Why M3GAN Moves Us

Will artificial intelligence be the death of us all? Or will it offer a new path to greater human leisure, even frolicsome freedom? No one appears to know who to believe at the moment. So put your faith in M3gan, a four-foot-tall sentient doll that walks, talks and possesses some serious knife skills.

M3GAN is the latest hit horror-movie heroine to burst into the public imagination. The film is well on its way to becoming something of a phenomenon, having easily surpassed expectations in both audience and critical engagement. The central question of whether the titular M3gan is a friend, foe or something in-between depends, like most forms of tech, on who’s using it — and who’s getting used.

Meet the robot who’s better than a parent

The movie opens with an ad for Purrpetual Pets, the latest toy fad to beset the younger set. The toys are Furby lookalikes that kids control using iPads. The main highlight of the toy is its ability eat, fart and poop.

The scatological aspects seem to be the principal joy for a young girl named Cady (Violet McGraw). On the way to a ski vacation with her bickering parents, Cady sits glued to the screen with her pet in the back seat, while her parents argue about screen time in the front. Moments later, a fast-moving snow plow crashes into the car, killing Cady’s parents. Enter Gemma (Allison Williams), Cady’s work-obsessed aunt, who adopts her newly orphaned niece.

From the outset it’s apparent that Gemma is not the most nurturing person, but she’s also under considerable pressure. As a roboticist working for a giant toy corporation, the woman has spent mucho company funds on her pet project, a four-foot animatronic doll capable of bonding with a child so profoundly that no other toy is needed or wanted. But things aren’t going exactly to plan. M3gan, an acronym for Model 3 Generative Android, isn’t perfected yet, but that doesn’t stop Gemma from taking her home and pairing her up with her wee, sad niece.

As Cady and her new sentient toy dance, play and sing, Gemma is only too happy to hand over the caregiving reins. Parenting is hard and extremely demanding of time and patience. AI is here to help! There aren’t too many parents in the world who haven’t plunked their precious darlings in front of a screen just to have a moment of peace and quiet. Here is the where the film pokes at a sore spot.

The uncomfortable truth of the film is that M3gan is demonstrably better at everything, unlike harried Gemma, who can’t be arsed to even deal with her niece most of the time. Counsellor, playmate, security detail, nutritionist, dance partner and part-time balladeer, M3gan can do it all. It’s little wonder that Cady would rather hang out with her animatronic pal than real live humans. Who can blame her?

Here is where things get sticky, and I’m not even talking about the gore unleashed when M3gan finally drops all pretense of little-girl coyness and goes full bloody rampage. She has, after all, developed free will as well as the will to kill.

A delicious inversion

The film arrives at an interesting cultural moment when the relationship between humans and technology is entering new territory. As younger generations adapt and adopt with ease, jumping into the deep end with nary a compunction, older folk are a little slower to join the pool party.

The embrace of the AI writing bot ChatGPT is the one of the most recent technologies to get folks’ dander up, with some maintaining that it’s merely a helpful tool and others insisting that it is yet another nail in human’s ability to figure things out for ourselves.

But the idea of technology escaping its human creators is a pretty old story. Even before Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, there was Pygmalion, golems, and then Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and other stubbornly independent entities, all intent on having their own way. M3gan plays easily and lightly with questions of autonomy and agency.

There are a number of surprisingly sly moments in the film, like M3gan’s use of therapy speak, mimicking the way that women often fight with each other before the knives really come out. Even as she’s cutting a swathe through anyone deemed an impediment to her primary directive as Cady’s principal caregiver, M3gan has already figured out how the world works. Beneath the blood and screaming, there is a surprising amount of pathos.

Akela Cooper’s script is sharp to the point of being razored, slicing and dicing expectations before you’re even aware that something dangerous is afoot. In this case, it’s a very small foot in a pair of patent Mary Janes.

M3gan is quite the fashionable killer. We see her in twee ensembles, including a pussy-bow blouse, a to-die-for velvet coat and prim white stockings that add a certain piquancy to the proceedings. Although she most resembles an American Girl Doll with some Bratz thrown in, M3gan is entirely herself, possessing the snark of a genuine teenager with the skills of a trained mercenary.

Much has already been made of the character’s instant appeal, not simply to mainstream audience, but also as an icon for the LGBTQ2S+ community, some of whom have taken to screaming “Mother!” at the screen whenever M3gan stalks onto the scene, referring to a widely used term in the queer vernacular that refers to chosen family.

There is something curiously empowering about the character, which helps explain her instant rise to super stardom. The scenes, wherein grown men flee in squealing terror from this demurely smiling and pinafore-wearing menace, provide a kind of catharsis. An inversion of fear that has its own profound pleasures.

Being a small girl is one of the most powerless positions there is, so when little M3gan not only refuses to accept a subordinate place but demands full control, a surge of wicked glee might course through your body. Let ‘er rip, babe. And she does. The film’s camp quotient is ratcheted up high as the pint-sized terror is loosed upon an obnoxious tech bro, bullies, nosy neighbours and aggressive dogs.

With a sequel already in the works, we are witnessing the dawn of a new super villain. Where does she go from here?

Anywhere she so pleases.

Machines, learning

Much of the brouhaha around AI right now is the concerns people have about its potential to replace creative endeavours like illustration and copywriting. M3GAN takes this uneasiness a step or two further, with indelible tasks like parenting and teaching offloaded onto technology.

In some ways, what is being examined has largely already taken place. But is it all bad? Perhaps not.

As Kevin Roose, writing about ChatGPT in the New York Times, says, there’s not much point in trying to stand down the future. It’s going to come one way or another.

“That’s the biggest reason not to ban it from the classroom, in fact — because today’s students will graduate into a world full of generative AI programs. They’ll need to know their way around these tools — their strengths and weaknesses, their hallmarks and blind spots — in order to work alongside them. To be good citizens, they’ll need hands-on experience to understand how this type of AI works, what types of bias it contains, and how it can be misused and weaponized.”

The conflict that drives M3GAN transcends well-worn tropes that pit human and machine against each other. Rather, the film takes a more nuanced and deeper approach to the love-hate relationship we humans have with technology, most especially in the tension and division between older and younger generations.

Is M3gan a death-dealing menace, or a super new tech friend who offers deliverance from your darkest days? Depends on where you stand or maybe how old you are.

If I was a wee child offered such a creation, it would be goodbye, adults. Hello, dolly!