Laughing and Sad: First Impressions of BoJack Horseman

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. – Kurt Vonnegut

“If you’ll excuse me, I have to go take a shower so I can’t tell if I’m crying or not.” – BoJack Horseman, “Downer Ending” (22 Aug. 2014)    

    

            It’s hard today to imagine a world without animated comedy series aimed at adults. Some of the progenitors of the genre like The Simpsons and South Park are still with us today, though many agree that they are past their prime. For every success—King of the Hill, Rick and Morty—there are failures—Sit Down, Shut Up and the Napoleon Dynamite cartoon, for example. Some, like Bob’s Burgers, start out rough but eventually establish a world and a way of doing things that makes them worth watching. Others, like The Cleveland Show, linger for a while, existing primarily as derivative copycats of previous efforts, reaching for the lowest, grossest, and most mean-spirited of laughs. Netflix’s BoJack Horseman exists in a world where influences are easy to spot and imitation is highly recognizable. Arguably the adage about every story having already been told applies to animated comedy series aimed at adults as much as it does to movies and books.[1] In that case, one can easily look for (and find) the familiar in BoJack Horseman; however, that familiarity doesn’t feel limiting because the series is an innovator rather than imitator and because it readily pursues the answer to the creative problem posed by the adage: It takes familiar elements but repurposes them to make something recognizable but also new.

            BoJack Horseman resembles a typical animated comedy series. Anyone who watches the first few episodes and sees the bevvy of humans interacting with (living alongside, talking to, hooking up with…) anthropomorphic animals without blinking an eye could be forgiven for immediately thinking of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane’s penchant for slotting talking animal characters into an otherwise normal-seeming family situation. The fact that these are animals behaving like humans alongside humans serves as a low-key source of constant humor but also makes its way into more explicit, focused jokes that serve to remind audiences of the animal characters’ real world behavior. In one quick shot, for example, a fully-dressed, human-sized pigeon lands on a telephone wire and bears it all the way to the ground. The “black sheep” of a human family is adopted and literally a black goat. BoJack also employs cut-aways, though these tend to be quick and have more to do with the context that spawned them than those from MacFarlane’s series. BoJack has its gross out moments, including a scene at the end of the pilot where the titular character vomits a massive amount of cotton candy off the balcony of his home. The first several episodes seem like something you would see on many other animated series.

            The show quickly establishes a cast of characters and an overarching plotline about BoJack’s descent into anonymity and the goal of completing his memoirs with the help of a ghostwriter, and for a bit it seems like the series is content with this set-up and the way that similar shows always reinstate the status quo at the end of an episode, drawing out the initial premise indefinitely. If characters change, the changes are usually superficial enough to avoid upsetting a situation that can be mined for comedic gold time after time. This is part of the suspension of disbelief that comes with the territory. We have years and years of Christmas- and other holiday-themed shows that suggest the passage of time in a series like The Simpsons, but Maggie never speaks and Bart and Lisa never move up a grade in school. Some shows like Family Guy and Steven Universe purposefully draw attention to the moments when they refuse to respect these “rules.” Peter loses his job at the toy factory in one episode and must find a new job in the next one. The Crystal Gems have a falling out and all is not well at the end of the episode (or the next, or the one after that). The characters acknowledge the fact that they should restore things to the way they were because that’s how these types of things work, but they then refuse to comply.

            The implication of the conscious decision not to restore the status quo is often that on “TV” things always work out, but in the “real world” (the world of the characters inside our TVs who watch TV themselves) things don’t work like that. It’s a metafictional stroke, calling attention to the fact that the viewer is watching television in the first place while also making explicit the artificiality of that experience—the way that characters never seem to change and all is always well in time for the next week’s installment. It’s a move that forces the viewer to confront the fact that what they watch (and sometimes invest in) is not true. Oftentimes, these shows that do hit reset on their characters each week do not have anything approaching character development. Sometimes they make their characters highly mutable and capable of being whatever sort of person the writers need them to be in order to make the jokes work for a given week. The cast of MacFarlane’s series, for example, do not have stable personalities. They have certain traits they commonly embody, but they generally become whatever they need to become. Stan Smith of American Dad can be alternatively a devoted husband, a blithe misogynist who continually disrespects his wife and all women, a capable problem solver, and a childish buffoon. His fanaticism and conservatism tend to carry over through all his various roles, but as a character he is essentially flat. He becomes slightly more tolerant of gay folks over time, but he’s more or less whatever the writers want him to be from episode to episode.

            BoJack eschews this sort of behavior. Rather than hitting reset at the end of an episode, it steadily builds up backstory and personality for its characters and introduces plot threads in one episode that do not appear again until later. BoJack learns that his old friend Herb Kazzaz has terminal cancer in one episode but doesn’t act on the information until later because, we eventually learn, there is bad blood between them. We learn that BoJack’s stand-up routine used to suffer because he was continually asking audiences whether they got what he was saying. Herb helped him get over that tendency as an adult, but then we flash back in a later episode to a letter young BoJack wrote to his hero Secretariat—a letter in which he made a joke and then proceeded to ask his idol if he got it or not. BoJack’s ghostwriter and eventual friend Diane Nguyen tells us about sitting on a certain hill to look at the stars when she was young, and BoJack uses that information in another episode to locate her. Characters have stable personalities and behave in ways that feel true to them. The plot likewise feels less like an excuse to tell whatever stories the writers want from episode to episode and instead works like the narrative in a serial drama. It builds upon previous actions to create new scenarios. When BoJack purposefully sabotages his roommate’s rock opera or gets caught frolicking with the actress who used to play his daughter on the TV series Horsin’ Around, these problems result in consequences down the line. Some pay off in bigger ways than others, but there is a consistency to BoJack that is missing from other animated comedies (specifically those aimed at adults). It treats its comedy seriously.

