Arrested Development and Philosophy (6 page)

Due to the disgust and nausea induced by Ann’s “mayonegg,” Ann and the snack were inextricably linked in Michael’s mind. This caused Michael, who has trouble recalling Ann’s name in the first place, to refer to her as “Egg”—a reference, hold the mayonnaise, to what made Michael ill earlier in the episode.

Motherboy, or the Oedipus Complex

Although parapraxes provide good evidence for the existence of the unconscious, a lot of what goes on in the unconscious is unknown to us. The Oedipus complex is one example.

Motherboy, while awkward, is nothing compared to Freud’s Oedipus complex. Motherboy, of course, is what Lindsay calls the “I’m in love with my mother dance thing” and is the main event in the episode “Motherboy XXX.” According to Freud, the Oedipus complex is very important in the development of a boy’s psychology. The complex derives its name from the Greek tragic hero, Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother—though the true identity of both his parents were unknown to him at the time.

Freud believed that every boy experienced the Oedipus complex. Put simply, the Oedipus complex manifests itself as the resentment of the young boy towards his father, who disrupts the child’s enjoyment of his mother’s affection.
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Because of this resentment, the boy wishes his father would disappear. But the father steps in and prohibits anything from happening. The child would like to take the mother for his wife, but the father poses a daunting threat. This causes the child to
repress
or turn away from the Oedipus complex. In other words, the complex is pushed into the realm of the
unconscious
. The frustration toward the father and the affection toward his mother remain unknown to the child, that is, unless we’re talking about Buster Bluth—but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Ernest Jones, Freud’s official biographer, writes that a failed repression of the Oedipus complex might result in the boy being abnormally attached to his mother and therefore “unable to love any other woman.”
10
Even if the boy could detach himself from the love for his mother, the weaning would always be incomplete and the boy would perpetually fall in love “only with women who in some way resemble the mother.”
11
Buster’s relationship with Lucille Two is a perfect example of this: Not only is Lucille Two around Lucille One’s age, they also share the same name! Buster makes no bones about his relationship with Lucille Two in the episode “Marta Complex.”

Buster:
Our relationship doesn’t work?

Lucille 2:
No, not as long as you keep getting me all mixed up with your mother.

Buster:
It is exactly the opposite. I’m leaving my mother for you. You’re replacing my mother.

George Sr. even needs to remind Buster of the father’s prohibition in the episode “Justice Is Blind.” Hours before his arrest, he says to Buster:

George Sr:
No, no, no. Let me help you with that, son. Enjoy yourself tonight. Because you are out of here. I’m not going to spend my retirement watching you wipe your nose on your sleeve.

Buster:
I can’t breathe, Dad.

George Sr:
(Gritting his teeth) Neither can I!!

From Buster’s Motherboy mission “Operation Hot Mother” to calling his sister his new mother (“And is it just me, or is she looking hotter, too?”), most of Buster’s behavior exemplifies his failed repression of the Oedipus complex. Take, for instance, his picture with Lucille in the
Balboa Bay Window
magazine in the “Marta Complex” episode. Included in the magazine is an article written by a young Buster, titled “Why I Want to Marry My Mother.” This same article causes Stan Sitwell to comment later in the episode, “You know, it could be worse. He could want to marry your mother. (
Laughs.
) Oh, I’m sorry. Is your family not laughing at that yet?”

Totem . . . : Boyfights

Looking for the origin of the totem animal, an object of worship that watches over the tribe or clan, Freud examined primitive culture using psychoanalysis in his book
Totem and Taboo
. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) inspired Freud’s answer:
the primal horde
. Darwin proposed that at one point, humanity was similar to bands of gorillas. One older male would live among many females and would drive out the younger males, much like the prohibitive father in the Oedipus complex. According to Darwin, this would prevent “interbreeding within the limits of the same family.”
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According to Freud, this angered the young males—so they devised a plot to unite and eat the tyrannical father after killing him. Sounds little like the sibling rivalry on
Arrested Development
. The plot of the episode “Making a Stand” echoes the unification of the brothers against the tyrannical father. Of course, instead of killing and eating George Sr., Gob and Michael hire J. Walter Weatherman (George Sr.’s one armed “scare-toy”) to teach George Sr. a “lesson” about pitting them against each other.

