- This video is brought to you by Wren.
(intro music)
- What's up guys,
Helen here to talk about TV's oddest greatest buddy comedy,
Rick and Morty.
The show has long reveled in absurdity and so crazy,
it's brilliant creativity.
Still, it's latest offering Rick and Morty's.
Thanksploitation Spectacular managed to surprise us
with a bizarre plot featuring plenty
of Turkey on Turkey violence.
- Blueberries.
- We got blueberries down hold your positions
it's a feeding frenzy.
- I can't see.
- But is there any depth beneath all the foul play?
Get it, foul play.
Like a bird.
We think so.
And we'd argue it has everything to do with
the show calling BS on America's own self mythologizing.
We'll explain in this wise,
crack quick take on Rick and Morty.
Why Thanksgiving is lie,
but before we get into it,
I want to give a shout out to this video sponsor.
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And now back to the show.
So what is this episode functionally doing at first glance?
It's pretty simple roasting America's history.
And with that it's present.
There's the statue of Liberty secretly being a Trojan horse
concealing a steam powered assassin,
or FDR is a spider creature.
Thanks to a bad vaccine.
Side note, please get vaccinated my dudes,
you won't turn into a subterranean spider human.
I promise.
Anyway, no venerated aspect of American history
or present is exempt from the show's irreverence,
especially not its presidents.
- Don't mythologize him.
He was a politician.
- [Helen] Or its congressmen.
- President Curtis has enacted a plan to turn all turkeys
in America into hybrid super soldiers.
The move has 100% approval from Congress following
its third pay raise in six hours.
- [Helen] Or its favorite bird center holiday.
- And on America's birthday
or whatever Thanksgiving is.
- Now, you don't have to
be history's biggest devil's advocate
to understand where the show is coming from.
American history has famously been edited,
polished up and at times straight up turned into mythology.
In fact,
the early days of American studies from the 1930s to
the fifties were dominated by the so-called,
myth and symbol school.
It, as you might guess, looked for myths
and symbols that allegedly attested to
the specificity or even uniqueness of the US.
As scholar, Heike Paul writes in her book The Myths
That Made America.
This effort was undertaken as scholar,
Donald E. Pease notes,
in search of historical confirmations of
the nation's unique mission and destiny.
In this way, America built a discourse establishing itself
as what scholar burnt Austin Dorf calls
a consciously constructed new world utopia.
That is we got pretty comfy believing that we were doing
something entirely new and totally radical.
That's of course, the perspective plenty of
the joke characters in the joke episode in body.
- That little race car driver, you got baking in your belly.
What world do you want him rearing up in?
One where some spiky hair doctor who
in a lab coat can change the color of the sky
or a world where he can feel his pickup
with hot dogs and drive it to a jukebox full of our
demographics current favorite music?
- That said, according to folks like scholar,
John Coakley, myth no matter how powerful
it's not enough to form a national ideology on it's own,
it needs two side dishes.
One is rituals like funerals, military parades,
or Turkey partnerings,
which serve to remind people vividly of their membership in
a community existing over time.
And the other is symbols, lots of symbols,
especially objects ranging from coins to flags
to posters of Rosie the Riveter,
which exists to elicit emotions in a communities members.
All of this together constitutes what sociologist,
Robert Bellah way back in 1967 called,
America's elaborate and well instituted civil religion
Here, civil religion means a collection
of beliefs drawing partly from religion
to create powerful symbols of national solidarity,
symbols that you know,
we might not want to see blown up in space.
- Why don't we just blow it up?
- It's national monument.
- [Helen] Now, of course, there's nothing inherently wrong
with building national solidarity,
but these myths rituals and symbols,
I E this civil religion,
shapes the way we view everything
from our presidents to our architecture, to our army.
And in fact, religious scholar,
Charles H. Long argues that America's civil religion breeds
a kind of historical selectivity
and blind faith in our innate goodness.
At its worst this can allow us to ignore
and even perpetuate major social ills, like racism.
And that's pretty clearly what Rick and Morty
is making fun of.
We see the way America's mythos is propagated
through cultural products like the country song,
which convinces all the soldiers that
♪ Now it's time to turn into a turkey ♪
- [Helen] Here invoking America's down-home
country goodness, successfully wrangles an army.
Despite the fact that these guys are really just fighting
at the behest of a president, engaged in a petty feud.
- Jesus ever loving Christ.
Why you two, just get it over with?
- [Helen] Or the way evoking country, musician,
Johnny Cash and race car driver,
Dale Earnhardt in a political speech helps lure
these men back into the Turkey war.
- What would Johnny Cash or Dale Earnhardt say?
- He'd say it's time to walk the line
or drive very fast between two of them.
- Now, some of our American mythologizing
was born out of cultural necessity.
Colonial America had to essentially create a past
and a national character from scratch in part
to divorce themselves from Britain's story.
National mythology.
As scholar, Henry Steele Commager explained,
nothing in the history of American nationalism
is more impressive than the speed
and the lavishness with which Americans provided themselves
with a usable past history, legends, symbols, paintings,
sculpture, monuments, shrines, holy days, ballads,
patriotic songs, heroes, and with some difficulty, villains.
We see this cultural iconography, roundly degraded
throughout Rick and Morty's patriotic roasting.
Even the villain part here in mocked,
the constant refrain about terrorists.
- You know, you used that word so much.
