"Have a bad life!"
"Joke's on you!
I already have one!"
Season 4 of BoJack Horseman is all about confronting the past.
The story sends the message
that it doesn’t work to shut out memories that hurt us --
we can’t just grit our teeth and will ourselves to be happy.
“Here's the secret to being happy.
Just pretend you’re happy
and eventually you’ll forget you’re pretending.”
Most of us have been damaged by childhood or by our parent’s damage from their parents,
or we might be wounded by other things that happened to us in years gone by.
"You’re doing the best you can considering your asshole parents."
BoJack Horseman tells us the way to break this cycle of hurt is
to access the past while we still can,
and to understand the root causes of our unhappiness.
Only after all this can a better life be possible.
"See?
When you make amends, don't you just feel lighter?"
"Well, I also ate a shit ton of Bugles, so no."
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The entire arc of Hollyhock’s search for a mom,
with BoJack assuming the role of a dad, is a clever red herring,
"I told you from the beginning I have 8 dads."
"Yeah.
Yeah.
Good."
But...
I've never had a brother."
and Season 4 proves to be less about this perceived daughter figure
and more about a different woman in BoJack’s life.
His mother, Beatrice Horseman, transforms from the series’ central villain
into a tragic figure on par with BoJack himself.
"You just said--"
"Time's arrow neither stands still nor reverses, after all.
It merely marches forward."
The series has always garnered sympathy for BoJack’s bad behavior
through scenes of Beatrice’s horrible parenting,
"I'm punishing you for being alive."
but by the end of Season 4
we’re challenged to sympathize with Beatrice’s bad behavior
because of her horrible upbringing.
"Come on now, be strong.
You can't let your womanly emotions consume you.
You don't want to end up like your mother now, do you?"
[SOBS] "No."
Just as we come to understand why BoJack is tempted to sleep with Penny,
does drugs with Sarah Lynn, and nearly takes his own life,
we can finally understand why Beatrice detested her father,
resented her husband, and abused her son.
Beatrice is both a horribly cruel mother and a person with damage all her own --
the trauma she’s suffered doesn’t change or necessarily excuse the bad things she’s
done,
but it does make us get it, and feel for her.
"Your throat is nearly swollen shut.
So perhaps you'll finally lose some of that weight that's giving you such trouble,
wouldn't that be nice?"
Notably, though, the writers keep all of the information we learn about Beatrice’s
life
hidden from BoJack.
He can return to his family’s lake house,
but he can’t witness his grandmother’s heartache over her dead son
or her subsequent lobotomy.
"Why, I have half a mind."
He can bring his mother to a nursing home,
but he can’t see her cruel childhood friends,
her misogynistic father, her cheating husband,
her lost dreams, or the expectations of the time period
in which she was raised and raised him.
None of this knowledge is available to BoJack
in part because of Beatrice’s dementia, and in part because BoJack doesn’t ask.
His anger toward his mother -- however justified --
has made him completely unwilling to try to know her.
"Best of luck.
See you never."
BoJack’s ignorance makes us think about something we might forget a lot of the time
--
that our parents are people, too.
The trap many of us fall into is viewing family members
only in relation to ourselves -- it’s right there in the name, relative --
but we feel better when we gain that perspective
that in reality our parents are nuanced beings with personal needs and wounds
that ought to be respected,
and they were raised under a set of circumstances and societal norms
that we can’t really imagine,
due to the completely different set of norms that govern our own eras.
When BoJack shows instinctive compassion to Beatrice in the moments
before he leaves her side, possibly forever --
"Can you taste the ice cream, mom?"
"Oh BoJack, it’s so... delicious."
we get the depressing sense
that their relationship could have been totally different
if he’d shown her that kindness earlier,
or if she’d somehow made peace with her own trauma
and avoided hurting her child so deeply.
“All this time I thought you were a terrible parent.
And you were.
But I blew it even worse.
Turns out being a parent is impossible.”
With wisdom like that, BoJack proves he’s capable of empathizing with the woman
he hates,
while BoJack the show wants us to learn from its characters’ mistakes:
If we don’t want our family to leave us to die alone,
we have to treat them well,
and the only way to be psychologically equipped to do this is
to address our flaws at their source.
"When you do bad things, you have something you can point to
when people eventually leave you.
It's not you, you tell yourself.
It's that bad thing you did."
It’s easy to find ourselves in BoJack’s position:
completely unaware of our parents’ truth
because we’re either too wrapped up in our own,
or too hurt by the fallout of theirs.
"Stop!
You're out of chances."
But if BoJack Horseman the show is making a case for anything,
it’s that we should take advantage of access to the past
while we still can -- ask questions;
"My grandmother sounds like quite a character.
Can I meet her?"
engage with our families’ histories so we can better understand ourselves.
We won’t always have the chance.
BoJack fails to do this,
and suffers throughout his whole life because of it.
He proves that misunderstanding our family makes us hold onto anger and misplaced emotions.
"You stupid piece of shit.
You're a real stupid piece of shit.
And everywhere you go, you destroy people.
Of course your mother never loved you.
