7.3/10. One of the big questions that’s developed with South Park’s big move toward serialization is “how are they going to tie this all together.” I’m a big fan of the fact that the show’s paid more attention to continuity over the past two and a half seasons, but the conclusion of these serialized elements has been a bit lumpy. One of South Park’s great advantages is its quick turnaround, which allows Matt Stone and Trey Parker to turn their focus on a dime to respond to whatever the news of the week is. But if the story of the day turns veers off into a direction that doesn’t really fit into the framework Matt and Trey have been setting up, that can make the act of giving everything a logical progression and an ending pretty unwieldy.
We saw it in Season 18, the show’s first step toward greater continuity between episodes, where the season finale was something of a letdown in terms of paying off what had been set up earlier. Things improved in Season 19, where the show’s “PC sanitation leads to ads flourishing” idea was a bit handwave-y, but at least created a thematic connection between the various stories being told over the course of the season.
But as disparate as Season 20’s interests have been in just a half-season, there seems to be an idea tying them all together, one poised to let the show bring concepts as disparate as Donald Trump’s candidacy, the cottage industry of nostalgia, increasing polarization among different groups, and trolling together into one satisfying finish.
The key is Gerald’s speech to his fellow trolls. He essentially gives them the “think bigger” monologue. While his compatriots believe that trolling is simply saying rude things to people to get them to quit social media, Gerald has a grander idea about it. Rather than just trolling one person, or trolling one group of people, he wants to create the sort of self-sustaining trolling shockwave that can’t be stopped. His pot-stirring extends to reactions and counter-reactions. True trolling, on his account, happens when you instigate people to go against one another, when people start taking sides, throwing blame around, and going back and forth until no one can remember how the whole thing started. Gerald’s favorite game, as one of my older relatives once put it, is “let’s you and him fight.”
Because that is, more or less, what Garrison-as-Trump has done, or at least participated in. He is, in some ways, the ultimate troll. He doesn’t want to be President. He admits as such when pressed. He just liked getting a reaction out of people. He liked drawing lines between people, pitting one side against another, so long as he got the cheers and admiration from it.
That’s part of what’s so funny about South Park’s choice to turn Garrison into an Andrew Dice Clay-esque stand up comedian at his campaign rally. It’s hard to call that era’s stand up comedians the original trolls, but they’re certainly a prominent analogue, from a time in which “can you believe he said that?” was very much a currency and comedy, and the differences between groups, and antagonism thereof was du jour.
(At the same time, I have to admit, there’s something very amusing and satisfying to me about Garrison saying his horrible things about women, and then responding when they leave his show, “Oh that’s your line. You were all on board when I said fuck all the immigrants, but now you’re offended.” Not that what Trump said about sexual assault wasn’t absolutely terrible, but it’s about the 90th terrible thing he’s said. To the show’s point, it seems like an odd place to draw your line of acceptability.)
The problem for Garrison, then, is that things have gone too far. When you stoke people’s anger at one another, and put yourself in the middle of it, they can turn on you. Garrison is desperate to return to his old life as a teacher, to pretend this all never happened, but he can’t. He started something, something ugly with a divisive atmosphere that he himself can’t escape the orbit of.
It fits nicely with the part of the episode of South Park elementary, where Cartman and Heidi are trying desperately themselves to end the war between the boys and the girls with their “Danishes for Denmark” plan. The entire school’s befuddled reaction to the pair’s so-cute-it’s-disgusting coupling is pitch perfect, and their song is a hoot. But the upshot of it is that even the pair’s devoted efforts to end all of this can’t end the divisiveness. Gerald started something with his trolling, something that polarized these kids, and it’s not easy to undo despite the best of intentions.
And maybe that’s how this season ends, how all of this gets tied together. There is a divide between boys and girls, between Republicans and Democrats, between protestors and counter-protestors. And whether it’s Gerald, or Trump, or perhaps J.J. Abrams as the ultimate troll, there are people out there ready willing and able to throw fuel and the fire and then sit back to watch it burn.
Randy’s speech (nominally about Star Wars: The Force Awakens but really about the attractiveness and perniciousness of nostalgia) lays it on a little thick for my tastes, but it closes the loop on this idea. When everything is so divided, we seek easy comforts, like the idea that everything should go back to how it was in some idealized past. We want pieces of that past regurgitated for us. We want reboots, united school projects, and politicians who tells us they’ll take our country back to the way things used to be.
