This post contains spoilers for BoJack Horseman Season 4.
You can’t walk away from this season of BoJack Horseman without feeling for Honey Sugarman, the latest victim of an old horror trope and onetime “treatment” for mental health: the lobotomy.
BoJack Horseman is certainly not a horror series, but “The Old Sugarman Place,” the second episode of its hard-hitting fourth season, is indeed horrific. It’s hard not to gaze in terror at the shell of a formerly fiery Mrs. Sugarman, now permanently dazed and empty with a grotesque scar on her forehead as she plays a single note on the piano, the rest of her natural talent fading into the ether with her former self.
Lobotomies may feel medieval in nature, but they were seen as regular practice not too long ago. The use of lobotomies as a treatment for mental illness increased considerably through the 1940s and ’50s, and approximately 60% of these procedures were conducted on women, despite more men being in hospitals than women. BoJack Horseman sums up the reason behind that in a quote from that same episode. In the words of Beatrice’s father, Joseph, as her mother sobs over the sudden death of Beatrice’s brother Crackerjack: “As a modern American man, I am woefully unprepared to manage a woman’s emotions. I was never taught, and I will not learn.”
So instead of helping her through her grief-induced depression, he took away her mind entirely.
We don’t see Mrs. Sugarman again in the flesh after “The Old Sugarman Place,” but the impact of her lobotomy permeates the rest of the season, disturbingly intruding Beatrice’s mind as her own crumbles rapidly from dementia. In blink-or-you-miss-it moments accompanied by jarring electrical static audio, Beatrice sees the ghoulish silhouette of her mother — and the scar that reminds her that she was never really her mother after the operation. Her mother’s shell haunts her when her father reminds her what happens to women when they let their emotions get the best of them. “Come on now, be strong,” he warns Beatrice as she cries over her doll’s molten form in the fire. “You can’t let your womanly emotions consume you. You don’t want to end up like your mother, do you?”
Though Mrs. Sugarman undeniably made some questionable decisions — like drunkenly letting her young daughter drive their car into a shed — it was right before her procedure where her grief let her finally rebel from the confines of sexism, even allowing Beatrice to have ice cream instead of a “healthy girl snack” of lemon and sugar. And though Joseph wouldn’t let Mrs. Sugarman sing “I Will Always Think of You” in full, one character that she could sing with after the passing of Crackerjack is Randy the dragonfly, who is mourning a loss of his own: his wife. In separate decades, together but unaware of each other’s presence, as two grounded beings that desperately want to fly, they mournfully sing in perfect harmony:
Spring and autumn, up and down / I keep trying to escape this town / And I just might / I’ll take flight / Maybe tomorrow not tonight
But she never got her opportunity to fly. When she rebelled and became what a woman in that era should never be, her sassy declarations like “I have half a mind to kiss you with that smart mouth” conformed to her new reality: “Why, I have half a mind…”
Beatrice’s mother post-lobotomy is a ghost, but not a vengeful poltergeist that murders innocent families that dare to enter her house. She’s an insidious, chilling reminder that the stigma surrounding mental illness is a real horror. Within the series, that horror cost Beatrice her mother, and ultimately, it also cost BoJack a loving mother. Off the screen, similar horrors have taken countless lives.
As Beatrice’s own mind deteriorates within the shabby room where her son put her at the end of the season, BoJack attempts to comfort her by telling her she’s eating ice cream with her mother. Beatrice very well may never have eaten ice cream again after her mother’s horrific lobotomy, but still, she believes it. Still she believes that she’s enjoying a small comfort of life, one that she was so often deprived of, with her mother.
“Can you taste the ice cream, Mom?” he asks her quietly.
“Oh, BoJack,” she responds, with slow, measured hunger in her voice. “It’s so delicious.”
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