#481

Interesting--maybe I don't really mean interesting, the way Socrates didn't really mean it when he told a motherfucker "hmm, maybe you're on to something there!"--that all types of people are adept at reducing all other types of people to the absurd, and to behave as though the people they like and admire--people like themselves in key ways, as they see it, typically--are unimpeachable zenith beings.

Not to include myself in this would be bullshit, of course. Might could even be fairly leveled that I am something of an expert, because the technique reaps incredible benefits: you settle on a moral high ground that you can live with, or try to, and you tell yourself that you have found this place to live and be due to your inherent validity and worth, and that most other ways of being are why the world goes to shit. You can see this very easily, from where you are, their venality and hubris.

Naturally, the person over there on their own moral plateau is pointing at you and making very similar noises. And it is deadly difficult to understand, harder to remember, and most grueling of all to make yourself care, in the face of what your entire lived experience tells you to the contrary, they see you as the problem and have just as much right to think so. 

If we all chose to be and live as I am--we say--there would be no such problems. Those poor wretches! They know not what they do. Those bastards! They'll be the death of us, if we don't do something.

This is such, such human all-too-human shit that I don't really know what to feel about it, honestly. Just perhaps that if we solved this riddle of perspective, collectively, we would make such a quantum leap in sociopsychic evolution that we might need a new name.

Usually what happens is war breaks out instead.

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Ok! Now, the promised Spongebob.

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It has been proven out over time that it is possible to animate eleven minutes of absolute perfection.

Listen to me, because I am being serious. Perfection has been achieved by our frail, nigh-doomed species: in the execution of the eleven-minute cartoon. 

In that, in so far as we have grasped theoretical mathematics, and in nothing else.

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The eleven-minute form for the cartoon exists because it has to--but it works because it does. And in these eleven minutes, multiple teams have made multiple perfections. I can think of six perfect Adventure Time cartoons off the top of my head--selecting one that I can use as an example later--Dungeon. 

Band Geeks is one of a few perfect Spongebobs, and it is an exemplar of the perfect eleven minutes.

One of the particular accomplishments that takes eleven minutes into the realm of perfection is to waste absolutely no time, but rush absolutely nothing.

A particular masterclass in showcasing this property is--Dungeon! Dungeon has the sass to bring up the fact that it is going to do what it's about to do before it does it (using precious seconds! but the payoff is huge--many perfect cartoons are metareferential, including Band Geeks), and proceeds to tell three stories, each chock-full of jokes and inside jokes and clever references, great action, magic, horror, human vs. self stuff, the power of love, some other tight ideas I'm forgetting to mention. Very advanced stuff here, a sophisticated play--one of the reasons Adventure Time would still matter to a degree even if it had only made one season: that season established a huge chunk of the thesis, which is to take six or seven genres and key points of reference, explode and invert them, combine them into a surging colloid that has never been seen before and which launched a thousand toons, explored the scope, grew its garden, set things up for the future, and executed several perfect episodes right away. I mean, this is how you do it. There are many ways the whole enterprise was and continues to be completely revolutionary--more on that another time.

Band Geeks is merely a perfect story that essentially doesn't stop being funny or good even for a second, and when the real payoff hits, it's not just funny anymore, though it continues to be funny--it is a power and a glory so huge that tears may come to my eyes as I type. I can tell you that the reason I wanted to write all this in the first place is that watching Band Geeks a few days ago made me weep salt tears into my lunch and left me feeling like things were gonna be ok.

A hallmark of the perfect cartoon, this: the sneak attack, the undoing, and the sustaining.

To break it down too completely is like cutting up a chicken until there's just a pile of wet tissue, a bleached wig. There must be something left to cook, so, you know, couldn't hurt you to find a way to watch Band Geeks and determine for yourself.

I will simply say this: to take a character that you have used up to that point as a strawman, a foil, the butt of the joke and the recipient of physical and psychic slapstick, mercilessly as punching bag, portayed as a base unfortunate, sometimes outright cruel, cynical, misunderstood, arrogant, putting on of airs, apathetic, lacking in knowledge of the self--Squidward is several types of the kind of dude Jewish folks have a less-than-flattering word for all vying for primacy in his tentacled frame. His bulbous head contains multitudes of shortsighted, self-satisfied, completely ineffectual idiots.

But! He does sometimes surprise us, rising to an occasion. The end of Pizza Delivery, another perfect Spongebob relying heavily on Squidward's personality, is the outstanding example. 

To take that character and bless him with the emotional arc presented in Band Geeks is more than simply generous and clever. There is something immortalizing and sublime about redemption that fucking costs something. Boromir is one of if not my very favorite character in Lord of the Rings, which is my Favorite Thing Ever, the gleaming spire on the diadem of my obsessions, so that should communicate something about my psychology.

Squidward pays and pays, and it is rare like hen's teeth but sometimes he gets paid, even if for no other reason than the misdirected generosity of others, and because of how the creators were careful with him up to that point, because of that little bit of fresh background at the beginning of the episode that set the whole thing up, the feeling when he wins, when he wins, and they make him a nonsense song about winning just to get him the fucking win--

Yup. Just made myself cry.

--JL