According to Freud, with the obstacle to sexual desires gone, the brothers become divided. Such desires do not unite men—they divide men.
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Each of the brothers wished to possess all of the females, as the murdered tyrannical father once did. Think of Marta from the “Marta Complex” episode—Gob, Michael, and even Buster (“Will somebody please punch me in the face?”) fight over Marta. Sexual desires certainly do
not
unite men, as George Michael shows us in the series finale by punching Gob in the face for dating Ann (Her?).

According to Freud, because of this division, the brothers could afford no alternative but to renounce the women they all desired, the women who drove them to the murder of the tyrannical father in the first place. The totem animal—the sacred animal of the tribe—is a replacement of the lost father. The tribe worships the totem animal by murdering, consuming, and subsequently mourning it. But even within the ritual there is an attempt at self-justification: “If our father had treated us in the way the totem does, we should never have felt tempted to kill him.”
14

. . . and Taboo: Les Cousins Dangereux

Freud also wrote about incest outside of the Oedipus complex in the book
Totem and Taboo
. The primal brothers become divided after murdering their tyrannical father, and so the taboo of incest was meant as a remedy that would keep them from fighting over women in their own tribe. Whatever its true origin, the prohibition against incest remains with us. For example, if you were to sing a karaoke rendition of “Afternoon Delight” with a relative—say, your niece or nephew—you might get some strange looks.

George Michael is concerned with the prohibition of incest to the point of asking if kissing Maeby is illegal in the pilot episode. Strangely enough, each time they break the taboo, George Michael and Maeby return to the prohibition against incest. After kissing Maeby, in the first episode, George Michael yells, “I knew it was against the law!” when the SEC shows up.

In the episode “The Righteous Brothers,” George Michael kisses Maeby and “steals second.” Their fun is ruined, however, when Gob walks in and says, “Dad’s gonna be crushed!” referring to George Sr., who he hid in the crawlspace beneath the collapsing model home. George Michael, panicking, responds, “We don’t have to tell him!” thinking that Gob was talking about Michael.

Gob has a similar reaction to the idea that he has transgressed the prohibition of incest. In the episode, “Family Ties,” Michael is investigating Nellie—NOT Tobias—and discovers three things: (1) Nellie is possibly his sister, (2) Nellie is a prostitute, and (3) Gob/Franklin is her pimp. Gob offers Michael a “family discount” for her services. Michael responds, “Family discount is right, Gob. This is the sister that I’ve been talking about.” Gob responds tearfully, “Maybe I should have been getting a family rate. Oh my God.”

Pop-Pop Gets Put on the Couch?

Who knows in what direction Freud’s theories might have gone if he had met the Bluths during the development of psychoanalysis? Tobias’s latent homosexuality, Buster’s Oedipus complex, and even Michael’s need to keep his family together would have made excellent case studies. And we will just have to wonder what Freud would have made of Tobias, the never-nude.

NOTES

1.
Sigmund Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,”
The Freud Reader,
ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 37.

2.
Ibid. “Repression,” p. 105.

3.
Ibid. “Ego and the Id,” p. 632.

4.
Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,”
General Psychological Theory.
Introduction by Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 85. Sigmund Freud,
Outline of Psycho-Analysis
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), p. 14.

5.
Ibid., p. 77.

6.
An Outline of Psycho-Analysis
, p. 15.

7.
Sigmund Freud,
New
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 29.

8.
Sigmund Freud,
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 290.

9.
Ernest Jones,
Hamlet and Oedipus
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), p. 75.

10.
Ibid., p. 77.

11.
Ibid., p. 77.

12.
Sigmund Freud,
Totem and Taboo
, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 156.

13.
Ibid., p. 178.

14.
Ibid., p. 179.

and:
the-op.com

Chapter 4

DON’T KNOW THYSELF

Gob and the Wisdom of Bad Faith

Daniel P. Malloy

Socrates once said, with his life on the line, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
1
But he never looked at the results of that examination. (His fellow citizens executed him.) So what if someone examined his life, and found it not worth living? In that case, it would be better to avoid the examination in the first place. In fact, that’s just the way that Gob Bluth lives his life, and we should respect him for it.

