Flash Post #4
So, I’m going to get back to my Retrospective (series) at some point, but before I do, here’s a post about Rick and Morty. Season one, episode six to be exact, and mostly only one scene. It’s the one with the love potion gone wrong. The episode starts out in the garage, with Rick tinkering, as he often does, on some gadget. At some point, he asks Morty to hand him a screw-driver, but Morty–who is tired of always doing things for Rick–refuses. He wants Rick to do something for him for once. So Rick grudgingly obliges, providing Morty with a love potion (no doubt riffing off some old sci-fi/fantasy trope that’s so tired it only ever appears in parody these days–well, that and DreamWorks films). As an unintended side effect, the love potion combines with the flu and morphs into a powerful virus that can infect the whole human race, initially only making them infatuated with Morty, but with Rick’s efforts to counteract these side effects leading to progressively worse outcomes until the situation becomes untenable and those infected are turned into monsters. With options dwindling, Rick decides to throw in the towel on his own reality (his dimension in the show’s multiverse) and so begins to look for greener pastures–a reality he and Morty can step into. He finds one, which leads us into our scene, which should be embedded as a video, but in case it’s been taken down, there’s also a brief description below:
Rick–our Rick–happens upon a nearly identical dimension, with its own alt-Rick and alt-Morty. Indeed, the dimensions can be presumed to be identical up until this alt-Rick succeeds in undoing whatever damage he’s done with his love potion, turning back the plague and saving the world, his place in the multiverse. With that out of the way, alt-Rick and alt-Morty (as presumably our Rick and our Morty would have done) return to the garage where the episode began. Now, alt-Morty cheerfully obliges as alt-Rick calls for him to hand over a screw driver, and, as he gets back to work tightening a screw on his gadget, both are killed by a sudden explosion. It seems they were only ever mere moments away from doom, and only Morty’s serendipitous refusal to hand over a screw driver stood between them. With this alternate dimension thus devoid of a Rick and Morty duo, our Rick and our Morty can transition almost seamlessly into their places. There’s just one loose end that needs tying up before they can get on with it: each must collect their own body (or rather their alternate’s body) and bury it in a shallow grave out back. Obviously.
With the scene laid, there’s just one more preliminary to check off before proceeding into the main body of the post. It’s this question of genre. I mean, Rick and Morty is a cartoon, obviously, and a comedy too, but what else?
One might arrive at the conclusion, seeing as Rick is a scientist who purports to do sciencey things using sciencey words, that Rick and Morty fits neatly into the sci-fi genre. I can’t agree. Not only do I consider the gadgets Rick frequently avails himself of to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles to be much more firmly rooted in the realm of fantasy than anything even remotely related to science (fiction or otherwise), I think the gloss of science is just one more tool in service of the show’s actual genre: cartoon philosophical fiction. Cartoon philoso-fi, we might call it. Even after seeing Rick present with a seemingly endless string of deus ex machinas, the implicit (though inconsistently realized) sense that science has limits (and so, by extension, might Rick) allows us to suspend our disbelief just a little longer than we might otherwise (as opposed to if it were literal magic), and so follow the series that much deeper down its conceptual rabbit-hole: exploring Rick’s nihilistic tendencies by way of existential dread.
With that in mind, let’s think about what the scene is showing us. Morty has been confronted, in fairly stark terms, with the opportunity to ponder at the tenuousness of his own existence, to see how he was quite literally just a few turns of the screw from annihilation and he never would have guessed it. In this, he has learned two things. First, that it turns out Rick cannot save the world. But even so, if the episode were to end on that note, with Rick and Morty sitting together on a rooftop looking over their ruined world, there might at least be some solace in that for Morty. After all, shit happens, right? Is it really so mind-blowing to realize that one man–even a man like Rick–can’t singlehandedly “save the world”? At the end of the day, mightn’t it be enough to know that if disaster comes and the world as he knows it is coming to an end, he can at least count on Rick to save him? Perhaps. But then even this small comfort is denied to Morty as he follows Rick through the portal and comes upon a horrific scene, its second lesson posed in stark contrast to the first: he can’t even count on Rick to save him.
The point is thus made: Morty can’t be sure of anything anymore. At any moment the world could end or, failing that, he might be flung against the wall and rendered no more than a sack of blood and broken bones, and there may be nothing he can do to forestall it. Nothing. He can no longer tell himself, “Whatever happens, it will be alright.” And, as if to drive the point home, he must now go out in the backyard and bury himself.
Have you ever had to bury yourself?
Reflections and Revelations on Self-interment
So, there’s a reason I chose to write about this particular episode and this particular scene. It’s because, the first time I saw it, I had this feeling that it was something I had lived through myself: that I had, at some time in the past, come upon the wreckage of some other version of me, and had to bury it—bury myself—somewhere. A version of me with a common past—but no future—and that I have since been living in the place of. As if my connection to this reality is not only tenuous, but predicated on a lie.
To be clear, the experience I had watching this episode was not the first time I’ve had this sensation, this feeling of being detached and out of place (a kind of dissociation, if you will: whether it’s depersonalization or derealization I leave to the psychologists). I am well aware that mental illness is involved here, some reaction to trauma (actual trauma, not cartoon trauma), and I fully understand and accept that there isn’t *actually* some other version of me that I’ve buried out back. It’s all just a feeling.
So why write any of this?
