11 million people tuned in
to watch the Season 3 premiere
of Rick and Morty.
And Rick and Morty’s fans are so
obsessed that a throwaway joke
“I want my McNugget dipping sauce,
Szechuan sauce, Morty.”
was enough to make McDonald’s
bring back a limited edition
dipping sauce from 1998.
Clearly, there’s something
about this show
that resonates
with people today.
It has an attitude
many of us can relate to.
“Seems like TV from other dimensions
has a somewhat looser feel to it.”
“Yeah, it’s got an almost
improvisational tone.”
So as we wait for the 70 more episodes
that have now been confirmed,
let’s take a moment to ask
how this show,
that has risen so rapidly
to incredible popularity,
expresses the sensibility
of our times.
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What are “our times” anyway?
It’s not always easy to see everything
about your own present day very clearly.
Looking back at history,
things become more crystallized
into eras and movements with labels --
The Renaissance, The Enlightenment,
Romanticism…
but trying to label the zeitgeist
while you’re living it
can feel a little like trying to see
that the Earth is round
while you’re standing on it.
Still, how can we try to define
today’s way of thinking?
And how is that mindset
reflected in Rick and Morty?
The defining mode of thought
in art and culture
for many recent decades
has been Postmodernism.
To understand Postmodernism,
first we have to look at Modernism,
a cultural movement inspired by
the increasingly industrialized cities
and changing lifestyle of the
late 1800s and early 1900s.
Modernism was about breaking with the past,
embracing the new and “modern,”
finding innovation in art and technology,
and grappling with the horrors of World War
I.
But Modernism still had faith
in the power of humankind
to create a better world
through science, technology,
and the applied human mind.
After World War II, Modernism was
eventually displaced by Postmodernism,
a movement that rejected
the one-size-fits-all
“grand narratives” of Modernism.
Instead, Postmoderism saw
truth and values as the product
of cultural and social circumstances.
It embraced moral relativism, pluralism,
not one universal meaning for everyone.
Postmodernism was irreverent --
Fredric Jameson said it showed
a “waning of affect,”
meaning it had less sincere emotion
and more irony and skepticism.
Rick and Morty has definitely been
called a Postmodern show before.
It has Postmodernism’s
irreverent self-referentiality,
“Roll the credits!
Go!
Just shake that ass!
That’s the end of Season 1!
That’s the end, mother-[BLEEP]!”
its deconstruction of grand narratives
“I accept your call to adventure, good sir.
Kind sir.
Come on, Rick!
There’s a giant in the clouds!”
“Yeah.
[Burp] Beginner’s luck.”
and its irony and skepticism.
“There is no god, Summer.
Gotta rip that Band-Aid off now.
You’ll thank me later.”
And yet, despite all the cynicism
and self-awareness,
the show also gives us sincere,
deeply felt moments,
like the time Morty has to
bury his own dead body,
or when Unity breaks up
with Rick
and he presumably tries
to commit suicide.
These scenes demonstrate
that there’s a strong undercurrent
of genuine feeling
beneath the facade
of not caring about things.
As the New Republic’s
Eric Armstrong put it,
“Roiland and Harmon are (...)
asserting the value of sentimentality,
cloaked in
Lovecraftian postmodernism.”
It seems as though
in general in our culture,
sentimentality and earnestness
are starting to come back into vogue.
Look at the success
of The Shape of Water,
which won Best Picture and Best Director
at the 2018 Academy Awards.
The film’s Director,
Guillermo del Toro,
has actually emphasized
the film’s earnestness.
“And the thing that is important for me
is to be shameless and earnest
and honest and not Postmodern.”
As cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen
and Robin Van den Akker argue,
all postmodern tendencies
aren’t being abandoned,
but they are taking on
a new sensibility.
So what we’re seeing is
that Postmodernism’s clever dissection
of grand narratives is
still very much in play,
“So dark.
You’re sure you’re not
from the DC Universe?”
but today there’s also
a strong desire for hope
and meaning again.
This shift back towards earnestness
is likely a reaction to the long list
of pressures facing our society today --
our divided political landscape,
climate change, globalization,
financial crises, tensions over
how a modern society approaches race,
gender and sexuality.
In the face of all these challenges,
neither Postmodernism nor Modernism
is really going to cut it alone.
To paraphrase Vermeulen
and Van den Akker,
Modernists were too confident
in humanity’s ability to fix everything,
while Postmodernists were
too apathetic.
To put that another way,
it’s as if Modernists say:
World War I was tough,
but we’re smart
and we have awesome
technology and innovation,
so we can make everything good.
Postmodernists say:
We were wrong to think we could
really change the world for the better.
Let’s just play in the ruins,
because nothing means anything anyway.
These days we say:
We know enough to see that everything
very possibly won’t turn out okay,
but we can’t afford
to give up hope.
Vermeulen and Van den Akker
call this new, emerging way of thought
Metamodernism,
and they define it as an oscillation
between the Modern and the Postmodern.
Metamodernism is a pendulum
constantly swinging back and forth,
that push and pull
between optimistic sentiment
and cynical detachment.
So now that you’ve stayed
with us through all of that,
what’s really fascinating
is that this oscillation matches up
very well with the key back and forth
we find in Rick and Morty.