In “S.O.B.s,” Gob pretends to be a waiter, only to find himself really being a waiter. This scene reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known example of the waiter in the café, the one who is just a bit too much like a waiter—too eager, too concerned, too perfectly waitery. As Sartre describes him,

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.
2

Sartre gives this example to illustrate his concept of
bad faith.
But, as we shall see, Gob’s initial act in “S.O.B.s” is not an act of bad faith. It is only later, when Gob really decides that he is a waiter that he enters into bad faith.

Gob, in fact, lives large parts of his life in bad faith. He tells himself that he is a great magician, that he can run the Bluth Company, that he loves Marta, and that everyone loves him, and he acts according to those beliefs. Each of these acts, among many others, is an instance of bad faith. Gob tries constantly to fill various roles for which he is simply unsuited.

Gob isn’t alone in bad faith, however. The rest of the Bluth clan keep him company on occasion. But outside of a few isolated incidents, such as when Buster bashes his mother in order to fit in with his siblings (“Bringing Up Buster”), the Bluths are largely too self-involved to be in bad faith. The only exception (aside from Gob, of course) is Michael, who we discover in the final season is living in bad faith about precisely how self-involved he is (“The Ocean Walker”). Gob is unique, a perfect case study of bad faith. Most people occasionally enter into bad faith, but Gob lives there—and good thing, too!

Gob is wiser for it. Not only does Gob’s bad faith make him happier, it also makes him a better person. For Gob, the ancient wisdom must be altered:
Don’t
know thyself, Gob.

Gob Isn’t Just Deceiving Himself

In
Being and Nothingness
, Sartre reluctantly identifies bad faith and self-deception. He says, “We shall willingly grant that bad faith is a lie to oneself, on condition that we distinguish the lie to oneself from lying in general.”
3
There is good reason for his reluctance—when we think a bit, we can see that self-deception and bad faith are two distinct concepts. As tempted as we may be to accuse Gob (or any other Bluth) of self-deception, such an accusation wouldn’t be correct. Gob lives in bad faith, but no one can live in self-deception.

So, what makes self-deception impossible? After all, it’s fairly common to say that so-and-so is just deceiving himself. But common and correct aren’t the same thing. Don’t deceive yourself about deception: if the person being deceived already knows the truth, then the deception has no chance of succeeding. When Buster deceives Gob into believing that George Sr. is controlling Larry (George’s surrogate while he is under house arrest), the entire act is based on Gob not knowing the truth about who is actually controlling Larry (“Mr. F”). Had Gob realized that Buster was giving Larry his orders, he would never have been fooled. In the case of so-called self-deception, a single person would have to know the truth of the matter (in order to deceive) and not know it (in order to be deceived). Hence, self-deception isn’t possible.

So, if bad faith is possible, we must distinguish it from self-deception more clearly than Sartre did. This can be done fairly easily.
4
Bad faith is existential; self-deception is epistemic. That means that while self-deception is about belief and knowledge, bad faith is about living and acting. It is not necessary to
believe
anything to be in bad faith. For Gob, living in bad faith means that he is acting like something he isn’t. It’s more like pretending than it is deception. But the pretense of bad faith should be distinguished from other forms of pretense. Occasionally, an actor or actress will be praised for “disappearing” into his or her part—making the audience forget that this is a person playing a part. The person living in bad faith tries to do the same—disappear into a role. Only, in this case, Gob’s audience is himself.

