For reasons I only sort of understand, the show
Rick and Morty is very polarizing and sometimes written off as puerile, sexist, or misogynistic. One episode in particular seems to divide not only people who hate the show from those who love it, but even fans from other fans. It's the Pickle Rick episode. If you've never seen the show, it's about an older man named Rick who is so intelligent he is almost godlike in his ability to control the world. Rick travels the multiverse with his grandson Morty looking for adventure. Morty is a normal fourteen-year-old kid who struggles to understand his grandpa, while Rick struggles to maintain his sanity when he knows only too well how meaningless life in the multiverse is, where there are infinite versions of himself and everyone else. Rick uses alcohol to try to dull the pain, and he tries not to love those closest to him, because he thinks that will only increase the pain of life in the multiverse.
In the Pickle Rick episode, Rick turns himself into a pickle. He says he does it to challenge himself, but in fact, he actually does it in order to avoid going to family therapy with his daughter and kids. Through a series of unlikely events, Rick ends up actually challenging himself much more than he meant to, but, because he's Rick, he survives. At the end of his adventures, he finds himself in the therapy session he meant to avoid with Dr. Wong, voiced by Susan Sarandon.
In the meeting, Rick blurts out his disdain for therapy, and Dr. Wong responds with a monologue of her own. Rather than rewrite all the dialogue, I'll just paste the .jpeg of it that someone helpfully put on Reddit:
Dr. Wong's rejoinder (which Rick later will comment on, hypocritically, with the dismissal of "what a monologist!") should make it clear that the show isn't dismissing therapy. It gives both characters strong lines, and it's possible to side with either Rick's masters-of-their-own-destiny-don't-need-therapy beliefs or with Dr. Wong's sensible and non-threatened rebuttal. By giving Dr. Wong the last word, though, the weight does tip slightly toward her. (Also, Rick will voluntarily go to therapy in later episodes, and he will do so in a way that takes therapy at least somewhat seriously.) But given all Rick knows, even if we side with Dr. Wong, it's hard to escape the feeling that there is something to his approach to life.
What the hell any of this has to do with "The Last Grownup"
When I analyze a story, I feel pretty free to use however much theory, close reading, criticism, and personal reaction make sense to me with each story, and in whatever combination. In the last year, I've been bringing in more and more theory, probably because I've been reading more about it. When I read "The Last Grownup," though, my reaction had everything to do with a series of thoughts about therapy and the meaning of life I've been playing with for years.
The story is about a woman who is kind of controlling, in both good and bad ways. For most people, their good characteristics are intimately and inseparably linked to their weak ones. Assertive people don't get taken advantage of, but they sometimes offend others. Caring people make sure others are okay, but are sometimes too nosy. Creative people find novel solutions to problems, but they also often are a mess and they resist doing things that don't really require a creative approach. And so on.
Debra in "The Last Grownup" is, depending on whether you're her justifying her attitudes or her ex-husband complaining about them, either a very responsible planner or a neurotic control freak.
Admittedly, Debra tended toward the worst-case scenario. It made Richard crazy, because she was always, as he said, fast-forwarding. But she had foresight. She prepared. She planned meals and vacations, scheduled lessons, pre-registered for summer camp. Slow down, Richard would beg her. Cut back, get help! Of course, he never considered helping. When they fought he said, But you insist on doing everything.
This was true. No one had ever told Debra to stay home and do everything; that came from her. Nothing compelled her but her conscience and her common sense.
I know some people like Debra. We all probably do. The Debras of the world are often underappreciated and derided, even by those who benefit from their borderline obsessive preparedness. At the outset, Debra's marriage has already been over for some time, but the official paperwork has just been filed and the divorce is now official. Her kids are on their first weekend visit with Dad since the official end, and she's lost in her house without them. The story will be about her figuring out what the good and bad parts of her personality are, where preparedness ends and obsessive, fast-forwarding, control freak begins. It will be her doing what therapy calls "the work." Therapy, in fact, makes at least one direct appearance in the story, as we listen in on part of one of Debra's meetings with her therapist. There is also an indirect appearance of therapy when Debra's sister, during what may be considered the muted climax, instructs Debra on a technique for expressing her anger.
My feelings about therapy and the unexpected sexual politics of it
I've never been crazy about therapy. This is partly because people close to me in my life went to therapy, along with a psychiatrist who prescribed medicines, for a very long time without it seeming to do much good. It's also got something to do, though, with how in modernity therapy seems to have creeped into territory that was once occupied by religion or philosophy. For example, the whole world
seems to treat suicide like it's primarily a question of mental health, but it's not. Therapy takes it for granted that suicide is bad. If I were the cynical type, I'd say that's in part because you can't bill dead people. Like any belief that takes something as an
a priori principle, it's kind of boring to listen to its proponents try to explain why you should accept the belief in the same way. Therapy isn't discovery of fundamental truths, but it's often presented as having the same gravitas, like once you've started therapy, it's like you've gone on a quest for the meaning of life. You haven't. You're just on a quest to learn how to stop annoying people.
