Arrested Development and Philosophy Read online

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Part One: Family First

  Chapter 1: Is the Examined Life a Huge Mistake?

  The Life of Arrested Development Is Not Worth Living

  Michael: “The Good One, the Moral One, the Fool.”

  Gob: “They’re Laughing with Me, Michael, They’re Laughing with Me.”

  Lindsay: “You Call Yourself an Environmentalist, Why Don’t You Go Club a Few Beavers?”

  Tobias: “You Blow Hard.”

  The Arresting of Happiness

  Chapter 2: Kissing Cousins

  The Argument from Naturalism

  The Yuck Factor, and the Wisdom of Repugnance

  Chapter 3: Freudian Arrested Development

  Analysts and Therapists for the Bluths

  Use Your Allusion: Freud

  Perhaps an Attic Shall I Seek—The Unconscious

  Freud’s Company Model

  Prove It: Baiting the Unconscious

  Shémale and Misreadings

  Michael, Marta, Ann Other Freudian Slips

  Motherboy, or the Oedipus Complex

  Totem . . . : Boyfights

  . . . and Taboo: Les Cousins Dangereux

  Pop-Pop Gets Put on the Couch?

  Chapter 4: Don’t Know Thyself

  Gob Isn’t Just Deceiving Himself

  Gob Plays His Roles

  Be Yourself, Gob

  Gob Makes Huge Mistakes in Good Faith

  The Wisdom of Bad Faith

  Part Two: A Business Model

  Chapter 5: Dr. Fünke’s 100 Percent Natural Good-Time Alienation Solution

  Happy Bluthday to You! The Bluth Family History

  Marx and Alienation—Or, How to Never Succeed in Life While Really, Really Trying

  A Case of “Light Treason”: A Man Who Would Do Anything to Make a Buck

  Lucille and Gob

  Meet the Fünkes

  Michael

  Don’t Buy This Book! Down with Capitalism!

  Chapter 6: Family First

  Product Safety: The Cornballer

  Marketing Ethics: The Model Home

  Treatment of Employees: The Banana Stand and Child Labor

  Treatment of Employees: The Office and the Construction Site

  International Business: “Light” Treason

  Moral Development Arrested

  Chapter 7: Bourgeois Bluths

  Your Uncle Doesn’t Not Work Here Anymore: Marx, Labor, and Capital

  It’s a Gaming Ship: Consumption and Leisure

  There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand: Class Status and Performance

  I Thought You Meant of the Things You Eat: the Bluths and the Politics of the Family

  The Important Thing Is That You Guys Don’t Lose Focus on Yourselves: Narcissism as a Crisis of Bourgeois Identity

  Part Three: Some Huge Mistakes

  Chapter 8: What Whitey Isn’t Ready to Hear

  You There, Reading This Book . . .

  Whatever I Do, I Won’t Quote Hegel

  It Ain’t Easy Bein’ White

  Stuff Whitey Isn’t Ready to Hear; African-Americany Might Not Be Ready, Either . . .

  An Ethics of Identity

  Chapter 9: “I Just Blue Myself”

  I Christen This Ship the Lucille

  “I’ve Been a Horrible Mother.”

  “Blueing” Oneself

  The Hearer Doesn’t Just Lay There, Michael, If That’s What You Were Thinking

  Chapter 10: To Bias Tobias

  How to Solve a Problem Like Tobias

  A Gender Enigma

  The Man Inside Him

  Mister Gay

  Tobias, the Blow Hard

  Denying the Man Inside Him

  Gender Empowerment

  Analraping Tobias

  Tobias as the Ideal

  Chapter 11: I’m Oscar.com

  Bland (I mean, Ann), Marta, the Richters, Aristotle, and the Metaphysical Question

  Oh My God . . . You’re Oscar. Dot com. [and George Sr. and the Metaphysical and Persistence Problems]

  Larry (the Surrogate), Forget-Me-Nows, and Locke’s Criticism of Descartes

  Thomas Reid, Gob, and the Problem of the “Forget-Me-Now”

  Part Four: The One Where They Do Epistemology

  Chapter 12: You Can’t Do Magic

  Career Advice from Aristotle

  The Virtues of an Illusionist

  Why Gob Can’t Do Magic

  The Magical World of Gob

  Chapter 13: Is Justified True Bluth Belief Knowledge?

