Lucy is a sociopath

November 2, 2014 7:02 AM

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’ Running Diary: An Unblinking Journey of Autumnal Despair Schroeder, a musical Faust, bangs away at a toy piano, coaxing impossible, darkly miraculous tones from the infernal instrument. The Devil’s notes pour out from his fingers like the blood offering from a slaughtered goat above the sacrifice-font. Snoopy, utterly helpless in the music’s thrall, dances and weeps, dances and weeps. He stumbles back out into the night, disoriented. The music, the music.
posted by 445supermag (30 comments total)

Paganism at its most despairing.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:13 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is the best summary of the 2014 midterms Ive read all week.
posted by T.D. Strange at 7:47 AM on November 2, 2014 [11 favorites]

"Autumnal despair" pretty much sums up my experience. I'm British; it's not my culture and not my generation and I NEVER, EVER got the point of Peanuts.

A Charlie Brown Christmas, even more so. People remember the Linus scenes, the piano dancing and the meaning of Christmas, but for most of it it's unrelentingly downbeat. It's a portrait of depression: that sensation of dragging through the day.

(And Snoopy, damn, Snoopy is a full-blown narcissist. Always indulging his immediate urges; never displays any empathy for others. Snoopy doesn't give one single shit about Charlie Brown's feelings.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 8:19 AM on November 2, 2014 [14 favorites]

I enjoy this because everyone acts like I'm a weirdo for really not liking Peanuts and finding it all pretty depressing.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 8:32 AM on November 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

The point of Peanuts was to teach impressionable young boys not to be a total wuss like Charlie Brown.
posted by Renoroc at 8:37 AM on November 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

"Hanging on in quiet desperation" is quickly becoming the American way.
posted by Sphinx at 8:59 AM on November 2, 2014 [11 favorites]

The long, dark teatime of the soul.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 9:23 AM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

...I NEVER, EVER got the point of Peanuts ... most of it it's unrelentingly downbeat. It's a portrait of depression: that sensation of dragging through the day.

I think you're getting the point just fine.
posted by Western Infidels at 9:37 AM on November 2, 2014 [15 favorites]

(And Snoopy, damn, Snoopy is a full-blown narcissist. Always indulging his immediate urges; never displays any empathy for others. Snoopy doesn't give one single shit about Charlie Brown's feelings.)

What dog really does give a shit about his human's feelings? Holy Red Baron, if I went into a butthurt meltdown every time my dogs ignored or mocked my feeble attempts at being a Dog Owner I'd be institutionalized by now.
posted by blucevalo at 10:17 AM on November 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

"I got a rock" is one of the most succinct, plaintive, and funny summaries of disappointment ever. Kids' programming doesn't have to have to be chipper, positive, anodyne pablum. Most of the time it is, but kids are still perfectly capable of relating and appreciating it even when it isn't.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:20 AM on November 2, 2014 [16 favorites]

I liked the Frank Miller Peanuts better. Less subtext.
posted by lon_star at 10:22 AM on November 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

Snoopy, a dog, mocks his belief.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:42 AM on November 2, 2014

The other shoe drops quickly: They turn him around and scribble on the back of his bald head with a Sharpie, his ruined pate now the model for a jack-o’-lantern’s jagged candle-hole. His humiliation is profound. He turns the wan red of a thousand dying suns.

Charlie Brown can be wan, turgid grandiloquence, or Charlie Brown can be red. They are opposites.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:43 AM on November 2, 2014

Also, I am hearing this entire piece as a monologue voiced by Werner Herzog.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:45 AM on November 2, 2014 [10 favorites]

I mean he's no Camut, but I'd describe Peanuts as existentialist and satirical.

The point of Peanuts was to teach impressionable young boys not to be a total wuss like Charlie Brown.

First of all, I hate the word "wuss," which sounds jarring and out of place when uttered by anyone over the age of 16. It's misogynistic locker room taunting, the language employed most frequently by bullies and abusers, or at least that's what I associate with hearing it.

