The Venture Brothers and the Failure of Masculinity

[Content Advisory: short, nongraphic discussions of uncomfortable/triggering matters such as child abuse in various forms, sexism, transphobia and more.]

From an illustration by Bill Sienkiewicz, showing the Venture Bros. characters as they might want to be shown

Cartoon Network’s The Venture Bros. is about one thing and only one thing: the failure of fathers, both literal and figurative, to create sons capable of functioning in the world they made.  If this seems reductive or dismissive of the role mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts and women in general play as movers and shapers of the destiny of that world, it is.  It’s meant to be.  This is a show about men, how men relate to one another and to the culture of domination and violence they’ve created for themselves and the ways in which that culture has stunted, destroyed, maimed or otherwise harmed their growth as human beings.  The story may touch on gay characters, characters of various races, characters with various mental or physical disabilities or characters with appearances considered unappealing by the cultural aesthetic consensus, but an overwhelming majority of those characters will all be male.

This seems to be partially a result of cohesion to the central theme (the men who get representation and how messed they are) and partially a reaction to the popular view of history and the popular culture the creators imbibed growing up which was dominated by able-bodied straight white men; as such, it’s impossible to have a discussion of the show without first admitting this massive, problematic exclusion as the show is, in many ways, about the very forces that created the exclusion; it’s about the excluders navel-gazing and seeing how fucked up they are.  This feels particularly worthwhile for this current moment as many of the (overwhelmingly straight, white and male) creators of American pop culture have been dealing, more and more, with the fact that keeping things white, straight and male has become something handwaved away as “tradition” instead of the toxic bullshit it always, always was.  As such, the show is about nothing but relations between (largely upper-class, exceptional straight and white) men and how truly fucked those relations can become when allowed to fester on their own terms.

The eponymous brothers are trying to get out from under their father’s shadow (their mother conspicuous in her non-entityship); their father, in turn, is trying to crawl out from under his own father and differentiate himself from his brother who better fulfills their father’s legacy.  Their badass alpha male bodyguard has issues with his figurative father (who in turn struggles with his desire to shed his masculine self and emerge as the woman he truly is in spite of his apparently-preferred presentation as a man).  Their nemesis fights against the rules of another figurative father even as his favoured son, one of his henchmen, works to reconcile his desire for freedom and an identity of his own with his love for his boss/father.  Even the Ventures’ wacky neighbour acts as father to a family of mystic superheroes as well as to a daughter who’d much rather be doing anything else.

What I’m saying is that the show features a lot of navel-gazing about masculinity and its meaning—with a few forays into pop culture parody.

Titanomachia: Pacific Rim and Attack on Titan

A lot of times, it’s not the song so much as the singer; that is to say, sometimes a work only works because of the person making it.  The difference between, for instance, the Nine Inch Nails version of the song “Hurt” and the Johnny Cash version of the same is massive despite the songs being largely the same in terms of structure and the progression of notes and the like (Cash did change a line or two).  Heck, the entire musical art form of jazz is, as I understand it, about little else; the songs might be called the same things and feature many of the same chords but giving them to two different jazz artists will produce almost entirely dissimilar experiences.

And it’s interesting to see that principle brought into other arenas; for instance the broad strokes of a plot.  For example, the recent not-unfair comparisons between the popular Hunger Games trilogy and the novel/manga series/film Battle Royale, two works based around the same basic high concept (the world has gone to shit in varied ways and now children fight to the death for the amusement of the government) which are nonetheless different in terms of scope, tone and the actual story being told; Hunger Games is largely about the world that would produce a foul spectacle like children being made to fight to the death and its (possible) undoing/restructuring where Battle Royale focuses harder on the characters’ attempts to navigate what taking part in such a contest means to them as individuals.  Another example case would be the recently-released film Pacific Rim and the manga (and anime series of the same name, also an upcoming movie) Attack on Titan.

Now, before we get going too far, I feel it only fair to warn that there will be SPOILERS both large and small throughout.  One can’t really discuss the inner workings and plots of works—even incomplete ones like Attack on Titan—without getting into some bits that can change the way a first-time viewer looks at the series.  There are plot twists throughout Attack on Titan, for instance, which would have completely changed the way I approached the series from the get-go and while I don’t think any of the ones I’ll drop for either show are exactly show-breaking or, y’know, SPOILING, it’s still a necessary courtesy with such recent works to warn about that up front.  SPOILERS for both Attack on Titan and Pacific Rim follow.

That said, on with the show!

The Princess Paradox: Or my love-hate relationship with Adventure Time

It feels unkind to berate something for not being progressive enough but that is where I am at with Adventure Time. Mostly as a reaction to the way in online circles it is lauded as an ideal representation of gender and equality. Because when I initially watched the first series my reaction was, and still is, ‘But why are they all princesses?‘ And it is a question that has yet to be answered in the show. Largely because I do not think it could be. Adventure Time is a show of contradictions, with the A-Cast ladies the writers make some interesting choices and present some challenging points of view, however with the B-Cast ladies things become much more traditional, and princess-y. (Not to mention the C-Cast with nameless women such as the Bikini Babes – s5e20). And it is this contradiction, and it is the presence of the female characters inhabiting the traditional ‘damsel-in-distress’ roles that undermines what the writers are doing with the primary characters. For every challenge they make to our expectations using major characters, they are reinforced two-fold with minor characters.

I have seen remarkably few explorations of this princess paradox, it seems to be a trope that we are willing to accept either at face-value or because; “Almost every female character is a princess but the typical cliché Damsel in Distress and/or romance obsessed girly-girl are parodied and subverted for all they’re worth.” But the question is; does that make it okay? Because I do not think it does. I do not think it is enough to subvert a trope without also offering viable alternatives. Because by subverting a trope you are also expecting a level of literacy from your audience which may not always be there. This is especially true of Adventure Time, it is ostensibly targeted at children despite having a popular following of viewers in their twenties and thirties.

So, to be female in Adventure Time is to be a princess. Or in the case of Marceline the Vampire Queen or Lady Rainicorn, nobility of some variety (and there is a distinction to be made there, which I will touch on later). What this leaves us with is a female cast named largely for their function. They are ‘X-Y-Z Princess’ and are called by their honorific which acts to strip them of their individuality. (What do we know of Hotdog Princess aside from the fact that she’s a hotdog? Wildberry Princess? Turtle Princess? Ghost Princess? They exist for their function, for their role, not as individuals, and quite honestly it feels like a lot of their names are place-holder jokes. Which does not even begin to touch the distastefulness of Embryo Princess (and the subtle pro-life message therein)).