First off, I’m not going to start with the Rick and Morty fan meme from Reddit, talking about how you have to be smart to like Rick And Morty. Because you don’t need to be a genius. If you get this joke, you get the whole show:
But there’s something to Rick and Morty that has a little of the same genius that exists in other projects Dan Harmon has been associated with. For me, it started with Rob Schrab’s Scud (still one of my favorite comic books), hit the through-line of Community (in my opinion the best sitcom of this era), then to Harmontown and Harmon Quest, and now to Rick and Morty. It isn’t that you need to be super-smart to enjoy this work (that’d be so pretentious), but rather it’s that there’s a little chunk of universal truth underneath the comedy.
Which brings me to this week’s episode of Rick and Morty and the profound implications it has for its audience. The rest of this post is going to be a great deal of me riffing and being nerdy. Bear with.
My frequent readers will know that along with getting mad about race, sharing teaching ideas, and talking about wrestling and games, one of my pet topics is identity and the idea of authenticity/reality. I dig my heels in pretty deep with Baudrillard then start to depart from his ideas in my own little rhizome. But I had another pocket-theory I’ve used before, a riff on how the narrator in Fight Club refers to single serving friends on flights. I was working on a theory of single-serving identities, those being the identities we form in specific communities ad specific times in order to accomplish specific things.
A single-serving identity can be extremely useful or it could be extremely deceptive. It could help or hinder. It could be reabsorbed into the whole of a coherent identity, or it could be discarded. In a sense, this idea came to me while watching the Joss Whedon show Dollhouse and trying to imagine that the ideas didn’t actually bleed together for the protagonist, trying to imagine that Echo could really be re-written and re-written, over and over, and could be different people. That’s a metaphor for how this world works, but it’s not realistic, of course. We can’t completely forget former selves.
So what might a single-serving identity look like? I’ll give you a perfect example of one. A blind date. Everyone’s been on a blind date in some capacity; it might not have been romantic, or it might have been digital, but almost all of us have been placed in a presumably highly intimate relationship with another person we’d never met before, went through the encounter, and come out the other side never to see the person again. Now the pragmatic person will claim “I was just me that whole time,” but were you?
Time to get highly personal. During my high school years, all those years ago, I used to go to journalism camp during the summer at Ball State. Journalism camp was a week of journalism training. I went both weeks my junior and senior summers, so I had 4 unique journalism camp experiences.
During one of those four week periods, I had a random roommate. He was a decent guy. He was from Detroit, liked sports, was passionate about photography and typestyling. We struck up a friendship. Then, in a shocking moment, I found out he was extremely racist. Like skinhead level racist. Now normally I’d have gone off over that, but I knew from the previous year that getting away from a roommate is difficult, and I knew that starting a fight about race with a skinhead probably wasn’t healthy for me. So I faded, for the last five days of that week, into my ability to pass and while I didn’t participate in any racist activities (and to be fair, it only came up in random ways– had he done anything truly hateful I’d have intervened), I let his little random jokes go. That wasn’t me. That was a single-serving identity.
I shared a story here a few months back about a blind date from Match.com with a girl who tried to hang herself with chicken wire. The Phill who went on a date with her was a single-serving.
I’ve spawned into games and played for an hour or so with an identity I later wouldn’t use again.
These things slowly snowball into parts of the real person we are. If you’ve read my reflections on playing my female blood elf rogue (it’s in my upcoming book as well as in a collection I contributed to), you know that I often think hard about how we reabsorb our created identities, what they say about us, etc.
This is where this comes around to Rick and Morty. Here’s the trailer for this week’s episode (you can find the whole episode on YouTube, but that’s not strictly speaking legal):
In the episode, Rick shows Morty to a room where he keeps all of the deposits from when Morty has had his “mind blown” and cannot handle a memory. This results in a whole room full of Morty experiences, essentially Morty identities. Some are times that Morty did something horrible. Others are times that Rick did something horrible.
About a third of the way through the episode, Morty asks “How can I ever learn if I just remove all my mistakes?”
And so we get to the heart of it all. Not to crack on millennials, but many of my students balk when I talk about the idea of building identities in various spaces, acting as if they can “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” their experiences and act as if, for example, being a terrible troll on a message board or screaming about “face raping” someone in a video game isn’t a part of who they are.
Morty in Rick’s room of removed memories is the absurdist version of this assertion. Morty has had all these things removed and as such cannot cope with who he is (an ironic revelation seeing as we know, as viewers, that this version of Morty remembers burying himself when he and Rick took over the lives of the Rick and Morty of this dimension). As he binges on his memories, he realizes how wrong it was to let this happen, and he lashes out at a Rick that he has accidentally erased all of the memories from.
Which leads us to the final irony of the episode. When Summer has to come and “resolve” the problem, there is an essential “Rick” and an essential “Morty” container, and she restores them and places them on the couch, resulting in them waking up with no memory of entering that room or what happened inside of it.
Because if we could neglect the fragments of our identity, and we came to see that we had done so, we couldn’t go back. Unless it was all undone.
And then we wouldn’t be who we were. We’d be who we are. Or who we were before we were who we were, the people we will always end up being. But not because of fate. In Rick and Morty’s world, we end up being who we were going to be because that version of us is the one they reinstall when we mess ourselves up. And so we never learn from history, and we are doomed to repeat it.
Wubba wubba dub dub.