            Early on, I characterized BoJack as dumb but fast. It didn’t feel particularly clever (see the cotton candy vomit scene), but it had good pacing and tossed out new bits fast enough that the humor arose from the breakneck pace at which the surreal interplay between humans and animal-humans shifted from one scenario to the next. However, that’s just the beginning. BoJack initially received mixed reviews, but critical perception has since shifted notably. The fact that much of the cast is made up of humanoid animals remains a source of humor at points, but the show doesn’t rest on the fact that Horseman is… well… a horse man to make the audience laugh. Instead, it goes in what could be seen as the exact opposite direction. It treats BoJack as human and his problems as important. The situations are still frequently ludicrous, but focus often shifts from cracking jokes to seriously considering the self-loathing and sadness that the main character feels.

            Not since the episode three turn in the seemingly cutesy, innocent Puella Magi Madoka Magica has a shift in tone caught my attention so unequivocally. First, BoJack was just stupidly clever background noise, but I ended up getting pulled into it. By the time I stopped watching after the first few minutes of episode twelve of season one, I was hooked. But not just because it’s a funny show. Rather, because, as Margaret Lyons puts it in “BoJack Horseman Is the Funniest Show About Depression Ever,” the show is “radically sad.” Lyons credits the series with a portrayal of depression that defies the usual “clichéd, fake-ass TV depression of just laying on the couch for an afternoon.” Instead, BoJack’s depression emerges not just from his frequently self-deprecating comments (which are played primarily for laughs early in the series) and the fact that we are explicitly told he is lonely, but also from his mistreatment of those around him.[2] His self-destructive behavior and mean streak serve to alienate him from others, prolonging his sense of loneliness. Depression is a vicious cycle and oftentimes breeds thoughts that prove to be self-fulfilling prophecies. BoJack Horseman seems to understand this and to be able to engage with it in subtle, at times deeply affecting ways.

            *Spoiler warning for the following example* The twelfth episode of the first season starts with a flashback to BoJack’s hero Secretariat giving an interview while facing allegations that he betted on races in which he was competing. Young BoJack’s letter to the older horse is read aloud on air, and in it BoJack asks his idol what to do to stop feeling sad. Secretariat tells BoJack that he was sad himself as a child, and he found the solution in racing. He encourages BoJack to keep trying and not give up—to keep moving forward. At this point, the flashback jumps forward in time to a more disheveled Secretariat standing on a bridge before jumping into the water below to commit suicide. Meanwhile, a radio in his parked car can be heard playing, and one of the personalities jokes about how someone’s parked car on the bridge is delaying traffic.

            Damn. Just damn. There’s a more eloquent way to put it, but that’s some powerful stuff. The way that BoJack characterizes himself simply as “sad” and the way that Secretariat picks up on that language and uses it himself to describe what we know to be depression is so understated and sincere that it almost seems like this moment belongs to another series. That we then almost immediately see the comforting figure of Secretariat give in to sadness himself sends a powerful message. And of course, the callousness of the radio announcer, whose ignorance only heightens our own sense of dramatic irony, is its own message as well—not just about sadness and depression but also about fame and the culture of fame. *Spoilers end here*

            In the A.V. Club’s review of the second season of BoJack, Vikram Murthi describes the series as “[a] silly satire of Hollywood culture and a dark character study about depression, [and its] best feature is that it doesn’t privilege one side of its premise over the other.”[3] The story is grounded despite the bizarre parallel universe it seems to take place in. Real world figures like Margo Martindale and Namoi Watts who keep their own names and human appearances and are even voiced by their real world counterparts bump elbows with anthromorphized raven versions of Cameron Crowe and an arachnid “Quentin Tarantulino.” Penguin Publishing is run by penguins. A Navy SEAL is a literal seal, and the news anchor on MSNBSea is a whale. Yet there’s the recognizable “Hollywood” sign (or most of it at any rate) on the hills. Like BoJack the series, the world which it occupies is recognizable but new. It’s at times hazy and surreal like the opening theme and credits sequence suggests, but it’s also familiar—physically but also ideologically.