After decades of trying to work to become intelligent, or even, in my more daring moments, to become an intellectual, I realize I'm no Rick Sanchez. I know full well that it's impossible to measure intelligence accurately, but let's pretend you could. In the types of intelligence that matter to being able to judge meaning-of-life questions, the math/science/language/reasoning types of intelligence, I'm maybe a 7 or an 8 out of ten. In effort, I'm a 9 or a 10 out of ten, so I make up for my quasi-mediocrity a bit, but all that work has done is make me realize how futile the work is without also being a ten of ten in natural ability. So maybe I don't have Rick Sanchez-level authority when I say I feel like life in this here multiverse presents us with a prima facie case that there is a lack of inherent order and meaning that's at the very least a bit disorienting, but I do think that I have cause to say that therapists might be side-stepping the real issues, and that they aren't the people with the most relevant things to say about the big questions in life.
I'm not quite a nihilist. Life may not have any inherent meaning, but it's kind of like living in a video game like Minecraft. There's no set order to how you "win" the game, but there are some rules in the sense that "if you do this, X will happen," and there are ways to play the game that are fun and ways to play that aren't fun. I try to play in ways that are fun. It so happens that those ways include not ruining the game for others, so I don't believe that all ethical decisions are equal. Even this borderline nihilism, of course, might raise an instinctive disdain among some intellectuals who feel they've graduated from it, that existential despair is a juvenile state of mind indicative of poseurs in the college coffee house, wearing berets and beating bongos and misquoting Sartre. They're like A.J. from The Sopranos, mispronouncing the name Nietzsche (which I admit I have to look up how to spell every time). I understand the resistance to poseur-y nihilism, but that doesn't mean that the class of people who think they're better than it have really made their case for something else. That includes therapists.
This near-nihilism of mine might not seem to have any reference to sexual politics, but it could, I suppose, be subject to a critique that it falls in the same vein of sexist dismissal of a feminist aesthetic that Nathaniel Hawthorne did when he dismissed popular female novelists of his time as a "damned mob of scribbling women." He meant, in part, that his work was serious but that the women to whom America was "wholly given over" were not. Hawthorne's characters lived in a dark and brooding universe still haunted by the ghosts of Calvinism or the Book of Ecclesiastes, and there is a sense of the vanity of all things under the sun, whereas the novels he derided were about the business of living life and life lived well, without any need to justify it, and they put away the sense of vanity and fully turned their attention to the secular business of living in all its small and wonderful detail.
This divide between "serious" fiction and frivolous has never gone away, and there has always been a bit of a sexual dimension to it, with serious white men writing ponderous stories about old men living alone in a cabin that appear in the New Yorker and women writing very talented prose about a seamstress that appear in Harper's. That's perhaps why early seasons of Rick and Morty, where Rick very much is into his "therapy is stupid" philosophy, earn the reputation for misogyny.
There is also a political dimension to the divide: Hawthorne's preference for eternal meaning-of-life-type issues over life-in-front-of-your-face ones could be seen as devaluing the struggle to improve life on Earth for the masses, because what's the point of short life in this valley of tears, anyway? As Siggy in What About Bob? put it when pushed to learn to dive off a dock, "With all the horror in the world, what does it matter?"
Those general philosophical preferences applied to the story
Knowing full well that my inclination for the eternal over the secular and for theoretical concepts over paying attention to the practicalities of life run the risk of being either frivolous or sexist or politically retrograde, those are still my inclinations, and I take them with me to a story like "The Last Grownup."
My instincts are to find that although I can recognize the quality of the craftsmanship and that the story is, in the terminology of the New Critics, a "well-wrought urn," it also doesn't resonate with me the way "The Castle of Rose Tellin" did a few stories back. (And if there's an argument that my predilections aren't totally sexist, maybe it's that I loved Kate DiCamillo's story, and that I recognize that to the extent there really is a distinction to be made between transcendental fiction and secular, women can write the former as well as men.)
"The Last Grownup" lets us watch as Debra "puts in the work." Part of the work includes the early phases of "feeling her feelings," as the kids say, but because Debra is Debra, the self-pity and inaction of the opening pages doesn't last. She gets almost excited about working with her ex-husband and his current girlfriend in the process of teaming up to get the whole family onboard about Richard and Heather getting married and having a baby. Yes, it means some pain for her as she watches her husband move on, apparently doing well in his own process of working on himself, as he's lost weight and quit smoking. But it also gives her something practical to do, which she loves. She finds herself, as she often does, fast-forwarding, wishing that Richard and Heather could just hurry up and get this whole transition over with so they could be a few years down the road and already adjusted to the change. "Debra wished it had all happened already, so she didn't have to watch."
