I was finally persuaded to watch
the last half of the last season of BoJack Horseman, under the auspices
that it would not be as depressing as it was portended to be. While BoJack’s
drowning in the pool was foreshadowed so many times that it could be called patronizingly
redundant, (and presumed to be a decoy) and while the ominous subplots in the
eighth episode of the final season suggested some sort of looming backlash, I
still grew to feel entitled to a happy ending. I know that I was not alone in
this.
The more that I thought about
it, the more it seemed ludicrous. I kept thinking: a man’s social life hardly
accounts for the entirety of his life, much less so in a world without any sort
of stable social order but rather a disorganized herd*, and if he has truly
found Inner Peace through Rehabilitation and atonement then he should have no
trouble greeting the Media’s intrusive policies with genuine criticism.
I watched Episode Nine of Season
Six within mere minutes of its release, and thereafter I waited four months
(yes: a third of a year) to venture into the rest. Keep in mind: I had binge
watched every season up until this point. I wasn’t eager to enjoy it, nor was I
unprepared for it to end. I simply feared the effect it might have upon me if
it bombed.
*Yes: I can still make light of
this by “stable” and “herd”, though I ought not to.
The tragedy of BoJack’s apparent
death would of course have been reconciled by appeal to a lasting legacy. As
early on as I saw Hollyhock exhibiting avoidant behaviour towards him, I was
worried for the fate of our beloved protagonist. I deplored Hollyhock for her
tendencies, only because I saw how clearly she had no ground to behave that way.
She did not confront her only brother about the disturbing fact that a stranger
was spreading gossip about him, gossip for which she had no substantiation. My
only hope was that this was an adolescent college-girl phase that would pass
when Truth came to Light. This never happened, though half-truths continued to
suffice.
The behaviour of the Carson
family was utterly repulsive, but I did my best to glean from it what insight I
could. I knew the facts, even if the other characters didn’t. Penny and BoJack
were consenting adults who were motived by emotional drives. Since it has been
established by numerous authorities that morality is a refined function of our
pursuit of the passions, and since Jung demonstrated the manner in which
feeling is a rational function, I did not question their motives, knowing that
any a posteriori reflection upon that experience would already find its warrant
in Penny’s own a priori sales pitch. While Penny was obviously behaving
manipulatively by advancing upon BoJack romantically, her reasoning was
unequivocal, valid, and symptomatic of maturity, the likes of which he had no
worldly right to dismiss, as if with age he had become party to some esoteric
truth which would reveal itself to Penny within the course of only one year. The
emotions that drive our decisions may change, but the facts of their vice or
virtue do not depend upon those emotions. When BoJack explains the situation to
Diane near the end of Season Five, with cavalier abandon, he demonstrates his
progress by rationalizing his behaviour; since this was precisely the
rationalization that Penny herself used BEFORE the fact, it remains valid, and
Diane never produces a response to it. Even Diane, ever the outspoken social critic,
is rendered speechless, hence compliant.
Yet the real curveball came when
Sarah Lynn came up. BoJack’s first interview on the subject followed the format
of his first ever interview with the duplicitous journalist B. Braxby: both
parties staged a conversation to fool the audience, largely in the interest of
BoJack’s loved ones. Yet, when BoJack returns to flesh out the details, Braxby
has betrayed him, and this was to my mind one of the most disturbing moments in
a television program devoted to deprogramming television. Braxby remained
manipulative, yielding to an inexplicable temptation to mimic the destructive
tendencies of another deeply confused journalist. It was only BoJack who became
honest, upon recognition of Braxby’s duplicity. Consider the list of offenses
against him, which are astutely defined as “sandbagging”:
1. Every
question that Braxby raises is a leading question. She already believes herself
to be in possession of the Truth, through several degrees of dubious
separation. This is a technique employed by debaters, ideologues, and
psychoanalysts alike to produce only the desired result.
2. She
frequently interrupts him when he attempts to respond, all the while
establishing her overt power over the simulated reality.
3. In spite
of this, she has the nerve to pitch pseudopsychological conjecture about his “underlying
motives” for engaging in a series of absolutely consensual affairs, as though
to destroy his “ethos” (the weakest of the classical appeals, for it is
entirely projected) by accusing him of relishing the abuse of his “power”.
BoJack, having put the manipulative
lifestyle of misleading showmanship behind him, recognizes its symptoms instantly.
He proceeds to deliver one of the most moving and profound monologues in the
entire series, summarizing with poetic brilliance not only the aesthetic life
he used to live but the postmodern world which he inhabits. People do not
exhibit “patterns of behaviour”; “behaviour” is simply a psychoanalytic term,
and the patterns are transparently logocentric projections which would tempt us
by absolving us of genuine inquiry. (This reduction of Media to projections of
a neurotic psyche is, in fact, an existential realization which, not much
earlier, aids BoJack in his renunciation of Hollywoo[d].)
