48 The New York Review
A Horse’s Remorse
Adam Thirlwell
BoJack Horseman
an animated Netflix series created
by Raphael Bob- Waksberg and
art-directed by Lisa Hanawalt
One of the pleasures of extravagant
length for someone making an art-
work—a novel, a movie, a TV series—
is how difficult it might be to predict
how the work is going to end or what
its meaning might become. Extrav-
agant length converts composition
into a hopeful but risky process of
improvisation.
Around 1917, the Russian literary
critic and revolutionary Victor Shklov-
sky wrote an essay on Don
Quixote, and in particular
on the genesis of its mythic
hero. Shklovsky argued that
Cervantes had begun his
novel as a series of episodes
with a gimmick: a character
who couldn’t distinguish
between reality and fiction.
It was only by following this
screwball joke for episode
after episode that he had
come up with something
much deeper and rarer. He
had created the compli-
cated figure of Don Qui-
xote, therefore, not before
he began but in the process
of writing his book. As he
continued to think through
its giant length, Cervantes
happened on a new inven-
tion: a character who was
fuzzy with ambiguity, a
study in self- deception, il-
lusion, and unreality, both
comical and noble, who begins the his-
tory of the modern European novel.
I’m in no way an avid watcher of
cartoons but, to risk a sense of dis-
proportion, I began to feel something
similar as the animated series BoJack
Horseman unfolded on Netflix over six
seasons and seventy- seven episodes,
beginning in 2014 and ending early
this year. “It’s not Ibsen,” went a re-
peated refrain in the show, which was
funny not just because it was a form of
immediate self- deprecation about the
show itself—a cartoon comedy whose
supporting cast includes a news anchor
who’s an irascible blue whale and a film
studio renamed Warbler Brothers—but
also because this show was Ibsen in a
way, just an opioid version: a wild inves-
tigation of self- deception and failure.
Or rather, that’s what I concluded by
the end. At first it was simply zany and
delightful, this series about a talking
horse who’s the washed- up star of a
now- forgotten 1990s hit sitcom, Hor-
sin’ Around, a saccharine confection
about a horse who adopts three human
orphans. But by the time it finished, it
had become something much grander
and more terrible. Exactly what, how-
ever, and exactly how, are conundrums
that have preoccupied me.
Created by Raphael Bob- Waksberg
and art- directed by Lisa Hanawalt,*
BoJack Horseman is set almost entirely
in a superflat, multicolored version of
Los Angeles. Against this landscape
its characters exist in sketchy, psyche-
delic outline. BoJack Horseman is
the damaged only child of a smash- up
marriage between a draft horse who’s
a failed writer and a runaway heiress
horse who never forgives her husband
or her child for her life’s unromantic
routine. BoJack moves to LA, starts
out as a stand- up comic, and becomes
friends with another comedian, Herb
Kazzaz. When Herb finally lands his
own TV show, he succeeds in persuad-
ing the network to cast BoJack as the
lead. And so begins the period of Bo-
Jack’s stardom in Horsin’ Around,
whose other star is a ten- year- old girlcalled Sarah Lynn. Twenty years later
the show is long since canceled, and
BoJack is surviving the catastrophe
of his vanished celebrity: depressed,
embittered, haunted by memories,
consuming anything—narcotic, alco-
holic—he can find, while living in his
elegant glass house in the hills.
Around him are four friends he re-
fuses to acknowledge as friends. There’s
Todd Chavez, his random twenty-
something housemate, who crashed
on his sofa one night after a party and
never left, and whose character—a gen-
tle stoner saint—is one of the lovely in-
ventions of the show. BoJack’s agent, a
pink cat called Princess Carolyn who’s
a model of self- containment, always
dressed in a fish- pattern dress and
plain cardigan, continues to patiently
look after his zombie career. Another
star from the 1990s, Mr. Peanutbutter,
an exuberantly amiable yellow Labra-
dor whose hit show Mr. Peanutbutter’s
House openly copied Horsin’ Around,
faithfully adores BoJack despite his
snarling rebuffs. But it’s Mr. Peanut-
butter’s girlfriend, a journalist named
Diane Nguyen, sardonic, self- hating, a
displaced hipster in the wilds of Holly-
wood, who becomes the closest to a
friend BoJack ever has.