What do you expect?
That's why Sarah Lynn died.
That's why Charlotte will never forgive you."
Conversely, learning about the past can lead to forgiveness,
because we can see that much of the pain caused to us
wasn’t intended to target us, nor brought about by anything we did.
Think of the old adage that the truth will set you free --
the past is where we look for that truth,
to liberate ourselves from the limited or false narratives we’ve been living with.
BoJack’s unwillingness to know his mom’s truth
stands in stark contrast to Hollyhock’s open-hearted search into her past --
“I’ve always wanted to know who my mother is.”
which is rewarded.
And her positive approach makes her an aspirational figure for BoJack and for
us.
“And she’s funny, but she isn’t mean, which is pretty remarkable,
because a lot of 17-year olds think you have to be mean to be funny,
but Hollyhock is very... sweet.”
So BoJack Horseman teaches that understanding our past empowers us,
and seeking that truth is imperative to our well-being.
"She has to know.
You don't have to tell her I was here.
I-I'll stay out of her life forever.
You can tell her I'm an asshole.
You can say you found this on your own.
I-I don't care.
But you have to tell her."
And given that much of the season is set against
the backdrop of Beatrice’s old age and the loss of her mental faculties,
the show’s reminding us that there’s no time to waste.
Two of the supporting characters’ storylines in Season 4
are brutal reminders that, even if we do make positive change,
it’s hard to maintain, until we address that underlying reason
for our unhappiness.
"I've had five miscarriages."
Princess Carolyn seemed to be showing growth with her newfound ability
to balance work and and her relationship.
But in Season 4, as she faces the pain of having another miscarriage,
she’s confronted with a situation that she can’t control.
[SIGH] “I just think...we should maybe talk about other options.”
"Okay.
Here's another option -- get out of my apartment!"
She reverts to her old thinking
that hard work will fix anything, that she can go it alone,
and that she doesn’t need Ralph.
“Get out!
Save it for your next girlfriend... the one you can take home to your parents,
the one who’s easy.”
[SIGH] “Goodbye, Princess Carolyn.”
She’s in denial because she’s scared about her body’s capabilities,
but instead of considering other ways to bring “Ruthie” closer to reality,
she throws herself into literally the first project that hits her desk
and makes Philbert her new “baby.”
“I think about how everything’s going to work out
because how else could she tell people?”
“But it’s fake.”
“Yeah, well, it makes me feel better.”
Her core desires to be a mother and have a family are once again set aside
because she doesn’t address her irrational fear
that she’ll inevitably end up alone.
"Do you know how hard it is to start a family at my age?"
So she ensures she is alone,
and she’ll continue fulfilling her own prophecy of singledom
until she challenges this deepest fear head on.
"If you spend a lot of time with stories,
you start to believe that life is just stories,
and it’s not.
Life is life.
And that’s so sad because there’s so little time and --
what are we doing with it?"
Like Princess Carolyn, Diane in this season gives up the fight for a relationship
that seemed to be an answer to her woes, and she reverts to old habits.
“Even when I was above-ground I wasn’t satisfied.
Oh my God -- I am the problem.
[SOBS]”
In previous seasons, Mr. Peanutbutter’s cheering presence
helped to balance Diane’s cynical worldview,
"Anyway, how are things with you?'
"Not good.
I should have known it was a waste of time to come back here."
"Oh, that's awful.
When you get back, I'll give you one of my patented Peanutbutter
hugs!"
but Season 4 revealed this isn’t really working long-term --
and the message is that we can’t overcome our sadness and pain
by ignoring them or willing ourselves to be happy.
It’s no accident that we’ve already seen this before.
In Season 2, Diane reaches the same conclusion
that her marriage to Mr. Peanutbutter is a dead-end.
"And if I don't make some change in my life then this is how I'm going to feel forever."
She's stuck in a vicious cycle.
We see in her a lack of purpose, and an inability to engage or commit.
“It makes me feel shitty!
Like you’re just visiting here
until the next thing.
And you’re going to leave me when you get bored,
or when you find something better!”
But, like her, we don’t yet fully understand what’s made her this way.
She knows she doesn’t want to feel like this,
“I’m so tired of squinting.
[SOBS]”
but she doesn’t yet know why she does feel like this.
Diane’s storyline poses the really challenging question of
What do we do when we don’t know what we want,
when we know there's something wrong but we don't get why.
"Why can't I be happy?
Am I busted?"
What Diane really needs is psychological help from someone
much more certified than BoJack.
"Don’t feel bad about feeling bad."
And ultimately, she needs to identify the deeper root cause of her pain.
BoJack Horseman is at its best when the audience learns from the ways
its characters deal incorrectly or poorly with their depression and despair.
"Can we please get some alcohol into my mouth?"
But after the first hopeful season finale the show’s ever given to BoJack,
Season 5 may give us what we really want:
to finally see these characters learn for themselves.
"You're responsible for your own happiness, you know?"
"Good Lord, that's depressing."
"No, it's not!"
"I'm responsible for my own happiness?
I can't even be responsible for my own breakfast."
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