Of Monsters and Men
Tale as old as time.
Note: Vague vibe spoilers for the film YOUR MONSTER. Go see it anyway.
I see an average of one film in a theater per calendar year, and the 2024 movie that I watched last night was YOUR MONSTER. Some months back my dear friend sent me the trailer, which pitched it as a New York rom-com where the guy is a closet-dwelling monster. A slightly less hairy, sardonic Sully, if you will. My friend has read almost everything I’ve written over the last few years (bless her patient soul), so she was like, this seems maaaybe like your “thing."
I went in with expectations of a slightly twisted romantic comedy for the ACOTAR and AO3 set, a little capitalizing on the romantasy bandwagon. There would be all the beats we’ve known and loved, but with a sexy monster instead of the latest normie who was on Euphoria or whatever. And for the first 2/3rds of the film, that’s what was served. Talented but soft-spoken Laura is dumped by her narcissistic, art world-climbing boyfriend at her most vulnerable point, and she’s forced to move into her vacant childhood home. Monster breaks through, wants his space, cue enemies-to-lovers plot points. Petty little fights, cute glimmers of hidden sensitivities and dimension (“onions have layers”), a lavish Halloween costume party set piece. The horrible boyfriend threatens to come back in the picture. Oh no!! Do not turn your back on Sexy Monster! Girl what are you doing!!
It was fun. It was cute. It was cozy in its familiarity. It was territory we had been before, but there’s a reason we have a hundred thousand versions of it.
And then the third act happened.
The delicious, dark, no-holds-barred third act, in which the girl does not only love the Monster, the Monster imbues her with agency. The love of the “good” girl does not temper the Monster into a man who could walk around the streets of Brooklyn without notice. She doesn’t fix his rage or tendencies. She allows them to ignite her, to push her to confront the gross injustice and hypocrisy of the true demons that have lay waste to her life and dreams.
And just like that, FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL became BLACK SWAN.
I wanted to stand up and applaud like Meryl Streep at the Oscars.
Unlike so many movies and shows that promise subversion but demurely pull their punches, YOUR MONSTER went swinging for the teeth, and landed square in the jaw.
And it was that thing that happens when you see another piece of media that is trying to say its own version of what you’ve been pouring your heart into trying to say for over a year or however long your passion project has been making you a feral crazy person, a little glimpse into the wider conversation that keeps you pushing through all of the loneliness and frustration because you feel down in the magma that it needs to be heard.
What is that “it” exactly, though?
Or, most specifically…what’s the deal with the monsters?
I started this essay on Sunday, November 3rd but I couldn’t finish it. At the time I wasn’t sure why; it’s only now, on November 6th, that the tonal dissonance comes into sharp, snapping focus: trying to balance being sardonic and cute about Beauty and the Beast with truly deep, dark, creeping fears felt hollow then, but especially in this fresh new 21st century reality where the Beast is dead, the castle is torched, and Gaston has scheduled Belle’s full frontal lobotomy.
There was a scene in YOUR MONSTER I failed to mention in my Sunday draft. That of protagonist Laura followed by her Monster as she’s fleeing the scene of her ultimate humiliation. An implosion of her career and personal life, with all of her dreams going up in smoke. Instead of confronting these horrors, she runs, embarrassed and devastated, telling herself that it will be okay. It’s okay.
“It’s NOT okay,” the Monster insists, refusing to stand down. Refusing her docile self-sooth. “It’s NOT.”
“It’s not okay,” she realizes slowly, her arguments finally crumbling. “It’s NOT okay,” she repeats again, and again, the words refracting and echoing off the one being willing to validate her pain.
IT’S NOT OKAY.
IT’S NOT OKAY!
IT’S NOT OKAY.
It is not. Okay.
One thing you will hear when you go to any writer’s conference or MFA residency or Reddit thread on the craft is “write what obsesses you.” The things that keep you fueled and focused and curious that will not exorcise themselves from your mind any other way. You’ll hear this because it is good advice, and it’s the truth.
Sometimes these are things that obsess you in a good way, the things that bring you joy. For a long time I wrote about food and Disneyland and Grumpy Cat and pop stars because that was compelling to me; and even though I endeavored to go deeper, it was still from this baseline of contentment…what does this delight mean?
As I’ve said here and elsewhere, I did not write for a relatively long time after I published a book of essays. When I did write again, I hadn’t just flipped genres. I’d flipped topics.
I wrote about about body autonomy, about the sanctity of choice, about the divinity of feminine rage. I wrote about the monsters women were made to think meant them harm by the tyrannical creatures that actually did. I wrote about the women who reaped rewards from upholding these systems, poisoned by the jealousy and self-interest that flourished with ingestion of that patriarchy. I wrote about the swift abandonment of ideals and self-interest, by a public seduced by what was easiest to believe and required no fight.
I started writing about these things after a pandemic, an attempted insurrection, and within an administration which was, while far from ideal, tenable to democracy. I wrote because it felt as if these realities were narrowly escaped, like we had survived a flit on the edge of ideas that are unimaginably dark but all around us; whether uttered from the lectern of a college graduation by a football star downplaying the young women’s academic accomplishments in lieu of the potential they offer his worldview as breeders, or our VP-to-be reaffirming his view that women without children must be “miserable” at every turn, these thoughts are not fringe. They are held by those with the power of office and the power of a vote—the millions of men and women walking around today, unbothered and in fact overjoyed, unfurling their cheap Amazon flags mounted above their spotless lifted Diesels and Jeep Outbacks that will never glimpse a safari or Jurassic Park*, celebrating the fact that a reality that they endeavor to make true has triumphed.
*I may have flipped some people off on my commute today. Maybe.
Writing about them as “fictions” was therapy and autopsy. Poking nightmares with sticks, foolish enough to think that the cages would hold.
In this reality, we are surrounded by the monstrous. The dehumanizing, the deplorable. The disgusting. And this is when we need to love monsters the most.
The Monsters we are told mean us harm. The Monsters who are supposedly the root cause of our problems. Whether YOUR MONSTER’s sexy boyfriend or THE SHAPE OF WATER’S misunderstood fish-man, Quasimodo or Ganondorf**, they have also been Othered by patriarchy’s mechanisms and reduced to the sum of their useful parts. Whether that’s their physical form and strength being harnessed to further an authoritarian’s agenda or capitalized upon to reinforce what will be tolerated within their society through cruel example (sorry Dumbo and King Kong), these Monsters are regarded with the same contempt as every individual outside of their narrow ideal. But through their physicality, they “look” like the personification of our fears and anxieties because those orchestrating the culmination of such horrors have told us so.
**Do not [@] me with canon.
That is what makes the Woman Loves Monster story so subversive, especially when it pushes past the status quo of stories like Beauty and the Beast, where the monster must temper his form for a happily ever after. In a story like YOUR MONSTER, the woman does not love the monster in spite of his strength and dominance and rage. These are precisely the qualities that draw them together, and when she allows it, set the dormant agency within her aflame.
The idea of a woman loving a monster, just like choosing Bear over Man in Wood, threatens male supremacy because it breaks through the illusion that we have nothing in common. It destroys all that the woman has been trained to apologize for and hide within herself—being loud, being disruptive, being seen—and instead empowers it. United and equal, the monster’s possessiveness transcends into protection, and all necessary wrath and truth and vengeance and justice is freed.
This is not okay.
None of this is okay.
This is never going to be okay.
And I hope to god that you have a monster in your life who sees that rage within you, cherishes it, helps you hone it and make it the truest it can be, reflecting all that you love far too much to watch burn without a gnashing, bloody fight.