Warning: This piece contains spoilers for The Midnight Club
Mike Flanagan got me again. His penchant for diving into the depths of human suffering and grief without a complete loss of hope is as cathartic as it is, at times, unnerving. I hesitated to start his latest Netflix show, The Midnight Club, as much as I was intrigued by it. The series is based on several books by young adult writer Christopher Pike, though the primary story is taken from his 1994 novel, “The Midnight Club.” The book and the series both concern a group of teens diagnosed with terminal illnesses, residing in a hospice called Brightcliffe. Every night they meet to tell each other scary stories and make a pact that the first of them to die will do everything they can to contact the others from the beyond. It is revealed in the latter half of the episode that one of the teens’ diagnoses is no longer terminal – a key plot point that shifts the series completely.
It’s been rare that media about cancer has felt relative to my own experience. I’ve never watched anything specifically about teens with cancer that has come even close to hitting the mark. Films like A Walk to Remember and The Fault in Our Stars always rang hollow to me — why were all movies about teens going through cancer treatment also romances?
It was why I was worried about watching The Midnight Club — it’s going to be a frustrating interpretation of being seriously ill as a teen. Or, and maybe worse, Flanagan will get it right and it will force me to confront things I so often try to keep buried. It turns out it was the latter, but in a surprising way. When I finally started the first episode, I was wary, but it wasn’t as triggering as I expected. I was seriously ill, but never considered terminal; there was enough distance.
But also an understanding of what it’s like to be a teenager dealing with a serious illness. How confusing and shocking it is, to have to deal with death head on. In The Midnight Club, this is mostly examined through the main character of Ilonka (Iman Benson), who actively searches for miracle cures. She struggles so hard against the inevitable of her diagnosis, that she immediately believes, upon hearing that one of the patients isn’t terminal, that it has to be her. Ilonka’s story is familiar, a fight against the unfairness of it all, and the struggle with this idea of “luck.” It’s been a key issue for me, examining my own survivor’s guilt — am I lucky to have survived or unlucky that I was diagnosed at all?
The comfortable distance the show held ended with episode eight, “Anya,” which focuses on the character of the same name (Ruth Codd), in the aftermath of discovering that her terminal diagnosis was incorrect. It follows Anya’s lonely existence as she must now move forward with her life, haunted by the friends who didn’t survive. Her life is repetitive and mundane. She works as a cashier at a grocery store, goes home to her apartment, attends group therapy, then does it all again. In the end, it’s revealed that this is all taking place in Anya’s mind as she clings to life in a coma and eventually passes away — Anya was not, after all, the one who had the misdiagnosis.
It took the entire episode to sink in for me, and not until Anya’s emotional realization that she isn’t saved, but dying, did I realize that this is essentially about serious illness and survivor’s guilt. Survivor’s guilt is something I’ve struggled with since my own diagnosis and have only in the last few years been able to name. Anya’s struggle to live when others did not, thus acknowledging the sheer dumb luck of who makes it and who does not, hit me hard. I’ve never seen it depicted on screen in so clear a way, and certainly never in relation to teen illness. I was never in hospice, but I was in a children’s cancer ward — and sometimes kids would be there one day and gone the next. It’s a challenge to feel saved when others aren’t; it’s all so arbitrary. It’s a challenge to feel saved when the aftermath of going through cancer treatment feels just as challenging — it not more, at times — as the treatment itself.
That was the case for me. Not that treatment was easy, but it felt very passive. I was too young to make decisions about my health and everything was taken care of for me. Afterwards, I had to figure out how to exist beyond constant medical care and to socialize and date after missing the entirety of my high school years. Things have gotten better, but I still often feel like I’m making up for lost time. Anya’s vision of a life post-illness, where she’s survived and others didn’t is a perfect representation of that feeling. She states in therapy, “But instead of feeling saved, I felt chewed up and spit out, like it had eaten parts of me. Good parts. And here I am, whatever’s left.” I felt chewed up. I still sometimes feel chewed up, and I certainly don’t feel saved. It’s been a long road to come to terms with feeling survivor’s guilt and ways in which to cope with bouts of anxiety and depression which may have been there without going through cancer treatment — but as my doctor said to me many years ago, “it certainly doesn’t help.” And like Anya, who doesn’t feel saved, I also don’t feel like a survivor. It’s a controversial word in the cancer community, and I don’t begrudge anyone who finds identifying that way empowering. For me, it feels wrong to suggest that I did anything different than others who didn’t make it. Without using those words exactly, Anya expresses that, too. Not saved, just chewed up with a lot of good stuff lost.
In the opening scene of The Midnight Club’s ninth episode, “The Eternal Enemy,” it is Sandra (Annarah Symone) who learns she is the one with the erroneous diagnosis. Her reaction is not one of relief and joy. Rather she states, after hearing the news, “I’m sorry. I have no idea why I feel the way I feel right now… How am I going to tell them?” Moving forward after a long illness was like that. I didn’t know how to feel for a long time. For so long I felt more comfortable being “sick”; it was easier, and I was practiced at it. Now that many years have passed, that feeling has flipped — I’m now terrified of finding out that I have a serious illness and will have to go through that all again. That the health and confidence I’ve gained in independently navigating the world will disappear.
The Midnight Club captures all the messy feelings I’ve had for the past 20 years. The show is really about stories, stories we tell ourselves and each other. Stories that pass the time we have in meaningful ways, and stories that connect us to one another and make us feel less alone in the very worst of situations. It was shocking, but incredibly cathartic to see an authentic version of my story that I never see told. Unfortunately, The Midnight Club — intended, unlike a lot of Flanagan’s television work, to be an ongoing series — has recently been canceled. I’m less upset about the cliffhanger mysteries that will go resolved, and more saddened that this genuine exploration of teenage illness and survivor’s guilt won’t continue; in my experience, it’s never been so earnestly explored.
