The 2008 horror movie Deadgirl is one of those films that stuck with me. The current vibe in the United States has helped with that, although we'll get to that in a moment.
Two alienated high school seniors named JT (Noah Segan) and Ricky (Shiloh Fernandez) skip school one day and wander around an abandoned asylum. To their great surprise, they find a mute, undead woman (Jenny Spain) chained naked to a table in the basement (not easy to find pictures that I felt comfortable posting, that's for sure). JT is a genuine sociopath and immediately comes up with a perverted idea of what to do in this odd situation. Ricky is more sensitive and doesn't want to partake, despite becoming increasingly despondent over his unrequited love for JoAnn (Candice King). Throughout most of the movie, Ricky struggles to find the courage to defy his best friend and free the captive.
It's an unpleasant concept, it's an unpleasant movie, and the reviews definitely reflected that. For the most part, critics dismissed it as exploitative and juvenile, even borderline misogynistic. You can see where they're coming from, but given everything that's happened since 2008, Deadgirl is also arguably one of the most prescient movies of this still young century. I haven't seen anything else (not even Netflix's Adolescence, as good as it was) that so accurately depicts the psychology of young men descending into hateful madness by rejection from women.
"Think about it," JT says at one point. "Folks like us are just cannon fodder for the rest of the world. But down here... you see, we're in control. Now we call the shots down here, man. Feels good, doesn't it? It's all right to say. You don't have to be the nice guy down here, Ricky."
The logic goes like this - they feel like losers in high school, particularly in regard to romance. Therefore they will be losers for the rest of their lives. Therefore the best they can hope for is an undead slave in the basement of an old building. It might sound ridiculous, but it felt real to me back when I first saw it and it still does. For decades, popular culture has drilled into the heads of young boys that to be a real man, you have to be promiscuous. If they haven't managed to get with the same amount of women as James Bond by the time they're adults, they have failed. It's totally absurd, but the damage it does is terrifyingly real. The intense shame and humiliation forced onto young men who have not met this impossible standard can (quite literally, in many cases) drive them insane.
I got picked on a lot growing up. Girls had no interest in me. For whatever reason, I didn't go down this path but I always feel like I could have. Because of that, whenever I read about some young man committing some appalling crime out of romantic frustration, I end up thinking of the pain underneath that behavior. And I end up thinking of Deadgirl.
Now we're going to get into spoiler territory, just FYI. After getting roughed up by JoAnn's meathead jock boyfriend Johnny (Andrew DiPalma), Ricky and JT spill the beans about Deadgirl but loosen her restraints before introducing them, leading to her taking a bite out of Johnny. About a day later, Johnny gets violently ill and enters a similar undead state. This gives JT the idea to create a new Deadgirl, since the original is beginning to rot. He and a dumb stoner named Wheeler (Eric Podnar) try to kidnap a random woman at a gas station and this is the only moment the movie becomes funny as she ends up beating the shit out of both of them and escaping.
JT isn't about to give up and now thinks he's going to do Ricky a favor and turn JoAnn into the next Deadgirl, since that will get around that pesky issue of consent. This finally pushes Ricky to act and he frees Deadgirl. After the ensuing chaos, JT has been bitten and JoAnn is mortally wounded, but Deadgirl has spared Ricky and escaped. JT urges Ricky to let him bite JoAnn and turn her undead, but instead Ricky breaks down and tearfully tells JoAnn he loves her and will save her. She spits blood in his face and tells him to "fucking grow up." This final rejection causes Ricky to lose whatever decency he has left. Sure enough, the final reveal is an undead JoAnn chained to the table as the new Deadgirl.
Seventeen years after the movie first came out, social media has created a huge industry of insufferable "alpha males" pushing the same old destructive ideas onto a whole generation of young boys and convincing them to blame the resulting feelings of inadequacy on women, even though this whole cycle is maintained by other men. Women are not interested in perpetuating this dynamic, after all it's not doing them any favors either. The "manosphere" urges them to use their frustration as an excuse to act out in all sorts of ways, from voting for fascists in elections to sending death threats to video game developers if the women in their games aren't sufficiently beautiful.
Have a look at this old commercial for Playstation 2. It's a clever ad, but it also sums up what I'm getting at. For a lot of lonely and frustrated young men, advancing technology like AI, VR, or even just better video game consoles means the promise of a reality that can replace the one we live in. Did you catch that one shot of the gamer being embraced by the hot mermaid underwater? She seems to have actually been some kind of octopus monster, but it still seems like a very purposeful inclusion. If the games get realistic enough, men can finally have access to women that are programmed never to reject them. What they want is a virtual Deadgirl, and that's why challenging beauty standards in games is such a threat. More powerful video games won't be useful to them if the women in there don't cater to their specific fantasies.
What might it take to end this era of young men being radicalized by their loneliness? It won't be possible without some pretty major changes that I'm not sure society is currently capable of. You have to convince them that they are not failures and can still get a lot out of life even if adolescence is painful, because adolescence will likely always be painful but it makes up not even a quarter of your entire life. It does not need to decide anything about the subsequent 60 years or so and telling kids that it does is deeply cruel and irresponsible. Still, it's a hard case to make when capitalism thrives on subjecting people to low quality of life in the name of financial gain for the ruling class. That gives credence to some of our worst anxieties about adulthood and life in the "real world." This is all a symptom of much larger issues that I hope are solved someday although it's hard to be optimistic about that.
Until that happens, Deadgirl will remain painfully relevant.