            BoJack is an interrogation of a vapid, desensitized culture that becomes, at times, almost equally vapid and desensitized. It’s an anesthetized world where the new generation of celeb music icons rises to replace (and deride) the old before they’re even old, where people start arguments about nationalism and patriotism over the most inane things (muffins), where the dumb and the pretty seem to always succeed where others fail: A pretty boy character identified only as “A Ryan Seacrest Type” happily tells BoJack that he thought he was actually dead (since his career is as good as dead). “Milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner – gentrification?” reads the ticker below a newscast, reflecting on the illogic of the culture even in the face of very real, salient issues. On the same ticker, another segment reads, “I wanted to write novels, you know.” Lyons writes, “Everywhere you turn, someone’s struggling. A horse sitcom actor. A ghostwriter who’s worried she’s not making a difference. A nameless, faceless entity typing out the tickers for cable news shows. Everybody, maybe.”[4] Alternatively, “BoJack Horseman understands that life is tragic and comic in equal measure, and that embracing that idea without sacrificing one for the other is the key to success.”[5]

            That laughter is always sign of happiness is a common misconception in our culture. Upon closer inspection, that assumption breaks down quickly. We often laugh when we’re uncomfortable, after all. Public speakers break the ice with a joke. When we have to present in front of our peers, we resort to understatement, self-deprecation, and the deferral of praise with wit to cut the tension. If we all laugh together, we can get through this together. We might be happy in a sense because of the communal experience of sharing a laugh, but the laughter is the result of our shared discomfort. We acknowledge the fact that if we’re in the audience we may soon be in front of it. We laugh as much at the jokes as we do at the situation. Haha, we’re uncomfortable. Black humor, in particular, meets our needs when circumstances are often not happy and we need to release the tension of being unhappy. Note the quote from Kurt Vonnegut above, obviously. Note also the quote from BoJack, which is funny because of how forthright it is and because of how soul-baringly true it is.

            The opening animation for BoJack Horseman highlights BoJack’s personal depression. He doesn’t seem to move through his life so much as it seems to move without him, placing him in new situations whether he wants to be there or not. The drinking and partying are effortless. Even when a plunge into a pool from a balcony transitions into BoJack relaxing by himself, comfortably, on the water’s surface, the hazy, melancholic pulse of the music backing the image makes it surreal rather than relaxing. Of course, BoJack’s posture throughout this sequence has never radically changed. He goes from lying in bed to lying in the pool. He eventually raises a hand to block out the sun, but he’s largely a passive figure adrift in his own life.

            That being said, the series as a whole could be read as a comment on the depression of our culture. If our culture can be said to have a mental illness, then depression works. At more than one point, BoJack suggests that nothing matters. Whether he has work or not—whether his memoir paints an inaccurate picture of him or not—none of it amounts. The eleventh episode ends with him begging Diane at a question and answer session to tell him that he hasn’t squandered his life. He similarly begs at another point to be told that he is a good person underneath all the apathy and anger. A sequence where Diane goes on at length about the position of women like BoJack’s former co-star Sarah Lynn in the world when they try to reclaim their sexuality is handled jokingly but makes a similar point. The length of the diatribe, the fact that this at times crass show has suddenly incorporated academic-sounding discourse, and the obsessive way with which the socially awkward Diane pursues her line of inquiry makes it seem funny; however, in this moment she asks questions about agency much like BoJack has.

            Specifically, Diane wonders whether women can reclaim their sexuality for themselves or if the attempt only causes them to play into the desires of the male gaze that is so prevalent in society. Is it even possible to make a change? Are we paradoxically stuck aware of our problems but unable to solve them from within? These are questions posed by postmodern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon when they look at media that attempt to offer a critique (like the ostensibly satirical BoJack). Can we use the flawed systems to point out the flaws in the system? BoJack spoofs Hollywood culture using a filmic medium. It pokes fun, but does poking fun accomplish anything or is it just another type of complacency in the sense that it allows us to acknowledge we’ve got problems but to also laugh at them, feel that release of tension, and thus return to a problem-riddled existence feeling better without really doing anything about it? If we’re just stuck, does anything really matter? If we’re not really stuck, then is the only thing preventing us from making a better choice our own cowardice? Charlotte suggests as much to BoJack during a flashback to a time when she was dating Herb and BoJack was still a sober, idealistic comedian unaware of the tar pits (literal and metaphoric) beneath his feet.      

    

            I once heard that trends in America start on the west coast and work their way eastward. If that is true, then Hollywood culture is defused throughout our national culture. Even if that isn’t strictly true, it’s safe to say that the ideals of Hollywood are important parts of our culture. Despite the fact that the internet has increasingly allowed independent voices to be heard, allowing encounters with cultures not nearly as homogenized as those found in Hollywood, we still regard Tinsel Town as the place with the ideal bodies, the ideal careers, and the ideal lifestyles. Sunny, boozy, and maybe a little bit perfect. Dreamy actors and actresses who get paid to look good and to sport the sorts of bodies we lust after while living the larger than life lives we’d like to lead.

