle. At the end of the day, she is literally put back in a box and stored  until she is needed again, perfectly preserved. 

Sabrina Carpenter is an interesting choice, but not an inspired one. The new Muppet Show is  intriguing, yet it ultimately feels like a retreat into familiar territory. If you love The Muppet Show,  you might as well just watch the original. It remains sharper, stranger and more alive than its  successors. 

Miss Piggy’s greatest appeal is her ability to function as a bridge. On the surface, she is just a pig  puppet in a wig and a dress. Beneath that surface is a personality capable of making people feel  seen, affirmed and entertained all at once. 

As an entity, Miss Piggy also works as a quiet teaching tool. For audiences still learning about  pronouns, identity and gender norms, she offers an accessible example. You can point to her and  say, notice how this character refuses to be defined by what society expects of her. That is a deeply  uplifting thing, even when it arrives wrapped in satin gloves and dramatic eyelashes. 

Diva worship is basically my religion, and Miss Piggy absolutely deserves a niche, if not a full altar. 

My favourite historical nugget is Miss Piggy’s 1979 campaign for the leading actress Oscar for her  role in The Muppet Movie. It is what I love most about her. It felt like a genuine expression of  character rather than a corporate publicity stunt. That campaign even produced a wonderfully  absurd exchange between ABC’s Hughes Rudd and Academy President Fay Kanin. 

“To see Miss Piggy is to think of Olivia De Haviland, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid  Bergman, Oscar winners all. So why shouldn’t Piggy have an Oscar?” 

“You know we all do love Miss Piggy,” Kanin replied, “but the rules of the Academy say that  we give awards and nominations to actors and actresses, not to characters, and since Miss  Piggy is a character, we just can’t, we can’t do that.” 

Miss Piggy, of course, would disagree. And she would be right in doing so.

The post The Glamorous, Immortal Nostalgia of Miss Piggy  appeared first on The New Absurdist.

And oh it was hot. Hot like Old Testament Lot, all mad/sad that his wife wanted to watch her friends go to ash. But what the hell was I doing there, then? Same exact thing. Only I didn’t care which one of us got to see the other go, didn’t matter if it was Helen or me. One of us would be cinder and the other salt. Here there was no skin-of-his-teeth, “wasn’t my fault,” Sodomite. And, anyway, Helen and I were not married.

I had been dating this girl who looked like a living Modigliani. The stretched limbs and dead eyes that are – as static modernist art – the pulse of surface beauty. But find someone who looks like this for real and it is not nice to gaze upon. I didn’t even like her for “who she was,” for, whatever that might have entailed, Helen was a creature who infatuated me because of her untranslatable nature, her put-off presence, her lines and planes. After our third date I knew she felt the same way about me. And now we had been seeing each other for three months and we kept meeting up for dates – never breaking them, I mean. Helen needs glasses and never wears them, so in her eyes I come off like one of Francis Bacon’s guilty men: red and pink and then too white, when I laugh I become all mouth, bragging about gums and no good can come out of me. 

I gave up on the window, got out of the car and found my way to my seat in the third row.  Helen’s always late. There is no one else who looks like me. So, I was thinking: if she gets here then no problem. Her eyes will adjust over the seats and she’ll find me. Or she won’t show up and she’ll have beaten me at this. Our relationship was this tight Rock, Paper, Scissors-thing that became evermore steeped in the stress of how used to each other we were getting. It had always been clear in our silence how we would end. One of us would stand the other one up, and this crowning act of negligence – no matter how much we’d spoken to each other on the phone or written postcards, smiled to our families whenever we mentioned who we were seeing, what we did on our evenings out – would end it. And, like I said, we had never broken a date.  

Every Thursday night the In-Joke shows two short local films before the main feature.  As I waited for Helen I watched a carnival movie. Seventeen minutes in and it still looked like there would be no fun, not even that rank howl of the dark carnival time. Although, I did feel the pain of sweaty things: there was a jar of some amniotic-looking fluid sitting atop a rotten workbench, there was a lot of sawdust, and the score was a very drunken sounding harpsichord. 

If the flick didn’t keep flashing the words CARNIVAL, I would have forgotten what I was watching. I was thinking that this was my chance; this was the sheer space I needed to make my exit. Like: Well, I was getting sick just waiting for you to show, these student films are all so painful. Why do you get to be late? This is wrong. I’m out of here, babe. But the picture ended and I let go of my tension as the commercials came on. BUY A SODA, the words so red that you felt thirst; and a child of – I was guessing – eleven holding a chocolate bar to her lips and not smiling, really looking bored, like she didn’t need this chocolate, or like she was so used to eating chocolate that it did nothing for her. I was calm now, not wanting to ever drink a soda or eat a chocolate bar again. And now the second film. A horror movie, a black and white thing called Wrist. Aptly named and well paced. This guy gets off his convenience store job, and on his walk home nearly trips over something sticking out of the ground. He looks down and it is this finger bone. There is a thirty second camera swim around the porous object, and heaven music – synthetic organ and wash out-waves that warmed my neck, made me smile. Cut to the guy trying to dig it up. His fingers rubbing out the soft earth around the bone. We see his wrists working like he’s untying someone that needs clock-stop rescuing. There is no music when he does this, but the pant and gasp of our hero’s determination. Now the hand bones are exposed.  And again: thirty seconds of a camera inspection, that same alcohol soaked cotton balls, then rubbed along the spine-music. He keeps on digging and we go down the wrist bone. Four inches down – the work, so easy – the guy starts to pull at the ossified appendage; handshake grip like his wrists and dead wrist have always been buddies. And he yanks the arm out, too far but the bone won’t stop. How long can this go on? When the guy sees that the single bone has revealed itself to be as long as a short leg, he takes a breather. Then slowly starts the inevitable pull again.  He is cautious now, not panting. In the corner of the screen the sky is changing, the sun is coming up. The screen goes to black. The film is over. I’m glad I saw it, but wish I could forget every moment. 

And this was my cue to leave. If I wanted to be the guy who cut it close but in the end bailed, I had to get up right then before Helen showed. There are never any trailers before the main feature. And I was sitting in the dark. I could hear the breaks in the film, the switch of audio levels. The screen kept flicking bright empty projections of no show. My eyes adjusted to having to seize quick sight and I noticed that Helen was sitting to my left, a seat away from me, looking at the same white surface. She couldn’t have been there for much more than a few minutes. She looked at me then pulled up a large tub of popcorn from her lap to offer me some.  I didn’t want to eat unless the main feature was playing. But when was it going to start? This was uncomfortable. 

We had shown up. Helen and I had kept up our part of the deal, but the movie hadn’t.  And now: not even the courtesy of erratic flickering, just the integrity of projector light unfiltered by any film. The sharp planes of Helen’s face and the pale lip-skin that detailed her pout had never cooperated so tightly before. She opened her mouth to ask me something, but didn’t say a word, and after a moment let it close. 

The screen went to black, then white again. The audio was being messed with. There was a sizzle-hissing noise coming from the speakers that were lined along the theater walls. Helen put her hand in the bucket of popcorn while I, before she could pull it out, cupped my fingers over her knuckle. My palm was growing cold, sweaty; but I left it there, counting to twenty and staring at the white screen, all the while knowing that we were both looking up at that sheet of silence, of bye-bye surrender. I let go of her, then stood up, really thinking that I was going to the concession stand to get a bottled water. I mean totally believing that, so much so that I didn’t even tell Helen what I was getting up for.  

But moving out of the theater and into the lobby I just kept walking. Slow pace-like; zombie sauntering toward final rest or little boy looking for an expensive toy he was warned against losing. I walked out of the cinema and then over to my car. There was a guy standing on a ladder and changing the letters on the marquee. And there was a pink flyer under my windshield wiper. I opened the car door. Water had collected in the driver’s seat. It was not raining, but it had. While I was inside, it had rained. 

The post Rock, Paper, Cinema appeared first on The New Absurdist.

If you’re unfamiliar, Letterboxd is a social networking platform that allows people to rate, review, and catalog films. It pretty much functions exactly like Goodreads with a laughably bad search function to match.

When I was a more avid reader growing up, there was nothing more satisfying than slamming my latest book shut and immediately typing away on my Goodreads account to publish the most unfiltered, long-winded review.

A friend or two—someone I knew in real life or Tumblr—would like my update, prompting feelings of immense pride and accomplishment to rush in. I was doing a great service. I was a critic offering well-regarded opinions. People trusted my taste in storytelling, an honor and responsibility I did not take lightly.

When Goodreads rolled out its recommendation feature, I was emboldened to continue pushing my favorite books at the top of my friends’ feeds like an absolute menace.

Now I slip my one-sentence, tongue-in-cheek, anonymous Letterboxd reviews in quick, smooth, easy conversations in person or via text. My comments are just as unsolicited, but the validation I get from making myself chuckle alone is enough of a reason for me to keep doing it.

—

I watched Jane Schoenbrun’s A24-distributed film I Saw the TV Glow (2024) and finished New York Times bestseller The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (2020) in tandem. 

On the surface, both stories are pretty different. If they were the same medium, they wouldn’t be in the same genre section in Barnes & Noble or Netflix. Their intended audiences seem far apart as we follow a 35-year-old British woman in present day in The Midnight Library and two queer pubescents in American suburbia in the late 90s to early 2000’s in I Saw the TV Glow. 

Still, I came away from each story equal parts comforted and disturbed by the shared antagonistic passage of time, the mess of people and remnants of wasted potential lost or left behind, the fatigue of existence and repression in a stagnant world, and the life-saving, persisting art that emerges as a constant opposition for stragglers to build identities, homes, and whole communities around.

In The Midnight Library, Nora’s lifeline is the musings of old male philosophers and in I Saw the TV Glow, Owen and Maddy bond over a campy young adult show called The Pink Opaque.

Despite their respective outlets, we witness the nightmares of Nora and Owen actualize in real time: a dead-end, unfulfilled life haunted by what-ifs.

Nora’s what-ifs are a wide range of unrelated choices and passions. Owen dismisses and runs from gender dysphoria, or as it manifests in the film: the possibility that they are an unconscious Isabel, one of the two main characters in The Pink Opaque.

