11 million people tuned in to watch the Season 3 premiere
of Rick and Morty.
And Rick and Morty’s fans are so obsessed that a throwaway joke
“I want my McNugget dipping sauce, Szechuan sauce, Morty.”
was enough to make McDonald’s bring back a limited edition
dipping sauce from 1998.
Clearly, there’s something about this show
that resonates with people today.
It has an attitude many of us can relate to.
“Seems like TV from other dimensions has a somewhat looser feel to it.”
“Yeah, it’s got an almost improvisational tone.”
So as we wait for the 70 more episodes that have now been confirmed,
let’s take a moment to ask how this show,
that has risen so rapidly to incredible popularity,
expresses the sensibility of our times.
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What are “our times” anyway?
It’s not always easy to see everything about your own present day very clearly.
Looking back at history,
things become more crystallized into eras and movements with labels --
The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, Romanticism…
but trying to label the zeitgeist while you’re living it
can feel a little like trying to see that the Earth is round
while you’re standing on it.
Still, how can we try to define today’s way of thinking?
And how is that mindset reflected in Rick and Morty?
The defining mode of thought in art and culture
for many recent decades has been Postmodernism.
To understand Postmodernism, first we have to look at Modernism,
a cultural movement inspired by the increasingly industrialized cities
and changing lifestyle of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Modernism was about breaking with the past, embracing the new and “modern,”
finding innovation in art and technology, and grappling with the horrors of World War
I.
But Modernism still had faith in the power of humankind
to create a better world through science, technology,
and the applied human mind.
After World War II, Modernism was eventually displaced by Postmodernism,
a movement that rejected the one-size-fits-all
“grand narratives” of Modernism.
Instead, Postmoderism saw truth and values as the product
of cultural and social circumstances.
It embraced moral relativism, pluralism, not one universal meaning for everyone.
Postmodernism was irreverent --
Fredric Jameson said it showed a “waning of affect,”
meaning it had less sincere emotion and more irony and skepticism.
Rick and Morty has definitely been called a Postmodern show before.
It has Postmodernism’s irreverent self-referentiality,
“Roll the credits!
Go!
Just shake that ass!
That’s the end of Season 1!
That’s the end, mother-[BLEEP]!”
its deconstruction of grand narratives
“I accept your call to adventure, good sir.
Kind sir.
Come on, Rick!
There’s a giant in the clouds!”
“Yeah.
[Burp] Beginner’s luck.”
and its irony and skepticism.
“There is no god, Summer.
Gotta rip that Band-Aid off now.
You’ll thank me later.”
And yet, despite all the cynicism and self-awareness,
the show also gives us sincere, deeply felt moments,
like the time Morty has to bury his own dead body,
or when Unity breaks up with Rick
and he presumably tries to commit suicide.
These scenes demonstrate
that there’s a strong undercurrent of genuine feeling
beneath the facade of not caring about things.
As the New Republic’s Eric Armstrong put it,
“Roiland and Harmon are (...) asserting the value of sentimentality,
cloaked in Lovecraftian postmodernism.”
It seems as though in general in our culture,
sentimentality and earnestness are starting to come back into vogue.
Look at the success of The Shape of Water,
which won Best Picture and Best Director at the 2018 Academy Awards.
The film’s Director, Guillermo del Toro,
has actually emphasized the film’s earnestness.
“And the thing that is important for me is to be shameless and earnest
and honest and not Postmodern.”
As cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van den Akker argue,
all postmodern tendencies aren’t being abandoned,
but they are taking on a new sensibility.
So what we’re seeing is that Postmodernism’s clever dissection
of grand narratives is still very much in play,
“So dark.
You’re sure you’re not from the DC Universe?”
but today there’s also
a strong desire for hope and meaning again.
This shift back towards earnestness is likely a reaction to the long list
of pressures facing our society today --
our divided political landscape, climate change, globalization,
financial crises, tensions over
how a modern society approaches race, gender and sexuality.
In the face of all these challenges, neither Postmodernism nor Modernism
is really going to cut it alone.
To paraphrase Vermeulen and Van den Akker,
Modernists were too confident in humanity’s ability to fix everything,
while Postmodernists were too apathetic.
To put that another way, it’s as if Modernists say:
World War I was tough, but we’re smart
and we have awesome technology and innovation,
so we can make everything good.
Postmodernists say:
We were wrong to think we could really change the world for the better.
Let’s just play in the ruins, because nothing means anything anyway.
These days we say:
We know enough to see that everything very possibly won’t turn out okay,
but we can’t afford to give up hope.
Vermeulen and Van den Akker call this new, emerging way of thought
Metamodernism,
and they define it as an oscillation between the Modern and the Postmodern.
Metamodernism is a pendulum constantly swinging back and forth,
that push and pull between optimistic sentiment
and cynical detachment.
So now that you’ve stayed with us through all of that,
what’s really fascinating is that this oscillation matches up
very well with the key back and forth we find in Rick and Morty.