Let’s dive a little deeper. For Sartre, there are two kinds of things in the world: beings-in-themselves (
en-soi
) and beings-for-themselves (
pour-soi
). Beings-in-themselves simply are what they are. They are defined by other beings, often before they even exist. For instance, a carpenter builds a table. Before he begins to build, he defines his project. He chooses the materials, designs the table, and establishes what his finished product will be and what it will be used for. Before it comes into existence, the table has its essence assigned to it. The carpenter is a being-for-itself. Unlike the table, the carpenter doesn’t have a pre-given essence. He chooses to become a carpenter, just as he chose to build a table. Humans are beings-for-themselves, and as such we are free beings. Unlike a table, a human can choose to be this or that. When we try to deny this fact, this freedom, we enter into the realm of bad faith. Bad faith consists in acting as though one was not free, as though one was a being-in-itself. As Sartre says, “The waiter in the café cannot be immediately a café waiter in the sense that this inkwell
is
an inkwell, or the glass is a glass.”
5

Although most of the Bluths lie to themselves, or try to, Gob is uniquely suited to guide our discussion of bad faith. Gob is sometimes like most of the rest of the Bluths—selfish, narcissistic, vain, and worse—but he is also often driven by a need to be thought well of by others. His quests for his father’s approval and Michael’s respect, for acceptance by the world at large, for love and self-respect, all lead Gob to deny his freedom, to disappear into parts, to live in bad faith.

Gob Plays His Roles

Michael also engages in bad faith. At least in the final season, much of Michael’s motivation is wrapped up in how he’s viewed by others. It’s not so much that he
is
a good person, as that he needs to be
seen
as
a good person. He, like Gob, is playing a part. Michael plays the part of the good one, the selfless one, the reliable one, “the living saint,” the put-upon member of the Bluth family. Michael’s acts of bad faith do not form the core of his existence, though. In this, Gob is unique. He is so bound to his bad faith that his life would be shattered without it.

Just consider Gob’s various careers. He began the show as a magician (illusionist!), moved on to being the titular president of the Bluth Company, and then became a ventriloquist—taking temporary gigs along the way as a waiter, a pimp, and an executive at a rival development company. Gob isn’t especially good at any of these jobs; for some he has no qualifications at all, and he knows it. But he desperately wants to be good at all of them. In each career, he tries to fill the role to a T. As a magician (illusionist!), he founded the Magician’s Alliance—only to be blacklisted by them (“Pilot”). As president of the Bluth Company, he tried hard to imitate his father—wearing George Sr.’s suit and firing everyone (“Afternoon Delight”). In each case, Gob behaves in the way he thinks he ought to, rather than recognizing and accepting that he is making free choices.

Sadly, Gob’s bad faith isn’t limited to his “professional” life. It also plagues his romantic relationships and encounters. In particular, it was ever present in his relationship with Marta. Recall his hasty decision to make up with her. The instant she accepts, Gob realizes that he’s “made a huge mistake” (“Key Decisions”). What was his mistake? From Sartre’s perspective, Gob’s mistake was that he denied his freedom, but not in the same way that anyone who enters a relationship denies his freedom. Gob denied his freedom by treating himself as “any man.” Convinced by Michael that any man would be lucky to have Marta, Gob acts as “any man” should. The trouble is that Gob isn’t “any man.” No one is. Gob is an individual, and as such does not fit into the mold of “any man.” In getting back together with Marta, he denied that fact about himself.

Gob’s brush with matrimony is likewise rife with bad faith. We can see this in two aspects of his marriage to the “Bride of Gob,” played by Amy Poehler (the character, although appearing in several episodes, is never named other than Gob’s misguided attempt to remember her name, when prompted by Michael). First, there’s Gob’s continuing insistence that the marriage was consummated, in spite of his inability to remember the event. Then there’s the fact that Gob briefly slips into the role of the ideal husband, or at least of the long-suffering husband.

One of Gob’s previous romantic encounters led to another instance of bad faith. We are not told much about his relationship with Eve Holt beyond the fact that it resulted in Steve Holt (!). Gob’s relation to Steve involves bad faith in two ways. First, there are Gob’s various attempts to deny that Steve is, in fact, his son. In a confrontation with Michael, Gob even denies the validity of DNA tests:

Gob
: Hey, can you do me a favor? A young neighborhood tough by the name of Steve Holt will be dropping by, and . . .

