The Venture Bros: “What Goes Down, Must Come Up”
“The Buddy System” asked the question “What is a father?” “What Goes Down, Must Come Up” seems to ask “What shall we tell the children?” Everywhere in this episode we see parents, pseudo-parents and quasi-parents dispense advice and level threats. Clearly someone needs to learn something, but who is teaching and who is paying attention? And, most important, in the end, what is actually learned?
Venture Bros: Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman
Rusty is threatened by Ginnie’s impressive weapon.
There’s something Shakespearean about “Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman.” It’s full of twins, mirrored story-lines, star-crossed lovers, frustrated couplings, all taking place in an Arden-ish (if not quite E-Den-ic) forest. It even has supernatural creatures flitting about the woods to spice things up.
Dr. Quymn is presented as very much a female Rusty — red haired, twin girls attuned to a life of adventure, supersonic airplane, muscle-bound bodyguard, etc. Her neuroses has developed differently from Rusty’s — she has ventured (sorry) into the rain forest as a bleeding heart to “protect the natives” and “cure cancer” instead of toiling in failure in her mother’s shadow, but she is as delusional and doomed as Rusty — the natives, we learn, do not want or need her protection and the rare plant she pretends to seek for her cancer cure is destroyed by the fire Ginnie and Brock start at the episode’s climax.
Everyone in “Dr. Quymn” wants sex badly, but in spite of their desires, everyone thinks of other things to do to instead. Dr. Tara Quymn wants to have sex with Rusty and has wanted to since they were both ten years old, but instead of doing so she has gone to the rainforest to try to “save the world”. Rusty is more open about his desire for sex (or at least easier to read) but his long list of failed projects is like a life-long parade of impotence — he hardly needs to have real impotence to make the metaphor clearer. Hank and Dean want to have sex, and while Hank sublimates his desires in a relatively normal fashion — that is, playing guitar — Dean is forced, in his terror, to retreat into his childhood fantasy world of mysteries and ghost stories.Brock and Ginnie, Dr. Quymn’s Brock, both want sex but are happiest expressing their desires either through the cars they drive or through fighting, or wielding their various weapons, their penis-substitute knives and guns. Ginnie is the most complicated of the cast in her sexuality. To be honest, I don’t know what the hell she wants out of all this. She’s devoted a healthy chunk of her life in a go-nowhere pursuit of Tara, but seems to be willing to give Brock a spin as well — if she’s drunk enough, or if she thinks it will make Tara jealous. Tara’s twins Nancy and Drew want sex, and their response as “teen girls” is the most natural of all — they fight over who gets the object of their affection, stuff their bras, change their minds, act older than they are and give up surprisingly easily (one wonders what would have happened if Ginnie had not interrupted them).
(Typically for The Venture Bros, the most “normal” of the sex-crazed cast members are the girls.)
(I would even argue that Clyde the orangutan wants to have sex — with Hank, but sublimates his desire through boxing.)
(For those who watch this episode guffawing at all the crazy story lines, let me inform you that the “boxing orangutan” angle is, in point of fact, 100% true.)
(The real Clyde The Orangutan, of course, met a quite unhappy end — no wonder he’s so pissed off. Hank must remind him of Clint Eastwood, the man who made him famous and then got him killed — shades of Rusty and Jonas again.)
Why isn’t anyone having sex? The answer, for the sake of this episode, is that it is impossible for these characters to have sex because their parents had sex. Or, specifically, Rusty’s father and Tara’s mother had sex, and therefore no one in the Venture universe may ever have sex again. To be even more specific, Rusty’s father and Tara’s mother had sex while they were playing an adventure game, thus fusing in their minds the ideas of child-like “adventure” and frustrated sexual desire. Rusty has pursued his goal of trying to be his father, in the hopes that it will lead to a fulfilling sex life, and Tara has lived her life of “adventure” in the wilderness, hoping for the same thing. (Of course, it hasn’t — her neuroses associated with the event have led her only to self-denial, failure, various addictions and related problems, and dead-end physical relationships. And, for all we know, unwanted twins and epilepsy.)
(A number of readers have noted that Rusty and Tara may, in fact, be brother and sister, and there is ample evidence to support this. If so, I see no reason that they could not, in fact, be twins.)
Rusty’s pursuit of potency and Tara’s sublimation of her desires kick the plot into gear. Rusty steals “the natives”‘ fertility idol and Tara seeks the “Solomon’s Heart” seed. They bring along their baggage, both physical (their families) and mental, guaranteeing their respective failures. Hank and Dean, who, as recently as last week had never met a real teenager, now meet two attractive, apparently normal teenage girls. Dean panics because he thinks they are wereodiles, which is, of course, only his way of dealing with his intense desire to avoid sex. Dean’s endgame in this episode is “solving the mystery,” but to solve the mystery there must, of course, be a mystery first, and so Dean must create a mystery in order to solve it, and thus forestall his sexual maturity.
(He is shocked to see his father’s erection: “Who did that to pop?” he worries. In Dean’s mind, and Rusty’s too I suppose, the fact that his father has an erection means that he cannot have one himself.)
(It is ironic thatone coupling between a relatively healthy man and woman enjoying each other would have such a devastating impact on so many lives. It is, I think, in spite of the adultery involved, the most “normal” sexual relationship we’ve seen on the show so far.)
(Jonas’s and Ms. Quymn’s coupling also illuminates a line from “The Buddy System:” Rusty says “If they found out their childhood hero had sex their heads would explode” I did not know then that he was talking about himself.)
