interview #5: waverly sm on bojack horseman

honesty, optimism, and cartoon horses

When I started watching Bojack Horseman, I felt like I had a pretty good sense of what I was getting myself in for: basically everyone had told me it’s a cynically hilarious show that will shatter your heart if you give it the least opportunity, so I thought I was well-prepared. Then I started watching it and it still managed to fuck me up more than I was anticipating. Who better to talk about it with, then, than Waverly SM, a friend whose writing also reliably fucks me up even more than I expect, which at this point is a pretty high bar. They’re a spectacularly talented writer — you can check out some of their work here, and look out for their inevitable bestsellers in a few years’ time — and, it turns out, are also fantastic at writing about others’ work. I had such a great time talking with them; I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Ellie: Without trying to pitch it, what do you think makes you love Bojack Horseman so much? 

Waverly: I love Bojack Horseman primarily because, where it matters, it doesn't ever reach for an easy answer. I'm very ready to recognise its failings: it does the sitcom thing where secondary characters occasionally warp under pressure to accommodate the lead character's arc, is one. Casting a white actress to play a Vietnamese character is another. But I love this show (which is, to be clear, about a cartoon horse who used to be a sitcom actor in the 90s) because its whole philosophy has to do with recognising failings, and living with them, and trying to correct and transcend them.

Bojack himself is a mean, self-pitying asshole who makes horrible decisions with troubling frequency and only ever experiences guilt too late. I don't ever feel as though the show shys away from showing that — he causes real pain to those around him, often people he loves, and invariably there are consequences for it. Equally, though, it doesn't shy away from showing what made him. It digs into the trauma of his emotionally abusive childhood, and then into the trauma of his mother's emotionally abusive childhood. It spends a lot of time on mental illness, particularly depression; there's an episode in one of the later seasons narrated throughout by Bojack's internal monologue, and it's as eviscerating as you might expect. It's merciless on the subject of Hollywood (Hollywoo?) culture, and the way it corrupts what it touches. Crucially, none of this ever tries to apologise for Bojack. It clarifies; it explains; but it never excuses, and Bojack's worst excesses are always handled with a horror that is compounded, not undermined, by the show's absurd and often-bleak humour.

I would be lying to you if I said that timing had nothing to do with it. I first started watching in 2016, and while I enjoyed the first — I think two seasons? I wasn't as gutted by it as I would grow to become. But about a year later, when I was fresh off a solid year of grim interpersonal disappointments, Bojack started asking questions about wrongdoing and accountability and restitution. I can't easily explain how frantic I was for anything at all that would reflect my own confusion and distress. I wanted a story that wouldn't condescend to me by trying to pretend there was an easy way out of the moral quagmire of public misconduct, and I found one in Bojack. Not a morality tale by any means; just an assurance that yes, it was difficult, and no, I wasn't alone in feeling that way.

E: A thing I noticed in your answer and in watching the show is Bojack's generosity. It feels like it has so much patience and openness for things being hard, for not being able to find the answers. Basically none of the characters have their lives in order or understand how to get there, but that's never seen as a failure; Bojack, for example, is only really criticised when he hurts people. I find that refreshing, I think — a lot of TV can feel like it runs on a deified self-improvement, and Bojack doesn't. 

Anyway, this is all to ask: do you think Bojack is an optimistic show?

W: I actually do, though it may be that my sense of what constitutes 'optimism' is broken. Without getting into in-depth spoilers for the way the show ends, I think it does right by just about all of the primary characters involved — it offers closure without disregarding consequence. There are characters out there who will always have to live with Bojack's actions; that's never brushed aside, and it shouldn't be. But I do think it believes in the possibility of meaningful change, in the face of the incredibly shallow and callous culture of Hollywoo, and in the face of the crushing complexity of being a person. Or a horse.

That's not to say that it's offering any kind of easy roadmap for self-improvement. It's not a show about how this bad horse turned his life around And So Can You. It's a show about how this bad horse figures out how to be a better horse, and it's too late to fix things for many of the people who have gotten caught up in his orbit, but it's still meaningful in its own right that he's doing the work. (I hear 'doing the work' a lot, in relation to accountability. Nobody can ever quite seem to agree on what 'the work' is, and Bojack itself is I think purposefully a little vague on the point — Bojack ends up doing time in prison for his actions, which I think is interesting given how much ostensibly-leftist rhetoric about accountability and restitution slip-slides into a carceral place in our world, also.) Given what I find to be a pretty self-servingly binary approach to abusive or unethical behaviour, in actuality, I do think Bojack's approach is an optimistic one. It's willing to sit in the uncomfortable in-between spaces on the road to 'doing better,' which — well, to me, that counts as optimism.

