The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Wednesday, November 2, 2022 — 5 The scariest TV episode is not one of monsters or horror, it’s one of fallen heroes and hilarious sitcoms: Season 3, Episode 6 of “New Girl,” “Keaton.” In “Keaton,” loveable egomaniac Schmidt (Max Greenfield, “Veronica Mars”) grapples with the loss of two girlfriends by finding solace in cold cuts and mayo straight from the jar, as his roommates tiptoe around him to prepare for a Halloween party. Schmidt faced his first loss of love after his father left him at a fragile 10 years old. To combat his subsequent tear-ridden, chocolate-covered hopelessness, his mother (Nora Dunn, “The Nanny”) wrote him a letter and masked as his childhood idol: Michael Keaton (“Batman”). Schmidt wrote Keaton to get through every embarrassing, traumatic pitfall of his childhood and his mother, as Keaton, wrote back. The pen pal empowered Schmidt, providing fatherly advice to face his worst traumas and humiliations. When Schmidt left for college, his roommate Nick (Jake Johnson, “Let’s Be Cops”) took over as Keaton, this time with a fake email. Schmidt adhered to every word of guidance. As 29-year-old Schmidt falls back into a deep deli-meat-feast depression, quirky roommate Jess (Zooey Deschanel, “500 Days of Summer”) attempts to take over the Keaton persona/email to expel a faltering Schmidt from the apartment Halloween party. The ploy quickly unravels, and Keaton is unmasked. When Schmidt (in a tie and lizard suit, dressed as a “public serpent”) realizes that he told his mother about his public erections (thinking he was telling Keaton), we might laugh until we cry. Looking inward, we might start crying, too — this time from sadness. Schmidt’s hilarious fall from grace (if grace here is adult male delusion) reminds us of the loss of our childhood. Heroes are monsters’ foils. Batman fights all evil in the city and, with it, all the fears that stand in our way. Our favorite heroes fight monsters alongside us, inspiring us every step of the way. Without knowing our idols’ real past, we can imagine them facing growing pains, persevering and reaching success. We can choose to be brave and ignore the scary things that hide in the dark because that is what heroes do. We can make up improbable storylines and frame our mortifying issues in fictional contexts (an ill-fated high school homecoming, for example, can be Cinderella’s ball). Heroes keep us hopeful, excited and wide-eyed to the wonders of our potential hero-like future. They provide a necessary constant. As kids, our list of role models is expansive: favorite artists of every modality, superheroes, silly cartoon characters and even local fire and rescue squads. As scared little kids, heroes are the antidote to the monsters of reality. It is no wonder that we are bravest on Halloween. We don a hero’s mask and run into haunted houses. We become perfect symbols of our dreams. As we grow up, our Keatons, real or fictional, lose their magic. We discover Taylor Swift has a Yeti-like carbon footprint, the Marvel Multiverse is not real (at least in this universe) and Barbie is just a doll. Spider-Man is Peter Parker is Tom Holland. Batman is Bruce Wayne is Michael Keaton is Schmidt’s mom. Keaton was the perfect childhood idol because he was only a symbol, a distant pen- pal and television hero with a perfectly-crafted brave and relatable false identity. When we realize our idol is fictional (or merely human), having one feels childish. We no longer dress up as heroes for Halloween, instead choosing whatever looks cutest. We pick a parent, sibling or teacher as a role model. As Nick puts it, real heroes “are never who we want them to be.” But we do not expel our fears or monsters with age; instead, we internalize them. Our skewed self-image, cynicism, malaise and general disappointment make the world seem scary and like it’s out to get us. We fear that after one failed relationship, our love life will be a horror story. We fear that one failed test is the end of our academic careers. Monsters appear not just in the dark of our childhood bedroom, but in the hidden corners of our anxious minds. Like Schmidt, we often curl up in our chosen (occasionally toxic) comforts, rather than confront our fears with a headstrong confidence. Maintaining a fictional or fictionalized idol may stop us from dwelling on our daily monsters: deadlines, injuries, failures, setbacks, humiliating hits to our self-image and pressures from those closest to us. Imperfect and familiar role models — parents, siblings and professors — can disappoint us or crush our self-image. If their standards are unattainable, we fall into hopelessness. If we watch our role models with their monsters up close, we can no longer view them as a pillar of strength, and we fear that similar (or worse) monsters may befall us. It is impossible to idolize those we truly know, even if we love them. Typically, kids do not get direct contact with their idols; that is what makes them perfect. Schmidt kept Keaton at a safe distance from an email or letter, allowing Keaton to remain a superhuman pillar of strength. If our distant idols are flawed, like Taylor