Rusty, of course, fails utterly in all his pursuits. Tara fails to cure cancer and to protect the natives, Ginnie’s desire is transferred to her fight with Brock, which both destroys Tara’s work and her relationship with Rusty. Nancy and Drew seem to have come out okay, and Dean actually seems to have come out ahead — he’s successfully avoided sexual maturity, while Hank, in “defeating the wereodile,” is denied the sexual initiation he craved and is given instead the gift of circumcision, which earns him the nickname “Broken Arrow” from father-figure Brock.
(Ginnie seems to be named after Virginia Slims, the 70s-era cigarette marketed to women with the phrase “You’ve come a long way, baby,” which Ginnie quotes to Tara, right before allowing her — that’s right — an emergency cigarette.)
Favorite moment: the wereodile, after reportedly ripping off a native warrior’s head, took the time to spell out “RARRRRR” on a rooftop. Well, what would one expect a supernatural creature to write?
Second favorite moment: James
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squeaking the line “Oh my God! I almost _____ed a wereodile!” And then sounding even more creeped out when he realizes that instead of being a wereodile, Tara is actually an epileptic. His parents must be so proud.
Venture Bros: The Buddy System
What is a father? That’s the question on everyone’s mind in this episode of The Venture Bros.
Action Johnny says fathers are “caring, protective men.” Rusty seems to have a different definition: a father, to him, is someone who shirks all responsibility, exploits the weaknesses of children, gripes about the time and effort it takes to guide them, but who will nevertheless clone a new, improved child if one is, by chance, killed in a surprise gorilla attack.
Rusty, surely one of the most spineless, unlikeable creations in TV history, deeply resents his TV-show childhood, but that doesn’t mean he won’t cynically exploit that childhood for personal gain. This man who cannot stand the company of his own sons decides, for some reason, to open a day camp. And a very poorly-run day-camp it is too: obviously thrown-together at the last minute, with more thought put into the t-shirt design than to scheduling or activities. Presenters are unpaid, their acts are apparently not previewed or vetted, the few scheduled activities offered are, to say the least, ill-considered. The laissez-faire attitude extends to the safety of the attendees: “The Buddy System” is instituted at Rusty’s Day Camp because Rusty is too irresponsible to watch over the children himself. “The Buddy System” is, in fact, just another term for “you’re on your own.”
(The rainbow flag in the background of the opening commercial is a particular puzzler — how could a 21st-century parent see this ad and not assume that Rusty’s Day Camp for Boy Adventurers is not a meeting place for children of gay couples?)
(Although the episode doesn’t push the comparison, Rusty’s Day Camp seems to be run along the same lines as the Bush administration: take everyone’s money, hire incompetents and cronies, conduct no oversight, have no plan, shift all responsibility to the people you’ve been charged with protecting, offer lies and no apologies when something goes wrong. The episode even concludes with an ill-timed military invasion.)
Having Rusty, Action Johnny, Billy Quizboy and the Pirate guy all in one place offers a sharp critique of children’s television. The shows that Billy, Johnny and the Pirate represent (It’s Academic, Jonny Quest and Scooby-Doo) were, after all, designed to be “buddies” to real-life children, companions to adventure on Saturday mornings. As fresh-faced kids gather ’round to obtain advice from these TV “buddies,” they find that their future presents few appealing opportunities indeed: one can become a 35-year-old quiz boy, a man in a pirate costume who teams up with rubber-mask ghosts, or a ranting junkie.
“The Buddy System” has many questions regarding what it takes to be a father, but what does it have to say about being a good son? The sons of “The Buddy System” are all bad sons indeed (my TiVo machine even identifies the episode as “Enter the Bad Seed” for some reason). They gripe about their fathers, they plot against them, they team together to pull their progenitors down. The sons of “The Buddy System” all feel terrible resentment toward their fathers (or father figures) — a sense of victimization that excuses any sort of bad behavior. Rusty himself, of course, is the king of this bad behavior — he has neither truly examined his past nor bothered to try to live in the present, and no doubt when a boy is killed on his watch he will blame his father for the event. (I can hear him now: “Well, my father never told me there were wild gorillas in the E-Den — how was I supposed to know?”)
(It cannot be coincidence that the dome of savage, brutal nature that Rusty sends the campers into is named for the staging grounds of the most primal father-son battle in literary history.)
Rusty is a psychologically stunted, pitiable wretch, and yet, he seems to be a high-functioning normal compared to poor Action Johnny. Spotlighting Johnny in “The Buddy System” reveals a father-son conflict much harsher than the one between Rusty and Jonas Venture. Johnny is capable of supplying a common definition of “father,” but it seems that he’s been a very bad son. Dying for his TV-show scientist-father’s attention, it appears that Johnny, between commercials perhaps, killed the family dog (not Bandit!) and stole one of his father’s precious formulas. Suddenly, all those episodes of Jonny Quest going off on adventures alone seem less like fun and more like child abuse — where the hell was Jonny’s father, not to mention Race Bannon? Why was Jonny along on all his father’s secret missions, and why was he constantly allowed to wander off on his own?
Child abuse forms the spine of the plot of “The Buddy System,” although the script, in a clever twist, decides not to tell us that until the last line of the episode. Doughy, dead-eyed Dermott is, it appears, Brock’s son, and sets the plot of the episode rolling by committing to get Brock’s goat. Brock’s goat is, apparently, easily obtained, as his conversation with Dr. Orpheus reveals. “So, anyone who doesn’t immediately give you respect, you murder,” says Dr. O, acting as temporary father to Brock, who responds by acting as a temporary son and deliberately perverts Dr. O’s perfectly sane advice. Brock leaps into action, launching a plot to humble Dermott, hoping to get Hank (to whom Brock has always been more of a father) to beat him up. When Brock can’t locate Hank (who is, as it happens, befriending Dermott at that very moment), he considers using the quasi-child Moppets, then, reluctantly, tries to train Dean to do his dirty work.
