Breaking Points

While grieving Pete, I mentioned the show Bojack Horseman and discussed how I love that it goes far more in depth about various nuances of human existence. One scene that resonated with me previously is when a good friend of Bojack's died and he began driving through the desert. I really appreciated how the show went past the surface of what grief looks like, the way other television shows tend to do. I love that his grief was never neatly tied up in one quirky episode, but how it literally took him a year to reappear and begin facing the world again. And even then, as he began to function again in daily life, he was haunted by memories and sadness of her passing. His grief presented like actual grief.

I've been keeping the show on the background lately and I recently honed in on another interesting aspect of the show. I'm going to give a bit of a spoiler here, so if you're planning to watch it, you may want to read any other of my hundreds of introspective posts. Anyway, in the show, Bojack discovers his long lost sister, Hollyhock. Hollyhock is an impressionable, bubbly teenager who absolutely adores her brother, in spite of him being an absolute mess.

Throughout the show, Bojack tends to push away and even violate and disrespect the people around him countless times (another source of contention in the story is Bojack's substance abuse). Throughout it all, his friends remain loyal and faithful, in spite of who he is. Although eventually, their dedication to him begins to fade too. As Hollyhock starts to get older, she begins to learn more about her brother and begins to distance herself. During this time, Bojack starts to see that his innocent younger sister hasn't been around and ceases picking up his phone calls. At some point, he learns that because she's started to see the kind of person that he really is, she opts to bow out of his life completely.

I don't know why that hit me so hard this morning. Like damn, she just said "nah" and stepped away. And like said before, I love how the show touches on real life scenarios and handles them realistically. I've seen so many people in life who feel that they should be granted carte blanche to be as reckless and insufferable as they please, with the insane notion that the people who love them will always be there. Their motto in life seems to be "better to beg forgiveness than to ask for permission." Sure, you may have to grovel a bit, maybe even beg, and promise to never do it again, but in the end, they'll come back. They always come back. Until they don't.

The show once again illustrates an important point about humans- that they break. Humans are just that- human. That no matter how much they love you and even worship you, at some point, self preservation comes into play and they have to remove sources of consistent pain, especially if those sources of pain are relentless in their pursuit of destruction of relationships and peace.

I understand that television is supposed to be a source of entertainment. That we often want conflict wrapped up in 30 minutes, with all of the protagonists hugging it out. And while I appreciate a nicely wrapped feel good story as much as the next person, the fact is that having this narrative thrown into our faces consistently severely warped our perception of reality and the complexities of human nature.

The fact is that not all conflicts are wrapped up in 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or even ever. Sometimes you can talk until you're blue in the face, you can explain, you can scream, you can cry, you can do everything in your power to make them understand you, and they still won't. Maybe they can't. Maybe they'll choose not to. But the result is the same- there is no resolution. No happy dance, no group of newly freed protagonists sitting around laughing in a circle about whatever they just unwrapped between far too many needless commercials.

In the real world, sometimes we just gotta sit in our shit. In the real world, sometimes we're the ones that walk away, and other times, we're forced to face the music in the loss of a relationship that we thought would never leave us. Hollyhock walked away, not because of something Bojack did, she walked away before he could hurt her, because she began to see him for who and what he really is. When people spend their lives toeing the line and destroying the hearts and lives of everyone they love, a breaking point is often reached. Finally, art imitates life.