[Pride 2020] "And I Still Don't Even Know How I Even Survive": Navigating Hard Times With Happy Death Day 2U

On October 15, 2016, I stepped off a plane into New York City. The taxi pulled up to a friend’s apartment. They greeted me. We caught up. They threw my dead friend’s photo in my face.

I still don’t know how he died, other than by suicide. I still don’t know what sequence of texts and Tumblr posts brought his photo to the phone that day. All I know is that at that moment, I needed a way to privately process the gut-punch of my friend’s death in a city where I had no privacy. So I hastily purchased a ticket for one to The Color Purple: The Musical. I started weeping at the first slightly despondent lyric, and I didn’t stop. Not when the theater let out. Not when I hit the tarmac in Detroit. Not while buying organic basil at Kroger.

I mourned a friend, but also the illusion that this could never happen to someone like me.

I’ll be blunt in saying that the following 10 months were the closest I’ve ever come to killing myself. The tragedy of my friend’s passing resonated with my history of mental illness and increasing academic anxieties just enough to have me cycling through a daily ritual of grieving him and wanting to die. And so, like many of us caught up in the lie that we can’t reach out for help — and without Broadway productions at hand — I drowned out the sound of my own impulses by escaping to a pitch-black movie theater.

I was never seeking out any particular kind of cinematic experience. It was only ever after entering a theater, sometime past 9 PM, that I’d be hit with the quiet realization: I was going to be processing death yet again. I’d sit down in the center of the center aisle, awash in the glow of the evening’s featured white woman — Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, or maybe Natalie Portman in Jackie — and experience my own kind of haunting. As these characters searched for loved ones in a bang on the wall or a blood-spattered jacket, I’d imagine what my hand might find if I dared explore the armrest next to me. Grasping at ghostly tendrils of air-conditioning breezing over my fingers, I resigned myself to crying out my excess anguish with the ladies on-screen. If we couldn’t escape this, at least we could survive it, together.

By the time I entered the empty theater on March 4th, 2019, I wasn’t thinking about any of this, though. Two years had passed, and my mental health and circumstances had progressed to the point that I no longer had to rely on this coping mechanism quite so often. Instead, I was back in my hometown of Lansing and craving a good scare on a Monday evening. I’d loved Happy Death Day more than almost anything else I’d watched in recent memory, mostly for the fact that it managed to mash-up a slasher with time loops. I’d loved seeing Jessica Rothe’s Tree Gelbman overcome eleven cycles’ worth of injuries the first time around, and I was excited for how the sequel would manage to surprise me (the original’s death-by-cupcake legitimately shocked me!).

The surprise of Happy Death Day 2U was how quickly it managed to go off the rails laid by its predecessor. Right as I was prepared to watch yet another character die at the hands of yet another baby-faced killer, a malfunctioning quantum reactor exploded and launched Tree and I back into the familiar hellscape of September 18th, 2017. Yeah, it was her birthday, and yes, we were going to have to wake up to that damn ringtone once again. But this wasn’t our familiar September 18th. This was an alternate reality: without a poisoned cupcake, without an insufferable rival, and without her love interest, Carter, as her boyfriend.

Oh yeah, and her mom was still alive.

We don’t get to see much of Tree’s mom in Happy Death Day. It’s only near the end of the film, when visiting her father for a birthday lunch, that Tree voices the pain she feels for a dead mother seen only in brief flashes of photo and video. Here then, as her mother comes into frame, she revises the script Tree expects to follow for however many more cycles. This is no longer a bittersweet meal between father and daughter, but a shared birthday celebration once more. Watching Tree, I empathized viscerally and vicariously as her incredulity gave way to breathless excitement. With this birthday wish granted, she could finally relax into her mom’s stable arms for the first time in years. There had been a purpose for all the deaths she’d endured after all.

I relished Tree’s ability to die through wilder and wilder suicides in pursuit of cementing her place in this reality. As Paramore’s “Hard Times” played under shots of downed drain cleaner and wood-chipped flesh, I thought back to my own suicidal summer listening to the same tune. The difference here, of course, was that Tree actually had an aim in subjecting herself to this perpetual death machine. And so I sat in that empty theater, singing, and cheered her on in the hopes that she might hold onto the sanctuary of this timeline if she could survive each new round of wounds.

Ultimately, it is Tree’s mother who twists the knife through these fantasies. When Tree is caught between reclaiming a relationship with her here or running after a future with Carter back home, her mother advises her to cut ties with the nostalgia holding her back. Faced seconds later with the prospect of Carter dying in this timeline, these words propel Tree to reboot what was supposed to be her final cycle. The loop would remain open, and the sun would rise one last time on September 18th. Tomorrow would be the dawn of a new day.

The final shared birthday lunch between Tree and her mother did its best to ensure I wouldn’t walk out of the theater dry-eyed. With the finality of someone sitting at a deathbed, Tree clasps her mother’s arm and emphasizes the weight of their final exchange:

“You know, people say ‘I love you’ all the time, but...it’s not until you can’t say it to that person’s face anymore that you really realize how much you mean it.”

The music swells, washing out all other sounds, and as they let go of their hug, they share a final glance that’s equal parts heartache and tenderness. I broke down here, finally, and cried, alone in that theater. For the mother not knowing this would be the last time they would see one another, for the daughter pretending this was not a goodbye, and for myself, having endured so many horrors just to be alone in a movie theater yet again, still mourning.

Walking out into the brisk March air thirty minutes later, it was with an understanding that my life would never make the same narrative sense as a movie like Happy Death Day 2U. There would be no eleventh hour reveal of an external killer causing all my problems, no manic rush to tie up my loose ends, and no closure with those I’d lost. Without an easy plot device to restart this cycle with myself fully intact, I would have to make due with finding value in the slow scarring over of my mental wounds.

This has meant coming to terms with how my time mourning through movies continues to frame my viewing experience. While four years ago I would rarely cry at movies, the slightest moments of on-screen sorrow now threaten to trigger my tear ducts. Especially when a plot centers around death or suicide, my immediate response is to tap into and mirror the on-screen ache that I too have known, compounded now by other losses. Nevertheless, with the passage of time,  I’ve been able to accept this exercise for how it’s helped me not only to cope, but also to grieve my loved ones and myself in a safe way.

At my lowest, I’ll return to a movie like Happy Death Day 2U that I know will force me to tap into this embodied bereavement. It’s a guarantee that while I’m rewatching, I have a contained, 100 minute runtime to engage with the memories of my dead looping through my mind. In front of the screen, I can hold space for these ghosts I’m no longer looking to exorcise — my friend, my aunt, my grandmother — and honor them with this homegrown requiem. And as the end credits blare “Stayin’ Alive” or some other cheery cover, I’m secure in the knowledge that my survival, too, is an act of loving them.

I can be the final girl they need just by moving ahead and living.