Hi friends
I wrote a piece about Bojack Horseman the other day, and I don’t have anywhere to place it, so I’m here it is, I’m afraid. Spoilers abound.
Normal service to resume asap – I have a brilliant In the Read interview to share in the next few days.
why I’m re-watching Bojack instead of getting into The Queen’s Gambit (or similar)
What truth are you following today? Whose narrative do you buy? Whose story is the most credible? In 2020, I feel like I’m grappling my way through a web of competing and contradictory narratives, all of which promise to put some sort of order on the chaos of this year. I distrust them all. I don’t have time to fact-check. I don’t have the energy to hypothesise. All I can do is reach out to the those closest to me and say – are you okay? Isn’t this insane?
The other thing I’ve done is watch Bojack Horseman all the way through, twice. And I want to go again. I love it, deeply and complicatedly. I turn to it in the way I turn to 30 Rock, Frasier and Seinfeld – it allows me to escape into a universe of characters I love living in a world that feels cosy and safe. If you’ve seen it, or heard a bit about it, you are by now snorting in disbelief – cosy? safe? It’s about the ravages of depression and addiction. It’s about how a bad childhood destroys you forever. It depicts a heroin overdose, grim sexual encounters, betrayal without forgiveness and the horrifying physical abuse of a woman by a (horse)man who can no longer tell what’s real.
Let me explain.
At first glance, the series is a merely an animated version of a story we’ve seen over and over again these past decades – the downfall and putative redemption(s) of a complex and troubled Great Man. Unlike Don Draper or Walter White, however, Bojack is never, even for a moment, permitted to be heroic in his flaws (this is signalled early on, when he pukes at a party, not because of drugs – of which his indeed an aficionado – but from eating too much pink candy floss). Nor are his women allowed to luxuriate prettily in their tragedy, though tragedies they indeed suffer. One of my favourite moments in the entire series is when Princess Carolyn, Bojack’s long-suffering agent and on-again off-again girlfriend introduces herself on the phone: I’m Princess Carolyn, the pink cat?
Pink cat she indeed is and this is one of the things that makes it impossible for the series to ever succumb to its own myth-making – most of its characters are animals, and it’s hard to banish humour entirely from the depiction of a friends-with-benefits set-up between a sassy cat and an alcoholic horse. There are humans here too, but there is no substantive difference between humans and the other creatures that populate the Hollywoo of Bojack Horseman. It is possible to recognise the way (real) humans project racialized identities onto each other in the ways the show invents stereotypes around certain groups (whales are sexy, horses a bit Lutheran, mice posh and weird ) but such banal sociology, while good for a few jokes, is not the real aim of Bojack. (I should mention here that there is a controversy around the show’s casting of a white actor to voice the Vietnamese-American character, Diane. I liked this interview with the show’s creator who talks about how this decision limited the way they could explore her experience as specifically Vietnamese-American, and how his colour-blind casting was bad for the show. I also think it’s funny the way he talks about getting kudos for apologising – this is very Bojack and also very Bojack).
Bojack is in his fifties as the series opens, a washed-up TV star who peaked in the nineties as the star of Horsin Around, a Who’s the Boss style sitcom about a horse who finds himself taking care of three orphaned children. We move back and forward in time between now and Bojack’s heyday of the nineties; and between now and the noughties, when his demise seemed more glamorously decadent than grim and depressing (a bender in your thirties is okay, admirable even, in your fifties, much less so). Throughout the six seasons, we are haunted by the sense that all we are seeing has come after, that we missed the chance to enjoy Bojack’s greatest years. That Bojack feels that too is perhaps the most important animating energy of the entire project.
Is it necessary to suffer to create great art? That’s a question Bojack asks himself and Bojack asks of us. It’s not essential to have a crappy childhood to make it in Hollywoo but it certainly helps, it seems. Diane (human woman), Bojack’s confidant, and wife of his relentlessly chipper alter-ego Mr Peanutbutter (yellow Labrador) also demonstrates this: her chillingly dreadful family (we meet them upon the death of her father, his body still slumped in the chair he died in, the dead do not enjoy much respect in Bojack) are something she knowingly tries to draw from to create art. Diane is a writer, and having spent the first season writing a book about Bojack, she later tries to write the memoir that she feels will validate all that she went through as a child. If she can make art out of it, then it was worth it. If she can’t, then, what was the point?
Things don’t happen like they usually do in fiction on Bojack (Diane doesn’t ever write her memoir, for example). But for all its febrile joke-per-minute denseness and meta-textual playfulness (an extended gag about 1930s screwball comedies in the show’s final stretch is really something), the series manages to create something that feels more like real life in 2020 than the grim realism of prestige TV. I tried to get into The Queens’s Gambit this week but something about the lavishness of its production values, the obviousness of its politics (I agree it’s great to show a woman in a man’s world, but the contrarian in me is weary of the way we still have to trumpet this, the way we have to make it “a thing”), made it impossible for me to watch for more than ten minutes. I wanted to go back to Bojack – where it’s not like everybody knows my name, but it does feel like everybody would understand what I’m going through.
There are two, or maybe three, or wait, actually more like five, Terrible Things that Bojack has done in his life, and that he must reckon with. The show flirts with this reckoning for a long time, and despite ourselves, we hope against hope that Bojack has learned, that he will be spared a punishment that fit his crimes. That the putative redemptions (he goes to rehab! And he tries really hard!) will suffice.
He’s not spared. Not even a little. Bojack’s reckoning comes in time for Me Too, and the show does not flinch from these resonances. Miraculously, however, it manages to do so in a way that does not feel trite, or token, or even confused. In fact, it is breathtakingly clear-sighted about the hypocrisies within us all as we try and figure out how power, creativity and abuse coalesce. Bojack is finally nailed in a TV interview that he could have escaped were it not for his own hubris; he is taken in by his own performance of remorse, he’s become the remorse horse. It’s a “thing”!
When it becomes obvious that his number is up, and he is asked, straight up, in front of the world, what about what about all of the women he has hurt, he says, incredibly, wonderfully, aptly, hilariously:
“Because that’s what’s hip now, right, hurting women? But I have also hurt a lot of men.”
Bojack, in its exuberantly dark inventiveness, shows us there is no escape, ever, from the web of narratives we are all struggling within. No way to control our tendency to make things into a “thing” and therefore impossible to understand, because “a thing” is really just a narrative, and a narrative demands a suspension of disbelief, of one sort or another.
All of this would be unbearably bleak if it were not unbearably funny too. And if the series were not also, insistently, dogmatically (pun very much intended), attached to the possibilities of love, loyalty, and enduring friendship. The last scene of the series has me in tears, every time. I won’t tell you what it is, because I want you to watch it, but it’s basically two people (sorry, a horse and a person) reaching out to each other to check – are you okay? Isn’t all of this insane?
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