E: Yeah, I think a lot of conversations about morality frequently fall into what you call a carceral logic, which is also — in my view — Bojack's logic: that a critique is a repudiation of the person, not a critical investment in making the person adequate to what you want them to be. I'd agree that if Bojack's optimistic, it's in that sense you identify — taking criticism of its main character, frequently from the implied perspective of the show itself, doesn't foreclose the possibility that they could be better. Within that, I'm interested in what you think about how the show works to separate its moral voice from its protagonist. It feels impossible to misread Bojack as representing the show's ethical approach, but then I also think that with, I don't know, Rick & Morty. I guess my question is — how do you think the show manages that separation? And what do you think are the stakes or consequences of that?

W: It's interesting that you mention Rick & Morty! I watched that in 2018, entirely at the behest of a new friend whom I was giving considerable benefit of the doubt, and was amazed that there are people out there who misread it so comprehensively. I still kind of resent that I enjoyed it so much. Anyway.

I think the show does the best it can. Which is to say — I have been directly aggravated before by friends whose critical analysis I otherwise trust writing Bojack off as an adult cartoon about the exploits of a shitty, even predatory man, so I know there are people out there who don't see the separation between the show's ethics and Bojack's. But it really troubles me that that's the case — that even when a character who has staunchly refused to criticise Bojack before is shouting at him that 'you need to be better,' in a moment the show handles with a knife-to-the-throat sort of gravity, it's apparently possible to conclude that Bojack at his worst is aspirational in the eyes of the show. I find it difficult to the point of impossibility to imagine that these people are watching the same show I watched. If anything, I would call its morality unsubtle! 'You need to be better' is not precisely equivocal.

But maybe that's necessary, that forthrightness. I don't know. There's a grim little tangent I could take, here, into the ever-more-popular requirement for all media to volunteer a clear moral reading to its audience, or more broadly into media literacy and why we still need it ('irritating fandom behaviours' probably the least of the many horrors brought on by its growing lack). My friend Gretchen Felker-Martin — who is not a Bojack fan, I'm pretty sure — has written about what she calls 'the fervour for purity in art,' and while she's focusing on the discrepancy between popular criticisms of corporate vs independent media, I think some of what she says is applicable here. People want to feel reassured. It's not reassuring to be asked to extend sympathy to a character who has done genuinely reprehensible things, particularly given that Bojack starts invoking #MeToo as of roughly season 4.

E: Glad to find someone else who shares my ~problematic~ affection for Rick and Morty, a show which neither its fans nor its critics deserve (in my head this is the Fight Club Problem). I agree with you that a lot of people seem to want shows which feel good, where the morals are clear and we don't have to ask difficult questions about ourselves and our relationship to the characters on screen. I agree, too, that that's a firmly negative trend in what passes for media criticism. One thing which I find weird about criticisms of Bojack along these lines, though, is that it totally misses the other ways this show, and shows like it, feel good: most notably, that it's extremely funny. Do you think that humour and whatever passes for joy in the show are  important parts of what you enjoy about Bojack?

W: Oh, absolutely! It seems sort of absurd that I've managed to talk for this long about a funny cartoon show without once mentioning its sense of humour. Probably my favourite component of said humour is the multitude of unapologetically punny background gags — a poster for 'Koalafornication,' or the headlines on the ticker on MSNBSea. I too am a loathsome pun fiend, and I feel personally attacked in the best way every time the show just kind of goes there, without overthinking it or apologising. 

Structurally speaking, too, I think the humour is really necessary; I'm having a flashback to sitting in a GCSE English classroom and hearing my teacher tell us that it's important to have jokes in tragedy so you don't find it impossible to engage with, but I'm also thinking of good friend and excellent author A.K. Larkwood and I talking at length about how the best epic fantasies are not afraid to make you laugh. Bojack deals with some really grim themes. I think it would be significantly harder to watch, probably to the point of not having been renewed as often as it was, if it took itself 100% seriously at all times and never gave us anything to laugh at (or with).

E: I entirely agree with that; I too am hugely compelled by the puns, and I so admire and enjoy the show's willingness to stay with the absurdity of its set-up and be up-front about how stupid its jokes are. I'm thinking here of 'Hollywoo Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let's Find Out!' and 'Happy Bat Bat Mitzvah / Yes two bats because she is a bat', but also just of characters like Princess Caroline and Mr Peanutbutter switching between acting like people and like the animals they ‘actually’ are. 

I guess my question here is: how does it balance that with the profound pathos of the show? How is it able to get us feeling profoundly sorry for these people at the same time as showing them to be kinda absurd?

