STRAIGHT FROM HIS MOUTH
Words of wisdom on Hollywood scandals voiced by an animated horse, Schneller, E2
It’s been quite the week for the question of forgiveness.
There was Jian Ghomeshi’s tone-deaf feint toward atonement in the New York Review of Books, followed by Isaac Chotiner’s delicate vivisection of the Review’s editor, Ian Buruma, on Slate. Asked why he published Ghomeshi — and made the essay part of a package issue called “The Fall of Men” — Buruma stubbornly stuck to his older-white-male line. Because women have had, like, 11 full months of attention, so I guess it’s time to hand everything back over to the dudes?
Then, on NBC’s Today show, Sean Penn called the #MeToo movement “a receptacle of the salacious,” calling for more nuance — for the men accused, not for the women. (Perhaps Sean should bone up on the meaning of the word “nuance.”)
Julie Chen left her job as co-host of CBS’s The Talk, in the wake of her husband Les Moonves’s ouster as head of the network due to repeated alleged sexual misconduct. And Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, didn’t ask for forgiveness after being accused of sexual assault; he denied it ever happened.
So it was with both surprise and relief that I discovered a show that’s dealing with #MeToo, fame and forgiveness in an intelligent, but also funny, manner. Relief because the protagonist is an entitled Hollywood male who manages to make the subject accessible to all. And surprise because the show is . . . BoJack Horseman (Netflix).
How have I not watched this series before? It’s right up my alley, a smart, up-to-the-minute riff on showbiz. I don’t know if the first four seasons did this, but Season 5 drills down on both sexism and the hypocrisy of the forgiveness industrial complex.
Episode 504 is a particular gem, in which an actor named Vance Waggoner (Bobby Can- navale), a Mel Gibson/Charlie Sheen/Johnny Depp/Alec Baldwin mash-up, makes anti-Semitic remarks, hits a girlfriend with a baseball bat and leaves an angry rant on his daughter’s voicemail — and is promptly nominated for a lifetime achievement honour at the We Forgive You Awards (the Forgiveys).
As one character sums it up, “We love exposing new dirt- bags and we can’t wait to give a comeback to all the dirtbags we already know about.”
BoJack (Will Arnett) inadvertently becomes a voice for woke men, dropping pearls like, “All that’s needed to listen to a woman’s voice is a man’s voice” and “The problem with feminism is that it wasn’t men doing it. We’re much less shrill.”
At the end of the episode, BoJack asks the question we’re all asking: “How do you make something right when you’ve made it so wrong you can never go back?” (Anyone who thinks women aren’t also struggling with this is, well, a man.)
Should people be defined by the worst thing they ever did? How many sins make a pattern? Can offenders recoup their careers and how soon is too soon? It’s fascinating to me that this important social issue is being addressed astutely and inclusively by an animated horse. But I’ll take it where I can get it.
Outside the Box is a weekly column about television’s impact on culture.