Take this quote from Vermeulen and Van den Akker,
which basically sounds like it could be describing the show:
“Metamodernism oscillates between a modern enthusiasm
“I love my grandkids.”
“Aw.”
and a postmodern irony
“Psych.”
between hope and melancholy, between naivete and knowingness,
empathy and apathy.
Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings towards fanaticism,
gravity pulls it back toward irony;
the moment its irony sways toward apathy,
gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm.”
This oscillation is everywhere in Rick and Morty.
Here, Morty is having what looks like a psychedelic soul union with the Fart:
“I said goodbyeee mooon men….”
but then it’s cut short
“Shut the [BLEEP] up about moon men!”
and he’s forced to shoot his new alien friend.
Or here, he’s enjoying the sunset,
but one minute later things take a turn for the worse.
Basically every time there’s a melodic pop song in the soundtrack,
it’s almost an announcement
that the show has reached peak sentimentality
and will be swinging back towards cynicism very soon.
For example, in season 3, we got the episode The Ricklantis Mix-up.
This stand-alone episode about the utopian citadel of Ricks
earnestly explores late capitalism and racial politics.
“Same old story.
Morties killin’ Morties.”
Its final sequence set to sentimental music,
in addition to revealing the Evil Morty connection,
makes us feel a deep sadness and regret about our modern lives
with our mind-numbing jobs, our fake happiness for sale,
and our evil politicians.
But lest we get the wrong idea from all this serious commentary,
the very next episode, Morty’s Mindblowers,
undermines this clear, earnest insight
with a collection of disconnected vignettes
and the episode ends with Rick and Morty
both forgetting everything and watching TV.
“How did we fall asleep during interdimensional cable?”
The point of Morty’s Mindblowers is basically that Rick and Morty’s life
is made up of repeating
the same disturbing, meaningless cycle over and over.
On its own, the episode Morty’s Mindblowers
is peak Postmodernism.
But in the larger structure of the season,
it’s the pendulum swinging back to balance out
what we just saw in The Ricklantis Mix-up.
Other times the show gives us sentimentality
“I’m ok with this.
Be good, Morty.
Be better than me.”
and then backtracks
“The other collar!
I’m not ok with this!”
telling us later that what we saw and believed to be genuine sentiment
was actually false.
“Oh Lord, hear my prayers.
Yes!
[BLEEP] you god.
Not today, bitch.”
Rick arranges for his capture by the Federation,
sacrificing himself to save his family,
to the soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”.
“I will let you down.
I will make you hurt.”
Then in season 3,
we learn that Rick wasn’t actually sacrificing himself for his family,
he was just doing the usual -
“You came to rescue them.”
“I came to kill you, bro.
That’s not even my original Summer.”
“Oh my god, he’s not bluffing.”
trying to disrupt the powers that be
by making supposedly meaningful things meaningless.
“Watch closely as Grandpa topples an empire by changing a 1 to a 0.”
So the show undermines what it’s previously presented
and rewrites itself,
to never let us get comfortable
with either the sentimental investment or the ironic detachment.
This push and pull can be seen in pretty much every aspect of the show --
one protagonist is a cynical nihilist, the other is a hopeful, empathetic kid.
And within Rick himself, we see this tension constantly.
We’ve talked before about how Rick’s character arc
fluctuates between caring and not caring.
He finds meaning by zooming into the love he has for his family
and then he reverts to zooming out and knowing that everything is meaningless.
And that brings us back to us and the zeitgeist Rick and Morty
is tapping into.
In many ways Rick’s emotional back-and-forth is a mirror
of how a lot of people feel today.
Even if we don’t have Rick’s access to innumerable galaxies,
the Internet gives us access to innumerable information bytes.
So like Rick, we have the ability to see how tiny our lives are
in comparison to the bigger world and universe out there.
And we can find ourselves a little exhausted by the never-ending
depressing, disturbing news produced by a world
that doesn’t always seem worth investing in.
But in spite of all that, we also don’t want to give up hope.
Because, like Rick, we do care,
in spite of how insurmountable the problems can seem.
So we can see that Rick’s back-and-forth sin wave
of caring and not caring
is a pretty accurate reflection of the zeitgeist.
The show’s popularity is more than just a sum
of its many great parts --
as it balances irony and empathy, idealism and nihilism,
enthusiasm and apathy,
Rick and Morty perfectly embodies that ever-swinging pendulum
of the spirit of today.
“Goddammit.
Why am I crying.
Makes no sense.
Ugh.
You’re probably confused because we barely knew each other,
but you’re different, Noob Noob.”
“Mother-[BLEEP].”
Hey guys!
So, in the absence of new Rick and Morty episodes,
you might want to start getting into HarmonQuest.
It’s Dan Harmon and his posse playing DnD with celebrity guests,
half animated, half live-action.
It’s quite funny, actually, and we love this episode with Aubrey Plaza.
“Uh, my name is Hawaiian Coffee.”
“I’m not a psychologist, but almost sounds like
you made your name up.”
“Well, doesn’t every name sound like that?”
For a short window of time, you can check out HarmonQuest
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