W: I'd actually say that the absurdity is part of what gets us to feel for them — because people are absurd! Not to be unnecessarily Riverdale Jughead about it, but we are all (particularly after being stuck at home for a year or more) big weirdos with a wide array of idiosyncrasies and foibles, and we are doing our best, but sometimes our best still lands us squarely in the realm of the ridiculous. So you get J.D. Salinger, known author, discovering the medium of television and applying all his intellect and craft to a comedy game show hosted by a labrador man, but you also feel very deeply for Todd and one-off character Mia as they try to win his approval; who hasn't had a strange and whimsical boss to keep happy? You get an asexual axolotl trying to introduce her boyfriend to her family, all of whom are just insanely hypersexual in a way that's nigh-impossible to take seriously — but you still feel for the two of them as they navigate parental expectations, because even though most parents' expectations don't involve a family vat of lubricant, they can be just as arbitrary and testing.

I guess it lets you laugh at yourself, by taking what you know and turning it up to eleven (and also, frequently, around by ninety degrees). I don't think this is necessarily unique to Bojack — a lot of sitcoms do something similar — but I do think Bojack goes about it in a much more absurdist way, often but not always facilitated by the coexistence of humans and animals in universe. I am no theorist of humour (I am no theorist, full stop) but that's my take.

E: I think that's a very good point — Bojack, even more than most sitcoms, feels like a funhouse mirror version of our world, showing it to us just differently enough for us to realise its actual contours. A really fascinating aspect of that, I think, is its engagement with animal rights and personhood — most visible in episodes like the chicken farming one. I think I'm asking — what's the political/ethical viewpoint of the show? How does that relate to its humour and its sadness?

W: God, the chicken farming episode fucks me up. I'd say the show handles it with a real sense of horror, too — like, it isn't pro-chicken-farming, and it uses the sentience of some chickens (but not others) (let's count down how long it takes me to invoke Orwell) to illuminate the real-world horrors of battery farming for the sake of cheap, easy consumption. But equally, there's no easy way for Bojack et al to solve the problem in any meaningful way. The episode ends with Diane saying she thinks they made a difference, even as they drive past the massive line outside Chicken 4 Dayz. And it's textually acknowledged as horrible that even the meagre victory they manage to claw out of the episode is accomplished only because Bojack has a celebrity friend.

I'd actually say that the chicken farming episode is a much more condensed version of the story that plays out repeatedly across the whole series: the machine that is Hollywoo, chewing up real people and often-irreparably harming them so the general public can stay entertained. You see it with Sarah Lynn, most overtly; you see it in Bradley's repeated and excruciating willingness to throw over his entire (successful! normal!) life to get back into Hollywoo; you see it in the way even non-participating exposure to the environment warps Hollyhock's self-perception until she no longer likes the horse she sees in the mirror. You see it in the network's betrayal of Herb Kazzaz, in Turteltaub's betrayal of Kelsey, and obviously in the disparity between pre-sitcom Bojack and the Bojack of the show's present day. There's a lot of humour to be mined from the larger-than-life absurdity of Hollywoo, a funhouse mirror of a setting that is already kind of a funhouse mirror to reality; but insofar as the show has an explicitly political viewpoint, I think it's very critical of systemic cruelty and careless consumption, and I could certainly never forget while watching it that there's only so much an individual, alone, can do to rectify system-level wrong. There's a lot of inherent sadness in that.

E: Yeah, I think, like, as funny as Bojack's version of Hollywoo is, it's always funny in a way of 'oh, this is horrifyingly broken isn't it'. 'Hollywoo Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things? Let's Find Out!' and the version of J.D. Salinger who creates it are both hysterically funny but neither could exist in a functioning [media ecosystem/society]. Bojack couldn't exist in a functioning world. But, okay, how do you think Bojack maintains the at least partial optimism you were talking about earlier in the face of these hugely cruel, broken, impersonal systems?

W: An extremely fair question, and I would say that the answer lies in the moments of one-to-one connection that become (with work) possible, even in the shadows of the systemic forces at work. Without wishing to get too deeply into spoilers for the ending, I think it's significant that the show ends on a long, lingering shot of two friends who are parting ways, and for whom parting ways is probably the best thing, but whose friendship mattered deeply to them both even when it wasn't always healthy — they managed to find good in one another, and to part amicably in the end. But I'm also thinking of the smaller connections, the ones that aren't always foregrounded. Kelsey Jannings and Gina Cazador, both Hollywoo women screwed over tremendously by Bojack, end up working together on a major project that will bear fruit for both of them, with Cazador's talent facilitating Jannings's vision and Jannings's understanding of Cazador's trauma enabling Cazador to function on-set. It's almost entirely implicit — there's, like, one shot of a billboard for their movie in a late-stage episode — but it struck me as a remarkably hopeful ending for two characters who have been ground down relentlessly by their industry, made possible by the fact that they're able to meet each other where they are.

