August 20, 2020 49
replaced by nightmarish landscapes
whenever they enter minicycles of bad
thinking, or hallucination, or memory
failure.
But the greater freedom is the abil-
ity to enlarge the cast into a fantastical
animal realm, a deadpan mélange of
animal and human. Three of the five
main characters in BoJack Horseman
are chimeras: BoJack is not so much
a horse as a centaur, with the head of
a horse but the body of a man, just as
Mr. Peanutbutter has the head and fur
of a yellow Lab but the musclebound
chest and arms of a workout freak.
These chimeras and other animals live
happily with and among humans, who
blithely accept their animal natures.
It’s a cartoon landscape designed, of
course, for pure comic delight—this
world where everything has been re-
named in animal terms (Catbernet
Sauvignon, Quentin Tarantulino, Mice
Krispies), and where the anthropomor-
phic detail of its extras is meticulously
imagined, like a giraffe waiting in an
airport lounge for a flight, ready with
four inflatable neck rests, or older in-
sects plodding along the sidewalk, their
multiple legs pushing multiple walkers.
Yet this proliferation of talking an-
imals also begins to assert something
much more melancholy, the central law
of BoJack’s universe: we will recognize
anything as a person—whether cat or
horse or dragonfly or human—if its
thinking is a form of self- defeat. The
show is maliciously fastidious in accu-
mulating vignettes of self- sabotage that
might only intermittently add to the
narrative momentum but that form a
brutal pattern, which can encompass a
dragonfly who can’t get over the mem-
ory of his dead wife; or the cat Princess
Carolyn, unable to block work calls
even when she’s being interviewed by
the birth mother of her potential adop-
tive child; or Diane, sleeping with Mr.
Peanutbutter long after their divorce,
even though he’s in a relationship with
someone else (a waitress pug called
Pickles) and she doesn’t care about
him anymore. The effect of this unre-
lenting pattern is to both foreground
the anthropomorphic strangeness of
this universe and simultaneously make
it irrelevant, because the self- harming
bleakness of the lives of everyone in it
is so humanly universal.
This pattern centers in its most in-
tense form on the show’s baroquely de-
structive hero, BoJack. Over the span
of the series we watch him continu-
ously, upsettingly, and comically harm
other people—sometimes casually
or carelessly, sometimes deliberately,
out of lust or ambition or cowardice
or envy or loneliness—while always
promising himself reform or asking for
forgiveness. He’s a machine for defeat-
ing his own best impulses. At one point
BoJack’s long- lost younger half sister
asks him, “The voice, the one that tells
you you’re worthless and stupid and
ugly, it goes away, right?” Yeah, he re-
plies, and of course we know that for
him this will never be true. Self- hatred
is his daily dose, like the shakes he
makes for breakfast out of vodka and
pills. The show’s energy is in its ability
to depict such an ambiguous character,
a monster with pathos, who does wrong
knowingly and deliberately but always
with simultaneous remorse.
There are so many of these cascading
wrongs (“regrettable life decisions,” in
BoJack’s terminology), but there are
maybe three that haunt him in particu-
lar. The first is a failure of loyalty. Back
in the 1990s, when Herb was outed as
gay after a televised police raid and
the network wanted to fire him from
his own show because of the perceived
negative publicity, BoJack didn’t de-
fend him. And so Herb was fired. The
second is a failure of power. Twenty
years later, after Herb has died, BoJack
convinces himself that he’s really in
love with Herb’s old girlfriend, a deer
called Charlotte. He travels to New
Mexico, where he finds her happily
married with two kids. First he tries to
upend this happiness, arguing that he
and she belong together, but she rejects
him; the same night he nearly sleeps
with her underage daughter, a moral
disaster that’s only prevented because
they are interrupted by Charlotte.
The final failure is one of basic human
care. After Horsin’ Around ended, its
child star Sarah Lynn pivoted to be-
come a global pop sensation, until she
finally burned out in a frazzle of narcot-
ics. Now, however, she has sobered up.
