“I believe the children are our future,

Teach them well and let them lead the way”

 

-Whitney Houston “The Greatest Love of All”

A couple of nights ago I was watching the new Joel Mchale Netflix show called, “The Joel Mchale show”, when he made a crack about QVC. Well, it wasn’t really a crack about QVC, but more of a slight aimed at the people who watch QVC. Mchale introduced his “Shopping for Shut-ins” QVC -related segment with the following: “Do you have disposable income, disposable time, and when you get right down to it, a disposable life?”.

I won’t lie, I chuckled. I don’t watch QVC, so I wasn’t the target of the jab. No harm done. But then two seconds later, it hit me: That was pretty fucking mean.

I’m not going to sit here and analyze comedy–that is seriously one of my least favorite things in the world–and I’m definitely not going to attempt to take a show that is built around snarking everything it possibly can to task, but I don’t know. It felt a bit cruel. Deep down I’m just happy that there is still a part of me that can put myself in the shoes of a QVC watcher who also enjoys the Joel Mchale show on Netflix (I am positive that this is not a huge cross-section of people), and am able to think that a joke about me having a worthless life because I watch QVC is kind of fucked up. I haven’t become completely hollow. Just mostly.

Listen, Joel Mchale is not the biggest perpetrator of meanness, he’s just the first thing that popped into my head when I needed a recent anecdote to kick this thing off with. And honestly, I really didn’t want to write about Trump, so I was trying to go a different route. But, politics aside, Trump is a giant fucking asshole, and he– and his ilk– are much better examples of the things that struck me during MON MON MON MONSTERS, so I really should have just gone with him to start this off, and I feel bad for even dragging that Joel Mchale/QVC joke into this.

Remember when Trump mocked that disabled reporter? Here’s a link if you forgot. Believe me, I know a lot has happened since this, but I still can’t get over that. I think maybe what bothers me the most is that some people found it funny in the same way I found that QVC joke funny, and it’s not the same thing at all. Joel Mchale has a Netflix show. Trump has a country. There’s an element of “punching down” to the whole thing. I want our leaders to be decent. I’m talking about Trump now, not Joel Mchale. The crassness, and meanness, exhibited by just about everybody these days worries me, and that kind of stuff starts at the top.

I’ll probably get to MON MON MON MONSTERS in the next paragraph or so, but, I think what bothers me the most is that I have started to turn into that “Think of the children” lady from The Simpsons.

Every time I see how callous, cruel, or unempathetic, society is right now, that “think of the children” shit runs through my head. And it’s not just Trump, it’s adults all over the place, including me. When I see an asshole like Trump bullying some disabled reporter, and then I see adults defending–or not giving a shit about it– it turns me into some sort of walking internet meme, and that’s what pisses me off the most. Kids see this shit. They learn from it. Stop being assholes in front of them, and at least try to be decent to one another.

Which brings me to MON MON MON MONSTERS, a new Taiwanese horror movie that hit Shudder a few months back. Produced, written, and directed by Giddens Ko, MON MON MON MONSTERS follows Lin Shu-wei (Deng Yu-kai), a senior at a Taiwanese high school where he spends most of his time as the object of humiliation by his fellow classmates. And by fellow classmates, I mean pretty much ALL of them. This is a school filled to the brim with shitty kids. There is one big bully though, and that’s Ren-hao (Kent Tsai), the leader of a small group of students that torments Lin endlessly.

As we meet this group of malcontents, we are also introduced to the titular mon mon mon monsters; made up of two sisters who are essentially Ghouls (or are we the mon mon mon monsters?). They are mean, dirty looking, and they prowl the streets of Taiwan feeding on people; specifically, the downtrodden and elderly. The group of kids, along with Lin Shu-Wei, and the mon mon mon monster’s paths cross one night at a home for the elderly, as the mon mon mon monsters are there to feed on the inhabitants, while the awful kids are there to steal a lock box filled with riches from China, which is in the possession of a war veteran that lives in the home.

