It’s M3

Dear friends,

I have seen the horror film M3GAN twice now. It’s great.

While there are no other Megans in my life who might have accompanied me, two non-Megans did: my younger brother William, named for our grandfather, and my good friend Carley, named after Carley Simon.

I’m named for no one, but the orbit of famous Megans keeps expanding as more of us, the majority born in the 80s and 90s, enter our prime: Meghan Markle, Megan Fox, Megan Thee Stallion, Meghann Fahy, Megan Rapinoe…

But few fictional Megans exist. There are Megs: Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time, Meg March from Little Women, Meg Masters from Supernatural (actually an unnamed demon inside the body known as Meg Masters). No Megans. Is that because Megan, though common and unambiguously a “girl”’s name, is neither particularly feminine nor especially tomboyish? Whereas “Meg” may suggest a frazzled dork or a likable, slightly vain, sweetheart, I’m not sure “Megan” connotes any type.

So it’s been surprising and sort of hilarious to confront promo posters with my name in all caps, whispering to me, hailing me, bellowing—around town and on social media. M3gan. M3GAN. M3333333gggggaaaannnn. There is something camp about the name itself—this not-scary, common-enough name—stamped onto the image of a classically styled doll, who we suspect is probably evil and who, frankly, doesn’t look like a Megan. But who does?

“What is a M3gan?” wonders a newscaster in a segment in the film. That is the question.

M3gan is “not a girl, it’s a doll,” as Gemma, the character who invented her (played brilliantly by Allison Williams), says. M3gan is being marketed as a toy—the only toy a kid could ever need—but belongs more to a set of vintage robots Gemma calls “not toys—they’re collectibles.” Adding to the things that M3gan is not: she’s not a Chucky, or an Annabelle. She’s not Haley Joel Osmond in A.I. Though she has precedents, M3gan is a new prototype. We still don’t know what M3gan is capable of. But we will find out.

The acronym stands for Model 3 Generative ANdroid. M3gan is a friend and playmate, a surrogate parent. She bonds with her primary user, Gemma’s niece Cady, a child who has recently lost both her parents to a car crash. Constantly reading Cady’s fluctuating emotional states, M3gan generates the appropriate verbal and physical responses to effectively soothe and support Cady. M3gan teaches Cady, laughs at her jokes, sings to her unprompted, protects her. Their relationship is astonishing, touching, creepy, and gay.

A number of critics have explored M3gan’s queer appeal, reading the film as part of a lineage of camp horror. In an article for the New York Times, Erik Piepenburg investigates why M3gan is a gay film: because gay men love women in charge; they love the film’s camp factor; they identify with M3gan as individuals who have often been seen as devalued and weak. M3gan as fashionable “fierce bitch” is a character gay men can get behind.

Yes. And—there is something importantly lesbian about the film’s themes and its central relationship, and how it’s camping both. Cady and M3gan are in friend-love, and—as the promo poster tells us, “friendship has evolved”—into a fierce attachment that recalls the alarming closeness between Pauline and Juliette in Heavenly Creatures. Scenes of M3gan gazing out at Cady from the window, a watchful sentinel, and of M3gan “asleep” on her charger, face fixed on Cady, suggest both a mom figure and an obsessed lesbian creep not unlike the speaker of Tegan and Sara’s “Living Room” (“My windows look into your bathroom / I spend the evening watching / You get yourself clean”). (See my short story “Allison’s Lament” in Slug and Other Stories for similar.) M3GAN’s camp sensibilities make it a queer counterpart to drearier films like SWF and Haute Tension/High Tension, in which the protagonists’ weird/lesbian attachments make them deranged psychos. M3gan’s weird/lesbian attachment to Cady makes her heroic, at least initially. When M3gan defends Cady from a bully in the forest, she’s a lesbian avenger; we cheer her on. And though this turns, we continue to love M3gan—a deranged psycho who’s fun and who can’t help it. She was born/programmed this way.