Nora lives out variations of her life through the purgatorial Midnight Library, each book a gateway to an alternate life she could have led. The Pink Opaque starts to bleed into Owen’s reality, but the harder they push this world away, the faster time skips ahead, leaving them with no memories of the past few years-turned-decades as they become more shell than human.

—

The metaphors these stories employ to make their points can be heavy-handed and blinding. (Though personally I enjoyed watching I Saw the TV Glow more than I did reading The Midnight Library.)

I’m aware this is a common crisis among 20-somethings and that other stories have dealt with disassociating from a life passing you by.

When I reminisce and look back on my life (as it’s beginning, thank you), my brain naturally visualizes my Goodreads account, specifically the annual reading challenges and year-end summaries in books. 

I can pick out a book and recall not only the year I read it in, but also the state of mind and circumstances I was in while reading.

If I go through my old rambling Goodreads reviews, skimming through the noticeable lack of punctuation and capitalization in some, and the ecstatic overuse in others, I can focus on the personal tidbits younger me threw in between the lines…as breadcrumbs, almost, leading to…I have no idea where exactly.

I can view my degression as an avid reader laid bare on screen. In 2015 and 2016, I read 53 books each year. In 2022 and 2023, I read a whopping total of 9 and 8.

Eleven months into 2024, I read 4 books including The Midnight Library and two of which being a manga volume and poetry collection. On the flip side, I logged 40 films in my Letterboxd diary.

One way or another, I’m getting my necessary fix of stories. As someone who has had difficulty being in touch with recognizing and feeling what’s real, media in its many forms has shaped and been shaped by how I’ve made sense of my life in that moment in time.

With an amorphous blob of a personality throughout my teenage years, using my favorite books, shows, movies, and music as an escape and front was always an intentional choice to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths.

Over time, I absorbed the stories so that they became a part of me, so that I was unrecognizable without them.

There are two aphorisms both The Midnight Library and I Saw the TV Glow really hinge upon. Without them, there is no purpose to either story. 

Matt Haig writes “three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse.” 

I AM ALIVE.

Jane Schoenbrun lingers on a shot of a street covered in chalk doodles and squiggles, framing a clear message.

there is still time

I want the stories I consume to be an extension of who I am, rather than define and form my entire being. 

I’m working on talking more about the experiences I’ve lived and not only the ones I’ve lived vicariously through fictional characters.

In separate discussions about I Saw the TV Glow and The Midnight Library, two friends asked if I had any regrets.

I said I didn’t, I’m too young, but I also don’t know that I’ve made decisions big enough to live out their effects. Or perhaps therein lies the regret: the absence of risk.

The voice that narrates in my head sighs and tells me to keep going.

The post I Walked Through the Midnight Library and Saw the TV Glow appeared first on The New Absurdist.

He watched them with all of his parents along with his aunts, uncles, and cousins, who cracked seeds so loudly and commented over each 7 minute episode that Amir already longed for a time when he could have the show all to himself. How crazily wonderful were these animals. Of course they were funny—the cat from the wrapping paper so tragically doomed to failure and the rabbit outsmarting the bald hunter proving among his instant favorites. But as the grown-ups laughed and pointed out obvious ironic moments and the kids younger than him applauded and fell over as the giant dog he would soon learn was a coyote fell several kilometers to the ground, he already felt somehow superior in his understanding of it all. 

It was more than mere antics or the idiosyncratic voices funny even to those who didn’t understand English (like many of his generation his parents had thankfully immersed him in the language since preschool). There was something special—miraculous even—in the totality of the aesthetic experience. The tension of the classical music his father always played as he painted in his studio positioned against such absurd scenarios played out with characters drawn so perfectly simple that they seemed to him more interesting than any humans he’d grow up to meet for the rest of his life. 

That night he set his alarm before the first call to prayer beyond his window, imagining instead of the muezzein on the loudspeaker he hears the rabbit and the duck singing the song to their dance steps. He only remembers one phrase from it, “On with the show this is it,” but it played throughout his dreams with the rest of the cast—from the fast mouse to the giant rooster—appearing on his unconscious stage. He positions his blanket right in front of the TV in the living room with his bowl of sugar cookies and a cup of milk. Turning the volume low enough so his parents and the fresh batch of relatives visiting from Tehran won’t wake up, he watches almost two dvds all the way through, so entranced he even forgets he has to go to the bathroom until his mother appears. 

“What are you doing up so early, Amir, and eating pure sugar for breakfast!” 

He can’t bring himself to pull away from the man who discovers a dancing frog that refuses to perform for money. She turns the TV off and stands in front of it.

“Sayyyyyy…what’s the big idea!!!” replies Amir, attempting his impression of one of them—Yosememite Sam—for the first time. 

“Come to the kitchen. I’ll make you a proper breakfast.” 

She heats up the fresh bread in the toaster oven as she takes Nutella for him and feta cheese along with cucumber for her and his father out of the fridge. As she begins to chop the cucumber he asks for carrots. 

“Carrots? For breakfast? Since when?” she asks, half smiling as she goes back to the fridge for a couple, which she peels and rinses in the faucet. 

Amir sticks out his front teeth, and chomps into it in rapid succession. 

“Awww….what’s up Doc?” he asks, in the nasal voice of Buggs Bunny, already hands down his favorite. 

“Oh Amir you’re being silly,” she replies, now cutting the cucumber. 

He cradles the carrot in his hands, like a kitten, then begins to sing longingly, in English: “Oh carrots are divine you get a dozen for a dime it’s magic!!!” 

“Shhh…you’ll wake your father!” admonishes his mother. “Those American cartoons are going to corrupt you,” she says, “They’re very violent, and they teach bad manners. I’m only going to let you watch a little now and then. And no more today. Now eat your breakfast and drink your juice.”

Of course he knew she couldn’t keep him from his new obsession. Already it hurt even physically to be away from them, like Rumi when his beloved teacher Shams went missing. But it wasn’t enough just to know that within an hour she’d abandon him for yet another entire day of painting like his father would later in the afternoon. Channeling the most rebellious, destructive model he can summon in the moment so full of sugar, he begins growling and salivating, then sends himself viciously spinning as the Tasmanian devil through the living room. It was as though he’d become some wild dog—considered especially dirty in Islam—rabidly crashing through all semblance of normalcy in the family home. 

He’s sent to his room as his father wakes up in a rage and his mother is left to clean up the pieces of broken lamp and a vase. The sugar crash hits him as he lies on his bed, almost in a kind of coma. Despite his parents yelling at him, he’s sorry for nothing. Soon his father will lock himself in his studio to paint, getting drunk throughout the day, while his mother won’t surface from her room until it’s time to make dinner. He will watch and re-watch as many episodes as he can. 

***

On afternoons and long Fridays his adult relatives at the garden are so grateful for his shows that occupy all of the usually menacing children for hours at a time. Now and then they might step into the upstairs tv room just to check on their own kids and laugh a little at Amir’s antics, but for the most part they let him do his thing, just grateful to be free of their responsibilities to supervise. 

At first he entertained the little snot-nosed masses of cousins and second cousins simply by acting out every character in every episode as they appear on the screen beside him. Off hours he’d devote all of his playtime to constructing what he’d need for each episode, always improving his go-to costumes like his rabbit ears or duck bill. 

To recreate one of his favorite moments in all of television, he’d even gotten his cousins Bobback and Farbad to carry up an old abandoned TV he’d found in the shed, the kind made out of real wood with the giant dial for the channel changer. Riding his bike early one morning to the garden, he sneaks upstairs with tools he’d taken from his father’s studio. First he drags two mattresses from a room on the first floor of the garden house outside, directly underneath one of the upstairs windows. He unscrews the back of the TV, then after yanking and cutting out all constricting wires, he rips out the bigger components. Putting a sheet down in front, he smashes the screen with a hammer. Then he knocks out all remaining glass. The-clean up takes longer than the destruction, but it was worth it for the big show later that afternoon. 

With his audience glued to the working TV set along with his performance alongside it, they laugh as he runs around in his black and white outfit with whiskers and a red nose stuck on his face and a long tail c pinned to his butt. He’s painted an actual stuffed nightingale yellow and tied it with strong to his belt. Chasing the bird around with the same stumbling moves as Sylvester after Tweety Bird, the kids all hoot and holler. Then in another episode, when his model cat creeps back inside granny’s house to eat the kitten’s food, only to suddenly discover that he’s caught behind the TV screen, so too does Amir find himself behind his own emptied TV set.

Aware of appearing as himself in a show, he joins the famous cat in breaking the 4^th wall. Holding up a can of tuna fish labeled like the original cat’s “Pussy Kins Cat Food” in one hand with the sign, “Ask for it by Name” in his other hand, they both blink knowingly. Then with a foolish grin they dance awkwardly as they sing in time to the commercial jingle:

 “Pussy kins cat foot tastes real good 

Satisfies cats like a cat food should 

Hardens their muscles softens their fur 

Pussy kins cat’s cat food makes them purr.” 

Amir then sends himself flying, as if having been thrown out the actual window like Sylvester by the old woman on the real screen beside him. The danger of the fall draws a collective grasp. All the kids panic until his cousin Esan runs to look out the window, screaming, “He’s okay!!! He’s okay!!! 

Delighted as always to serve as his passive audience, all of his young relatives sitting crisscross applesauce clap and laugh so loudly that by the time Amir comes back upstairs he is followed by one of the old men from the garden below who creeps up to tell them to pipe down. 

This was Uncle Ali Mohammad, his father’s eldest brother, who’d often stumble into the room in various degrees of drunkenness. He yelled in a slobbering slur at the room full of toddlers, Shut the hell up, raving about how they were trying to recite great lines of poetry and couldn’t concentrate. This time as the kids cower in terror, Amir fearlessly grabs one of his seemingly endless carrots picked daily from the garden. Chomping on it, he walks up to the bald man with the big belly, and ask, “Aaaaaa…..what’s up doc?” 

