DIALOGIC COMMUNICATION IN BOJACK HORSEMAN 1

Dialogic Communication in the Opening Montages Of Bojack Horseman

Dhananjay Rajendran

M.Phil Student

Department of English

University of Calicut

In Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin lays out his discourse typologies as a “system by which complex

aesthetic information may be explicated”, based on his notion that a novel is a “site for the dialogic interac-

tion of multiple voices, or modes of discourse, each of which is not merely a verbal but a social phenome-

non” (Bagby, 1982, p.37; Abrams and Harpham, 2008, p.77). Lewis Bagby demonstrates how Bakhtin’s ap-

proach allows us to identify how the authorial voice in a text interacts with other discourses produced

through narrative techniques like stylisation, individualised and sociotypical reported speech, parody or hid-

den polemic (p.37).

However, Dimitri Anastasopoulos’ observation in the context of political discourses, that persisting with the

author-narrative-reader paradigm as a means to understand the development of narratives misses the frag-

mentation of narration behind a facade of authorial intention, becomes an occasion to think anew about the

TV show as a dialogic contemporary cultural form that displaces authorship across time, space, media and a

dynamic group of agents (2011). The position of the “reader” is likewise replaced by socially mediated

publics that are, in the words of Mizuko Ito, “reactors, (re)makers and (re)distributors, engaging in shared

culture and knowledge through discourse and social exchange as well as through acts of media reception”

(quoted in Boyd, 2010). This paper attempts a very limited examination of dialogic activity in the set of 54-

second-long animated video montages that play at the start of episodes of BoJack Horseman.

BoJack Horseman is an animated show that premiered on Netflix from 2014 to 2020. The show’s scope ex-

panded considerably over the seasons, making it a culturally significant body of work that also utilised its

meta-ness to engage with issues surrounding mental health, racial and gender justice that were gaining trac-

tion both within the entertainment industry of the USA and the wider internet publics in the late 2010s. It re-

volves around the life and (mis)adventures of the eponymous hero, an anthropomorphic horse and 90’s sit-
DIALOGIC COMMUNICATION IN BOJACK HORSEMAN 2

com star, as he struggles to stay relevant in a semi-fictionalised version of Hollywood. The show is set in a

world where anthropomorphic animals live and work side by side with human beings. It is populated by a

mixture of fictional characters and fictionalised versions of real Hollywood personalities. A network of con-

temporary “cultural scripts” that are familiar to viewers with a shared social and cultural context drive the

show’s plot (Alberti, 2019) even while it is placed in a highly plastic world where characters are capable of

apparently absurd actions that then become part of the show’s reality. For instance, after BoJack steals the

“D” from the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign in an attempt at a romantic gesture, everyone in the show’s uni-

verse starts referring to the industry as Hollywoo. This reaction is absurd on the surface, but it is intelligible

to viewers familiar with the entertainment industry’s “short memory”.

Netflix and other streaming platforms now offer a “Skip Intro” button to streamline the bingewatching expe-

rience and enable the user to get straight to the action, but BoJack Horseman has opening sequences that

manage to simultaneously mark the developments on the show and foreshadow BoJack’s eventual fate.

Through the first five seasons they retain a fixed template that consists of the following six scenes: establish-

ing shots that pan into BoJack’s house at sunrise, the interior of his home, a scene representing his work life

during the season, BoJack getting drunk at a party hosted at his house, BoJack in the pool, and lastly, a pan

out of his house as the sun rises again the next day. Within these scenes, changes to the surroundings and the

characters present in the background track major developments in the show’s plot. In the sixth season, scenes

two to four mount a string of BoJack’s memories before returning to the shot of him falling into his pool.

Although discourses in this text pass through multiple levels of mediation, what we have noted above comes

closest to Bakhtin’s “direct unmediated discourse”, inasmuch as they convey a chain of events centred

around BoJack (Bagby, 1982, p.37). The sequences taken singly may be read as narratives that follow a

structural pattern resembling William Labov’s scheme of “orientation, complicating action and resolution”

(Georgakopoulou and Goutsos, 2000). But as a show that released a season every year for five years (each

containing twelve episodes each, all released at once) and a sixth season over two years (in two parts of eight

episodes each), the overall narrative structure moves recursively until the final climax towards the end of the

sixth season. The second and third scenes from the opening sequence within BoJack’s home across the sea-

sons capture this pattern as they snapshot his deteriorating relationship with his significant others, so that af-
DIALOGIC COMMUNICATION IN BOJACK HORSEMAN 3

ter the events of the third season his home is empty and he is beset with thoughts of having ruined his most

important personal and professional relationships; by the fifth season, it becomes difficult to distinguish be-

tween the second and third scenes, reflecting how his confusion between personal and professional spheres

has snowballed into a slackening grip on reality.

