Playing those Existential Blues
Do you remember that movie by Steve Martin “The Lonely Guy“? Didn’t think so. It’s a little know Martin vehicle that tells the tale of a suddenly single man struggling to find love and purpose and in his life.
I saw it when I was eighteen, my soon to be ex-girlfriend had left for college I was months away from active duty and I was killing time till then. A bunch of us were kicking it at Herbie’s house ’cause he had cable. We were all big Martin fans and so we started watching “The Lonely Guy“. We were laughing through the first half of the movie ragging on each other that this or that scene was taken from their life. It soon dawned on us that we were the character in the movie and the laughter ended.
It is a good movie but it made us think long and hard about our lives; sometimes I think that this is the reason Herbie Married LEX. We were all single and direction less contemplating college or career. Mine is the only generation I know that had midlife crisis in our twenties. In the go go eighties and nineties if you weren’t making piles of cash or starting a family you were pretty much a dead beat or a slacker.
In a similar vain as “The Lonely Guy“ is an on-line comic strip Garfield 
minus Garfield. Like many people my age I enjoyed the early years of this comic and proudly placed a stuffed replica of the pasta loving feline in my car window. But alas all good things must come to an end and so did Garfield.
What’s that you say; “But Garfield is still running.”, “I read it every day in my paper.”, “They’re working on a third movie.”. My point is there hasn’t been a good ‘Garfield‘ comic in decades. The strip has become derivative of it’s self, repeating fat jokes and pasta quips repeatedly, a sure sign it’s past it’s prime. The antithesis would be ‘Get Fuzzy‘ with it’s sharp word play and layered secondary characters that give the even deeper leads plenty to play with.
Into this figurative and literal two dimensional world stumbled a genius able to see past the one note name sake and see the story behind the fluff. The site says it best:
“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.”
When you think about it in real terms; only the mentally disturbed or terminally lonely converse with their pets. Anthropomorphizing your cat into a person you talk to and answers you back is not the sign of a healthy mind. In psychobabble terms Jon Arbucle is projecting his need for aformation onto his pets but his subconscious, feeding on his depression, reflects his self loathing off his pets back to himself. So his cat is just a cat and the snide remarks are Jon’s ego manifesting and berating himself for his lack of initiative. Yeah he’s that screwed up.
The absolute brilliance of G-G is the removal of the surrogate i.e., the cat, leaving Jon trapped in his own mind. We see a man stripped of his defenses naked to the world suffering though bouts manic depression, paranoia, worthlessness and some things to disturbing to contemplate. This is the lonely guy taken the nth degree. Yes I do see people I know as well as my self reflected in the eerily existential story within this strip.
Jim Davis would do well to consider branching out into edgier fare. He obviously has a lot of angst buried within himself as the edits on G-G shows. The problem is that the ironic artistry would probably be lost once it passed though marketing.
-CJ