The room explodes with nervous laughter. While his uncle rages and stomps his foot to scare them all into momentary silence, when he turns to leave Amir in his rabbit ears sends him off with one of Bugg’s famous sarcastic lines. “So long screwy…see you in saint louie!” This brings renewed laughter, and even more applause, while solidifying his position as their true leader. Overjoyed at the triumph of their claims upon the upstairs room, without Amir asking they again settle down in greater obedience than to their preschool teachers, waiting patiently to watch whatever episode he next had ready for them. 

All along, however, as he keeps workshopping his own performances he’s been training his minions for theirs. Two months into an especially hot summer, one day he turns the dvd off. “Nooooo…..!” they all cried, starving for the repetition of his mimicry just like he did for the original show. 

“Wait! Wait!” he yells, waving his hands down upon them as if to cool off their outrage. “You know it all now…like me. Instead of just watching Looney Tunes, who wants to play Looney Tunes?” A chorus of kids screamed so loudly the old men sent his own mother up to control them. 

After assigning his young relatives various roles and doing what he could to get them in costume, with Ali Reza as the new Sylvester and Miriam his youngest and by far the cutest cousin as Tweety Bird, they rehearse the scenes they watched and saw their great teacher act out. Baback, stocky and inherently ornery, made the perfect Yosemite Sam, especially in the cowboy hat Amir made for him by cutting and refiguring one of his mom’s hats with her sewing equipment. Eson and Elhan, brother and sister, wanted to take turns as roadrunner and coyote, so no argument there. Though nobody would ever have thoughtlessly asked Kaveh to play Porky Pig because of his stutter, he himself volunteered. Ironically, he had a hard time stuttering once he’d put on the foam pig nose and ears. 

Without question Amir would stay eternally as Buggs, and to that end he kept perfecting more and more of his costume. Soon he ended up with an entire rabbit suit. The other roles were flexible, and some got to play two or even three parts. For some reason, though, Amir was never satisfied with anyone as Elmer. He’d let everyone, even his teenage cousin Farhang, try on a stocking for the appearance of baldness, then cover it with a brown hat he’d painted red in the back. Still, despite the rifle he created out of cardboard tubes used to ship his father’s special paper, nobody seemed to pull it off. So they all took their turns, and he learned to live with what they could offer. 

After rehearsal, they started to take their show to the garden, performing their little seven minute skits for various packs of relatives able to give them their attention. To a point the grown ups seemed encouraging, stopping their backgammon and ping pong to watch the coyote chase the roadrunner by flapping wings made from umbrellas Eson took out of a box labeled ACME. After his exaggerated fall from the heights of a chair, they’d all clap then return to their own entertainment. 

The old men, though, had none of it. Invariably if they got within earshot the same irascible Uncle Ali Mohammad would complain, now more than ever. Even worse, he’d get his otherwise seemingly tolerant reciters of poetry on his side. 

“Hey! Hey!” he said, clearly drunk in the early afternoon. “We are discussing poetry right now, so shut the hell up! Or else…I’ll give you all spankings!” He raised his hand as if to swat their backsides. From a safe distance, Amir once again munched on a carrot, saying, “Ehhhh…what’s up doc?” With his pack of animated animals under his direction, he would count off the time to the big song and dance opening. “Okay, ready? Yek, do, seh!” Just as in the show, they all came out dancing and signing. 

Overture, curtain, lights 

This is it, the night of nights 

No more rehearsing and nursing a part 

We know every part by heart 

Overture, curtain, lights 

This is it, we’ll hit the heights 

And oh what heights we’ll hit 

On with the show this is it! 

 Having seen the routine so many times, most of the grown-ups would just tune it out. Ali Mohammad, though, had reached a breaking point. Already too drunk to recollect lines from Hafez he was to recite at the shab-e-sher, after downing the lukewarm tea his niece had brought him, he threw the glass as hard as he could. It smashed against the wall, but shards reached Amir, still dressed as Buggs, actually hitting him in the side of the head.

His entire Looney Tunes cast stood still, waiting for his reaction. Touching the bleeding wound near his real ear, then raising his fingers to show the blood, he declared with eerie calm, “Of course you know this means war.” 

But those expecting an immediate and comically violent reaction were soon disappointed. Strangely, and rather tragically, the show stopped for a while. Completely stopped. Amir started dressing like himself, and despite the constant pleading of his entourage, he refused to act his part as Buggs or direct the others. He wouldn’t even join some in going back to watch the original in the TV room. Soon burned out on the reruns, the kids just congregated near, but not too near, their disaffected leader. Some wore their costumes for a while and tried acting out scenes on their own, but soon they too abandoned the get up. Though it went without saying, all of course hated Uncle Ali Mohammad more than ever. 

Every so often Amir would leave them altogether, or at least try to, walking beyond the walls of the garden and into the streets and alleys. There was considerable construction, with workers laying pipes for some new buildings. He stood beside a hole, a new one that seemed rather deep, beside a mid-size digger with the fresh dirt on the teeth of its scooper. “Hey Buggs, are you going in that hole?” asked cousin Ali Reza. 

“Yeah, you going to hide from Elmer Fudd?” asked Bobback. 

He brushed them off as he kicked a little dirt into the opening, clearly studying what was down there. Soon he returned to the garden, and they’d all settle into some new routines of kicking a soccer ball and eating watermelon near their parents. 

Then one Friday early evening, when most adults beyond the old men reading poetry had decided to pay a visit to a sick relative before coming to the garden, Amir showed up in his bunny suit. His cousins were dying to join him again, but instead of directing them, he just stared at his Uncle Ali Reza, so the kids all stared at him too. Since the old man’s wife was not around he seemed to allow himself to get especially drunk. At one point he tried to get up for the restroom, then fell back down in his chair. Even worse, since the kids weren’t misbehaving, this time he started to take out all of his bullying aggression on his small circle of friends. 

“Heeeey Emmmmmdod,” he said, slurring his words. “You don’t know shit about Hafez. You know that? You think you’re so fucking special with your PhD. I’m surprised you passed kindergarten. And Hisham, yeah…you Hisham!” he continued, as the men looked to each other. “You only stay with us because your wife…she looks like an old goat…and your kids are even uglier.” 

His pack of friends and relatives soon had enough, and decided to take a walk without him. As the drunk old man dropped his head on the table, Amir as Buggs Bunny now sensed his chance. Clipping on his father’s crisp white collarless shirt and his mother’s white gloves, he went to the portable sound speaker on a nearby table. He’d once played dj for his father at a gathering, mostly just choosing from songs on a preset list, something his dad hoped would keep him busy and out of trouble. Thankfully, though, it had given him just enough instruction for this performance. 

Putting on Rossini’s opera, like Bugs before him in the episode from “Rabbit of Seville,” he stuck a comb in his hair and picked up a pair of scissors and a razor he’d taken from the bathroom. Then, he started to sing along to the intro, just like in the episode:

How doooo! 

Welcome to my shop 

Let me cut your mop 

Let me shave your crop! 

Daintily! Daint-til-ly! 

Hey yoooou! 

Don’t look so perplexed 

Why must you be next 

Can’t you see you’re next? 

Yes, you’re next! 

Yoou’re so next!

How about a nice close shave 

Teach your whiskers to behave 

Lots of lather lots of soap 

Please hold still don’t be a dope 

Now we’re ready for the scrapin’ 

There’s no use to try escapin’ 

Yell and scream and rant and rave 

There’s no use you need a shaave! 

As the kids started to applaud and scream in delight, he began pouring drops of oil on his drunken uncle’s bald head. In time with the violins, he manically rubbed it in, all the while looking at his usual audience of eager children who cheered him on. 

“Buggs is back!” they cried, “and look what he’s doing to Elmer Fudd!” He then took off his dampayees and took turns lifting each foot high above him, awkwardly rubbing the oil into his uncle’s head with his toes. Then he went away, to the kitchen, with the music still playing. That panicked his audience, and they all screamed, “Come back, Buggs come back!” Thankfully he soon returned with a container of homemade whip cream and a bowl of fruit. Even though they knew he’d make a circle of white with the cream, then balance bananas, apples, and grapes on his head, it still profoundly amused them. They all chanted now, in unison, “Buggs! Buggs! Buggs!” 

When he added more cream on top, followed by a cherry, even though his uncle made no acknowledgement like the original Elmer as Amir held up a mirror for his client to see his new hairdo, the recognition of the details from that episode killed them all with laughter. Of course they wanted to see him in a turban, like a mullah, playing a flute as a razor came out of a basket like a snake to bite the old mean man on the behind. For that matter, they’d also wanted the whip cream to have been sprayed around his head, as opposed to dolloped on with a spoon. Like Amir, though, they’d learned to make do, using their imagination to fill in the blanks. 

Children charged with great imagination, just to see Amir gesture toward key moments was more than enough for them to fill in the rest. As Amir sat next to the old man and called for the kids to rock, and even try to raise his chair, though they barely could move the old man back a few centimeters they could easily pretend they were enacting the infinite ascension of the barber’s chair to the climatic classical music. 

Completely in sync with their fearless leader, when he next reached down to take off the old man’s shoes they beat him to it. As a few of them together heaved his bare feet onto the chair where Amir had been sitting, Elhan ran to a room where her older sister spent a lot of her nights since a big fight with her parents. In less than a minute she returned with the nail polish, which Amir put on the old man’s toes. 

Of course there was no cement to affix to his face and let dry in a block before chipping off. But when Buggs cried for a container full of mud, all his minions went scrambling. He waited then, with the music playing, his gaze right before him as though in front of a camera. Soon he had options: pots and pans filled with dirt from the garden moistened with water from the tub, flour mixed with water from the kitchen, and even their grandma Taj’s leftover fesenjan. 

Near the end of the song, Amir went for the mud, packing it on the old man’s face, which they tilted back for maximum exposure. Though a little off script, Amir allowed the addition of fresh tulips picked from the garden, which he planted on his drunk uncle’s upper forehead with more handfuls of mud. 

