The Visible Screenplay in BoJack Horseman
Barnabás Szöllősi
Abstract
In this paper I present and analyze the many examples of how BoJack Horseman makes its screenplay visible. By drawing the viewers attention to the details of how an animated series is crafted, the creators deconstruct classical Hollywood screenwriting techniques in order to show how stories manipulate our minds. With subversive and ironic reflections on the mechanisms of fiction, BoJack Horseman brings socially important contemporary issues to the table of animation
Keywords: BoJack Horseman, animation, screenwriting, screenplay, Deleuze, sound image, Barthes, McKee, Paul de Man, Lev Manovich
Résumé
Dans cet article, j’analyse comment BoJack Horseman rend son scénario visible à travers de nombreux exemples. En attirant l'attention des spectateurs sur les détails de la fabrication d'une série animée, les créateurs déconstruisent les techniques classiques de la scénarisation hollywoodiennes afin de montrer comment les histoires nous manipulent. Avec ses réflexions subversives et ironiques sur les mécanismes de la fiction,
BoJack Horseman porte des enjeux sociaux contemporains à la table de l'animation.
Mots-clés: BoJack Horseman, animation, scénario visible, Deleuze, image son, Barthes, McKee, Paul de Man, Lev Manovich
Raphael Bob-Waksberg's animated series BoJack Horseman (2014-2020, USA, Netflix) is known for being subversive about depression, loneliness, anxiety, failure; alcohol and drug addiction; the patriarchist mechanisms of the Hollywood culture industry; the difficulties of maintaining a long-term relationship; the inconveniences of sexual difference in a sex-driven society; and even about transgenerational traumas. The show does all this with sensitive, sharp humor and irony, but the writers never ease the tension of the aforementioned subversity. This is an important element of the series, since its main characters (anthropomorphic animals and humans) are all working in the culture industry (even real actors such as Margo Martindale, Daniel Radcliffe, Jessica Biel appear in their animated form but dubbed with their own voices), and though they are very well aware of how a show is put together, they seem to seek Hollywood cliches in their private lives in order to be happy.
Thus the series is also very open about writing and warns the audience quite often that what they are watching is created, crafted and fictitious. The creators push this to the boundary where the audience becomes as much of a reader as a viewer.
Gilles Deleuze noted and even stressed the importance of spoken word in motion picture as opposed to most mainstream Hollywood theorists. Robert McKee wrote: "The aesthetics of film are 80 percent visual 20
percent auditory." (McKee, 1997, 398). In contrast, Deleuze created a notion he called sound image and
explored its importance through the analysis of films by Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. In Cinema 2 he wrote: "The voice-off loses its omnipotence but by gaining autonomy." (Deleuze, 1989, 250). Deleuze found it extremely important that film is capable of the disjunction of sound and image, that the two can be present simultaneously while – broadly speaking – telling two different stories. It is by this phenomenon that the viewer can also be a reader of some films. Roland Barthes also outlined that narrative questions in motion picture and literature overlap, thus he argued that film and textual analysis should borrow notions and techniques from each other (Barthes, 1966, 1-27). By following these concepts I attempt to demonstrate the meta-narrative elements of BoJack Horseman, concentrating on how visuality and textuality interact with each other in the animated series.
In the episode called The Amelia Earhart Story (Season 5, Episode 5, written by Joe Lawson)1 we see
BoJack Horseman (voice: Will Arnett)² complaining on the phone to his manager, Princess Caroyn (voice: Amy Sedaris) that he has five pages of lines to learn in the series he is currently shooting. He says: "No show should have that much talking. TV is a visual medium." We can easily relate this statement to the theory of Robert McKee, but the very next episode, Free Churro (Season 5, Episode 6, written by Raphael Bob-Waksberg), consists of only two long monologues with very minimal visual action and almost no plot at all.
This is only one of the many examples when BoJack Horseman reflects on and mocks Hollywood-screenwriting traditions. In this paper I shall present and analyze these examples of how the series makes its own screenplay visible. Outlining these moments is essential in the understanding of the show, since its title character is someone who has been performing such screenplays in all his life, and as a result of his profession has internalized screenwriting schemas. Throughout the six seasons we witness BoJack Horseman as he tries and fails to create his off-screen life into one big on-screen performance. Constantly breaking the narrative flow with mise en abyme elements brings the inner dynamics of the main character into the texture of the animation and adds another layer to its subversity on a formal level.
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1 Since the series is written by several screenwriters, I will always name the ones credited for the episode mentioned in parenthesis.