            Consequently, there’s a telling scene in which BoJack converses with his longtime rival Mr. Peanutbutter. BoJack has been cast in the role of Peanutbutter for a film, and the two are wearing similar outfits as they talk. Peanutbutter is hung up on the fact that BoJack is not right for the role because his shirt is wrong (it isn’t a v-neck) and that that constitutes a massive inaccuracy; however, as an audience, we can appreciate Peanutbutter’s shortsightedness. BoJack has the wrong shirt and the wrong body. He’s a horse instead of a dog. Peanutbutter is a well-meaning, golden-haired doof and something like the ideal of the male Hollywood success story. He’s done some acting that he is moderately well-known for and has turned to reality TV and starting his own production company to further his career. Meanwhile, the prosaic BoJack is almost universally disliked because of his abrasive personality. Reasonably intelligent, biting, clever, and not in peak physical condition—BoJack is a better surrogate for the American viewing audience than Peanutbutter, yet the latter is closer to embodying the ideals of Hollywood culture. He represents its idealism and its stupid but likable insistence. BoJack, on the other hand, is an example of its futility and unsustainability. Aware of his own limitations but desperate to succeed within those imposed on him by society (to be seen and liked again), he refuses to grow or change because he is obsessed with Horsin’ Around and the period when his career showed so much promise.

            BoJack Horseman vacillates between comedy and drama and between ideals and harsh realities—between the heights toward which we aspire and the low reality that we sometimes only secretly acknowledge as the truth—and this is a thoroughly American sort of humor.[6] We have always aspired to a dream (the American Dream) while daily confronting the disappointments of waking reality. The disparity between what we idealize and want and what we must make do with brings us back to the questions of agency and whether we can get ourselves, culturally, out of our sadness and disappointment. We may be aware of the fact that we are sad or that we’re stuck in some ways, but we may not be able to get out. We may only be able to laugh.

Notes:

[1] There is an argument to be made that what all these different mediums need is an infusion of new stories that capture the experiences of previously under-represented groups of people.

[2] Lyons, Margaret. “BoJack Horseman Is the Funniest Show About Depression Ever.” Vulture. New York Media, 11 Sept. 2014. Web. Accessed 29 Jul. 2015. <http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/bojack-horsemans-radically-funny-sadness.html>

[3] Murthi, Vikram. “Absurdist Humor, Biting Drama Groom BoJack Horseman into one of TV’s Best Shows.” A.V. Club. Onion, 17 Jul. 2015. Web. Accessed 29 Jul. 2015. <http://www.avclub.com/review/absurdist-humor-biting-drama-groom-bojack-horseman-222415>

  

[4] Lyons

[5] Murthi

[6] Rubin, Louis D., Jr. “Introduction: ‘The Great American Joke.’” The Comic Imagination in American Literature. Ed. Rubin, Jr. Rahway, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1973. 9. Print.

Do we live in a post-blog world?

“The age of the blog is forever over. The age of ‘tl;dr’ is upon us. Even tweets are deemed too wordy these days. We can dig our heels in and say ‘Not here! Not me!’ But that doesn’t change the idiot momentum of history.”

            --        Caitlín R. Kiernan, “I wouldn’t mind leaving, but I got so far to go” (13 Jul. 2015)[1]

            I have never had any doubts as far as the readership of my blog(s) is concerned. I got started blogging years ago in a Professional Writing class, so I had something like a captive audience for those first few posts. When I decided to expand the blog beyond the class assignment, I also started to link to posts through Facebook, Twitter, and eventually Tumblr to try to bring in more readers. Although the blog itself had a dedicated Facebook page, most of the views came from friends following the links. Twitter brought in a few readers, but Tumblr barely attracted any. I left my old blog behind to start again with what I conceived of as a more professional voice and an increased interest in producing quality posts with a greater emphasis on researched topics than personal stories, and at the time of my leaving I had been holding steady at seven official “followers” through Google and only a handful of actual comments on posts that mostly came from friends. Originally, this wasn’t even supposed to be another blog. It was going to be a professional portfolio or website with a little blog on the side, but when I couldn’t find a platform that provided what I was looking for, I came back to Blogger with the intention of continuing the same practices I had previously established with the old blog.

            For a little further perspective, consider that it took me nearly five years of posting semi-regularly to the old blog to hit roughly 10,373 views. This blog currently has around 200. Granted, I am not a well-known blogger. I’m not even remotely famous, and I could arguably have worked harder to draw in readers. I have recently heard at least one blogger whose posts I frequently read saying good things about Medium as a platform for potentially attracting an audience.[2] That’s beside the point as far as this post is concerned, however. I am far more interested in the relevance of blogging in general. Reading Kiernan’s post was the impetus for this interest.

            Admittedly, I felt a bit like a dinosaur having to Google “tl;dr” to find out that it meant “too long; didn’t read.” I had seen it used before, but I never took the time to figure it out. Obviously this sort of shorthand is a product of internet culture, generally, and texting and Twitter culture, specifically. Its brevity is functional but also tonal. Like other shortened words or phrases—“Totes,” “’Merica,” etc.—it suggests a flippancy or even petulance associated with adolescence or teen culture, which is often seen, reductively, as apathetic about or disinterested in complicated discourse or subjects requiring effort to understand. “Tl;dr” encapsulates not just an idea but an attitude generally associated with internet and youth cultures which are, arguably, cultures that currently dovetail in their interests and ideas. As someone who has studied education and done some teaching, I am familiar with “tl;dr” as an attitude if not as a concept with a name (so to speak). If it’s too long or not of interest, then why read it? More recently, I was working in a university library and saw that someone had written on the desk where I was sitting, “I love studying for finals not in my major. – No one ever.” Although not necessarily a matter of length in every case, the sentiment is the same. The effort required to do something makes the doing not worthwhile.

