Venture Bros: The Doctor is Sin

After offering the Mexicans jobs for which they are absurdly unqualified, Rusty zips off in his hovercar and passes an iPod billboard. I puzzled over this for a minute or so: is The Venture Bros somehow connecting American joblessness, Mexican infiltration of American jobs, high-tech employment and Steve Jobs? If so, what is the statement? Is it just that even here, in the desert where itinerants gather to look for work, there is ample evidence of the carefree, glamorous life promised by American high-tech prosperity? Is the image the Venture Bros version of this? Is America truly the Great Satan, luring immigrants with promises of sexy high-tech glamor, just as Dr. Killinger is a Satan luring Rusty into a life of supervillainy with his promises of strong identity and dynamic self-actualization?

Perhaps, but as I looked at the image again I realized that the silhouette on the billboard is that of none other than Rusty’s brother Jonas. The shot, seemingly a throwaway gag, actually propels the plot forward. Rusty is in the desert looking for cheap labor, in order to impress General Manhowers, in order to compete with his brother Jonas. Whew! That’s a lot of baggage for a second-long shot of a billboard to carry.

(Jonas’s black silhouette against the purple background also segues nicely into the silhouettes of the Venture boys’ legs against the red of the opening titles.)

As the show begins, we see the dead Manasaurus being taken off the electric fence by Brock. This is what Brock has been reduced to by the Monarch’s renunciation of his arching of Rusty: once a bodyguard, he is now a clean-up crew. The Monarch has altered his identity, now everyone he affected will need to change theirs as well.

(Not that the Monarch was ever really a threat to Rusty. I can’t remember — does Rusty even have a clear understanding of what the Monarch wants, or is the Monarch merely a distracting irritant to him?)

Rusty, feeling the pressure of forging his own identity, arranges to meet with General Manhowers to show off the compound and hopefully pick up some orders. This information is gotten across in his phone conversation with Jonas, a nice bit of expository writing that compresses the important plot information into an elegant character beat emphasizing Rusty’s rivalry with Jonas.

Note the contrast between Rusty’s company and Jonas’s. Each brother has a staff of oddball misfits, but Jonas’s team operates with smooth efficiency while Rusty’s gripe and quarrel — or so it seems, until Jonas mis-handles his hold button and we see that he, too, is plagued with personality conflicts and incompetent personnel.

(Bonus: it’s always nice to see a scene of

  talking to himself.)

Rusty puts on a Potemkin Compound display for General Manhowers. I understand why the weak-willed Dr. Orpheus would go along with the play-acting, but seeing his gloomy teenage daughter Triana happily pretending to be a receptionist (in powder-blue lipstick) seems odd at first. But it makes the eviction of her and Dr. Orpheus all the more of a slap in the face.

(Of course, we find out later that Triana performs her roles under protest, and she throws in a jab at the writing staff for good measure.)

As Rusty shows off his new identity of “efficient super-science-guy” to General Manhowers, his old identity of “loser supervillain magnet” keeps re-asserting itself. His tour is interrupted by an attack from a supervillain whose name would be, if I had to guess, Four-Armed Falcon, and his pride over his newly-refurbished walkway is undone by his neglecting to staff, or even dust, the R.O.C.C. This all ties in with what we shall see, the political message of the episode, namely that Rusty, in pretending to be a hot-shot leader, has focused all his energy on presentation and none on substance. Just as Bush spent all his energy focused on putting on a flight suit and printing up a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, and none on figuring out how to prosecute his war properly. Appearance over substance is a hallmark of the Bush years in all aspects of American society I’m afraid, and Rusty is no exception.

Just as General Manhowers leaves, unimpressed, Dr. Killinger arrives. The connection of Killinger to Mary Poppins is made again, as is the connection to Satan. I myself would never have made a connection between Henry Kissinger and Mary Poppins, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have made a connection between Mary Poppins and Satan — but the connection does exist, mainly, that both Mary Poppins and Satan each arrives on the scene bidden by earnest request, in writing. Oddly, Killinger breaks this rule and shows up at the Venture compound seemingly of his own volition.

Killinger, already a wonderful character, is here given a full-on multi-dimensional treatment. He is both a soulless murdering machine of cruel vengeance and a delicate, warm, even fussy, agent of encouragement and wonder. In skull slippers.

He warps Rusty’s mind, true, but he also does provide a service, does he not? His advice may lead to evil, but it starts out as essentially positive: be your own hero, slay the image of your father, take back the dignity stolen from you by your brother, etc.

(The David and Goliath metaphor employed in Dr. Killinger’s hallucinations is, perhaps unintentionally, altogether apt. In the Valley of Elah, the pipsqueak David was able to slay the giant Goliath by virtue of what was, in the Bronze Age, new technology, the slingshot. The Philistines had swords but David, applying then-advanced physics to an old idea, was able to best the dominant weaponry of the day with a much smaller, more portable new device. How appropriate that Killinger advises Rusty to be the David to his technology-king father’s Goliath.)  UPDATE: My scholarship on this point is well-intentioned but flawed — see comments below.

Killinger’s interactions with the other characters develop thus: to Rusty he supplies positive messages of self-actualization, to Brock he takes away identity and replaces it with a reasonable monetary profit, and to Hank he dispenses advice that, unless I miss my guess, is a barely-changed page from The Secret. So we see that the language of self-actualization masks selfishness, selling-out and, eventually, a kind of personal fascism.

Rusty, of course, eventually realizes that Killinger is not turning him into his father — he’s turning him into a supervillain, no better than the costumed freak Brock had to take down off the fence at the top of the episode. His dreams of success, driven by his awe of his father and his envy of his brother, will lead him to be the thing he most despises — or at least is most irritated by. Rusty, for the first time in my memory, commits an actual moral act in this episode — he turns down success in order to keep his soul, and thus restores not only his old identity of failed loser but also the identities of all those dependent upon him.  By committing his first moral act, Rusty, ironically, genuinely changes his identity — he becomes a moral person instead of a showy capitalist.

And the political message? Killinger, agent of the Guild, avatar of Nixon, symbol of Satan, appears in the sky alongside General Manhower. They are, story-wise, the same person, which is why one appeared as the other went away. Rusty’s desire to “do well” for the General (and thus land lucrative war-profiteering contracts) is directly related to his desire to renounce his identity, out-do his father (calling W!) and beat his brother (calling W again!). Rusty offering the Mexicans the John McCain deal only underlines the point. We as a nation find ourselves in the summer of 2008 at a crossroads: shall we continue to renounce our national identity of imperfect democracy and pursue appearance over substance, glorifying in our supervillainy as our old friends are evicted and bought out, or will we tell the Killingers of the world to fuck off?

(Killinger quotes As You Like It at the close of the show, as Manhowers suggests that we can “read more about” this “in the Bible!” Is Manhowers hoping to do a deft bait-and-switch between Shakespeare and the Bible, or does he just not know the difference? I also note the exceptionally large number of other Biblical references in this episode — the serpent and the apple, Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, etc. Perhaps I’m thinking too small, and the entire episode is actually a biblical parable — or perhaps the reference is yet another dig at Republicanism, that political mode of thought that is always prepared to cite the Bible to cover up whatever evils it engenders.)