"Chapter One"
Already the pilot episode (written by Raphael Bob-Waksberg) and the entire first season are built around writing: the creation of BoJack Horseman's memoir. The "washed" up celebrity, the former star of the '90-s sitcom "Horsin' Around" has signed a contract with Penguin Books, but he keeps missing his deadlines. The publication of BoJack's memoir would be a mutual benefit for both BoJack and Penguin Books, since the former has fallen out of public focus and the latter is in dire straits.
Penguin Publishing. The BoJack Horseman Story, Chapter One (Season 1, Episode 1). Netflix, 2014 (the author asked the producer for the right to reproduce these screenshots in Nov. 2020)
Besides the visual joke of having an actual penguin, Pinky (voice: Patton Oswalt) as the editor in chief of Penguin Books in the world of an animated show where all kinds of anthropomorphic characters walk around, we could analyze the situation as a metaphor. Penguin Books is widely known for the publication of classical and modern English literature – thus Pinky and his publishing house become a symbol of high culture. BoJack on the other hand is clearly exposed as a mere product of pop culture who has nothing to say or offer to the world when he is not on the screen. The fact that a person who spends his days drinking, over-eating, having meaningless sex and watching old episodes of himself and one of the world's most canonical publishing house are in need of each other makes it clear that BoJack Horseman takes place in a universe where the distinction between high and pop culture is no longer valid. One can literally not survive without the other.
BoJack lacks no ambition: he declares several times that he wants to write a book which will prove to the world that he is more than just a "washed up" celebrity and he hopes to be remembered for decades for his memoir, not for his role in "Horsin' Around". However, he fails to even start his writing, which is presented in a humorous scene. He sits at his desk with a dictaphone in hand, but only repeats the words "Chapter One" over and over again while we see the sun rise and set in the background through the window of his studio. In contrast, we witness his verbal talent in many scenes: BoJack has been acting in a sitcom for nine years so his routine is to turn every dialogue into a serious of running jokes or wordplays. This habit tires a lot the people around him.
His desire to break out of this superficial way of using language is expressed at the end of the pilot episode. BoJack finally admits that he cannot write his memoir without professional help, so he hires Diane
Nguyen (voice: Alison Brie) as a ghostwriter. When they first meet, Diane brings up a story about The Brady
Bunch (Sherwood Schwartz, 1969-1974). She tells BoJack: "(...) the guy who played the dad hated being on The Brady Bunch because he was a real actor and he considered it beneath him." BoJack replies: "That's not all
that was beneath him. ... Gay joke. Sorry, I'm better than that."
The main question in the entire first season of BoJack Horseman is whether he is really better than just running away from his problems by making silly wordplays out of them. My choice of words professional help above was intentional: the first season explores writing as self-confrontation, just as the aim of psychoanalysis in the Freudian sense is also self-confrontation. The creators of BoJack Horseman deliberately stress the analogy between psychotherapy and the relationship of BoJack and Diane as a ghostwriter. In both situations, someone is telling stories about him/herself to someone else, in both situations one is paying for the other to listen to him/her, and in both situations the listener's main task is to reframe/retell what s/he heard in a way that will reveal something to the other. It often happens that patients - especially with narcissistic personality disorder, which is clearly the case of BoJack - fall in love with their therapists and so does BoJack with Diane (Kernberg, 1995, 143-162). It is not the aim of this paper to further analyze the phenomenon of erotic transference in therapeutic situations, but we shall recall how BoJacks's agent, Princess Carolyn makes a joke out of this: "You're in love with Diane. And you're not even really in love with her, you just think you are, because you pay her to listen to you talk about yourself." (Say Anything, Season 1, Episode 7, written by Joe Lawson).
The fact that BoJack cannot get himself to start writing means that he cannot face his life's choices alone. This is further exposed in the episode One Trick Pony (Season 1, Episode 10, written by Laura Gutin Peterson), in which BoJack reads Diane's first draft. He becomes so disappointed by the reflection he gets of himself from Diane's words that he vetoes this version of the book and fires Diane at the end of the episode. It is an important choice of the creators to make the audience hear Diane's sentences in voice-over, while we only see BoJack moving from one spot to the other in a time-lapse effect, which makes it clear that language is more important here than visuality. All the same, we get a powerful image of BoJack when he is hiding behind a curtain while reading the text on his phone. The composition, or to use Deleuze's notion: the sound image makes it clear that BoJack is afraid of himself.
In the episode Downer Ending (Season 1, Episode 11, written by Kate Purdy) we see BoJack making one final attempt to write his own text in a week, but he eventually ends up asking for help again from his friends Todd (voice: Aaron Paul) and Sarah Lynn (voice: Kristen Shaal). Under the influence of drugs they try to come up with stories about BoJack that would comfort his image about himself rather than telling his true life story. This is the episode where images are obviously more important than words. A distinction evolves that cues us to believe that colorful images are the surface and plain words are depth. The visual field becomes vivid, fast-changing and experimental: though BoJack revisits some events of his life that he earlier told Diane about, he always turns them into pleasant memories, or at least he attempts to do so.