(“Where’s your brother?” says Brock to Dean. I would have done a spit-take if Dean had protested that he is not his brother’s keeper. Dean, in this situation, should be experiencing a healthy dose of sibling rivalry. But his hostile response to Dermott seems to have more to do with his fear of Dermott’s size and rudeness, and attendant feelings of unmanliness — the fact that Dermott is stealing Hank, the only friend Dean’s ever had, doesn’t seem to enter into the equation.)
(Dermott hits this episode like a meteorite. He looks about 200% more “real” than the stylized, moon-faced Hank — he almost looks like he’s from a different TV show altogether.)
(The usual twinnings and mirrorings abound in “The Buddy System”: as Dermott attends the day camp to spy on Brock, the Moppets attend to spy on Rusty. The twist is that the teenager, by befriending Hank, gains the access he’s looking for and the professional henchmen come up short. Also, the Monarch uses the Moppets to get to Rusty the same way Brock tries to use them to get to Dermott, before turning to Dean instead.)
Meanwhile, the Monarch reneges on his promises to Dr. Mrs. The Monarch. Dr. Girlfriend has committed to her new identity, why can’t he? But no, he’s back to his old tricks, using his wife’s henchmen to arch Dr. Venture. He’s not ready to be a husband, much less a father — he still wants, essentially, to be a teenager, to dress up in his costume and stalk his boyhood nemesis.
(Brock, apparently, would prefer this as well, for reasons that are unclear to me.)
Venture Bros: Home is Where the Hate Is
The Venture Bros continues to mine the deep vein of the theme of Identity in ever-more subtle and intriguing ways. “Home is Where the Hate Is” is much lighter in tone than many VB episodes (adult swim.com put “Viva Los Muertos!” on right afterward, a real shock to the system), but as skillfully crafted as any.
In this case, the identity in question is the Monarch’s (the Monarch is quickly becoming the protagonist of this show). The Monarch has given up arching Dr. Venture and gotten married to Dr. Girlfriend; this should have been a positive change for his sense of identity, abandoning his old grudges in order to become a loving, integrated costumed supervillain. But here we see that he’s having second thoughts about his decision.
Sgt Hatred, on the other hand, seems perfectly comfortable with his life as a company man. Perhaps a little too comfortable. His notion of arching, involving questionaires, welcoming parties and baskets of home-grown okra, doesn’t sound like arching at all — it is, plot-twists aside, a development of “business.” Supervillainy in the VB universe is always, in some form or another, a kind of cosplay, and what good is cosplay if it’s “just business”? (“You put the ‘pro’ in ‘protagonist,’ says Hatred to Rusty, and he means it as a compliment.) Hatred blithely goes about his shows of villainy while feeling no ill will toward Rusty or anything in particular, while the Monarch seethes and rages against the slightest slight.
“Home is Where the Hate Is” takes a closer look at the business of arching than we’ve gotten as of yet. What is this institution of arching and how has it come to be this way? In the cosmology of The Venture Bros, it seems that super-science is like God and supervillainy is like Satan: the latter exists so that we may better recognize and understand the former. Supervillains, it seems, are a natural outgrowth of super-science — create wonderful works of technology and, voila, a costumed freak will emerge to arch you. The fact that Rusty (grudgingly) accepts this indicates that the institutions of super-science understand and condone The Guild and its bureaucracy — it is, somehow, a necessary part of doing business.
The Guild has reduced arching to a business, but The Monarch understands that arching is driven by hatred (if not Hatred). Or perhaps “victimhood.” Victimization plays a strong role in the VB universe and may be what best ties Rusty and the Monarch together. Rusty feels like a victim for being born in his father’s shadow, he feels like a victim for having a more-successful brother, he feels like a victim for being saddled with Hank and Dean (whom he calls “the buzz-kill boys” in this episode). He has made his victimhood his identity, which may be what really keeps him from developing as a human being. He uses his victimization as a crutch or a fall-back position: “The General doesn’t want to buy any of my inventions because I was born in my father’s shadow.”
(At the start of the party game, Sgt. Hatred announces: “Everyone has the name of a famous person pinned to their backs.” That isn’t just the groundwork for a game, that is the essence of the entire show, boiled down to one sentence. Everyone on the show feels like they have someone else’s name pinned to their backs like a “Kick Me” sign, whether it is the name of a parent or an arch-enemy or a better-known member of their community or their younger selves. Everyone in the VB universe lives a reduced life in some way, no one is capable of reaching their full potential, because of that name pinned to their backs. In a way, one can admire Sgt Hatred for seeing this commonality for what it is and embracing it — so what if he can’t really live up to the name tattooed down his front? There are other things in life, like a loving wife, a thriving vegetable garden and an interest in lawn care. He has found a way to live outside his chosen identity — could The Monarch ever do likewise?)
The Monarch, on the other hand, seems, perversely, to be most comfortable when victimized. He grouses as he looks through the Guild’s Facebook and bickers with Dr. Girlfriend about her past, but only comes into full bloom when able to shout defiance, whether he’s feeling aggrieved about a life-long grudge or cheating at a party game. Like Rusty, he’s most comfortable as a victim because it keeps him from facing his “adult” duties of marriage and career: “I can’t be a loving husband because Sgt Hatred cheats at Charades.”
