New & now: The Monkey

Death is the great and very stupid equalizer.

Precious childhood memories

“Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.” — Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”

When I went into the hospital at the end of 2020, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it back out, and I almost didn’t. Oddly enough, I don’t remember feeling scared, or much of anything, really, other than very, very tired, more tired than I had ever been in my life, and maybe even an odd sense of relief: either they’d fix what was wrong with me or they wouldn’t, either way it would end.

There was a sense of absurdity to the whole thing, however, particularly when the emergency room nurse directed me to a bathroom to give a urine sample. Trying to muster up the energy required to hover over a toilet to catch the specimen was a challenge, and it was mere seconds before I began to feel faint, falling against the wall and ultimately pissing on myself (though, hooray for me, I managed to get enough in the cup before I collapsed). Later, when I was waiting to be seen, I felt a wave of nausea, and, as I had been for the past month, violently threw up. An older gentleman lying on the gurney across from mine almost immediately sat up, and then he threw up.

And then I threw up again, and then he did, and then I did a third time, and it became like an old-fashioned call and response, except with vomiting instead of singing. You can’t throw up that much and not get it on yourself, and I did, along with the pee from earlier, and suddenly it all seemed very funny. This is how I die, I thought, covered in puke and piss and trying to out-barf an old Black man.

I didn’t die, but if I did there would have been no dignity in it, because there’s rarely any dignity in death. That’s the primary message of Oz Perkins’ The Monkey, a gruesome and deeply funny horror-comedy that emphasizes that death is the ultimate equalizer, and for most of us it will be messy, sudden, and very, very dumb.

Though based on Stephen King’s creepy (and not funny at all) short story of the same name, The Monkey is a cheeky, cynical-but-loving response to Perkins losing his mother at a relatively young age. If his father, Anthony Perkins, who died of AIDS, got the messy death, then his mother, Berry Berenson, got the sudden, unexpected death, when she boarded a plane in Boston on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

Neither of their deaths could be described as “dumb,” but weren’t they, really? Not through any fault of their own, of course. If Anthony Perkins wasn’t forced to keep his bisexuality a secret, he likely wouldn’t have needed to sneak around and leave himself vulnerable to contracting HIV (let alone if Ronald Reagan hadn’t assiduously ignored AIDS until 1985). Berry Berenson’s death was due to a massive failure in communication, when the U.S. government minimized alerts that a terrorist attack on American soil was in the works, and TSA agents overlooked weapons on passengers going through security. Their deaths were dumb, they could have been avoided, but they weren’t, because that’s how death works. When your time is up, your time is up, baby, whether you like it or not. Most of the time, it’s completely out of your control.

Similarly to King’s short story, Perkins wisely does away with any explanation of where the cursed monkey toy comes from, only that it ended up in the hands of a man named Pete Shelbourne (played here by Adam Scott), and it was passed down (much like a disease) to his twin sons, Hal and Bill (played as children by Christian Convery and adults by Theo James). Pete does try to get rid of it at the opening of the film, but it still somehow ends up in his home, with his children, although Pete himself disappears. Did he too die a gruesome death off-screen? It’s possible, and it’s also possible that it wasn’t connected to the monkey at all. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.

It also doesn’t matter that Hal and Bill as adults both live in isolation, orphans, long estranged from each other, friendless, and with no romantic prospects. Hal only sees his teenage son Petey (Colin O’Brien) one week per year, out of some misplaced notion that he’s sparing him from the “family curse,” when that curse is the same thing that every single other family in the entire world experiences at some point. Who’s to say that that’s the only cursed monkey toy in the world? There could be thousands, millions out there, the keys in their backs always turning, always grinning, always beating their little drums.

Metaphorically speaking, at least.

We humans keep thinking we can cheat death. You see it all the time, rich weirdos who think that with the right combination of green juices, vitamin supplements, and virgin blood they’ll live forever. It’s wild that people think their money will save them, that when it’s their time Death will ride up, look them over, and say “Nah, you’re right, you can stay.” Me, I’m the opposite, I’ve always had a (perhaps unhealthy) awareness of (if not fascination with) death. I’m a scaredy-cat. I always make sure to locate the “oh shit” handle when I get in someone’s car. Every time I walk through a subway grating I briefly imagine plunging through it into the darkness below. I’m not entirely convinced there isn’t a monster hiding underneath my bed. I’ve never experimented with drugs harder than marijuana because I’m convinced I’ll be that person who snorts a single line of cocaine and then immediately has a heart attack.

And yet, it’s far more likely that I’ll die by choking to death on a Dorito. Or, y’know, this thing I have that shriveled up my kidneys into two little useless lima beans may kill me someday. I hope it doesn’t. I’m doing everything I can to prevent that from happening. But my point is, I have no idea, and neither do you, or you, or any of the rest of you. Even if you were just told yesterday that you have an inoperable brain tumor, you could be taken out with a bus, or bird flu, or tainted lunch meat. There is no way of knowing how it will happen, or when.

While this sounds like you should hide in your house in constant fear of your imminent demise, I’m actually suggesting the opposite, as does The Monkey. In trying to protect Petey from the “curse” of the monkey, Hal is denying himself a loving relationship with his son. He’s lived a lonely, empty life out of some misguided desire to hold off the inevitable, when living a happy, fulfilled life surrounded with love would have eventually led to the same outcome. You can acknowledge the reality of death without spending your life doing nothing but waiting for it to happen, because it could be tomorrow, or fifty years from now.

The saying “laughing in the face of death” doesn’t mean deliberately doing something stupid and putting your life at risk, like wading into a swamp full of alligators. It means to be brave, and live joyfully, and to understand that it’s a random act of the universe, and not a competition over who gets to stay the longest. Mocking death is a good thing, a powerful thing, for us, the living. Death itself doesn’t care either way.