On the Couch with Beavis and Butthead
Jeff Schwartz
November 1995
Introduction
In this essay, I will apply psychoanalytic theory to the MTV cartoon series Beavis and Butthead. Although this work will somewhat resemble a case history of the characters, I do not believe the psychoanalysis of fictional characters is useful or possible. The specificity of the analytic setting and manipulation of the transference are fundamental to psychoanalysis, so this clearly precludes the analysis of personalities such as Beavis and Butthead, who do not exist.
Beavis and Butthead cannot visit the analytic couch, but they are in a sense already on it. Each episode of Beavis and Butthead is fifteen minutes long, including commercials, and consists of a primary narrative, broken into four segments. In between these episodes are sequences where Beavis and Butthead watch and comment on music videos, sometimes thematically related to the narrative. Each episode follows the sequence: narrative, videos, commercial break, repeated four times, with the last video segment sometimes omitted, depending on the length of the narrative and the strength of its ending.
During the video viewing segments of Beavis and Butthead, they are shown sitting on a couch at Butthead's house. Our viewpoint is as if we are staring out from inside the television which they are watching. However, the possible mise en abyeme effect of Beavis and Butthead watching the television viewer watching them watch television, the feedback loop of (virtual) camera and screen evoking Lacan's Mirror Stage, where the child learns to watch himself watching himself, is not exploited here. Instead, Beavis and Butthead are positioned as analysands. They sit on the couch, in the state of regression described by theorists of the cinematic apparatus (Baudry 698-699), and free associate in response to the music videos, a genre which Marsha Kindler and E. Ann Kaplan have both closely connected to the dreamwork (Kinder 12-14; Kaplan 28).
My goal in this paper is not to take Beavis and Butthead as my patients; I have
already explained that this is impossible. Rather, I intend to argue for the continuing
utility of psychoanalysis for textual analysis, as Slavoj Zizek does in his work
on film. Beavis and Butthead are invoked in this paper to defend Freud and Lacan. Specifically, I will show that many of the crucial elements of Lacanian theories of subject formation are explicitly depicted in Beavis and Butthead. By reconstructing Lacan's allegedly contrarian and obscure work through this militantly
lowbrow text, I will attempt to demonstrate the relevance of this work.
Let me begin by summarizing the narrative portions of my favorite Beavis and Butthead episode: "The Great Cornholio:"
Segment 1-Beavis and Butthead are on their way to visit their neighbor Stuart, who is a frequent object of their abuse. Stuart is of special interest to them on this day, because Butthead has heard that Stuart has diarrhea. On arriving at Stuart's house, Stuart's mother confirms this information, gives Beavis and Butthead breakfast burritos,
and leaves to bring Stuart more toilet paper. In her absence, Beavis and Butthead
ransack the kitchen and Beavis eats the family's entire supply of sugary snack foods
and sodas.
Segment 2-Beavis and Butthead are at school, in class. Their hippie teacher Mr. VanDriesen is lecturing on U.S. Central American policy. Beavis is quivering and babbling in his desk, clearly wired out of his skull on sugar and caffeine. When VanDriesen mentions Nicaragua, Beavis stands up, pulls the collar of his T-shirt over the back of his head, and asks "Nicaragua? Agua for my bunghole," while pacing rapidly back and forth. VanDriesen directs Beavis to sit down, to which Beavis responds "Are you threatening me? I am Cornholio." Beavis then leaves the classroom, demanding "T.P. for his bunghole."
Segment 3- Beavis in is the school hallway. He approaches a janitor, who attempts
to ignore his demands for "T.P." Beavis then asks him "Would you like to see my bunghole?"
Moving on, Beavis pauses outside the girls' bathroom, looking at the sign and
saying to himself "This is going to be cool." He excitedly enters, declaring "Come
out with your pants down!" but the facility is unoccupied.
Next, he interrupts a Spanish class, announcing that he is the Great Cornholio.
The teacher asks "Senõr Beavis, donde esta tu
hall pass?" and Beavis replies, as always, "Are you threatening me?" He then demands
"T.P." and then "olio" for his bunghole. The Spanish teacher orders Beavis to the
principal's office, and Beavis leaves, muttering "Where I come from, we have no bunghole."
Segment 4-In the principal's office, Beavis is devouring candy from a desktop dish
as he is being reprimanded. He is no longer in character as Cornholio; his shirt
is worn normally. The principal pauses in his tirade to ask "Do you understand?"
