Madea Goes to Jail and the Transience of Identity

Picture this: It's late on a Saturday night, you are bored and want to watch a movie. But not a good movie, because there is something wrong with your brain. So you head over to [STREAMING SERVICE] and you see a film you've heard of, and one you're pretty certain you have a good hold of despite that. Madea Goes to Jail. What follows is a harrowing experience that can hardly be represented in words. But I guess I'll give it an shot.

Initially, the film presents itself as what one might expect. Madea, played by Tyler Perry, is an ornery old lady who apparently fucked up one too many times, and now is going to jail to meet a wacky cast of characters and learn a lesson or something. But then Madea leaves the courtroom. We stay and watch some completely separate characters. The actual main characters. Candy is a sex worker brought in on prostitution charges, and the prosecutor, Joshua, recuses himself as he knew her at some point in the past. What follows is a crash course in human misery, as every bad thing that could happen to a person happens to Candy. After one night back working on the streets, she is abducted and raped by a pimp, who plans to hold her captive until she escapes and seeks shelter with Joshua. When a local minister sets Candy up for a job interview, the man interviewing her sexually assaults her.

I could go over the laundry list of calamity that befalls Candy, but I think you get the point. What makes this film so bewildering to watch is that each of these scenes of tragedy is interspersed with scenes of Madea and her family being zany. You settle into the tone being dark and emotionally wracking, then Madea shows up for a sassy back-and-forth with Dr. Phil. It is impossible to get your footing with this movie. The listing says "Comedy." The description mentions nothing of tragedy.

What is the deal with this? I must mention I had never seen a Tyler Perry film before. Everyone I spoke to who has seen one of his films sat back like a jaded old schoolmaster and said, "Oh yes, they're all like that." One person's only comment was that it was a "funny movie." How could someone see every heart-wrenching event that takes place and come away with a bunch of yuks? It's simple. It's all in the name.

This film is billed as a comedy, and so that is what people see of it. Once they see Tyler Perry's name, they gloss over the details. Madea is a (supposedly) funny character, and her name is in the title, ergo the movie is a funny film. The content is almost irrelevant when we have nice little titles and genres to tell us what it is.

When does description cross the line into prescription? Is the film a comedy simply because it is labeled as such? Is it a comedy because it has some funny parts? Can it be a comedy even though most of the runtime would be better described as drama? Too often we take things by appearance, by how we think they should be sorted on first glance.

Most of the time with media, that works. If a movie is billed as a comedy and stars a comedic actor, we get what we expect. Sure, one or two sad things might happen in the film, but its primary purpose is to make you laugh. You pick what you want and that's the end of it. Life is rarely that simple.

The worst experience of your life can follow a moment of rare gaity.You can find yourself laughing at a funeral, mere minutes after crying the hardest you have ever cried. People can call you one thing your entire life and one day you realize you never fit in that mold at all. Films are made with intent. Indie or mainstream, somebody wrote a script and a bunch of people took their time to pick what parts they wanted in it until it appeared on your screen. Life has no intent. Things just happen. People just are.

The moral of Madea Goes to Jail arrives late in the film. While Madea and Candy are both incarcerated, Madea tells the group that you cannot be a victim, that you have to take responsibility for the things that happen to you. Shortly afterwards, both Candy and Madea are released from prison when it is revealed that the prosecutor has been padding charges, making all the cases she litigated invalid. Not a single thing about their escape from that situation was in their control. The film expects you to believe this moral it espouses while directly contradicting it with events portrayed in the film itself. It bills itself as a comedy, while bombarding me with more unfortunate events than those billed as dramas.

The labels we use are so inadequate at capturing life. So few things can be boiled down to a couple easily comprehensible terms. But we need them. You can't just think about everything all the time. We have hobbies, jobs, people to meet and things to do. You have to boil things down to handle everything being thrown at you day-to-day.

But there are times when you can't. When the words you used to describe yourself turn into a prison, a list of dos and don'ts. When the things people have said to you don't match up with what you can plainly see. When you've been submerged in an ocean of easily classified Comedies and Dramas, there falls into your lap that which defies these conventions. And though every signpost and label says it's one thing, you know it's not. It is not so easily categorized. The only question is:

Where do we go from there?

And Then You Keep Living

Life is just one of those things, y'know? When I'm not watching Barbie movies or finding the most depressing interpretation of kid's media, I like to watch things that are just regular sad, but bill themselves as comedies because, shit, man, nobody wants to sign up to get sad.

Okay, well, I do.

If you peruse a plethora of pessimistic media like I do, you're likely to see one of two outcomes for them: Either the protagonist dies and the audience is left with the poignancy of tragedy, or a happy ending comes out of the blue, contradicting themes that may have been prevalent throughout the work. Each of them can work, depending on what you're watching. If the show is something like Breaking Bad, the viewer gets catharsis in seeing the main character reap what he sows, or a nice resolution can keep the whole day from being a real bummer, dude. For me, those two endings can feel stale after a while. The Death Ending just closes off any further questions, with the sort of finality it's a little too easy to write, and the Happy Ending can seem just as cheap, sidestepping content I was probably really interested in.

That leaves the somewhat less oft-chosen path, commonly known as The Bittersweet Ending. That qualification is the most vague, essentially a mix of the other two endings in varying amounts. I tend to like these more, and I'd like to go into it by discussing two oddly similar shows; Welcome to the NHK and BoJack Horseman. Needless to say I'll be spoiling the entire plots, so watch them beforehand if you care about that sort of thing.

