The Meaning of Death: BoJack Horseman vs. The Good Place

Hello everyone, this video was made in collaboration with our

good

friends at the tape, stay until the end of the video to hear more about their deep dive into Princess Carolyne, what's up, joke with Jared again in case you missed it lost. Two of our favorite shows in recent memory this year is a

good

place

and Bojack Horseman now on paper these shows can seem very different a feel good show about a ragtag team of dead people trying to save everyone from limb crushing hell such maybe if you get negative points on earth I'm sorry You ruined it, you enjoy having your penis flattened while the other one is fine, this idiot maybe some of the troops are heroes, but not automatically.

I'm sure a lot of the troops are idiots, but what if I told you to dig a little? More deeply, these shows actually approach the same philosophical topic from opposite perspectives. Oh, it turns out that both The Good Place and Bojack are concerned not only with

death

, but also with how the big dream gives

meaning

to our lives, so, in the words of everyone's favorite Florida man, hook them all, top cocktail and see what happens, welcome to those clever edits about two ways to die, the good

place

and

bojack

horseman

and as always, spoilers ahead now for the uninitiated, the good place has many twists and turns throughout its four seasons.

The show started out as a story about humans who mistakenly ended up in heaven only to surprise us with the revelation that their good place was actually a convoluted plot to torture them, but after having a surprisingly attractive demon on their side, hello Silver Fox, the show goes on. the gang as they try to change the rules that govern the afterlife that is because the current system is seriously broken this is the problem with the current system live anything less than the most exemplary life and you are brutally tortured forever with no recourse cruelty The punishment does not match the cruelty of the life one has lived to solve the problem.

The judge is like a pseudo-God with a dad complex. The last time I checked, I didn't have a dad, that's why I'm attracted to all fathers. TV shows I watch want to erase humanity and start from scratch, but the gang manages to convince her and the people of the bad place to adopt a new system, you die, you go to the afterlife and then you go through a series of tests before . At the end you go to heaven, they give you some kind of evaluation and the architects explain to you what you did wrong, what you did right and then they restart you and you do it again and again until you get it, all is well, that ends well. true, not so much, the gang may have stopped all of humanity from going to hell, that doesn't mean heaven is all that great in the words of Hypatia of Alexandria's document, this is paradise, all your wants and needs are They satisfy, but it's infinite and when perfection goes on forever, you become this glassy-eyed person, living forever is a kind of hell, so Eleanor has a solution, a way to restore people's

meaning

to the good. place is to let them go, in other words, for your afterlife to have which means you too must die or, in this case, cease to exist, the show concludes with our heroes doing what they need to feel at peace before to get rid of this immortal spiral.

Now if you think it's strange that a show about the afterlife essentially ends everyone. Dying is probably because you are not familiar with this guy. Mortality offers meaning to our lives and morality helps navigate that meaning. Wait, what I think it says is that mortality offers meaning to the events of our lives. That guy over there is Todd Mei, no. only philosophy professor but also philosophical advisor of the program with Pamela Harana. It is May's book, Death, that actually provides the philosophical framework for the series that ends with May making the bold claim that the fact that we die is the most important fact about life. we formai

death

provides a unique structure to our lives with death subsuming all other facts about our lives without death he argues that we would all lose a sense of meaning and perhaps even virtue to prove the point can ask us to consider its short story by jorge luis borges the immortal who follows a man named joseph kartoffel in search of a river that will grant him immortality, but when kartoffel finally drinks from the river and discovers his society of immortals, he is shocked to discover that they are just pathetic remains of ancient humans.

They barely speak, show surprisingly little interest in others, and wander around the literal ruins of their own civilization. If this sounds familiar, maybe it's because it reminds you of this charming character in the good old multi-ball place. I mean, it's perfect, we're all having it. orgasms literally all the time I died a virgin, so that's really crazy because there is nothing that the residents of the good place haven't done or won't do during that eternity, nothing gives them meaning or joy, not even the constant and literal orgasmic bliss cosmic or go. -karting with monkeys monkeys are the ideal opponents of karts they are fun enough to point the finger but not smart enough to win perhaps worse this endless life also seems to strip people of their identities Hypatia of Alexandria, For example, she becomes the exact opposite of an ancient philosopher scholar who traded her toga for an NFL jersey named Patti and has completely forgotten the name of her former profession, but it is not just our passions that eternity would numb. .