As the students leave the building they come across one of the mon mon mon monsters feeding on one of the elderly folks in a dark hallway inside the home. The students run out of the building and into the streets where they witness the younger of the two mon mon mon monsters become the victim of a hit-and-run accident, leaving the mon mon mon monster wounded on the ground. The students blast the mon mon mon monster with a shovel, and take her back to their secret hideout where they tie her up and immobilize her. The rest of the movie follows the bullies as they torture and experiment on the creature, while the mon mon mon monster’s sister attempts to track her down.

There’s a lot going on in MON MON MON MONSTERS, with bullying being the obvious theme running through the film. It’s also a film that touches on the mistreatment and ignorance shown toward the elderly, but I don’t necessarily have a grasp on what it’s trying to say. For example, I think there’s something going on with the mon mon mon monsters feeding on the elderly and the poor, I just don’t know enough about the culture of Taiwan to really have a handle on it, or maybe it’s just confused anyway. It feels like there is some backstory on the creatures missing that might have provided a stronger thematic element related to why they seem to specifically feed on the poor and the elderly.

The one aspect of the movie that stood out to me though was the complete systemic failure of the institutions present in the film. MON MON MON MONSTERS is as much about the culture that has created, and in some ways encouraged these bullies, as it is about the bullies themselves. We never see the parents of the students, and in the case of Ren-Hao they aren’t there at all, as he’s been left to fend for himself by his prostitute mother, and his incarcerated father.

The other big institutional failure is that of the school itself, which is embodied by the student’s teacher, Ms. Lee. The movie opens with Lin Shu-Wei being humiliated in front of the class while his teacher looks on. Following this humiliation, Ms. Lee even encourages Lin Shu-Wei to not get the bullies in trouble, and helps integrate him into their group, as she thinks it will help his popularity.  Much of Lin Shu-Wei’s turn to the dark side can be attributed to the culture fostered by Ms. Lee, and the other adults at the school, and there is one scene that really highlights this theme.

After Ren-Hao brutally beats a fellow student in class, Ms. Lee, who is a devout Buddhist, attempts to right his behavior by offering spiritual guidance, something that Ren-Hao, rebuffs and mocks. Ms. Lee responds to Ren-Hao’s mocking of her beliefs by slapping him repeatedly, and insulting him by mentioning his criminal father, and prostitute mother. This bullying, both physical and psychological, by his teacher sends Ren-Hao into a rage, and he proceeds to take out his anger on the immobilized mon mon mon monster, beating her with a bat. This sequence is where the cyclical nature of violence created by the culture surrounding the bullies is at its clearest. With one exception, everyone in MON MON MON MONSTERS kind of sucks by the end of the movie, but for me, and maybe it’s just because I’m getting old now, the adults actions–or inactions– are at the root of why that is.

I guess we should talk about the mon mon mon monsters real quick. They’re cool, but like I mentioned earlier, I never got much of a handle on what exactly they were, and that hurt the movie for me a bit in certain points. The bullies are awful to these creatures, to the point where the movie is begging for the audience to feel sympathy for them, but that’s tough to do when most of what we have seen from the monsters are brutal attacks on societies most vulnerable citizens: the poor and the elderly. I know that the film is trying to draw some parallels between the mon mon mon monsters and the bullies, as they both attack the elderly in their own ways, but that’s where the parallels ended for me. The creatures and the bullies never align beyond surface level comparisons, and a lot of that is because we never dive too deep into the mon mon mon monsters, which is a problem when we are asked to feel sympathy for them. The only thing I really know about them is that they are sisters, they love each other, they have poison blood that causes people to spontaneously combust, and they eat old people and poor people. This isn’t a Guillermo Del Toro movie, is what I’m trying to say, I guess.

What MON MON MON MONSTERS is, is a tragedy about a kid who gets bullied to the point of losing all hope, and the institutions that fail him along the way. I know I’ve taken an American-centric approach to a story from Taiwan, but I’m an American and that’s what we do, sorry. But I also think that unfortunately, this is a pretty universal story now. It’s a story of young people, so it focuses on them predominantly, but it’s also a story about adults, the institutions they oversee, and the culture created by them that allows hope to be lost.