"What the hell?
What kind of question is that?!"
Beth Smith sure doesn’t like being analyzed.
“[Bleep] you.”
But we’re going to try anyway.
“Take that back!
You do not think that about me!”
As we’re watching "Rick & Morty," one of the first things we notice about Beth
is that she was clearly deeply shaped by the childhood trauma of her father, Rick, abandoning
her.
And on top of being absent for big stretches of time,
Rick wasn’t emotionally available when he was around.
"It’s called a hug dad, it won’t kill you."
So adult Beth clings to any scrap of attention or affection she can get from her dad,
however insincere it might be.
"You really made the crap out of those eggs.
I wish your mother was here to eat them."
"Oh, dad."
"What?
For real?"
She’s driven by a deep-seated fear of losing him again.
“Guess who dismantled the government?”
“Please don't leave me again.”
Rick takes advantage of his daughter’s neediness, living rent-free and using Morty for his adventures.
And he actively drives a wedge between Beth and Jerry
because he wants to become the only patriarch of the family.
Beth makes excuses for Rick’s behavior,
and when she does stand up to her father it’s always with a tentative edge.
"I know I sound like mom, but I can't sacrifice this whole family's safety just because I'm
afraid you'll leave again,"
But even though Beth strikes us as the definition of “needy,”
she doesn’t like neediness in others, and she even admires Rick’s ability to detach.
“He doesn't need anything from anyone.”
“You admire him for that.”
“It's better than making your problems other people's problems.”
This contradiction can be explained by the mix of forces that shaped Beth, as she was
growing up.
Her childhood was defined more by Rick’s absence than his presence.
So when she sees him as an adult, all of her independence goes out the window
and she’s back in that abandoned child mindset.
But at the same time, whether thanks to her genes or the time she did spend with her dad
as child,
Beth has a lot of Rick in her.
She has quite an ego, like Rick.
"I will use it to dominate the universe."
She’s very intelligent.
"Are you saying Tommy survived here by having sex with Froopy creatures,
creating Froopy-human hybrid offspring, and then consuming their proteins,
sustaining himself with an endless cycle of cannibalistic incest?"
And she can be just as rude and dismissive.
"Tommy, I'm sorry you think you deserve an apology.
Oh, my God.
I'm my father."
So who she’s become now is a confusing mix of the Rick-like qualities in her,
and the little girl who couldn’t deal with her pain and guilt after her father left.
When we look at Beth, it’s like she’s always clenching, always tense,
holding herself together as some persona that she thinks she should be.
She’s like a self-created Stepford Wife.
"I am not a bad person, and I'm fixing this."
We have a theory about why she’s like this, based on what we know about Beth’s youth.
"I can’t believe you used to lock me up in this glorified chicken coop."
"Chicken coop?"
When Beth confronts Rick about Froopyland, he tells her that she was essentially a psychopath
as a child.
"You were a scary [bleep] kid, man."
He says that he left her to her own devices in Froopyland because he needed to keep her
isolated from society.
"I didn't make Froopyland to get rid of you, Beth.
I did it to protect the neighborhood."
So basically Rick used any of Beth’s bad behavior as a pretense to abandon her in Froopyland.
“Look at some of the [bleep] you were asking me to make you as a kid:
ray guns, a whip that forces people to like you, invisibility cuffs, a parent trap..."
"Has it occurred to you that I asked you to make those things because I wanted you to
spend time with me?"
Maybe baby Beth was acting out to get her father’s attention, or maybe she did have
murderous tendencies.
But in any case, young Beth internalized that the reason her dad left was her misbehaving.
A natural perfectionist, Beth would have decided subconsciously or consciously to become "perfect"
for her dad,
hoping that this could bring him back.
"I feel like I’ve spent my life pretending you’re a great guy and trying to be like
you."
Beth forced herself to become her idea of the perfect daughter, the perfect wife -- the
perfect person.
And this is what we see when we look at her -- a person who’s constantly trying hard
to be perfect.
"I will reach into heaven and yank your screaming deer soul back!"
Beth ended up creating what amounted to a false identity.
She married a guy who she had nothing in common with but who seemed like a safe choice.
She got a respectable job.
She tried to be a good mom.
And she completely repressed who she really was.
And that’s why it’s no surprise that Beth’s adult life ended up a little half-assed.