Both Rusty and The Monarch resent the responsibilities that come with their identities. Rusty resents his sons, The Monarch resents, well, pretty much everything. With identity comes responsibility, and in the case of “Home is Where the Hate Is” the themes of Identity and Responsibility are put into comic relief with the b-story of Hank and Dean’s hijinx with 21 and 24. 21 has a responsibility toward 24, his friend, but is given the responsibility of watching after Hank and Dean, which he resents: his identity as a friend comes into conflict with his identity as a henchman.
21’s problems are multiplied by an internecine conflict with The Moppets. Essentially a case of sibling rivalry — Mom’s kids don’t get along with dad’s kids — The Moppets are resenting their pending identity shift from Dr. Girlfriend’s henchmen to The Monarch’s henchmen. And while Kevin and Tim-Tom don’t make very good victims (pushy, knife-wielding dwarfs seldom do), they do hold their identities dear and harbor a grudge against their opposite — which is, of course, really a grudge against The Monarch, the man who took their “mother” away from them.
The plots of both the A and B stories of “Home is Where the Hate Is” come together, as all good comedy plots should, with everyone taking off their clothes. When Sgt Hatred invites The Monarch to strip down for a soak in the hot tub, he’s being more than just a bourgeois suburbanite, he’s asking The Monarch to shed his identity, assuring him that he will be happier and more comfortable for it. Of course, neither he nor The Monarch can fully shed their identities: The Monarch keeps on his cowl, and Hatred cannot shed his tattoo, which literally spells out his identity. Maybe that’s why The Monarch and Sgt Hatred can’t fully relax in the hot tub while Rusty seems quite at home: Rusty has no costume to shed, only clothing.
Meanwhile, off in the hedge-maze, 21 and 24’s lives are saved by shedding their costumes, losing their identities, as The Moppets, in their infantile sibling rage, literally mistake the clothes for the men. 21 asks Hank why he and Dean also took off their clothes, and Hank seems genuinely baffled as to his reasons. We know the reason, of course: thematic unity. Hank and Dean, of all the characters in the VB universe, carry the heaviest burden of identity troubles, even though they don’t seem bright enough to ever articulate their anxieties in any meaningful way (as Dean amply demonstrates in his conversation with 24, a conversation about — what else? — identity).
Dean advises 24 to “follow your dream”, but in the closing moments of the show we are given the dark side of that advice: Sgt Hatred, so comfortable in his identity, is shown pursuing an agenda of child molestation. There are, the episode reminds us, some dreams better left unfollowed.
Venture Bros: The Invisible Hand of Fate
Part-way through my third viewing of “The Invisible Hand of Fate” it occurred to me that The Venture Bros is a show so wide-ranging in its conception and subject-matter, so ambitious in its scope, that there is, for all intents and purposes, no “typical episode” of the show. A show like Scooby-Doo, or VB‘s inspiration Jonny Quest, were, of necessity, the same show over and over again, but while The Venture Bros. repeats and strengthens themes and motifs and plot devices, it also repeatedly upends audience expectations to the point where you can tune in and be confident that your concept, whatever it is, will be blasted.
So Billy injures himself in the bathroom of the trailer he shares with White, and suddenly remembers his past, which seems to take place at the intersection of Magnolia Street and Quiz Show Boulevard. Billy is, apparently, a brighter-than-average prodigy whose life-plan involves attending MIT and becoming a super-scientist like his boyhood idol Rusty Venture. He is, of course, thinking of the Rusty Venture of TV, not the balding, pony-tailed lout currently drinking himself to the floor of an empty bar. Billy, like many in the VB universe, is a decent-enough freak with big ambitions, heading for disappointment, disillusion and failure.
Billy’s brilliant career as a quiz-show prodigy is undone in a moment by one “Todd,” the quizzee to his left. As a life-long watcher of televisual “Todds”, I have often noted that any character named “Todd” is either presented as a lazy-eyed, buck-toothed moron or an over-educated, uptight Poindexter. I congratulate The Venture Bros for somehow managing to combine both of these archetypes in one Todd — a buck-tooth, lazy-eyed, over-educated uptight Poindexter.
White tries to console Billy with a line about how the “invisible hand of fate” has brought him to this point, but of course nothing could be further from the truth. Billy might have had the wrong answer in the quiz show final, but it was White who turned him into a cheater for the sake of ratings, ruining both their lives and leaving them inextricably linked for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, it appears that White cheated for Billy out of a sense of camaraderie — “we freaks have to stick together” — so his actions could be seen as rooted in affection.
(Which leads me to wonder — are White and Billy lovers? Do I even want to know?)
Billy and White flee the quiz-show world and the episode takes a left-turn so abrupt that it looks like an out-of-order reel-change. The sudden G.I.Joe parody O.S.I., with the strike team that dresses like the Village People and the hyper-violent shenanigans with Sphinx, the Cobra-like evil organization they fight, is so bizarre, so astounding, such a strange confluence of references and influences that it resists easy interpretation — for me, anyway — and probably deserves an entry all of its own.
The already-complicated Venture Bros world gets more complicated when we learn that the Guild were the bad guys on “the old Rusty Venture TV show.” So, wait — in the world of The Venture Bros, Rusty Venture is a “real person,” and was also the star of a TV show, which either was or was not a dramatization of his “real life”? That is, did Rusty Venture really have adventures with his father and also star on a TV show about his own life, which was only tangentially related? And was the Rusty Venture TV show a cartoon show? That is, would the animated Rusty Venture in The Venture Bros. look different from the “Rusty Venture” character in the Rusty Venture TV show? And does that mean that when we see Rusty in boyhood flashbacks, we’re seeing scenes from his “real life,” or scenes from his TV show?