For example, when he composes a sentence about his childhood, he comes up with a simple situation: his mom giving him a snack in the afternoon. BoJack writes three variations for the snack, and whenever he uses another word in his sentence in the voice-over, the image of his mom and his childhood self always changes. When he ends up dissatisfied with his solutions, his "wanna be" writer father enters the image and slaps little BoJack on the face saying: "Nice writing, Shakespeare!" This makes it visible despite the verbal joke that one cannot alter their traumas: an abusive father will always be abusive in your memories.
In the final scenes of this episode BoJack ends up being in an even bigger mayhem than he used to be. Though he admits Diane wrote a better version than he did and agrees to publish her text, he now has nowhere to hide from himself. This is something that we could call a spiraling narrative, since the beginning and the ending of the season are more or less the same: BoJack wants to change, but he is not sure if he is capable of it. The writing process of his book did not really help him to take a step in that direction: it only brought him back to the starting point.
In this sense, I would go as far as to say that the first season of BoJack Horseman is the deconstruction of Freudism and classical Hollywood narrative. Both believe in the idea that most problems in the life of an individual are often caused by past traumas. By confronting those traumas, the individual will be able to solve the problems. The first season of BoJack Horseman performs every part of a classical Hollywood narrative (Bordwell, 2006): there is a "hero" (BoJack) who has a problem to solve (write his memoir), there are obstacles that block him from solving it easily (past traumas) and this creates tension, but he manages to get through the obstacles. The story of the first season even has a climax, a false ending and a true ending (McKee, 1997, 208-232). In a classical Hollywood narrative however, this would lead us to the (tragic or comical) solution to the hero's problems, which is most commonly understood as the change of the hero, but BoJack Horseman only takes us and its hero to the cusp of change.
Creating spiraling narratives from season to season is one of the most essential specifics of BoJack
Horseman. The first season does this through the metaphor of writing as self-confrontation.
Verbal jokes
Wordplays are obviously an important element of BoJack Horseman, since the show evolved from the tradition of adult animated sitcoms. Even critics were so inspired by the virtuoso wordplays of the show that they started to refer to it as a sadcom instead of sitcom, and some claim that BoJack Horseman has created a new genre. It would be neither possible, nor reasonable to analyze every verbal joke of the series in this paper, but there are moments when the writers go beyond simply making us laugh. Wordplays are another tool in BoJack
Horseman for reflection on writing.
In BoJack Hates the Troops (Season 1, Episode 2, written by Raphael Bob-Waksberg) Mr. Peanutbutter (voice: Paul F. Tompkins), BoJack's archenemy sorts of, launches a TV-reality show. He comes up with the idea to call it "Peanut butter and Jelly", which he explains by: "Get it? Because I'm Mr. Peanutbutter." BoJack doubtfully asks: "OK. Who's jelly?" Mr. Peanutbutter replies with enthusiasm: "No-no-no, it's like a peanut butter-jelly sandwich. It's wordplay." BoJack continues to criticize him: "You may have too forgiving a definition of the word 'wordplay'." Mr. Peanutbutter: "Well, it's a working title." Then BoJack gives his final
touché: "Well, it could be working harder. And that's wordplay."
To have a demonstrative dispute about the definition of good wordplay could be considered as the ultimate meta-joke for an animated sitcom. Furthermore, this conflict evolves in the episode as BoJack verbally insults a soldier, which creates such a big media buzz that he has to hide at Mr. Peanutbutter's house. Here, they are shooting "Peanutbutter and Jelly", still lacking the pairing Jelly to Mr. Peanutbutter. BoJack finally agrees to apologize to the insulted soldier on live television, which he does with a cynical monologue:
"Furthermore, I do not find it unbelievably appropriate that this conversation is taking place on reality television, a genre which thrives on chopping the complexities of our era into easily digestible puns of empty catch phrases."
One can associate in this moment to the concept of spectacle by Guy Debord (1970). An animated midcult series of Netflix is surly a part of the spectacle, thus the writers attempt to criticize another part of the spectacle through a fictitious character, BoJack, who is a product of mass media even in the universe of the show, and who is also the champion of wordplay competitions makes this scene very ironic, proving Debord's statement: there is no escape from the spectacle. While BoJack delivers his criticism about culture industry, Mr. Peanutbutter distracts the attention of the cameras by getting his head stuck in a bucket. By the end, it turns out that the nick name of the girl who helps the bucket off his head is Jelly. As the title "Peanut butter
and Jelly" is complete, nobody pays attention to BoJack anymore.
