Venture Bros: Showdown at Cremation Creek, Part II
Everyone needs a story; it’s how we define ourselves. Our lives are meaningless without a narrative to transform them. Without a narrative, a human life is seventy years of haphazard coincidences. With a narrative, they become poetry, drenched in meaning and drama.
Some people take this idea further than others.
In this concluding episode, David Bowie fulfills his promise as a symbol of transformation. He transforms all over the place in this episode — into Iggy Pop, Dr. Girlfriend, an eagle, a pack of cigarettes. In real life, Bowie took the idea of narrative as a transformative device to baroque extremes, creating a new persona with each new album. It’s difficult, I imagine, for a modern audience to understand how audacious and exciting this was back then. Madonna puts on a new hat with each of her reinventions, but for her it feels more like a marketing decision, a way to keep the old perpetually new. With Bowie, the transformation was the subject of his art itself. And what’s more, he transformed himself every year for 15 years or more, a decision that would make today’s marketing executives shudder in horror; no sooner would he acquire an audience but would then shed it immediately the next album (or, famously in one instance, even in the middle of the tour promoting the current album/persona). Now he has settled in to his still-current permanent persona of “David Bowie,” classy British guy with a reputation for brilliance. (How ironic that Bowie’s most recent album is titled Reality.)
The woman he’s giving away, Dr. Girlfriend, comes all this way without finally transforming herself: she pointedly never gets to say “I do” to The Monarch. She hasn’t completed the commitment ceremony, she’s still the woman of a half-dozen costumes and personas. Would that make her spiritual father Bowie happy, or would he be saddened to know that his spiritual daughter hasn’t yet found herself, is still gathering meaningless personas, is still, in essence, pretending to be something she’s not? Lady Au Pair, Queen Etheria, Dr. Girlfriend? Who is she, finally? Who could she be if she can’t even settle on a narrative to define her life? If she’s not careful, life will decide her narrative for her.
That is, after all, what has happened to Dr. Venture. He’s decided that narrative is for babies. Burned by narrative at an early age, he’s thrown it on the trash heap and decided to face life on its own terms. As a result, he is in control of nothing in his life. He has no ideas, he’s haunted by the ghost of his father, he’s dominated by his twin brother. In this episode, while everyone else is busy heroically pursuing their narratives, he gripes, carps and eats a sandwich. Thrust into an actual heroic journey, Dr. Venture can only retreat into the most mundane details of life.
(A friend of mine once told me that, in psychoanalytical terms, one has until age 30 to decide who one is. After that, one is stuck, reinvention is impossible. This is how we know that Elvis Presley is dead — one cannot crave wealth and fame for 23 years and then, at age 42, decide one does not care for them after all.) (Elvis Presley — speaking of people who live their life according to an invented narrative — his being Dr. Faustus.)
But look at Dr. Girlfriend’s boyfriend, The Monarch. He has chosen the butterfly, the ultimate symbol of transformation, as his narrative device (which he calls “a theme thing”). Who knows, after all, if his absurd story of being raised by butterflies (back in Season 1) is true or not? It must have seemed true to him at the time; in any case, he’s picked his narrative and he’s sticking by it, regardless of the apparent inconsistencies and the scorn his decision brings. (If The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend have a baby, that baby’s lullaby can only be David Bowie’s “Kooks.”)
Brock, like Dr. Venture, doesn’t have time for pretense; he just wants to get on with it. Yet he has defined himself by another, more subtle narrative, that of the protector of the innocent. He transforms himself in this episode, donning the hated butterfly wings (Brock gets his wings; his tatoo of Icarus, ironically, does not), to do what, exactly? Not to protect Hank and Dean or Dr. Venture. Hank he only protects as an afterthought, Dean’s protection is left in Hank’s hands (“Am I my brother’s keeper?” quoth Cain) and Dr. Venture is left in the hands of his arch-enemy The Monarch.
(The Monarch, in a telling moment, when faced with certain death, invites Dr. Venture to escape with him. Why? Why not escape by himself and kill his arch-enemy? I’m guessing because, as I’ve said earlier, The Monarch defines himself by who he’s arching; without Dr. Venture, he’s nothing. This is borne out by the end of the show, where The Monarch gripes about Phantom Limb being his “new” arch-enemy — as though he would have it any other way.)
No, Brock drops all his obligations in order to rescue Dr. Girlfriend, the damsel in distress. This is, of course, one of the oldest narratives in existence, which could be why Brock falls back upon it when faced with a crisis.
