Poetical! The Art-Science Wars in Ooo
DANIEL LEONARD
I can see it now . . . thousands of banana guards pouring down the streets of the Candy Kingdom. Each one, glazed eyes pointed forward, moves in precise lockstep with thousands of his fellow soldiers. File after file marches on with spears shouldered menacingly. The denizens of the kingdom look on. Some yell with patriotic fervor, others shiver with fear, but all are required to watch and celebrate the “Fourth Ripe”—“That time when a new kingdom of peace and order is brought to the land of Ooo.”
The ground quakes as the soldiers pass through the candy gates. Princess Bubblegum looks on, smiling, and thinks to herself . . . “All of them smart enough to follow orders, none smart enough to question them.” A new era dawns in the land of Ooo . . .
Okay, so we haven’t seen PB go completely power-crazy yet. But seriously, what’s the deal with Princess Bubblegum? She seemed like any other science-loving head of state: straight-laced, pink, and soft in the center. But lately, the more we’ve chewed on it, the sourer she’s become.
Donked-up stuff about PB:
• She’s hundreds of years old.
• She almost suffocated the Flame Princess.
• Goliad, the immortal Sphinx she made from her own DNA, tried to destroy its opponents and take over the world.
• She’s watching the whole Candy Kingdom through security cameras labeled BGCCTV.
• Her amulet makes her “the biggest cheese in creation.”
• She can create and destroy Candy life.
• She sabotaged Finn’s escape plans and knocked him unconscious to carry out her own plan, which involved letting James die, when a colonization mission failed.
• Speaking of which . . . colonization? What gives?
Has Princess Bubblegum been Ooo’s final boss all along?
Yes and no. On one four-fingered hand, PB may be turning into a fascist dictator bent on expanding her control and maintaining order at all costs. On the other, she truly wants what’s best for her kingdom. After all, her scientific research and inventions have often come to the rescue of her subjects, not to mention Finn and Jake. Bubblegum’s attitude toward the world isn’t purely good or purely bad in itself. It just needs another attitude to push against it: Finn’s.
Where Princess Bubblegum is a scientist, Finn the Human is an artist—not because of his sick rhymes (“I can punch all your buns . . . I will punch you for fun”), but because of his passion for life and his willingness to try anything. To thrive, Ooo needs the interplay of their two approaches. If Finn stays true to himself, he could prevent PB from starting a Second Great Mushroom War. He’d be just like his “son,” Stormo, the Sphinx with Finn’s DNA who’s locked Goliad in an eternal psychic conflict that keeps the peace. Maybe Finn will even help build a new kind of civilization.
How Do You Think about Technology?
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) picked the wrong side in the twentieth century’s Mushroom War. After the Germans lost World War II, he retreated to a hut in the mountains, which he called, creatively enough, “die Hütte” (yup, “the hut”). He spent his days thinking long and hard about the frames of mind people—or candyfolk—can have and how they affect society. A few years later, in 1946, he published an essay (“What Are Poets For?”) on how his country’s “destitute time” had been caused by an imbalance between two frames of mind, which he calls “technology” and “poetry.”
He doesn’t mean “computers” and “sonnets,” exactly; Heidegger is referring to the mindsets behind things like Beemo’s circuitry and Marceline’s bodacious lyrics. Ooo faces the same problem as mid-century Germany: an unprecedented spread (“mushrooming”?) of technological thinking. To set it back on track, poetry needs to catch up.
Here’s what I mean by technological thinking and poetic thinking. . . . Try this thought experiment: look around you. What do you see? Walls? How would you describe them? Take a second; say what they are—aloud, if you can. (And don’t use the word “walls.”) . . . Okay . . . so what did you say? If instead of “tall rectangles,” you said “neighbor-keeper-outers,” then you’re living in a “technological mode.” In this “mode,” in this way of thinking, we look at the things around us as stuff we could use—as tools, fuel, or raw material for serving our aims. This viewpoint is great for solving problems that stand in the way of getting what we want.
In “Five Short Graybles,” Peebles creates the perfect sandwich by spinning a cow on a centrifuge and combining a jellyfish and a balloon. Where others saw “marine lifeform,” PB—thinking technologically—saw “recipe ingredient.” Building gizmos, applying scientific method, and rotating cattle are all ways of altering what’s around us so that it serves a purpose. But what if the purpose is evil?
Why Think when You Can Destroy Stuff Instead?
Typical low-IQ robots don’t question the purpose they serve. Often, neither do we; at those times, we live in the technological mode. This mode has no values of its own except efficiency and usefulness. This means that some devices we usually call “technology” don’t participate fully in this mode. Intelligent robots, for instance, like the Gumball Guardians and Neptr, sometimes second-guess their programmed motives. On the flipside, people, when they’re at their most technological, can act with a machine’s unthinking allegiance to any plan, even a rauncheous one.
When the Ice King finds out about a glitch in the universal source code (“A Glitch Is a Glitch”), he’s willing to exploit it to get a date with Princess Bubblegum. He doesn’t care that the glitch will delete everything else in the universe as long as it gets him to Tier 2 with P-Bubs.