            It’s easy to see this attitude as a result of unmotivated youth, but arguing that today’s young people are less anything (less studious, less motivated, less moral) than previous generations feels remarkably shortsighted given that there has always been a cycle of older generations bemoaning the shortcomings of the next generation, which will in time be the older generation itself. If today’s youth are less likely than ever to put forth the effort to read a longer piece of writing (for example), the cause can be found not just in internet culture which promotes information glut and prioritizes easily digestible snippets over more developed texts but also in the current economic climate. The cyclical, generational argument about youth not caring is one way of explaining the problem, but I have recently begun to feel that the issue is too much caring or too much responsibility. I would argue, though I have no data to support the argument, that today’s young people are more aware than ever of what is expected of them by society. Perhaps they have less time for activities they do not find immediately enjoyable or applicable to their lives because they feel that they have such a short amount of time to work with.

            In that case, the abbreviated lingo and cries of “YOLO” take on a more desperate feel. “The end is nigh.” Youth is short, and the stakes are high. Although different people take on varying levels of responsibility at different points in their lives, the implications are the same. You have to have fun while you can, but you also need to figure out what to do with your life. You have to decide on your career path, find work, pay off any loans that you might accrue in the process. I’m generalizing heavily here, but this is the thrust of what I’m arguing: that a youthful unwillingness to read or otherwise “waste time” is a result of societal forces (cultural, economic, political) that conspire to impress upon them at increasingly young ages the utter lack of time that is afforded to them to figure out what to do and to get it done. Without going too far afield into the subjects of pedagogy and educational theory, I find it very interesting that while public schools become increasingly regimented and stress the importance of getting ready early for the future, certain collegiate subjects like Rhetoric and Composition are trying to move in more holistic directions that stress experimentation and exploration—things today’s youth seemingly have little time for.

            Again, this sense that time is short and anything that cannot be done in as short a time as possible isn’t worth doing could be a result of an increased sense of urgency amongst the younger generation, but the source is something of a mystery. In the case of internet culture, in particular, one can almost find a version of the old chicken and egg question. Did youth culture influence the creation of quickie social media culture like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr? Or did quickie social media culture influence its youthful users? The world may never know… Suffice it to say that it’s easy to see a bit of one in the other. Either way, internet culture is a fast culture, and the question of whether blogs still have a relevant place in that culture today is an important one—especially if you happen to have a blog like yours truly. When I was doing some research for this piece, in fact, one of the suggestions offered by Google to complete my “are blogs” search was “are blogs still popular.”

            According to Mary Pipher in her chapter on blogs (“Blogs—A Revolutionary New Tool”) in her book Writing to Change the World, “blogs surfaced in the 1990s as online journals for people who worked with computer technology, but they quickly morphed into a much bigger phenomenon. Computer users began posting personal blogs that included everything from daily activities to poetry, travel tips, movie reviews, political commentary, and thoughts about the universe.”[3] 9/11 served as the catalyst for a dramatic increase in the number of users with blogs, and by 2005 there were thirty-two million people in the United States (sixteen percent of the population) working blogs into their lives as part of their daily reading, while one in seventeen Americans maintained a blog of their own.[4] Of course, this data came from 2005, and Pipher’s book came out in 2006. Perhaps tellingly, Tom Watson wrote for Forbes in 2014 that when he tells social entrepreneurs to start a blog as a part of their digital media strategy, “[t]hey sometimes look at me like I teleported in from the mists of 2006.”[5] In the world of business, blogs were once integral parts of marketing; however, they have increasingly been relegated to the backburner in favor of maintaining a presence on more immediately accessible social media sites. Writing for Didit, Steve Baldwin reports that in a recent (as of May 15, 2014) study of “professional social media experts,” eighty-seven percent maintained blogs, but only thirty-four percent actually produced up-to-date content for those sites by posting at least once per week.[6]       

            Given their origins in the 90s and the fact that we now live in an increasingly streamlined, “mobile-dominated media world,” blogs have been outclassed by newer services that are definitely more efficient at allowing people to share their thoughts, though they have developed flashier and more intuitive interfaces in an effort to keep place. Although it’s certainly possible to have shorter blog posts or blogs that primarily deal in images or photographs—and these types of blogs and posts fair best on Tumblr where the most popular content is that which can be quickly digested while scrolling through updates on one’s dashboard—I find it hard to separate the notion of blogging from its root “log”: as in, a captain’s log or some other long-form, primarily text-based piece of writing.

            Interestingly, both Watson and Baldwin still encourage the use of blogs despite the trends in social media use. To a degree their sentiments echo those of Pipher from 2006. Blogs provide instant publication and the possibility for anyone with internet access and an email address to write about whatever they want and potentially join or create a discourse community. They are strictly democratic spaces, as they “offer us zero degrees of separation from people anywhere and everywhere.”[7] Whether it represents a business or an individual, a blog (even one hosted through Google) gives that group or person content control, the opportunity to connect directly with an audience, and the opportunity to establish a “brand,” which can include a space free of ads or other unrelated content which has increasingly invaded spaces like Facebook and Twitter to distract from the personable and personal aspects of those services. Baldwin specifically suggests that “social platforms” like these are transient, while “domains and blogs go on and on.” How many kids today know about MySpace or GeoCities? There is some merit to this argument given that having a domain name you own and through which you can host your content into perpetuity guarantees you web space where you can easily archive work that is difficult to find years, months, weeks, or even days after the initial posting on a site like Facebook or Twitter. Not to mention the fact that some creators are leery of using Facebook to promote original content like artwork because of potentially skeevy copyright issues.

