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| Words by Curmudgeon Film Talk. Title image compliments of Green Ornstein. |
Garfield is super weird.
Sigh…
I suppose I should qualify that statement, but alas…all in good
time, dear readers. All in good time…
Garfield should require no introduction. The contentiously curmudgeonly cat is an icon of American comics,
and I’m guessing you wouldn’t have clicked on this article if you didn’t have
at least some prior familiarity.
Authored by Jim Davis in the mid-1970s - 1976/1978, specifically - the
adventures of Garfield follow a pretty standard format. Garfield is a
lazy, churlish feline with an obsession with lasagne and a propensity for
self-centredness, much to the chagrin of his owner, Jon.
It’d be far from controversial to say that most comic strips
lack longevity. After all, their family-friendly values and basic, slapstick
humour doesn’t translate so well to the modern day. Cultural milestones like The
Simpsons (1989-) saw to the death of traditional “values” in popular media
long ago, and it’s probably safe to say that the internet is rapidly overtaking
its printed counterparts by the second. The comic strip lives on in the form of
webcomics, which mostly cater towards the post-millennial audience, our bleak
humour, and our crippling, crippling depression (i.e. Sarah’s Scribbles,
Mr. Lovenstein, Extra Fabulous Comics, Shubbabang, I could go on
but you get the point). Those traditional strips with their lazy humour and saccharine
sensibilities have mostly been left behind, in a puddle of their own filth and
tears…
…but not Garfield.
Yes, you might have noticed that Garfield has suffered something
of a resurgence, lately. I say 'suffered,' because it’s not so much a “Garfield
rose on the third day” as it is a “Garfield’s partially rotted corpse was
exhumed using forbidden magic.”
Unluckily for you, I'm bored, have nothing better to do, and have absolutely no shame. Who better to take a needlessly analytical deep-dive into the most uninviting corners of internet fandom?
So; what say you, friends? Would you like to join me as we
take a trip down ͕͗Ɠ͕͕͗͗α͕͕͗͗я͕͕͗͗f͕͕͗͗ι͕͕͗͗є͕͕͗͗Ɩ͕͕͗͗ɗ͕͗ avenue,
into ͕͗Ɠ͕͕͗͗α͕͕͗͗я͕͕͗͗f͕͕͗͗ι͕͕͗͗є͕͕͗͗Ɩ͕͕͗͗ɗ͕͗
lane, grab a pint of ͕͗Ɠ͕͕͗͗α͕͕͗͗я͕͕͗͗f͕͕͗͗ι͕͕͗͗є͕͕͗͗Ɩ͕͕͗͗ɗ͕͗ and
chase down the mutated, amorphous ͕͗Ɠ͕͕͗͗α͕͕͗͗я͕͕͗͗f͕͕͗͗ι͕͕͗͗є͕͕͗͗Ɩ͕͕͗͗ɗ͗
before he lays waste to the entire town of Slough?
The Meme-ification of Garfield
LET’S TALK ABOUT MEMES (I promise it’s relevant).
The word “meme” is graspable yet totally elusive. I mean, we
all understand memes, don’t we? They litter our Facebook feeds, we share
them among our friends to propagate our own bizarre, intangible humour. Those
privy to the workings of internet culture would know a meme when they saw one,
but could they define it?
Okay, bear with me, I am going somewhere with this.
The word itself, as you may know, originates from The
Selfish Gene (1976), penned by atheist darling Richard Dawkins. Dawkins
states:
Examples of memes are tunes,
ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from
body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool
by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be
called imitation. (The Selfish Gene, Dawkins, p.192).
In other words, a meme is basically a piece of information
that is repeated, imitated, from individual to individual. Through imitation,
there is proliferation.
But what happens when something is meme-ified?
I don’t think it would be fair to say that imitation and
repetition results in dilution. No, no…something much more fun
begins to happen.
In a basic form, a meme can serve as a cultural shorthand. Everybody familiar with meme culture knows what this means:
In a basic form, a meme can serve as a cultural shorthand. Everybody familiar with meme culture knows what this means:
Slap some original text on there, and you’ve got yourself a
shorthand. The monkey is guilty and embarrassed in equal measure, etc, you know
what I meme...uh...mean. But, sometimes, memes can take a piece of data and mutate
it, transform it into something else entirely. My favourite example of this
would be No Context Peep Show: various, random screencaps are extracted
from the popular British comedy and isolated. Without their proper context,
they’re left to metamorphose into something stranger…
S T R A N G E R…
This brings us to ol’ Garf. Garfield has experienced
a resurfacing as of recent, but not a legitimate one. Hell, there have
been some attempts to sincerely capitalise on the conspicuous cat, but they’ve
been met with hilarity; any praise they do receive is ironic. The most obvious
example of this is Garfield Eats, a bizarre attempt to make a (reportedly
revolting) fast-food chain out of Garfield’s name. It’s received much
attention, but only on account of sheer, troubled bewilderment. If anything, this
tone-deaf capitalist venture has only fuelled the fire of the online
fascination with the feline, and what lurks beneath Garfield’s inexplicable internet
identity…
Why is Garfield SO WEIRD?