The montages start off with a presentation of BoJack Horseman the Hollywood actor, zooming in on his life-

style even before we get a sense of his life. The geography of his Los Angeles home itself, situated between

a spacious driveway and a precipitous slope on the Hollywood hills, and literally propped up on stilts, mir-

rors LA’s existence in what Mike Davis phrased as a “tension between myths of sunshine … and their noir

antithesis” (quoted in Doherty, 2021). Sociotypical features like his enforced hyper-visibility and loss of

work-life boundaries, as we see in scene four of the opening sequence when his house doubles as a site for

his participation in the entertainment industry, clue us into the narrative’s suggestion of the generalisability

of BoJack’s condition.

Eleanor Robertson argues that “making BoJack a horse allowed (show creator Raphael) Bob-Waksberg and

Netflix to fudge the fact BoJack Horseman was really just another series about a middle-aged white guy”

(Alberti, 2019, p.1). John Alberti reframes this observation into the following question: “what is the effect of

making a middle-aged white guy into a middle-aged brown horse?” (p.1). He argues that the “surreality of

how ‘human’ he is coupled with his signifiers of horsiness … denaturalise(s) the idea of the “middle-aged

white guy” and instead focus(-es) on the middle-aged white guy as a social construct, a structural subject po-

sition within the power matrices of patriarchal white supremacy” (p.4-5). Alberti argues that his reading of

BoJack as a representation of a middle-aged white Hollywood celebrity is supported by instances in the

show, where BoJack and his publicists fall back nimbly on well-worn cultural scripts like going to rehab or

garnering attention with “male feminist” performances to repair his image and rebuild his career that are fre-

quently accessed by white Hollywood stars (p.9). A framed poster and a framed magazine cover, both from

his time on Horsin’ Around and shown in scene two of the opening sequences, provide additional support to

this argument by revealing how BoJack’s career-making show is modelled on the 90s sitcom Full House

starring actors Bob Saget and John Stamos where these surrogate parent figures’ whiteness is a key unac-

knowledged figuration of universalness, and his cop drama Philbert which plays on his TV screen during the
DIALOGIC COMMUNICATION IN BOJACK HORSEMAN 4

opening sequence in season five is again reminiscent of the white male anti-hero stereotype that BoJack is

meant to evoke.

Michael Doherty argues, however, that BoJack Horseman attempts to avoid feeding what Emily Nussbaum

calls the “bad fan” phenomenon, where certain viewers identify “positively and uncomplicatedly” with the

antihero protagonist, by letting Mr. Peanutbutter — and, I add, others in the show’s universe who exercise

power in the multiple and shifting hierarchies of the entertainment industry — “live in a world of cartoon

consequentiality” (2021).

BoJack’s thoughtless and wilful actions have consequences, even if they are delayed. On the other hand, Mr.

Peanutbutter, a Labrador Retriever and BoJack’s friend/rival in show business, does not have to face such a

kind of moral reckoning (Doherty, 2021). In the text of the opening sequences, this is evident in how their re-

spective characters are presented. BoJack, in the foreground, cannot escape the viewers’ gaze. His framing

also positions him as a mirror image in relation to the viewers. He is acutely aware of his actions and tortured

by his inability to break the vicious cycle he is trapped in even as he continues to hurt others and himself.

Through most of the sequence we are locked into an eye level medium close up frame of BoJack, creating at

the same time the impression of an undistorted perspective and a sense of identification with the protagonist.

In the first and third seasons, Mr. Peanutbutter appears in the background in the third scenes. For about four

seconds of the opening sequences for the third season, we see not only his sunny disposition and eagerness to

be liked and validated by the media, but also his apparent blindness to the effects of his actions (here, on Di-

ane Nguyen, a primary character on the show and BoJack’s ghostwriter-turned-friend who is married to Mr.

Peanutbutter for most of the first five seasons).

Thus, the establishment of BoJack as the protagonist through the opening sequences, in addition to its narra-

tive function, also attempts to anticipate (and precipitate) a moral consensus among the show’s “ideal” view-

ers. In a show where a logic of action and consequence, a logic of consistency governing individual charac-

ters’ behaviour, as well as non-narrative elements such as physical humour and wordplay interrupt each

other, BoJack’s actions and their consequences become the pre-eminent site where viewers search for the au-

thorial voice in the text. Here, I follow Barrett Watten’s use of the phrase “nonnarrative writing strategies” to
DIALOGIC COMMUNICATION IN BOJACK HORSEMAN 5

mean “(those) which deferred or suspended at least one of the several distinguishing features of narrative”

(p.48).

