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