So…the internet hasn’t exactly been kind to Garfield.
In the same way that various clips of acclaimed sitcoms can be isolated and
distorted from their original meaning, so too can Garfield.
There are some noteworthy examples of this. The YouTube
channel lasagnacat, for example – a creator who appears to use Garfield
as a platform to make uncomfortable, experimental films.
The rhythm of lasagnacat is as follows: one of Davis’s original strips is reiterated in live-action, with performers dressed
in fur-suits. Once the strip is acted out, it diverges into a bizarre…skit (?)
I’m tentative with the word ‘skit’ because they’re less skits than they are…uh…
…
Well, they defy description.
My personal favourite ‘skit’ from lasagnacat is simply
entitled “Sex Survey Results” (viewer discretion is very much advised,
but you can check it out here). In a deviation from the channel’s normal content
(if you can call it ‘normal’), what proceeds is not a post-modern
mangling of a pre-existing Davis comic. Instead, we’re…um…treated (?)…to
an almost five hour-long video, revealing the results of a telephone
“sex survey” in the form of knock-knock jokes. This format repeats for a
full four-and-a-half hours. Then, in the last eight minutes or so, it morphs
into an unfathomable, experimental film, involving hyper-fast ageing, living
mannequins, and a child-birth in a Polish school.
Frankly, I’m not intelligent enough to even attempt
unpacking the disturbing tail-end of the video. Perhaps it defies analysis.
Perhaps that’s the point, who knows. But content such as lasagnacat begs
the question: why is Garfield being abstracted in this way?
There’s an uncanny value to lasagnacat. This might
have something to do with the almost fantastical treatment of Davis’s
source material found in most of their videos. At its roots, though, I would
say that it primarily lies in the live-action treatment of the characters, from
which the rest springboards. When you think about it, however, there’s already
something uncanny about Garfield.
Garfield occupies an intangible liminal space between a
domesticated house-cat and an anthropomorphic being who can talk (or, at least,
thinks in full sentences) and is capable of consciousness, of self-realisation.
I mean, that’s weird, right? Although his canine counterpart, Odie, is
occasionally caught doing something eerily human (like typing on a keyboard,
etc), Odie still behaves like a dog, for the most part. Even those garbage
movie adaptations with Bill Murray portrayed Odie with an actual dog, while
Garfield maintained his canonically cartoony style. But Garfield…if Garfield is
capable of forming full sentences in his head, has opposable thumbs, is self-aware…isn’t
Garfield basically a person? Hell, Garfield even sits like a
person. And yet, Garfield is still treated as though he were a pet.
This might seem like such a simple thing to find so odd, but allow me to offer a comparison.
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| Credit: https://garfield.com/ |
This might seem like such a simple thing to find so odd, but allow me to offer a comparison.
Let’s think about Adventure Time (2010-2018) for a
moment. Specifically, let’s think about Jake the Dog.
Jake, like Garfield, is basically a person. He has his own
life and responsibilities, and he’s independent of Finn the Human. Finn is not
his owner, he’s not his guardian. Finn is his friend, and his adoptive brother.
Appropriately, he’s treated like a person. He even sustains romantic
relationships and has children. He’s got his feet planted firmly in the
internal logic of the show, for sure, but how we’re supposed to feel about him
is made pretty clear. He hasn’t opened up shop in the middle of the uncanny valley.
Sure, Garfield can’t literally talk, but he’s easily as
conscious and mentally sound as Jake. Yet, he still performs the song and dance
of the domestic pet. That’s weird, is it not? It just screams “hardcore
furry roleplay.”
That said, it isn’t so unimaginable that recent
meme-ifications of Garfield have situated him in such an uncanny fashion. He’s
already uncanny. Memes just abstracted him into a new realm.
I’d like to say “that’s that” and move on, but this is just
the tip of the iceberg. It gets a whole lot weirder from here, folks.
Get ready for r/imsorryjon.
r/imsorryjon (or, the subreddit that disturbed me so much I decided to write an internet article about how weird Garfield is)
Oh Jesus…r/imsorryjon…where do I even start?
Well…r/imsorryjon is a subreddit entirely structured upon
the strangest Garf memes. Again, viewer discretion is very, very much
advised, but you can find the subreddit here. It's honestly worth checking out, even if only for the sake of morbid curiosity. Its contributors are clearly very talented.
Its description is as follows:
Its description is as follows:
Garfield has abandoned His
limited form and He is beautiful. Surrender yourself to Him and be saved! Here
we celebrate our favourite cosmic entity with cattitude.
It’s particularly curious how Garfield’s pronouns have been
capitalised, as though he were some kind of ancient, unknowable deity.
As the description suggests, this batch of bizarre
shitposts re-imagines Garfield as a cosmic horror the likes of which even Cronenberg
or Lovecraft would dread. They mostly capture Jon’s sublime emasculation in the
presence of a creature beyond his comprehension, or our own, for that matter.