Swift, it is often part of an inspiring or relatable story, not a disappointment. Celebrities can provide a perfect hero when we are young and unaware, but when they are exposed as real people (or as our mom and roommates), all of the magic fades away. Humans cannot be vehicles for our anxieties, hopes and dreams. Real people are flawed and cannot be put on a hero-like pedestal. But a song, show or piece of art that inspires us, or an origin story that makes us feel understood, can still empower us through adulthood. My childhood dreams led me to a long and strange list of living, deceased and fictional media idols. I saw a future of love, friendships and hundreds of dream jobs. I romanticized a childhood of small heartbreaks and setbacks and followed my idols’ footsteps as I found my footing in the scary world. Even as Jess dons a child-size Batman costume to meet Schmidt and convince him to leave the apartment, Schmidt holds that his pen pal was Keaton all along. “How dare you hack into the email account of one of our nation’s finest actors!” Schmidt cries. Nick and Jess, dressed as “paper mountain trash king” and “Joey Ramone-a Quimby” (respectively), sit Schmidt down to reveal the painful truth like parents revealing the Santa secret. As Schmidt faces reality with a falsely brave face, he moves out of the loft and leaves his idols (and friends) behind. Childhood idols do not provide “false hope.” They provide the purest hope one can offer: one that never disappoints, admonishes us for failure or expects us to be anything but ourselves. Call it childish or delusional, but choosing to hold onto childhood heroes may be an antidote to a sometimes monstrous reality. Fighting off the monsters of adulthood with ‘New Girl’ KAYA GINSKY Daily Arts Writer Monsters are borne out of our deepest fears and anxieties; they’re reflections of ourselves, as individuals and as members of society. From killer clowns to vampires to poltergeists, we all have a monster that scares us more than most. At this time of year — when, in myth, the veil between our world and the spirits’ is said to be thinner than it usually is — monsters are on our mind more than ever. They haunt our Spirit Halloweens, our dark closets, our basement stairs and our midnights. They remind us that the sanity of the world we live in is tenuous at best and that the things lurking in the shadows are never quite as far away as we think. If I ask you to picture a monster, what comes to mind? A Victorian ghost, a decrepit zombie, a purple thing that lives under your bed? Or maybe, like the writers for this B-Side, you think of Coraline’s other mother, Cookie Monster, Mike and Sully, Carmilla or even a house itself. Monsters are not a monolith; neither are our feelings about them. This B-Side explores our monsters, in all their scary, inspiring, erotic, out-of-this world glory. THE B-SIDE The Monster EMILIA FERRANTE Senior Arts Editor Read more at MichiganDaily.com Design by Phoebe Unwin There is probably no fear that has plagued me as intensely or for as long as my fear of the “other mother” in “Coraline.” This stop-motion animated character from the 2009 children’s film has hands resembling metal spiders with knitting-needle fingers and a face that is, at first, loving (except for its button eyes), but transforms into something altogether inhuman. She was the monster I feared was sitting behind me or just around the corner from ages 10 to 12. If I wanted to test my emotional stability, I would type the movie’s title into my iPod Touch. Just seeing Coraline herself, who is not remotely scary, sent a jolt of fear through my body by association. The “other mother” — also called the beldam — begins as a fulfillment of Coraline’s fantasy: a doting parent in an alternate reality who gives her all the attention and gifts and, it seems, love that she desires while her real parents are distracted by work and moving into their new house. But the fantasy sours as the mother reveals herself as a monster bent on permanently trapping Coraline and stealing her soul. Not only was her love a facade, but her humanness was as well. This evil mother figure did something monsters from stories rarely do: She crawled out of the movie and became a monster in my own life. I had once felt safe walking home from my neighbor’s house at night when my parents and sister were with me. “Coraline” erased this sense of security. I stood next to my mom and couldn’t shake the image of spindly arms erupting from her body as her skin slipped off and she became a beldam. I pictured this happening with everyone around me. I thought I was with other people, but what if I was actually alone? There are some things that are (at least supposed to be) universally “safe.” Mothers are one. Blankets are another. They are not just safe by default but are often the safety we turn to when scared. When a story questions the safety of these things, it strips away a viewer or reader’s sense of security in a way monsters with only dark associations cannot. A few years after watching “Coraline,” when my fear had finally faded, my dad read me a story by M. R. James in which the protagonist’s sheets and blankets become a