Compare his behavior with Rattleballs’s selfless choice to serve the Princess even if it means his own destruction—compaction into a cube—because he has “found peace” (“Rattleballs”). Any person can enter the technological mode, and any self-aware machine can exit it.
Once we start fitting things into a system and imposing an order on them, it gets hard to stop. When Finn gets the idea to try out romantic pairings on toy versions of his friends, he spends sixteen weeks in his pajamas nudging them into dates and breakups against their will—all in the name of “chemistry” experiments (“All the Little People”). Outside of Ooo, many of us feel compelled to check Facebook twenty times a day just to keep up with Facebook; we end up serving the tool, not the other way around. The technological mode “wants” to be used everywhere and for everything.
Letting a computer take over your world for a while can be okay, like when Finn and Jake enter Beemo’s game (“Guardians of Sunshine”). But what if we live technologically for too long without taking a break? If we forget there’s more to life than the game, we won’t stop playing it. And the better the game, the more likely we’ll forget. When Finn spends years aboard the Dungeon Train, he no longer sees any good reason to go home (“Dungeon Train”).
We can get so caught up in turning the world into raw material for our designs that we forget that things are more than what they’re made of. We’re just as vulnerable to this in virtual worlds, thanks to sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto. Such games let us treat objects and characters in odd and destructive ways, even rewarding us for it—with no real-world consequences. So the technological mode disregards our ordinary values; it considers how to make use of things, not what they’re used for.
Beemo and the Mushroom Bomb are both useful devices: each serves its intended purpose. The fact that one befriends heroes and the other ends worlds is irrelevant to how effective they are. That fact is highly relevant, though, to the goodness of their effects. Doing evil efficiently makes it more evil, not more good! Technology tempts us to think otherwise—to value effectiveness for its own sake, regardless of what it achieves. And it can collapse our systems of value even further. Through technology’s lens, we tend to see things as lacking any value in themselves—except, that is, for our own values and purposes, our own selves. Thinking technologically makes a rift between you and all else, as if you were Glob and the world existed to serve your will.
Lich Play a Game
But wait! Don’t go Amish just yet: sometimes evil technology in Heidegger’s sense doesn’t need gadgets and electricity at all. The most consistently technological character in Adventure Time is its arch-villain, the Lich. A child of the Mushroom Bomb, the Lich sets his aims entirely in line with technology’s tendencies; he wants nothing other than “the extinction of all life.”
PB values things based on how they might help her protect her kingdom, but the Lich’s aim is to devalue all things. Try to imagine him, for instance, chatting with a friend, enjoying a walk together by a lake. Nope! His only pleasure is in controlling and destroying everything that isn’t him. If he can do so through abusive means, so much the better. He possesses Peebs, wears Billy’s skin, and tricks Finn into breaking the Enchiridion, all in service of an attempted Ooolocaust (“The Lich”).
There’s a paradox here. The more systematically the Lich ignores others’ wills—for instance, their desire to survive—in pursuit of his own, the more he surrenders his will to the impersonal “will” of technology. If he’s completely an embodiment of self-assertion (which logically leads to other-destruction—“Look out for Number One”), then he’s interchangeable with any other villain defined by that single trait.
By being so willing to sacrifice others to his plans for domination, the Lich has let his will become purely negative. He’s empty; he’s lost anything we could call a self. He’s possessed by possessiveness. To quote a famous Enchiridion: “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it.”1 The more control we try to have, the less aware of everything we become! But, like the Lich, we can become so busy trying to own everything, to control it, that we lose sight of what really matters.
Poetry, Poetry, Make Yourself Adventurey
The poetic mode is risky business. Instead of placing your will at the center of the universe, it places your will at stake—to give up control. This is what Heidegger calls “the venture”—as in “Ad-venture Time.” To be poetic is to be open to what each new day brings. It’s to be up for anything, to value all you encounter for its own sake, and to be in tune with the greater purpose of Life. It’s to be, in a word, exuberant. A certain character comes to mind. . . .
PRINCESS BUBBLEGUM: See this book?
FINN: Yeah, I see it!
PRINCESS BUBBLEGUM: It’s called the Enchiridion. It’s a book meant only for heroes whose hearts are righteous.
FINN: Shmow-zow!
PRINCESS BUBBLEGUM: The book lies at the top of Mount Cragdor, guarded by a manly minotaur. It’s waiting for a truly righteous hero to claim it!
FINN: Do you think I’ve got the goods, Bubblegum? ’Cause I am into this stuff!
PRINCESS BUBBLEGUM: Yeah, I know. And yes, I do.
FINN: Then off I go! [Finn jumps out of a high tower window]
Being poetic doesn’t require you to end every chat by flinging yourself through the nearest wall-hole, but it does mean throwing your “self”—the idea that you’re completely your own—out the window. Finn’s identity as a hero is based on saving Ooo, not on getting what he wants. Saving Ooo doesn’t just mean rescuing kidnapped princesses; it also means reinforcing the true value of the things and people in Ooo apart from how any one person wants to use them. Finn does this by identifying so passionately with those he serves that he feels their losses and gains as his own.