Michael:
Your son?

Gob
: According to him.

Michael:
And a DNA test.

Gob
: I hear the jury’s still out on science. [“Notapusy”]

Accepting one’s freedom also means accepting the consequences of one’s choices. Gob goes to extremes to deny this particular consequence, however. At one point he goes so far as to dose himself with a Forget-Me-Now (“Forget-Me-Now”).

On the other hand, when Gob does acknowledge Steve as his son, he goes to the other extreme, once again trying to play a role for which he’s unsuited. Like many parents, Gob decides he won’t make the same mistakes his parents did. So, instead of mimicking the absentee parenting of his father, Gob attempts to mimic the parenting style of Ward Cleaver. For instance, in “Making a Stand” Gob opens a banana stand with the help of Steve Holt (!). By including Steve, he’s trying to avoid being the neglectful father that George Sr. was. The trouble is that Gob isn’t Ward Cleaver. He’s an adult in name only.

The examples we’ve considered so far all seem to point to the conclusion that bad faith is, well, bad. But if we look at some of the times when Gob is happiest, or making others happiest, he’s living in bad faith then as well. The example that springs to mind is when Gob plays catch with his father in the prison yard. Gob knows full well that he is not that kind of son, nor is George Sr. that kind of father. Nevertheless, they both have their fun—until Gob gets stabbed by White Power Bill (“Key Decisions”).

Be Yourself, Gob

Although bad faith generally seems to work out for Gob, there’s a reason Sartre labels it “bad” faith. Gob seems happiest when living a lie, but his happiness doesn’t make the lie any more honest. Further, given the number of bad faith scenarios we’ve outlined, it would seem difficult
not
to live in bad faith. Indeed, it is. Sartre acknowledges as much. He says, “If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being.”
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In everything we do, there is always the risk of bad faith. It is a constant temptation to simply play our role in life. Consciously trying not to be in bad faith can itself be a form of bad faith. Sartre calls this form of bad faith “sincerity.” If we tell Gob that instead of living in bad faith he should be sincere or just be himself, Sartre will laugh at us in a mocking, French way.

Recall the definition of bad faith: treating a thing that is for-itself as a thing that is in-itself. By Sartre’s understanding, any demand for sincerity does just this. He even says, “The essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith.”
7
When we ask Gob to be sincere, we are not asking him to accept his essential and radical freedom, or his responsibility for the events in his life. Instead, we are acting as though there’s some other independent essence of Gob—his Gobness, we might say, just as there’s an essence of being a chair (it’s “chairness”). In demanding sincerity, we want Gob to act in conformity with his Gobness, to play the role of Gob as we’ve come to know and tolerate him. This involves denying his freedom just as much as any other form of bad faith. Just because Gob is playing the role of Gob doesn’t mean that he isn’t playing a role.

Since sincerity itself is just another form of bad faith, we seem to be left with few, if any, options. We are doomed to lives of bad faith, and we might as well get used to them. All is not so bleak, however. The term
bad faith
already points the way to the alternative:
good faith
. So what is good faith? How is it distinguished from sincerity? And what happens when someone lives in good faith? Remember, the problem with sincerity boils down to treating someone as something that he or she is
not
. For Gob to be “sincere,” he must treat himself as though he had no choice but to act in this way. But the facts are otherwise. Gob is a radically free being. Whatever he is doing at the moment, be it an illusion or talking to his brother or having sex with his former high school civics teacher, he chose to do it—and he can choose to quit.

Good faith, then, is not “being oneself” but accepting the type of being one is, accepting radical freedom and responsibility (the two go together). It’s a frightening prospect: to live without identifying with one’s roles, without guidelines telling one how to live. It is a goal that is rarely achieved because it is difficult to break out of our roles, or even to be sure that we have. Oddly enough, one of the few times that we certainly act in good faith is when we act ironically. For instance, Gob is acting in good faith when he pretends to be waiter. He knows he’s not a waiter. He’s just Gob, choosing to have a laugh at the idea that he’d work for a living.