Anonymous1: Morbius is not a simple movie. It is an experience, an experience that rearranges your DNA on a subatomic level, reorders your chakras into a more aerodynamic configuration, and makes you question why you ever wasted your one wild precious life watching things like Citizen Kane, or "sunsets," or "your own wedding," or the slow, patient breathing of a sleeping infant. Those things are fine. Those things are fine. But have they ever made you feel like a pharmaceutical bat-god clawing his way out of a CGI chrysalis at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday? I didn't think so.
After I watched Morbius, every other movie looked like a hostage video. The Godfather? Blame, obviously a slow Sicilian guilt-trip with no echolocation whatsoever. Schindler's List? Important, sure, vital, even, but where were the bats. My own childhood home movies? Blame, blame, blame just amateurs flailing around with a camcorder, no Morbins in sight, my own mother failing, repeatedly, to deliver a single line as iconic as "It's Morbin Time." I watch the moon landing now and just feel embarrassed for everyone involved. Neil Armstrong took one small step. Adrian Toomes took one giant flight directly into my soul.
Now I only love Morbius and Jared Leto, in that order, and possibly that's the wrong order, I have not decided, I think about it nightly, I have a dry-erase board in my kitchen with the two names on it and an arrow that I move back and forth like a very small, very personal Federal Reserve. I sold my Criterion Collection on Facebook Marketplace for $40 the buyer asked if I was "doing okay" and I said "I am doing Morbin," and he left a 1-star review that I have since had laminated and framed, because suffering is part of the journey. I used the $40 to buy a single framed photograph of Jared Leto's CGI bat-cape billowing dramatically in a wind tunnel that, scientifically, should not exist indoors, in what appears to be a parking garage, at midnight, for no narratively coherent reason. I put it where my family portrait used to be. My family understands. My family gets it now too, mostly because I will not stop talking about it, mostly because I performed the entire Morbius script for them at Thanksgiving using only a flashlight, a pair of oven mitts as bat wings, and my uncle Gary as a non-consenting Matt Smith.
I have also begun referring to my apartment as "the cave," to my downstairs neighbor as "the antagonist," and to my landlord as "a man who simply does not understand the burden of being two things at once."
And then then he says it. He says "It's Morbin Time," and something in my chest, some ancient lever that has never once been pulled in 30-some years of being alive, not at my graduation, not at the birth of my nephew, not during the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy, gets pulled, hard, like a slot machine that only pays out in bats. I feel the way astronauts must feel looking back at Earth for the first time, except smaller, and louder, and with significantly more echolocation, and also slightly nauseous, the way you'd expect a man to feel after turning into a flying pharmaceutical creature against his will live on a movie screen in front of a AMC employee who is just trying to sweep up popcorn. I feel like I have been personally knighted by a sentient bat-vampire pharmaceutical executive. I feel reborn, slightly winged, faintly nocturnal, faintly allergic to sunlight, faintly suspicious of garlic bread for reasons I cannot fully explain to my nutritionist.
I have started hanging upside down in my garage "just to see." The blood rushes to my head in a way that I can only describe as correct. I have started eating dinner standing on the ceiling, metaphorically, philosophically, and on one occasion involving a stepladder, literally, before my downstairs neighbor "the antagonist" called the building manager. I bought a sonar app for my phone that just makes clicking noises, and I use it instead of Google Maps now, and I have gotten lost four times, and I regret nothing. My doctor has Concerns. She used the actual word "Concerns," capitalized, the way you'd say it if you were reading it off a clipboard at a deposition. She asked when the "echolocation thing" started, and I said "It's Morbin Time, Linda," and she wrote something down very quickly and did not look up.
I do not have Concerns. I have Morbin energy, and there is a difference, and the difference is roughly the distance between a man who watches movies and a man who has been changed by one, who has stood in the wind tunnel of his own soul and let his cape billow indoors, scientifically impossible, gloriously unbothered by the laws of physics or, frankly, narrative cohesion. And if you've truly watched the film really watched it, let it crawl down your throat and nest somewhere behind your sternum and lay its small leathery eggs of pure cinema you already know exactly what that difference is, and you, too, are probably hanging upside down somewhere right now, and to you I say, with my whole bat-shaped heart: it's Morbin Time. It's always been Morbin Time. It will, tragically, eternally, gorgeously, always be Morbin Time.