Beavis offers mechanically "Oh, yeah, huh huh, sorry about that. Huh huh." Oddly, the principal
is swayed by this lame apology and lets Beavis go without punishment. On his way
out, Beavis is offered a hall pass by the secretary. He turns on her, raising his
T-shirt again and asking "Are you threatening me?"
The final shot shows Beavis as Cornholio wandering the school hallways back and
forth, babbling about T.P. and olio for his bunghole, as well as repeating that he
has no bunghole, while sad Spanish orchestral music swells on the soundtrack.
It is obvious from this single episode summary what a psychoanalytically rich
program Beavis and Butthead
is. While "The Great Cornholio" will figure prominently in the remainder of this
paper, I will frequently refer to other episodes, particularly since Butthead's role
in "The Great Cornholio" is unusually small. Butthead is significant, because he
embodies a subjectivity constructed in accordance with convention. Beavis, on the other hand,
literally fails to complete each of the metaphorical Lacanian narratives of subject-formation.
The Women's Room
First, Beavis' interest in the girls' restroom in "The Great Cornholio" clearly
evokes the railway station story from Lacan's "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,"
in which two children, a boy and a girl, look out the windows of a train, each seeing the sign for the restroom of their opposite sex on the facing sides of the
tracks (Lacan 1977: 151-152). Among other things, this story points to the role of
proper object choice in subject formation: each child has learned to see itself in
the desire of and for members of their opposite sex. Lacan describes the conclusions he draws
from this story in purely semiotic terms:
Besides the fact that the rails in this story materialize the bar in the Saussurian
algorithm (and in a form designed to suggest that its resistance may be other than
dialectical), we should add that only someone who didn't have his eyes in front of
the holes (it's the appropriate image here) could possible confuse the place of the
signifier and the signified in this story, or not see from what radiating center
the signifier sends forth its light into the shadow of incomplete significations.
(1977: 152)
Beavis' visit to the women's restroom yields a far clearer reading. First, it
clearly supports Lacan's famous claim that "the unconscious is structured like a
language," since although Beavis' faux pas
is based on his failure to recognize sexual difference, it is manifest through a
linguistic confusion between the various functions of the possessive in English:
is the women's room a room of
women (Beavis' fantasy) or a room for
women (social custom)?
Second, it is extremely significant that the first place we are shown Beavis'
misunderstanding of sexual difference and his failure to be a properly Oedipalized
subject is a restroom. During their video watching segments, Beavis repeatedly disturbs
Butthead's sexual reveries by interrupting with his own, which consistently feature
either passing waste in place of orgasm or his stool as substituting for his penis.
For example, Beavis and Butthead watch Janet Jackson's video for her song "You
Want This." In this video, Jackson and her troupe of female dancers begin their day
at a hotel in the Southwestern desert, assemble, and proceed to their next stop in
a group of vintage sports cars. Along the way, two men on foot call out to them. Jackson
and her entourage stop and perform a sexually taunting dance routine appropriate
to the song's title, then drive off, leaving the men ostensibly enlightened ("don't
yell at strange women, they might stop and dance for you" appears to be the moral of this
story).
Butthead, impressed by the hotel setting and sexy appearance of Jackson and her
dancers, begins fantasizing about staying in a hotel and being able to order in prostitutes.
As Butthead elaborates, Beavis interrupts with his own additions. Beavis' imaginary room service request is for "two whores and a side order of poop."
In another episode, Butthead is attempting to explain to Beavis the idea that
men with big hands and big feet also have large penises, but Beavis can only respond
to Beavis' leading "You know what they say, big hands, big..." with "big turds?"
The Mirror Stage
The single most jaw-dropping moment for the psychoanalytically informed viewer
in all the Beavis and Butthead episodes comes in the episode entitled "Steamroller."
Our heroes are watching a music video by the eccentric Scandinavian singer Bjork
when Beavis blurts out: "I heard Bjork has a schlong." Butthead stammers, and asks where
Beavis heard this. Beavis claims it was "the guy in the bathroom." After a few more
questions, it becomes clear to everyone except Beavis that "the guy in the bathroom"
is Beavis' own reflection.
It is a cliche of Lacanian cultural criticism that any appearance of a mirror
must evoke the mirror stage, but surely Beavis' failure to recognize himself, coupled
with his reflection telling him that Bjork (a small woman) has a "schlong" (a word
chosen, surely, over all other possible penis euphemisms for its incorporation of the
word "long"), deserves such analysis. It fundamentally ties Beavis' incomprehension
of sexual difference to anality (as described in the last section) to his failure
to accept the boundedness of his body. In the mirror stage, the infant recognizes that subjectivity
is limited to the surface of the body and agency to the reach of its limbs and voice.
