i.
I wake up and once I muster the energy, I watch the person in the mirror move her mouth and tongue, shaped over time like I and then am and then not and then a and then commodity. Her hair needs washed and her tits are whatever, but there’s something in her eyes. Bleary, blessed. At first she thought it was the other way around, but now she thinks she’s finally got it: the price of being seen is being able to see.
The way people often talk about their Genders, as boujee and bespoke Tamagotchi made only for cradling, is enough to give her cavities. The way people often talk about Genre, as the obnoxious echo of distorted tropes and franchise potential, is enough to give her ulcers. It’s not the labels that rot her human teeth, not the categories that eat through her human stomach, but the sacrine language the taxonomy, and thus the taxonomy’s power, are birthed from.
Instinct and expectation come from someplace, and that place is not always your body, your heart, your head. Gender and Genre are modalities you buy into. The chick in the mirror is bored to tears of metaphor, but even she has to admit it is not, strictly speaking, useless. If close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, Genre only counts in bookstores and awards shows. Gender is not the tree, nor the tree falling, nor the sound it may or may not make, depending on what is at the center of our imaginations, our definitions of Witness. Rather, if you have to say it is anything, Gender is the entire ecosystem of which that tree is a part, the woods you walk through, get lost in, calmly or in terror.
i.
I promise you already know the premise of Happy Death Day, even if you’ve never heard of it. It’s an ironic time loop slasher movie, Scream by way of Groundhog Day. The movie hinges on the set-up being so simple that its possibilities are already alive and growing inside you, the viewer, buried but benign in your narrative gut, an inevitable biological reaction to the media it expects us all to have consumed. Jessica Rothe plays Tree Gelbman, a bitchy slut attending Bayfield University who wakes up hungover on her birthday, September 18th, in the dormroom of random classmate Carter (played by Israel Broussard). As she goes about her day, we see her act as the kind of woman we expect her to be. We see that she is thin and blonde and pretty and so we see that she is snarky, cruel, dismissive. Tree actively antagonizes everyone around her, she stands her father up at a lunch he arranged to commemorate her late mother, and we see that she is having an affair with her married science professor. At the end of the night, on the way to her surprise party, Tree is stabbed to death by someone wearing a mask based on the school’s mascot, The Bayfield Baby. She wakes up back in Carter’s room, eventually realizing she’s stuck in a loop and will need to repeatedly die in order to figure out who’s killing her and somehow break the cycle.
Happy Death Day knows what you’re thinking, knows all the ways you’ve been trained to evaluate the characters and situations it presents. It communes with the aforementioned cyst inside you, the one brought on by years of lampshading and meta commentary and American culture’s chronic misunderstanding of satire. The movie is better than it has any right to be because it understands not just its audiences’ expectations, but its audiences’ relationship with those expectations, what they hope to see and understand about the world through the deconstruction of empty cyphers, conduits whose static meaning was decided long ago.
In this context, Tree is a revelation. Screenwriter Scott Lobdell remixes these tropes in order to give Rothe the freedom to explore her incredibly thorough, dynamic performance. Because her repeated death acts as a visceral metaphor for her journey toward betterment (an unsubtle symbol of her past not just haunting but hunting her), and because the film’s narrative relies so heavily on the viewer’s understanding of genre conventions, Tree’s emotional development is inexorably tied not just to her navigation of the plot, but her navigation of how those watching her die understand the slasher genre more broadly. It’s a rare example of structural gimmickry that serves something beyond self-indulgence, punitive brutality, or lazy writing. Here, the multiple levels of elaborate subversion act as an argument for Tree’s genuine humanity, playing with how audiences have come to understand mean girl characters, as well as the larger, more pressing fact that mean girl characters aren’t real. Tree may not be a “good” person, but she is also not a person, period. She’s a character, one part of her larger predetermined world, a set of motives and mannerisms and aesthetic signifiers embodied by a talented actress trying to tell you a story.