The imitative power of the internet community at its finest,
ladies and gentlemen. I have no idea who started it – and frankly, it’s
irrelevant - but clearly a large enough portion of Reddit’s user base latched
onto the idea to make it a thing. The subreddit is currently 777,000 users
in size, which isn’t anywhere near the largest subreddits on the website, but
it’s enough to demonstrate the clear, mimetic proliferation of its content.
The Garf towers menacingly over Jon like the otherworldly
entity that he is. Jon is dwarfed by the looming monstrosity before him. His
inability to conceive of such an astronomical horror is captured in his failure
to illuminate the creature with his measly flashlight. If you’re feeling especially
weird, you could point out the phallic nature of the flashlight and its ineptness
in the presence of The Garf. Regardless of Freudian psychoanalysis, there’s
this weird sense that Jon is neutered, sterilised like the domesticated house
pet. Their roles have reversed, you could say.
In the insane reality of r/imsorryjon, it’s made pretty
clear that Jon does not own Garfield. No…Garfield owns Jon…
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| Credit: https://www.instagram.com/rabid_sloth_attack/ |
But does Jon truly own Garfield in Davis’s original comics,
either? Hear me out for a second. It’s pretty obvious that Davis was trying to
capture something of the cat-like spirit in Garfield – the moodiness,
the laziness, the independence, the uncontrollability. It’s possible, however,
that Davis inadvertently illustrated a weirder element to Jon’s relationship
with his pet. In this sense, the nightmarish concoctions of r/imsorryjon are
actually less nonsensical than you might think. I would argue that they are –
like lasagnacat - a hyperreal distortion of traces already present
in Davis’s comparatively tame source material.
I think that, in his attempt to encapsulate and humanise the
free-spirited moodiness of a cat – the creature that cannot be owned – Davis ended
up weaving a relationship of emasculation into the narrative. For example:
That creepy little shit just showed Jon up.
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| Credit: https://garfield.com/ |
That creepy little shit just showed Jon up.
Jokes aside, there’s a bizarre kind of…cuckoldry, for lack
of a better term, present in their dynamic. The cat’s sassy dismissiveness is
manifested in Garfield in such a way that evokes the stereotypical, American
wise-guy routine. But Garfield’s perpetual belittling of Jon provides the faint blueprints
for something much worse. The above image, whereby Garfield keeps Jon
captive in a hole in the ground, is just an abstraction of the
relationship already present in Davis’s text. Garfield owns Jon. Why not take
it a bit further?
None of this is to say that Garfield is as downright insane
as the internet has made him. All I’m saying is meme culture has made a monster
out of characteristics that were already there. It is these
characteristics which have afforded Garfield, as a comic, the longevity
it wouldn’t have achieved otherwise. After all, what of American Splendour
(1976-2008), Marmaduke (1954-2015), all the other once-popular comic
strips which have yet to see the same, horrendous treatment?
Uh…please don’t take that as a challenge.
We learned nothing. Did you honestly believe you could click on an article titled "Garfield is Super Weird" and actually learn something?
Honestly, we've really only scratched the surface. I've made some kind of effort to make sense of this crazy phenomenon, but truthfully, it can't be made sense of. Words cannot capture how complexly peculiar these Garfield-themed, internet subcultures truly are. You might even say that writing over 2000 words about it would be a waste of time.
...
*Cough*
In either case, what fascinates me most is that these works transcend Davis's original comic by leaps and bounds. Sure, comedy is subjective. But the Garfield comic occupies a position of safety and vapidity so securely that it ceases to be more than mediocre at best. One could say that these nightmarish deviations from Davis's vision are interesting despite their horror elements. After all, many contributions to this perplexing internet subculture demonstrate some pretty incredible, expressionistic art work.
Such a statement would be unfair, though. They're not remarkable in spite of their horror. They're remarkable because of it.
See more: How to Travel with a Salmon
What did we learn?
We learned nothing. Did you honestly believe you could click on an article titled "Garfield is Super Weird" and actually learn something?
Honestly, we've really only scratched the surface. I've made some kind of effort to make sense of this crazy phenomenon, but truthfully, it can't be made sense of. Words cannot capture how complexly peculiar these Garfield-themed, internet subcultures truly are. You might even say that writing over 2000 words about it would be a waste of time.
...
*Cough*
In either case, what fascinates me most is that these works transcend Davis's original comic by leaps and bounds. Sure, comedy is subjective. But the Garfield comic occupies a position of safety and vapidity so securely that it ceases to be more than mediocre at best. One could say that these nightmarish deviations from Davis's vision are interesting despite their horror elements. After all, many contributions to this perplexing internet subculture demonstrate some pretty incredible, expressionistic art work.
Such a statement would be unfair, though. They're not remarkable in spite of their horror. They're remarkable because of it.
See more: How to Travel with a Salmon
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