May sees fellow philosopher Martha Nussbaum and speculates that eternity might even chip away. she far from our moral concerns, she even went so far as to speculate that even justice would be in danger; the needs of others would not be imposed on us in the same way since their existence would not be threatened by our negligence; This is certainly the case in Bohr's story where a topless car tells how a man was left at the bottom of a ravine for almost a century because no one bothered to get him out. After all, why rush when you have until the end? of the times and while the good place is not?

To confirm this thesis, it is interesting to note that after an eternity, Chiti, who made moral philosophy his entire life on earth and in the hereafter, was no longer interested in studying the subject once he reached the good place after from thousands of readings of the most difficult writings in the world I have acquired a new passion rubbish books do you think I would have been a good symbologist if there was a real job, but the good location strange may you both agree that eternity is a little less than big, everything you need in it can, for your part? asks his readers to consider a novel, the conclusion of a book is not important in itself, literally every book in existence has an ending page, but this ending in itself allows you to reflect on what came before and gives you the opportunity to order that experience or we can.

Consider a typical television sitcom: the fact that there is a final scene for each episode is not surprising, but building to that ending allows the episode to have narrative momentum and a sense of closure because of the good place that knowledge of the finality allows the show and its characters to create meaning the opportunity to walk through a door of nonexistence allows Jason to feel complete when he played the perfect game of Madden after over 400,000 tries and allows Chiti to feel at peace when he and Elinor They sit down to dinner for the last time. Together, as Michael paraphrases Elinor, you said that every human being is a little sad all the time because you know you're going to die, but that knowledge is what gives meaning to life, but if all this seems too optimistic, then maybe once Bojack Horseman z'.

After all, perspective would speak to you more. Bojack has spent six seasons deconstructing the idea that anything in life can be carefully wrapped, let alone in the face of death. It's funny, isn't it the things that matter? And the truth is that everything matters tremendously. I'm surprised any of us ever get out of bed, and yet we get out of it and the latter half of season six is ​​no different, as Bojack seems to have soberly turned a new leaf as a drama professor at Wesleyan, all Things go wrong for him when two intrepid 1930s-style reporters start digging into his past, what starts as a story about Bojack's involvement and Saralyn's death quickly turns into a PR nightmare with Bojack being interrogated. for all her horrible behavior on national television when she was drunk, you had sex with her and when she was sober, you gave her the heroin that killed her and then, in an effort to cover yourself, you waited to call the paramedics who could have saved her life, one relapse later, complete with a near-death experience and one of the best dream sequences on television. and Bojack has been sentenced to 14 months in prison.

The series ends with Bojack being freed for one night to attend Princess Carolyn's wedding, where he must accept the fact that life has no rhythm or reason, he just has to make do, yeah, what. Are you going to live one life and then die well? Sometimes, sometimes, life is one and then you keep living. It's that last sentence that really sums up the philosophical essence of the show. Life is one and then you die or sometimes you just keep living unlike the good place. There are no clear endings in Bojack Horseman. There are no real moments to have a greater sense of closure.

Sure, Bojack could make a big gesture of change at the end of a season, whether it's saving Todd from an improv cult or showing kindness to his mother. his deathbed, but he always comes back, this place was supposed to be a new beginning for me, rehab was supposed to be a new beginning, but no matter how many beginnings I have, there's always the same ending, everything falls apart and I'm done alone, in a few words. The endings in Bojack offer little to no meaning, so it's not too surprising that death, the end of all ends, is also treated as a terrifying and meaningless unknown.

This all goes back to the early variety of French existentialism, to paraphrase the original bad boy of French philosophy. -paul Sartre humans are created without any specific purpose, unlike toilet paper which is obviously made to be bought and treasured like precious gold, we enter this world without rhyme or reason and only define ourselves afterwards, but whatever one find in your search for meaning, that's all. In vain, when the cosmic curtain draws to a close, some existential nihilists even go a step further and say why bother looking and philosopher Donald Crosby's words get longer, we worry and deceive ourselves, as our Lives are meaningless and useless. seeking or affirming meaning where none can be found, while existential nihilism is as far as possible from Todd May's argument that death gives meaning to life; has been a constant staple for Bojack; in fact, death punctuates almost every season with herb deaths because as sarah lynn and

bojack

's mother made bojack reach new emotional levels and subsequently struggle to make sense of his life.