Previously, the child has no sense of a world outside, but is total ego, thinking of itself as the entire universe, understanding existence only as immediate sensation.
Playing off Freud's idea of the homunculous, the internalized figure of the body
onto which a properly formed subject maps sensation, Lacan describes this pre-mirror stage, pre-Oedipal, undifferentiated being as l'hommelette
(Lacan 1978: 197), punning on "man" (homme
) and omelette, evoking the fluidity and homogeneity of beaten eggs.
The figure of l'hommelette
is evoked later in "Steamroller" when Beavis decides to prepare some pancakes. Off-screen,
Beavis demands directions from Butthead:
"How many cups of mayonnaise do I use?"
"None."
"One?"
"None!"
"Ok, one."
Naturally, Beavis' mayonnaise infused pancake batter fails to set and burns,
filling the house with smoke and ending the episode. Its excessive fluidity is like
that of Beavis' self, and Beavis' mishearing of "none" as "one" points both to his
total failure to complete the mirror stage and become one and to his ignorance of sexual
difference, in Irigaray's classic formulation: the sex which is one and the sex which
is not one.
The threat of castration, represented by Woman's lack, is essential to subject
formation, and Beavis is clearly outside of this system. Not only does his reflection
tell him Bjork has a "schlong," but when he and Butthead watch another video, which
features a (supposedly) nude woman in a bathtub, Butthead expresses the hope that the
woman will stand up, revealing her body to them. Beavis thinks that she will not,
speculating that "she's embarrassed because she has a stiffie." Butthead attempts
to explain that women cannot get erections, but the existence of humans without penises is
unimaginable to Beavis.
The Symbolic
Because Beavis has not passed through the Oedipal scene or the mirror stage,
he has not entered what Lacan calls the Symbolic. Beavis' relationship to language
is highly unusual.
On the one hand, he is not aware that language exists. In an episode called "Right
On," a right-wing TV personality clearly modeled on Rush Limbaugh mistakenly identifies
Beavis and Butthead as ideal American youths and invites them onto his program, only to recoil in shock as they reel off profanity and moon the crowd. He attempts
to restrain them, saying "You can't use that kind of language on TV," to which Beavis
replies, in true amazement, "We use language?"
In fact, Beavis does not really use language. He understands it only functionally,
not representationally. For example, in "The Great Cornholio," his apology to McVicar
is transparently insincere, since Beavis means none of what he says, but also completely sincere, since Beavis does not know that these words have meaning. He only
knows that they are the appropriate words to say in that situation. Similarly, in
an episode titled "Manners Suck," Beavis interprets VanDriesen's attempts to teach
him politeness by saying to everyone he meets "thank you, drive through," regardless of context,
a phrase he obviously learned at his and Butthead's fast food jobs. Beavis has no
idea what "thank you, drive through" means; he is oblivious to the possibility of
words having reference, but he knows that this is a polite thing to say, so saying it
all the time must mean that he is being polite.
On the other hand, though Beavis does not understand language, his use of it
is torrential, especially in comparison to Butthead who, as a normalized subject,
can only speak in short clipped literal phrases reflecting a tiny world of narrowly
defined desires: chicks, beer, rock, nachos, stuff that doesn't suck. Two episodes illustrate
this.
In "Bang the Drum Slowly, Dumbass," Beavis and Butthead encounter VanDriesen
and several of his friends in a forest, in a drum circle modeled in those associated
with the mythopoetic men's movement of Robert Bly et al. The boys are invited to
join and take their turns beating a drum and expressing their feelings. Butthead goes first,
tapping the drum a couple of times, then passing it away, with the comment "this
sucks," clearly disappointed that the hand drum did not produce the booming sound
of a heavy metal double bass kit. Beavis, in turn, hypnotizes himself with the rhythm he plays
and begins spewing fantasies of waste, destruction, and omnipotence, beginning by
imagining using a bulldozer to knock down the walls of the girl's gym in order to
watch the girls undressing. There is a zoom out, a commercial break, and we return to see
Beavis alone, clearly having gone without sleep for several days, finishing his rant.
In "Butt-niks," the boys wander into a neo-Beat cafe where, after imbibing vast
amounts of what he calls "crapuccino," Beavis takes on his Cornholio persona and
is moved to take the stage and recite poetry. Butthead smirks at the other patrons
delight in Beavis' glossolalia, not because he knows it's gibberish, but because he cannot
take pleasure in language itself.