After I watched Morbius, every other movie looked like a hostage video. The Godfather? Blame, obviously a slow Sicilian guilt-trip with no echolocation whatsoever. Schindler's List? Important, sure, vital, even, but where were the bats. My own childhood home movies? Blame, blame, blame just amateurs flailing around with a camcorder, no Morbins in sight, my own mother failing, repeatedly, to deliver a single line as iconic as "It's Morbin Time." I watch the moon landing now and just feel embarrassed for everyone involved. Neil Armstrong took one small step. Adrian Toomes took one giant flight directly into my soul.
Now I only love Morbius and Jared Leto, in that order, and possibly that's the wrong order, I have not decided, I think about it nightly, I have a dry-erase board in my kitchen with the two names on it and an arrow that I move back and forth like a very small, very personal Federal Reserve. I sold my Criterion Collection on Facebook Marketplace for $40 the buyer asked if I was "doing okay" and I said "I am doing Morbin," and he left a 1-star review that I have since had laminated and framed, because suffering is part of the journey. I used the $40 to buy a single framed photograph of Jared Leto's CGI bat-cape billowing dramatically in a wind tunnel that, scientifically, should not exist indoors, in what appears to be a parking garage, at midnight, for no narratively coherent reason. I put it where my family portrait used to be. My family understands. My family gets it now too, mostly because I will not stop talking about it, mostly because I performed the entire Morbius script for them at Thanksgiving using only a flashlight, a pair of oven mitts as bat wings, and my uncle Gary as a non-consenting Matt Smith.
I have also begun referring to my apartment as "the cave," to my downstairs neighbor as "the antagonist," and to my landlord as "a man who simply does not understand the burden of being two things at once."
And then then he says it. He says "It's Morbin Time," and something in my chest, some ancient lever that has never once been pulled in 30-some years of being alive, not at my graduation, not at the birth of my nephew, not during the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy, gets pulled, hard, like a slot machine that only pays out in bats. I feel the way astronauts must feel looking back at Earth for the first time, except smaller, and louder, and with significantly more echolocation, and also slightly nauseous, the way you'd expect a man to feel after turning into a flying pharmaceutical creature against his will live on a movie screen in front of a AMC employee who is just trying to sweep up popcorn. I feel like I have been personally knighted by a sentient bat-vampire pharmaceutical executive. I feel reborn, slightly winged, faintly nocturnal, faintly allergic to sunlight, faintly suspicious of garlic bread for reasons I cannot fully explain to my nutritionist.
I have started hanging upside down in my garage "just to see." The blood rushes to my head in a way that I can only describe as correct. I have started eating dinner standing on the ceiling, metaphorically, philosophically, and on one occasion involving a stepladder, literally, before my downstairs neighbor "the antagonist" called the building manager. I bought a sonar app for my phone that just makes clicking noises, and I use it instead of Google Maps now, and I have gotten lost four times, and I regret nothing. My doctor has Concerns. She used the actual word "Concerns," capitalized, the way you'd say it if you were reading it off a clipboard at a deposition. She asked when the "echolocation thing" started, and I said "It's Morbin Time, Linda," and she wrote something down very quickly and did not look up.
I do not have Concerns. I have Morbin energy, and there is a difference, and the difference is roughly the distance between a man who watches movies and a man who has been changed by one, who has stood in the wind tunnel of his own soul and let his cape billow indoors, scientifically impossible, gloriously unbothered by the laws of physics or, frankly, narrative cohesion. And if you've truly watched the film really watched it, let it crawl down your throat and nest somewhere behind your sternum and lay its small leathery eggs of pure cinema you already know exactly what that difference is, and you, too, are probably hanging upside down somewhere right now, and to you I say, with my whole bat-shaped heart: it's Morbin Time. It's always been Morbin Time. It will, tragically, eternally, gorgeously, always be Morbin Time.