Venture Bros: Showdown at Cremation Creek, Part I
As this is the first half of a two-part episode, any attempts at analysis are bound to be premature. But what the hell.
The theme tonight seems to be “commitment.” In the A story, Dr. Girlfriend wants a commitment from The Monarch, while in the B story, Dr. Orpheus wants a commitment from The Alchemist. The Monarch submits to Dr. Girlfriend’s desire, The Alchemist isn’t so sure.
In the C story, Phantom Limb pledges commitment to The Sovereign, then immediately goes back on his word. This cannot end well. The Sovereign is a spooky distorted head in a TV set; one would do well not to cross him.
Both Henchman 24 (or is it 21?) and Brock wish to commit to tattoos. Both attempts are abortive. In the henchman’s case, the abortion is voluntary. This foreshadows the abortion of Dr. Girlfriend’s attempts to get through her wedding to The Monarch. Both the tatoos and the wedding are commitment ceremonies.
A note on The Monarch’s and Dr. Girlfriend’s relationship: if it continues along the lines it is, it’s doomed. It cannot end happily. These two have issues, and I’m not talking about dressing up in costumes and living in a flying cocoon. Dr. Girlfriend wants a commitment, but she wants The Monarch to change who he is in order to get it. This is a common and tragic mistake. Dr. Girlfriend wants The Monarch to give up arching Dr. Venture, but that is all The Monarch knows. He only defines himself in opposition, he has no positive identity. If he’s not arching someone, what is he going to do with himself? Dress up in the costume, fly around in the cocoon and — what, exactly? What kind of a way is that to live? And once his identity is taken away, how will he maintain his appeal to Dr. Girlfriend? What is her attraction to him after all? He’s a whining, petulant, fussbudget. She must be attracted to him for the command and drive that he possesses when arching Dr. Venture. Take away his hatred and his plans for destroying Dr. Venture and what will come to the fore? Where will he direct his energy? Dr. Girlfriend (Dr. Wife? Dr. Life-Partner?) makes the classic mistake of gutting her relationship when she thinks she’s solidifying it, a rare manipulative misstep for this otherwise canny woman.
(Incidentally, this may answer a question from last week. Why wasn’t The Monarch present during the raid on the Venture Compound? He apparenly had a hot date with Dr. Girlfriend in their seedy motel room.)
Dr. Orpheus is disappointed with the Order of the Triad. Jefferson Twilight seems okay with going along with arching Torrid, but The Alchemist is wavering in his commitment to costumed arching (his comment about being “disguised as a paunchy gay man” is a telling moment). The team cannot even perform the Man-Mound without the two lesser team members griping about it (and no wonder — The Alchemist, being the shortest member, should be at the top of the mound, not Dr. Orpheus — what are they thinking?). Dr. Orpheus wants to have a “practice session” (another kind of commitment ceremony), which The Alchemist derails by bringing a treat that Jefferson is susceptible to (thereby demolishing Jefferson’s commitment to sobriety).
While The Monarch is commiting to Dr. Girlfriend by promising to marry her, the henchmen are proving their commitment to The Monarch by capturing Dr. Venture and his family. (Strangely, the henchmen, while ever loyal, are beginning to show signs of independent thought — they gripe about hench-life out in the open now without apparent fear of repercussions — could this represent a more democratic atmosphere around the cocoon?)
Later, Hank and Dean are each becoming seduced by the henchman lifestyle. Hank is attracted by its juvenile, play-acting dress-up side while Dean is interested in the technical aspects. In fact, Dean shows more interest in the flying cocoon than he’s shown in his father’s projects in two seasons. Thematically, these storylines don’t exactly fit: one does not, after all, commit to being a child or a sibling, one is simply born that way. One does, however, commit to being a “Venture Brother,” and if they can be attracted to the hench-life, can the end of the Venture-brand line of adventures be far behind? (At the moment Hank puts on the “evil Hank” beard, he is distracted by the henchman’s alarm clock, a Rusty Venture clock of all things, with Jonas’s voice calling for Rusty to “wake up.” Is Hank experiencing an awakening of a sort by donning his henchman garb and his “evil Hank” beard?)
In the middle of all this, Dr. Venture has a revelation: Dr. Girlfriend is Charlene, the woman who turned him into a caterpillar (I know that everyone reading this knows that, I just enjoy typing phrases like “the woman who turned him into a caterpilar”). And so he does something rather alarming; after an adulthood filled with grumpily harumphing at the whole costumed-arching lifestyle, and at The Monarch in particular, he goes ahead and does something that cannot help but actually make him a genuine enemy of The Monarch. So while The Monarch has hated Dr. Venture all this time for no reason at all, Dr. Venture, on the day The Monarch has vowed to stop arching him, has given him something to really arch about.
The special surprise guest at the wedding is, of course, David Bowie. Which prompts the question, what does David Bowie represent in the Venture Bros cosmos? If the theme of tonight’s episode is commitment, then Bowie, chameleon without peer, would seem to represent the pinnacle of non-commitment. Bowie’s career (and by “career” I mean from 1969 to 1980; I can’t account for the ensuing 26 years of fitfully entertaining product, which puts Bowie more into the “squandered potential” theme of the show) was founded on what we might call “success through transformation.” So then we ask, well, who in The Venture Bros has succeeded through transformation? We could say that The Monarch has succeeded through transformation, if you can call what he does successful. The butterfly is the ultimate symbol of transformation, the ugly creeping worm that becomes the beautiful floating flower. And now he is contemplating another transformation, from arch-villain to, what, house-husband?
Well, at least it’s a step: Rusty and Brock have both refused to transform at all, they have both remained stuck in their adolescent mindsets for over twenty years now, Rusty with his frustration and curdled dreams and Brock with his devotion to Led Zeppelin, which even the butterfly-dressed Monarch puts down as juvenile.
Or maybe the Bowie reference is not to transformation but to masks: many of the characters in Venture Land wear masks, but Dr. Girlfriend has gone through more then most. Is she, like Bowie, a chameleon, or does she just not know who she is? First she’s Lady Au Pair, then she’s Etheria, now she’s Dr. Girlfriend: who is she “really?” Is there a symbolic weight to chameleon David Bowie “giving her away” at the wedding (and quoting “Modern Love” before the ceremony)? Does this represent Dr. Girlfriend’s farewell to masks, to false identities? Will we (and perhaps she) now find out who she “really is?”
(I see that David Bowie’s henchmen, at least for the road, are Iggy Pop and Klaus Nomi. A formidable team — but where are Fripp and Eno? Are they more of a “brain trust,” perhaps, that Bowie keeps in a vat of viscous liquid hooked up to electrodes, or does Eno outrank Bowie at this point?)
(A commenter on urbaniak‘s blog suggests that David Bowie is, in fact, The Sovereign. There is evidence to suggest that this is so. The Sovereign, after all, lets slip to Phantom Limb that he “has a wedding” to get to, and we see no distorted, floating head at the wedding. Unless The Sovereign is Sgt. Hatred, or Miss Littlefeet, both of which seem doubtful.)
UPDATE: Another aspect of Bowie’s work occurs to me, his deep and abiding belief in space aliens. In “Space Oddity,” space seems to be quite empty and lonely, but from Ziggy Stardust through Young Americans’ “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” he turns to the idea of invaders from space as Earth’s only salvation. (It’s not an accident that Ziggy’s band is called the Spiders From Mars.) His interest seems to have peaked with The Man Who Fell to Earth, but the appearance of genuine alien Klaus Nomi as a bodyguard suggests an exciting new avenue exploration in the Venture universe.