Welcome to the NHK is a 2002 anime about the life of Tatsuhiro Sato, a 22 year old man who dropped out of college and in the four years since has become what's known in Japan as a "hikikomori." He rarely, if ever, leaves his apartment, has no friends, and lives off money sent by his parents. This changes when he meets Misaki, an 18 year old girl who claims she has a program which can cure Sato of his hikikomori tendencies and bring him back into society. What follows is a series of mishaps as Sato tries to con his way out of being a shut-in, through things like creating a visual novel, selling MMO items for real life money, and joining a pyramid scheme. Most of the time he's pulled from the brink by friends he makes as the series goes on, like Yamazaki, his otaku neighbor, and Hitomi, his old classmate. It's often comedic, with Sato's foibles exaggerated to the point of parody, but can hit hard when you see how Sato truly feels about himself and isolation from the world.

BoJack Horseman, also known as Sad Horse Show, is about an actor who was in a successful TV show back in the 90's, but is now all washed up, living off residuals in a sea of alcohol, drugs, and codependency. Things change when BoJack meets Diane, a ghostwriter hired by a publishing house to write the memoirs BoJack promised but did not do at all. Misadventures ensure, Diane publishes what turns out to be her account of spending time with BoJack, which, though brutally honest, gets him back in the limelight, leading to a shot to play his dream role. Successes and failures come in spades, with BoJack trying to become a better person, but always falling short. Oh and almost everyone is a talking animal-person.

The series of events in both of these shows is essentially a series of opportunities and failures by the main characters in their quest to try to get better without really putting in the effort needed to do so. BoJack, for most of the series, pursues professional success while neglecting the alcoholism and emotional issues that sabotage his accomplishments, and Sato finds himself unable to reenter society despite his efforts. Each show comes dangerously close to a bleak, nihilistic worldview. It fringes upon the idea that only failure is possible.

This would all be too much if we didn't widen our focus once in a while, to the secondary characters. In each of these shows, there's a cast of people who have different problems, that similarly lead to comedy or drama. These characters develop alongside our leads, allowing them to affect one another in different ways. Yamazaki goes from a lonely otaku to a somewhat abrasive friend that even starts dating a girl. Misaki turns out to be an orphan with an abusive childhood, cared for by her aunt and uncle, and struggles with feelings of worthlessness. She takes on Sato's case to prove to herself that someone could be so pathetic that even her life could have value.

Princess Carolyn, BoJack's agent, founds her own agency and becomes a mother. Todd grows out of being an aimless slacker into running a daycare and paying for his own apartment. BoJack and Diane's friendship is the cornerstone of the show, their differences heightened by their sometimes disturbing similarities.

See, as each series goes on, the potential for a happy ending gets further out of reach. In NHK, Yamazaki moves away, removing Sato's one friend, and he rebuffs Misaki's feelings out of shame and anxiety, leaving him worse off than when the series began. In BoJack, the sheer magnitude of his mistakes piles up, and it's hard to see a path forward. In the final episodes, both shows have the main characters attempt suicide. Sato flings himself off a cliff (that Misaki's mother once used to end her life,) in a misguided attempt to absolve Misaki from her guilt, and BoJack becomes dangerously drunk and passes out face-down in a swimming pool after confronting just how far he's fallen. I've seen arguments that these shows could have ended this way, with these people dying, wrapping everything in a nice depressing bow. I heartily contend that this would have been a wrong move.

With the focus these shows put on their side characters, it shows that a person's actions affect more than just themselves. Each step they take is felt by the people around them, for good or for ill. To have them die would shunt that desolation onto everyone else in their lives. Even BoJack, who by the end of season 6 we know let Sarah Lynn die, would have affected those around him with his death.

It would just be too tidy to end a story that way, as far as I see it. You kill a character who seems to be beyond redemption and say, "That's over," seems like a cop out. Because for most of us, when life is at its worst, we don't just die. And even if we do, life keeps going for everyone else. Death is not really the end for us, because there will always be people who have to deal with the things you've done or haven't done. In real life, there's always more show.

Luckily for me, then, that neither of these characters die in these attempts. Sato is saved by some netting set up to stop suicide attempts, and climbs back up into the arms of Misaki. She tearfully reprimands him for his jump, and after a flash forward, we see that Misaki is trying to get into college, with Sato teaching her on nights after coming back from the construction job he hates. They have a new contract, called the NHK¹, where neither is allowed to kill themselves or else the other would do the same. They each see themselves as worthless, but couldn't stand the idea of the other dying. As Sato says, "In the end, even after all we went through, none of our problems were solved. And even though things look better now, it wouldn't surprise me if we went back to saying things like, 'I'm useless,' or 'I can't do it.' Still, for now at least, I'm hanging in there. I don't know how long it will last, but dammit, I'll give it the best I've got."

In BoJack Horseman, he is saved at the last minute from the family whose house he broke into, but since what he did was illegal, he is sentenced to jailtime. He is let out for one day to attend Princess Carolyn's wedding, where he briefly meets with each of his friends. The last he sees is Diane, where they have a long talk on the roof. Diane tells hm she got a phone call from him before his attempted suicide, making it very clear what he was about to do. She had built a life far from BoJack and Hollywoo, but this phone call threw that all into disarray. She almost gave up on her new life, but went through with it and is finally happy. She says, "I think there are people that help you become the person you end up being, and you can be grateful for them even if they were never meant to be in your life forever." It's likely BoJack and Diane will never see each other again.

The end of a life is never as simple as the end of a television program. There are always people left behind. You can't wrap a nice little bow on chapters of your life, either. Whether or not you solve your problems, the scars remain, and regret will rear its ugly head. But you keep going. Sato isn't cured. BoJack is still depressed. The difference is we can see a path forward for them now. It's probably going to be shitty for quite a while, but it will continue and there's always a chance for them to make it better. Sometimes, life's a bitch, and then you keep living.

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^{1. Nihon Hitojitsu Koukankai, translates to Japanese Hostage Exchange Association.↩}