life-in-grayscale:

The third season of BoJack Horseman comes out this Friday and, in preparation, I have been rewatching the series in my spare time. One of the reasons I enjoy the show is its exploration of the titular character’s relationship with his family – as well as Diane Nguyen’s – and its pessimistic take on the possibility, desirability, and achievability of reconciliation with one’s blood relations. Rather than regurgitate the tacit imperative towards resolution, BoJack Horseman offers an alternative.

To paraphrase, sometimes it does not get better.

I wish I could claim credit for that turn of phrase, but Shen said it offhandedly a couple months ago. We had just finished a workshop for AAPI members of the LGBT community that explored the process of coming out to one’s parents. Naturally, people were in various stages of the process – from totally in the closet to out and proud (if not always entirely accepted) – but I felt decidedly alone for being the only person who does not even talk to his or her parents.

After my brief introduction to the group, I wanted to say, “With all the problems we have now, could you imagine the disaster if I sprinkled on the bacon bits of telling my father I’m gay?” Instead, I just sat silent. Nobody wants to be a downer when the implicit assumption is that maintaining or restoring closeness to one’s parents is the goal. In exploring these feelings with Shen on the walk home, he said that there needed to be a wider acknowledgement that sometimes it does not get better.

Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the workshop erred. Thankfully, total alienation from one’s parents seems to be a rare experience. However, it seems impossible for one to avoid a silent sense of betrayal for abandoning one’s duty to filial piety without at least a nominal aspiration to resolution that much of the LGBT community and broader society make seem both possible and desirable.

I think this is why I write about my father so much and why I enjoy BoJack Horseman. Absent the ability to commiserate with another person, I can at least “talk to myself” in an essay and derive some measure of reassurance from the show that it is okay to despise one’s fucked-up fathers, bastard brothers, or martyred mothers. Nobody gives Diane shit for getting the piece-of-shit-dad-package-would-be-too-good-for-him package for her father’s funeral. BoJack’s nearly nonexistent relationship with his mother seems like the only rational choice when we see how she treated him as a child and even as an adult.

While there is something noble in overcoming previous disagreements with one’s parents, one can find equal honor in recognizing the signs of a lost cause and retreating for the sake of one’s mental and emotional sanity.