To make things even weirder, we see Jonny Quest’s bodyguard Race Bannon at O.S.I. HQ torturing someone who, I’d guess, was a minor character on Jonny Quest but my computer monitor could not bring into sharp enough focus to identify. Also at O.S.I. HQ we meet two young men, a blond and redhead, who bear suspicious resemblance to Hank and Dean Venture, albeit with personalities reversed — the blond is a squeaky-voiced nerd while the redhead is a broad-shouldered meathead. The significance of this I await to be eventually revealed.
Billy and White arrive at an “underground quizzing match” (nice thing about a Venture Bros plot, “underground quizzing match” is one of the least unusual story point) that seems to be hosted by, of all people, Andy Kaufman stand-in Tony Clifton.
We see that Billy is, in fact, a natural in the quiz arena — he rattles off the answer “the Magna Carta” with nothing but a date to guide him. (I’m guessing that the episode was written well before the recent Supreme Court ruling that was a blow to Bush’s attempts to repeal the Magna Carta, but resonance is resonance.)
“The Invisible Hand of Fate” also takes time to fit in what appear to be two non-sequitur, stand-alone comedy scenes: Brock and Hunter Gathers playing the cow game on the road, and the whole “nozzle” scene. This development seems new to me, but I’m sure more alert viewers will correct me.
Billy and White arrive at the Venture compound just in time to see Rusty’s “bodyguard” Myra being tased by security forces. I puzzled over this odd piece of brutalization against a woman until I realized that the scene is probably there simply to explain why Rusty is in need of a new bodyguard. In any case, Rusty spurns Billy and White and another of Billy’s childhood dreams is crushed — he finds out that his role model is “a total dick.”
Billy’s next quiz meet turns out to be a dogfight, which Billy loses. I like how he’s disqualified because White enters the ring, not because he isn’t actually a dog. His relationship with White at an impasse, Billy gets off the back of (his own) moped, coincidentally at the exact spot where he and White will one day share their trailer.
(Oh wait, I just realized, it’s not coincidentally at all — Billy leaves White at this spot, which is why White places his trailer there — all out of love for Billy.)
Billy is picked up by Brock and Hunter, who press him into service spying on Professor Fantomas, who is doomed, of course, to one day become Phantom Limb. (“Fantomas” being, of course, a reference to this guy.) Billy is nervous about becoming a spy, but finds that he is welcomed as a freak in Fantomas’s class, even as he is overwhelmed by studies.
Billy’s roommate commits suicide (or does he) and Billy goes to see Fantomas in his office. He’s let in by one of my favorite characters of all time, the Guy Scraping The Name Of The Office’s Previous Occupant Off The Door. This character shows up in two of my favorite ’90s movies, Seven and The Hudsucker Proxy, although I can find no direct reference to either of those movies in “The Invisible Hand of Fate”. In the office when Billy walks in is the episode’s only other female character, Dr. Girlfriend, who is at this point calling herself “Sheena” and apparently trying to win favors from Fantomas. Sheena, it will not surprise the reader, is a punk rocker. (UPDATE: Apparently the name is “Sheila”, not Sheena. Mea Culpa.)
Fantomas, we learn, was quite impressed with a paper Billy has written, which we later learn was actually written by Stephen Hawking. So Billy has, again, advanced in his cause through unintentionally cheating. He is always a pawn in someone’s game, a victim of good intentions — White’s love and Hunter’s rabid patriotism.
Hunter believes that Fantomas is a member of the elusive Guild, and as the episode develops it seems that, indeed, he is. The question I have at this point is, does Fantomas know that he has been bankrolled by the Guild, or he is he, too, a pawn? Has the Guild orchestrated this entire bizarre, convoluted plot in order to turn Fantomas into Phantom Limb and bring him into the Guild? Is the Guild the “Invisible hand” of the title? Or is the episode asking for a less ironic interpretation, is this wild, complicated plot actually a heartfelt, earnest exploration of the strange, twisted byways that sometimes shape our lives and, more importantly, our narratives?
(Brock says that he and Hunter “think” Fantomas killed Billy’s roommate because he was “getting too close,” which leaves enough room for me to guess that they are, perhaps, wrong.)
Brock and Hunter browbeat Billy for his naivete (honestly, how could he not see that his professor with the withered limbs is a threat to national security and a member of an international criminal organization? Wake up, Billy!) but Billy fights back and escapes, runs to Fantomas to make a clean breast of it.
He shows up just in time for the experiment that will change Fantomas’s life. What he does not know is that he, in his ignorance and foolishness, will inadvertently create a supervillain. This is, in fact, Billy’s only real act in the episode — to clumsily give Fantomas the power he needs to become Phantom Limb.
Billy, traumatized, is trundled off by O.S.I. to a memory-wipe program, Hunter is sent to Guam and Brock is booted from the O.S.I. to be assigned to bodyguard Rusty (as he recently got rid of Myra, his old bodyguard). The beefy Dean double makes a pointed Don Quixote reference I’m still puzzling over, then reveals himself to be a member of the Guild (or so it seems). Which seems to indicate that the Guild has, indeed, quietly orchestrated this entire improbable scenario.
Last week I noted that the iPod billboard with Jonas on it in silhouette next to the line of itinerant Mexicans reminded me of this famous photo. Almost immediately, I regretted making the comparison, certain that I was reaching, seeing things that weren’t there. Then, this shot turns up in this week’s episode, reminding me that it is, apparently, impossible to look too deeply into an episode of The Venture Bros.
