"M3GAN" and the Terrifying Potential of the Queer Child
The new horror is a reminder of the terrors posed by the conceptual figure of the queer child.
If there’s one recent film which seems fated to become a true camp queer classic, it would have to be M3GAN, the sci-fi horror film about a human-like doll who gains self-awareness and becomes a hazard to those around her (particularly those who pose any threat, no matter how minor, to Cady, human with whom she has been bonded). As the film goes on, she becomes ever more dangerous, and soon she’s wreaking havoc, and bringing death, to anyone who stands in her way, including her creator, Gemma (played by Allison Williams).
There are many things which explain why this film has become beloved by queer viewers everywhere. To begin with, there’s the film’s obvious camp, including its B-movie narrative, which stands in a fascinating and productive tension with its glossy production values. (In fact, I think that it’s hard to imagine a movie about a killer girl robot that wouldn’t be camp). There’s also the seemingly inherent relationship between queerness and the uncanny, which has long undergirded horror as a genre. And then, of course, there’s the title character herself, with her immaculately coiffed hair, her flawless outfits, and her ability to deliver a devastating line. If ever there was a demonic robot who was born to be a bitchy diva, it would be M3GAN.
For me, though, what immediately stood out was the way the film evokes the terror and the potentiality of the figure of the queer child. As the queer scholar and theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton writes of this figure: “Our futures grow sideways whenever they can’t be envisioned as futures,” she writes, “—due to forceful obstacles, forms of arrest, or our wish to be suspended in the amplitude of ‘more’, as your simply wanting more time, more pleasure, more leisure, more luxury, even more destruction (as odd as that may sound)—just ‘more’” (52). This figure crops up throughout the history of western literature and film, and M3GAN clearly partakes of this fine tradition, with her uncanny and disturbing similarities to a human (and thus “real” child).
M3GAN, even more than the other queer child-like figures that have preceded her–I’m thinking here of the malevolent doll Chucky–embodies the type of resistant, destructive energy that Stockton identifies as key components of the figure of the queer child. Though her programming is originally intended to keep her in check, Gemma makes the mistake of imbuing her with the ability to learn and to continue developing. Unfortunately, as a creature of artificial intelligence, she doesn’t seem to be gifted with the same sense of innate morality as her human counterparts and, once deprived of the basic imperative to save Cady, she is given free rein to run amok.
Furthermore, M3GAN is also a being of ever-increasing desires, particularly when this comes to her human companion, Cady. As the film goes on, she proceeds to lash out at anyone (or anything) that poses a threat to Cady, whether that’s the dog that lives next door, the neighbor who enables the dog’s bad behavior, or even another child who torments Cady. In that sense, M3GAN is like so many of the other excessively affectionate lesbian characters that have emerged in the history of the cinema, of which Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca is perhaps the paradigmatic example. Because she lacks the moral imperative associated with a human conscience, there is nothing to keep her from indulging them, no matter how destructive they might be.
Just as importantly, M3GAN is also an agent of anti-capitalist rage. To the surprise of absolutely no one, Gemma’s boss at the tech firm where she works decides to go all-in on M3GAN, without really pausing to consider what the consequences–social, cultural, physical, or otherwise–might be in creating a being of such limitless potential. Equally unsurprising is the fact that he is one of those who also falls victim to her relentless desire to destroy, impaled as he tries to escape. In the world of M3GAN, both men and capitalists are to be destroyed.
In the end, though, M3GAN, like so many other horror films, must see normality and the status quo returned, and so Gemma and Cady overcome their differences and join forces to destroy this unholy and destructive creation. Ironically, they do so through a more primitive robot that Gemma developed at an earlier period of her professional career. In that sense, M3GAN is a surprisingly humanist film; in the end, it is the relationship between Gemma and Cady that proves the more enduring and is key to their victory over the malevolent and maniacal machine.
Yet even in the ending there is still a hint of menace to come. As Gemma and Cady finally escape from the house of horrors, the home of artificial intelligence, which until now has merely existed at the periphery of the story, seems to have gained some measure of sentience of its own and, as the heroines flee, it looks on after them, a harbinger of things to come. Has it been possessed by M3GAN herself? Is it simply moving according to its programming? Has it become yet another monster? Like all good horror films, M3GAN doesn’t provide any concrete answers to these questions. Instead, it allows them to hover in the air, not only providing fodder for a potential sequel but also reminding us of the ever-looming threat of AI and the dangers it poses to the human condition.
Like all queer children, M3GAN (and M3GAN), forces us to rethink our basic assumptions about the world and the way it works. Everything from the boundary between the human and the machine, between childhood and adulthood, and between reality and sinister fantasy is up for grabs in a work like this one. We’re never quite sure where we stand, whether we want M3GAN to succeed or whether we want her to perish; several moments suture us into her perspective, enhancing the unsettling identification. And, in the end, we’re left hovering in that perilously pleasurable space of ambiguity, facing a future as riddled with uncertainty as our terrifying queer present.