monster that attacks him in the night. I couldn’t even look at my bed for the next hour, my rumpled comforter (ironic name for it in this context) sending bolts of fear down my spine. I paced up and down my hall, unsure where to go to feel safe from the story. My fear of my blanket didn’t last, though. I fell asleep that night without issue. Something else had kept my fear of the beldam alive and well years after the details of her face and the plot of the movie had begun to atrophy in my memory. The fear persisted. The thought of someone I relied on — of everyone around me — turning into a non-human and leaving me alone was insurmountable. I had no plan of action in this scenario — not like I did in other imagined face-offs with monsters and dire circumstances. If the people around me were not human, there was nothing I could do to face them. We question other people’s humanness often. I’ve had many “I have no way of knowing that everyone around me isn’t a simulation and I’m the only real person” conversations with friends and family members growing up, as I’m sure most of us have. It was always a frustrating conversation as we tried to assure each other that we were real, but it wasn’t scary. We were safe from the consequences of being the only real human because we had no way of knowing. As long as it seemed like we were surrounded by other people, we might as well have been. Coraline’s other mother holds isolation in those spidery fingers ERIN EVANS Senior Arts Editor Design by Evelyn Lee I reimagined the Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNaF) franchise as a Muppets movie — skipping dinner to do so — and half of my friends are worried about me. Starving and spiraling after staring at Microsoft (MS) Paint for hours, all I had to show for my effort was a madman’s monstrous PNG. How did I get here? It started as a typo and evolved into a tirade. On a Monday night in January meant for productivity, I sent a nonsensical series of images to one of my closest friends from high school. It was a series of parodying representations of Freddy Fazbear, the mascot of the Chuck E. Cheese-esque horror series, and he responded with a Spoonerism. “Fozzy fredbear,” the message said, and I felt a chill run down my spine. I pulled up Google Images, not for the last time that night, and grabbed an image of Fozzie Bear from The Muppets for my reply. “FOZZY,” I announce. “fnaf muppets remake where fnaf is freddy,” I continue, not realizing my typo before I received his reply, which had a mistake of its own: “what if fnaf was freddt” (sic). “hold on,” I shoot back while pulling up MS Paint, “i need to set this up.” The crucial part of that message was “need.” Looking back, that chill was something I’d felt countless times over, some cold hand of Creation that would grip my psyche and not let go until I’d brought it into reality. Every creation I’ve ever conceived came from this same feeling. That night I began cobbling together my connections board. The Living Tombstone blared in the background as I pulled up game models and character collages — cropping and cutting and pasting as needed, casting the beloved Muppets as the characters of children, animatronics and serial killers. When the work was finally done, it needed to be shared — distributed among some of my friends who I knew would appreciate the magnitude of what I’d made. That’s not exactly how the night went, as much like the horror franchise I had created a fan retelling of, there’s quite a bit more beneath the surface. The Five Nights at Freddy’s series is infamous for a host of reasons: its noisy jump scares, its quietly horrifying premise and its deeply convoluted backstory, among others. This article is not meant to inform you about that backstory either, but the bare minimum of context might be needed. You could learn as I did, watching Markiplier play through the games and Game Theory’s MatPat theorize about them, but a saner option would be to find a summary. I was never actually able to play the games, as I was too broke to buy them in middle school, then too anxious in high school. However, there’s a certain entertainment factor to watching these content creators’ descents into insanity as the games and their lore twist themselves further and further. The franchise is split into its original series and its succeeding storyline (and eventually an actual movie adaptation by Blumhouse?). The original series — containing “Five Nights at Freddy’s” one through five — was developed primarily by the creator Scott Cawthon, while the sequel series was developed by Cawthon and Steel Wool Studios. The original games follow the story of a pizzeria entertainment franchise being haunted by both its murderous possessed animatronics and the dark history of child serial killings that took place there. While being enraptured by such a dark premise might make my therapist worry, my real obsession is with how the story is uncovered. My monstrous Muppets-inspired prediction for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie SAARTHAK JOHRI Daily Arts Writer Design by Arunika Shee Design by Evelyn Lee Read more at MichiganDaily.com Read more at MichiganDaily.com