The View from Halfway Down: Guilt, Despair, Suicide, and Hope.

Editor’s Note: The more you find out about the Netflix series Bojack Horseman, the more despicable it becomes, and you may find yourself asking, “what does such filth have to do with the gospel?” The answer, of course, is it has everything to do with the gospel. If we agree that repentance and faith are two sides of one coin (see Acts 20:21), then the question becomes, what can we do to help make post-post-modern people conscious of sin and guilt before their creator? It turns out the world has been giving us helpful hints all along in the form of “entertainment” that can’t stop talking about guilt and suicide. So, let me ask you to read Timothy Bootsveld’s blog with the view that it is not designed to glorify or even justify the existence of Bojack Horseman. It is designed to help us know how to minister the gospel to all the Bojacks of the world who are desperately seeking a solution for their guilt.

By Timothy Bootsveld

WARNING: SPOILERS THROUGHOUT 

Bojack Horseman! The show, now complete after six seasons, has been called one of the greatest animated television shows of all time. It follows the life of a washed up half-horse half-man actor trying to fight his way back into fame.

Though animated, Bojack is not a show for kids. It might not even be a show for adults, as it is rated a well-earned ‘TV-Mature’. Bojack has been called an anthropomorphized Calvinist because the show regularly displays his depravity in the totality of his life. Plugged In has a full review available for those who demand specifics.

But despite the grossness, writers for the show have courageously taken on some of the hardest topics in life, including depression, guilt, self-loathing, and suicide. More importantly, the show featuring a reverse centaur has a large contingent of the culture (internet culture at least) talking about these issues. 

The View from Halfway Down

The penultimate episode of the series (next to last) was particularly impactful in how it dealt with the topic of suicide. The episode is titled `The View from Halfway Down`, and is amongst the highest rated episodes of the entire series. Bojack, overcome with self-pity, runs off by himself to his childhood home, intent on self-medicating with vodka and pills. The drugs successfully bring him to the catatonic state he desires, but, unfortunately for him, while he is in the backyard swimming pool. This leaves him face-down in the water, slowly asphyxiating, with nobody around to rescue him. Despite this, his mind is active, and begins to hallucinate a scenario in which he and his past-dead friends and family are invited to a dinner party. One of the attendees is Bojack’s hero, a racehorse named Secretariat.

Near the end of the evening, the attendees each take a turn putting on a performance for the party. Secretariat goes first and gives a dramatic reading of an original poem called "The View from Halfway Down" (Transcribed here). Now, remember, Secretariat is dead. He died in an act of suicide, having leaped off a bridge. But having been recalled to life by Bojack’s mind, Secretariat is able to give us his thoughts and feelings at the point when he was halfway through his fall—the view from halfway down. The poem is terse and heartbreaking, first expressing the willingness to commit suicide, but closing with regret for his jump and the anguish of (given that he is mid-fall) a dreadful inevitability.

What would have driven him to jump to his death in the first place?

Mere months before he jumped, Secretariat received news that his beloved brother died in the Vietnam war. But this was not just tragedy, it was a death due to betrayal. Secretariat, not wanting to go to Vietnam himself, made a deal with the government to send his brother instead. This, partially, allowed Secretariat to keep racing. But at the same time that he learns of his brother`s death, Secretariat also learns that he has been banned for life from professional racing because he was found betting on his own races. Not only has Secretariat sacrificed his brother`s life, but the thing for which the sacrifice was made has turned to dust because of his own selfishness.

So what made Secretariat jump?  It was his deep and pervading guilt. And now, in Bojack’s dying reverie, Secretariat remains plagued by overwhelming guilt. 

Secretariat`s Non-answer to Guilt

Before we continue with the story, we should observe that Secretariat is right to feel guilty. He feels guilty because he is guilty. Think how calloused a person he would be to not feel guilty over the vain sacrifice of his brother. His guilt is not due to an over-active conscience producing false positives. No, his guilt is the product of a well-developed conscience correctly informing him as to his true state.

But curiously, when recalled to life in Bojack’s near-death experience, Secretariat does not make any mention of his guilt in his poem. The reason that Secretariat gives mid-fall for regretting his jump is that, instead of remembering his guilt, Secretariat finds himself distracted from it. He forgets why he jumped in the first place, and suddenly fears missing out on all his favourite sensations, all the wonders the world has to offer. His regret is not because he has solved his problem of guilt, but rather because he has been distracted from his purpose.

Distraction is the drug that serves to force all matters of importance, including the drumbeat of guilt, from the common areas of the mind (Pascal is incredible at this point, and his observations are worth reading (see Pensees #139). When distraction is present, guilt retreats to the attic of the mind to quietly pace the floor. So long as distraction is present, and so long as it is brash enough, guilt remains hidden away and easily ignored. But as soon as distraction takes its leave and the mind quiets, guilt immediately escapes from its attic hideaway and the mind becomes once again occupied by guilt’s muttered accusations of an unchangeable past. Guilt can be drowned out, but never finally stilled. Distraction can serve as a temporary relief, but only so long as the distraction is maintained.