            None of this actually answers the question of whether blogs are still a viable part of internet culture, however. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a definitive answer. There are a lot of people on the internet, and not everyone has a “tl;dr” attitude. Arguably, Medium is working to provide a platform from which internet texts of all lengths can find readers (and all readers can find the texts they will read) by offering an estimated reading time next to the link to an article. Readers can decide for themselves whether a five minute read or an eighteen-minute one better suits their needs. From an English teacher’s perspective, students read daily (all sorts of things), and there is plenty of content available for them to choose from. From a content creator’s perspective, I recognize that I live in a world influenced by youth and/or internet culture, where “tl;dr” is a likelihood, and where the sort of writing that I do is less likely to attract an audience. Although I like to hope that someone will read what I write, I also recognize the holistic value in writing for its own sake or at least for a smaller audience. I could post more often and in smaller snippets and probably draw more attention, but that’s not what I want from my own writing. It’s not what I want out of blogging. I have argued that recognizing early on what one’s ideal “endgame” in writing is is important to the writing process. An honest assessment of what one expects to get at the end of a particular writing venture is important for warding off disappointment and not expecting something from oneself superficially that one doesn’t truly want on a deeper level.

            More objectively, my final thought on the blogs issue is this: next to official news sites and platforms like Kindle that presuppose a certain amount of professionalism (though it certainly varies), a blog is the purest, widest-reaching way for individuals to self-publish in the internet age. Blogs provide access to an audience to people who would otherwise be denied access through traditional channels like publishing houses and the like. Marginalized voices can use blogs to great effect. Though the digital divide is still a very real issue (and therefore even access to blogs is gated based on economics), there is still great opportunity for self-expression to be found at minimal cost through blogging. Where one can easily be one truncated voice lost among many on Twitter or Facebook, a blog allows a voice to thrive and express itself as fully as it chooses. Relevancy is as much a matter of effective marketing one’s voice as it is a matter of being cutting edge. Blog content is your content, and what you do with it is determined by your personal endgame and limited only by your aspirations and your willingness to seek out your intended audience.

    

Notes:

[1] http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1131797.html (Author Caitlín R. Kiernan’s LiveJournal.)

[2] Lauren Modery of Hipstercrite (http://www.hipstercrite.com/). You can read her article “What I’ve Learned from Going Viral” on Medium (https://medium.com/@Hipstercrite/what-i-ve-learned-from-going-viral-b0f7c557672b).   

          

[3] Pipher, Mary. Writing to Change the World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006. 215. Print.

[4] Ibid.

[5] http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomwatson/2014/02/28/why-blogs-still-matter-for-social-entrepreneurs/ (Tom Watson’s article “Why Blogs (Still) Matter For Social Entrepreneurs.”)

[6] http://www.didit.com/are-blogs-still-important-today/ (Steve Baldwin’s article “Are Blogs Still Important Today?”)

[7] Pipher, 216-217, 221.

Seen

*In the interest of pushing more content to this blog given the glacial rate at which I am developing some longer, more formalized pieces, I am going to go ahead and offer some reflection on each week’s episode of Bryan Fuller’s beautiful Hannibal TV series on NBC.

"Hannibal Title Card." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Mar. 2014.

“Contorno” (aired 7/2/15)

            Hannibal has never been more brazen or vulnerable. During the show’s first two seasons, the titular cannibal’s murderous activities were largely left to viewers’ imaginations. Though we sometimes saw him on the brink of a kill (as with poor Beverly Katz back in season two), the unsavory business of murder was generally omitted in favor of the (arguably) equally unsettling experience of watching Hannibal prepare beautiful dishes that might at any given time contain human beings. Season three, for all its increasingly experimental visuals and at times ludicrously cerebral dialogue, has been the most direct of all when it comes to Hannibal’s murders. We’ve seen him snap a man’s neck, stab another in the head with an icepick, and disembowel and hang a third.

            The perpetrator of this violence never seems to lose his cool poise or drop the perpetually detached expression he wears no matter the stakes, but the fact that we are seeing all these murders firsthand now suggests that Hannibal is no longer concerned with going unseen. Though he seems in control of himself as usual and the assuredness with which he performs these violent suggests confidence in his decision to draw his pursuers to him, what remains largely unsaid is that this is a self-destructive behavior. In “Contorno” Hannibal goes so far as to murder Pazzi and then dangle his body from his (Hannibal’s) place of work like a grisly banner. It’s not a cry for help; it’s just further proof that Hannibal’s heart is broken and that as with Mischa before him, Will and what he represents have become preoccupations for Hannibal that he can only remedy through murder.

