One of BoJack Horseman’s biggest strengths throughout its first two years on the air was its ability to pack some of the funniest jokes on television into episodes that could pivot into fully fledged drama and have it all feel genuine and earned. The capacity to float between these genres is not something particularly new or groundbreaking in television (the term ‘dramedy’ has been in use to describe the many shows with these traits for years now), but the seamless nature with which BoJack navigates these positions is what has set it up as one of the best programmes currently on television. In this episode the show expands its oeuvre further by delving into Noir territory with BoJack’s ‘good’ name being dragged into the mud by his connection to the death of a stripper in the home of his old acquaintance, Cuddlywhiskers.
The noir shenanigans of the episode begin when BoJack takes Diane to Cuddlywhiskers’ house to run a personal errand, despite Diane’s request that they keep their interactions for the day at a minimum then return home. Diane tells BoJack that she needs for them to keep their relationship more professional in order to get her life and marriage back on track. They both acknowledge that they are very similar people and therefore have the tendency to bring out the worst in one another (This is a trait BoJack seems to share with several people. As noted in my previous review, there was a similar dynamic to his relationship with Princess Carolyn that led to them both wasting years of their lives together because it was easier to do that than to break it off and reassess who they were as people. Similarly, it is no coincidence that BoJack chose to keep Todd around as his roommate for so long. Todd is infinitely loveable to the audience but he is undoubtedly a slacker and somebody who BoJack could keep around confident in the knowledge that Todd would not outgrow or outshine him for as long as they lived together).
Whilst the Noir-ish plot of the episode is very fun and entertaining it is not really worth covering in much detail. Anybody familiar with the Noir genre will know that there are several tropes that will almost always be stuck to: the plot will be too convoluted to follow; there will be too many clues and leads to keep track of; and the final explanation of who did it isn’t really the point of the story. So, to quickly boil down this noir plot: BoJack thinks he has been framed for murder, he spends the episode working through leads then eventually comes to find that, in fact, it was a strain of heroin nicknamed BoJack (“because you played the horse, man”) that killed the victim in question. The point of the episode isn’t really to unravel this mystery; the point is to give BoJack and Diane the exact type of adventure that Diane knows she should be avoiding in order to highlight the difficulty that she has fixing her personal problems. During her day with BoJack, Diane speaks with clarity on her struggles with trying to achieve happiness in her life. She astutely acknowledges that it is a fairytale to believe in permanent happiness, telling BoJack that “all those perky, well-adjusted people you see in movies and TV shows […] don’t exist”. Diane tells BoJack that she is focusing on just getting through each day at the moment. The problem with this approach is that it leaves Diane’s marriage in an even more precarious position than ever. For Diane to focus solely on her own quest for happiness inevitably means that she will have to neglect the needs of Mr Peanutbutter to a large degree. This is exactly what ends up occurring in this episode: Diane spends the whole time getting into trouble with BoJack then forgets to keep her promise to Mr Peanutbutter that she will let him know when she’ll be home that night. This leads to Mr Peanutbutter exploding in anger at her in a way that we haven’t seen from him before. Due to his nature as a Golden Labrador, the show has always written Mr Peanutbutter as a very loyal and happy-go-lucky character. This makes his anger and frustration at the end of the episode hit home even harder to show just how far their relationship has disintegrated due to Diane’s actions. It seems fairly clear at this point that their marriage will surely be over soon. Both characters care a lot about each other but they simply aren’t compatible enough to survive; and having to be so committed to the needs of another person (particularly someone as needy as Mr Peanutbutter) isn’t something that Diane can trust herself to do at this point in her life.
It seems as though subconsciously Diane has maybe realised for a while that this will be the outcome of their relationship, and it is possibly why she has shown such little enthusiasm for couples’ counselling and seems so frustrated with the communication and work that is required for that type of counselling to work (see how she brushes off the language of therapy in her phone call to Mr Peanutbutter: “I hear it and I accept it and I value it and… all the other verbs”). Despite this, it seems as though Diane doesn’t fully realise that she will have to end the relationship to work on her own issues until Cuddlywhiskers spells it out for her at the end of the episode. Diane leaving Mr Peanutbutter would ultimately be a selfish act but Cuddlywhiskers believes that to achieve real change you must rid yourself of all of your old possessions, relationships and ways of life. Cuddlywhiskers doesn’t try to disprove or make excuses for the inherent selfishness of doing this; he simply states that despite it being selfish, it is the only thing that has ever made him genuinely happy.
It would behove BoJack to also follow Cuddlywhiskers’ advice but, in truth, BoJack doesn’t want to work that hard and give up that much to achieve happiness. BoJack is still obsessed with short-term fixes for his problems. As he tells Diane in this episode, to achieve happiness “you have to focus on the little things… like winning an Oscar”. Cuddlywhiskers pointedly tells him that this won’t fix his problems or make him happier; in fact, winning his Oscar made Cuddlywhiskers feel worse than he ever had done before. Cuddlywhiskers, like BoJack, probably built up that moment as being the thing that would finally bring him happiness, and then when it didn’t, it left him feeling emptier and more unsure of what to do next than he ever had before.
Watching this episode, and listening to Cuddlywhiskers’ thoughts on his Oscar I couldn’t help but be reminded of real-life Oscar winner Matt Damon’s quote on The Graham Norton Show about winning his Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting. Damon said:
I remember very clearly looking at that award and thinking very, very clearly […] ‘thank god I didn’t fuck anybody over for this’ […] Imagine chasing that and not getting it and then getting it finally in your eighties or your nineties with all of life behind you and realising what an unbelievable waste of your… you know… […] it can’t fill you up. If that’s a hole that you have, that won’t fill it. And I felt so blessed to have that awareness at 27 and I wouldn’t have known it unless I knew it […] My heart broke for a second and I imagined another one of me as an old man thinking ‘oh my god, where did my life go, what have I done?’ And then it’s over
This quote is a fascinating look into the real life experience of winning such an award and it speaks exactly to what Jill Pill told BoJack in the first episode of the season and what Cuddlywhiskers tells him in this episode: winning an Oscar won’t be enough. The hole that BoJack has inside of him won’t be filled with an award. He already knows it won’t be filled with money or praise or women or alcohol. BoJack’s problem is that he likes all of those things too much to give them up in order to achieve happiness. TV writer Todd VanDerWerff once wrote that the world of The Sopranos “is one where people – nations, really – don’t change because it’s easier not to”. I think the world of BoJack Horseman is a similar one. This episode ends with BoJack and Diane driving away from Cuddlywhiskers house, both of them clearly shaken by what they had heard from Cuddlywhiskers; but BoJack doesn’t want to properly take it in. BoJack wants Diane to confirm to him that Cuddlywhiskers is crazy. He wants Diane to comfort him and tell him that he doesn’t need to change in order to be happy. Just like the characters on The Sopranos, BoJack isn’t willing to achieve happiness if it will mean having to really acknowledge his deep faults and working on them. It’s simpler for him to keep acting the same way and hope that change will come from an easier source, like winning a prestigious award. BoJack certainly isn’t willing to give up on all of the creature comforts that he has gotten used to over his life. Diane seems to take Cuddlywhiskers’ message in and it seems as though she accepts that she is perhaps now forced onto the brink of a real change that will occur during this season. Bojack, on the other hand, will be destined to continue running in circles over and over again until he is really willing to work towards a change.