It’s a complex role that Rothe succeeds in making feel seamless. She’s tasked with being the campy liaison cum medium for the bitch Tree acts like diegetically, the character she’s presented as non-diegetically, and the woman she actually is that the audience can only glimpse in slivers past these other personas. Tree is not aware that she’s in a horror movie, but she knows where the walls are, is familiar with the dusty frankness of their limits. Her awareness is constant, jagged. She knows she’s stuck in something arbitrary, arresting, and fundamentally unreal, even before the time loop stuff begins.
i.
Whatshername in the mirror is sick to death of looking at my face. I mean really, how many trees fall of their own accord? Odds are it was felled by something, a sharp split or a groaning machine. And besides, I use pieces of my body to build things all the time. Saying I’m a woman scares me because I take words themselves too seriously. Some piece of me still wants to believe itself immune to propaganda, and so I always find a reason to remain skeptical of the notion that preciousness is the enemy of play, that nothing ever gets found out if you’re afraid to fuck around.
Saying I’m a woman scares me because choosing life necessitates insistence, and insistence necessitates a level of self-possession whose dibs I usually see called by broods of annoying white women. I guess this is what people talk about when they talk about social conditioning, representation, the porn with which you’re able to touch yourself being reflected back in your mind’s I, like annihilation is cool, like the most femme thing you can do is be hung. To be a baddie, you have to be a human first, and I’m not sure I’ve made it even that far. I don’t think I’ve figured out how to Want something, not really, not yet. I don’t know where Want comes from, if the shapes it takes are the result of boundaries or stencils.
At the very least, I know there are many names for cowardice. If the faculty of touch is indeed a static, limited version of sight, you can spend your whole life caressing walls and pinching pennies to buy boots to shield your unstubbed toes. You can prostrate yourself to the electric flashes of every almostroom in the abyss of your shut eyes, an army of brief figments, there and gone again.
i.
The worst parts of Happy Death Day are the moments of emotional exposition, the scenes where playing with Genre conventions requires the movie to have Tree sit across from a man and explain her grief. The backstory about her mother’s passing is as thin and generic as the rest of the film’s narrative particulars, but the rug has to exist before it can be pulled out from under the viewer. One of the film’s best inversions, a plot point that the sequel would go on to ruin, is that Tree’s predicament is both unexplained and unrelated to any convenient metaphors of morality or closure. Her birthday, the time loop, and the murders have nothing to do with each other. Tree doesn’t live to see September 19th because she learns to be nice or because she’s finally able to process her mother’s death, but because she finds out who keeps killing her and stops them from doing so. The movie makes it clear this hasn’t really been a journey toward betterment, because those kinds of tidy arcs don’t exist. They’re cozy abstractions, stories we plaster over reality after the fact, myths canonized through relentless dissemination.
As a character, Tree works best when she’s somewhat hidden, all but drowned out by the movie’s predictable sound and fury. If we were ever able to peel back the tropes and see her as herself, she would be unremarkable, banal to the point of discomfort. Her abrasiveness is played so arch that it belies a sense of desperate sadness that writhes under the surface of her engagement with everything, staying just this side of the film’s breezy horror-comedy framing. Tree is a character Theresa Gelbman puts on to cope with a personal kind of melancholy that has rapidly outgrown the trite conventions of the world around her, a character that is both intimate and exaggerated, both herself and not. Beyond the meta pyrotechnics, Tree is just a young woman who is depressed and lonely and made to strut through a world built on cultural legacies that have nothing to do with her. In this way, she is the perfect horror heroine for the late-2010s: dissociative, repressed, driven to near insanity and an act three Buffy impersonation by the patterns and expectations of the ones watching her on the other side of the screen.
