It’s hard to think of a show currently on air that could make me want to watch a single character speak in one long, despairing stream for nearly a whole episode. Prolonged expressions of angst can sink live-action drama, which thrives on eventfulness and conflict. But BoJack Horseman—a cartoon sitcom whose title character is a melancholic, middle-aged stallion—inhabits a genre of its own, somewhere between slapstick and theater of the absurd. Midway through the show’s new season, BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) wears a charcoal suit and stands at a pulpit next to a coffin. His mother has died. For over 20 full minutes, with no interruption, he delivers a brilliant, pained, rambling eulogy.
Written by the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with brilliant art direction by Lisa Hanawalt, the monologue careens between pathos and black humor, delusion and acceptance—and is totally transfixing. BoJack doesn’t miss his mother so much as he despises her; he is angry that she’s left him without a sense of closure. He begins his story by saying that when he went to a fast-food place and said that his mother had died, the person behind the counter gave him a free churro. Later, he ties this anecdote up in a joke: “My mother died, and all I got was this free churro.” Then he adds, “That small act of kindness showed more compassion than my mother gave me her entire goddamn life.” His voice starts to break, as he finally confronts a lifetime of abuse from his mother. It is an aria of abjection and resentment. I’m still thinking about it, days later.
If this seems like heavy stuff for a cartoon, BoJack has earned it. Over five seasons, Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt crafted a truly goofy world (there’s a spider who works as a playwright, multitasking with eight limbs, and an ingenue deer who has literal doe-eyes) that allows them to slip in and out of surreal, sometimes dark subject matter. In one episode, a pop star named Sextina Aquafina (a leotard-wearing dolphin) has a cynical hit song about abortion; in another, BoJack is present when one of his young mentees overdoses on heroin in a planetarium. In true Darwinian fashion, BoJack Horseman has evolved from an easy joke about a horse to one of the most complex and empathetic shows on television. (...)
BoJack has become, more than anything, a show about how hurt people hurt people. It is about generational trauma, and how abuse trickles down until someone works out how to stop the train. In his eulogy, BoJack muses on the nature of sitcoms as a metaphor for life. He says that in television writing, you can never have a happy ending, because then the show would be over: “There is always more show, I guess, until there isn’t.” His mother’s story may be over, but he is still living with the trauma of her life, still acting out its major scenes. He is caught in a loop—a fact underscored by the eerie sense that BoJack may not be delivering this speech to anyone at all, but may be standing in an empty room, or perhaps inventing the macabre setting in his mind. He often cues an off-screen drummer to play a snare riff after his jokes, which makes the episode feel like a dream sequence, a kind of nonsensical vaudeville act.
He recounts his entire family story: his dad’s failed ambitions, his mother’s seething. He remembers how, at parties, she sometimes temporarily dropped her mantle of martyrdom and began to dance. It was one of the few moments, he says, that he could see love between his parents. “This cynical, despicable woman he married took flight,” he says.
There is a sticky cohesion to this episode, which is the apex of the season—it both stands alone and works as a mortar for the other characters’ stories (Diane travels to Vietnam in the numb wake of her divorce, Princess Caroline is desperately trying to adopt a baby, the feckless Todd rockets to the top of the corporate ladder in a position he can neither handle nor control). This is what BoJack Horseman has been building up to for several seasons—it is a cathartic release and a cruel joke. The last words BoJack’s mother ever said to him were “I see you” from her hospital bed. It was “not a statement of judgment or disappointment,” he says, “just acceptance and the simple recognition of another person in a room. Hello there, you are a person, and I see you. Let me tell you, it is a weird thing to feel at 54 years old that for the first time in your life, your mother sees you.”
By the end of his speech, BoJack realizes that Beatrice was in the intensive care unit, and she was probably just reading the words “ICU” from a wall. He steels himself against this knowledge and says that he is relieved to finally know that, like all other creatures slithering and trotting and flapping their way through Hollywoo, he is truly on his own. Then, he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, flicking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor.
