#milo morbius

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I watched Morbius in the cinema yesterday and while I feel it was lacking in some places (post to come later) one thing I did truly enjoy was its portrayal of living with a disability. While I don’t suffer from the same illness that Milo and Michael did, I do live my life in pain the majority of the time and I understand where both characters’ motivations come from.

Milo – he says in the film that they have lived their entire lives under the shadow of death and that it is time for everyone else to experience that. My condition isn’t going to kill me, but I understand the desire to make everyone else feel what you feel; every nurse that has ever looked at me like I’m a hypochondriac, every person who has ever looked at my limp with a certain expression, and that one particular kid in the supermarket who laughed at me when I kept dropping things because my fingers weren’t working properly. These are the people who, when I’m feeling particularly low, I wish that I could make experience what I feel all the time, I wish that I could give them just some of my pain and make them understand. I get where he is coming from, before people start to claim that he’s demonising people with disabilities.

On top of that, the suddenly gained ability to do things that you could only ever have dreamed of spoke to me – my condition started when I was about 12 and it took a lot of things away from me that I enjoyed including dancing, trampolining, and even now when I’m trying to re-join groups, regain some of what I have lost it is painful to constantly be reminded that I have limits other people do not. If I was suddenly given something that could remove my pain, not only remove those limits but extend my abilities? I would take it. It’s painful having to watch other people do things you desperately want to do and if I got that chance, I do think that the overwhelming relief of being free would take away from any consequences and I do think that being able to exercise control over people who could have controlled me previously would be a heady experience. *

Michael – that said, the horror of hurting people, of being out of control is completely understandable. If the cure came at the cost of other people’s lives, would I continue as I was or undo the one thing that I’ve wanted for years? I understand why they couldn’t have Michael return to his state at the start of the film because they want him for sequels etc, but I do think that if his character arc was completed it would involve going back to how he was before and continuing to search for a more reasonable cure. And yet, watching him fight desperately to avoid returning to his previous state is incredibly relatable and I think could probably be compared to a drug addiction if anyone wanted to do anything with that metaphor.

In the two of them, I see the two sides of a potential reaction – the fight between ‘I suffered, now it is their turn to suffer’ and ‘I can’t let people suffer like I did.’ It is incredibly human, and I very much enjoyed how that was the main conflict of the film.

*NB – I do not condone murder under any circumstances, this is just a reflection on how I understand.