Rick and Morty, one
of the most popular animated shows aimed at adults in recent memory,
telling dark sci-fi stories full of absurd jokes and cosmic inanity,
has officially garnered a fanbase that basically terrorized a limited
number of fast-food restaurants across the country in ravenous
entitled droves all in a bid... to get their hands on a limited run
McNugget dipping sauce. There are rants on Youtube, accusations of
harrassment of employees, and a crapload of maniacs on eBay selling
gallons of the sauce for hundreds of dollars.
But first let's
rewind. Partially because I like me some bizarre cold opens and also
because I want to make this column as accessible as possible for
those out there with no direct access to cable or have been
blissfully ignorant of this animated craze.
Premiering in 2013,
Rick and Morty was the dual creation of underground animation talent
Justin Roiland and Community creator Dan Harmon and revolves
around the adventures of Rick Sanchez, a mad scientist who has
returned to live with his daughter's family, and his teenage grandson
Morty. It was originally conceived as an off-brand parody of Back to
the Future with Rick as Doc Brown and Morty as Marty McFly but with
the roles and dynamic changed from close friends to Grandfather and
Grandson.
And for most of the
show's first season that was essentially the schtick. Rick and Morty
would get into crazy adventures involving aliens, building an
amusement park inside a human body in a hilarious mash-up of
Fantastic Voyage and Jurassic Park, and hyperintelligent dogs trying
to overthrow the human race, all while a more grounded B-plot
unravels involving Morty's parents dealing with Christmas stress,
marriage woes, or work. It was funny, it was cleverly written, and it
had just the right mix of silly, dark, ridiculous and pisstaking
going on under the skin.
That is until an
episode called Rick Potion No. 9 where Morty begs his grandfather to
use his super science to make a love potion to use on his love
interest Jessica at a school dance. Things snowball when the potion
attaches to a flu virus and infects the entire school, leading to the
entire planet mutating into horrifying monsters. But since this is a
cartoon made on television, the status quo is god so Rick has
everything go back to normal...by opening a portal to an alternate
universe where everything was normal but that world's version of Rick
and Morty had died horribly in an experiment a few seconds ago,
burying their bodies and then continuing life like nothing happened.
Leaving an entire world to burn, a grandson traumatized by burying
his own corpse and dealing with the existential dread of what just
happened along with the terrifying implication that this isn't the
first time Rick has done this.
It is here that Rick
and Morty plants its flag about what its central theme and idea is or
at least what central theme it will explore with a straight face when
it isn't taking the piss out of everything else: what happens when
someone has access to the literal infinite. Easy access to a
multiverse where literally anything and everything has happened, will
happen, and is happening right now with every conceivable variation imaginable. The answer
they settle on is pretty depressing. Rick Sanchez is a gassy
alcoholic with an almost sociopathic non-existent moral compass. Save
for his instinct to protect his family, Rick basically does whatever
he wants to mess with people, a jaded Bugs Bunny with an arsenal of
sci-fi gadgets.
The rest of Season 1
and 2 lean in to this... in between other one-off episodes like Rick
beating up The Devil in a riff on the Stephen King story Needful
Things or an episode long parody and satire of The Purge movies.
Stuff like a clipshow episode made up of a bunch of random sketches
and bits that look and sound like they were improvised on the spot
called Interdimensional Cable, and the introduction of the Citadel of
Ricks, a pocket dimension full of thousands of variations of Rick and
Morty that the show's lead actively despises due to his hatred for
organized government and his desire to a genuine Rick.
All of this with a
mantra repeated over and over: nothing you do matters, nothing is
sacred, and life is meaningless.
This leads to
probably the greatest absurd joke ever in the show's run between its
Season 2 finale and the Season 3 premiere. After the Galactic
Federation actively hunts after Rick and his family for his multiple
crimes against humanity, murdering friends Rick had accrued fighting
in a Resistance movement (keep that in the back of your head by the
way), and leaving the group on the lam, Rick willingly turns himself
in on the condition that his family will not be harmed.
Cut to a year and a
half later when Season 3 premieres and the Galactic Federation try to
probe Rick's mind to figure out interdimensional travel, which leads
to them seeing what looks like Rick's origin. Him discovering how to
travel the infinite, refusing to despite being egged on by the
Citadel of Ricks, then losing his family in a tragic accident, a
trite anti-hero background meant to make him more sympathetic. It's
all a crock of shit though, a ploy used by Rick that sets off an
audacious chain of events leading to the total destruction of the
Federation, the Citadel of Ricks, and Morty's parents getting a
divorce.
