One of my earliest blog posts was an essay defending Johnny Bravo from a feminist perspective. In my defense of it, I mentioned in passing that one of the ways that the series still falls short of truly being a feminist show was that it potentially diminishes how detestable his behavior towards women is.
This post is partially a response to that one. I grossly undercut how pernicious the show’s treatment of Johnny’s behavior towards women is.
One thing that is important to point out is that Johnny Bravo was a show that was created by and mostly if not entirely written and directed by men. From the top of my head, the biggest names I can think of that been attached to the show are Van Partible, Butch Hartman, Seth MacFarlane, John McIntyre, Gene Grillo, Jed Spingarn, Russell Calabrese, Kirk Tingblad, and Craig Bartlett. I also feel I should be clear about this as well. If I haven’t mentioned this already, I absolutely love Johnny Bravo. As a kid, it was my favorite Cartoon Cartoon after Ed, Edd n Eddy and as an adult it still remains a favorite of mine. In my own circles, the only other animation fans I have talked to who were also fans of Johnny Bravo were other men. I have plenty of female friends who are animation fans and grew up watching Cartoon Network in the early-mid ’00s and none of them I talked about Johnny Bravo with cared for it very much. I know this is purely anecdotal, but I suspect that this example speaks to my female friends’ experiences with the subject matter Johnny Bravo’s central focus is on vs. mine and my other male friends’ experiences with it.
One way that I think Johnny Bravo falls short in this regard is that it frames all of the women Johnny makes a move on as interchangeable, in their personalities and their designs. Most of them aren’t even given names. I understand that this is a show framed strictly from Johnny’s perspective and I don’t doubt for a second that he sees all the women as interchangeable. However, the show never challenges that framing, and this is a show that has no problem putting Johnny back in his place in every other regard. Since the show was so focused on Johnny, viewers never got a good perspective of what those women go through in their lives (because Johnny’s not the only man who treats any of them like a piece of meat) with the exception of the season four episode “Witch-Ay Woman”. I understand that doing this would have made Johnny Bravo a very different show, but as it is a shortcoming is still a shortcoming nonetheless.
This brings me to the other shortcoming of the show. Even though Johnny Bravo was constructed to be a satirical takedown of meat-headed male chauvinists like our titular character, audiences have long been trained to sympathize with the protagonist in a given piece of media. As an example, a few years back CNN caught flak for their coverage of the Steubenville rape case because their coverage centered around how devastated the rapists must have felt hearing the guilty verdict and only mentioned the rape victim in passing. Getting back to Johnny Bravo, the quandary the creators found themselves in is that although they want to use the character to denounce male chauvinism, they can’t make him so reprehensible that nobody would have a good reason to watch (a good example of utterly deplorable characters making a satire unwatchable is the short-lived Lil’ Bush). So they responded by making Johnny really funny, charismatic, and endearing in his stupidity and failures. Problems arise because oftentimes the endearing aspects of characters like Johnny obfuscate whatever satirical critique they were supposed to represent (see Homer Simpson, Archie Bunker, Eric Cartman, Glen Quagmire, Rick from Rick & Morty, Tony Montana, Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street). Since the audience is not granted as much exposure to all of the women Johnny makes moves on, it’s harder to empathize with them than with Johnny, even if it’s easy to understand why they all beat the crap out of him.
This brings me to a bigger quandary about satire that all satirists and aspiring satirists have to grapple with. In short, doing effective satire is hard. Really hard. Effective satire has to carefully thread that fine line between authorial intent vs. death of the author with whatever statement the author intends to make intact and clear to the wider audience. It is really easy for satire to fail somewhere and when satire fails, it inadvertently reinforces the idea it had attempted to take to task.
Speaking of a satirist often criticized for his portrayal of women, I think Robert Crumb is often a great case-study of satire that often fails. There are definitely instances where his satire succeeds (this example is extremely graphic, so I’m only gonna share the first page of it, you can look up the rest yourself if you want to), but there are also many times where his satirical point is lost on me or on audiences in general. The most infamous examples of this are his are “When the Niggers Take Over America” and “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America”. These examples are particularly infamous because white supremacist groups took these comics at face value and used them for recruitment. I suspect that Crumb’s thought process behind these pieces are that the racism/antisemitism in them is so over-the-top that nobody could possibly believe this and that nobody could mistake him for being racist/antisemitic because his adoration for many African-American blues artists and marriage to a Jewish woman have long been public knowledge.
The problem is the first line of thinking is that Crumb naively underestimated how fanatically unhinged the beliefs of many racist/antisemitic people actually are. The problem with the second line of thinking is that first of all, one can still perpetuate racism/antisemitism (intentionally or inadvertently) without explicitly holding those beliefs. Second of all, the extent to which Crumb himself is not racist has never been clear to me. I don’t think he necessarily believes all the stuff he portrayed in “When the Niggers Take Over America”, but I was never clear on what his point was with Angelfood McSpade and his constant portrayal of black people with sambo imagery in his older comix. I’ve heard many times before that all that imagery was satirical but it never differentiated from intentionally racist imagery to me. I suppose the sambo drawings are consistent with the 1920s aesthetic he drew his other characters with (Ku Klux Klan membership was at an all-time high in the 1920s), but that’s not a critique of racism. I have always interpreted Crumb’s work as an expression of his id, unfiltered in its ugliness for all to see. Just as Crumb has always been uncomfortably candid in sharing his sexual proclivities in his work (and in a way that is not at all flattering to himself), I always interpreted his sambo drawings as his own admission to his own latent racism (and his portrayals of women as his own latent misogyny). It is what it is, but it ain’t a satire of racism.
To get back to Johnny Bravo, I stand by my assertion that its conception was an attempt of showing deference toward women and the advances they have made in society since the days of Pepe Le Pew. But I’m more aware now of how it falls short than I was before and I thought it was important to be clear on that.
Further viewing:
Cartoon Essays 