Anyway, to your point, there is no heroic arc, so I doubt that. He's the main sympathetic character, more of a peek inside the existence of Schultz than a cautionary tale. He's like Chaplin's tramp, flailing in futility against cynicism and predictably cruel and dumb people. In the end, it's easier to care about Charlie Brown than Lucy, and no contest as to which one makes a better friend.
posted by krinklyfig at 11:46 AM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

When my daughter first saw this, she thought the 'I got a rock' line was the funniest thing she had ever seen. She quotes it to this day. It was a very amusing piece but Lucy, is not a sociopath, IMHO. If you'd ever met (or worked) with a real one, you'd know.
posted by McMillan's Other Wife at 1:25 PM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

People who don't get Peanuts have probably had easy lives.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:26 PM on November 2, 2014 [3 favorites]

The point of Peanuts was to teach impressionable young boys not to be a total wuss like Charlie Brown.

#gamergate
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:27 PM on November 2, 2014 [1 favorite]

Lucy can't actually be a sociopath, because it is a condition only adults can have. Children can display all the behaviors associated with personality disorders, but they will usually grow out of them. It's when the shitty behaviors stick around in adulthood that you can diagnose.
posted by idiopath at 1:28 PM on November 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

"10:00 Sally makes a ghost sexy vampire costume. The inadvertent glimpse of her own morality frightens her."
posted by randomkeystrike at 1:49 PM on November 2, 2014

The OP is only barely exaggerated: Peanuts really is about anxiety, fear, depression, cruelty, and neurosis. It's an existential rumination hiding as a gag comic.

Lucy is a tyrant, but she's offset by her own neurosis— her unrequited love for Schroeder.
posted by zompist at 1:49 PM on November 2, 2014 [6 favorites]

I enjoy this because everyone acts like I'm a weirdo for really not liking Peanuts and finding it all pretty depressing.

Weirdo for not liking Peanuts, maybe, but of course it's pretty depressing, that's what's so great about it.
posted by kenko at 1:52 PM on November 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

Don't even get me started on Violet
posted by thelonius at 2:16 PM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

it's unrelentingly downbeat. It's a portrait of depression: that sensation of dragging through the day.

It started off even more depressing. Here's the first ever strip.
posted by dersins at 2:57 PM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

Peanuts is depressing but it's the truth. Kids can enjoy truth in their entertainment just as much as adults can. They don't always need or want candy-coated optimism.
posted by equalpants at 3:00 PM on November 2, 2014 [6 favorites]

krinklyfig, I honestly didn't know that "wuss" had such misogynistic origins until you pointed it out (and looked it up just now). I'd thought it was another way of saying "wimp" and now I'm kind of horrified at myself because I'm pretty sure I've used it interchangeably. I'm glad I know now but I'm cringing pretty hard.

I used to love love love Peanuts as a kid in the '70s and had many (most, even?) of the paperbacks and hardcover collections that were out at the time. But even as a kid I don't think I ever found Peanuts funny at all. And now that I look back I'm not sure what exactly what it was I loved about it so much, but I think, like equalpants says, it was the truth behind the deceptively cutesy facade. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Linus, he was always my favorite character.
posted by misozaki at 3:44 PM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

Sartre & Peanuts:

An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus’ letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn’t matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.

posted by octothorpe at 4:29 PM on November 2, 2014 [5 favorites]

I think as an eight-year-old I appreciated that these kids could wrestle with their own problems without involving adults, even if those problems were rarely resolved. And that characters could engage in lightweight theological discussion without it becoming an us-vs-them argument.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:43 PM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

I think Peanuts attempts to identify with the lack of agency that childhood represents. As a child, you often feel that everything is out of your control; that faceless adults dictate everything that happens in your world. And I think it represents that well. That being said, I have also always found Peanuts to be hopelessly depressing - the fact that the characters are trapped in that state of perpetual childhood, and the fact that the titular character, Charlie Brown, is never able to gain that sense of control, is just, for lack of a better word, a total buzzkill.
posted by darcyite at 8:27 PM on November 2, 2014 [4 favorites]

"Charlie Brown, you have to model for us!" squeals a girl.

A GIRL?! That's Violet, you infant. Get the fuck off my lawn.
posted by Melismata at 6:47 AM on November 3, 2014 [3 favorites]