I don't know how being Diane doesn't get better and it doesn't get easier, but it's season 6 where the show really delivers the existentialist message, particularly in the episode, the view from the middle after Bojack relapses, breaks into his old house, takes a bunch of pills, drinks a bunch of vodka and then has a near death experience while drowning, yeah I kept having this dream. where I was having dinner with all the people who were gone and I thought I should do that in the dream Bojack has dinner with everyone he knew who died too zach braff is the waiter water Thanks Zach Braff what starts out as a dinner game about the best and worst parts of the characters' lives quickly turns into a conversation about the value of these lives saralyn insists that all the joy she brought to her fans must mean something, while corduroy jackson jackson meets the guy who hanged himself while masturbating and sucking. in a lemon says he can't match Bojack's uncle's sacrifice, you sing songs on stage, it's the same as this guy who died liberated because his Apple to Auschwitz is remarkably, this is not the structured type of philosophical conversation we would see develop. in the good place or there is always an answer or resolution at the end of the 22 minutes instead there is no agreement there are no answers here bojack's father represented by Secretary says that what they did with their lives is better it didn't matter all the time that those people went through trying to do good or help people will be something I didn't do, none of that and yet here I am the same as them, no matter what they did on earth or who they were, they all died and he tries create meaning or find peace or justdespair, peace.

It's someone trying to convince themselves of something about the meaning or purpose of life, but if they check the right boxes and dance and get a little parting gift at the end, a framed certificate that says congratulations, you have peace. Of course, Bojack is not at peace when he realizes that he won't wake up from this dream, you guys won't come, oh this is always the part where I wake up, everyone go to the show. Zach Braff says that he starts from my reach although he can clearly take my plate from another angle and then I wake up fine.

Bojack joins the others for a literal show, one by one, the characters perform an artistic interpretation of their deaths, Saralyn sings a song about how you shouldn't stop performing until... Re Dead Corduroy hangs himself and Secretary /bo Jack's father reads a haunting poem about jumping off the thrash bridge to free himself from gravity. What could stop the stop now? He would give four toes to touch the latch at the top at the end of all of these. performances the characters leave through a door of nonexistence but this door is not the serene wooded variety that we see in the good place it is an abyss it is a stark contrast where the good work strives to tell us that death will be peaceful and that I will go safely win.

What will happen when we go through it. Well, we really don't know exactly. All we know is that it will be peaceful and their journey will end. Bojack implies that it's scary and you're gone whether you want it or not now. Although it might be tempting to attribute all of this to Bojack's merchants being a little more artistic in their visions of death, these choices are actually part and parcel of existentialism, Most existentialists argue that if meaning exists in the world, it is an entirely human construction. According to Sartre, when we perceive the world around us, what we are actually doing is trying to impose order on it.

He writes, it is our presence in the world that multiplies the relationships, it is we who establish this relationship between this tree and a little piece of sky, thanks to us, that star that has been dead for millennia in that quarter moon and that dark river are revealed in the unity of a landscape that is even more important. Existentialists maintain that this process mental is what allows the human being to be We are sure that our existence does not have a great purpose, but that does not mean that we cannot try to create one for ourselves and the artists who distill their vision of the world on a canvas or on a stage They are perhaps the freest of all those he explains. why so many existentialists like Sartre Camus and de Beauvoir were also playwrights and explains why Herb says this to Bojack during his dream, has anyone ever returned from this place?

PJ, there's no room, it's just your brain going through what it feels it has to do. Go through all you can do now is sit back and enjoy the show. None of this was real, Bojack simply created art out of his life trying to impose order. In the end, Bojack has to realize that this is it. See you on the other side there is no other side this is of course Bojack doesn't actually die and maybe that's the point, think about the point of the maze, the idea that death gives structure and meaning to a life If a person never died if the book never ended If the show just goes on, at what point can we sit back and wonder what it all means?