            The comparatively fast pace of tonight’s episode and the pay-off that comes in its final moments when Jack finally unloads on Hannibal likely comes as such a relief to the faithful who have been waiting for things to finally start happening that the excitement may obscure the fact that this is an altogether different Hannibal that we’re seeing. He is still a man who would never do anything as crass as to tell an opponent to “bring it on,” but that’s essentially what he does when he goads both Alana and Jack. Not only does Hannibal seem to have an eerily accurate understanding of what transpired between Jack and Bella during the latter’s final moments, but he then goes on to all but dare Jack to kill him as well. The implication in this taunt, of course, is that if Hannibal is going where Bella has gone, then she must not be anywhere good.

            We have seen little moments of weakness in Hannibal before and where his curiosity or interest in testing a what-if scenario have led him to do things that could potentially leave him exposed if they backfired (like tipping off Garrett Jacob Hobbs way back at the beginning of season one); however, he seems to have lost his sense of self-preservation. He is saved from death in “Contorno” only because of a thematic technicality—because, suggests the teaser for next week’s episode, Jack knows that Will has to be the one to finish things. Other than the trussing and near hanging he endured at the hands of Will’s errand boy back in "Mukōzuke," this is the worst beating Hannibal has taken in the series. Obviously it signals the beginning of the end for him.

            Hannibal’s conversation with Bedelia about snails, fireflies, sheep, and sheepdogs represents the doctor’s attempt to justify his dangerous behavior by insisting on the primacy of the food chain. Firefly offspring eat snails; sheepdogs have an innate desire to savage sheep even if their conditioning is supposed to keep them from doing it. “Contorno” keeps returning to the image of the monstrous firefly dotted with snails that Will created at the end of “Secondo” because it represents an inversion of the established patterns of animal behavior. Will is making human art. Snails are eating a firefly (of sorts). All bets are off as to who comes out on top, and Hannibal has made a grave miscalculation. Unfortunately, Hannibal’s lack of discretion still spells doom for Pazzi, who decides that the “half-life” of the honor he could regain for himself and his family name by apprehending Hannibal in the name of justice is outweighed by the thirty pieces of silver he could acquire by selling the doctor out to Mason. I have no idea how Pazzi thought he was going to get away with taking a fingerprinted knife right out from under Hannibal’s nose (one that he just put down and was bound to miss). Hannibal ought to have at least gotten Pazzi into his apartment or somewhere less public to kill him, but, then again, Pazzi should have known better than to step into the lair of “Il Mostro” alone and at night.

            Will exists on the fringes of this episode. His travels with Chiyo do yield a mention of Hannibal’s aunt Lady Murasaki, but her attendant’s motivations remain inscrutable. She knows Hannibal’s location somehow and tosses Will off the back of the train because, she argues, a violent gesture is the only kind he understands. What is the message here, then? Chiyo does not see herself as a killer—at least, she does not continually replay the act of killing her former prisoner in her head, suggesting that she either forgives herself or is a bit of a psychopath herself. The teaser for next week shows her setting the sights of a rifle on Hannibal, so she clearly plans to kill him for his treatment of her (still an ambiguous question mark for the most part) and his duplicity in having her guard and harm what seems to have been an innocent man. Does she toss Will off the train to protect him or to keep him from stealing her own revenge? Either way, she clearly thinks little of their shared revelation that he must kill Hannibal to stop himself from transforming into him.

            On the fringe of the fringe this week, we have Mason and Alana continuing their plan to have Hannibal captured and eaten. Although Mason’s aggressive sexual taunts are beginning to irritate me (after only two episodes), it is nice to have him cut through the faux-artistry at times with a disgusting, crass spin on the show’s preoccupation with food and eating. Sadly, Margot is missing from these brief visits to the Verger home.

            There are still two episodes left until we hit Red Dragon proper. Next week is “Dolce,” which means “sweet,” suggesting that we are having dessert… “Just desserts” perhaps? At any rate, the meal is winding down. The following week is “Digestivo,” which refers to a drink that comes before or after a meal, apparently to aid digestion.[1] That title in particular is ripe with meaning. On the one hand, it seems that the story of Hannibal in the wild is drawing to a close, but a new chapter of the story is also beginning. Given that the process of digestion involves mulling over the meal that has been consumed, it stands to reason that “Dolce” could settle the principle conflict of the first half of the season while “Digestivo” deals with the resulting fallout.

Note:

[1] I’m using a simple “_____ meaning” search to get this information, so there may be additional nuance here I’m missing.

Bonsoir, Mr. Robot

         

"The intertitle of the TV show." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Jun. 2015.

          USA’s new series Mr. Robot is a study in contrasts. At its worst it paints by the broadest, ugliest, crudest strokes. Characters utter drivel like comparing a computer virus to “a serial rapist” with a large penis. Several members of the principle cast have been liberally smeared with a Lisbeth Salander-esque hacker grunge. The leader of an extreme “hacktivist” Anonymous-like group called “fsociety” dresses up like the Monopoly Man to issue an ultimatum against “Evil Corp,” complete with a threat about chopping off tentacles and imagery of an octopus mixed in with a montage of clouds and cityscapes. It’s a heavy-handed use of the Anonymous shtick that comes off as almost parodic (the Monopoly Man definitely lacks the sly menace of the Guy Fawkes mask), but the show seems to take it all very seriously.