But after he fails to receive the Oscar
nomination for Secretariat, BoJack
persuades her to go with him on a gar-
gantuan weeks- long bender, which cul-
minates in her overdose at the Griffith
Park Observatory—an overdose from
which she later dies in a hospital after
BoJack takes seventeen minutes to call
911, having sat in his car in the observa-
tory parking lot, worrying how to dis-
guise his involvement in the situation.
The show’s outlandish comic premise
can’t help but leak real pain and horror,
as the gap between the self BoJack is
and the self he wants to be becomes
more and more a form of self- haunting.
So one way of putting it is to say that the
show begins with BoJack as an appar-
ently comic rewrite of Norma Desmond
in Sunset Boulevard—the washed- up
star as a study in the way all of us will
outlive whatever glamour we might at-
tain and then blithely shield ourselves
from this knowledge with the pleasures
of self- pity and self- deception. Even
the show’s manic pop culture allusions
are part of this shtick—they reference in
particular the pop culture of the 1990s,
the era of BoJack’s resplendent youth:
“Every time he does a dumb little somer-
sault everybody goes nuts like he’s god-
damn Kerri Strug,” BoJack complains of
a costar to his agent. “Kerri Strug? You
gotta update your references,” she says.
“When the world sees the likes of Kerri
Strug again, I will adjust accordingly,”
intones BoJack reverentially.
But the continuing wrong he does
makes BoJack increasingly lost in a
mania of accusation, and the breezy
sitcom structure gradually dissolves
back into Sunset Boulevard’s chiar-
oscuro LA noir nightmare, with a hero
haunted by his past, cut off from ordi-
nary feeling, unable to offer reasons for
his actions. And so the show develops a
vocabulary of ethics and responsibility,
as it conducts a prolonged argument
about whether a self can be irrevoca-
bly bad or is simply the cause of bad
actions. BoJack prefers the idea that a
self might be separate from its actions,
but it’s a position that the show exposes
as a form of laziness: “You need to be
better!” his friend Todd tells him. “You
are all the things that are wrong with
you.” But it’s also one aspect of the
show’s intelligence that the most re-
lentless critic of the myth of the good
person is BoJack himself, just as hiswish to be forgiven is matched only by
his understanding that it’s impossible:
“How do you make something right
when you’ve made it so wrong you can
never go back?”
In this manner, the show felt its way
toward the wisdom of its initial gim-
mick. Sure, this was a cartoon about
an asshole millionaire actor horse. But
it had to be set in the world of money
and celebrity, you began to think, be-
cause one aspect of such celebrity is to
be cushioned wherever possible from
true punishment. And its star had to be
an animal, because this needed to be a
world that didn’t respect the human as
an arbiter of value.
Still, the subtlest form of wisdom
acquired over BoJack Horseman’s six
seasons really emerged much later on,
as the writers improvised on themes
whose urgency was imposed on them
from outside the studio. This portrait of
the tormented male—wielding power
but desperately using the alibi of his own
interior powerlessness—was overtaken
by the accelerated moment of Me Too.
That redistribution of moral anger was
directly incorporated into the show’s fi-
nale—BoJack is finally punished after
two journalists (channeling, naturally,
in this metafictional world, the plot of
His Girl Friday crossed with Katharine
Hepburn’s persona in The Philadelphia
Story) write an article revealing his in-
volvement in Sarah Lynn’s overdose,
a situation he makes worse through a
catastrophic TV interview.
But more quietly and more inno-
vatively, the show began to decenter
its composition, to drift away from
BoJack and imagine in greater detail
the lives of those around him: Diane,
Todd, and Princess Carolyn. BoJack
becomes an intermittent, fond, but
background presence in their lives.