So even if we could grant Secretariat his mid-fall wish, to return to the safety of the ledge from which he jumped, he would still have his guilt—unabated and coming at him full force.  His guilt would not be affected by anything he learned mid-fall. It would remain. And because his guilt would remain, how long could he distract himself away from returning to the ledge from which he jumped in the first place? As a solution to guilt and the impulse to suicide, distraction will eventually fail. Eventually the band stops playing, and Secretariat/we have to look ourselves in the mirror.

Atheism’s inability to resolve Guilt

Distraction is no solution to guilt. The only real and lasting solution to guilt is forgiveness. But what is forgiveness? It comes when the wronged party willingly takes upon themselves the debt of the party that wronged them. In this willing exchange, the two parties are reconciled. This is the only solution for guilt. The problem for Secretariat is that he lives in a world in which such forgiveness is impossible. 

You see, Secretariat lives in an atheistic universe, a world with no God. We see this through Bojack himself. During his near-death experience, Bojack has to watch as his past-dead friends disappear one-by-one though a black door. Bojack finally figures out that the door represents death, and he finds that he is himself being summoned to the door—he remembers that in the real world he lost consciousness in a swimming pool and that he is drowning. Near the end of the episode, with most of the people in his near-death experience already having traversed through the doorframe, Bojack says to his friend Herb that he will “see you on the other side.” He hopes against hope that that the abyss into which his friends have plunged holds them safe.  But his consciousness answers him though the voice of his friend Herb, when Herb responds “Oh, BoJack, no. There is no other side. This is it.”

This is it. After this, nothing. 

We can see why Secretariat’s guilt drove him to suicide—he had no way to relieve his conscience. His brother is dead, and according to atheism has therefore ceased to exist. As a non-existent being, he is unable to offer Secretariat forgiveness, making reconciliation impossible. For Secretariat there will be no absolution. In atheism, the guilt that visits the conscience is unable to leave. Forgiveness is required. But in atheism, with no forgiveness possible, Secretariat’s unquiet mind drives him to welcome the quiet that he thinks will come with death.

The Solution to Guilt

It is not just Secretariat who stands guilty. It is also me—and you. And to tighten the screws a bit, we feel guilty because we are guilty. We have taken things which we cannot give back. We have destroyed things which we cannot restore. We have lived and told a thousand lies. And we have done these things to those we claim to love the most. If you are panged with guilt in reviewing the choices you have made, it is because your conscience, in producing the feeling of guilt, is accurately tracking reality.

But our guilty consciences, though accurate in a sense, are incorrectly focussed until we see God as the wronged party in all our sin. Certainly, our fellow human is the proximate wronged party, but human beings have a moral status derived from God. He is the archetype after which mankind is imaged. We have broken His laws and injured those whom He created. When we wrong another human being, who bears God’s image—when we steal, lie, murder, act cruelly—we ultimately attack God, from whom human beings derive their existence, purpose and value.

“When we wrong another human being, who bears God’s image—when we steal, lie, murder, act cruelly—we ultimately attack God, from whom human beings derive their existence, purpose and value”

Guilt does have a solution. But not in distraction, nor the denial of the reality of our guilt. Rather, the solution to guilt starts with the affirmation of its truth. We are guilty and our offense is against God. Worse, our guilt is evidence of rebellion against God.  As we have attempted to free ourselves of His rule, we have only shattered the divine image we bear, and the guilt we feel comes from the shards of God’s fractured image stabbing back as us, reminding us of who, and what, we ought to be.

Here is God’s solution to guilt. He, the offended party, is willing to extend forgiveness. To those who are willing to admit to their evil deeds and not excuse them—to those who weep and despair over their actions—God extends forgiveness. We have tried to efface God’s image from our souls, yet He remains willing to deal with the just penalty for our sins in order to pull us out of the captivity of guilt.

Guilt can be swallowed up in forgiveness. But forgiveness is not forgetfulness—God does not deal with our sins by forgetting them. Instead, God has truly taken our sin debt upon himself—this is the forgiveness effected by Jesus of Nazareth, in space-time history.  Jesus is God who has entered into His own creation. He took to himself a human nature so that He could willingly absorb into His own being the moral debt each of us has stored up for ourselves. It is in the crucifixion that we see Jesus willingly carrying our guilt and sin into death, in order to leave them there, resolved. Our debt is fully borne by God. We don’t have to bear it any longer. And what`s more, in the resurrection of Jesus, in his physical return from death, he tells us that this forgiveness is completed. We don`t have to sit in suspense as to whether God is angry with us. The Christian account, being rooted in history, finds the assurance of God’s forgiveness in the historical resurrection of Jesus from death—an event open to evidential verification.  It is out of this forgiveness, extended by God as a free gift, that humanity can be free from guilt.

When your guilt overwhelms you, know that you are right to feel guilt. But God has so loved even those that make themselves His enemies that He acted to achieve their redemption. The answer to guilt is to admit the true depth of evil that has occurred, and then to go to the offended One to ask forgiveness.  He will not turn you away.

You who were dead in your trespasses and sins, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:13-14, ESV

Conclusion

The problem of guilt is intractable in atheism. Secretariat was right to feel guilty, but as an atheist he had no way to deal with his guilt, to remove its burden from his shoulders. So, apart from the temporary relief of distraction, how might atheism equip itself to deal with guilt? By acknowledging the God who is there, and receiving the forgiveness offered by God to those who repent and trust in Jesus—in other words, by becoming Christian Theists.