Rick and Morty: Are We Free to Imagine?

this video is brought to you by ren [Music] what's up guys michael here to unpack the wild two-part finale of season five of rick and morty the last two episodes dropped back to back putting a bow on a season that's been a little all over the place featuring incisive commentary on things like climate change and objectively dumb detour into incestual space babies and a lot of bird-based content in between and not to reveal ourselves as overly predictable political philosophy nerds but episode 10 had our ears perking up when the show explicitly talked about capitalism it's a metaphor for capitalism morty what do you think twice wow i thought my capitalism metaphor was on the nose so what are the writers trying to say and is what they're saying actually smart and above all did it effectively tie up this wild season let's find out in this quick take on rick and morty are we free to imagine and as always spoilers ahead but before we get into it i want to give a shout out to this video sponsor ren if you're paying attention which you presumably are then you're nodes outgrowing more and more concerned about climate change and many folks are wondering what they can do and specifically how they can cut back on their own carbon footprint rent is a website that helps you calculate your carbon footprint and then shows you how you can offset your footprint by funding projects that do things like plant trees and protect rainforest ren knows that you might not have the time and energy to spend your weekends getting sweaty and dirty planting trees so they make it easy for you to help fund those projects i was excited to learn about ren's biochar in california project which removes dead trees from redwood forests with high fire risk and turns them into biochar a stable form of carbon that lasts for thousands of years as someone that lives in california it feels good to know that ren has projects that directly impact important local issues so to get started all you have to do is 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toxic as ever between rick and morty rick and the rest of the smith family and rick and a recently resurrected bird person just to name a few most obviously morty is stuck in rick's endless cycle of abuse summer you idiot we're not decoys why did i get punished he's constantly belittled with rick even replacing him as a sidekick with a pair of crows which he picked through a price's right style spinning wheel just to be a dick i never said you're worthless in fact i've given you a very clear metric of your worth two crows what's more rick only seems to care about morty when he can get something out of him hell the entire reason they adventure together is because morty's dumb little brain provides rick cover to hide from his enemies in the multiverse when a rick is with a morty the genius waves get canceled out by the uh morty waves their relationship seems to be largely transactional so when morty does break away from rick in these most recent episodes and seemingly bonds with this guy nick via their portal orifices it seems like he's finally found a partner who will respect and value him but not so fast eventually we find out that nick was also just using morty specifically to get access to rick's fancy tech morty has to literally sacrifice a hand to escape this new abusive relationship all the action of that movie 127 hours but in three seconds meanwhile rick starts training his new pair of winged sidekicks to whom he serves a similar platter of condescension and low expectations seeing them as only valuable for the various services they can provide and when we get to the citadel now run by evil president morty we find a world of rampant subjugation with hundreds of gruesome mortys laboring underground to power a cheerful futuristic metropolis massive weapon where president morty lives in well-protected luxury things only get darker when we learn that tons of jerry's and beth have been manipulated into mating in order to produce ever more mortys to keep the merry citadel functioning they've essentially been instrumentalized to provide an endless supply for the so-called morty market so what does all this have to do with capitalism before you accuse us of being depressingly obsessed with the economic system that everyone in pop culture loves to hate remember that the show drops the big c word twice first when rick produces a weird rick-haired blob who seems to get off on experiencing rick's battle wounds it's a metaphor for capitalism morty what do you think and then it comes up a second time wow i thought my capitalism metaphor was on the nose but let's go back to the blob for a second if we're to see the show as being sincere or as sincere you can be about a masochistic blob we could see the entire citadel as a critique of capitalist economies a manifestation of the harshest imaginable version of the capitalist system it's a world built and sustained on class bifurcation i.e the separation of a society into two separate classes where one gets to drink wine while the other never sees the light of day here the blob gets off on being defamed off of basically being tortured and abused to facilitate rick's craven pursuit of power power he couldn't obtain without a lower class rick blob to take the punches for him the show is seemingly telling us that anyone who wields power is usually doing so on the backs of something much uglier indeed each network of relationships that we see in the citadel is built upon pure exploitation a larger scale version of the kind of exploitative individual human relationship rick and morty have shared for all these years unfettered capitalism here becomes a metaphor for abusive relationships and it seems like they might be setting up an infinite cycle where abusive relationships lead to exploitative systems which lead to abusive relationships and so on and this repeats endlessly in a seemingly infinite number of dimensions with a seemingly infinite number of ricks abusing mortys without owning up to their cruel behavior none of them have to be responsible they're all victims of themselves oh it's so hard to be a genius in fact we learned that mortys are literally bred to be forgiving which reinforces the cycle of abuse geez you guys really are bred for