These later episodes found a way of
placing the supporting characters in
new compositional planes—especially
Diane, whose unhappiness had often
been a kind of echo of BoJack’s own,
and whose emerging happiness might
represent the true discovery of the se-
ries. She moves to Chicago—figured
as LA’s wintry opposite—to live with
a new boyfriend (a minotaur camera-
man), starts taking antidepressants,
gains weight, and instead of writing
the elegant series of hipster essays she
imagined, writes a best- selling feminist
YA detective novel. Her happiness is
unglamorous, fragile, unromantic, dis-
illusioned—it coexists with all her de-
pression and her damage—but it’s also
real. And it’s only visible because of the
show’s dissolving of perspective, the
way it developed its apparently periph-
eral accumulated material. So the most
moving aspect of the finale is the fact
that the final image isn’t just BoJack, in
the expected biopic manner, but a two-
shot with Diane, held in an inexpress-
ible, extravagantly protracted silence.One of the show’s most original ep-
isodes occurs in season 3, in the mid-
dle of BoJack’s campaign to win an
Oscar. His publicist sends him to the
Pacific Ocean Film Festival, held under
the sea. The entire episode happens
without any dialogue, since all beings
who aren’t sea creatures are encased
in sealed diving helmets. The episode
becomes an extravaganza of bad pan-
tomime—riffing on a cinematic history
of muteness, from Charlie Chaplin
through to Bill Murray in Lost inTra n s l a t i o n. BoJack glimpses the di-
rector Kelsey Jannings, who was fired
from the set of Secretariat, and tries
to find her to apologize for never call-
ing her afterward. At the end of the
episode, he finally reaches her as she
leaves in a taxi and, unable to speak, he
thrusts a hastily handwritten note into
her hand, but all the letters are blurred
in the water. The taxi drives away, and
BoJack stands devastated on the side-
walk, until an angry pedestrian shouts
at him, “Hey, move it buddy! What are
you, deaf?” to BoJack’s enraged sur-
prise, because it turns out that there’s
a button on every helmet that allows
you to talk and be heard, which he had
never noticed.
The episode is a little allegory about
communication, but it’s also the show’s
most explicit investigation of its own
devices. What animates a drawing in a
cartoon isn’t just movement but sound,
and the absence of dialogue in the ep-
isode was a way of letting the creators
of BoJack Horseman show off a gran-
diose keyboard of gloopy sound effects
and aquatic resonances. But at the same
time it made you realize, through its
absence, that the greatest sound effect
in their repertoire was voice. All the
voice actors in BoJack (among them
Aaron Paul, Alison Brie, Amy Sedaris,
and Paul F. Tompkins) run through
virtuoso ranges, but it’s especially Will
Arnett’s bravura performance as Bo-
Jack—not just angry and embittered
but also tender, broken, bedraggled,
a one-man band of tonal oxymoron—
that grounds the show’s investigations
into morality and feeling.
This episode felt so important be-
cause it was a sustained version of an
anarchic mode that the show had ini-
tially played with only casually, and
that became more and more method-
ically garish in subsequent seasons:
BoJack loved to loop back on its own
construction. In the undersea episode,
it examined the sonic means of its pro-
duction, but this wild attention to its
own processes and assumptions took
multiple and increasingly varied forms.
It began with the TMZ overload of ar-
cane references and gradually spread
to include the show’s deadpan way of
dating a flashback by simply including
songs with titles like “Generic 2007 Pop
Song” (“Generic 2007 pop song/Auto
tuned so all the voices sound weird/This
is a pop song, it’s 2007/Don’t say 2006, /
It’s 2007”), or its characters’ sometimes
frank amazement at the plot’s melodra-
matic coincidences, or those sudden
sequences in which the cartoon was
sketched in a different style.
Most radically, there was the show’s
obsessive circling around its accu-
mulated past, whose visual summary
might be the whiteboards in one of
the final episodes (“Sunk Cost and All
That”) on which BoJack, together with
Todd, Diane, and Princess Carolyn,
tries to list all his many crimes and mis-
demeanors. That kind of unruly frame-
breaking isn’t necessarily something
you might associate with poignancy
or sincerity. But it was this continued
backtracking attention to its own mak-
ing that finally allowed BoJack Horse-
man to end up showing that cartoon
might be the most truthful model of
our landscape. A person, you might
conclude, is also an outline infested
by other selves, a vehicle for mournful
self- criticism and recomposition. We’re
all fantastical now, it seemed to argue,
in the multicolored digital light. Q