            This is a drama that sometimes soars to glorious heights—the opening sequence of the second episode mixes composition and music in ways that make it feel almost operatic—and occasionally aspires to the erudite conversational weirdness of the likes of True Detective by committing to an extended conversation between two characters like gifted hacker Elliot and his drug dealer’s supplier (also in episode two). Mr. Robot has managed to hold my attention only by catching me with a nice ’80s sci-fi flick style music track or interesting twist just as I was about to give up on it. At this point, I still do not know whether I consider it good or bad TV. All I have right now are a series of short notes and one serious thematic gripe.

            First, I am still trying to decide how I feel about Elliot himself. The character is obviously meant to have an anxiety disorder of some kind (in addition to schizophrenia), but his struggle to understand people frequently takes a backseat to the rest of the drama going on around him. It feels less like a central part of the character’s identity than in the case of, say, The Bridge’s Sonya Cross. This can be a good thing, however. Although it is nice to see characters represent a diverse range of human experiences (including mental illness), anyone who actually has or struggles with anxiety or depression or the like is probably tired of seeing that be the defining aspect of a character. Elliot has problems socializing and interacting with other people, but thus far the show’s creators have avoided turning him into a caricature. He has other facets to his character, though anyone watching the show has probably noted the troubling connection between the way that Elliot keeps a CD for each of his “victims” the way that serial killers keep trophies. Elliot is ostensibly out for justice, but we already know two episodes in that he can be selective about administering it. He allows his friend Angela to continue dating an inconstant partner because he does not want to see what her next boyfriend will be like given her bad taste in men.

            The fact that the writers have committed to having everyone use Elliot’s pet name for E-Corp (“Evil Corp”) is a subtle touch that reinforces the fact we are experiencing events from the point of view of a subjective and unreliable narrator. There is also a nice moment in episode two when one of Elliot’s hacker allies pulls him suddenly onto a subway because, she tells us, she likes to stay on her toes. What Elliot wonders but does not outright ask is whether she saw the same suited men in black moving toward them that he did. Although it would feel like a huge cop-out and cheat to have Christian Slater and his merry band of “fsociety” folks ultimately turn out to be nothing but delusion and hallucination, I do like that the show is reminding us in little ways that Elliot is compromised. Of course, it does give in at the end of the second episode and have his therapist make explicit the fact that he is backsliding.

            Unfortunately, the more inventive look from the beginning of episode two does not stick around. I cannot go in expecting every series to deliver the visual experimentation and diversity of Hannibal, but I was hoping for a little more than the usual thriller cinematography, give or take the occasional wide shot framing a character or two standing or conversing in the midst of a busy crowd or cityscape. On one hand, I understand that the swelling soundtrack and emphasis on making the space of the E-Corp building feel enormous and airy at the start of episode two is all about establishing an atmosphere for that space—something grand, operatic, and nearly Olympian. On the other hand, I am a sucker for a show that consistently gives me something different or unexpected to look at.

            The biggest problem with Mr. Robot, however, is that its primary themes of rebellion against financial institutions and our homogenization by social media is that this is a TV series airing on a channel that costs money to see. The entire time Mr. Robot is on, the network encourages you to tweet using #MrRobot. The way that it preaches against capitalist excess sounds nice, but it is a critique invested with little real bite owing to the fact that there will one day be Mr. Robot DVDs and a Mr. Robot soundtrack, and that money all goes back into the pockets of the media conglomerates. Maybe the folks behind Mr. Robot really buy this stuff, but if they do they have fallen into the same postmodern pit as other stories with a social axe to grind. Can you really critique from within the very systems that you intend to criticize? How do we tell the difference between a genuine critique and complacency disguised as rebellion? Case in point, the first episode of Mr. Robot draws particular attention to The Hunger Games as part of the media machine that is consuming us, and that story is another one that makes a point that is much blunted by the fact that it is a film to be viewed for pleasure.

            In short, The Hunger Games calls attention to the fact that our insatiable appetite for people doing dumb things onscreen may one day reach a point where we are calling the murder of actual human beings quality entertainment. The problem with this message is that The Hunger Games is a piece of media meant to be enjoyed. In reading the books or watching the films, we automatically take part in the same voyeuristic celebration of violence and murder the story purports to critique. We root for the heroes to triumph over the villains, and that triumph requires murder. We are the Capitol audience cheering on the violence. Similarly, when we pay to watch Mr. Robot and go out and tweet (or blog…) about it and provide free advertising to the companies with a vested interest in seeing it succeed, we become part of the same “evil” ubiquitous system. We appreciate it when Tyler Durden blows up the credit card companies, but since we paid to watch Fight Club using our credit cards in a world where those company buildings still stand, where does that leave us?

            We are participants in those systems even as we cheer their downfall. They are the ones who authorize, finance, and profit from the content depicting their downfall. At worst we are passive participants in our own exploitation. At best we are watching and buying and tweeting ironically, and we all know that our mindset going in means little in the long run. As Mr. Robot would point out, what matters is that it all comes back to money. We put it down, we watch, we rebel in thought alone and those we rebel against still get paid.