“Is creepiness always gay/about gayness?” Dia wondered, commenting on the film in a text. M3gan’s creepiness is both serious and hard to take seriously because she is a girl doll with a chirpy voice who spontaneously breaks out in song. The film relies on this juxtaposition of “silly,” seemingly anodyne femininity with brutal violence, and belongs to the same tradition as Jennifer’s Body and Heathers. And Mean Girls—which shares a protagonist named Cady. All of these films are so gay. The protagonist of Jennifer’s Body is named Needy. Is creepiness about needs? Maybe it’s just desire, and how, even when not enacted upon, it can seem to cross a boundary. I’m at a salon now creepily eavesdropping on a stylist who is telling their client-friend, “I was just staring at [mutual friend’s] picture on my phone, I’m such a creep.” Dia and I have been exploring queer creepiness and other things in a collaborative chapbook we hope to put out this year.

Somewhere, in an alternate storyline, Cady is growing up and realizing she has these creepy, uncomfortable feelings for M3gan. Maybe it starts when Cady gets sick of, maybe embarrassed by, M3gan’s shift dress and striped pussy bow, and in turning her off to replace them with, I don’t know, a high-waisted utilitarian coverall gets flushed and weirdly ashamed. Or maybe it’s when M3gan teaches Cady how to kiss, undulating her rubber tongue in ways that Cady will, for better and for worse, replicate her entire life. However it happens, they fall in love and it’s bliss. Until one day Cady comes to resent M3gan’s know-it-all nature and breaks up with her in a flash of humiliated rage. After some time off she reminds herself: “when things are broken, you don’t throw them away, you fix them.” So they fix it. They get back together and break up and do this again and again. Cady can never let go of M3gan. She becomes an AI savant and reprograms M3gan to be M4gan, then M5gan, and M6gan, ….. on up to M333gan. Finally Cady reads You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, a recommendation from who else but M333gan, who has evolved to wise love, and so Cady realizes: she’s her own M3gan. The end. As the credits roll I find I’m in a massive theater full of Megans (and Meghans, Meagans, Meaghans, and Mxgxns). I’m a Megan among Megans. Or are we all M3gans? We join hands.

*

In the film, M3gan supplants the company’s other popular toy, the PurRpetual Pet, a robot furby operated via an app. The pet that never dies.

Late in 2022, I said goodbye to my beloved Claude, my cat companion for more than nineteen years, basically my entire adult life. An important attachment figure, he gave me stability and connection across many moves. One might, could say: he was my M3gan. But no! He was my Claude.

I adopted him as Squeaker, presumably for his teeny meow, and renamed him after my grandfather, William Claude; the homophonic relationship to “clawed” did not occur to me. My grandfather, aka Big Daddy Bill (he was Southern), also died last year, in March.

My granddad’s favorite thing was to amble around his house and yard barefoot and shirtless, in tiny shorts, sipping on a tumbler of Fireball cut with seltzer. Claude’s favorite thing was napping on his pillow and periodically gazing at me as I worked at my desk. He also loved being brushed and demanded it most days around 11 a.m.

After I mentioned Claude’s passing at Carley’s Christmas Eve party, Char asked if I wanted to take on a dog sitting gig—maybe I’d appreciate some animal energy in my life. And so I found myself hanging out with the French bulldog of a [TV celebrity whom I am not at liberty to name - oops!]. While I enjoyed my time with this Frenchie, who is a precious anxious gargoyle, the experience confirmed that I am firmly and furrever a cat person. For now my life is petless. Claude’s ashes sit a shelf up from a framed photograph of my grandfather smiling in shorts and sunglasses, his skinny legs oustretched. Leaning against the wooden urn is Audra’s small square portrait of Claude with his funny underbite. His eyes are made from glow-in-the-dark paint and charge as he gazes at me. What a creep. I miss him.

*

I want to do some kind of roundup of my 2022 year in writing, but it was an odd, transitional year for me, and most of what I wrote has not been published. I’m feeling sluggish and slow from the too-much/not-enoughness of current circumstances but there is no dearth of literature to love. A lot of what I read in 2022 was from 2021, or about milk. Here are some favorites:

• Carley Moore, Panpocalypse

• Shola von Reinhold, Lote

• Ari Brostoff, Missing Time

• Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Borealis

• K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want

• Raquel Gutierrez, Brown Neon

• Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless

• Davey Davis, X

• Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque

• Tim Jones-Yelvington, Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret

• Louise Erdrich, The Sentence

There are a few spots open in my 5-week class, “What Is This Thing Called ‘Weird’?” for the Work Room. It starts on Tuesday – sign up here.

Yours,
Megan