Although the narrator assures us that Debra is "good at therapy," meaning that she listens to her therapist, knows the language of therapy, and can recognize the places in her life where therapeutic concepts apply, it's also true that she's guilty of everything Richard says she is. In the first conversation we see Richard and Debra have after the divorce is final, Debra is jumping ahead to Richard proposing to Heather, when he's really just talking about himself making smell steps of improvement. Debra then spends much of the narrative writing the story of what will happen before it's happened.
The conflict of the story develops when Debra, Richard, and Heather hatch a plan to tell the kids about the baby and their marriage. During their meeting to formulate the plan, Debra is a little pushy--not too much, but enough that Richard and Heather could plausibly say that the plan was Debra's, even though Heather seemed to instantly recognize the wisdom of it. They seem to all be on board, and Debra, happy to have a role to play, writes up a "family proposal," which is kind of like one of those well-meaning corporate values statements that companies immediately ignore when it becomes difficult. Before she can drop the document on the family, though, Richard and Heather depart from the plan and tell the kids everything all at once, instead of telling them first about the marriage and later about the child, as the adults had agreed to at their meeting.
Mini-lit court
I could have made this post very different. It could all have been one of my
literary court entries, and we could have examined whether Heather and Richard were in the wrong for deviating from the plan. Debra's sister Becca sure thinks they were. She thinks Debra ought to be angry about it, and she even gives Debra a little drill to do to work out her anger. She has Debra plant her feet, breathe in and tighten her whole body, including making fists. Then she is supposed to let it go. Which made me wonder: was this a drill where she was supposed to get in touch with her anger rather than justify it away, or to let her anger go? Because Becca seemed to be advocating the former, while her drill was more about the latter.
In any case, if I were to have done a literary court back-and-forth argument, one strong case against Debra would have been her attitude at the end of her meeting with Richard and Heather, where she feels superior to them, the "last grownup on Earth," in contrast to their foolish optimism launching them into a difficult future. A full litigation of the case would probably have revealed that it wasn't clear whether Richard and Heather were in the wrong, and that, by extension, the failure of Richard and Heather's marriage wasn't entirely the fault of either party.
The big theme
Debra's revelation seems to be that she needs to let things go more. She tells Max, the dog, that "sometimes you have to rest," and she recognizes that the things she's lost will eventually turn up, probably when she's stopped looking for them. It's a very complete ending, and yet I find myself wondering why I don't feel much. Maybe I'm just a sexist bro and that's why I like Rick and Morty. Maybe I'll never much love a story that doesn't have a white whale in it somewhere, along with a hapless villain-hero trying to kill it.
As much as I say I value big, cosmic themes, most of the problems that occupy my mind in real life are practical ones. Right now, I've been spending most of the past four months trying to find a job to replace the one I gave up--for reasons I can't believe are wrong--and feeling more and more anxious as the time I'm looking lengthens. I curse myself for not having learned more practical skills in life, like how to do household repairs or knowing more about finance or having chosen HVAC repair trade school instead of an M.A. in English.
I try to divorce real-life stuff from "what's life all about, anyway" questions, and to put more weight on the second, but there's an inevitable link between the two, because of a lot of the angst that's there is tied to real-world issues. I partly see the universe as potentially hostile because I doubt my own ability to take care of myself and my family in it. This fear would be lessened if I spent less time thinking deeply about short stories and more time learning to run a CNC lathe. Not worrying about what could go wrong and preparing to avoid it is a better way to actually keep the bad thing from happening, I get it. And yet, I can never fully make myself commit enough to playing the game that I'm willing to quit spending time asking what the point of the game is, anyway, or how the game is put together or what kind of madman created it and put sentient beings inside of it.
A good deal of story analysis can be done without emotion. One can read closely for meaning and apply theory to it. AI can probably do a (mostly shitty, for now) job of coming up with a thoughtful reading, even while it doesn't "think" about the meaning of the stories at all. But literature really has no point if it doesn't eventually cross a threshold from "meaning" to "meaning something to me." And when it comes to "meaning something to me," I find it hard to feel much about a story that's a "therapy" story, where the revelation has something to do with a small change that will bring a small improvement in one's happiness, provided one is willing to be content being a slightly less annoying parent to one's children and not ask inconvenient questions like why did I bring children into a universe in the first place when this universe is a place where it is possible that those children may be kidnapped and raped and tortured?
I'm being unnecessarily difficult, I know. I have made personal changes before as a result of revelations from fiction, whether in a book or on the screen or on the stage. Those changes have usually, although not always, made my life easier or better. So I'm not saying every story should be Moby Dick. If it were, I'd probably eventually get sick of it and want some stories about the everyday relationship issues of a butcher in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am saying that there are stories about doing the work, and there are stories about why one should bother to do the work, and I feel myself more drawn to the latter. When I do arrive at those moments in my life where I feel convinced I should do the work--and those are probably the majority of moments in my life--I'm grateful for art that is focused on how to do it. But I will probably draw what benefit I can from the story and then throw it to the side ungratefully. In that sense, a story like 'The Last Grownup" is to me the way people like Debra often feel--full of forethought and wisdom and totally underappreciated.