Written by the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, with brilliant art direction by Lisa Hanawalt, the monologue careens between pathos and black humor, delusion and acceptance—and is totally transfixing. BoJack doesn’t miss his mother so much as he despises her; he is angry that she’s left him without a sense of closure. He begins his story by saying that when he went to a fast-food place and said that his mother had died, the person behind the counter gave him a free churro. Later, he ties this anecdote up in a joke: “My mother died, and all I got was this free churro.” Then he adds, “That small act of kindness showed more compassion than my mother gave me her entire goddamn life.” His voice starts to break, as he finally confronts a lifetime of abuse from his mother. It is an aria of abjection and resentment. I’m still thinking about it, days later.If this seems like heavy stuff for a cartoon, BoJack has earned it. Over five seasons, Bob-Waksberg and Hanawalt crafted a truly goofy world (there’s a spider who works as a playwright, multitasking with eight limbs, and an ingenue deer who has literal doe-eyes) that allows them to slip in and out of surreal, sometimes dark subject matter. In one episode, a pop star named Sextina Aquafina (a leotard-wearing dolphin) has a cynical hit song about abortion; in another, BoJack is present when one of his young mentees overdoses on heroin in a planetarium. In true Darwinian fashion, BoJack Horseman has evolved from an easy joke about a horse to one of the most complex and empathetic shows on television. (...)
BoJack has become, more than anything, a show about how hurt people hurt people. It is about generational trauma, and how abuse trickles down until someone works out how to stop the train. In his eulogy, BoJack muses on the nature of sitcoms as a metaphor for life. He says that in television writing, you can never have a happy ending, because then the show would be over: “There is always more show, I guess, until there isn’t.” His mother’s story may be over, but he is still living with the trauma of her life, still acting out its major scenes. He is caught in a loop—a fact underscored by the eerie sense that BoJack may not be delivering this speech to anyone at all, but may be standing in an empty room, or perhaps inventing the macabre setting in his mind. He often cues an off-screen drummer to play a snare riff after his jokes, which makes the episode feel like a dream sequence, a kind of nonsensical vaudeville act.
He recounts his entire family story: his dad’s failed ambitions, his mother’s seething. He remembers how, at parties, she sometimes temporarily dropped her mantle of martyrdom and began to dance. It was one of the few moments, he says, that he could see love between his parents. “This cynical, despicable woman he married took flight,” he says.
This moment of grace, it meant something. We understood each other in a way, me and my mom and my dad. . . . My mother, she knew what it was like to feel your entire life like you are drowning, with the exception of these moments, these very rare instances in which you suddenly remember you can swim.BoJack and his circle are drowners, and always have been. But they also attempt to keep swimming, despite everything. And it makes sense that many of these characters are zoological. We are less likely to blame animals for their own pain; if they are hurt, we tend to ask what the world did to them, rather than what they did to themselves.
There is a sticky cohesion to this episode, which is the apex of the season—it both stands alone and works as a mortar for the other characters’ stories (Diane travels to Vietnam in the numb wake of her divorce, Princess Caroline is desperately trying to adopt a baby, the feckless Todd rockets to the top of the corporate ladder in a position he can neither handle nor control). This is what BoJack Horseman has been building up to for several seasons—it is a cathartic release and a cruel joke. The last words BoJack’s mother ever said to him were “I see you” from her hospital bed. It was “not a statement of judgment or disappointment,” he says, “just acceptance and the simple recognition of another person in a room. Hello there, you are a person, and I see you. Let me tell you, it is a weird thing to feel at 54 years old that for the first time in your life, your mother sees you.”
By the end of his speech, BoJack realizes that Beatrice was in the intensive care unit, and she was probably just reading the words “ICU” from a wall. He steels himself against this knowledge and says that he is relieved to finally know that, like all other creatures slithering and trotting and flapping their way through Hollywoo, he is truly on his own. Then, he looks up, and we finally see his audience: a confused-looking room full of reptiles, flicking their tongues. He is in the wrong funeral parlor.
by Rachel Syme, TNR | Read more:
Image: Netflix