  I Didn’t Even Know That There Was a Cabin . . . He Wasn’t Taking Me To . . .

  As You May or May Not Know [JTB] and I Have Hit a Bit of a Rough Patch . . .

  First You Dump All Over It, Now You Want to Know How It’s [Solved] . . .

  Chapter 14: Bunkers and Balls

  Choosing Between Wayne Jarvis and Barry Zuckerkorn

  The Lenses of Wayne Jarvis, Barry Zuckerkorn, and George Michael Bluth

  Q: War! What Is It Good For?! A: Well, Certainly Not Buster Bluth

  How to Choose Between Bunkers and Balls

  Who Knows What Balls Look Like?

  In the Absence of Opie (Sorry, Ron)

  Part Five: Solid As Iraq: Politics and Ethics Arrested

  Chapter 15: No Touching! George Sr.’s Brush with Treason

  “Do You Know How They Punish Treason?”—First Time . . .—“I’ve Never Heard of a Second!”

  A Company Whose Founder May Be on Trial for Treason: The Case Against George Sr.

  “He’s Guilty, Michael, of Medium to Heavy Treason”: The Degrees of Treason

  “We Do Need to Stick Together Like a Family on This”: Why Treason Is Wrong

  “I’ve Made a Huge Mistake”

  Chapter 16: “I’ve Made a Huge Mistake”

  “And I’m Not Afraid to Make Mistakes. Or Have You Forgotten to Read This . . .”

  “Nobody Makes a Fool out of Our Family without My Help.”

  “. . . She Keeps Saying That God Is Going to Show Me a Sign. The . . . Something of My Ways. Wisdom?”

  Chapter 17: The Comedy of Contradiction

  Seemingly Deceptive: Lindsay’s Lies

  A Jealous Gob

  Think of the Children

  “I’m Not Sure if My Ethics Teacher Would Love It if I Cheated on My Essay”

  Going Both Ways

  Beyond the Never-Nude: Nietzsche’s Man of the Future

  Contradiction and the Form of Comedy: There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand

  Part Six: And On The Epilogue . . .

  Chapter 18: And Now the Story of a Wealthy Family Who Lost Everything

  Narrating the Bluths: “A Clear-Cut Situation with the Promise of Comedy”

  “And That’s Why You Always Leave a Note”: What Lessons Can We Learn From Our Narratives?

  “And That’s How You Narrate a Story”—What We Tell, What We Are

  Contributors

  Index

  The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

  Series Editor: William Irwin

  South Park and Philosophy

  Edited by Robert Arp

  Metallica and Philosophy

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  Family Guy and Philosophy

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/>   Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy

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  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy

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  Arrested Development and Philosophy

  Edited by Kristopher Phillips and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

  Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley and Sons. All rights reserved

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

  Published simultaneously in Canada

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  ISBN 978-0-470-57559-8 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-14609-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-14626-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-14627-9 (ebk)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  And Now a Few Words from the New CEOs of the Bluth Company

  Three years ago we set out to keep this family together . . . and it looks as if . . . (pardon us if we get a bit choked up here) it looks as if we’ve succeeded in that goal. Okay, maybe we’re not really the CEOs of any company, and we certainly didn’t succeed in keeping the Bluths on television, let alone together, but we do have some people to thank for making this book happen.

  We really lucked out a number of times and would like to extend serious thanks to our Banana Stand staff both for moving the Bluth Company down one floor to save on costs and ultimately saving the company, and for contributing wonderful works to our book without having made too many huge mistakes. We’re also endlessly grateful to Connie Santistiban for making this work sparkle, and Bill Irwin for his Michael-esque patience in working with Kris’s (very) Buster-esque pestering (panic attacks and all) about the viability of the project.

  Kris would like to thank Shawn Akbar and Amber Griffioen for their help and encouragement; you guys are the Gob and Lindsay to his Buster. He would also like to thank various co-graduate students at the U of I for reading papers and giving him invaluable feedback, in particular Seth Jones, Sam Taylor, and Matt Drabek. Kris would also like to extend thanks to his parents Jeff and Joyce Phillips, mostly for being nothing like George Sr. and Lucille, and by that he means, for encouraging him every step of the way. Most importantly, he would like to thank his wife Nateasa McGuire for reading, re-reading, and listening to him read the papers in this book, for giving him ideas much better than those that he came up with himself, and for all of your support.