The Venture Bros and Pynchon

[Daniel Harper]

Sorry in advance for the length here.

Many of you may not be familiar with the Adult Swim show _The Venture Bros_ 
(and to be fair, when I first saw it on the network I thought it looked 
pretty dang silly and underwhelming, like the rest of their lineup excepting 
one or two decent shows), so let me sum it up. _Venture Bros._ started out as 
a sort of pastiche of the old Johnny Quest animated series, making fun of the 
idea of teenage boys getting to be adventurers, but has grown into a 
brilliant satire of various types of pop culture, from old children's 
cartoons like Scooby Doo, to comic books like the Fantastic Four, to David 
Bowie. I'd highly recommend seeing the series in order, if anyone's 
interested, as only then do you get some of the depth of the characters and 
the references -- borrowing a friend's DVD set of the first season was what 
sealed it for me.

So the second season was released on DVD Tuesday, and series creator/writer 
Jackson Publick was interviewed in Reason (find the interview here: 
http://www.reason.com/news/show/119655.html) about what the whole thing is 
all about. One of the primary themes of the series is the failure of many of 
these highly pathetic characters. Let me quote from the interview:

=============QUOTE===================

[from the initial commentary on the series]

The Venture Brothers is a different beast. It flaunts all of the elements of 
the series on the adult/hipster animated landscape: irony, satire, 
uncomfortable pauses, outright parody. But as creators Jackson Publick and 
Doc Hammer frequently explain, the show is about failure. It's about the 
vision that inspired the science fiction wave of the 1950s and 1960s, the 
optimism of the space race, and the baby boomers' beloved, indulged idea that 
they could achieve anything they wanted.

These were ideas that satirized themselves. Awarding its 1966 "Man of the 
Year" award to the "Young Generation," Time magazine's editors saluted the 
boomers as the folks "who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common 
cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped 
world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war." Forty years later the 
boomers have disappointed no one as much as they've disappointed themselves, 
buckling in to watch movies about how great their parents were as they pop 
pills and build their Dennis Hopper-endorsed "Dream Books."

[...]

[from the interview itself]

Reason: Why create a sci-fi/adventure/action series about failure?

Jackson Publick: The basic idea of The Venture Brothers was taking the world 
of Jonny Quest and jumping back into 30 years later, seeing how someone who 
grew up like Jonny -- with that kind of space race enthusiasm and disregard 
for other cultures -- would turn out. Dr. Venture is a boy genius who didn't 
grow up to be what he should have been. Doc has really said it best: The 
beauty of failure is the beauty of human beings.

Reason: And I suppose you're not just talking about the failure of 
superheroes, because these fantasy science stories were produced by a culture 
that was high on superscience -- beating the Russians to the Moon, curing 
every disease, etc.

JP: That's the deeper thing behind it -- it's me voicing my disappointment 
that we don't have that kind of magic going on any more, that level of 
enthusiasm and hope. That extends to the kind of cultural stuff that was 
going on in the 60s, a youthful generation thinking they could change the 
world. I'm voicing my displeasure at having been born in a time when some of 
that magic, for lack of a better word, is gone, and some of those promises 
that were made in all of our pop culture were never met. My laptop is the 
coolest thing that's come out of that. I'm still waiting on my jet pack.

=====================END QUOTE==========================

And I began to think that this seems to relate to M&D and ATD in some very 
real ways. Consider the mechanical duck in M&D -- it has almost supernatural 
powers including the ability to move so fast that it cannot be seen, and and 
intelligence and purpose that exceed anything that we can even produce in 
computers and AIs even today. It's curious that Pynchon, with his historical 
research so well done in other ways, creates this incredibly unrealistic 
technological achievement -- he's got to have some reason for it.

And I think it may have something to do with that loss of optimism mentioned 
above. M&D and ATD are clearly heavily influenced by science fiction -- as 
Publick says in the interview, much of the SF of the middle of the last 
century was filled with a sense of hope and optimism for the future, so much 
so that many of the predictions made seem laughable today. Look no further 
than Clarke's _2001_, in which permanent moon bases have been in place since 
1992 -- and that book was published in 1968! Few serious writers today would 
attempt to consider commercial flights to the moon in a mere quarter century 
today; we're expecting it to take something like a decade just to repeat the 
achievements of the Apollo astronauts, let alone make remarkable strides 
forward.

Things like the mechanical duck, then, may be seen as the sort of optimism 
that the Age of Reason brought with it, that through applied science amazing 
wonders would be achieved, and many of the problems that have plagued mankind 
through the millennia would be conquered. And while many of these implicit 
promises have borne fruit (medical technology allows us to live much longer 
lives, technology makes us more comfortable, our understanding of the 
universe around us is much greater), many of the more grandiose claims of 
human improvement have not. We still have bigotry and intolerance, stupidity 
of our leaders takes many lives every year, and basic human nature is just as 
brutish as it ever was.

Likewise the grandiose theories of time and light in ATD. While we have made 
enormous strides in our understanding of the universe, we haven't built time 
machines and the like, and many of the ideas that were at the forefront of 
19th century physics are really just a pipe dream today. 

In any case, it's an interesting way of viewing the books, and I think it's a 
profitable one. Upon reflection I'm not remotely sure that the family in the 
show has a last name starting with "V" is a coincidence at all, although I've 
never heard of any comments from Publick that Pynchon is an influence.

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper
countermonkey.blogspot.com