MEGAMIND (3D)

“Man has become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent...”—Sigmund Freud

Well-rested, a double feature, a rare popcorn, even—as I mount the stairs I like to stick my face in the bag and let a few salty buds leap onto my tongue. All nine theaters in use, tonight, and a quick calculation finds that this showing of this film’s worth around three grand, not counting concessions. While outside the fall sunset pours bright slag, gilds the architectural details clustered on the roofs of houses, or flares the crowns of trees.

Megamind and Metroman are classic doppelgangers, right down to the initials and the former’s compulsion, upon the latter’s faked death, to re-create him. In the vacuum villain Megamind rules undeterred, occupying city hall with his big brain and big ears and unexpected coloring and his face on a parody of the Shepard Fairey “Change” poster: he’s Obama (but why does Metroman look like Romney?). And what is it to have a “megamind,” in what does such a thing consist? Interestingly: ambition, a taste for theatrics, a facility with technology about whose value, however, both he and we are ambivalent. For his minion—a fish in a bowl—he’s designed an ape-shaped exoskeleton, thereby collapsing into one object all the evolution that precedes the human, with this twist: the fish itself occupies the very position (head, brain, speech) on which evolution’s most intensive processes were supposedly directed. As isn’t the technology Megamind creates precisely an exteriorization of an intelligence which he therefore in and of himself can’t really be said to possess.

The thing about Slavoj Zizek is the way his name, whenever invoked, elicits the spasm of anyone’s hang-up: he’s too serious, not serious enough, too trendy, not trendy enough, etc. And yet, are these not precisely the conundrums upon whose uncomfortable borders he wants to tarry, are these predicaments not our very own? For example, the characteristic genre of our time is not memoir but rather the hand-wringing article that asks of memoir whether it is okay, and what does it say about us, and Are We Allowed? And what kind of fucked-up subjects have we become, who choke on our own life stories even as they compulsively spew forth in the face of their every denial and degradation?