That’s the entourage. Over six sea-
sons, BoJack publishes a memoir
ghostwritten by Diane that audaciously
wins a Golden Globe for best com-
edy or musical—despite being neither
of these, and also a book—as a result
of which he launches a comeback in a
biopic of Secretariat, the famed race-
horse from the 1970s. The movie is asurprising critical hit, although he fails
to win an Oscar nomination despite
his desperate campaigning. He then
stars in a philosophical detective series
called Philbert, in the course of which
he develops an opioid habit that leads
him to nearly strangle his costar. Fi-
nally, he goes to rehab and sobers up,
to begin a vita nova. But as he pursues
his earnest dream of a better life, qui-
etly teaching drama at Wesleyan, all
the violent mess of his years of casual
selfishness overtakes him in a finale of
punishment and retribution.
It’s a Hollywood story, and the
surface comic texture of the show isa constant overlay of knowing Hol-
lywood gossip, in- jokes, and pop
culture references, like its adoring
cameos for Margo Martindale, always
known as “Character Actress Margo
Martindale,” or this bit from Mr.
Peanutbutter:I had this breakthrough recently.
One day in therapy I blurted out,
“Is my problem with women any
movie directed by Christopher
Nolan? Because, yes, women are
involved, but it’s never really about
the women. It’s about me.... Then
it occurred to me: “Are my self-
destructive patterns and unexam-
ined cycles of codependency the
popular Jim Carrey character The
Mask? Because, somebody stop
me.”But the Hollywood paraphernalia is
also, I think, a clue.
The show investigates the surface of
LA’s screen world with abandon, de-
lighting in metafictional asides (“So
making TV is like a full- time job? Then
why is it so bad? I just assumed people
weren’t trying,” says one character) and
careening through some of Hollywood’s
most enduring and mythic genres, yet it
somehow emerges as sincere and mov-
ing and unique. One way of attempting
a preliminary explanation of this might
be to note something that the mashup
makes obvious. It turns out that vari-
ous Hollywood genres (sitcom, crime
drama, cartoon slapstick) overlap in
one crucial area: the way most peo-
ple in them act against their interests.Human intention, in Hollywood pro-
ductions, is often weak and intermit-
tent. Everyone is either traumatized
or the cause of trauma in others, or
sometimes both together, but no single
genre has encompassed the tragicomi-
cal craziness of this condition because
each genre is only allowed a single tone,
whereas BoJack Horseman somehow
inhabits multiple tones at once, oscillat-
ing between irony and sincerity, dam-
age and frivolity, its human murkiness
always dissolved in its candy- colored
palette. The most accurate portrait of
contemporary malaise, therefore, the
only adequate form, might have to be
a cartoon that stars an ass-
hole sublebrity horse.Animals who talk are one
of mythology’s deep forms,
and some of the most dis-
turbing versions are the
chimeras, fantastical beings
who are part animal, part
human, little nodes of for-
bidden energy: the centaurs
and the satyrs, the minotaur
in his labyrinth. In litera-
ture these monsters retain
their mystical wildness but
sometimes add an antic
comic tenderness: Apulei-
us’s hero transformed into a
golden ass or Shakespeare’s
Bottom wandering through
a forest with the head of a
donkey.
Whenever something
speaks in fiction that cannot
speak in real life—whether
a rabbit or a donkey or a horse—we are
in the realm of the marvelous. And one
place the marvelous migrated to in the
twentieth century was cartoons: Disney,
Warner Brothers, Hanna- Barbera. The
British artist Andy Holden recently pro-
duced a brilliant essayistic video work
called Laws of Motion in a Cartoon
Landscape (2016), a kind of Euclid’s ge-
ometry for the world of Hanna- Barbera,
with its impossible physical laws: “ev-
erything falls faster than an anvil,”
“any body suspended in space will re-
main in space until made aware of its
situation,” “objects can contain a space
bigger than their volume. Each object
is potentially a black hole.” The gluti-
nous physics of this cartoon world has
its equivalent in the absurdist brilliance
of its dialogue, like Bugs Bunny’s line,
as he stands suspended above a void: “I
know this defies the law of gravity but,
you see, I never studied law!” The car-
toon landscape is a model of the marvel-
ous that’s an alibi for something much
more malign: a world where infinite
potentiality is experienced as terror.
This, I began to think, might repre-
sent the temptation of animation over
film for the creator of a show like Bo-
Jack Horseman, set in our violently
woozy era—this fluid freedom to move
beyond the laws of physics or biology. If
you want television to be a medium for
a reality experienced as unstable and
slippery, then you may need to abandon
human actors for cartoons. One small-
scale freedom is the way any character
can suddenly be redrawn in sketchier
or more uncertain and garish ways, and
their usual backgrounds washed out orA scene from ‘The Face of Depression,’ an episode in season 6 of BoJack Horseman, 2019Netflix*Hanawalt’s own animated series, Tu c a
& Bertie, is also streaming on Netflix.