[8.6/10] So there was a post on Reddit the other day, asking when movies stopped showing people getting into elevators. OK, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. Movies used to show their characters walking to the door, walking down the hallway, getting into the car, stopping for gas, rolling on, arriving at their house, opening the door, and boom, that’s how you got to the next scene. Then, Godard happened, and suddenly you just cut past that stuff. The character was just in one room and then in the next and with a brief establishing shot or transition or even nothing more than the switch of backdrop, we eventually trust the audience to understand that the character did all that boring stuff in the meantime.
It’s the grammar and literacy of film audiences, and it’s just baked into our brains at this point. You don’t need to be told that Michel Poiccard didn’t apparate from one part of Marseille to another. We understand it intuitively in a way that audiences in the 1960s didn’t because we were raised on it. Maybe not to the degree that BoJack Horseman was raised on film and television, but still we know.
There are expectations on how this whole T.V. show thing works. Even in the post-Sopranos, peak T.V. era where everyone wants to do something a little differently, there’s basic rules for what television is, and how its deployed. You may not have A-plots and B-plots. You may not have three cameras or rising and falling action. But there are rules, damnit, and you’d better abide by most of them or risk alienating your audience (or taking refuge in being confusing which means your show is daring and smart).
And one of those rules, not in so many words, is don’t just have your character stand around and talk to the audience for half an hour. Save it for your one man show. Leave it on the stage. But for television, you need dynamism, you need things happening, you need multiple characters and incident and developments or people will get bored. You can’t leave your main character naked out there, especially in an animated show, when you’re not even limited to sets or locations or visual variety in the way that live action does.
But BoJack Horseman does. It gives you 21 uninterrupted minutes of its title character giving his mother’s eulogy, recounting his family history, doing a gallows humor-filled stand up routine, and processing the death of a woman he hated but still wanted approval from in one giant stream of consciousness presentation.
There’s interludes of humor in the form of those black comedy bits and the occasional musical accompaniment gag. There’s a cold open that flashes back to a glimpse of BoJack’s emotionally screwed up and emotionally screwing up father, and of BoJack’s first taste of how he thinks he’s supposed to process his mother’s absence. But for the most part, it’s just BoJack, in a room, practically talking directly to the audience, for a whole episode.
It is bananas. You could perform it as a monologue for your high school. You could print the whole thing out and turn it into one of those giant movie posters where the words make up the imagery of the film in some kind of literary pointillism. You could listen to it in the car and not miss much beyond the occasional coffin-side glance or impressionistic moment. It’s not something that had to be on television, that could only work in this medium.
And somehow, that’s what makes it feel as bold as it does, because it chooses to set aside all those tools in the T.V. toolbox that help make us feel things: the sad music, the hauntingly lit scene, the expressive reactions of other characters. It eschews using those same sweetners that help keep up the audience’s interest during a half-hour sitcom: scene changes, change-of-pace sideplots, pure comic relief. And instead it just gives you a sad, messed up horse on stage, digesting his relationship with his parents in real time for what is an eternity on television, and hopes it can keep your attention, make you feel BoJack’s pain, and thread the complex emotional and familial needles the series has been toying with for four and half season, with words alone.
Television is, as BoJack and BoJack wink at, considered more of a writer’s medium than a visual medium like film. That’s changing, but it comes from the fact that television started out as something much cheaper, much faster, and much more disposable than its cinematic brethren. There wasn’t money or time to worry about fancy images or incredible sets or stunning cinematography. You needed to film twenty something episode in about as many weeks and do it on the budget provided, which meant the spark had to come from the talents of performers like Lucille Ball and the skills of writers who could make three cameras and two rooms feel like an entire world.
That’s the advantage of the T.G.I.F. shows that Horsin’ Around is spoofing. Yeah, it’s easy to make fun at the laugh track or the outrageous situations, or the cornball humor. But those shows emerged from a long and proud tradition, of folks who may have been doing what they had to for a paycheck, but who also made some magic with the meager tools at their disposal, who taught a generation of latchkey kids and people whose lives were far removed from the ease and security of a T.V. family what good could look and feel like it.