I haven't talked much about Princess Carolyn here, which feels like a terrible crime because she is one of my favourites. That being said: she's at her personal and professional best, consistently, when she's working with her (definitely autistic, by the way) PA Judah. He helps to keep her career and her life on the rails, in the face of the sheer chaos she invites into her life by trying so insistently to overachieve. There's a period where he oversteps in his efforts to help, and she pushes him away accordingly; but in the end, they get married, and I love it as a testament to the quiet, functional kind of love that leans much harder on collaboration and understanding than it does on intense feeling. (There's kind of a lot of that in Bojack, actually? See also the entire Peanutbutter/Diane marriage and its dissolution.) It doesn't feel, to me, as though she's settling. It feels as though she's reaffirming her priorities as a go-getting Hollywoo power manager, and moving forward with a partner committed to supporting her work.

And I guess on a darker note, I'm thinking of Sarah Lynn's efforts to reach out to and befriend her older co-star Joelle on the set of Horsin' Around. Here is a kid who is just looking for kindness, and literally nobody around her is prepared to give it, and it kills her. The efforts at connection in Bojack don't always end well; there are lots of breakups, lots of deeply ill-advised hookups, and lots of miscommunications. But they speak to possibilities, and the outright refusal of connection — the characters who buy into the mercenary mindset of Hollywoo, treating those around them as tools or competition or inferiors — almost always ends badly.

My secondary answer is that sometimes Todd will get a whimsical subplot and it's very charming.

E: We're dangerously approaching 'Ellie gets intense about Krapp's Last Tape' territory, but I'll try to resist. I think that's a really good way of thinking about Bojack, though, but I want to pick up on one specific part of your answer here: who, besides Princess Caroline (and Todd?) are your favourite characters, and why?

W: I don't know if I'd call Todd a favourite — he's funny and charming and I like what he brings to the table, but I tend not to gravitate toward characters whose primary function is comic relief. (Huge shock, I know.) Princess Carolyn is a favourite, because she's an asshole, and she's allowed to be an asshole while remaining sympathetic. She gets to come dangerously close to succeeding at screwing over every assistant in Hollywoo, and she gets to lie cheerfully to her clients on a daily basis, and I could probably pull out any number of additional PC plotlines in which she is terrible and it's very good fun, but she is also an overworked, largely self-made woman in a brutal industry who has made a career out of 'I can fix him,' probably her most self-destructive tendency. Not to bang the 'Complex Female Character' drum, it's already been punched to death, but you get it.

I love Kelsey, who is... another exhausted and underappreciated woman in a brutal industry, wow, I am certainly revealing a type. She is exactly the kind of cynic I love, which is to say the kind of cynic who hasn't totally given up hope and hates that about herself. She's probably my favourite minor character, I'd say.

And, like. I've written at length elsewhere (and also... earlier in this interview) about why I love Bojack, the character, yes the same character who nearly has sex with a teenager and actually causes tremendous misery to at least half of Hollywoo. I know enough about myself to know that if he were real and I met him, I'd absolutely default to thinking he was misunderstood and weirdly charming, and I'd probably get hurt as a result; I probably shouldn't love him, knowing that. (That screenshot of Wanda the owl saying that through rose-tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags? Yeah.) But he makes sense to me, as an experiencer of sustained emotional trauma. Without eviscerating myself live on internet: I think that sometimes it is good to look at a character whose processes are at least adjacent to your own, and experience some old-fashioned self-recognition-through-the-other.jpg, and feel understood (as distinct from 'valid'). This is another place where I think the tentative optimism of Bojack is valuable: even when characters walk away from Bojack, even when they lay into him for his behaviour, the show itself never treats him as a totally lost cause.

E: I find it interesting that in your Wanda analogy you're both Wanda and Bojack, perceiver and perceived; are you, too, misunderstood and weirdly charming? Or, put a little more usefully: what does that split identification, with the people Bojack fucks over, the people who love Bojack (admittedly these last two are kinda the same category), and with Bojack himself mean for you?

W: 'Weirdly charming' is definitely a reach, and 'misunderstood' is (at least to me) situational, but... I have my moments? I mean, clearly I have somehow obtained friends, and people have in the past elected to date me, so presumably I have something going for me somewhere. Equally, I am sensible of having made poor choices, and caused harm to people who loved me, and done probably-questionable shit — knowing it was probably questionable — from a place of trauma. And on top of that, I've absolutely made horrible emotional investments in a real-life Bojack or two, and I know intimately how much it sucks to realise that no, this endearingly complicated mess is not going to change because of you.