Being the vindicator of quality verbal jokes remains the core of BoJack's identity throughout the series, which underlines the fact that he has internalized the schemas of sitcoms. When Alex (voice: Joel McHale), the Soviet agent appears in the episode Yesterdayland (Season 2, Episode 2, written by Peter A. Knight) after a thirty-year-long coma, they get into an argument with BoJack. Alex says: "(...) if you're gonna kick me to the curb just because I think you're all capitalist swine and wanna see your way of life destroyed, well: so be it. Or should I say: Soviet?" (emphasis added – B. Sz.) - for the admiration of everybody besides BoJack: "That's not even good wordplay!" Later, when Wanda (the girlfriend to BoJack in Season 2, voice: Lisa Kudrow) asks Alex to give her a ride home, he says: "Sure thing Wanda. And I can get you there fast. Because I'm always
Russian." (emphasis added – B. Sz.) - again, for general applause, whilst BoJack bursts out: "Seriously?!"
These moments raise the awareness of the audience to the fact that the lines are written. They also serve as a reflection on the tradition of sitcoms and American mass culture in general, which is one of the most important themes throughout the series.
Alissa Chater gives a detailed analysis in her paper From Real Housewives to the Brady Bunch: Bojack
Horseman Finds its Place (2015) about how the animation does this not only on the level of dialogue and
narrative, but also in its mise-en-scène. The episode Prickly Muffin (Season 1, Episode 3, written by Raphael Bobwaksberg) is based on the re-encounter of BoJack and Sarah Lynn, who used to act together in the show
"Horsin' Around". When Sarah Lynn moves into BoJack's house, the episode uses re-enactment to compare
scenes from the old TV-show to the characters' present life. Chater delivers a shot-by-shot analysis of these scenes and proves that although animation is the most flexible medium when it comes to perspectives, BoJack
Horseman uses three-wall mise-en-scène in order to stay true to classical sitcoms that were shot before a live
studio audience (like "Horsin' Around" according to the series' own interpretation).
Visual, textual
Visual jokes indeed play an important role in animation. It may sound surprising, but in BoJack Horseman it also does so in textual way. Early from the first season flashbacks and past events are important in the series' narrative: this creates a unique approach to time in the field of animated sitcoms. BoJack Horseman continuously tells its audience that past is always present in an individual’s life: even if we think that we left something done, it can always come back in the most surprising way.
There is a widely accepted convention about how a motion picture should cue its audience to information about the era in which the picture takes place. Techniques like showing the corner of the newspaper with the date, using hit songs from the era as background soundtrack, adjusting the costumes and objects to the decade's fashion, citing extracts from radio and television podcasts of the historical period are all parts of this convention. The writers of BoJack Horseman use all of these techniques and of course they also use them to mock. All the same, irony again becomes subversive, since it reveals the fact that every so called "evidence" of an era is always written and drawn, thus it is fiction.
When BoJack tells a story to Diane about the beginning of his career (The Telescope, Season 1, Episode 8, written by Mehar Sethi), the narrative goes back to the 1980s. While driving a cabriolet in Los Angeles, BoJack sings along with the radio, and we see signs on the streets like "The Flop House", where floppy disks are sold, "Walt's Walkman" for a walkman shop, or a billboard with "The Big Brother is Watching You". The lyrics on the radio say: "This is a song from the '80s. / The decade which here currently is." Later the narrative jumps ahead ten years and we see BoJack driving on the same road. Now kids are playing footbag on the sidewalk, the walkman shop turned into a record store, the billboard shows a mock on the "Got milk?" advertisement with an actual cow asking the question, and we hear on the radio: "Generic 90's grunge song, / Everyone in flannel. / Generic 90s grunge song. / Something from Seattle." It is very clear how these details use humor to call attention to the fact that motion pictures cannot evoke a past era and the use of conventions will never seem flawless.
To find and understand every Easter egg and reference in BoJack Horseman became a habit in fan communities. The response from the audience encouraged the creators to hide more and more of these in the background, up to the point that in the The Amelia Earhart Story, when Princess Carolyn walks across a flee market, we see somebody folding T-shirts in the background, and on one of the T-shirts this text appears for no more than one second: "Stop pausing and just watch the show".
Intertitles as book titles. Time's Arrow (Season 4, Episode 11). Netflix, 2017.
keep track of what happens when. It also became a convention to help the audience in such cases with intertitles. No wonder that the creators of BoJack Horseman had to make fun of this in the episode Time's
Arrow (Season 4, Episode 11, written by Kate Purdy), where all the cues like "The Next Morning" or "2 Weeks
Later" are presented as titles of books read by BoJack's mother, Beatrice (voice: Wendie Malick). Another visual motive in this episode calls attention to the nature of animation: all the characters who Beatrice forgot are faceless, whilst one character's face, who Beatrice wants to forget but cannot, is scribbled out.