BoJack’s personal life is
neither the business of the Media to investigate nor of the Public to pass
judgement upon. Human beings, as anthropomorphized in this fable, make
decisions instinctively and impulsively. Those who lead the aesthetic life of
the drug addict cannot be accused of any sort of dark conspiracy because their
plight rests precisely in the lack of structure in their lives. For this
reason, Braxby’s insinuations ought to strike any viewer as propaganda designed
to reduce the Horseman persona (in itself a misleading construct) into a
caricature. Upon this strawman the Public might easily be tempted to project
their own shortcomings, but only to the extent that free, willing agents are so
weak of character that they might absolve themselves of any responsibility by
barbaric scapegoating.
BoJack recognizes, in his
psychological depth, one informed by trauma, that people at least ought NOT to
be so stupid. He owns up to everything he did, and yet he also does what I had
hoped that he would do: he tells the Truth. Everyone with whom he was involved seriously
was affected by his actions only to the extent that that same person made
decisions of equally nebulous merit. Having renounced the aesthetic life and
assumed a station in ethical life, he has not merely “earned a second chance,”
to be decided emotively. He has developed the clarity to recognize the extent
to which his “victims” were also aggressors. And he has forgiven them, understanding
that people live this way.
Alasdair MacIntyre wrote no more
than fifty years ago about the dangers of retaining moral language in a world
divorced from the traditions which produced that language. Among the scholars
whom MacIntyre all but blames for the shift are Nietzsche and Sartre, both men
whose ideas (and even names) are referenced repeatedly throughout the show. Jung,
owing some considerable debt to Nietzsche’s legacy, nonetheless characterized
Nietzsche as an introvert because Nietzsche made the MISTAKE of projecting the Will
to Power upon external objects; this is precisely what Braxby does, and
considering that she asserts her own power by doing this she is no better than
a Fascist who professes the existence of a Jewish Elite whose power must be
subverted.
Yet even Nietzsche understood
the abuse of this sort of moral power that comes about when people are labeled “evil”
through a judgement NOT upon their actions but upon their SOULS. Each situation
which Braxby raises we know as viewers to have been a complicated misadventure
for which no “right answer” ever existed. The backstory only makes me pity
BoJack more, for he was never taught how to truly hold OTHER people responsible.
It was never his legal obligation to incriminate himself for the feeble chance
of saving an addict’s life, nor was it that he didn’t try, repeatedly, to get
her sober. Yet because he was no longer a Father Figure but a peer to Sarah
Lynn, her hedonistic bender was tempting, if only as a departure from those
absurd strictures that Hollywoo(d) imposes hypocritically.
Orwell writes about the dangers
of propaganda, urging readers to discern idiomatic phrases from words. Saying
that BoJack “killed” Sarah Lynn is no less manipulative than threatening his
career to fire his best friend. Even that Executive didn’t have the power, but
she had the ILLUSION of power. BoJack does not want that power, but he is
bamboozled by its illusory allure.
By ignoring the high-context
facts of BoJack’s Life, one which was documented multiple times, to varying
degrees of depth, Braxby zeroes in on a portrait which is reductionistic and
utilitarian. She has no factual basis for her allegations, nor moral basis for
her insinuations. Self-interest drives all beings, but so long as it is
informed by Reason and NOT by affect alone, it is justified. BoJack is the only
character who seems to grasp this. This is what establishes him as the Hero of
the Story, in a Universe which is otherwise devoid of Meaning. When Braxby
compels BoJack to confess that his own self-interest produces the tragedies
which follow in his wake, she manipulates his guilt to propagate a lie.
Self-interest alone is often a sufficient motive when one is left to one’s own
devices in an Absurd World, as well as when one must speak on one’s own behalf
with righteous indignation. BoJack’s “behaviour” violates social “norms”;
outside of the murky realm of “Social Convention” which far too many adults
inhabit, that’s it.
Peer pressure is nothing worth
dying for. I was NOT expecting the sort of abuse with which the titular protagonist
meets his untimely end. Every character in BoJack Horseman struggles
with personal delusions and temptations; he simply lends them perspective.
There is nothing “psychotic” about his interview, and I doubt that ANY
interview could impact one’s “reputation” in this way. My only hope is that a
less cynical outlook will guide human beings as we must reassess miscarriages
of justice perpetrated by radical ideologies, the likes of which threatened comparable
figures such as Bill Cosby by bypassing Moral Common Sense.
[({R.G.)}]
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