M3GAN (Gerard Johnstone, 2023) (Patreon)

Hi folks, just wanted to drop in and say hello. I haven't been seeing too many films lately, since I've been dealing with a lot of other work: grading freshman papers (done, for now); reviewing another horrible Cannes selection from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (coming soon at In Review Online); and trying to make heads or tails of Deborah Stratman's latest featurette which (despite all the catalogue descriptions to the contrary) is not about the world as seen by rocks. Rocks can't "see" shit.

But I did finally catch up with M3GAN, which was ridiculous and thoroughly enjoyable on that level. At one point Funki, the toy company that plans to market M3GAN (before she goes on a killing spree, anyhow) describes this semi-sentient robo-tween as "the most important new invention since the automobile," or something like that. (The CEO seems to have a bit of an Elon fetish, asking whether M3GAN's list price would be "more or less than a Tesla?") I need not tell you, I'm sure, that M3GAN the film is not a new invention of any kind. Sort of the Frankenstein obverse to Spielberg's AI, it's a fairly typical story of science getting out of hand when a brilliant creator (Allison Williams) tries playing God.

I suppose one could identify a conservative streak in M3GAN's treatment of Williams' Gemma, who suddenly goes from being a cool out-of-town aunt to primary caregiver for Cady (Violet McGraw, impressively grim) when her parents die in a car accident. Rather than cash in her stock options and go full mommy, Gemma employs M3GAN (Amie Donald, voiced by Jenna Davis) as a high-tech babysitter. But as the film makes clear, Gemma's decision is really just the next phase of "too much screen time," and her reluctance to fully embrace Cady (and vice versa) is less calculated decision than a response to unresolved trauma. As you might expect, defeating M3GAN is the culmination of their joint emotional breakthrough.

None of this is rocket science. The free radical in all this is the M3GAN character, a calculating mean-girl robot who insinuates herself into Cady's emotional consciousness by literally calculating her weaknesses in order to produce a viable empathy response. We see M3GAN's internal point of view, and it instantly conducts facial and body-language analysis to generate percentages of fear, attachment, anxiety, loneliness, etc, on the part of her interlocutor. In other words, this is what it looks like when an algorithm starts walking around in a wig and a dress. 

Need I state the obvious? In an age of TikTok challenges and 24/7 cyber-bullying, M3GAN is as "real" as anyone else, especially in her "age" group. We are constantly looking to machines and apps to tell us how to behave, to assure us that we are not weird or unlovable, and of course we feed that drive for elusive normalcy right back into the code. M3GAN is the Other, but M3GAN is also us.

Final random thought: I did not expect that Williams would emerge as the least obnoxious, most theatrically adept among the four Girls principals. But here we are.