Forgotten and scribbled out faces. Time's Arrow (Season 4, Episode 11). Netflix, 2017.
In the episode The Old Sugarman Place (Season 4, Episode 2, written by Kate Purdy) the writers mock not only the era in which the flashbacks take place, the 1940s, but also its representative genre: the melodrama. In this episode, the dialogues are filled with descriptive similes and metaphors which are rarely used in everyday conversations but can be easily found in any Hollywood movie made around or about World War II.
Since these episodes are only 25 minutes long, sometimes the narrative has to be compressed into texts, which in the Hollywood screenwriting fashion would be considered "bad craftsmanship", but the writers of
BoJack Horseman take advantage of this. When BoJack's grandfather (voice: Matthew Broderick) has trouble
dealing with his crying wife, he says aloud: "Well, I'd love to stay, but I must be going. As a modern American man, I am woefully unprepared to manage a woman's emotions. I was never taught, and I will not learn." This statement first of all makes fun of the so-called text-subtext theory, which advises all writers to cover their characters true thoughts and feelings with small talk (Seger, 2011). BoJack Horseman uses this technique of
revealing the characters alter motives through monologues quite often in order to direct the audience’s attention to more important details. Secondly, the problem indicated in the sentence is boldly true for the historical period, since the idea of the "hysterical", "unreasonably emotional" women was not only common in the '40s, but it seems to be so pertinacious that it stays with us even today. (Since it is not the aim of this paper to analyze the social and political criticism of BoJack Horseman, I can only call attention to the fact that there is one episode in every season of the series dedicated to gender issues.) Thirdly: as it is true for the historical period, it is also true that most romantic problems in melodramas evolve around this conflict.
The most virtuoso episode in this regard is Mr. Peanutbutter's Boos (Season 5, Episode 8, written by Kelly Galuska). Though it physically takes place on one set, temporally it shifts between four timelines. We see Mr. Peanutbutter at BoJack's annual Halloween party with his three ex-wives and current girlfriend, repeating basically the same fight with the same stages. Already in the cold open part we are introduced to all four women in all four timelines and we can witness the nuanced work the creators have put in this episode. In each timeline, Mr. Peanutbutter and his current partner choose a different costume for the party, which in some twisted way references the era of that timeline (e.g., in the 80s, they dress like hippies from the '60s). As the timeline changes, the background music continues to play the same tune, but with a different orchestration that matches the taste of the era. They also use different argot in all the different timelines which culminates at the point where the screen becomes divided into four frames to show how excited Mr. Peanutbutter is: "This party is going to be dope. Booyah! / It'll be off the heezy fo' sheezy! / OMG it's gonna be cray-cray! / Turnt!"
Further analysis of this phenomenon in the series would only reproduce my earlier conclusions. However, the next example of flashback takes us to another perspective worth examining more closely.
Meta-jokes on writing
The BoJack Horseman Show (Season 3, Episode 2, written by Vera Santamaria) takes place in 2007, which we
find out at the beginning of the episode when the radio informs us about the time (to which Princess Carolyn reacts with the same surprise the audience has). In this period, we witness BoJack trying to break out of the status he created for himself after the cancellation of "Horsin' Around". This attempt is similar to the one explored in Season 1, only this time it is via another TV show.
Cuddlywhiskers (a hamster, voice: Jeffrey Wright) is a screenwriter-director famous for his work "Krill
& Grace", obviously a mock on Will & Grace (David Kohan, Max Mutchnick, 1998-2020), which eventually
"did so much to the way society views Krill-people", as Will & Grace featured a homosexual main character. Even so, Cuddly wants to "dig deeper" this time and offers BoJack the lead role in his new series. After brief hesitation, BoJack accepts the role and we see a reading audition, where Cuddly reads the stage directions and BoJack his lines.
This is one of the many mise-en-abyme situations in BoJack Horseman, where the narrative reveals how a show is put together and sold step by step. There is at least one episode in every season which takes place at a shooting, if not the entire season is built around one, as in Season 2 (the movie "Secretariat") or Season 5 (the series "Philbert"). However, it is The BoJack Horseman Show and later That's Too Much Man! (Season 3, Episode 11, written by Elijah Aron) which demonstrate and make fun of the writing of a show. In this context meta-jokes serve as meta-narrative (Bordwell, 1985, 18-21) elements that reveal several facts
about fiction, narrative and humor within one scene. Demonstrating the creation of a fictitious show within the boundaries of a fictitious show calls attention to the fact that we are watching fiction, which is always fabricated and written. Meta-jokes furthermore reveal the mechanics of humor, in which sense they can be regarded as analytical scenes: they are jokes about how jokes are written.