In a bookend scene, Billy awakens from his unconsciousness to find White, Brock and Rusty gazing down at him with what looks like real affection. But is he among friends? These people, in one way or another, ruined his life.
(Emphasis is placed on Billy’s twitching mechanical hand, a hand that matches Fantomas’s own artificial limbs in design. Is Billy also, one day, going to develop an evil hand?)
Venture Bros: The Doctor is Sin
This episode opens with what I think is a first for the show: a topical political joke. In the middle of the desert, Dr. Venture pulls up in his hovercar to some itinerant Mexican workers and asks if they want $50 a day to work on his compound. I have to assume that this is a comment on John McCain’s speech a while back where he mentioned that Americans would not work for $50 (an hour) picking lettuce. The significance of this joke in this episode won’t become apparent until the post-credit coda.
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.)
The Venture Bros: “Shadowman 9: In the Cradle of Destiny”
Sonic Youth’s album of b-sides and rarities The Destroyed Room begins with a ten-minute-long jam session. The object of this is to separate the fans from the noobs. Similar demands are made by “Shadowman 9:In the Cradle of Destiny,” a dense, flashback-laden, complexly-structured season-opener that gives no quarter to casual viewers.
(Speaking of upending expectations, it’s worth noting that this season-opener episode of The Venture Bros does not feature the Venture Brothers, nor their father, and goes out of its way to not picture the faces of any of the Venture clan (except Helper, seen in a long shot). Instead, the Monarch and his relationship with Dr. Girlfriend is placed front-and-center, complete with its own opening title sequence.)
The episode proper opens with the Monarch’s henchman, the surviving ones anyway, picking themselves up and dusting themselves off after the rout at Cremation Creek, lo these many years ago. 21 and 24 wonder what to do now that they are “ronin,” and 21 (or 24) says, nobly, “We forge our own destiny,” which becomes a kind of statement of theme for the episode. In this episode, the weak follow rules and join societies, the strong push ahead and make their own rules, form their own societies.
(You can tell the difference between leaders and followers because the leaders give themselves names and followers are assigned numbers. Interestingly, the “Council of 13” trying the Monarch, even though they are much more powerful than their prisoners, themselves have only numbers — they are leaders to the Monarch, but they are followers to the Sovereign.)
The dominant society examined in this episode is, of course, the Guild of Calamitous Intent. The Guild, we shall see, is very big on procedure, hierarchy and rules. Humans, however, invariably have their own ideas and the drama of the episode occurs where power’s zeal for order and the human instinct to forge one’s own destiny collide. The theme of instinct rebelling against order repeats itself again and again throughout the episode: The Guild brings the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend to their tribunal, and the Monarch rebels against them (in his own childish, impetuous way of course). No sooner does a Guild lackey intone an absolute rule than another lackey comes along and carelessly flouts it, no sooner does one member of the Council of 13 demand “Silence!” than another member tries out the new command — and fails. The council can’t even decide what to call the event — a tribunal, a trial, or a crucible.
And what motivates the individual to break the rules, to rebel against authority? According to “Shadowman 9”, the answer is classic: sex and death — or love and murder, depending on your point of view. The Guild accuses the Monarch of breaking the rules because he wishes to destroy Dr. Venture, but the Monarch insists that he broke the rules in order to make it with Dr. Girlfriend (nee Queen Etheria). The Phantom Limb, on the other hand, is moved to rebel against the rules of society (and the Guild) by a romantic notion of evil, which is really only a trumped-up version of lust and revenge. The Guild can see only death as a motivation but the Monarch makes them see the equal power of love. In the end the Monarch triumphs, the Guild is convinced of the rightness of his cause, they seethe light and wed not only the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend in villainy, but also weds the Monarch’s twin impulses, sex and death, by sending him to kill the Phantom Limb on his honeymoon. Dr. Girlfriend drives the point home by insisting on the Monarch carrying her over the threshold of the site of their first sanctioned assassination.
(In one of the episode’s two punchlines, her ass against the Monarch’s waist also accidentally deploys his wings — is Dr. Girlfriend’s ass the “cradle of destiny” of the title?)
To make things more challenging, the episode is thematically dense while the plot remains at a near-standstill. Employing a complex flashback/dual-interrogation structure for most of the running time, the episode is almost a clip show, albeit a clip show consisting of new clips.
The b-story, meanwhile, is both more straightforward and more perplexing. The Monarch’s henchmen are taken over by the Moppets, who are, seemingly, forging their own destinies. But are they? It’s unclear to me. It seems they are taking over the henchman for their own nefarious purposes, but then at the end of the show a swarm of other supervillains descends upon the scene, helping them re-build the cocoon, to put it back into the control of the Monarch. Was this the plan all along? If so, why don’t the Moppets seek the help of the other supervillains to begin with? Or are they, in the beginning, acting “against the rules” and undertaking the rehabilitation of the henchmen themselves, but, after the Guild has had their hearts softened to the cause of the Monarch, they are able to then bring in the other supervillains? And why is Brock helping out on this project? I’m sure these questions will be answered in a future episode.
Running through all of this, of course, is the constant theme of the show, the construction of an identity. We witness the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend plow through three or four identities each in this episode as they forge their destinies and are finally united in villainhood. Meanwhile, the Phantom Limb, stripped of his hard-won identity, is left with only his “rules” (in this case, “anyone on my ‘shit list’ must die, regardless of whether they actually someone who has harmed me or not”).