I would like to think that the split identification means I'm at least vaguely self-aware about my own way of being, in a way that surpasses Bojack's efforts at self-knowledge which all too frequently stall out at 'I'm poison and I can't change.' Then again, I catch myself getting too self-satisfied about having some awareness of my own bullshit, and I start to worry that I am more like Bojack than anyone really should be. Swings and roundabouts?

I do think it's useful, when engaging with fiction, to be able to extend sympathy to multiple places, whether it's identificatory or not. It absolutely amazes me that there are people out there advocating for more black-and-white morality in art. I want to be able to feel for everyone, such that I experience acute dread and regret when any given character makes the inevitable bad choice or interpersonal mistake.

E: I think a view I'm increasingly coming round to is that a vital element to good media criticism is — you have to want to like the thing you're responding to and the characters. It doesn't matter if you don't in the end — I mean, god knows I enjoy a properly good negative review, but actually interesting reviews only ever start from genuine openness to enjoying yourself, to falling in love with the characters, to, as you say, extending sympathy to multiple places. I'm guilty of not being able to do that, at times. But I want to, and I think I should more often. 

Crucial to that, I think, is being able to extend the 'wrong' sympathy. You said in your previous answer that you 'probably shouldn't love' Bojack, but like — actually, truly engaging with art means putting a bit of yourself into it, even if regrettably, even if you're left wondering if you're a bit too much like Bojack for comfort (I have this with Diane, for the record. I'm a Diane guy). What I love about Bojack is its ability to non-judgmentally accept and enable that investment — just as similar investments repeatedly play out on screen. Do you think there's a parallel here between the ways that you (we) watch Bojack and the ways that the characters on the show relate to one another, and particularly to Bojack himself? And what do you think that says about what the show is doing?

W: I agree, re: openness to art. I know I tend to find it hard to really unequivocally dislike, say, a book, unless the prose is bad or the ideas are bad. I can think of two books I have found almost nothing to enjoy about (they were Something That May Shock And Discredit You and Docile, which I realise is a two-for-one deal on controversial book takes, but what can I say, I'm irrepressible) over the past two years, despite being a fairly critically-minded person. I think that's down to approaching everything I read with a willingness to be invested. Also, plausibly, to being pretty selective about what I pick up, but that is a necessity based in trying to write my own books while also having a job.

The other piece of media I considered talking to you about was It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which spends a lot of time showing bad people comically failing to get away with bad things, but which will occasionally bust out a moment of pathos so intense that you find yourself uncomfortably vibing with, say, narcissistic nightmare man Dennis Reynolds. I think Bojack does something similar, albeit in a much gentler and far less sitcom-y fashion. That's not really an answer to your question, but insert expansive hand gesture here, intertextuality or something.

And to actually answer your question: I think it's pretty significant that the show opens with Diane trying to ghostwrite Bojack's book, and being frustrated at every turn (at least at first) by his total unwillingness to concede that anything is wrong with his life. We get the flashbacks to his emotionally-negligent parents, to his fraught early years in Hollywoo, all that stuff — but he won't own any of it directly. And Diane perseveres! Her observation of Bojack, independent of the story he's trying to tell her about himself, yields an insightful and sympathetic portrait of an unhappy, traumatised man (horse) past the peak of his career. Bojack, of course, hates this, because he wants to seem cool and aspirational, not relatably pathetic. Setting up the show that way, I think, kind of primes the viewer to look past face value for meaning and understanding — not because what you find will always be good, but because it's the best way to find something real. Not to say that the characters who decide they can't tolerate Bojack anymore are wrong! They're usually characters who've gotten close enough to the reality of Bojack to make an informed decision. But, crucially, that informed decision comes from (oh no it's King Lear time) seeing better, or at least from looking more carefully.

E: I think we've talked a lot about perception and investment throughout this conversation, and I wanted to circle back to the first question I asked you and put it slightly differently: what does Bojack mean to you?

W: As I said in answer to your first question, I found this show when I badly needed its approach to the world, and I will probably always associate it with that time, and it will probably always matter to me disproportionately because of that. Which is to say: Bojack means, to me, a certain generosity of spirit in the face of the cruel absurdities of being alive. It means finding ways to laugh at the miseries of participating in society, and from there, finding ways to keep going even when it sucks and you want to quit. It means casting a reflective eye over my own failings and trying to reassure myself that I can do better, if I choose to keep trying. And it means it's not just me. However you want to interpret that, one way or another, it's probably true.