Megamind, or Coping with Rejection

11.09.2018

(posted again 03.07.2023. Note: My advice to anyone that is rejected is to remember that you have been rejected because someone couldn’t see your potential and/or value – and also, sometimes, a lot of the time, because of their prejudices and poor judgement. Don’t see yourself as a reject. I have been rejected in all the important things in life for no good reason – and because of racism – and yet I have taught at Cambridge and Oxford, got a PhD and several degrees with good grades, and become a published author and poet as well as taught voluntarily to change society for many years. I have achieved most of my ambitions despite rejection and the fact that most people wouldn’t give me a chance or what I really wanted. Rejection does not and cannot define you.)

(…) In the evening, we watched Megamind again. If you haven’t watched it, there is a spoiler here. So stop reading if you’re planning to watch it.

Megamind is a computer animated film about a super villain that eventually turns into a superhero. The theme is about how goodness and badness are related to ideas of rejection and love. Rejection leads to badness. The super villain starts off as a nice enough child, but rejection makes him choose the path of badness. Love cures him and puts him on the path of goodness, when he is finally accepted by the woman, Roxanne. Rejection by the woman makes Titan transform from a superhero to a super villain too.

Even the makers of an animated cartoon film know that rejection can make someone bad. I look into my past life and I know that it is rejection that made me do bad things, my major mistakes in life. Does this stop people from rejecting certain individuals and groups in our society? Of course it doesn’t. Something that everyone knows doesn’t change the habits of people in this world. As Michel Foucault said, society needs deviancy. It is structural. It is because we know that rejection makes deviants that people reject. People are malicious. Is rejection inevitable? Yes.

Megamind is rejected because he is different. He looks different and has a different skin colour. He is never allowed to be good. Why is Titan rejected? Titan is a sad figure. He has to go to work with the woman he loves every day and she never reciprocates his feelings. In the past, you had no contact with a woman that you might love. She was usually in the home and you had no opportunity to talk to her. Titan is forced to see the woman that he loves all the time. She is constantly on his mind and they are forced into a situation of intimacy where they are constantly alone together. Titan lives by himself in the city, a lonely individual. It appears that he doesn’t really have anyone except for Roxanne. He has curly red hair, has an overweight and unsightly body and doesn’t fit the conventional standards of male beauty. He also looks remarkably young. The woman that he loves, Roxanne, chooses a male with a different sort of appearance: he wears glasses, looks old, has a conventional hair colour and is tall and thin. He looks like a father figure rather than a young boy. Titan is thus rejected because he is seen as immature. Even when he takes on the musculature and figure of a hero, the woman still won’t see him as attractive. Is it fair to say that Titan doesn’t grow up? Is this why he is rejected? Or is it because the woman can only be attracted to someone that reminds her of the father figure?

When Titan therefore turns into a homicidal maniac that is bent on destroying the woman that has rejected him and the city, which we assume has also rejected him, since he is alone, should we be too judgemental? Should we accept that he is an immature person not fit to be a hero? I don’t think that we should. By the logic of the film, we should see Titan as just another victim of rejection and stereotyping. But this is not the direction that the film takes us in. If Megamind is the figure that is able to overcome the feeling of rejection, then Titan is the bad figure that is unable to take it.

It is obvious who I identify with. Not Megamind, the eventual hero of the tale, but Titan. Titan is right to destroy the kind of city and the kind of woman that rejected him. This is not to justify attempted murder or the systematic destruction of the physical city. These are simply fictional acts which have to be read as symbolic. The type of person that rejects us must be systematically dismantled so that they can no longer reject us because of the stereotypes that have in their minds and the false patriarchal ideals that have been planted there. The type of environment that rejects us must also be systematically dismantled so that we don’t have to be seen as bad and therefore become bad. We have to build again and arrange space differently. We have to become children again like Titan and refuse to accept rejection any more. We must not be fooled into accepting conventional love whose ultimate condition, as in the fulfilment of the romance between Megamind and Roxanne, is the preservation of the status quo, the heartless city and of the conventional identities of women and patriarchal identities, those entities which reject particular groups and build deviancy and deviants into the system.