Take this quote
from Vermeulen and Van den Akker,
which basically sounds like
it could be describing the show:
“Metamodernism oscillates
between a modern enthusiasm
“I love my grandkids.”
“Aw.”
and a postmodern irony
“Psych.”
between hope and melancholy,
between naivete and knowingness,
empathy and apathy.
Each time the metamodern enthusiasm
swings towards fanaticism,
gravity pulls it back toward irony;
the moment its irony
sways toward apathy,
gravity pulls it back toward enthusiasm.”
This oscillation is everywhere
in Rick and Morty.
Here, Morty is having what looks like
a psychedelic soul union with the Fart:
“I said goodbyeee mooon men….”
but then it’s cut short
“Shut the [BLEEP] up
about moon men!”
and he’s forced to shoot
his new alien friend.
Or here, he’s enjoying the sunset,
but one minute later things
take a turn for the worse.
Basically every time there’s
a melodic pop song in the soundtrack,
it’s almost an announcement
that the show has reached
peak sentimentality
and will be swinging back
towards cynicism very soon.
For example, in season 3,
we got the episode The Ricklantis Mix-up.
This stand-alone episode
about the utopian citadel of Ricks
earnestly explores late capitalism
and racial politics.
“Same old story.
Morties killin’ Morties.”
Its final sequence
set to sentimental music,
in addition to revealing
the Evil Morty connection,
makes us feel a deep sadness
and regret about our modern lives
with our mind-numbing jobs,
our fake happiness for sale,
and our evil politicians.
But lest we get the wrong idea
from all this serious commentary,
the very next episode,
Morty’s Mindblowers,
undermines this clear,
earnest insight
with a collection
of disconnected vignettes
and the episode ends with Rick and Morty
both forgetting everything
and watching TV.
“How did we fall asleep
during interdimensional cable?”
The point of Morty’s Mindblowers
is basically that Rick and Morty’s life
is made up of repeating
the same disturbing,
meaningless cycle over and over.
On its own, the episode
Morty’s Mindblowers
is peak Postmodernism.
But in the larger structure
of the season,
it’s the pendulum swinging back
to balance out
what we just saw
in The Ricklantis Mix-up.
Other times the show
gives us sentimentality
“I’m ok with this.
Be good, Morty.
Be better than me.”
and then backtracks
“The other collar!
I’m not ok with this!”
telling us later that what we saw
and believed to be genuine sentiment
was actually false.
“Oh Lord, hear my prayers.
Yes!
[BLEEP] you god.
Not today, bitch.”
Rick arranges for his capture
by the Federation,
sacrificing himself
to save his family,
to the soundtrack
of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”.
“I will let you down.
I will make you hurt.”
Then in season 3,
we learn that Rick wasn’t actually
sacrificing himself for his family,
he was just doing the usual -
“You came to rescue them.”
“I came to kill you, bro.
That’s not even my original Summer.”
“Oh my god, he’s not bluffing.”
trying to disrupt
the powers that be
by making supposedly
meaningful things meaningless.
“Watch closely as Grandpa topples an empire
by changing a 1 to a 0.”
So the show undermines
what it’s previously presented
and rewrites itself,
to never let us get comfortable
with either the sentimental investment
or the ironic detachment.
This push and pull can be seen
in pretty much every aspect of the show --
one protagonist is a cynical nihilist,
the other is a hopeful, empathetic kid.
And within Rick himself,
we see this tension constantly.
We’ve talked before about how
Rick’s character arc
fluctuates between caring
and not caring.
He finds meaning by zooming into
the love he has for his family
and then he reverts to zooming out
and knowing that everything is meaningless.
And that brings us back to us
and the zeitgeist Rick and Morty
is tapping into.
In many ways Rick’s emotional
back-and-forth is a mirror
of how a lot of people feel today.
Even if we don’t have Rick’s
access to innumerable galaxies,
the Internet gives us access
to innumerable information bytes.
So like Rick, we have the ability
to see how tiny our lives are
in comparison to the bigger world
and universe out there.
And we can find ourselves
a little exhausted by the never-ending
depressing, disturbing news
produced by a world
that doesn’t always seem
worth investing in.
But in spite of all that,
we also don’t want to give up hope.
Because, like Rick,
we do care,
in spite of how insurmountable
the problems can seem.
So we can see that Rick’s
back-and-forth sin wave
of caring and not caring
is a pretty accurate reflection
of the zeitgeist.
The show’s popularity
is more than just a sum
of its many great parts --
as it balances irony and empathy,
idealism and nihilism,
enthusiasm and apathy,
Rick and Morty perfectly embodies
that ever-swinging pendulum
of the spirit of today.
“Goddammit.
Why am I crying.
Makes no sense.
Ugh.
You’re probably confused
because we barely knew each other,
but you’re different, Noob Noob.”
“Mother-[BLEEP].”
Hey guys!
So, in the absence of new
Rick and Morty episodes,
you might want to start
getting into HarmonQuest.
It’s Dan Harmon and his posse
playing DnD with celebrity guests,
half animated, half live-action.
It’s quite funny, actually,
and we love this episode with Aubrey Plaza.
“Uh, my name is Hawaiian Coffee.”
“I’m not a psychologist,
but almost sounds like
you made your name up.”
“Well, doesn’t every name sound like that?”
For a short window of time,
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Premium members can watch
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Gary and His Demons,
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Right now ScreenPrism fans
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