What’s up guys, Jared here. We’re always getting requests from fans saying, “you
guys have got to cover ____." *insert movie, tv show, video game, meme, book, sarcastic
joke here* We’ll then enthusiastically watch it, brainstorm for a really long time, and
often, come up empty-handed. It’s not that we can’t think of anything. The show might
HINT at ideas but not fully develop them, or evidence keeps coming up refuting our argument,
or sometimes a show is just plain inconsistent. Or hey, maybe, we’re just too dumb to figure
it out. So, when it came time to look at Netflix’s surreal retro-futuristic love story, we didn’t
quite get where we hoped. We dug and dug, and found some really cool stuff. But a cohesive
Philosophy Of? Not quite. So, we’re going to do something a bit different. We’re going
to go through the ideas we considered, show how and when they work within the context
of the show, and why we ultimately decided NOT to go with it. And hey, maybe this will
serve as a foundation for you to think about the show in new ways. This is another experiment
for us, so be sure to let us know what you think in the comments.
And without further adieu, welcome to the inaugural episode of Wisecrack Half-baked
Edition on Superbad 2: Maniac. And yup, spoilers ahead.
Alright, guys, so first, a quick recap is in order. Wish me luck. Maniac primarily focuses
on Owen Millgram and Annie Landsberg. Owen, the schizophrenic black sheep of a very wealthy
family, struggles with delusions of saving the world and a made-up brother. Annie, a
broke girl with a dysfunctional family, struggles with drug addiction to cope with the death
of her sister and estrangement of her mother. They enter a highly experimental pharmaceutical
study run by three doctors and a supercomputer called GRTA, that hopes to eradicate psychological
pain by having patients identify, map, and ultimately confront their issues through drug-induced
fantasies. Annie and Owen’s wires get crossed, causing them to inhabit each others fantasies
where they experience whole lifetimes together.
GRTA gets depressed after the death of Dr. Muramoto, threatening the experiment and the
subjects. Inside the final fantasy, Annie comforts the computer, finds the resolve to
move past her sister’s death, while Owen confronts the fact that his fantasy brother
is just an idealized version of his crappy real brother. He saves the other patients,
and back in the real world, finds the confidence to stand up to his family. In the end, Annie’s
friendship inspires Owen to escape from a psych ward and have faith in his ability to
function. Or was that a fantasy? Alright, whew. Now on to the pitches, organized from
best ideas to worst for your entertainment.
Pitch 1: Don Quixote - This one is an 8/10… almost good enough for a video.
Miguel de Cervantes’s modern classic is everywhere in Maniac. One of the fantasy scenarios
even revolves around Owen and Annie infiltrating a seance to find the fictional lost final
chapter of the novel. So why this focus on an old book? Let’s break it down: Don Quixote
tells the story of Alonso Quejano, who becomes so obsessed with books about chivalry that
his mind “dries out.” Essentially, he goes mad, which makes this line extra ironic:
"I'm gonna read you this time, because I'm healthy Annie now and healthy people read
books." Inspired by his books Alonso decides to become a knight errant himself. The bulk
of the book follows him as he goes on wild adventures including the one where he famously
attacks windmills he mistakes as giants. “Windmills” happens to be the name of Maniac’s second
episode which briefly features Annie looking at some during the road trip that ends in
her sister’s death, but, trust me, it gets deeper than that. Already we can draw a parallel
between the madness that makes Don Quixote want to perform heroic acts and Owen’s schizophrenia
that makes him believe he will save the world. Like Don Quixote, Owen can’t distinguish
reality from fiction. But more than that, Don Quixote inhabits a dream-like mindspace
that makes castles of inns and giants of windmills, turning the regular world into a fantastic
one.
Similarly, the ULP treatment turns its patients sad realities into fully-fledged fantasy adventures.
Annie’s lemur painting becomes a bizarre “recover the Lemur” story, the copy of
Don Quixote she picks up becomes the “steal the final chapter” plot and, Annie and Ellie
watching a Lord of the Rings esque show becomes the this, and Owen’s Hawk that kills Ernie
the Gerbil inspires the “save the world from aliens tale": "This is madness. I loved
Ernie. If I was a secret agent, I would know I was a secret agent." But perhaps the most
powerful connection between the two works is the shared theme of transformation through
the power of dreams. "You've just completed the 73rd iteration of the ULP. It's been a
complete success. Congratulations. You are healed." In the case of the Don’s delusions,
he adventures so that he may reinvigorate a Golden Age when people were more authentic.
As he says: “Blessed the time, and blessed the centuries, called by the ancients the
Golden Age… In that time, women…spoke their thoughts of love from the soul, simply
and pretentiously, exactly as they thought them, not searching for elaborate verbal circumlocutions
to beautify them. Truth and simplicity were unmixed with fraud, deceit, and malice. Justice
remained firm and sure, neither troubled nor offended against by patronage and self-interest,
as today she is so grievously tainted and troubled and persecuted. "Judges did not feel
themselves, as they do today, entitled to be tyrants.”