forgiveness rick pathologically behaves like a dick morty pathologically forgives him and so the cycle can begin again in a universe dominated by all-powerful ricks there are only so many ways that any given morty can behave so many choices he has and how he responds to his material and emotional conditions similarly some critics of capitalism argue that the economic system thrives by offering all of us plebes the illusion of choice while simultaneously limiting our imaginations for what is possible this is what scholar mark fisher identified as capitalist realism i.e the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it this seems contradictory since so much of capitalism is based on supposedly rational actors making choices about how to interact in the free market and sure there's a free market we can pick from any of hundreds of health care plans but chances are most of those plans will cost about 33 of your income so how much choice do we really have and like most people most mortys don't see any choice other than to work within the system our central morty accepts a world where rick has power over him while constantly trying to convince rick to practice basic human decency morty's stuck in his own cycle of forgiveness of rick's abuse followed by hope that rick will eventually do better his choices are severely limited by the relationship structure created by rick's evil genius that's where evil morty comes in motivated by the emotional damage of seeing rick instrumentalize morty after morty for his own purposes he seeks to break out of this infinite loop to imagine an existence outside of the rick mandated universe is where a blue-headed geriatric jerk runs things good morty versus evil morty's approach to the problem of rick's abuse is like the difference between asking your exploitative boss to treat you better versus seeking out a new universe where bosses don't exist evil marty is obviously otherwise super evil it's hardly incidental that his goals are dependent on the forced labor of hundreds of other abused mortys but can we really break these cycles of abuse and arguably abusive social conditions that can accompany capitalism the show investigates that question in several ways first we see rick unexpectedly form an empathetic relationship with his crow's sidekicks when he learns how smart and badass they are rick stops seeing his bird friends as mere tools to serve his ends and sees their intrinsic value problem solved right not so fast we eventually find out that the crows were actually using rick as a rebound after breaking up with a very horny scarecrow what do you mean using me as a rebound this relationship had always been transactional and morty seeks out equality in his friendship with nick who it turns out was just using him too the show seems to suggest that even the most apparently heartwarming relationships still can't transcend systems of transaction and exploitation except for maybe beth and jerry but that's a topic for another day dr wong suggested we experiment we've been watching pornography together i might never come back and then we get to evil morty who's characterized as evil not because he's turned everyone's portal guns into murder machines but specifically because he wants to break out of the rick ruled system but this raises a question what if evil morty's desire to break free is the one good thing about him arguably he's freeing his imagination to consider not just making improvements to the citadel's brutal reality but tearing the whole thing down and freeing himself the show even makes the limitations of imagination inside rick's version of reality literal through the central finite curve which separates all the universes where rick is the smartest from all the universes where he's not on the side of the curve we know rick will always abuse morty will always forgive and there's no alternative to this system some scholars would call this analogous to the way we view capitalism in contemporary society any variation on capitalism is possible heck the united states will even demand it from certain countries in exchange for humanitarian aid but while you can revise capitalism any which way the adage attributed to frederick jameson remains it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism but the show eventually seems to suggest that evil morty's search for a reality outside the cycle of exploitation is a valuable goal with the season concluding as he blast into a different unknown universe presumably not run by any version of rick so maybe the show's writers are once again using the animated multiverse to get us to reflect on some of the nihilistic tendencies baked into our own society maybe they're digging even deeper into the dark depths of rick's relationship to morty or was this just a way to cram five seasons worth of canon and lore into a couple of episodes so the next season they can just get back to dark wacky serialized adventures i guess we'll all have to wait and see but what do you guys think is rick and morty slyly critiquing capitalism or just throwing us off dissent with the occasional reference what's next for evil morty and is there any real alternative to capitalism let us know your thoughts in the comments big thanks to our patrons for all your support hit that subscribe button like you're milking your own clone for blood and don't forget to ring that bell and as always thanks for watching later [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Wisecrack

Views: 310,367

Keywords: rick and morty, adult swim, dan harmon, rick sanchez, justin roiland, season 3, sci fi, rick and morty finale, morty smith, rick and morty live action, adult swim commercials, dan harmon rick and morty, cartoon network, cartoons, tv, rick and morty breakdown, rick and morty reaction, wisecrack, show me the meaning, deep or dumb, what went wrong, video essay, philosophy, psychology, culture binge, podcasts, tv analysis, film analysis, comedy, season 5

Id: akdz8NXhmx4

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Joseph_Furguson]

Wren.co. "Can't lift a finger to solve the climate crisis yourself? He's a way to spend money and assuage your guilt at the same time, like the liberal that you are. You have a sticker that says 'Black Lives Matter?' Well, that's good enough I guess."