Finished watching Midnight Mass.
One episode that struck me really hard was when the Old Lady, Mildred, gets cured of her dementia and recognizes her daughter again. And the daughter just asks her: “- Mom?”
We are our memories. Without them, we’re just bags of meat and bone.
In Episode 7, there’s an interesting continuation to the “monologs on the sofa” from Episode 4. Riley and Erin discuss the nature of death. Riley then presents death from the biological standpoint: organs failing, release of hormones. Erin presents the Gnostic standpoint: after death our soul raises that is wrapped in love. Finally, in Episode 7 Erin as she dies presents a third standpoint: from the “physicist” point of view, there’s no such thing as life or death, we are just a collection of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty, so we are walking emptiness. And from the Cosmos point of view, or “lives” are so short we may as well not exist at all.
By the end, Warren Flynn, The Young Brother, says another sharp bit:
“- If I’d known at that dinner,
the last dinner, I would have been different”. We rarely know that it’s the last time we see someone we love.
This is something Mildred already addresses, though, when she speaks with Father Paul in the church at the beginning of the episode.
“That’s how it’s supposed to work. It’s supposed to be over.”
Vampire stories are usually just a vessel. Often, just for erotic fantasies about “dangerous but handsome men”. This time: about coping with aging, mortality, addiction, guilt.
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