It certainly explains what happens to poor Dean in this episode. Left alone in the engine room, filled with anxiety and feelings he cannot define or control, Dean conjures up the grandest narrative of all, involving a melange of “heroic journey” tropes, including a damsel in distress, a magic ring, a white, bearded deity, magical animals, enslaved innocents, an evil robot overlord and a giant flying dog. Why does he retreat into this bizarre, ridiculous narrative? Because otherwise his life has no meaning. This all comes out in the final moments of his delusion where he frees the enslaved orphans (symbol of his trapped innocence) and rants not about an evil robot overlord but about his own father and the absurdities heaped upon his young life, the monsters and yetis and evil scientists he must contend with every day. Dean’s “real life” makes no sense and he doesn’t have the tools to fashion a useful narrative for himself. Instead, he fashions an un-useful narrative as a weapon against his doubts and pain (and, interestingly, puts his father’s life in danger as a result). (How Dean manages to change from his butterfly outfit back into his street clothes is another question entirely.) (The dog-dragon, of course, is from The Neverending Story, in which a motherless boy, guess what, disappears into a narrative in order to deal with his grief.)
Meanwhile, Dr. Orpheus and co. have found themselves stuck against reality’s brick wall. How will he and the Order of the Triad rescue Hank and Dean, when Dr. Orpheus can’t even buckle his seatbelt? With the aid, of course, of a fictional character, a minor character from Star Wars, conjured not from the movie but from a trading card. The Alchemist worries that the creature is an abomination that should be killed; Dr. Orpheus opines that, whether the creature fictional or not, it is still a living thing. And, it turns out, their salvation. (Of course, no one in the Venture universe ever really learns the lessons they’ve been taught — no sooner are they rescued by a fictional character than they roll their eyes at Dean for retreating into a world of fantasy.)
The need for a narrative in life reaches its bleakest, most terminal point with the death of the Monarch henchman in Brock’s arms. Spitting blood onto Brock’s shoulder, he confesses that the time he’s spent under his command have been the finest of his life. This is, of course, the narrative that every soldier tells himself as he goes into battle, that his actions have meaning, that he’s risking his life for something meaningful and worthwhile — without it, what he’s doing, throwing his life away, is the ultimate in perversity. The soldier’s lie withers as his body is transformed into a hunk of meat, from a living thing to an object. And Brock, who has no use for pretense in the first place (or sentimentality for that matter), listens to the harmless lie, then uses the body to jam the engine of an approaching aircraft: finally, in death, the unknown soldier becomes useful.
(Or maybe I’m wrong; maybe the henchmen is sincere in his statement to Brock, maybe he finally has found meaning through serving under Brock — after all, one would have to have a pretty empty life indeed in order to find fulfillment dressed up as a butterfly.)
Hank wants that henchmen’s narrative so badly he can taste it. He disobeys Brock’s command to take care of Dean (“Why do you have to be the screen door on my submarine?” he pouts) and joins the henchmen’s fight. When faced with the reality of it, of course, he recoils in horror and screams like a little girl. Hank wants that narrative but in the end he doesn’t have the guts for it. (“Again, again!” he blurts after his near-death experience, clearly not understanding the meaning of the dying henchman’s story.*)
Henchmen 21 and 24 have long functioned as Shakespearean clowns in this show, speaking in malapropisms that nevertheless reveal theme and authorial intent. Here, they talk about a group of lost henchmen and reference the phenonmenon of the “urban myth,” underscoring humanity’s need to make up narratives out of thin air in order to deal with the chaos and absurdities of life.
Dean finds his purpose by recycling a heap of pop-culture detritus and fashioning it into a meaningful narrative. The Venture Bros does something quite similar, turning over bits of trash to find the wriggling, bleeding humanity underneath.
And it’s very funny.
*With the dying henchmen, and Brock’s treatment of him, I keep beingreminded of Snowden, the dying airman in the back of the plane in Catch-22. “Yossarian heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out…Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes…He forced himself to look again. Here was God’s plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared — liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch…He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret.” And Snowden (and Yossarian) signed up to fight and die for one of the worst kinds of narratives, that which insisted that the United States was the handsome prince rescuing the princess of Liberty from the evil clutches of the Fascist overlords. Perhaps it all come back to David Bowie, who notes, in his song “Soul Love:”
“Soul love, she kneels before the grave
Her brave son, who gave his life to save a slogan
That hovers between the headstone and her eyes
For to penetrate her grieving.”