But it’s a false promises, in cartoon form or in flesh and blood. The trolls of the world, the Garrisons, the Geralds, the Trump, the people who are happy to gin up controversy and breed divisiveness, not for any goal, but just because they love the attention and the reaction, are easy to give into when times are tough. Maybe, the way South Park closes its ambitious twentieth season, is by showing someone: Cartman, Kyle, Randy, of the state of Denmark, taking a stand, not letting the world give itself over to wistfulness and polarization, and letting the trolls go hungry.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-10-21T21:52:36Z
7.3/10. One of the big questions that’s developed with South Park’s big move toward serialization is “how are they going to tie this all together.” I’m a big fan of the fact that the show’s paid more attention to continuity over the past two and a half seasons, but the conclusion of these serialized elements has been a bit lumpy. One of South Park’s great advantages is its quick turnaround, which allows Matt Stone and Trey Parker to turn their focus on a dime to respond to whatever the news of the week is. But if the story of the day turns veers off into a direction that doesn’t really fit into the framework Matt and Trey have been setting up, that can make the act of giving everything a logical progression and an ending pretty unwieldy.
We saw it in Season 18, the show’s first step toward greater continuity between episodes, where the season finale was something of a letdown in terms of paying off what had been set up earlier. Things improved in Season 19, where the show’s “PC sanitation leads to ads flourishing” idea was a bit handwave-y, but at least created a thematic connection between the various stories being told over the course of the season.
But as disparate as Season 20’s interests have been in just a half-season, there seems to be an idea tying them all together, one poised to let the show bring concepts as disparate as Donald Trump’s candidacy, the cottage industry of nostalgia, increasing polarization among different groups, and trolling together into one satisfying finish.
The key is Gerald’s speech to his fellow trolls. He essentially gives them the “think bigger” monologue. While his compatriots believe that trolling is simply saying rude things to people to get them to quit social media, Gerald has a grander idea about it. Rather than just trolling one person, or trolling one group of people, he wants to create the sort of self-sustaining trolling shockwave that can’t be stopped. His pot-stirring extends to reactions and counter-reactions. True trolling, on his account, happens when you instigate people to go against one another, when people start taking sides, throwing blame around, and going back and forth until no one can remember how the whole thing started. Gerald’s favorite game, as one of my older relatives once put it, is “let’s you and him fight.”
Because that is, more or less, what Garrison-as-Trump has done, or at least participated in. He is, in some ways, the ultimate troll. He doesn’t want to be President. He admits as such when pressed. He just liked getting a reaction out of people. He liked drawing lines between people, pitting one side against another, so long as he got the cheers and admiration from it.
That’s part of what’s so funny about South Park’s choice to turn Garrison into an Andrew Dice Clay-esque stand up comedian at his campaign rally. It’s hard to call that era’s stand up comedians the original trolls, but they’re certainly a prominent analogue, from a time in which “can you believe he said that?” was very much a currency and comedy, and the differences between groups, and antagonism thereof was du jour.
(At the same time, I have to admit, there’s something very amusing and satisfying to me about Garrison saying his horrible things about women, and then responding when they leave his show, “Oh that’s your line. You were all on board when I said fuck all the immigrants, but now you’re offended.” Not that what Trump said about sexual assault wasn’t absolutely terrible, but it’s about the 90th terrible thing he’s said. To the show’s point, it seems like an odd place to draw your line of acceptability.)
The problem for Garrison, then, is that things have gone too far. When you stoke people’s anger at one another, and put yourself in the middle of it, they can turn on you. Garrison is desperate to return to his old life as a teacher, to pretend this all never happened, but he can’t. He started something, something ugly with a divisive atmosphere that he himself can’t escape the orbit of.
It fits nicely with the part of the episode of South Park elementary, where Cartman and Heidi are trying desperately themselves to end the war between the boys and the girls with their “Danishes for Denmark” plan. The entire school’s befuddled reaction to the pair’s so-cute-it’s-disgusting coupling is pitch perfect, and their song is a hoot. But the upshot of it is that even the pair’s devoted efforts to end all of this can’t end the divisiveness. Gerald started something with his trolling, something that polarized these kids, and it’s not easy to undo despite the best of intentions.
And maybe that’s how this season ends, how all of this gets tied together. There is a divide between boys and girls, between Republicans and Democrats, between protestors and counter-protestors. And whether it’s Gerald, or Trump, or perhaps J.J. Abrams as the ultimate troll, there are people out there ready willing and able to throw fuel and the fire and then sit back to watch it burn.
Randy’s speech (nominally about Star Wars: The Force Awakens but really about the attractiveness and perniciousness of nostalgia) lays it on a little thick for my tastes, but it closes the loop on this idea. When everything is so divided, we seek easy comforts, like the idea that everything should go back to how it was in some idealized past. We want pieces of that past regurgitated for us. We want reboots, united school projects, and politicians who tells us they’ll take our country back to the way things used to be.
But it’s a false promises, in cartoon form or in flesh and blood. The trolls of the world, the Garrisons, the Geralds, the Trump, the people who are happy to gin up controversy and breed divisiveness, not for any goal, but just because they love the attention and the reaction, are easy to give into when times are tough. Maybe, the way South Park closes its ambitious twentieth season, is by showing someone: Cartman, Kyle, Randy, of the state of Denmark, taking a stand, not letting the world give itself over to wistfulness and polarization, and letting the trolls go hungry.