When she first encounters her Baby Mask Killer, they are standing motionless at the mouth of a dark tunnel, staring at her. When Tree’s Can-I-help-yous fail, we see her shift her stance before replying in-character: “Look, weirdo. I’m not scared. Why don’t you go try this with one of the heifers at Delta Gamma? They’re into cosplay.” It is not so much the joke that hits, but the moment of silence afterward, the panic that crawls across her face, the whimper of hesitation as Tree realizes that she might be about to get actually, physically hurt, that playing her part isn’t enough to spare her from what that part’s ultimate fate was always designed to be.
A movie with a less compelling lead might have been hobbled by how flat Tree’s family backstory falls, but Rothe elevates the film by never losing sight of what’s actually going on with her character and the heightened world she’s a part of. Happy Death Day is a movie about grief and futility, but importantly, it is not a movie about what Tree has lost or what she cannot achieve. The artifice is the point: the film is concerned not with the minutiae of what caused her despair or how she can move past it, but the mechanics of what she builds to navigate it. After all, it’s a dumb slasher movie. Nothing in her world was made to hold the weight of real Horror: she herself is barely keeping up among all the histrionic cardboard. Happy Death Day is a minor film with a minor point to make, but “pleasant surprise” is still a synonym for “miracle”.
i.
Enough with the mirror shit, the doubling, the chick with the mouth: you eject into the third person because distance makes “idolatry” easier to spell. There is no silver lining. There is the sun and there is a cloud and there is a You occupying a position that lets you decide that one’s movement in front of the other is a comfortable omen. If all language is metaphor, then pronouns are just mouth sounds that make making other mouth sounds more convenient, no more a part of you than the stitches of fabric you wear are your actual physical body. Trans people talk all the time about cracking eggs but what the fuck do I know about making omelets? I’ve convinced everyone I’ve ever slept with to cook for me by taking on all the menial, in-between stuff, the dishes and the driving. I have fed myself with my inability to feed myself. I have feasted on the strength I convinced myself it takes to starve with elegance.
By which I mean I am old enough now to have survived what my younger self believed was her only Want. I am old enough now that I don’t want the obvious to be true. I don’t want decay to be the only method by which I can trace these structures, don’t want to be aware of my contours only as they disintegrate. The wind doesn’t give a fuck about how you style that skirt you thrifted. The water couldn’t care less about how fucked up your eyeliner is or how bad you think you look in selfies. Your hatred will not save you, no matter where it’s pointed. Death and I aren’t even tight like that, so what are we even talking about?
Besides, all this handwringing assumes a perpetual future. There is a temptation to believe that, like the inconsequential control of a lucid dream, there is freedom to be found in resurrection, in being able to come back and come back, in knowing you are just one version of yourself. But I suspect liberation is allergic to the negative definition, the gentrified self-actualization of knowing what you don’t want to be. I suspect the privilege of all our extra lives is a curse, something that looms and darkens the sky over our every choice. It is not so much about growth, about what each iteration of yourself is able to accomplish, but about the fact that you will never be able to experience those developments because change changes you. You are never yourself. You are always searching. In this way, sadness is the price of admission because grief, nostalgia, yearning, is the sonar you use to walk around. There is power in that orienting echo, power in reaching for what you Want. I am not above putting opossum stickers on my insulated cocoon, not above forgetting the sun is the same sun everywhere. But I feel the cutest when I, however briefly, remember that sadness is not always sad, when I trust my senses not as evidence of the Real World, of my Real Self, but as evidence of my experience of my senses. This is not nihilism, pedantry, unbelief. On the contrary, it is a deep, devoted Love, one that opens me up. I suspect that on a molecular level, everything is a verb. If a tree falls then the bitch falls, so what? The critters and the creeping plant life will make a snazzy third place out of its once mighty stretch, and we’ll have another ending to add to the pile.
There is always a bigger structure to consider, a trope to be subverted, an expectation to play with. Breaking the fourth wall does not count as dismantling anything. At some point, that which is flammable must burn.