If Don Quixote’s fantasies represent his yearning for the days when people weren’t
full of s**t, then one could say the ULP experiment uses fantasy to heal a society that has been
defined by isolation. As James suggests at the beginning, all levels of physics require
collision and bonding in order to progress, and so does the human heart. “Camaraderie,
communion, family, friendship, love, what have you. We’re lost without connection.
It’s quite terrible to be alone.” However, the world we’re presented with is one that
is tragically absent meaningful connection.
Owen: "Hello Mrs. Finkelstein." Mrs. Finkelsten: "F**k off Jonathan."
Owen: "It's, uh, Owen. Owen M-" Mrs. Finkelstein: "F**k off Jonathan."
The first two episodes introduce to a vision of New York in which people are more alienated
from each other than ever. Most of the human interactions we witness are purely transactional.
This is made quite LITERAL with FriendProxy, a service that provides you with someone pretending
to be your friend for a fee. Annie: "You're using a service that gives you pretend friends."
Patricia: "I have real friends, this is just more convenient." Then there’s Adbuddy,
where a human being pitches you products in exchange for goods and services. It’s kind
of like getting free content on the internet but having to watch annoying ads. There’s
even appears to be a market for people to escape the world entirely. Enter A-VOID, a
box that basically allows you to hibernate your life away instead of engaging with the
outside world. There’s also lines like: “Thank you for braving the outside world
for me," and the fact that Azumi and James sleep in isolating drawers.
The encroachment of consumerism in to every facet of our lives is further emphasized by
the omnipresence of advertisements, from the ads that “purchased” Annie’s face, to
the neon signs blaring through Owen’s window, to ad copy on bridges. In Maniac’s New York,
you can’t even take a s**t without being bludgeoned by ads. So- Don Quixote uses fantasy
to bring back an ideal era of authentic expression and Maniac portrays two lonely souls finding
connection through fantasy in an era of alienation. It’s important to note that, in many of
the ULP fantasies taking place in the “real” world - all the creepy retrofuturist stuff
seems to disappear. When trying to save her Lemur, for instance, the world goes from “what
the 80s thought the 2000s would look like” to “just the 80s” But there’s an important
qualification to mention here. This “golden age” that Don Quixote waxes poetic about
NEVER REALLY HAPPENED. There are many characters in the book who bemoan the negative effects
of chivalry books, deeming them trash and assuring people that there was never such
an idyllic time. “I can swear to you that, in fact, this world has never seen a single
of those knights, nor any of their grand deeds or their stupidities.”
In the end, Don Quixote is tricked into hanging up his lance and becoming Alonso Quejano again.
He eventually renounces his madness and dies a quiet death. Similarly, Annie ends up rejecting
GRTA’s offer to stay in the fantasy world with her sister. She accepts reality, and
together with Owen, move forward confidently. The problem with this is that although it’s
clear that Annie’s break from fantasy is considered a positive development for her
character, there’s more ambiguity surrounding the conclusion of Don Quijote. Are we supposed
to agree with the bulk of the characters in the book who claim that fantasy has done nothing
but make him a fool? Is it good that he’s no longer out adventuring? Or should we look
at it like Don Antonio Moreno, says: “may God forgive you for the damage you’ve done
to the whole rest of the world, in trying to cure the wittiest lunatic ever seen! Don’t
you see, my dear sir, that, whatever utility there might be in curing him, it could never
match the pleasure he gives with his madness?” So why wasn’t this made into a full video?
Well, despite these really great connections - what else is there to say? That reality
is better than being a McMurphy? That fantasy is a liberating force for humanity? "Thank
you for such an exhilirating experience."
It seems that the connection between the two works is that they both vaguely deal with
the nature of fantasy vs. reality, but not in a way that could really provide a definitive
philosophical thesis.
Pitch 2 - “Mommy Daddy and Me” - ...Eh I’d give this one a 5/10.
Up top we should mention Owen’s name. His surname “Milgrim” is a reference to the
Milgram experiment in which subjects were given the ability to electrocute people and
continued to harm them under the suggestion of an authority figure. A cool shoutout- but
we didn’t really see how it connected to any of the events in the series. There’s
also the serious Freudian undertones. James is a paraphilic, meaning he’s attracted
to inanimate objects. He also has a...strange relationship to his mother. In fact, if we
want to get Oedipal, and we always do: the Oedipal triangle of mother, father, and child
seems to be important for many of the main characters. Annie’s mother walked out on
her father,, Owen’s dad is an overbearing fascist, and Mantleray, also without a father
in his life, "You drove my father away and you slept in my bed way too much," literally
goes blind after confronting his mother, "I can't see!"
