Mess Flix: Mannequin
The newsletter in which I finally face my biggest fear......
Hello!
I’m coming to you fresh off the high of Zohran Mamdani winning the NYC Democratic mayoral primary and sending that troll Cuomo back to the $8K bridge he lives under. What a nice surprise for an election to finally go well for once. Especially amidst everything else transpiring in our current bleakest possible timeline.
Beyond that, I’ve just been violently sweating, in a constant state of dehydration, and trying to siphon free, maximum-strength air conditioning off whatever establishments will provide it to me. In keeping with this indoor cat lifestyle, I decided to write a classic Mess Flix breakdown for you all today dedicated to yet another terrible cult classic movie – Mannequin. And, my god. What an absolutely bonkers film.
As many of you know, I have a touch of automatonophobia, so this choice is in part a means of facing my fears. But mostly I chose it because of literally one screenshot I saw on social media that we will discuss below. And despite the film being all about an inanimate object whose job it is to wear clothes, there is an extreme lack of appealing fashions contained within this footage. However, it really did make me cackle at times. Also, despite the many offensive stereotypes contained within, I found it to ultimately be surprisingly, charmingly gay?! There’s a real peace and love sexual agenda running throughout this film. Honestly to a problematic degree, as you will see shortly.
Besides this movie has way bigger fish to fry as this thing is basically the proto incel bible. I genuinely wonder if they know about this movie because it is a romantic fantasy tailor-made for 4chan. If this movie had been released today, the discourse it would’ve caused online would’ve been so relentless and deafening, they would’ve turned this one bad movie into a trilogy of rage bait.
Ok, get your popcorn and turn the lights down low, it’s movie time!
We begin this saga in Edfu, Egypt circa ~2490 BC where Emmy, played by Kim Cattrall, is attempting to evade an arranged marriage by pretending to be a mummy which feels like a very dangerous game to play. A sure fire way to get yourself sealed up in a great pyramid for the rest of time, if you ask me. Also, from moment one, her mother played by Phyllis Newman of The Beautician and The Beast fame (well, that’s how she’s famous to me anyway) is making some powerful points. Who amongst us doesn’t wish to smoke and tell their husband to go to hell??
She then proceeds to rattle off a laundry list of things going to shit at that particular moment in Egypt as a way of explaining why Emmy having to marry a man she hates isn’t really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. And by the time she got to “the pharaoh has hemorrhoids,” I started to think to myself, man, this is sounding a hell of a lot like Trump’s America…..and it turns out I was more right about that than I even realized! But we’ll get more into that in a few screenshots…