If you’re not living anything close to a life you really want,
then it's hard to make yourself care when you don’t get everything right.
Beth married Jerry because he got her pregnant,
and she ended up having Summer because her car broke down on the way to the abortion
clinic.
She wanted to be a surgeon for humans, but stopped her education and settled for horses.
She considered cheating on Jerry, but didn’t even go through with that.
Her lack of agency to fix her unhappiness would seem to be at odds with her hard-working
nature and her obvious intellect.
But on some level Beth knows that she isn’t really being true to herself.
"I want to be a more complete woman."
Her efforts to be “perfect” have made her very unhappy.
Basically, this Beth, trying to be this Beth, resulted in this Beth.
Beth has nothing if not mixed feelings for her husband, even in the same moment.
“What are you an idiot?!
[Sighs] I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
That was so rude.
I came to you for help, and now I'm insulting your intelligence --
and look what intelligence gets you.”
Sometimes Beth is grateful for Jerry, and sometimes she just can't respect him.
"Does everybody see what I mean?"
The question in everyone’s mind when watching Beth is,
if she idolizes her dad so much, then why oh why did she marry a man like Jerry?
"See that?
I'm peeing all over your special guns!"
It does make sense that Beth would try to find a man who is nothing like her father
--
because she wants a husband she can be sure won’t abandon her.
Still, because there is that piece of Rick in Beth,
that person in her also sometimes hates Jerry just for being who he is.
"Jerry, get a job!
Jerry, don't look for a job at an alien wedding.
I don't get you!"
Beth is at her most disgusted with Jerry when his lack of intelligence is on display,
because Rick’s refusal to suffer fools has infiltrated her thinking.
The struggle between her “Good Beth” and “Real Beth” identities is externalized
in Rick's and Jerry’s competition to dominate the Smith household.
"Beth -- it's him or me."
Rick’s presence in the house reminds Beth of who she was and makes her feel distant
from Jerry.
"You're saying I should leave Jerry.
I can't believe I'm finally having this conversation."
When Beth chooses Rick and divorces Jerry, she’s choosing to resurface her old, pre-Jerry
identity.
"Dad, I’m out of excuses to not be who I am."
Things come to a head when Rick refreshes her memory about who she was as a kid,
and Beth realizes she has been missing out on her true self.
"And the ugly truth has always been--"
“That I'm not that great a guy and you're exactly like me.”
At this point though, things get complicated.
"I can make a clone of you, a perfect instance of you, with all your memories."
"I don't know if I can do it.
Then stay, and luxuriate in a life you can finally know you've chosen."
In the next episode, Beth is enjoying the family life she’s chosen so much,
that she actually starts thinking she is the clone.
[Screams]
Could she be a clone, or has “Good Beth” actually quietly somehow become the Real Beth?
We all start out life with an idea of who we are.
But over the years Beth's life turned into something so far removed from the self-image
she had growing up,
that it only makes sense to her to think of her adult life as a lie, a choice that sold
out her real self.
It seems more probable that she is a clone than
that authentic Beth could possibly like being a mom, married to Jerry.
We’ve all seen those movies about spies or cops that infiltrate a criminal operation
and start to feel that’s their real life.
Beth is like the suburban version of that.
She paradoxically faked her way into a real life that she does want, without knowing it.
Something like this happens to many of us as adults -- we take paths that weren’t
what we planned.
We still think we’re the same person we were when we started forming a self-image,
but our lives move on and --
consciously or unconsciously -- we made choices that led to where we actually wanted to be.
Beth’s story proves that, at the end of the day, we aren’t what we think, we’re
what we do.
A fake identity ends up being your true identity, if you’ve lived it long enough.
Because any identity we have is really just a construct, a choice.
Beth’s idea of who she was as Rick’s daughter ended up being false
because she chose not to live as that person.
Beth also represents the pressure to live up to certain expectations, that many people,
especially women or the children of alcoholics and divorced parents are likely to feel.
Under all this pressure, it can be easy to lose sight of who we originally wanted to
be.
But people can and do change, even so drastically they don’t recognize themselves.
In the end, Beth’s arc is heartening, because it shows us that we'd probably end up better
for the journey we’ve taken,
even if our lives don’t look like anything what we thought we wanted once,
eventually we end up in the place we do want to be.
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