The Bojack In Us
So, what are you? A conscious thinking being, let’s dwell deeper. A self-righteous being….. because the only people that talk shit about you are your parents so take that boomer!! Director of your life, creating your elements of surprise and those elegant twists and turn. However, the script is not your’s but handed over to you by your elders who designed it while you tried to suck your toes and it tasted delicious. P.S. toes are very soft, I don’t fetishize my feet. Let’s say you are like me a 20-year-old guy following a rulebook handed over by millions of generations, some demands met and some not. Barely managing to not lose your shit and want some sort of salvation but also justify your procrastination (WOW, I am very self-aware must say). Just remember this-
The person you are right now is 1/4th you and 3/4th reflection of the imperfections of your surroundings.
Well, 75% of crucial life decisions were not even made by you. When your main problem was to figure out your’s father material net worth to brag amongst your friend, your parents decided for you the tuitions you will go to, your rights and wrongs which includes the infamous rule of not questioning your elders. Our parents are humans too and they made some human error that reflected upon us and affected us. Aghhh, let’s pause for a moment. Why did I want to write this blog so badly? I thought of all the content since I finished Bojack Horseman and now I am all blank as if this was never an end goal for me. This, feeling right I am having the feeling we all have inside us. The same feeling which Bojack has inside him and somehow you feel like you are okay, getting a good grade, getting a promotion, maybe your relationship just got spicier and that’s how we are leaving things when they feel just good. A new problem might arise later you can solve it then, why bother to watch a TV series on the psychoanalysis of a self-absorbed, all-righteous TV star who wasn’t even a human being but a horse. Why does anyone of us have the right to call your life fucked up? I never witnessed your breakup, F grade in your report card or maybe getting kicked out from your college club. I don’t have the right to correct you or to mentor you, I am not a great soul but then think about it “Are you a good person?”
P.S. Spoiler Alert! Watch the series, Bojack Horseman, on Netflix as this blog may have some spoilers.
SFVP
It’s my humanities elective where they teach you about how to make a short film. When it comes to the analysis of a media many things come into play. The cause and effect cycle going on, cinematography tricks used to realize a particular emotion or flow. Cuts and Transitions to make everything feel the way a director dreamed of. Lots of planning is done just to make Tohar Chumma Vitamin A. However the most crucial part of any content you make is to reach the audience. Bojack Horseman does a great job at verbalizing topics related to mental health whether it be depression, existential crisis, fear of missing out you name it. The show starts by introducing us to Bojack Horseman who’s known for his 90s TV show Horsin’ Around. It’s strange though that throughout the series how an actor relates to us more than we can relate to these victim mentality memes we see every day while scrolling social media. The show portrays Bojack as a mock of this society that how we are invested in finding alternatives to escape the hell hole we have created within ourselves. You can hear numerous time Bojack saying
You didn’t know me. Then you fell in love with me. And now you know me.
During the first season, Bojack is shown as a drunkard, craving for meaningless sex, desperate for attention, and going at great lengths doing things just to control the situation in which he had no right to. The end of season one or you might say every season’s end Bojack is seen to realize his mistakes and go for salvation and you might think that the next season’s he might come off as a better person at least a more self-aware one. Uh-Oh! This is not a normal sitcom though. Yes, he does get more self-aware but that makes him realize that what more of a mess he is and he again falls into a pit and then tries to escape it. He does some even more bad things and then later on demands for salvation and that’s how all the seasons continue except the last season.
All this loop that he faced in every season made the audience sympathize with him because like the characters in his story we were equally involved and we wanted him to get better. At least he was trying his best to become self-aware and get better. When he visited his grandparents’ house or when he went to Charlotte or when he went to rehab. We all felt like from now Bojack will become a different person. Maybe he will focus on himself and not do wrong, maybe he will not justify himself and except the mess, he has created and is accountable for. Another side plot is the past whether it be of Secretariat, his childhood, or his parents’ past and it helps a lot in the character development of Bojack making him more familiar to us and someone you realize that person he is now is not even his fault completely. He had an unsympathetic mother, his father had a mistress and his role-model Secretariat committed suicide by jumping off a bridge into a river. You know that’s how life is. The majority of the character you develop is because when you were soft something very hard hits you and you couldn’t do anything than to live with the dent then.
Let’s come to the last season now. The last season of Bojack Horseman was the most hard-hitting season and somehow if Bojack we saw in season one faced that he would have committed suicide because that Bojack was irresponsible this one isn’t and somehow this Bojack knew that the problems are gonna get worse but you as a person are only going to better by solving it.
Let’s get honest now. There are some lines which the characters deliver and someone those lines resonate with your life problems or a phase of your life. When Bojack said, “Is there any good left in me?” it resonated with me that I am not an ideal being. When Herb said, “ I don’t forgive you.” it gave us all chills that how can he not because along with Bojack we all realized that we are not the master of every situation. You know what’s strange that a man completely unrelated to us on completely different economic strata defined us way better than the rulebook which was handed over to us. Maybe there’s a Bojack in all of us.
It Was Nice While It Lasted
I could go on and on about Bojack Horseman. It had someone the great episodes Free Churro, View From Halfway Down, Downer Ending, and the list never ends. But here I am talking about the saddest and most truthful part. The show ended with loose ends everyone bidding farewell to Bojack and his problems being unsolved. Bojack is known for the death of Sarah Lynn, ruining Todd’s rock Opera and being Princess Carolyn’s first true love and that is the harsh truth. If you say that from this moment you are going to be unassociated from your past that is never gonna happen. If you say that you are a good person and you can’t be blamed for bad deeds you did earlier that too never happens. If you say that you have realized your mistake and deserve a second chance that won’t happen either. The list can go on and on for disproving this entitled list that’s the harsh truth other than yourself you are not master of anything. Surely you may have an unfruitful past or maybe have faced terrible situations which have made you a terrible person but then other than you no one has the power to fix it. A lot of things we do right now are because someone taught us to or because we are conditioned that way but that doesn’t give you any leverage to keep doing it.
Bojack Horseman is not a holy grail of solutions to your life problem, it’s a harsh statement to the misinformation you carry with you. Control is an illusion and if you think that the good deeds you do now are going to free you of your past is never gonna happen. No matter how far you progress life will still be half happy and half sad like you are right now or when your boss kicked you out of your cubicle you are going to feel the same. You can replace that sadness with a half-assed material escape but eventually, your life is going to get more sad. If you think that the peace is attaining salvation that never comes because when you demand one and don’t get it your victim mentality kicks in and makes you entitled to all the bad decisions you are going to take later on. Surely watching this series will take you through a rollercoaster of emotions but like this series, life is a loose end and you can never help it. Control was not an option, one-stop solution for all was never an option, creating a fake self-denial based identity was never an option and most important playing victim for your bad self was never a part of this plan. You have to become a good person no matter how bad you are and when you decide to walk on that path the world is not going to treat you better or worse you are going to be treated the same. We all have our characters in the TV series we create but things will never get better or worse. Surely Bojack lived 50 fucking years of his in self-denial so why now become a better person because this is a small world and your actions have repercussions on others.
Bojack Horseman is a statement on no matter whichever path you choose it is not going to make any difference to your material life the only difference it will make is that maybe you are more at peace and familiar about yourself when you sleep on your bed every night. Maybe the next day you wake up you are more human than a machine of self-denial fueling actions. Maybe the next day you wake up you feel the responsibility you have towards yourself. All this might not make your problems vanish but
It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.
Bojack Horseman was never about solutions it was about getting more familiar and real than ever.