It’s a feeling that BoJack has been chasing for his entire life, and it’s led him here, to twenty-minute half-rant/half-confession delivered to his mother’s coffin. And in those twenty minutes, he chews on his confused feelings about his parents, the way that he doesn't so much mourn his mother but mourns the end of a possibility for love from her than he didn’t really believe in in the first place, the way that he tacitly admits his father taught him not to rely on her or anyone, the way he acknowledges the screwed up solace in admitting that you’re drowning together as a family, the way he cherishes those brief respites when you can stop and see your family being as graceful and happy as anyone else’s, the way we confuse and expect big gestures in lieu of the everyday work of being good, the way we look for hidden depths and transcendent meaning in coffee mugs and I.C.U. signs and sad horse shows that may or may not be able to sustain them.
He does it all from a podium, a lecturn, a stage, that lets all that raw emotion and complicated feeling spill out and just sit there with the audience. There’s no subplot to cut to, no wacky interlude from Todd to take the edge off, no break from a man making peace with the fact that he’ll never make peace over this. It’s just there, in one big dose, for BoJack and the audience to have to swallow at the same time, in a way that T.V. almost never makes you do.
T.V. is usually gentler, easier, more escapist than that, even at its most challenging and un-user friendly. If you watch the 1960s Star Trek series you can see the wild new locales the show journeys to every week, the occasionally repetitive but differently-flavored guest stars who would arrive on a daily basis to fight our heroes or help them or just create a problem for them to be solved. And if you watched long enough, you would recognize that every other episode seems to have Captain Kirk schmoozing, smooching, and seducing his way out of (or into) whatever the problem of the week is.
It’s easy to write of Kirk as a womanizer until you realize that T.V. was different in the 1960s. However more colorful and adventure-filled Star Trek was relative to the twenty-minute speech of “Free Churro”, it was also meant to be disposable, watched once and never seen again, before Netflix binges or home video or even syndication were reasonably expectations for people to string all these disparate stories together in one cohesive whole.
You realize, then, that Kirk wasn’t meant to be a lothario in a series of continuing adventures. He was meant to be a passionate man in a bunch of disconnected stories that happened to feature the same characters. He didn’t leap from bed to bed -- he was just fated by the laws of television to find The One over and over again, because like BoJack says, and the arrival of the Starship Enterprise in last year’s Star Trek Discovery vindicates, the show just goes on.
That’s what we do when people die. We try to make sense of their life, and our relationships with them. We try to take all those individual moments that they lived, all those big events, and the moments that we shared with them, and sew them together into some sort of narrative that makes sense to us.
But lives aren’t stories. They don’t always have happy endings, or arcs, or resolution. Sometimes they just end. Sometimes you only see part of who your parents were and are and try construct the rest into something you can extract meaning from. Sometimes you only feel the ways your absent friends shaped you, or scarred you, and try to understand how and why it happened now that they’re no longer around to be asked. Sometimes you take that rush of moments and try to build it up into something you can wrap your head around, a series of episodes with lovable characters and continuity and choices that are as comprehensible as they are kind.
And sometimes, someone important in your life is gone and everything’s worse now. There are rules for television, unwritten stricture for how we communicate with one another in the medium, expectations that the audience can walk in with that may be subverted but have to be respected.
But life and death have no rules other than that each of us must experience both, however brief or painful or confusing that may be. And there are no rules for grief, the process by which we try to come to terms with a parent’s death, the marks their presence and absence have left on our lives. So BoJack Horseman breaks the rules of television, stops telling us stories, and just gives us twenty minutes of raw, writerly confession and digestion, as interconnected and familiar and yet unknowable as the real life tangles of being alive and watching someone die, without the comforts the glowing screen normally provides its hero, or its audience.
[9.8/10] It seems like every season, there’s one episode of BoJack Horseman that just floors me, and this may be the best of them all. More than BoJack’s dream sequence in S1, more than his unforgivable act at the end of S2, more than the even the harrowing end for Sarah Lynn in S3, “Time’s Arrow” is a creative, tightly-written, absolutely devastating episode of television that is the crown jewel of Season 4 and possibly the series.
The inventiveness of the structure alone sets the episode apart. It feels of a piece with the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for finding outside the box ways to communicate the idea of dementia and the brain purging and combining and reconstructing dreams and memories into one barely-comprehensible stew. The way that the episode jumps back and forth through time is a superb way to convey the way this story is jumbled up and hard to keep a foothold on for Beatrice.
And that doesn’t even take into account the other amazing visual ways the show communicates the difficulty and incoherence or what Beatrice is experiencing. The way random people lack features or have scratched out faces, the way her mother is depicted only in silhouette with the outline of that scar, the way the images stop and start or blur together at emotional moments all serve to enhance and deepen the experience.
