Favorite Characters: BoJack Horseman (BoJack Horseman)

Let’s be honest here:  BoJack can absolutely awful.  He’s done so many terrible things, selfish things that crap on others for no reason and hurt the people he cares about.  Usually, just when things start looking up, he sinks to a low you didn’t know he had.  He’s a complicated chacter with tons of painful baggage, but that doesn’t excuse any of the things he’s done.

And yet.  BoJack captivates me.  I’ve seen all manner of a-hole characters:  entertaining unrepentant ones, annoying unrepentant ones, despicable unrepentant ones, ones who are genuinely trying to change their ways, ones are more complex than they first appear, ones who are draped in woobiness in lieu of actual depth or grow, ones who are their own worst enemies.  I’ve seen all sorts.  But I’ve never seen a character quite like BoJack.

He’s a former sitcom star, obnoxiously rich and once hugely famous.  His star now faded, he lurches between craving the adoration of the masses, proving himself relevant as a real actor, and just wanting to be left out of the Hollywood fishbowl.  He’s both incredibly arrogant and desperately insecure.  When he’s looking for validation, whether it’s from a close friend, a casual acquaintance, or a random passerby, there’s a fine line between wanting to be puffed up and frantically scrabbling for a lifeline, and he nearly always crosses it.  He spends so much time thinking about how he wants others to see him and how to go about accomplishing that, but for every time he follows that path to what he wants, there’s another instance of him torpedoing it all at the last second, and another of his calculated plan driving him straight into disaster.  What’s more, another instance of him achieving what he wants only to find that he still isn’t happy.

BoJack lives with depression but doesn’t seem to have ever sought help for it.  He avoids it with alcohol, drugs, and food.  He tries to cut it off by pursuing this or that goal, all of which he’s determined will finally allow him to be okay with himself.  He gives himself over to it, wallowing in self-disgust or burning bridges because he doesn’t know what else to do or going completely numb, staring into an endless expanse and seeing no hope.  He does, on occasion, reach out to others for a hand, but as with his goals, he pins his rescue so wholly on them that they can never help but disappoint in his eyes.

And so, he gets into enormous fights over pointless things.  He pushes people away.  He sabotages his career.  He hurts his friends.  He runs away.  He makes himself look stupid and petty in his herculean efforts to appear anything but.  He gets jealous.  He hates everything.  He feels crushingly alone.  He drowns his sorrows.  He looks for light and doesn’t find it.  He does terrible, terrible things, again and again, often not realizing just how awful they are until he’s in far too deep to back out.

It’s maybe a weird comparison to make, but I’m reminded of a scene in the first season of Skins where Sid and Michelle visit Cassie in a mental health facility.  As Sid looks dubiously at the activities of the patients around him, Michelle simply says, “They’re trying to be happy, Sid.  It isn’t easy.”  That’s what comes to mind when I see BoJack.  More than fame, more than relationships, more than relevance, BoJack just wants to feel happy.  All those other things are just ways he thinks he can get there, but time and time again, he finds that it’s just so hard.