Stranded on stage in front of thousands of members of her adoring public, Skye is trapped and doomed — even her own mother innocuously mouths to her to smile, insisting she cover up all this pain and guilt and torment that she’s been experiencing over the last week. Where Rose saw the Monstrosity (the physical manifestation of the entity, all bloody, muscular gristle surrounding a series of mouths) emerge from the source of her trauma, her late mother, Skye once again sees a version of herself, only it’s a mirror image of herself, all glammed up for her first big song. This DemonSkye smiles as she exposes another part of Skye that she was literally trying to keep hidden: the scar from one of her wounds that travels vertically down her stomach. DemonSkye opens up this scar, allowing the Monstrosity to crawl out and force Skye’s mouth open to let it in. In reality, the amassed crowd stares horrified as Skye appears to have a seizure on stage, but before anyone can alert authorities, Skye sits back up, apparently fine. She stands, a big, nasty smile plastered over her face.
One under-discussed aspect of artists is the way that they communicate themselves through their work. In most cases, a baring of their soul is fully intentional: the actor seeks to communicate their deepest emotions, the singer projects their thoughts and feelings through music, etc. However, there also exists the fact that artists have to sell themselves in order to gain and keep an audience, to remain successful in a fickle industry. Thus, actors can be typecast, celebrities only remain interesting as long as they’re causing drama behind the scenes, and so on. When an artist is caught within their own public image, they can want to lash out at it: to shock, to upset, to stain, and even sometimes, to ruin. The final moment of “Smile 2” sees Skye Riley enact the ultimate version of this, doing something that’s partially a cry for help and partially a rejoinder to everyone who doubted her, disrespected her, abandoned her, or simply never listened to her. She slams her microphone into her face repeatedly, ending up lodging it deep inside her head through her eye socket. This is witnessed by thousands of concert attendees, which means that all of these people have just shared a collective trauma, and also likely means that each one of them is now infected with the entity. (If there is a Morris, the poor guy has his work cut out for him now!) As for Skye, she is no longer, but there is a bitter irony to her fate, a sort of pyrrhic victory. To paraphrase KISS: they wanted the mess, so now they’ve got the rest.
“Smile 2” is in theaters everywhere.