It's lost all meaning Mr. P.
- [Helen] As Paul writes,
even as we have come a long way since the beginnings
of the myth and symbol school,
the entanglements between historical myths
and contemporary ideology are as complex
as they have ever been.
We see this in the way,
one soldier before being Turkafied,
evokes a Nobel call to duty.
That sounds like world war II, era propaganda.
- That world needs a few good men in a secret Pentagon lab.
Turning into turkeys.
- [Helen] At the same time.
The show critiques the far less savory realities
of modern American warfare,
which are often left out of the mainstream discourse.
- Who's side are we on?
- I don't know but, we've done enough to pay for college.
- [Helen] In the post credit scene.
We even see a veteran suffering from blueberry induced,
PTSD and lacking adequate healthcare shrug off
the president's failure to help him.
- Ain't his fault our insurance got cut.
We gotta build missiles.
- But before you go and pick up a Canadian passport.
It's worth pointing out.
America isn't alone in its proclivity for myth-making.
Every country relies on cultural mythos.
For reasons we'll get into.
There's the way composer Richard Wagner's operas
were used to rally German patriotism during
Hitler's reign
or the way writer Alexander Pushkin helped define Russianist
after the Napoleonic wars.
And even the way history is told
fosters strong national identities.
This makes sense.
History as it's practiced today,
grew out of 19th century academia,
a deeply nationalist period of Western history.
When countries like Italy and Germany
were uniting several regional states
under one national flag,
while countries like Greece,
Serbia and Poland participated in revolutionary uprisings
against the Ottoman and Russian empires.
The result was that each country pretty much developed their
own specific nationalist history.
And that includes America's conception of itself within
the 17th century puritanical paradigm of
an explicitly Christian city on a hill.
While, these national perspectives have certainly been
called into question by many historians.
It hasn't vanished from the field,
as historian E. J. Hobsbawn,
explained back in 1992 historians
without a past are contradictions in terms.
What makes a nation is the past,
What justifies one nation against others is the past,
and historians are the people who produce the past.
Now the fields of history and American studies have both
in recent decades,
been complicated by new schools of thought that question,
these prevailing narratives
for Rick and Morty's part,
Summer pipes up at one point sharing a far
more skeptical perspective about American history.
- Oh wow. Wiping out a native population on Thanksgiving.
That's never happened before.
- What did you just say?
- [Helen] Still, the show argues that much
of the nationalist myths propagated over centuries,
continue to stick around in our cultural psyche.
Rick and Morty also suggests that the resulting mythologies,
many of us share about America are just as random and absurd
as the idea that Thanksgiving was won by alien pilgrims
and native Americans who secretly got along.
- No wait, they love each other.
- [Helen] This moment might also be explicitly critiquing
the very real mythos about Thanksgiving, which posits,
peaceful corn sharing relations between white settlers
and native Americans.
Rather than, you know,
a lot of genocide.
Overall, the episodes own American mythology escalates
into absurdity.
- Is that a Turkey dinosaur?
- [Helen] In this way, it draws into sharp relief.
The absurdity of our own real life myths about cherry trees
and productive fair trade between white settlers
and Native Americans.
Oh, not to mention the intended sacrilege of releasing
a Thanksgiving special in July,
but why do we as societies like sharing myth,
after myth, after myth?
That is to say,
what do mythologies practically do for us as a people?
At a most basic level they're necessary
for maintaining collective identity that provide
a given society with a sense of coherence and continuity,
but it goes deeper than that.
Scholar, Roland Barthes argues that myth functions literally
as a sort of language we can all share in.
What historian Laila Danielson describes as,
a mode of communication the disguise is something
that is contingent and socially constructed as natural
and timeless.
That is to say, mid street America as
the only possible outcome of history.
Rather than as a very carefully constructed,
human-made reality.
And this sort of historical mythologizing can change the way
a country feels entitled to behave.
For example,
the sense of a timeless exceptional America
has historically arguably made it possible
for the country to justify lots
of gnarly things like unnecessary invasions
of the middle east
or overthrowing democratically elected governments
in Latin America.
After all, if we're the greatest,
our actions must be justified.
Right?
This Rick and Morty episode underscores
the importance of mythology and symbols
in keeping society coherent,
and then creating a shared language
for our nationalist impulses.
- Heritage destroyed.
- [Helen] Moments like this suggest the importance
of collective symbols in sustaining society
as we know it,
and at the end of the episode.
We also see the risk a society faces when
its myths get busted.
After seeing everything he knew about America be upended,
Morty comments,
- I always thought we were more special than that.
Like we invented everything and did everything
and that's why we own everything.
Now, I don't know what to feel.
- [Helen] Here, he's lost the comforting language
of the mythology he was raised on.
The president offers a toothless.
- Feel thankful Morty, feel thankful.
- [Helen] What Morty's facing is the de-stabilizing reality
that America isn't what he thought it was.
It's just like any other nation built on a foundation
of myths and narratives rather than
on any real moral exceptionalism.
And having had my own mind blown,
listening to Howard Zinn's a people's history,
largely because of Matt Damon's stellar narration.
I know that's a lot for anyone to take in,
but what do you guys think?
Did Rick and Morty roast Thanksgiving like
it's a prize Turkey or is there still value in our
national mythology?
Let us know in the comments
and please don't get too angry at us.
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and as always,
thanks for watching.
Peace.
(outro music)