The Animal Artifice of Bojack

Puns on Bojack

I hate puns, I fucking loathe them. When people call puns the lowest form of humor, they are being much too nice to this evil genre of pseudo-humor, which deserves to be sent to hell without a return address. Puns are the perfect display of humor for people who don't have a sense of humor, and think the world's feelings are too important to laugh at except when we make empty displays of cleverness, which is a shame because most of the people who employ puns as a humor substitute are not good enough at making puns to make decent ones.  

But Bojack Horseman raises pun to high art. Puns in Bojack are not for their own sake, they exist at the mercy of their story, to set the unreal atmosphere of Hollywood, which is already the strangest place on earth. If Hollywood, or Hollywoo, were portrayed realistically, we'd have no sense of just how strange this place really is. So instead, Hollywoo is portrayed through the ingenious masks of a world populated by anthropomorphic animals, a place where every denizen is so distinctly individual that they don't seem quite human, and their strangeness and extremity is reflected through their animal-like qualities. And in this way, Bojack Horseman clearly positions itself as a kind of successor work to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which itself clearly means to channel Chinatown in its portrayal of Los Angeles - in all its both superficial attractiveness and its dark, dark underbelly.

A lot of the very greatest TV shows, or at least the greatest shows in my esteem and a lot of others, like Mad Men or The Sopranos or Seinfeld, are extremely realistic. The reason that they can afford to be realistic is that the cartoonish elements of the characters come to us pre-exaggerated. The recently departed critic Clive James had the perfect line for this, as he did for everything else, that 'fiction is life without the dull bits.' In order to capture life as its really lived, we need to capture both what's realistic and familiar about life, and also what's strange. All lives need both solace and adventure in equal measure, and great fiction gives us this multidimensional vision of life as it's experienced. So in a work like Mad Men, the midcentury plumage of its ostentatious dress and sets and behavior that now seems strange takes care of itself. With The Sopranos, the reason they can afford to be realistic is even more obvious. The world of Jersey mobsters is already strange to the vast majority of its audience, so by recording their dark and often darkly comic behavior, The Sopranos could afford to focus amply on the ways in which the characters were exactly like us. And with Seinfeld? Well, the whole point of Seinfeld was to focus on the extreme minutia of everyday dilemmas and point up those trivialities of everyday life we take for granted. so if you're focusing on the most extreme elements of micro-realism, you need characters who are simultaneously realistic and believable yet also so cartoonish that you cannot imagine that real people would ever act that way, and there are no more extreme human cartoons on TV than Cosmo Kramer and George Costanza.

But shows like Bojack Horseman, or The Simpsons, or South Park deal with issues we think about every day. They are completely familiar to our experience rather than alien, so in order to be compelling, their creators are required to point up the ways that everything we think about is strange. South Park is produced so quickly that literally every episode past the first few seasons is tied directly to whatever the zeitgeist thinks about that week. We already know what we think about, so what we already think about has to be examined for how strange it is. The Simpsons? Well, The Simpsons is, literally at this point, the archetypal American family. In it's 1990s golden age, it examined over and over again the most recurrent, universal themes - not just in American life, but in world life, and do it in ways that are completely original. And now there is Bojack, Bojack is not about American life in nearly the same way, but it is about Hollywood, the element of American life that has dominated, some even troublesomely say 'controlled', American discourse for a whole century. Hollywood is so woven into the fabric of American experience that we take it completely for granted, we've even elected a two-term President who was a lifetime Hollywood resident. What we take for granted about Hollywood is that the people who control the discourse of this town are such atypical oddballs among Americans that there is no way that they will properly represent American concerns in ways that are good for anybody but them, and the ways they represent America are not even good for them.

What makes Bojack Horseman work is that all the artifice and the glitz of its characters are clearly a cover for a very, very human emptiness and hurt, and Bojack graphs an extremely precise map of how that hurt spreads from one person to the next, one person passing on the psychic wound to the next like original sin.

It's not a perfect show, next to something like Mad Men or even The Simpsons, I think Bojack is sometimes a little too orderly in how it assumes that there can be penance and redemption done for wrongs and solutions for how to act more ethically, when there is so much evidence, on the show no less than elsewhere, that the sins of one's lifetime are crosses to bear for which there is no way to truly unburden oneself. But there is so much about Bojack that is right and good in how it represents bad. The evil, both unwitting and sometimes witting, at the heart of American prosperity is laid bare here as rarely ever done in any work of American fiction.

On note whose relation will be explained in a moment, I don't think Bojack's distributor, Netflix,  is a good development for television. Netflix clearly means to crowd out the market for 300 television channels that gave us this 20 year golden age, and caters so precisely and algorithmically to every demographic that no shows can spread their wings in a way that's truly experimental because it might alienate its target audience. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Netflix is cancelling its most successfully experimental show a couple years before the creators hoped to end it.

But the cancellation turned out to be a move so presciently correct that it was uncanny. I yield to very few people in my Bojack fandom, but aside from that stunning funeral episode last year, I couldn't help noticing that the show was losing a bit of steam. The cancellation forced the shows writers and animators to re-focus their aim. Every episode, every scene, now matters, and this bizarre, nebulous way TV shows have of extending their final seasons to two-shorter half-seasons that make up a larger final season seems to work incredibly well for Bojack in a manner it didn't really even for Mad Men. Every one of the eight episodes just released is among their best, and together they comprise a new peak. Perfect or imperfect, this, one of strangest television shows ever made, is also one of the best. I envy anyone who has yet to make its acquaintance.