Butthead's range of expression and pleasures is impoverished compared to Beavis,
who can tap into limitless unregulated flows. The abundance of Beavis' speech is
clearly related to that of his other bodily flows: his boasts of near constant masturbation, and most of all, his anality.
When Beavis takes the stage in "Butt-niks," he announces "Now, my bunghole will
speak!" Beavis presents a metaphorical reversal of sphincters, as his speech flows
as obscene waste.
Beavis' Body without Organs
Of course, Beavis' proclamation "Now, my bunghole will speak!" also evokes the
infamous "talking asshole" sequence from William Burroughs' Naked Lunch
. In this section, a vaudeville performer teaches his anus to speak via controlled
flatulence. The orifice soon develops a will of its own and supplants the functions
of all the body's other openings, which atrophy and close.
While this story is an example of Burroughs' usual grotesquery and a vehicle
for his disgust with the inefficiency of the human form (in another episode from
Naked Lunch
, Dr. Benway removes all unnecessary or redundant organs from his patients: appendix
and tonsils, but also spare lungs, kidneys, gonads, etc.), it is also a vivid example
of what Deleuze and Guattari call the body without organs. While it is difficult
to derive a specific definition from their writings on the subject (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: 9-15; 1987: 149-166), their examples, besides those drawn from Burroughs and
Artaud (the originator of the term), are all bodies which have moved towards a state
of closure, of regression to the egg: modified bodies, addicted bodies, intoxicated bodies,
bodies whose subjectivity has been altered through unusual sexual practices, etc.
In all these cases, the body moves towards undifferentiation, away from lack and
away from the territorialization and discipline of normal subjectivity.
The body without organs has a liberatory character like the uncontrollable flow
of l'hommelette
, but also a paranoiac tendency resistant to intersubjectivity. Beavis personifies
this contradiction, if we read Cornholio as his body without organs.
Beavis taps into chaotic flows of language and desire which are unavailable to
Butthead, and when Cornholio demands "olio" for his "bunghole," there is a clear
suggestion that he wants to open it up, so that it might flow better, but also perhaps
for other purposes, other improper pleasures.
However, the paranoiac character is also obviously present. Beavis' lifting of
the back collar of his t-shirt over his head when he becomes Cornholio is an attempt
to close up, and the word "bunghole" itself refers originally to an opening in a
barrel, meant to be corked with a "bung." Of all the euphemisms and slang terms for "anus,"
"bunghole" carries the strongest reference to the hole being closable. While Beavis
demands "olio" to open his "bunghole," he more often declares that he doesn't have
one.
Introducing Deleuze and Guattari allows a consideration of Beavis' ethics. While
the Lacanian system sees Beavis as a case of arrested development, it is possible
using schizoanalysis to see Beavis as a figure of freedom. However, the freedom of
the schizo, of the anti-Oedipal subject, is not something to be uncritically celebrated,
as can be seen in the works of Burroughs, Sade, Bataille, and Artaud, all of whom
appear frequently in Deleuze and Guattari's work. Outside of normal subjectivity,
there is great potential for inhumanity.
While Beavis is occasionally inhuman, there are far more moments when he displays
a greater capacity for empathy than Butthead, who has become completely socialized
into the casual sadism of patriarchy. The last video watching sequence of "The Great
Cornholio" bears this out.
The boys are watching a voyeuristic clip by a 1980s glam metal band in which
the camera enters various windows of an apartment building, recording different stories
related to the song's lyrics in each room. Early on, it shows the silhouette of a
woman in lingerie arching her back in a typical soft-porn pose.
both: Whoa!
Beavis: What's wrong with her back?
Butthead: Nothing, when a girl's sticking her butt out like that, it means she wants
it.
Beavis: I don't know, she looks hurt.
Butthead: I don't care, it still gave me a stiffie.
Beavis cares.
Works Cited
Baudry, Jean-Louis. "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression
of Reality in Film." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings
. eds. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. fourth edition. New York: Oxford
UP, 1992.
Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch
. New York: Grove P, 1959.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
. Minneapolis: U of MN P, 1983.
---. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
. Minneapolis: U of MN P, 1987.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture.
New York: Methuen, 1987.
Kinder, Marsha. "Music Video and the Spectator: Television, Ideology and Dream." Film Quarterly
38: 1 (Fall 1984): 2-15.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection
. New York: Norton, 1977.
---. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
. New York: Norton, 1978.
Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
. New York: Routledge, 1992.