Remember the song he recited in “Donny”? “Empathy, empathy, put yourself in the place of me.” Maybe that’s why Finn’s always wearing a bear hat. Animals exist in harmony with all of Nature; they can’t do otherwise. When a boy refuses to bend his surroundings to his will and wears an animal’s unselfconscious, non-abusive mindset as a choice, that’s something special: a human with a capital H.
Living in poetic harmony with Nature means accepting it as it is, even its dark side. Fact: all living things will inevitably die. Those living in the technological mode can’t handle this, because it means their will is limited and the most crucial aspect of themselves is outside of their control. They ignore this fact and instead seek to cure all diseases, mechanically prolong life (like Moseph, Beemo’s millenarian inventor who’s replaced all but his skin with artificial parts), or simply deceive themselves into thinking their power will last.
What use is it to think about the dead? Those living in the poetic mode affirm all beings, even those that have passed on, and give freely of themselves, knowing that nothing they have is a permanent possession anyway. Finn shows this side of being a poet when he risks his own life to save someone else’s soul by engaging in a musical battle with Death (“Death in Bloom”). He proves that the poetic way of accepting Nature isn’t a passive head-nod; it requires struggle. Death keeps time, and the battle is a kind of concert.
The struggle is work, and it makes what we call a “work” of art. Poetry does more than just “compare thee to a summer’s day” or measure out life with coffee spoons; it’s the kind of work that underlies all meaningful artistic creation. Art refreshes our sense of reality. A painting of Finn’s shoes would help us to see them not for what they do, but for what they are: black, sturdy, unified items that take up space, have weight, and hold together on their own, even when we’re not looking.
Heidegger says that art is “the setting-itself-into-work of truth.” The artist makes a thing we can perceive, a work—a sculpture, a dance, an action-adventure-romantic-comedy movie—that helps us perceive everything else more clearly. Marceline’s songs clue us into the reality of her emotions. By writing the songs, Marceline even gives her emotions a new kind of reality; they become more definite and more vibrant by being put into lyrics.
Artistic creation has the power to change reality itself. In “Rainy Day Daydream,” Finn suffers the effects of Jake’s imagined lava, poison fountains, and snakes, even though he can’t see them. Our noggins might not be as potent as Jake’s, but still, when we set out to imagine something new or bring an artwork into the world, we don’t know exactly how it will turn out. The process forces us to give up some control over our lives, stay open to changing our plans, discover new possibilities, then see what happens next; that’s the “venture.”
So, art is a way to break free of the technological way of protecting our goals from outside influence. It’s the opposite of imposing our will on the world. Art lets us ordinary folks join Finn in saying “Yes!” to the universe.
Magic: The Guntering
Adventure Time has its fair share of Magic Men, Tree Witches, and Abracadaniels. And in the conflict between technology and poetry, magic has a special role. The widespread presence of magic in Ooo seems to be the result of the Mushroom War—the fallout of humanity’s abandonment of poetry and complete obedience to the technological mode. Some things we’d usually think of as magical—Shoko’s slug-like body, Susan Strong’s ultra-brawn, the zombified Goo Monsters, the Lich—all turn out to be products of nuclear radiation. But there’s plenty of real magic in Ooo, too, from Marceline’s red-sucking to Jake’s shape-shifting.
Magic is a kind of halfway point between the poetic and technological modes. Like technology, magic can be an extremely effective way to get what we want; it can satisfy our desire to control the world, like when Gunter uses a Demonic Wishing Eye to conquer Ooo (“Reign of Gunters”). But like poetry, magic can have unexpected consequences and can’t be fully controlled by any one person. Magic makes Ooo a place where anything can happen. The spread of magic, then, might be the universe’s way of preparing a place for poetry; by letting Finn grow up in a magical world, Ooo makes him more open to new possibilities than his human ancestors and more devoted to preserving the wonderful things around him.
But while Finn’s learning to venture, technology—the gadgets and circuits kind—is reaching a level where a Mushroom-type attempt at conquest could happen again. In Season Five, Princess Bubblegum:
• uses a robotic exploration vehicle to scout out new lands (“James”);
• installs sleeping gas in the Gumball Guardians due to “an increased chance of threat” (“Sky Witch”);
• wears an invisibility device and performs experiments on Flame Princess to model her “elemental matrix,” hoping to suppress her emotions through science (“Earth and Water”); and
• makes an android clone of herself, which she gives a synthetic soul because it’s “easier to manipulate” (“The Suitor”).
It’s too soon to say for sure that she’s a National Ice Cream Socialist, but her ends-justify-means side is definitely getting creepy. If anyone’s going to keep her in check, it’s Finn, the Poet Laureate of Ooo: the one who’s so impressed by the inherent value of his land’s things and people that he pursues their needs and goals before his own.
Finn’s life is his art. If it’s a masterpiece that moves PB and the rest of Ooo to loosen their tight grasp of their own aims for the sake of others’—to take the bold risk of thinking poetically—then it might be the start of a new era for the world: an Adventure Time.
1 Luke 17:33a.