Ultimately, The Good Place chose a comedy that ends in one where all the characters completed their journeys and found peace, even if it meant their existence. it is coming to its end. I suddenly had this calm feeling as if the air inside my lungs was the same as the air outside my body. There was peace in Bojack. The show ends but the journey continues. Even Bojack doesn't really know what he's going to do. do or what it's going to be like but it's easy now in prison I don't have to make any decisions for myself I worry about what's going to happen when I get out we keep coming back to that line from the final scene sometimes life is an and then you keep living in the last scene.

Bojack faces the reality that he will never fully patch things up with Diane, but life will still go on as if he proves the point. The final moments of the show are an uncomfortably long shot of the two sitting awkwardly. side by side in silence, so here is the million dollar question prank and asks how death affects life, why the good place ended with simple answers and why Bojack ended with open questions in a strange way . I think the answer does not necessarily lie with the program itself, but with its creators and, more importantly, its media, after all, the good place is the baby of Michael Schur, one of the most influential figures of American television, I'm sure he got his start in the American office before creating Parks and Rec Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the Good Place in In other words, he's a true sitcom genius, but sitcoms as a form have their own narrative demands.

Dan Harmon said it best when he wrote that television does not sell revolution, but rather a sanitary, identifiable substitution for your own dirty, unsellable humanity. What television plays is that it exchanges any meaningful and therefore potentially subverted truth for eternal basic truth that changes unnecessarily, ultimately the traditional television model focuses on appeasing audiences. Television wants to make you feel good, even secure about your life. watch more television the last thing you want to do is create an existential crisis but this is exactly what Bojack Horseman does and it is precisely because the man behind the show Raphael Bob-Waksberg is not from Hollywood, in fact, like many Bob-Waksberg existentialists, is a trained playwright and as a result, Bojack uses theatricality, the episode's Arrow of the Times, for example, draws loosely on theatrical inspirations such as Harold Pinter and Carol Churchill in depicting Beatrice's dementia while mixing and mashing various moments of his life, another free churro episode is essentially a single episode.

Man features a 20-minute monologue in which Bojack delivers a eulogy about his mother Beatrice and is also one of the best TV episodes of all time on IMDB. Even Bob-Waksberg's penchant for theater and all his existential baggage is no surprise that Bojack shoehorns in the easy answers and happy endings to the closing of the television network is something invented by Steven Spielberg to sell movie tickets is like true love and The Munich Olympics don't exist in the real world. The only thing we can do now is keep living forward. In the end we get a very interesting dichotomy: The Good Place tries to be a show about philosophy, even the initial premise of people trapped in hell.

Torturing Each Other is inspired by the famous work by Jean-Paul Sartre, still unreleased due to the show's comedy roots. tied to answers that can easily fit the sitcom mold with clean endings, he wants to lull us with traditional sitcom logic that everything will be fine as long as we have our friends or as Chiti says, but maybe we should be excited that any program on television or otherwise is willing to talk about Conte, what are you reading? Immanuel Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals is a treatise on the aesthetic preconditions of the mind's receptivity to duty, on the other hand, Bojack Horseman is the exact opposite of good place.

It's a show set in Hollywood that, because of its theatrical roots, ends up being about philosophy and, to be sure, we never get the answers to many questions. Does the harm we experience have meaning? Are we condemned to always be the people we are now? and but in all seriousness, just as the show leaves us unsure about what bojack's journey will be like, it also leaves us unsure about the meaning of life, death, and any other deeper philosophical question, and in that there is a certain genuineness and authenticity what is missing from the good place. To get to know every nook and cranny of Bojack Horseman's cool, be sure to watch the video of the take on the only person who somehow remained friends with Bow Jack Princess Carolyne.

Explores the trope of the working woman she embodies and her unique relationship with storytelling. Lots of great videos exploring the tropes that are everywhere in your favorite movies and shows. They have a ton of videos about The Good Place, Bojack and my absolute favorite, The Matrix. Click here to see them. Make sure you subscribe and tell them. Wisecrack sent you thanks for ensuring everyone's peace.