To choose life is to accept that some things are realer than real, and that sometimes the realest thing is what we imagine for ourselves. I start friendly debates about Trans Materialism with the sexy robots that fill my inbox with spam. They’ve taught me a lot about how exactly to wear a face, how to use my debit card’s genome to step into who I really am. I too can misuse the term “cunty” and worship anything that winks at me. I too can get high after work and baptize these skinny white starlets in my eager drool. I too can follow another meme page and trick out everything I own in cutesy pride colorways whose creators can’t afford rent. Transgression, after all, depends on curves, courtesy, color, comfort, contrivance, context. The inside parts of me make themselves known like the soft fuzz of cut wood. When a tree falls, scion or psyop, the faggots weep.
i.
If there is one thing I know I Want, it’s for Happy Death Day 2U to have not been so terrible. Christopher Landon, now taking on writing duties in addition to reprising his role as director, decided to completely switch genres for the sequel, making the movie a time travel/multiverse sci-fi comedy with a few token slasher set pieces sprinkled in. If the film had been a worthy successor, the metaphor would’ve worked perfectly: whatever existential gender questions I saw reflected in Tree’s attrition would become a more obvious part of the series’ meta text as it literally transitions, becoming something new.
Unfortunately, Happy Death Day 2U never figures out how to properly deal with the inherent problems of trying to expand on the insipid, deliberately cliché narrative setting of the original film. After a solid 30 minutes of different fake-outs riffing on bad sequel tropes, eventually we find out that the time loop was caused by a side character’s thesis project, a timey wimey macguffin called the Sisyphus Quantum Cooling Reactor (Sissy for short) that sends Tree back in time to relive another September 18th loop, this time in an alternate dimension, one where her mother is alive. Not only must she figure out how to break the cycle again and get home, but she must decide which dimension “home” really is.
Happy Death Day 2U doesn’t have plot holes so much as it operates in the smoldering craters where plot once was. It’s the kind of movie that makes less and less sense the more you try to work with it, meet it where it’s at. This is partially because the rules for these kinds of sci-fi plots are often more complicated and narratively singular than time loop stories tend to be, so they don’t lend themselves as well to the kind of measured thematic chicanery that made the first movie so satisfying. Plus, even with new faces and new roles to play, none of the other characters even threaten to become compelling, and with so much of the film spent trying to bolster the auxiliary stuff, Tree doesn’t get anything to do either. Rothe still delights when she can (like in her montage of pop-backed slapstick suicides, a structural joke borrowed from the first movie), but the film has no real interest in her interiority, so everything else crumbles accordingly.
Honestly, the only interesting thing about Happy Death Day 2U is how thoroughly its mid-credits gag undermines everything about itself and its predecessor. After an astonishingly slap-dash last 15 minutes involving one of the characters pretending to be a blind exchange student named Amelie Le Pew, followed by Lizzo’s commissioned-for-the-movie girlboss cover of “Stayin’ Alive” (“You can tell by the way I use my walk I’m a wo-man”), we see Tree and her fleet of nerdy stock characters conducting community service as penance for their shenanigans. As they pick up litter, the gang is swarmed by secret service vehicles and escorted to a DARPA laboratory, where a Black agent explains that the government has acquired Sissy and is recruiting them to help the military figure out how to weaponize it. Carter points out that actively trapping people in time loops is “messed up”, but a sideways look from the agent makes him hastily add “Unless they deserve it”. Tree’s eyes widen with epiphany as she tells everyone she thinks she has “the perfect recruit”. We cut to Danielle, one of her bitchy sorority sisters who cheated on Carter in an alternate dimension, as she wakes up screaming.
In the shadow of everything that makes our subversion possible, a name for something is a name for anything. It seems appropriate, given the ostensible subject matter, that the metaphor, with its opacity and smooth logistics, will always find a way to rise again, to crawl up my throat and turn itself into an enamel pin or a knowing grin or a gun. I don’t know how to talk about what it is. The mirror remains trite, but I remain spoken for.
