Have you heard of Megan (from the movie M3GAN)?
Of course you have. She is, after all, the moment. The conversation. The internet’s meme du jour. In the pantheon of Instantly Queer Online Figures, Megan is the new grand marshal of the digital Pride parade.
But for my own satisfaction, I’ll give you the must-know details. Earlier this week, Universal Pictures released the trailer for M3GAN, a film about a little girl named Katie whose parents died in a car accident. Her caretaker, played by Allison Williams, is an engineer who believes Katie would benefit from her newest project: an android tasked with keeping Katie emotionally and physically safe by the name of, you guessed it, Megan. This immediately sounds like a terrible idea, but Marnie’s going to Marnie.
Long story, short: the trailer went viral. Megan was a hit from the moment she opened her demented eyes and looked up creepily toward the camera, like she’s recreating a shot from The Handmaid’s Tale. When she began twerking, it was over.
Notably, she found her most impassioned audience in the online queer community. There’s a meme floating around of Megan giving the side-eye. One pointing out how she looks eerily similar to a young Scarlett Johansson. There’s a video of Megan dancing to Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar.” There are no shortage of jokes that indicate that Megan has been embraced as Online Queer Canon. It happened like a John Green novel: slowly, and then all at once.
There’s something specific about these mononymous figures of horror lore that draws in queer people. I’m talking about the Babadook. I’m talking about Annabelle. I’m talking about my personal lord and savior, Ma (from the movie Ma). When the Babadook debuted in 2014, the film was met with acclaim, but it was two more years before the big queer conversation started, appropriately named “The Babadiscourse.” The whole thing kicked off with a meme on Tumblr, and soon after, the Babadook became known as canonically queer. Ma followed in 2019, giving us a queer icon who is, decidedly, not queer herself. And now we have Megan.
You could attribute that LGBT-embrace to a number of things. In the case of Megan, there’s something inherently queer about looking like you’re wearing colored contacts. I for one am drawn to the palpable tension that arises from Megan’s conservative fashion choices at war with her blatantly liberal politics. But I think the fairer, more analytical bet is that there’s something recognizable to us in these figures. Strained family dynamics, grandiose outfits, themes of loneliness that stem back to childhood, being bullied and feeling othered—uh oh! I don’t know if I’m writing about M3GAN or discussing my twenties with my therapist.
What keeps films like Ma, The Babadook, and M3GAN from becoming some kind of emotional mess though is that it’s all drenched in camp. I mean, Ma is literally a film about how Octavia Spencer can’t let go of high school trauma, so she befriends her daughter’s classmates and FaceTimes them to say, “Don’t make me drink alone!” It’s wild. It’s wonderful. It’s someone that’s a bit more bananas than I am in my day to day life.
Sure, we can sit and psychoanalyze Megan until she crowbars you to death in Katie’s honor (just watch the trailer), but what really makes these characters so rife for virality is that they have that “thing.” The thing that happens when you go to a party as a queer person and you finally clock the other queer person that’s in the room. You want to hang out with Megan because y’all have something in common. Yeah, you want to do that stupid dance with her. You want to be friends with someone who’s willing to go to bat for you (sometimes, literally with a bat). You’re both a little twisted, and you love that creepy ass version of Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” that was used to soundtrack the trailer. Game respects game.
So let us exalt her, our current queen of being very queer and very online. Megan is the supreme, despite M3GAN not being slated for release until January 2023. We love her, and she loves us, and we love her for loving us, and she loves us for loving her. And that’s ’cause we didn’t get enough love in our childhoods.
