Spongebob: Product or Porifera?
In my junior year of high school, I applied to QuestBridge, a non-profit made to help disadvantaged high school students get into college. As a part of my application, I was asked to write about a historical figure I would like to meet and a question I would ask them. I chose Spongebob Squarepants.
Spongebob was a central figure in my upbringing. I had a Spongebob wristwatch, Spongebob toys – I even had seasons one through three on DVD. The sponge’s adventures with his undersea friends were some of my fondest childhood memories. However, as I grew up, I came to know Spongebob in its commercial appeal: loads of ads, McDonald’s partnerships, the works. Like other shows and movies of my generation’s childhood, it lost its flair as it commercialized itself.
When questioned about what I would ask Spongebob, I responded rhetorically: Did he know he was being watched by us all? In his naive shroud of innocence and childhood idealism, did he know he was just a market ploy, a popular child’s character created to generate revenue? It was, perhaps, an off-the-wall question, but Spongebob was an off-the-wall character.
Shortly before my application to QuestBridge, I read Jack Halberstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure” as part of my studies at debate camp. It was here that sobering realizations about the commodification of art and culture helped me reimagine my childhood idol. Halberstam themself took up the question of Spongebob’s innocence in the introduction to the book, in a chapter titled “Low Theory.” For Halberstam, Spongebob represented something quite different from my commodified vision: he was a queer disruption of the present, a move towards alternative existence. Halbsertam writes that Spongebob represents a constant yearning towards alterity, an “alternative … to working all day for Mr. Krabs, or being captured in the net of commodity capitalism.”
In this way, I am met with a paradoxical reading of my once favorite TV character. Halbsertam argues that, In Spongebob’s embrace of naivete and fantasy, he moves away from the depressing “idealism of hope,” to instead, “gain wisdom and a new, spongy relation to life, culture, knowledge, and pleasure.” Spongebob, in his characteristic embrace of friendship, adventure and spontaneity, represents a mode of being which seeks authenticity in self and challenges dominant systems of thought. However, something confuses this reading of Spongebob as a figure of liberation: How does the alternative, the emphatic step away from universal exploitation, exist as a Burger King product deal? How could a figure of liberation, an alternative approach to being, be a global symbol of capitalism’s suffocating hegemony over art?
“Dying for Pie” and Embracing Meaning
In Season 2, Episode 4 of “Spongebob Squarepants,” titled “Dying for Pie,” Squidward is forced to buy Spongebob a gift for Employee Brotherhood Day. However, in his apathy for Spongebob’s relationship, he carelessly purchases a pie that is actually a bomb from some underwater pirates. After Spongebob seemingly eats the pie without his knowledge, Squidward believes he has set Spongebob towards certain death. As a result, Squidward reckons with mortality, friendship, and absurdity throughout the episode.
The episode begins as Squidward has a joyful dream disrupted by Spongebob repeatedly pressing a bell. – Squidward is forced to return to his mundane existence, his day at work clouded by the usual desire to experience life only in fantasy. Squidward is again repeating the cycle of his exploitation, forcing himself towards emotional exhaustion to survive. He is later asked to participate in a gift exchange with Spongebob. He is originally opposed to the idea, even rejecting Spongebob’s gift, however, he is slowly convinced by Mr. Krabs to buy Spongebob a pie. A group of ragged pirates sell Squidward the pie but are obviously skeptical traders, stating overtly that the pies are actually bombs. Squidward refuses to take heed, however, resulting in a purchase that leads him to believe Spongebob will die at sunset.
The episode then follows the day Squidward spends with Spongebob trying to ensure Spongebob’s final hours are full of meaning. Squidward undergoes a series of ridiculous activities to please Spongebob in what he believes are his last moments, from strange rituals to open-heart surgery. Shockingly enough, Spongebob’s love for Squidward in these moments begins to mold Squidward’s stoicism and angst into a love for Sponegbob. Yet, sorrow is the only destination for these new feelings, as Squidward comes to realize they have been discovered devastatingly too late in Spongebob’s life.
As the sun sets on Bikini Bottom that night, Spongebob and Squidward rest on a hill watching it fade into the sea. Between them is a brick wall that Squidward has built to protect himself from the imminent explosion that will occur in Spongebob’s intestines. In this way, the wall also forms the barrier of care that had so long divided the two until it could no longer be effectively repudiated. Squidward starts to become overwhelmed with tears: He had, for so long, denied his genuine emotional connection with Spongebob, and now, he must face Spongebob’s death as both his friend and his murderer. The countdown ends with no explosion until Spongebob resets it, suddenly an explosion coming from his side of the wall. Squidward cries. Spongebob must be dead.
Behind the brick wall, Spongebob has only blown a bubble bomb, revealing soon after that he had never consumed the pie. Squidward erupts into a fit of anger, refusing to believe Spongebob did not explode until Spongebob suddenly trips, slamming the pie into Squidward’s face, the force of the explosion visibly destroying the whole city. Here, the absurdity of the act is made abundantly clear. Squidward is only capable of forming a meaningful relationship with Spongebob in the presence of the “death drive,” the human instinctual need to form emotional relationships with trauma and destruction. For Halbertsam, this death drive forms an existence of misplaced effort and confusion, leaving Squidward disillusioned and without a clear pursuit of productive meaning. Squidward’s lash out is oddly characteristic of the behavioral death drive, itself; since he is incapable of seeking pleasure unless it is tied to the avoidance of pain, Squidward must use trauma as the basis for coming into emotional being. However, when Spongebob’s fate is absurdly sealed against all reasonable expectation, Squidward finds himself destroyed, his project incomprehensible and his very existence in question.
The Plight to Live Otherwise
I believe the experience Squidward undergoes in “Dying for Pie,” albeit subtle, is a good lens to understanding Halberstam’s reading of Spongebob’s embrace of the “alternative.” It may seem the commercialization of Spongebob would discredit it as a source of radical experimentation, but it is the story of meaningfulness in the face of misery that helps form Sponegbob into a character of alternative, emotional existence.
Spongebob, for Squidward, is a catalyst for emotional self-exploration. Through the invention of genuine love and the perception of crisis (as the death drive), Squidward is convinced to abandon his nihilistic worldview. He performs a series of purposeful actions to bring Spongebob’s final moments meaning. However, Squidward’s actions seemingly end in vain when Spongebob is revealed to have never been in danger. This leads Squidward into absurdity and angst, programming only further incoherency until the episode ends with the bomb falling out of Spongebob’s hands into Squidward’s face, creating an explosion which may have wiped both characters out of existence entirely. Indeed, simply embracing Spongebob’s lifestyle leads to moments full of friendship and meaning, and the moment back into the exploitative lifestyle comes with the total disruption of the project of self-understanding altogether.
Spongebob serves paradoxically as a figure of queer disruption, an embrace of radical love and queered innocence, even in its commodified state, not because of its independence from its means of production, but the consciousness of its fantasies. Spongebob, like Halberstam’s project of queer failure, embraces a subjective interaction with the status quo, where the future is only achieved in fantasy, where childhood is infinite and where the act of alternative orientation, as Halberstam further asserts in “Low Theory,” “announces a political project, begs for a grammar of possibility .. and expresses a basic desire to live life otherwise.” So, in asking Spongebob if he knew it was us that brought him to stardom, we miss the point of the question: Spongebob is to represent, even at the universal level, the freedom of self-consciousness and meaningful experiences, even if in their decay comes the total subversion of society towards an alternative way of being.