‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ or — It’s-a Nihilistic a-Night-a-Mare?

Have you ever played Donkey Kong and wondered to yourself “Wouldn’t it be great if this video game about creatures leaping about the place was expanded into a full length feature film inhabited by vacuous entities engaged in meaningless activities with zero dramatic propulsion and all in the service of generating as much money as possible for a huge corporation already worth billions of dollars?” You have? Then ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ (2023) is for you, you infantile weirdo!

Look, it’s not that ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ is particularly bad, unwatchable or awful but more that it’s nothing than a profoundly hollow exercise in basic object recognition. That’s Mario! He’s a plumber! That’s Princess Daisy! She’s a princess! There’s a mushroom! Is that… is that a turtle? Yes, it’s a turtle! So if your idea of a great movie is watching a succession of readily identifiable objects appear on screen before your eyes for 90 minutes then this’ll blow your god-damn mind.

This makes sense, however, when you realise that ‘TSMBM’ is aimed explicitly, and exclusively, for children and/or toddlers because outside the activity of brightly coloured object recognition and familiarisation preferences there is nothing else to stimulate adult brain arousal of any discernible or experiential kind whatsoever. This results in a fascinating phenomenon — you exit ‘TSMBM’ in precisely the same emotional, psychological and neuroanatomical state as when you entered. In that sense Illumination Studio’s film functions as a sort of gap in existence, similar to the Bardo state of death described by the Tibetan Buddhists, than a visit to the cinema.

Yet this thanatological aspect of ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ is, in many ways, the fundamental crux of the entire film (it certainly isn’t to provide entertainment) and one that’s explicitly represented in the form of the character Lumalee, a tiny, cute blue creature who, acutely aware of the soulless prison they’re all capture in, has lost the will to live and so only speaks in nihilistic sentences such as — “There’s no escape. The only hope is the sweet relief of death.”

At first I thought this was a joke for the adults or maybe a sneakily slipped in cry for help by the script writers but then I realised that none of Lumalee’s lines were treated with any hint of irony and that the message of the movie was “Death is inevitable and we should embrace the fact”. Needless to say this raises some very interesting questions because although I have no problem with a film pointing out the inevitability of permanent annihilation it’s quite weird watching one that seems to actively encourage it.

This combination of the Freudian todestrieb (death drive) with the rampant commercialism of the Hollywood and Nintendo machines results in a product that is not only spectacularly empty but one that contains an even deeper and more profound void within than expected. Yet it is a void that makes total thematic sense when you remember that all drives and desires contain, and arise from, their own extinction and that the single unifying, universal and constant experience of anyone who plays Donkey Kong, Mario Kart etc is personal obliteration. This is the dark heart of the movie because the games aren’t about getting the princess, defeating Bowser or winning the race but the inescapability of individual annihilation.

Or maybe watching this movie just makes you feel like that. “Wahoo!”