Yep, it was all an
elaborate scheme by Rick Sanchez to take over the family without the
simple human mediocrity and constant series punchline, Morty's dad,
Jerry, in the picture. As for his true origin, the real thing that
drives him to act like a mad god that creates and destroys whatever
he wants? Because he utterly craves a limited run of szechuan dipping
sauce created by McDonald's to promote the Mulan movie back in 1996,
and he has yet to find a version of Earth to have replicated the
sauce exactly as he remembers it. It was a throwaway gag in the
beginning of the episode as part of his planted backstory and the
result of me almost passing out from laughter.
Now, originally for
Animation Deviation I was going to talk about Season 3 at length and
how it went into more serialized storytelling, analyzing how much
Rick's antics have actually damaged and changed Morty and his sister
Summer, how Jerry actually grows as a character, and the legitimately
tragic and complex interactions between Rick and his daughter Beth.
For a show that goes out of its way to keep things simple and quick
to grasp, especially with the main cast, there was a lot of layers to
peel back.
That and the
brilliance that came from an episode premise as bonkers as Rick
turning himself into a pickle.
But, once again,
look at the opening. Much like Fight Club, the fanbase surrounding
Rick and Morty has gravitated towards and began identifying not with
the human characters like Morty or Jerry, but the psychotic asshole
who “has it all figured out.” Just swap out Tyler Durden's
anarchic toxic masculine nihilism with Rick Sanchez's
self-destructive nihilism and you still have a bunch of fans who take
it as an excuse to abandon personal growth or personal ambition in
favor of wallowing in the absurd and the nothing.
Hence a bunch of
manchildren issuing death threats to some poor fast-food employees to
get some expired foodstuffs.
It's a trope that
some have called The Asshole Philosophy or The Asshole Effect. A
singular character that acts like a completely unlikable jerk,
actively demeaning and berating the entire cast while flaunting how
smarter, sharper, or more capable he/she is, and ultimately gets away
with it because their intelligence helps solve the problem of the
week or because they're (allegedly) so goshdarn likeable. Peter
Griffin gets to do whatever the heck he wants like terrorize his
family, kill people, steal, do stuff in terrible taste, and will
ultimately get away with it because the status quo is maintained and
it amounts to nothing. It's read as a power fantasy for the smartest
guy in the room to be entitled to impunity. And if there's a group of
people that want to embody that power fantasy more than anyone, it's
the psuedo-intellectuals on the internet.
But here's the rub.
In recent history, there have been shows that have pushed back
against this characterization, using serialized storytelling to let
consequences play out. Bojack Horseman is a fantastic example of
this. A show that starts with a well-off Hollywood celebrity in a
furnished apartment with friends, an agent getting him work, and an
affable roommate, and through his selfish manipulative actions,
actions that would otherwise be swept under the rug, ends with the
apartment in shambles, all of his peers hating his guts, leading to
the lead having to deal with his self-destructive tendencies and
deepseated self-loathing.
But while Bojack is
a human drama wearing the skin of a goofy comedy, Rick and Morty is
mostly a comedy with dark drama below the surface. As mentioned
before, Rick Sanchez has been held up as some sort of ideal guy, and
on the very surface he is quite appealing – once again he turned
himself into a pickle on a goof and still somehow MacGuyver'd himself
some doomsday weapons to fight off a threat in an office building –
but the show has also made it clear that Rick Sanchez is both
miserable and terrifying to his own family.
He has been seen
wanting to kill himself on multiple occasions. The one serious
relationship he has with an alien hive mind falls apart because a
literal collective infection of millions of men and women find him to
be a dangerous influence on their existence. He actively fought for a
cause that was only hinted at before, meaning he does have something
resembling a moral center, or at the very least an ideal he'll fight
for.
It's a message the
show implicitly says: Rick coping with the infinite possibilities of
the multiverse actively makes him miserable, and his coping
mechanisms are actively hurting him and everyone around him.
A message that
becomes blatantly explicit in the Season 3 finale where Beth gets
back together with Jerry, finding his earnest and grounded simplicity
a much needed balm for Rick's chaotic actions and tendencies, ending
with Rick now seen as the lowest status character in the family
dynamic.
Despite him
repeating that nothing matters and that God is dead and that
Thanksgiving is about killing Indians and other “edgy” dark
revelations, the family moves on and lets him dwell in this dour
mood.
This is not to say
that I hate Rick and Morty. I love this demented show. I love the
cast. I love the jokes. I love the rapid-fire sci-fi parodies,
deconstructions, and inversions it throws at you one after the other.
I love the writing, I love the performances. I love how it can go
back and forth between being smart and stupid in equal measure with
sci-fi concepts.
I just find it
maddening that a community that will tell you “you need to have a
large IQ to understand the true depth and complexity” of the show
have a complete lack of self-awareness to not recognize that their idealized paragon of
awesomeness actively uses his intelligence to justify his sickness
and promotes self-harm, leading to an ultimately unhealthy and dangerous lifestyle.
And that's not just
me saying it, the show
itself says it too!
Digital Desperado
out!!
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