As the music ended and Amir took a bow, his ears flopping down to his knee caps, the garden gate opened and they saw the pack of his relatives, including his parents and, much worse, Ali Mohammad’s wife. Instantly she registered what was happening. She raised her purse, swinging it wildly as she ran toward Amir. He zig zagged around her, then took off into the lemon trees. Though his wife couldn’t keep up, she now had a host of adults on his trail, including her athletic youngest son Mirdad in his 40’s, who years ago had played semi professional soccer. 

But Amir as Buggs could weave in and around the legs of these grown-ups, slipping passed them with a kind of poise. It helped of course to have the kids cheer him on. At one point, back near the outdoor tables where the family would have the big meals, he grabbed a cloth napkin and held it like a bull fighter’s cape. As Mirdad ran to grab him, Amir took two quick hops to the side. Seeing Amir now in the episode of Buggs fighting the bull, a couple of them grabbed tulips off the old man’s head and threw them at their hero matador. 

They gasped when Mirdad did grab him by the arm of his rabbit costume, but Amir quickly twisted out of it, then charged for the garden door. The pack of grown ups all followed, of course, then the kids after them, running into the dusty twilight of the outside village. Here and there kids did what they could to impede the pack of adults, jumping onto their own parents back and even running ahead and stopping short, forcing them to fall onto the gravel road. 

Though Amir was obviously fast, he still ran with the ironic grace of his character, kind of half skipping now and then, when he’d sensed he had a decent lead. Though quick at the start, however, the legs and lungs of his fiercest opponent was soon proving too much for him. The footsteps in dress shoes got so close he knew he’d be grabbed any second. But just as Mirdad reached with both hands for his neck, he plunged, feet first, down into the hole. It’s as though it really were a real episode, where he once again evaded capture by Elmer Fudd and others. At first in anger, then in real concern, his father shined a flashlight down in search for him. The fall looked much further than they’d imagined, and though they could ultimately see the ground below, he didn’t seem to be anywhere around. Soon his mother was calling frantically, “Amirjan, of course you are in some trouble, but we love you and won’t let you get hurt. Please just come out where we can see you…we need to know you are okay.” 

As her voice echoed through the hole, his audience all got very still. They wanted, even had to believe, he was okay. Now, however, they had some doubts. At first cheering for Buggs, suddenly the kids called him by his real name. “Amir! Amir! Are you okay? Are you hurt?” Eson got on his knees by the edge, as if to climb down, before his father stopped him. “I need to save him! He’s…he’s down there!”

Soon the adults decided to send someone for some rope, in the hopes of hoisting someone down in search of him. It would take some doing, for at least over an hour, and by the time Mirdad reached the bottom and shined his light, in real distress he cried out, “I don’t see him! He’s not there. I mean, did anyone see him actually fall into the hole? I’m not so sure now. Maybe at the last minute he made it look that way?” 

As his father now called the authorities, who would also get down there and look, some of the parents soon took their kids to bed partly out of fear of what they might find. All the while, though, Amir was back at the garden. Having fallen down the hole on a mattress he’d dragged there earlier, then out of sight upon landing, like Buggs before him he’d found an alternate escape route through a narrow passage deep underground. Now with a pillow and blanket taken from one of the guest rooms, he settled into bed between rows of corn. Chewing a carrot he plucked directly from the garden, he said as if to a camera in front of him: “Ain’t I a stinker?”

The post Persian Looney Tunes appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Leading up to its theatrical release, Greta Gerwig’s third feature film continues to be all anyone and everyone have been talking about. This and of course, its tonal and seemingly gendered juxtaposition with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023): a beautifully organic, fan-driven internet phenomenon that will forever hold a black-and-pink space in cinema history. 

But I want to focus on the woman of the hour herself. The doll. The myth. The legend. Barbie. (Trademark of Mattel Inc.) 

Who is she behind the painted face? What was she made for? 

Growing up, I hated Barbie. But not for any socially relevant reason like the size of her (white) body or internalized misogynistic one like the perceived size of her brain as suggested by her blonde hair, love for fashion, and 1992 struggles in math class. 

I hated Barbie like I hated all hard dolls. I hated the way their plastic bodies felt. I hated that it hurt if you stepped or fell on top of them. And quite frankly, they scared me. Barbies, Bratz, American Girls, you name it. Before I opened presents at my birthday parties ages 3 to 5, I would announce this to the friends and family gathered around me, immediately making several of my parents’ friends feel bad as they had inevitably bought these dolls for me as a kind, thoughtful gesture. I even wrote a whole essay about my hatred and fear of hard dolls in the third grade; it really was that serious. 

Instead, I played with Groovy Girls, Manhattan Toy’s line of fashionable dolls. They were marketed as the funky and more ambiguously diverse alternative to Barbie and introduced to me by my aunt for that exact reason. But their most important feature? They were soft and I could sleep comfortably with them in bed. (There was an East Asian-looking Groovy Girl named Caring Caitlin, but at 5 years old, I didn’t have the language nor context to express why that meant so much to me at the time.) 

Groovy Girls were not as popular as Barbie. Not even close. In 2019, Manhattan Toys retired the Groovy Girls, while Barbie today and more broadly, Mattel, are stronger than ever. Those poor Groovy Girls never had a chance. Since her creation in 1959, Barbie has always been more than just a doll. She herself is a brand with over 40 films (I adored many of them as a child despite hating the doll itself), TV shows, a now taken down-website filled with online games, skincare/makeup lines, and clothing. 

She also embodies a movement: packaged yet personified feminism of the past and present. She’s held over 200 jobs and with that, has her own money, dreamhouse, plane, etc. Barbie was the first toy to reflect and encourage the unique aspirations of little girls. They didn’t have to play and train for motherhood anymore; now they could be whoever they wanted to be. As the 2023 film so accurately states, “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever”: a sentiment that summarizes the great reckoning Margot Robbie’s Barbie confronts and the reason behind the commercial success of Barbie the doll. 

Greta Gerwig, along with the actresses in the film, will be the first to tell you that Barbie is “most certainly a feminist film.” Robbie Brenner, Executive Producer of Mattel Films, and other Mattel executives are quick to say the exact opposite. Whose words do we believe? Whose words hold more weight? Is it Gerwig, the woman who co-wrote and directed this film, or is it Brenner, the woman spearheading the years-long rollout of the next MCU: Mattel Cinematic Universe? (More on that later.) 

Greta Gerwig is an artist. A visionary. A filmmaker. Robbie Brenner, as she stands as Executive Producer, speaks for Mattel, the multinational corporation whose executive leadership team consists mostly of men. In fact, in the over 60 years Barbie has existed, Mattel has never identified Barbie as explicitly feminist; instead, she’s been associated with vague promotions of female empowerment and girl power. “Feminist” is too politically charged for Barbie; it’s us, society at large, that has projected feminism onto a plastic doll. 

Where does this leave a film that’s smashing box office records with a multimillion-dollar omnichannel marketing campaign to match? 

Well, as it will reveal—perhaps in a punchy five-minute-or-so monologue—somewhere sort of in between. 

Spoilers ahead. 

True to Barbie canon, every Barbie in Barbieland is…everything. She’s the President, a mermaid, a diplomat, a lawyer, a doctor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the Supreme Court Justices, a Nobel Prize-winning author, and a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The lead protagonist, Margot Robbie’s Barbie, is “Stereotypical Barbie,” presumably a fashion model and the enduring original from 1959. She’s the brand, nay cultural icon, the feminist, nay fascist symbol, the role model, nay impossible beauty standard. She’s the most everything anyone could ever be. 

And the film does its best to acknowledge and tackle this dichotomy, albeit in chaotic, rushed scenes. You have to remember: Mattel’s CEO is watching Barbie’s every move, both Will Ferrell’s unnamed character in the film and the actual current Mattel CEO, Ynon Kreiz. 

(Barbie’s also a major plastic pollutant and the factories she’s made in have a long history of unsafe and inhumane working conditions, but that’s a bigger issue that doesn’t begin and end with Barbie. Mattel would never want you to know that though.)

Margot Robbie’s performance as Barbie is grappling with the culmination of ideals, expectations, and politics she represents is a marvel to behold. But it is America Ferrera’s monologue as Gloria, receptionist to Mattel’s CEO (Ferrell’s version), that has followed people long after they leave the theater. Ferrera articulates the sobering reality of the female experience, answering the film’s central question: if all this pressure is placed upon a doll, how does this manifest for women in the real world? 

Literal impossibility. A paradox that would make philosophers the likes of Plato and Bertrand Russell shudder. 

Gloria’s feminism is pure. It’s real. It’s relatable. 

At the same time, it’s pretty uncontroversial and not revolutionary; in other words, it’s perfect for Mattel. This merely enhances the trendy Barbiecore aesthetic taking the world by storm. 

Feminism goes far beyond the individual. It’s systemic. It’s global. It’s inherently political. 

That isn’t to say Barbie is completely devoid of 21st century politics. One can deduce where Gerwig stands on more contentious social issues concerning Americans today, say for instance the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. In Barbieland, the Supreme Court is packed with women until Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who I have purposely not mentioned until now, brings patriarchy and unravels everything the Barbies have ever worked for in a day. 

With the issue of bodily autonomy, Barbie just scratches the surface. The key difference is these hints are far more subtle than the otherwise spoon-fed messaging on what it means to be a woman. Mattel has to appeal to the pro-lifers after all. 

But I’ll cut the film some slack. The overt yet simple feminism of Barbie works for the narrative too. The Barbies are still dolls, empty vessels made of toxic plastic. In the end, Robbie’s Barbie decides to become human, accepting that she will realize how much worse the real world is in time. 

This time, however, she won’t be experiencing it alone. She has Gloria and Gloria’s daughter, Sasha, to lean on. Gloria may be a Mattel employee, but she’s, more importantly, the owner of Robbie’s Barbie. 

Which brings me back to my original question. Who is Barbie? 

When we push everything we’ve pushed onto Barbie aside, what is left? 

A doll. No, still not just any doll. She’s your doll.

She’s an extension of every child that’s played with her. 

And Mattel knows this. Boy, do they. 

Fourteen Mattel properties are in active development for their respective film adaptations including but not limited to Barney, Polly Pocket, American Girl, Hot Wheels, UNO, View Master, and more. 