Despite the success of the reading audition, BoJack and Cuddlywhiskers decide to rewrite the show because they feel that they are "playing it too safe" and they both want to make something "edgy" and "real". So, they sit down for a night to get drunk and write. Their script becomes a non-linear, experimental piece entitled "The BoJack Horseman Show", which consists of elements such as BoJack sitting for twenty minutes reading for himself, and lines of dialogue they are both uncertain of whether to use or not, but they agree they can "always take it out later", or that they "will figure it out". No wander the show becomes a huge failure, which adds one more layer to the audience's understanding of why BoJack is so afraid to step out of his comfort zone.
Season 3 ends with an even bigger failure when it turns out that BoJack will not get the Oscar. To get through his depression, BoJack once again chooses alcohol and drugs: he goes on a month long "bender" with his friend, Sarah Lynn. The mixture of all kinds of narcotics causes BoJack to have more and more frequent blackouts, which eventually becomes the narrative basis of the whole That's Too Much Man! episode. When BoJack and Sarah Lynn snort heroin, Cuddlywhiskers appears in BoJack's hallucination only to explain again how big of a mistake it was to make "The BoJack Horseman Show":
"This last episode got the worst ratings yet. I was afraid your character trying heroin would be a bridge too far. And the disjointed blackout structure with that one flashback at the middle really confused our audience. They hated all the fourth wall breaking meta-jokes."
While Cuddlywhiskers is complaining, the walls of his house around him are physically breaking in BoJack's hallucination. Once again, we see the literal to become visual and hear the visual to become literal. It also becomes uncertain whether the scene is a part of the That’s Too Much Man! episode, or if the whole episode we are watching used to be a part of “The BoJack Horseman Show”. Furthermore, we cannot be sure if the scene is a flashback, a hallucination, or a mixture of both. The tension is eased with Cuddlywhiskers’ sentence, which reveals about a joke that is a joke about how jokes work.
Sometimes BoJack Horseman uses meta-narratives for more than mocking. In The Dog Days Are Over (Season 5, Episode 2, written by Joanna Calo) Diane has to write a listicle for an online feminist girls' magazine, while she tries to recover from her recent divorce in Vietnam. Her voice-over writing this listicle becomes the narrative core of the episode. Of course, it is much more than a listicle: it is her travel diary sorts of, and also a tool for the creators of the series to demonstrate how inappropriate the forms of girls' magazines are to truthfully discuss emotions. Throughout the series Diane is employed in many different fields of writing, thus she cannot work on her own autonomous texts until the very last season. In the episode titled Good
Damage (Season 6, Episode 10, written by Joanna Calo) we see her in a somewhat similar situation as we saw
BoJack in the first season. Diane tries to get over her depression through the writing of her book, so whenever she composes a text, we, the viewers, enter into a visual field, where all the drawings of the animation are just as rudimentary as the sentences heard in voice-over of her first draft. She turns out to be just as incapable to write her own memoir as BoJack was in the beginning, which demonstrates how false was her idea about herself as a professional writer, who as such would be more honest when it comes to self-confrontation. All the same, she manages to transform her experiences into teenage fiction, and finally settles there as an author.
There is one more episode worth mentioning in this perspective. The 7th Episode of Season 5 is titled
INT. SUB. (written by Alison Tafel), which is already a reference to screenwriting, since it indicates the scene
headlining of screenplays, which always starts with INT., standing for "Interior" or EXT., standing for "Exterior". In a scene, we also come to understand what "Sub." stands for. Flip (voice: Rami Malek), the writer of the show we see being created in this episode, says he intended to write "Subway", but since he had writer's block and writing is a "process" he did not get as far as to write: "way". Due to this accident, the production crew built a submarine set, so Flip and Diane (now working as a screenwriter) have to write a screenplay that fits the decoration.
Moreover, this episode reflects not only on screenwriting, but on the creation of animations as well. The narrative structure here is based on a dinner conversation between a married lesbian couple. One of them is the therapist to Diane, Dr. Indira (voice: Issa Rae), and the other is the corporate mediator at the company where Todd and Princess Carolyn work, Mary-Beth (voice: Wanda Sykes). The wives share their work-related problems with each other, but since they cannot use their patients’ real names, they make them up. This way the famous opening title of BoJack Horseman becomes Bobo, the angsty zebra. During the whole episode we witness the stories told by the therapist and the mediator, thus every character becomes something else, not just verbally, but also visually. The horse transforms in the animated drawings into a zebra, the yellow Labrador, Mr. Peanutbutter, becomes a brown dog named Mr. Chocolate Hazelnut Spread, and so on.