What’s even more impressive is how “Time’s Arrow” tells a story that begins in Beatrice’s youth and ends in the present day, without ever feeling rushed or full of shortcuts. Every event matters, each is a piece of the whole, from a childhood run-in with scarlet fever to her coming out party to an argument about the maid, that convincingly accounts for how the joyful, smart young girl we meet in the Sugarman home turns into the bitter husk of a woman BoJack is putting in a home. It’s an origin story for Beatrice, and a convincing one, but also one of the parental trauma that has filtered its way down from BoJack’s grandparents all the way down to poor Hollyhock.
And my god, the psychological depth of this one! I rag on the show a decent amount for writing its pop psychology on the screen, but holy cow, the layers and layers of dysfunction and reaction and cause and effect here are just staggering. The impact of Beatrice’s father’s cajoling and her mother’s lobotomy on her development as a woman in a society that tried to force her into a role she didn’t want or necessarily fit is striking in where its tendrils reach throughout her development. The idea of rebelling against that, and the way BoJack’s dad fits into that part of her life is incredible. And the story of growing resentment over the years from a couple who once loved each other, or at least imagined they did and then found the reality different than the fantasy is striking and sad.
But that all pales in comparison in how it all of these events come together to explain Beatrice’s fraught, to say the least, relationship to motherhood and children. The climax of the episode, which intersperses scenes of the purging that happens when Beatrice contracts scarlet fever as a child, her giving birth to BoJack, and her helping her husband’s mistress give birth all add up to this complex, harrowing view of what being a mom, what having a child, amounts to in Beatrice’s eyes.
The baby doll that burns in the fire in her childhood room is an end of innocence, a gripping image that ties into Beatrice’s mother’s grief over Crackerjack’s demise and whether and how it’s acceptable to react to such a trauma. The birth of BoJack, for Beatrice, stands as the event that ruined her life. BoJack is forced to absorb the resentments that stem from Beatrice’s pregnancy being the thing that effectively (and societally) forced her to marry BoJack’s father, sending her into a loveless marriage and a life she doesn’t want all because of one night of rebellion she now bitterly regrets. For her, BoJack is an emblem of the life she never got to lead, and he unfairly suffers her abuses because of it, just like Beatrice suffered her own parents’ abuses.
Then there’s the jaw-dropping revelation that Hollyhock is not BoJack’s daughter, but rather, his sister. As telegraphed as Princess Carolyn’s life falling apart felt, this one caught me completely off-guard and it’s a startling, but powerful revelation that fits everything we know so well and yet completely changes the game. It provides the third prong of this pitchfork, the one where Beatrice is forced to help Henrietta, the woman who slept with her husband, avoid the mistake that she herself made, and in the process, tear a baby away from a mother who desperately wants to hold it. It is the culmination of so many inherited and passed down traumas and abuses, the kindness and cruelty unleashed on so many the same way it was unleashed on her, painted in a harrowing phantasmagoria of events through Beatrice’s life.
And yet, in the end, even though BoJack doesn’t know or understand these things, he cannot simply condemn his mother to suffer even if he’s understandably incapable of making peace with her. Such a horrifying series of images and events ends with an act of kindness. BoJack doesn’t understand the cycle of abuse that his mom is as much a part of as he is, but he has enough decency, enough kindness in him to leave Beatrice wrapped in a happy memory.
Like she asked his father to do, like she asked her six-year-old son to do, BoJack tells her a story. It’s a story of a warm, familiar place, of a loving family, of the simple pleasures of home and youth that began to evaporate the moment her brother didn’t return from the war. It’s BoJack’s strongest, possibly final, gift to his mother, to save her from the hellscape of her own mind and return her to that place of peace and tranquility.
More than ever, we understand the forces that conspired to make BoJack the damaged person he is today. It’s just the latest psychological casualty in a war that’s been unwittingly waged by different people across decades. But for such a difficult episode to watch and confront, it ends on a note of hope, that even with all that’s happened, BoJack has the spark of that young, happy girl who sat in her room and read stories, and gives his mother a small piece of kindness to carry with her. There stands BoJack, an individual often failing but at least trying to be better, and out there is Hollyhock, a sweet young woman, who represent the idea that maybe, just as this cycle was built up bit-by-bit, so too may it be dismantled, until that underlying sweetness is all that’s left.
