Day 127: All Cronenberged up

Oi oi! I’ve got bugger all to offer today. I was at work and it was a horrible Saturday with the pub filled with horrible weekend dad lads and screeching hen parties and ageing rockers for a festival down the road, and I got home at six and slumped in my chair and my feet were throbbing and my head caning and all I could do was sit in front of Zelda and poke about in little glowing tree-lined grottos and collect shiny doo-dads and climb outcrops and paraglide down through the air watching the world tiny and indistinct below me grow larger until it engulfed me, and then I turned the Switch off and went to buy and cook tea and while I was eating I watched an episode of Rick and Morty, the one where they Cronenberg up the world, make a real Cronenberg of it, and I made notes on the episode's story structure, the hero’s journey for each character, how the writers toyed with the format of serial television, some neat metatextual stuff where they both adhere to the rules of the paradigm while satirising and even transcending them.

Rick and Morty can be cloyingly cynical, that cynicism where everything is sneer-worthy and it becomes posture, watching it can be tiring, depressing, even, how it always has to stay one step ahead of the curve, has to prove its superiority with every syllable (maybe I’m just identifying it with some dark parts of myself, there) - but at the same time the show is wicked-funny, bracingly unsentimental, and so au fait with story structure that it regularly provides complete hero journeys for each of its cast members that are as solid as anything else you’ll see on Netflix, while simultaneously mocking the whole process.

I don’t worship the programme - I think unguarded sentiment, simple sincerity, is as important as the obsessive misanthropic intellectualising that Rick and Morty embodies, sometimes more so in these dark times, but I respect the hell out of it. Comedians and storytellers at the top of their game, those guys. Well done.

Blarg, and those are all the words I can squeeze out of my tired old brain tonight. Everything is gooey mush now. A right old Cronenberg. 

Niiiight! x