Bobo, the angsty zebra. INT. SUB. (Season 5, Episode 7). Netflix, 2018.
Since there are not only one but two narrators in this episode, there are two story lines. The episode structurally becomes a rhythmic change between three spaces: the wives dinner table, the fictional space of story line A, told by Dr. Indira, and the fictional space of story line B, told by Mary-Beth. The fictional spaces are even more layered, since what Dr. Indira can tell Mary-Beth at the dinner table are only the words she has heard from Diane at therapy sessions, thus what we, the audience see is actually the imagination of Mary-Beth based on the words of Dr. Indira, which are based on the words of Diane. The wives reference this problem by telling one another how difficult it is to imagine the story one is telling the other. This is also unveiled when the wives argue about whose turn it is to continue her story.
"There's definitely more to your story than to mine. Mine's more like a secondary story. A B-story, if you will.", says Mary-Beth, to which Dr. Indira answers: "I have a feeling it will continue to offer a light alternative, as my story gets increasingly serious." At the end they agree: "Let's continue to switch back and forth between our stories, pausing at their most interesting moments. That sounds like the most natural way to have a conversation." Of course, it is not, nor is it to tell two stories in motion picture: it has just become a convention over the past decade, one that we or the creators rarely question. We can see that the writers of
BoJack Horseman do question it again, but in a manner that also incorporates this way of storytelling.
No words at all words
When sound was introduced to filmmaking, there was an intense debate among film theorists and filmmakers whether sound can be an integrative element of motion picture. Film history seems to prove it can, so much that people rarely question it anymore. Of course, there are some, like Kaurismäki, who thinks differently: "My eternal plan is always to make a film that a Chinese lady from the countryside can understand without subtitles." (Kaurismäki, 2012), and the aforementioned Robert McKee also writes about dialogue as the last thing to “add” to a film when it comes to screenwriting (McKee, 1997, 394). All the same, making a motion picture without any dialogue still remains as the ultimate questioning of the way conventional film narrative works.
It is no surprise in this sense that BoJack Horseman had to present an episode like this: Fish Out of
Water (Season 3, Episode 4, written by Elijah Aron). When BoJack is on a tour with his movie "Secretariat"
he has to attend an underwater festival to raise publicity for his Oscar nomination. In Pacific Ocean City water creatures can communicate with each other, but land creatures, like BoJack, have to wear a diving suit which seems to block the ability to talk with others. The whole episode lacks any understandable dialogue until the very end, when it turns out that there is a button on the diving suit which makes it possible to speak, only BoJack was too careless to discover it.
To tell an eventful story like Fish Out of Water, which has an intense plot, without dialogue is in the most noble sense of the word: showing off your writing skills. The episode pays hommage to the silent movie era by evoking the traditions of burlesque. BoJack is involved in a series of accidental situations: he continuously falls and has to get up, or recognizes at the very last moment that something or somebody is right behind him. This episode also incorporates the intertitles of silent movies. All the techniques explained in the "Visual, textual" part of this paper come from the background to the foreground, and the main task for BoJack in the episode is to deliver an apology note to Kelsey Jennings (voice: Maria Bamford). We get to read different versions of this written note until BoJack comes up with the perfect one at the end of the episode, only to find out by the use of the button on his diving suit that it was all in vain.
Apology note. Fish Out of Water (Season 3, Episode 4). Netflix, 2016.
The episode Free Churro mentioned in the "Introduction" can be regarded as a counterpoint to Fish
Out of Water. Whilst the latter is plot driven and has no dialogue, the former consists of only two monologues
and has almost no plot at all.
The first monologue is delivered by BoJack's father, Butterscotch Horseman (voice: Will Arnett), in the relatively long cold open. The episode begins with an image we have already seen in Downer Ending during BoJack's drug trip: the child BoJack is waiting for his father after his football training. When Butterscotch's car is getting closer, BoJack waves to him, to which his father answers: "I see you. Get in." On the way home, BoJack has to listen to his "wanna be" writer father's story of the day. Butterscotch is complaining about how BoJack's mother distracted him in writing his novel, how she forgot to make him lunch and how he actually learned from making himself a sandwich that he can depend on no one, but himself, and so should BoJack embrace this philosophy as well. Like any other scene from BoJack's childhood, this also adds another layer to our understanding of his adult character.