Well, partly to record a lesson I learned some time ago (back when I was first grappling with these issues), but seemed to have forgotten since. I started this writing because I wanted to try and suss out “the moment.” That is, I wanted to attempt, through writing, to see if I could think back and identify the precise moment in time that I (metaphorically speaking) buried myself. What I learned again in the writing–what I came to remember from the first time I went down this road–is that there is no such “moment.” Again, it’s just a feeling. Not only is there no moment in my past where I literally stood over my own corpse (or the corpse of my doppelganger) and buried myself: there isn’t even a metaphorical moment. I mean, I can roughly identify the first time I had a similar dissociative sensation, but that wasn’t “the moment” itself, nor was the most proximate traumatic event to “the moment” the sole cause. Indeed, the most traumatic event had come some years before. The next traumatic event was somewhat lesser, and hardly enough to account for my reaction in and of itself. So to the extent “the moment” was significant it didn’t happen; to the extent it happened it wasn’t all that significant. Grappling with “the moment” itself is therefore of… minimal therapeutic value (long string of disclaimers: in my opinion, on personal experience, not being a mental health professional). What matters more is placing “the moment” in the broader context of what came before and what happen(s/ed) after.
That’s the lesson I wanted to get down somewhere I’m unlikely to lose it.
Trauma is not one thing that happens in isolation. It happens in light of everything else that is going on–all the ordinary stresses of life, be it military or civil–and on top of whatever trauma may have come before it. To think that there is some moment in time that someone (whether it’s you or someone else) can point to and identify as “the moment” to get over on the path to healing is to ignore the vastly more complex reality of mental health issues, particularly among post-9/11 veterans. And it doesn’t help, in my view and going off my own personal experiences, that the modern VA seems to still have a mindset built around playing a catch-up game in the aftermath of Vietnam, with a focus on “one and done” draftees and single (shorter) term enlistees as opposed to the present reality of an all-volunteer force with four to eight year minimum commitments fighting “forever wars” contemporaneous with (in the Navy, at least) a resurgent Cold War mentality. But I digress. That wasn’t the point, to pontificate on policy and administration of the VA.
Closing Thoughts
- There is no value in seeking out “the moment,” because there is no such thing.
- Trauma does not happen in isolation, it adds onto everything else, like so many shovelfuls of dirt in an open grave.
- Don’t let the nihilism cripple you.
And with that last point, perhaps it’s a good time to get back to what is supposed to be the topic of this post: Rick and Morty. Consider the relationship between intelligence and emotion presented to us by the series. In addition to being a sociopath, Rick is smart and right pretty much all the time (except, of course, for when he occasionally brings about a literal plague upon the world). Conversely, Morty is stupid, emotional, and wrong pretty much all the time (caveat for when he follows Rick’s lead–then he gets to be just as right). Moreover, Rick is so often presented as arriving at the correct conclusion precisely because he chose to set aside concern for things like “emotions” and “other people” (apart of course from his grandson Morty, whose brainwaves he needs to mask his own). In the philosophy of Rick and Morty, then, sociopathy is presented as being as much a superpower as extraordinary intelligence. We might even go so far as to ponder, is Rick a sociopath because he’s smart, or is he smart because he doesn’t let feelings get in the way?
Well, neither. Because of course the true “cause and effect” relationship at play here is that Rick and Morty are, along with the world they inhabit, the product of writers. Rick is smart because he is written… not so much as smart, but as if we should believe he’s smart. Rick is a sociopath because he is written as a sociopath. He’s right so often because every outcome has been foreordained by writers who want (so far as I can tell) to portray Rick as some sort of nietzschean Übermensch on steroids. And Morty? Morty is what you’d get if a sociopath (like Rick) attempted to reverse engineer and write a character representing actual human emotions by abducting someone off the street, tying them to a table, and jabbing them with a needle to record their reactions to stimuli (pain), continuing the experiment indefinitely as they (the sociopath) just can’t get over how unwilling their subject is to cooperate with their great endeavor of better understanding the human psyche. That’s why the series, built so much around Rick’s cartoonishly nihilistic worldview (itself a caricature of actual nihilism), is best understood not even as a work in the genre of philosophy, but philoso-fi. Its world is fictional, its characters are fictional, its philosophy is fictional. The characters do not react as people do, but as caricatures, with Rick being best understood not so much as a nihilist, but as a caricature of a nihilist, and Morty being something like a caricature of a “normal” human (as if one cannot be both a “normal,” functionally well-adjusted human and a nihilist). At best (or maybe at worst, depending on how you look at it), Rick might be said to react as people who devalue others’ emotional experiences and are thus possessed of an unearned sense of superiority might envision themselves reacting to trauma (calm, cool, and collected), while Morty reacts as how those same people might envision other people (implicitly “lesser” than themselves–the Übermensch) reacting to the same: panicky idiots.
Rick is not the master of his world, nor even truly an actor within it: he is a product of often hilarious and highly effective comedic, but ultimately unrealistic writing and nothing more. While (very fictional) Rick’s answer to trauma might be to pick up a shovel and bury whatever’s left of one’s own person, I might in the alternative suggest therapy. And we all know how Rick feels about therapy…
Anyway, that’s my take on Rick and Morty.
“Then I awoke like a man drained of blood who wanders alone in a waste…”
–The Epic of Gilgamesh: Enkidu’s Dream and the Death of Enkidu
Songs of Babylon 