The ideal viewer in this case is imagined as part of a public with other fans of the show, an atomised entity

whose ongoing project of constructing an ethical personhood is bound up with their engagement with the en-

tertainment industry. They also participate in the bi-directionality of communication (Baym and Boyd, 2012)

between the show and its viewers, achieved through socially mediated responses characterised by virality or

other modes of in-group circulation in fan fora or comment wars under video clips circulated on YouTube.

This bi-directional engagement produces interesting effects.

In one well reported instance, Bob-Waksberg accepted fan criticism of Diane Nguyen’s character being

played by a white woman (Alison Brie) and responded by paying attention to the hiring process (both in the

writer’s room and in the studio) to make sure that representations of race on the show would no longer re-

main a cosmetic feature ( ). A less known instance involves a Twitter thread started by Diana Hussein, the

digital communications specialist at UNITE HERE, a hospitality workers’ union that functions across several

North American cities. She wrote: “Considering how unionised the entertainment industry is, I wonder how

many labor references have wound up on the cutting floor thanks to Hollywood executives somewhere in the

decision making process” (2020). And sure enough, Jake White — a lawyer for the International Alliance of

Theatre and Stage Employees, the union for stagehands and theatre replied with a screenshot that depicts

stagehands on a movie set, who happen to be ants, wearing I.A.N.T.S.E t-shirts (2020). Beyond the obvious

wordplay, this shot is also reveals more layers of mediation among which the authorial voice is displaced.

In a discussion featured on artofthetitle.com, Bob-Waksberg mentions that the template for the opening se-

quences is built on director Mike Roberts’ idea of “having this GoPro fixed camera on BoJack as he drifts

through his day”. Roberts goes on to mention in the same discussion that he drew inspiration for this mon-

tage from the music video for the song 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins (BoJack Horseman, 2014). The song it-

self is a nostalgic look back from 1995 at a group of (white) teenagers who are just old enough to see life as

full of possibilities and can think of death as something distant enough to sing: “And we don’t know/ Just

where our bones will rest to dust/ I guess forgotten and absorbed/ Into the earth below” (Corgan, 1:17 -
DIALOGIC COMMUNICATION IN BOJACK HORSEMAN 6

1:34). The attached camera, the pan shots of the party, and the pool outside, all feature in the music video.

This simultaneous congruence between the shots and images, and the stark difference in moods, give the

opening sequence the character of parody.

The presence of parody — an integral element of the carnivalesque (Bakhtin, 1984, p.4) — in the text, is not

an isolated occurrence. It is worth paying attention to the way the text interacts with the carnival spirit latent

in it. Consider first the narrative of the opening sequences: BoJack wakes up, drifts through his day, and

throws himself into the pool, only to end up in the final shot, floating on his pool with his shades on. By its

repetition, this sequence conjures an image of the carnivalesque cycle of renewal and rebirth, interrupted.

The show similarly sees the frustration of BoJack's attempts to (pun intended) turn his life around, as other

invisible circles of consequences catch up with him. In the montage, even his desperate action of flinging

himself over his parapet only lands him in his pool with his eyes still open. The deployment of parody in this

text, too, does not summon an “(orientation) towards the future” that is a hallmark of the carnival spirit

(p.33). Rather, it brings nostalgia for a time for a past when his stagnant present was not his future. It is also

hard to miss the omnipresence of official life in the opening sequence. BoJack’s home which serves as a mu-

seum of his has-been-ness, his significant others who are themselves part of the entertainment industry, the

party hosted at his home — an officialised version of the carnival symbol of the feast — which is always

also a networking event, are all sites where a “second life” is rendered impossible (p.6).

However, it is also this carnival spirit evident in the opening montage that finally allows the show to move

beyond a narrative coherence that establishes BoJack’s character for viewers to set themselves up as judges.

The show does not promise to administer justice upon BoJack on behalf of its viewers. It ends on a note of

ambivalence — BoJack is scheduled to return to prison (he was out on parole to attend the wedding of his

former agent and friend, Princess Carolyn — a feast, in the final episode) for a few more months, and he has

all but accepted that his most important relationships may never go back to what they were. But there is a fu-

ture for him, and there is a world for him outside the entertainment industry.
DIALOGIC COMMUNICATION IN BOJACK HORSEMAN 7

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