Hand in hand with “identity” is “mistaken identity” — Dr. Girlfriend wonders how Phantom Limb could fail to recognize his own henchman as the Monarch when she herself has failed to recognize that same henchman is now her husband. (Phantom Limb takes this a little too far — he tracks down people based on their assumed identity, in spite of the fact that they bear no physical resemblance to the people he’s looking for.)
Tying in the theme of dual identities, we see that the Monarch, like Batman, has a giant penny in his flying cocoon.
Cute kids update
click for larger view
SAM (6): I was wearing my Fancy-Schmancy Ultra Limited Edition Secret Stash In-house Promo Venture Bros shirt today, which attracted Sam’s interest.
SAM: Who’s that?
DAD: This? This is — [dramatic voice] — The Monarch!
(no response)
DAD: He’s a bad guy.
SAM: I can see that!
Meanwhile, KIT (4), has taken it upon herself to put together a new lineup of The Beatles:
To those who believe that Ringo is irreplaceable, here is your answer: Ringo is replaceable, if he is replaced with BATMAN FROM THE FUTURE and A SHARK ON A POSTAL DELIVERY TRUCK.
Attention World
I am now cool.
How, you may ask, has this improbable event come to pass?
The explanation is devilishly simple — I have recorded a voice for an upcoming episode of The Venture Bros. Yes, it’s true, I made the trek from Santa Monica to a sound studio in Burbank, a sound studio cleverly concealed within the converted garage in the back yard of a non-descript fake-Craftsman house on an anonymous street in an anonymous neighborhood in Southern California’s most anonymous city, not far from the Bob Hope Airport and beneath a row of enormous power lines. It was here in these secret surroundings that my transition from Fool to Cool was made complete. The lines were recited, the tape rolled and magic was created.
Needless to say, the details of the plot are highly confidential and cannot be revealed, even to me. In fact, I was not even given a script to read. Rather, for security purposes, I simply recorded a series of phonemes that will later be edited together by Mr. Publick to form words and sentences.
But Todd! you will gasp in disbelief. You suck! You suck, and voices for The Venture Bros. are only recorded by the coolest of the cool! Stephen Colbert does a voice on The Venture Bros.! Can I get a sweet gig like that?
It turns out yes, you can! The process, it turns out, is startlingly simple.
First, befriend Venture Bros. star voice-actor James
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for 18 years. Then, ingratiateyourself with
by writing and publishing long, detailed, in-depth analyses of all 26 episodes of his TV show. If your analyses please him, before long, you will be invited to meet with Mr. Publick.
Your first meeting with Mr. Publick will be in a public (pun intentional) place, a bar or a restaurant in a crowded urban area. Mr. Publick will sit with his back to the wall (assassination attempts are, sadly, a daily event in his life). You are advised to bring Mr. Urbaniak along as a pacifier, a kind of racetrack goat — Publick is a true thoroughbred and is prone to irrational fears and sudden outbursts of paranoid frenzy. Bring plenty of cash — Mr. Publick has the appetite of several lions and can consume six chickens and a roast suckling pig at one sitting — and he will expect you to pick up the tab.
To keep up your end in conversation, you are also advised to research the darkest, dustiest corners of popular culture — no reference is too obscure, no quip too knowing to stump the fiery and provocative Mr. Publick, whose brain weighs over sixteen kilos (counting the one he has in his upper thigh to control his lower half).
This process may need to be repeated. Mr. Publick has many enemies with false faces and more than one shape-changing alien has tried, and failed, to get close to him in the past.
Once you’ve impressed him with your knowledge of The Eiger Sanction and Colossus: The Forbin Project, you will be required to submit a highly personal cv: allergies, fears, dislikes, loves and lusts, embarrassing anecdotes from birthday parties long past. Mr. Publick requires absolute loyalty to his cause and needs to know every single aspect of your private life in order to make sure there are no skeletons in your closet that he has not put there himself. This will require the presentation of an autobiography, a minimum of six hundred pages, which Mr. Publick will have read by the scores of Korean children who draw his cartoon show.
Then there are some sexual acts you will required to perform, which I will not recount here. Suffice to say, you will know what to do when the time comes.
Then, if all goes well, you too may be chosen to do a voice for an episode of The Venture Bros. And then you, too, will be cool.
Venture Bros: Assassinanny 911
I have received numerous requests to analyze this episode of The Venture Bros; now that Season 2 is out on DVD it seems like a good enough excuse to do so.
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Sexual tension and examination of sex roles is always a feature of The Venture Bros, but the sexual tension in “Assassinanny 911” rises to the level of sexual hysteria, even outright sexual panic.
Take the cold opening. In a flashback, Brock Sampson reports for duty to Col. Hunter Gathers. In short order he is jumped, pinned to the floor and threatened with all manner of phallic objects — a knife, a baton, and a jutting, thrusting cigarette holder (later, Col. Gathers will remark on how “big” Brock is –as well he might). What does Brock want in the scene? To be “made a man” — or re-made as one, anyway; as Col. Gathers puts it, a “Frankenstein.” In the context of this episode, to “be a man” is explicitly to kill. Once Col. Gathers has dominated Brock, stabbed him, destroyed his identity (with that phallic cigarette holder, no less) and knocked him down with his baton, he ejects himself from what turns out to be an aircraft of some kind, the shape of which one can only imagine.
Now that the Cold War is over, Molotov wants to consummate the flirtation that was begun with Brock 20 years earlier during a Paris stakeout. That stakeout ended with Brock being pinned down to a bed with knives in a flaming hotel room (and is apparently not the same time that he took her left eyeball, as Molotov escapes unharmed).