After the opening titles, the episode continues with BoJack's monologue at his mother's funeral. He starts by picking up the motive of getting food and tells his morning's story of how he got a free churro because he told the waiter at a fast-food restaurant that his mother had died. This seems to be deliberately in contrast to the episode told by Butterscotch, since BoJack's anecdote is about being served, which means depending on someone. In many ways, BoJack's eulogy is all about the question of emotional dependence, even if all the stories he shares about his family outlines that he could never count on his parents. He even borrows a story he admits to be fake from a TV show only to demonstrate how deep his desire for unconditional love is.
He also borrows a sentence from his mother's eulogy, when he realizes he talks too much about himself ("I don't want to turn this eulogy into a meulogy." [emphasis added – Sz.B.]). The sentence is from his mother's eulogy delivered at Butterscotch's funeral: "My husband is dead, and everything is worse now." Given that the episode is based on text, BoJack consistently laments on sentences heard from his mother. Like his father analyzed the making of a sandwich in a philosophical way, he deconstructs sentences from his mother, proving Paul de Man's theory (1979) that behind every sentence there are a lot of untold sentences. It is by the deconstruction of this sentence that BoJack understands what his mother meant by saying this: she meant that even if Butterscocth was not an ideal husband, now that he is dead, the very idea and the possibility of having a good husband is dead for her as well. So BoJack can also say at the end of his eulogy: "My mother is dead, and
everything is worse now.", because even if his mother was not an ideal mother, now the very notion of having a mother is dead for him.
The other recurring motive in both monologues is the statement: "I see you". Butterscotch greeted his son with these words and BoJack believes his mother said good-bye to him in the same way, although he never refers to his father's words, it is up to the audience to discover the similarity. BoJack tries to understand what she could have meant by saying, "I see you.", before she died in the hospital and he comes up with several meaningful interpretations, only to realize at the end that she was unconscious and just read out loud what was written on the door behind BoJack: "ICU" which stands for "Intensive Care Unit".
There is a punch line similar to this one at the end of the episode. BoJack opens the coffin but freezes at the sight. He looks up and this is the only time that we, the audience, also get to see the attendees BoJack is speaking to at the funeral. They are all lizards, and at this point BoJack realizes that he is at the wrong funeral parlour. Although his eulogy shows many similarities to the likes of existentialist monologue writers such as Thomas Bernhard or Samuel Beckett, Raphael Bob-Waksberg's writing (he is the only author credited to this episode) also pays hommage to another text-based genre: stand-up comedy. BoJack's dark monologue is filled with bits and there is even an "organ guy" who is supposed to foist rim shots and piano rolls whenever BoJack says something funny.
In the way Fish Out of Water evoked one of the oldest forms of motion picture comedy that used no
words at all: burlesque, Free Churro joins the tradition of stand-up comedy which consists of all words. Each
episode outlines the importance of writing in two very different ways.
Conclusion
As shown above, BoJack Horseman incorporates advanced narrative techniques in a more complex way than most midcult series. Though I did not analyze the social and political aspects of the series, it is important to underline that the show uses these techniques to thematize socially important issues enumerated at the beginning of this paper.
Since BoJack Horseman is animated, the characters bear a somewhat eternal, more symbolic meaning, which makes it easier for the audience to relate to them. As the creator of the show, Raphael Bob-Waksberg said: "Scott McCloud talks in his book Understanding Comics about the use of iconography and that by making things less realistic, sometimes you make them more universal." (Bob-Waksberg, 2018) It may sound surprising, but it is true that anyone can relate to an anthropomorphic horse, but it would be difficult, for example, for a woman from any minority to relate to a white male, even if the story of the show were the same. The abstract nature of animation helps to understand abstraction not only in a psychological way, but in the case of BoJack Horseman, also the abstract mechanisms of fiction.
Lev Manovich wrote (2001, 244-278) that the history of 20th century motion picture can be described as
the opposition of film and animation, the former becoming more and more mainstream, the latter holding on to its underground status. Though adult animation has become more and more popular since The Simpsons (Matt Groening, 1989- ), and BoJack Horseman is also a Netflix production, it still stands as a counterpoint to most
mainstream shows that tell linear stories with happy endings, seeks relatability in their narrative and character design, and tend to hide the fact that they are: fiction. These shows could raise unhealthy expectations in the audience about their lives, whilst BoJack Horseman deliberately deconstructs these expectations, as we witness the fall of a once successful celebrity, or the bitter compromises of a highly ambitious writer.
The techniques I analyzed in this paper raise awareness in the viewer/reader that even these less idealistic stories, though closer to everyday experiences, are also made up. Fiction is not something to believe in: it is something to think about.
Works cited
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Barnabás Szöllősi (1991) is a Hungarian writer, screenwriter. He is currently working on his PhD about the literary autonomy of screenwriting. His other research fields are leftist film theory and the pedagogy of creative writing.