Hollywood has our nostalgia in a chokehold, squeezing out every last dollar. 

Who cares about the controversies that have plagued Mattel as a corporation? Thanks to Barbie, they now have enough advertising to distract us for at least a decade. Unlike Will Ferrell’s character, Ynon Kreiz is no bumbling idiot. 

I get it, I do. If by some miracle there’s a Groovy Girl film, you know I’ll be the first in line. 

As another self-proclaimed pop culture nerd, I’ve fallen victim to the consumerist dystopia that comes out of fictional “utopias” such as Barbieland. (I’m staring right at my Harry Potter and Marvel Funko Pop collection.) You can use fantasy and capitalism as an escape! 

It’s not wrong to be nostalgic. It’s not wrong to revisit our favorite stories—in this case, toys—and reimagine them with a fresh new take. Greta Gerwig had a point to make. A point that was diluted to appease a billion dollar company, but a point nonetheless. 

The announcement of Robbie Brenner’s MCU has me nervous. The joint success of Barbie and Oppenheimer is exciting and yet it is happening against a backdrop of a historical double SAG-AFTRA and WGA strike. We talk of million dollar earnings when there are writers and actors who can barely afford to live. 

Barbie is feminist and it is not. 

Barbie belongs to you and she does not. 

At the core of Barbie, the film, and Barbie, the doll, is a fascinating push-and-pull between art and money, consumer and corporation. 

Looking back, Groovy Girls were not nearly as interesting. (I love them dearly, Bác Xuyến/Aunt Kelly; I’m kidding.) 

If only I had inserted myself into this conversation sooner as a 3 year old.

The post What Was Barbie Made For?  appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Hollywood’s favorite trope and the ideology of self-sacrifice.

The climax of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame was monumental for superhero fans: facing certain defeat at the hands of Thanos, Tony Stark says, “And I… am… Iron Man,” and snaps his fingers, using the Infinity Stones to erase Thanos and his army from existence.¹

The moment is teeming with emotion because we were told earlier in the film that using the Infinity Stones would kill a human being. Tony Stark knew that, and yet chose to do it anyway, sacrificing his life to save the universe.

Fans were stunned. Many viewers cried, as did star Robert Downey, Jr., when he was told about the scene. But no one should have been surprised. In fact, the moment felt familiar – probably because the exact same thing had already happened earlier in the movie.

When Hawkeye and Natasha are told that the only way to get the Soul Stone is to lose what one loves,² they know one of them has to die. They race toward the edge of a precipice, fighting for the chance to be the one sacrificed. Natasha wins, and dies.

Endgame wasn’t the first time Marvel fans saw someone willing to die for altruistic reasons. In 2018’s Infinity War, both Gamora and Vision instruct their loved ones to kill them rather than allow Thanos to get his hands on the Infinity Stones.

Across two movies, four people eager to offer their lives in service of some greater goal. That’s a lot, though it didn’t seem strange at the time. That’s because this type of suicide is found in many popular films. Just how common is it? You’d be surprised. I know I was.

The prevalence of heroic suicides in blockbuster movies

My wife is Japanese. She loves Sci-Fi and action movies, but a lot of the stuff that was big in America when we were kids wasn’t as popular in Japan. We’ve had fun going back and watching all the action series she missed – Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones, etc. In doing so, I’ve been able to teach her about movie trends that occur often enough to become predictable.

For example, if there’s an old man who’s a father figure to our hero, he’s probably going to die. If there’s a friend or mentor played by a suspiciously famous actor, he’ll probably turn out to be a bad guy. The most common trend of all, though, has been how many movies feature heroic characters committing suicide.

It goes like this: our heroes are outnumbered, and there’s no way out. One of the group decides the only way to win is if one of them dies. As the other characters beg him not to, he charges the enemy, killing himself and saving the day. American movies are bursting with suicide scenes. It’s astonishing how much they do it.

Don’t believe me? Here are a few examples:

• Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice: Superman grabs a spear of Kryptonite and suicide bombs Doomsday to save the world.
• Star Wars: Solo: Thandiwe Newton blows herself up.
• Guardians of the Galaxy: Rocket crashes a spaceship in order to kill a bunch of guys. Later, Groot kills himself to save his friends.
• Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Mark Strong blows himself up.
• Doctor Sleep: Ewan McGregor blows himself up to destroy the hotel.
• Star Trek Into Darkness: At the start of the movie, Spock sacrifices himself to save the crew, and later, Kirk does the same thing.
• Wonder Woman 1984: Steve Trevor tells Wonder Woman to kill him.
• Man of Steel: Kevin Costner tells his son not to save him, instead willingly getting killed by a tornado.
• Tenet: Robert Pattinson gleefully walks off to his death.
• Interstellar: Matthew McConaughey flies into a black hole.
• Armageddon: Bruce Willis blows himself up so Ben Affleck may live.
• Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer: Silver Surfer flies into Galactus and kills himself to save Earth.
• Donnie Darko: Donnie goes back in time and kills himself to prevent the movie from taking place.
• Stowaway: Anna Kendrick waltzes toward her death to obtain an amount of oxygen that’s conveniently enough for one person and not two.
• Mars Attacks!: Jim Brown fistfights a bunch of aliens to allow Tom Jones and Annette Bening the time to escape.
• No Time to Die: Felix begs Bond to let him drown instead of helping him to safety. Later, Bond decides it’s better to blow up than be unable to have sex again.
• The Tomorrow War: Mike Mitchell, Mary Lynn Rajskub, J.K. Simmons, Science Daughter, Pink Shirt Guy – seriously, everyone in this movie is just begging to commit suicide to save piss-butt science teacher army man Chris Pratt.
• Loki: Old man Loki laughs while getting eaten.
• Black Widow: Scarlett Johansson implores Florence Pugh not to explodify herself, but Pugh does it anyway.
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Instead of using his magic rings to free himself, the dad gives them to Shang-Chi and allows himself to die even though doing so actually makes the bad guy stronger, and then the sister begs for death because she also didn’t listen during the part where they said the bad guy gets stronger when they die.
• Prometheus: Janek wants to suicide alone, but Ravel and Chance are like, “No way! We want to suicide too!” Then they all crash a spaceship into another spaceship.
• Obi-Wan Kenobi: In Episode 5, the white lady blows herself up with a grenade in order to kill as many stormtroopers as possible.
• Into the Badlands: In S2E10, Veil kills herself so she can also kill Quinn, allowing Sunny to stay alive and make it to Season 3.
• A View to a Kill: May Day refuses to jump off the cart even after she’s outside, blowing herself up to save James Bond and the garbage people of Silicon Valley.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Ray Winstone lets go of Indy’s whip and falls to his death because… um… he wants to?
• Alien 3: Ripley wants to die to protect everyone from the alien, and wants everyone else to die as well. Dillon sacrifices himself to save Ripley. Ripley dies to kill the alien.
• Alien: Resurrection: Dreadlocks guy unfastens his harness and drops into the water so chair guy can hold onto the ladder, but they’re both human traffickers so don’t feel too bad.
• Thor: Love and Thunder: Natalie Portman doesn’t get chemo and instead holds the hammer that gives her cancer in order to show Christian Bale what love is.
• The Mandalorian: S3E7: big boy closes the blast shield and fights all the bad guys himself even though he’s outnumbered so he can save the others.

Keep in mind, this list only contains things I’ve watched since I started keeping track. I’m sure you can think of more I didn’t list here; once it’s been pointed out to you, you’ll start to see it everywhere. It could be my imagination, but this trope seems to be getting more common in recent years. Why is this happening, and why are we okay with it?

The ideology of intentional martyrdom

Wreck-It Ralph has a suicide scene. When things look bleakest, Ralph leaps toward his death,³ making it clear in dialogue he expects this to be “game over” and holding a necklace that declares him a hero as he falls. He’s miraculously saved, but was willing to sacrifice his life.

Minions has a suicide scene! The big Minion eats a rocket, ready to kill himself to save the others,⁴ and only through movie magic is he okay after it explodes. This is entertainment for children; do we want our kids learning that it’s okay to kill yourself so long as you have a good reason for doing so?

In almost every instance, the characters killing themselves are portrayed as making a heroic choice, being brave as they sacrifice themselves for a noble cause. What’s more, they’re often not just committing suicide, but suicide bombing: blowing themselves up or crashing spaceships, killing others as they go.

Isn’t that what al Qaeda did? Didn’t they kill themselves and many others by crashing aircraft or setting off bombs to kill their enemies? Surely we don’t want to make heroes of terrorists.

And yet, there’s Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman in Oblivion, blowing themselves up to kill as many aliens as they can,⁵ in the same way suicide bombers try to take as many people with them as possible. In The Gray Man, both Alfre Woodard and Billy Bob Thornton blow themselves up to take out the guys chasing our hero.

I can admit that there is something admirable in the notion of sacrifice, being willing to forego your own wants and needs for the sake of others. The logic then follows that there’s something even more noble (and dramatic, lending itself to cinema) about being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, namely of one’s life. What doesn’t make sense to me is the idea that the best use of an individual’s life is as an instrument of destruction for a cause, that your death is “worth it” so long as it involves killing a lot of people who pose a threat to what you believe in.

I think part of why this trend became more noticeable to me in recent years is that I live in Japan, where suicide in the name of honor was once part of the culture. It has been very difficult to explain to my wife how it is that Americans have come to glorify the methods of Kamikaze pilots. To her, this is beyond illogical: she’s never heard anyone in Japan praise the bravery of suicide bombers, and those who participated in that type of violence during the war are looked upon in the same way we might view cult members who’ve been brainwashed. To position suicide attacks as valiant just isn’t something they would do in Japan.

At least, that’s what we thought until we played a video game called Paper Mario: The Origami King, in which not one, but two characters commit suicide. You cannot finish this game, which is full of cute, cuddly characters, without watching Bobby and Olivia kill themselves after giving speeches where they list their reasons for doing so. It appears this isn’t just an American problem.