But Molotov is not about to get what she wants, for Brock has been called away on a mission and has asked Molotov to babysit Hank and Dean. The mission (an assassination, a killing — his “old” male identity) is just a piece of gruntwork for Brock, who finds his new role as nurturer and caretaker much more rewarding and, let’s face it, more challenging. Challenging as in Manaconda (another phallic symbol), who leaps out of the X-1 fusillage (another phallic symbol), is killed by Molotov (who, for the purposes of this episode, is the male, ie “killer” presence), and turns out to be, as Dean notes, “Womanaconda” (thus underlining the episode’s themes and foreshadowing the surprise ending).
Brock doesn’t exactly drag his feet on his way to meet his contact, he’s not that kind of guy, but neither does he have patience for the spy-spy rigamarole of his briefing — the spy biz has changed too much since he was in it, it’s no longer a “man’s world” — Brock tosses out the gadgets and weapons from his kit, muttering “gay, gay, useless…” as his briefing officer tries to tempt him with a unthreatening-looking pen(is). (In case the gay subtext in this scene is not strong enough, it is noted that Brock will get the next part of his briefing from, er, “Captain Swallow.”)
(Side note: when Brock opens the case file to see that his target is Col. Gathers, the file is, in fact, printed backwards. Is this a mere technical glitch, or are Jackson and Doc hinting at a “backwards” nature of Col. Gathers’ personality?)
Once Brock is gone, Molotov turns herself to her task of “turning Hank, Dean and Rusty into men.” This involves shooting at them with a machine pistol and getting Hank and Dean to try to kill each other. (There is, on top of everything else in the show, a puzzling dwelling on the wounds of Christ — Brock is stabbed through the hand by Col. Gathers, and Dean is stabbed through the foot by Hank with a pen[is]cil. Are Jackson and Doc suggesting that Christ was not a “real man,” as he was not a killer but rather a healer?)
Once Hank “kills” Dean (or so he crows, having wounded him), he believes himself to be a “real man.” The ability to kill gets mixed up in Hank’s mind with the desire to have sex with Molotov — one gives rise (so to speak) to the other, in spite of the fact that the object of Molotov’s affections, Brock, is a killer but no longer wants to have sex with her.
Rusty, for his part, believes his “mature” status gives him an edge over the boys (“mature” here meaning “stealing the neighbor’s newspaper for the double coupons”), while Dean, as ever, is just confused and hapless.
On the way to his rendezvous with assassination (shot from the phallic submarine in an even-more-phallic torpedo), Brock remembers his training and partnership with Col. Gathers. The phallic symbols (sharks, spearguns, oxygen tanks, the Eiffel Tower, baguettes [“don’t eat that! It’s C4!” — indeed]) and sexual confusion (Col. Gathers’s cross-dressing) abound as Col. Gathers explains the finer points of assassination etiquette — “no women, no kids.” Minutes later (literally, as the “clock” in the lower left-hand corner of the screen indicates) Brock finds these rules tested as he attempts to bed Molotov and finds himself bedded instead — it seems that he could kill Molotov if he wanted to, but is restrained by his code of assassin’s honor.
Back at the Venture compound, Molotov finds herself doing some “mother” work, perhaps in spite of herself — we see her with a very un-assassin-like bag of groceries (bought with Rusty’s double coupons?). Her single “motherly” gesture is not wasted on Hank, who becomes filled with Oedipal rage when he sees his new “mother figure” become “friendly” with Rusty and the “real man” urge to kill becomes intertwined with the urge to have sex with Molotov.
(One wonders if having a motherly presence in the Venture compound would be in any way a good idea, as the sexual dysfunctions compound themselves so quickly with the mere presence of a female.)
Brock, on his mission, shows how not-gay he is by bedding a native woman, who shops from the Bond Girl catalogue — thus signifying her as a “real woman” — a purely sexual object who comes complete with six-pack and easy-open bikini-top. The “native woman” is a lover, not a killer, not, essentially, a “man,” like Molotov.
By the poolside, Hank drowns as Dean chats with his own foil/crush, Triana. Molotov must perform the ultimate non-assassin act, bringing Hank back to life with mouth-to-mouth resusitation. Both boys suffer from swollen swim-trunks in this scene — Hank’s from his mouth-to-mouth erection, Dean’s from having his pockets fill up with water. Hank, we see, is at least physically ready to have sex with a woman (although he is pointedly not mentally ready — when his erection is pointed out, he panics, saying his “pants are haunted”).
There is a nice double climax (so to speak), twin Apocalypse Now parodies, as Hank turns his murderous Oedipal rage on Rusty and Brock confronts his target. Hank, for his part, grabs his crotch and swings his phallic sword wildly as Brock is confronted with Col. Gathers’s ultimate truth. Brock is shocked with what he finds, but he should not be: he has come to the same conclusion, in his own way. Brock has found value in life outside of killing (ie being “a real man”). Col. Gathers has taken the notion to its logical conclusion, and in the context of The Venture Bros has struck on a solution that would satisfy even
— he has escaped the dead-end role of “real man” by becoming a woman. As the surgeon makes explicit, Col. Gathers started as Brock’s Frankenstein father and ends as his even-more-Frankenstein mother.
Brock returns home, lesson learned. The episode ends with Hank’s melancholy as Molotov drives away, suggesting that, for him at least, this struggle is not yet over.
Discussion of the other episodes of Season 2 of The Venture Bros can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.