Not so different than say, a tragic figure who stabs his eyes out after romancing his
madre. He also built a computer modeled on his mother’s mind, and while that’s not
in the Greek tragedy, it seems pertinent. The ULP test also functions on the idea that
our mental ailments can mostly be attributed to some unresolved trauma. For Freud, many
of our neuroses and mental health problems were brought on by unresolved trauma that
we must work through. The three stages of the ULP treatment take a similar approach,
but with the mapping and confrontation stages being more fantasy lives and less laying on
a couch talking about your mom. But the connection we really wanted to make was to a pair of
thinkers who were strongly opposed to Freud’s method: philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his
psychoanalyst sidekick Felix Guattari. The three things that got our spidey senses tingling
were: 1. the use of the term “arborization” to describe the method they use to map the
brain. 2. There are bonsai trees EVERYWHERE and. 3. the opening monologue suggests that
the the universe and life are a chaotic series of collisions.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the dominant way of thinking about the world is arborescent,
that is, resembling a tree. We often think about history and society like a tree, starting
at a trunk, and growing in a mostly linear fashion while occasionally branching. But
Deleuze and Guattari preferred another natural metaphor - the rhizome. Rhizomes are the roots
of plants like ginger or weeds like dandelions. The important thing about rhizomes are that
they look like a series of connections, with no visible starting point like say, the roots
of a tree. Basically, the world is too complex to be understood linearly, and instead of
simple cause and effect, there’s inputs, outputs, feedback loops, and a lot of chaos
that we barely understand. So why does this matter for Maniac? Well in some sense, we
could view the opening monologue under this framework. Life isn’t so much a straight
line as it is a chaotic assortment of random connections, like the structure of a rhizome.
The crossing of wires for Owen and Annie kind of follow this logic. The straight lines of
their computer connections are interrupted by a random connection. Bonsai trees, in theory,
would be an interesting addition to this symbolism: not only is it defined by linearity and branching,
but that branching is intentionally guided by a human hand. "I just love little trees."
MAAAAYBE we could say that the show ends up somewhere in the middle between the totally
chaotic rhizome and the guided branching of the Bonsai tree. After all, Annie starts the
series saying: “There is no plan or pattern to the universe. It’s just chaos.” And
ends the show saying: “This is a sign, Friend Proxy Owen. Maybe the universe isn’t full
of total chaos." We ultimately abandoned this idea because we couldn’t find any evidence
that linked the the bonsai trees to the couple times chaos vs. order is referenced to in
the show. We had a few other clues too, but they went nowhere. For instance, Deleuze and
Guattari are well known for their book “Anti-Oedipus,” which challenges people who sought to analyze
the world in Freudian terms. Specifically, they want to break free of the Oedipal triangle
- mommy daddy and me.
And Mantleray, after interpreting his blindness of a symptom of his mother’s behaviors,
rejects this Freudian framing and accepts that it was instead brought on by a kiss from
Azumi. There’s also this probably random coincidence. Felix Guattari wrote a screenplay
called “Love of UIQ,” which at least sounds kind of like “ULP,” about a sub-atomic
consciousness that inhabits a computer and falls in love with a human. Plus, Deleuze
and Guattari used schizophrenia as a model to think about the world, where our desires
were not limited by the confines of society, or say capitalism. And yeah, Maniac shows
a kind of dystopian capitalism and there’s a guy with schizophrenia, but it doesn’t
quite work.
Pitch 3 - Owen’s Schizophrenia - Yeah this is the worst one.
Now, opposed to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of schizophrenia, which we need to say is
not exactly literal to the medical condition, there is Fredric Jameson’s rebuttal to them.
Jameson suggests that when people are so bombarded with commercial images and messages about
who they can be, or how a product will make them in to this or that person, they’re
actually imposing competing ideas of identity on to them. Therefore, this causes a perpetually
shifting identity, or a schizophrenic subject, and the more one’s identity vacillates,
the more one consumes. Therefore, the schizophrenic subject is ideal for such an economic system.
"I'm compos mentis." There's little doubt that the show hints at a causal connection
between advanced consumer capitalism and isolation, but is Maniac using Owen’s schizophrenia
as a metaphor for the ills heaped upon the denizens of the dystopia? Nope- Definitely
a stretch. It’s interesting, but there’s no evidence we could point to to make a confident
case. Just because we couldn’t come up with a cogent argument about the show’s grander
messages doesn’t mean it isn’t a good show, nor does it mean it isn’t a smart
show. There are some extremely clever things going on- the constant easter egg references
that connect the dreams to not only other dreams, but real life, the focus on how narrative
builds meaning in our lives. "Our brains are just computers that tells us a story to make
our lives make sense," and the small details at the end that make us question the validity
of the real world above others.
Get it... like Wendy the Lemur. What makes Maniac so impressive is its daring visual
aesthetic, it’s formless structure, and its regular dips in to absurdity, and for
that we can’t help but admire it. It sticks to a relatively simple thematic base a runs
with it- that people need connection, and it’s our ability to bond that can give us
hope to beat our demons. That’s all for now, let us know what you think about our
“half baked” format and as always, thanks for watching. Peace.