Japanese suicides in World War II got the American film treatment in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. For the most part, the film presents men pressured to kill themselves in the name of honor, while the more sensible characters point out the uselessness of this gesture and discourage it. The imagery is disturbing, and the movie at least seems to be anti-suicide… until Nishi, the guy who’d been telling the others not to kill themselves, shoots himself in the face as the music swells.

It’s important to discuss Japan so we don’t waste any time on the idea that art such as movies and video games somehow creates suicide bombers. There were plenty of Kamikaze attacks during WWII, long before these American action movies were popular in Japan, yet there are almost no mass shootings or terror attacks in Japan today. If movies created suicidal killers, then suicide attacks would happen equally everywhere those movies are shown, but they don’t.

It’s also important to remember that suicide bombers are often (though not always) members of restrictive subcultures like extremist sects of Islam, right-wing militant organizations, or other regressive political and religious movements that seek to severely limit what a person can be and what roles one can play in society. It would be improper to ignore these factors and say “Americans watch suicide movies and also commit mass shootings” when in reality the disease is concentrated among male-dominated backward-thinking ideologies.

The question is not whether movies are inspiring people to carry out suicide attacks (because, as noted, there are many other influencing factors and there’s no evidence to suggest movies have any effect), but why we choose to enjoy films that espouse an ideology shared by mass shooters: that it’s honorable, heroic, and desirable to die in service of killing one’s enemies.

Where does this ideology come from, and how are viewers responding to its prevalence in popular culture? How do we really feel about suicide bombing? Do we… like it?

Martyrdom vs. selfishness: suicide in history, literature, and cinema

History has no shortage of famous martyrs, including those who decided their own fates. Socrates, Sir Thomas More, and Joan of Arc are a few who’ve been the subjects of popular works of art. These individuals chose death rather than forsake their convictions, though this isn’t necessarily why they’re revered. After all, Galileo recanted his statement that the Earth revolves around the sun to save his own skin, and he’s still pretty vital to history. Their acts of martyrdom aren’t what make them important or beloved, but do add to their legends.

Looking at literature, one could examine Shakespeare’s use of suicide in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, or the sacrifice of Éponine in Les Miserables, but the best example of the type of martyrdom seen in contemporary films comes in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

The book’s final scene depicts Sydney Carton being taken to his execution after switching places with Charles Darnay, saving the condemned man’s life so as to do something kind for the woman he loves (set up earlier by his explicitly stating that he would really like to do such a thing). Carton’s final thoughts are: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”⁶ These famous lines are read by Jim Gordon at the end of The Dark Knight Rises after Batman either does or does not commit suicide in order to destroy a bomb.

When Carton tells Lucie of his desire to sacrifice for her, he calls himself a “wasted, drunken, poor creature of misuse.” Carton views himself as unworthy of Lucie’s love, and believes the only way he can be of value is to “give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!”⁷ 

Are Sydney Carton’s feelings of self-hatred the key to understanding why we gravitate toward martyrdom in storytelling? Do we feel that the only way we can be worthy of love and respect is through a grandiose sacrifice, that anything less than laying down one’s life in service of others isn’t good enough? 

It is a bleak and desperate outlook that says one’s only hope for salvation lies in death, but we seem to cherish that idea. Perhaps we’re cherishing the notion that we may one day be in a situation where the noble thing to do will be obvious to us, and we’d trade that simplification for our lives if we could get it. Or perhaps we like the idea of dying in an act of heroism because only by performing that act are we then given permission to die, to unburden ourselves of the constant feelings of inadequacy that plague us, for as we will see later, suicide isn’t an option unless it’s tied to a selfless act. 

It’s clear this isn’t a modern invention, nor limited to American art. If those literary references are too old for you, I’m pretty sure both Harry Potter and Dumbledore offer themselves up to be sacrificed, but I haven’t read those books, so you tell me.⁸ 

Valiant suicide has been a part of some of the most successful movies of all time. Much has been made of the end of Titanic and whether someone actually needed to die, but at any rate, it would seem Jack thought one of them was doomed, and the heroism comes from his decision to let it be him. 

It’s tough to think of a movie more popular than Star Wars, in which Obi-Wan Kenobi closes his eyes and lets Darth Vader kill him.⁹ These scenes in Titanic and Star Wars may not explicitly be suicides – it’s not like Jack and Obi-Wan shoot themselves – but in both cases, the characters are electing to die for what are seen as unselfish reasons. 

This idea of being “unselfish” is key to understanding our attitudes toward suicide in storytelling. When movies present suicides that aren’t framed as martyrdom, the most important thing for the filmmakers seems to be casting blame. 

In 2018’s A Star is Born, after Jackson’s death, Ally and Bobby discuss how they feel, and Bobby gives this speech: 

“Listen to me: it isn’t your fault. It just isn’t. You know whose fault it was? Jack. That’s it. No one else. Not you, not me, no one but Jack.”¹⁰ 

Without offering any reasoning or explanation as to the logic behind Bobby’s words, the filmmakers go out of their way to tell us that what we just saw was all Jackson’s fault. There’s almost a desperation to the scene, like they worried they had to absolve Ally as quickly as possible lest someone rush in and call her an enabler before her big song. 

What threw me was how quickly the scene went by, how abbreviated the discussion was. The message that only the person committing suicide is to blame, that it’s all their fault, is so established in our culture that they didn’t feel the need to spend much time on it. 

Television has also found it easy to slip in this idea of judging the suicidal. In an episode of Family Guy,¹¹ Stewie tells Brian that it’s “pretty selfish” to consider suicide. Brian’s reasons for why he may kill himself are empty, with his stating that it’s “all too much” without any details that might show respect for those who deal with suicidal ideation. He’s “tried to find meaning” in his life and “can’t,” but any actual struggle is completely absent. We as viewers can’t believe for a single second that Brian might kill himself, and we’re not meant to sympathize. Brian philosophizes, but he doesn’t feel. He doesn’t ache. He doesn’t suffer. 

There’s an irony in Stewie’s sentiment that Brian is selfish. When told Brian might commit suicide, Stewie’s first thought is of himself. This is a common admonishment of the suicidal, that they should think of everyone they’re hurting, should just tough it out and stop being ridiculous and weak. What those who say this don’t understand is that to the suicidal, they are thinking of others when they consider killing themselves; it seems like the “right” thing to do, even if it only feels that way for the few minutes it takes to go through with it. 

There are people in your life who despise themselves so much that they think the world would be better without them in it, and your first move is to think of how it will affect you? To try and make them feel worse about themselves? To judge them for what they don’t see as a decision but an inevitability? To me, that’s way more selfish than wanting to remove yourself from the world if you genuinely believe you’re without worth. Suicidal ideation is a serious problem that comes with real suffering. Stewie doesn’t respect Brian’s feelings, and neither do the writers. They give Brian a dumb reason for suicide so they can easily chastise him for it. 

We’ve all heard these lines about suicide, that it’s “selfish” or “the coward’s way out.” They’re so common that when we see them on screen, they pass by without notice. In an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,¹² Buffy calls a girl who’s just committed suicide “an idiot,” “stupid,” and “weak,” while the other characters just stand there tongue-tied. 

Where are the opposing voices in these shows? There never are any, because it’s accepted that suicide is an immature, weak, spiteful, inexcusable act. There are songs about it. It’s even in video games: in Grand Theft Auto V online, there is a “kill yourself” option on the menu. When it’s selected, your character shoots himself in the head (or ingests a lethal pill), and the message “you took the easy way out” appears on screen. 

Our culture has made up its mind about suicide: it’s selfish, cowardly, and wrong, never the right thing to do. So then, one would think critics and viewers would take issue with how often characters in popular films kill themselves, right? But here’s how viewers reacted to this other type of suicide, where a fictional character takes “the easy way out” for an ideological cause: 

Tony Stark’s suicide in Endgame was seen as a heroic sacrifice, with some going so far as to say it made him “saviour to trillions”¹³ and that the action “mended” the past mistakes of his character.¹⁴ Clearly he isn’t viewed as a selfish coward.

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Laura Dern’s character crashes a spaceship into another spaceship, killing herself and countless others. Writers called it the film’s “most breathtaking moment,”¹⁵ said it “ruled so hard,”¹⁶ and the character was praised as a feminist hero. The movie also contains a scene where Rose risks her life to stop Finn from killing himself, but by then, it’s too late; everyone’s favorite part is when the lady suicide-bombs the enemy.

When valiant suicides happen in children’s movies like Wreck-It-Ralph, Minions, and Inside Out, one might expect some sort of outcry or major cultural discussion, but very little has been written. This is possibly because in Wreck-It-Ralph and Minions, the characters conveniently survive, allowing the filmmakers to have their cake and eat it too. And in Inside Out, the death is seen as a necessary part of growing up rather than an actual person’s death.

There’s a dearth of articles questioning whether suicide should be included in a children’s film, or if, perhaps, the characters were wrong to have attempted suicide. I was as emotionally wrecked by the loss of Bing Bong as everyone else, but am I the only one concerned with what children are being taught about how eager one should be to rush toward death?

Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard includes several heroic suicides¹⁷ while also featuring an extended subplot about how Picard’s mother’s suicide scarred him for life, with no discussion of what makes one suicide different from another. The show seems to hate the mentally ill while revering those willing to die for the cause of Starfleet. 

To be clear, I don’t like either of these responses: not how suicide attacks in the name of a cause are considered heroic, nor how suicide absent an ideology is considered cowardly and selfish. How could someone ever get the help they need when merely admitting to having suicidal thoughts opens them up to judgment and scorn? We HATE the suicidal, and it shows in our art – except when a person is committing suicide in battle. Then and only then do we approve of killing oneself. 

We find personal suicide cowardly, but suicide in the name of someone or something else is heroic. This has become so ingrained in our culture that films no longer have to justify it because audiences barely bat an eye anymore. 

In Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, when Wanda tells Dr. Strange that she’s going to kill herself, her explanation takes less than 15 seconds,¹⁸ and Strange simply nods without any attempt to talk her out of it. We know these beats so well the filmmakers don’t have to dwell on them. Heck, one of the sorcerers already killed herself to save Wong earlier, and when America thought Dr. Strange was going to kill her, she seemed cool with it. We’ve been prepared for these moments enough that they can be conveyed through a sort of shorthand, no longer requiring discussion among the characters. 

