Unlike Oedipus, Martin does not choose blindness but rather it is a result of his passion and desire for Mini. Watching Mini's First Time, the audience has a sort of god-like perspective as perhaps the audience felt in one of the great Greek theatres. As one watches the film, there is a definite feeling that it isn't going to end well for the humans involved. We can see the machinations growing and growing until they spin out of control and utter chaos is revealed. We are not sure what the fate of the characters will be, unlike Oedipus because we are so familiar with it, but like Oedipus, we know that there isn't much hope. In the Iliad and Odyssey, the gods do occasionally look down upon the humans with some compassion and interest -- and sometimes involvement. However, there aren't any gods looking down upon the characters in the film.

Mini's First Time is a story that revels in the themes of love, passion and beauty, but underneath all of those beautiful ideas is a festering ugliness. The film, while chaotic and disturbing, has a lot of very funny moments -- like Ovid's poem Metamorphoses. There's little doubt that the filmmaker wanted to show how fickle and selfish humans get themselves in trouble and their behaviors can often be viewed as a bit ridiculous. Humans have a way of making their lives -- which are pretty insignificant in the scheme of the world (especially from a god's perspective) -- into these huge messes because of characteristics like passion, desire, selfishness, and pride among other characteristics.

Mini's First Time is...

As we watch, from a god's perspective, we see the characters spinning more and more out of control, knowing that their end is going to be tragic, but what is even more tragic is that nobody seems to have any control over their own selves, which is inevitably why such a mess is made. Sleeping with ones stepfather and killing your mother are the elements of a great myth. At once the characters need to be pitied and need to be punished. If there is anything to learn from this film about human flaws, it is that we all have them, but secondly, it is that writers have been contemplating the ideas of fate for thousands of years.
Ovid begins his Metamorphoses with the first, original great metamorphosis, which is the beginning of our great universe and he makes it out of chaos. The next metamorphosis is the human race, which continues to change with the metamorphosis of people into anything that can be imagined. While Mini's First Time doesn't change humans into rocks, there are transformations that are taking place from the beginning of the film until the very end. The film is at once chaotic and predictable -- sort of like human life, in general, which great writers like Ovid and Sophocles discovered so long ago, and which human beings will keep discovering as some goes by.

Works Cited

Sophocles. (Berg, Stephen., Clay, Diskin) Oedipus the King by Sophocles. Oxford University Press: Trade edition. 1988.

Ovid. (Martin, Charles) Metamorphoses. W.W. Norton & Company. 2005.