Movies don’t exist free from ideology. As we repeat these tropes, we train ourselves to accept their reasoning. We learn to exhibit disgust for a young woman’s suicide at the beginning of a film, but love a hero’s suicide in the third act. A question I had going into this was: are there commonalities among these films that I’m not seeing? What kinds of characters are doing the suicide bombing, and what kinds of audiences are enjoying it? Are we secretly expressing other desires through our obsession with proactive martyrdom?

The religion thing

In Seven Pounds, Will Smith kills himself with a jellyfish¹⁹ to preserve his organs so he can donate seven “pounds of flesh” to atone for the seven people he killed by texting while driving. Before that, he spends the movie meeting the people who are to receive his organs to make sure they’re good folks deserving of his body parts. 

It takes a special kind of ego to martyr oneself while at the same time believing that you (and only you) should get to decide who is worthy of receiving a transplant. The arrogance of this character’s “selfless” act made the movie ripe for mockery, with A.O. Scott of The New York Times saying this about Smith’s penchant for sacrificial moments:

“Who does he think he is? Jesus! That last, by the way, is not an exclamation of shock but rather an answer to the preceding question, posed with reference to Mr. Smith. Lately he has taken so eagerly to roles predicated on heroism and world-saving self-sacrifice (see “I Am Legend” and “Hancock”) that you may wonder if he has a messiah clause in his contract.”²⁰

Is Christianity to blame for the spate of movie suicides? Are these people just “being Jesus?” After all, there are a lot of Christians in America, and they do seem to like these movies. Wreck It Ralph, for example, has been praised by Christian media.

The connection to Christianity is easy to make, as Jesus is one of history’s most famous martyrs. But if it were the case that we love these movies because we love Jesus, you’d think films featuring this story point would be less popular in countries where Christianity is less widespread. Are they?

On the list of the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time in India, there is one English-language film: Avengers: Endgame. Of the top 10 all-time grossers in China, Endgame is the only non Chinese movie on the list.²¹

Clearly people from non-Christian societies (like Japan, where I live) enjoy these films and accept their ideology. The popularity of suicide movies seems to know no religious or political boundaries. Their acceptance is, as far as I can see, more or less equal around the world. 

Is there anything else about these films and their heroes that isn’t equal? Something off-balance that would provide a clue as to how this has become our go-to plot?

Commonalities in films featuring heroic suicides 

To better understand what these movies have in common beyond suicide, I first traced the relationship between the character who commits suicide and the other main characters in each film. How often is this person a parent of the hero? A love interest? A child?²²

Here’s a breakdown of the relationship between the sacrificing character and the film’s protagonist (or second lead, as the case may be): 

While the person who dies is frequently the protagonist’s parent (such as in Armageddon or  Man of Steel), it is rarely a child. Donnie Darko dies while his parents, sister, and girlfriend live (I  chose Other for that one). Chris Pratt’s daughter in The Tomorrow War volunteers for death, but she’s an adult after he’s traveled to the future. In Multiverse of Madness, young girl America is  willing to die, though she isn’t the actual child of Dr. Strange.

This makes sense to me. It’s easier for an audience to take the death of an old man who’s had a  long life than to watch a parent lose a child. We like the idea of a parent sacrificing for their  children, but no one wants their baby to grow up to be a suicide bomber.  I expected to find more parents on the list than I did, because parents are generally played by  older actors, and killing them is an easy way to allow those stars to step away from a franchise.  Same with love interests, whose deaths allow our heroes to continue to sequels without the  burdens of family or romantic attachment.

The concept of friendship is murky, since people on the same team can often be considered  friends, but from my unscientific analysis, it seems the majority of the time, the person being  sacrificed isn’t a parent, lover, or child. Instead, it’s a compatriot killing themselves not for an  individual, but for a cause – sacrificing their life for “your side.” Other also applies when the  person dying is the main character and there isn’t one central relationship that’s most  important (this will matter later when we talk about ego).

What about race? Here are the racial/ethnic backgrounds of the people committing suicide:

And here are the numbers for gender: 

We can’t assign too much meaning to this, as most action blockbusters have white male leads regardless of whether they include suicide. That said, it seems audiences really enjoy watching a white man sacrifice himself for what is perceived as the greater good.

What was most notable to me was what didn’t appear in the data. Two categories that got zero hits were Arab and Indian, and it’s not hard to see why: first of all, those actors rarely get parts in big-budget films (Native American also got zero hits). But second (and most importantly), audiences don’t want to watch a Muslim (or anyone Americans might mistake for a Muslim) heroically killing themselves in service of an ideal.

Why do we like to watch white people going out in a blaze of glory, but not Arabs? The answer is simple, though difficult to put into words that don’t make my skin crawl: because they did that to us on 9/11. 

We can’t have them in these roles because they are not us. Islamic extremists from the Middle East committed suicide attacks against America. So when Americans think of the enemies of freedom, they think of Arabs, and when Americans think of America, they think of white men. I imagine movie executives and filmmakers know the difference between, say, a Hindu Indian American and an Islamic terrorist, but they don’t want audiences to even think of 9/11 while watching a hero blow himself up to destroy the enemy.

We don’t want to make heroes out of terrorists, yet we seem to think it’s quite heroic when white movie heroes borrow their tactics. Are these movies incorrectly representing our values, or are they spot on? Do we actually find suicide attacks reprehensible, and are fooling ourselves with films that romanticize them in the way we romanticize organized crime, assassins, etc., or do we actually find suicide attacks heroic, and we’re abhorred by terrorists and school shooters not because we disagree with the act itself, but because those attacks were perpetrated by the other, while movie suicide attacks are done by us?

What if this were real life?

On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger killed six people and himself in Santa Barbara, California. Before doing so, he uploaded a YouTube video and 137-page manifesto explaining his motives, which involved enacting revenge against women because he was a virgin. 

People were rightly horrified by the emergence of the Incel community and the very real threat of more violence from these men. There was certainly no sympathy, with one of the nicer profiles of this community calling them “self-pitying babies.”²³ I don’t plan to read this psycho’s manifesto and find his reasoning perverse, but to those in his community of angry virgins, his actions were something to be admired and imitated. He was, to them, a hero. 

In a movie made by and for Incels, Rodger’s strike on his enemies might be portrayed similarly to how Duke Leto Atreides and Liet Kynes are portrayed in 2021’s Dune. Both are overtaken by the enemy and face certain death, so they kill themselves and several others in order to takeout as many people as they can while they go.²⁴ In both the film and Rodger’s real life, the  people perpetrating suicide attacks felt they had “good” reasons for doing so.  

In another profile of Incels, it was revealed that the type of suicides condemned by movies and TV as “cowardly” or “selfish” are also common in this community.²⁵ From my point of view (and I can’t believe I’m typing this), that’s… better? Like, better to just kill yourself than yourself and six other people? I’d prefer it if they didn’t kill themselves at all, but you certainly won’t catch me promoting the idea that if you’ve made up your mind to die, it’s best to take people with you (like Caliban does in Logan.²⁶) 

I can’t diagnose the psychology of suicide bombers in an essay about film – that’s too big of an ask. But note how frequently real-life suicide bombers are referred to as cowards. Even the Dalai Lama has received criticism for not speaking out against acts of self-immolation on his behalf. In general, we don’t approve of suicide for a political cause – unless it’s our own political cause, that is. Rioters killed on January 6^th, 2021, are not considered heroic by most of us, but were treated as martyrs by some who shared their beliefs.

This is where things get difficult: I don’t think Elliot Rodger and Ashli Babbit were heroic in sacrificing their lives for a cause, but I also don’t approve of their causes. The people who do believe in those causes treat them as heroes. Would you consider a person a hero for blowing themselves up in service of a cause you support? Judging by our movies, it appears we think the act itself is okay as long as the cause is just.

School shooters and terrorists don’t get their murder ideas from Minions. However, they certainly agree with that film’s assertion that killing oneself in service of a crusade is brave. If we don’t like it when someone shoots up a nightclub or elementary school before turning the gun on themselves, why do we like it when Laura Dern kills a bunch of stormtroopers, people we’ve been told are slaves born into servitude and suffering under a dictator? 

It’s not because she has a good reason – every asshole thinks they have a good reason. Incels think being virgins is a good reason for killing people; the 9/11 hijackers thought Jihad was a good reason; January 6^th protestors thought they were heroic revolutionaries. “Good reasons” are in the eye of the beholder, and shouldn’t affect how we evaluate the ethics of a person’s actions. Why don’t we view movie suicides in the same way we view suicide bombings on the news, as cowardly and wrong?

Simple: because we’re the ones doing it. We don’t imagine ourselves as the aliens in Independence Day; we see ourselves as Randy Quaid, finally doing right in his son’s eyes by Kamikaze-bombing a spaceship. We can’t imagine ourselves in the shoes of Islamic terrorists, but we can easily fantasize about being the only ones who can win the space war by choosing to give up our lives. There’s never a question about whether it’s right or wrong to commit suicide in these situations because there is only one side to the story.

The people committing these acts in movies are always on “our side.” We like them because their suicides are in the name of “our” cause, and not our enemies’. Their deaths serve our ends. When the suicide doesn’t serve you (like when lonely teens slit their wrists), it’s inconvenient, and therefore cowardly. When the suicide serves your purposes, it’s sacrificial, and therefore heroic. This is why we despise “selfish” suicides – they don’t gain us anything. Maybe if we stood to benefit from them, we’d have more sympathy.

In the real world, most people sacrificed for a cause do not choose to be sacrificed – they’re soldiers or civilians who are forced to die in service of what someone else has determined to be the greater good. A “sacrifice is good” ideology allows us to pretend as though if they’d had a choice, maybe they’d be thankful they were murdered for our cause.

How about instead of, “suicide bombing is okay if your cause is just,” we go with, “don’t kill yourself, no matter what?” That seems more sensible to me.

It’s a case of “it’s okay when I do it,” a logic particularly pervasive in America. We act horrified at Putin for invading Ukraine, yet accept our own country’s drone strikes in other nations. We’re mortified by the treatment of Uyghurs in China, but most of us were taught a version of American history that left out the slaughter of babies by US forces. We have a show called Locked Up Abroad about how horrible it would be to be imprisoned in a foreign country while we’ve got more prisoners than any society on Earth.

The list goes on, but we seem perennially capable of viewing ourselves in the hero role, with no question as to whether our actions are justifiable. Movies make this simple: the fight is always brought to our characters, and whether to fight back is never a choice; they didn’t start this war, but damn it, they’re gonna finish it. And if we can’t win, we’ll “take as many of them with us as we can.”²⁷ Gandhi would not make a sexy Marvel hero. 

The suicide bomber or school shooter is often thought of as desperate for attention. They kill because that’s a surefire way to be the most important person in the world on that particular afternoon. In a movie, the guy who blows himself up to save Earth is the most important person, while those they kill are faceless soldiers or cartoonish villains. It’s an ego fantasy: either you get to decide who lives or dies and go out on your own terms, or others are willing to sacrifice themselves in order to save you because you are so important.

In the real world, we aren’t on the side of desperate people who see no way out. We’re the ones they hate, and that’s why they suicide bomb us. They think it’s justified because they don’t know us personally; to them, we’re just as bereft of humanity as the aliens in Independence Day, and we deserve what’s coming to us. 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I deserve to be killed in a suicide attack, or that the perpetrators are heroes. I don’t think it’s okay to murder just because you feel unjustly put in a position where you’re in opposition to society, regardless of how overwhelming your feelings may be. 

But when Duncan Idaho turned and smiled in Dune, rushing off to kill as many bad guys as he could before dying, I couldn’t see myself as those nameless guys getting sliced in half. I saw myself as Paul, whose badass friend loves fighting so much that he wants to die like a man to protect me and my special ability as I go on to unite the universe as its savior. 

That’s the part of this for which we’re all to blame: our movie heroes are people we should have outgrown by now.

So where does this leave us? 

Is this gleeful martyrdom no big deal? Are we fine with teaching ourselves and our children that dying for a cause is good? Does this accurately reflect who we are as a society? It doesn’t seem to: judging by how some lawmakers treat veterans and 9/11 first responders, I’m not sure Americans give two shits about those who make sacrifices for our causes.

We hate violent martyrs in real life when they go after us. We love it when a suicide is performed going after them. The others. The ones we don’t like. Brown people and creepy virgins dying in the name of their fringe groups? Gross. A strong, wealthy, powerful, attractive man killing himself to stop an enemy so simple that there’s no denying its evil? That’s a hero. Never mind that in the minds of these psychos, America is the great evil; their logic doesn’t count because that’s them. This is about us, and our sexy white saviors. 

This trope shows no signs of stopping. Even after years of compiling my list and researching this essay, I still don’t understand it. I doubt I’ll ever understand, and I don’t think it’ll stop because I pointed it out. 

I just ask this: be consistent. If ideological suicide is heroic for one person, it should be heroic for everyone

If you think it’s brave of Tony Stark to kill himself in order to kill Thanos, then you need to think it’s brave of Muslim terrorists to kill themselves in order to kill their enemies; if you think it’s heroic of Joe in Looper to shoot himself to stop bad things from happening, you have to think it’s heroic of all struggling people who shoot themselves because they feel they only bring pain; and if you think it’s okay for children to play a game like Paper Mario: The Origami King where the mission can’t be completed without two of the characters killing themselves (forcing players to sit through lengthy explanations of why they’re doing so), then you need to be okay with kids watching footage of school shootings and reading the manifestos of the shooters. That’s consistency. 

And if that sounds insane, good: it sounds insane to me, too.

¹ Endgame, 2:30:00. 

² 1:49:45.

³ Wreck-It Ralph, 2012, 1:25:00.

⁴ Minions, 2015, 1:13:00.

⁵ Oblivion, 2013, 1:55:00.

⁶ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, Book Three, Ch. 15, p. 288. 

⁷ Book Two, Chapter 13, p. 119 & 121. 

⁸ Please do not tell me. I don’t care. 

⁹ Star Wars, 1977, 1:32:20.

¹⁰ A Star is Born, 2:03:30. 

¹¹ Family Guy, “Brian and Stewie,” 2010.

¹² Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Get it Done,” 2003, 19:00. 

¹³ Kshitij Mohan Rawat, “’Iron Man’ director Jon Favreau didn’t want Tony Stark to die in ‘Avengers: Endgame’.  Here’s why,” Wion, Jul 30, 2022. https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-iron-man-director jon-favreau-didnt-want-tony-stark-to-die-in-avengers-endgame-heres-why-501997 

¹⁴ Alyzza Chelsea Avestruz, “How Iron Man’s Endgame Sacrifice Fixed His Past Avenger Mistakes,” ScreenRant,  March 8, 2022. https://screenrant.com/iron-man-endgame-avenger-mistakes-sacrifice-past/

¹⁵ Ben Lindbergh, “The Most Breathtaking Moment in ‘The Last Jedi’ Is Also Its Greatest Threat to ‘Star Wars’ Lore,”  The Ringer, December 20, 2017. https://www.theringer.com/2017/12/20/16800970/vice-admiral-holdo-maneuver the-last-jedi 

¹⁶ Albert Burneko, “Here Is a short Review Of The Last Jedi,” Deadspin, December 15, 2017.  https://deadspin.com/here-is-a-short-review-of-the-last-jedi-1821340821

¹⁷ In S2E1, the crew volunteers to die in order to prevent the Borg from taking over, while in S2E10, Tallinn and Q  both die to restore reality. There is also a suicide bombing in S3E5. 

¹⁸ Multiverse of Madness, 2022, 1:50:10. 

¹⁹ Seven Pounds, 2008, 1:48:00

²⁰ A.O. Scott, “An I.R.S. Do-Gooder and Other Strangeness,” The New York Times, December 19, 2008.  https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19seve.html 

²¹ Data on box-office grosses from https://cinereveal.com/news/top-10-highest-box-office-collection-movies-in india/ and https://www.statista.com/statistics/260007/box-office-revenue-of-the-most-successful-movies-of-all time-in-china/ 

²² A note on methodology: This research is based on a list of suicide films that I compiled casually while watching movies with my wife over the last few years. It is by no means comprehensive, and the categories were often a judgment call: is the T-1000 a father figure to John Connor, or a friend? I went with friend. With gender, I usually used the gender of the actor (i.e. Vision is a man), and with race, I went with how the character is represented (Rocket is male because Bradley Cooper is, but isn’t white like Bradley Cooper because Rocket’s a raccoon). Even the number of suicides in a film is open to interpretation, since many times characters volunteer for suicide but don’t have to go through with it (for example, I counted Natasha’s suicide in Endgame, but not Hawkeye’s attempted suicide). This isn’t scientific and isn’t meant to be.

²³ Erin Gloria Ryan, “Lessons From a Day Spent With the UCSB Shooter’s Awful Friends,” Jezebel, May 29, 2014.  https://jezebel.com/lessons-from-a-day-spent-with-the-ucsb-shooters-awful-f-1582884301

²⁴ Dune, 1:34:45, 1:55:45. 

²⁵ Elle Reeve, “This is what the life of an incel looks like,” Vice News, August 3, 2018.   https://www.vice.com/en/article/7xqw3g/this-is-what-the-life-of-an-incel-looks-like

²⁶ Logan, 2017, 1:28:15.

²⁷ Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, 2022, 2:14:50.

The post Why Do Movie Audiences Love Suicide Bombing? appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Let them eat McDonalds says director, Mark Mylod, with one of Searchlight Picture’s newest star-studded original films, The Menu. There’s a lot going for this film: Ralph Fiennes’ hypnotic performance as psychopath Gordon Ramsay, a hauntingly memorable score by Colin Stetson, and Peter Deming’s masterful camerawork weave gorgeously together to create what really is an entertaining time with friends and family. But sadly, that’s where the buck stops.

At the end of the day, the film rings hollow: there’s enough Christopher Nolan brand spectacle and pseudo-intellectualism to satisfy most viewers exiting the theater (or more likely, turning off their streaming device), but you’re left with a sour taste once you inevitably realize that there is no depth to the film at all.

Class is used as a buzzword in the hopes that the film will appear profound, but frankly, the message of the film is insulting. The protagonist is named Margo, a sex-worker who manages to escape because she fulfills the crazed chef’s fantasy of having his high-end food rejected for a ten dollar cheese burger to go. Chef Slowik, his staff, and the wealthy clients trapped on the island perish explosively as Margo hungrily scarfs down the burger on the boat she escapes on. 

So what’s the message? Satisfy the white man in power if you want to survive? Flipping burgers is more fulfilling than pursuing your passion? Whatever hang ups you might have about Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion (assuming you’ve watched it), it’s hard not to admit that the imagery it closes with is powerful and evocative of radical leftist rebellion; unlike The Menu, Glass Onion actually says, eat the rich.  

Mylod writes in a snooty critic to dismiss criticism as a whole, insinuating that they destroy artists arbitrarily because they are given too much authority— that artists can’t fail because their work… might not actually be that good. And Tyler, played by Nicholas Holte, is created to criticize fans who obsess over things they can’t do themselves. It’s as if to say that only people who know how to do it should enjoy it, whatever it may be. 

The film, like Fight Club, The Dark Knight, and American Psycho, is essentially about cults and intoxicating cult leaders. But unlike the movies mentioned, the ideology and allure of the cult is never developed in The Menu, robbing it of the entire premise’s appeal. We watch people burn themselves alive for Chef Slowik, but we never quite get why, and that’s extremely disappointing!   

I desperately wanted to love the film, but it’s best described as a bunch of interesting ideas, loosely strung together in the hopes that viewers will make something of it. Once it’s in their hands though, it quickly falls apart and any meaning you might try to extract from the film ceases to make sense once you think about it for two or three seconds. There are a lot of reasons to watch it — just don’t be surprised when you’re left hungrier than before. 

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