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xandromedovnaCW: psychosis, self-harm, overdose, sexual assault
Community is well known for its meta-humour and frequent homages, and this playfulness can make the rules of reality in episodes look wildly different from each other. And yet, only very rarely does the show actually break with mundane reality completely—while many of the things that happen in Greendale are farfetched and fantastical, there is usually an attempt to at least ground the story in some sort of plausible continuity. In fact, the more high-concept or stylistically distant the homage, the more deliberate and poignant the connection to the mundane, because “Community subverts the tropes by using the oldest trick in the book: making you care about the characters” (Knode). There are several episodes throughout the show’s run evincing an approach to magic and performativity that emphasizes the importance of both ritual and whimsy in everyday life.
This is especially noticeable in the animated episodes. I’ve talked about “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” (2x11) before, seeing as it’s my second-favourite episode, but what I want to highlight is the narrative justification for the entire episode being presented in Claymation. We learn that the episode is from Abed’s perspective when he says, “I’m assuming that’s why we’re all stop-motion animated” (2x11)—no one else in the group physically perceives the world as animated, which they point out with grave concern. Throughout the episode, the ramifications of Abed’s psychotic break drive the narrative forward: the study group has to convince him to do therapy or he’ll get expelled. While Abed thinks he’s saving Christmas, in the mundane world he’s destroying school property and (as implied by the snowman sequence with Chang) sexually assaulting people. The reason he sees the world in Claymation is because his mom has broken their yearly tradition. When the tradition of watching Christmas movies with (found) family is completed, the reflection in the TV in the final shot shows the study group restored to their traditional physics (perhaps my favourite shot in the whole series).
Because mental illness and neurodiversity are such important themes in the show, episodes like “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” or “G.I. Jeff” (5x11) often showcase the emotional core of Community. In paying such loving homages to genres, the show also deconstructs their core premises and points out all the ways that the genre is actually quite disturbing. For example, the plot of “G.I. Jeff” revolves around Jeff having actually killed someone in the world of G.I. Joe, which had never happened before in the cartoon (neither had using the bathroom or sex). As both sides mourn the casualty, Jeff has to break out of the cartoon world and return to the mundane world, where he has just overdosed on a mix of pills and alcohol in despair over his 40th birthday. Animation in Community is often justified by using it to illustrate severe mental health crises.
Importantly, while individual characters often are skeptical of these moments, the show takes seriously the vital importance of recognizing and validating alternate perceptions of reality so they can be integrated more healthily for the person experiencing them. The study group uses the Christmas backdrop of Abed’s delusion to essentially conduct group therapy for him, a tactic he resents but that takes the rules of his internal world seriously. Troy and Annie physically restrain Duncan so that Abed can make it through to the end of his quest to find the meaning of Christmas (eventually accompanied by Pierce in one of his few good moments), and the entire group later returns to rescue Abed. The ‘Winger speech’ for this episode (notably delivered by the group instead of just Jeff) sums up the series’ approach to magic:
Jeff: “The delusion you’re trying to cure is called ‘Christmas’, Duncan.”
Annie: “It’s the crazy notion that the longest, coldest, darkest nights can be the warmest and brightest.”
Britta: “Yeah, and when we all agree to support each other in that insanity, something even crazier happens:”
Annie: “It becomes true.”
Troy: “Works every year, like clockwork.”
[…] Abed: “I get it. The meaning of Christmas is… the idea that Christmas has meaning.” (2x11)
In performance studies this notion is called performativity (not to be confused with ally theatre). In “How to Do Things with Words”, J.L. Austin notes that all speech acts have a locutionary (what the utterance means), illocutionary (what the utterance intends), and perlocutionary (what the utterance accomplishes) aspect (98-107 passim). Extending Derrida’s observation that all such utterances are citational, Judith Butler famously applied this notion to the construction of gender, which opens the door to all sorts of aspects of reality that are performatively constructed. From the perspective of ritual, the locutionary element is the ritual itself (e.g. Abed’s friends singing the final song and summoning the Christmas Pterodactyl), the illocutionary element is the purpose of the ritual (e.g. restoring Abed’s Christmas spirit), and the perlocutionary element is what the ritual actually accomplishes, successfully or unsuccessfully (e.g. thawing out Abed and returning the world to its normal physics). There are various ways rituals can fail to carry the necessary perlocutionary force, becoming ‘infelicitous’ either by not being completed correctly, not being taken seriously, not being recognized, or being fictional. And when you are straddling realities, some rituals may carry performative force in one reality but not another, which often requires either translation or multivalent rituals. The ontology of magic in Community relies on this stacking of realities such that the mundane is augmented by its intersection with the rules and structures of another world.
The episodes that rely heavily on extended bits or highly stylized worlds often require ritual signposting to begin and end the disruption to daily life. In “Basic Human Anatomy” (4x11), Troy has a psychotic break when he realizes he needs to break up with Britta. He and Abed re-enact the scene from Freaky Friday where they wish they could switch bodies, twirling around while holding the DVD to simulate the 360° camera from the film. Importantly, the light switch flickers as this happens, indicating the move to a magical frame of reference. The flickering is explained by a “routine light switch check” by the janitor (4x11). The next morning, Troy wakes up as Abed and informs Abed’s body, who is thus hailed/interpellated by Troy-as-Abed’s call to ritual. He complies, becoming Abed-as-Troy, and until they find the DVD, which has conveniently gone missing, they cannot complete the switch back, meaning Abed-as-Troy has to go on Troy and Britta’s anniversary date instead. Throughout the episode, Jeff is frustrated by what he perceives as Abed being obnoxious, until he realizes that Troy’s the one who asked them to switch. He comes to understand the importance of rituals such as these and facilitates the transformation back by performing the “routine light switch check” for them.
There are actually several episodes where Jeff specifically is called on to performatively declare the resolution of a ritual. Perhaps the most telling is “Pillows and Blankets” (3x14). The Pillow War rages because Troy and Abed are having a major fight, one that they cannot resolve using their usual methods of either mundane friendship maintenance or the current magical reality: a civil war begun by the destruction of New Fluffytown. Jeff tries several times to broker a peace, but because of his insincerity, the ritual is not completed and talks break down. It is only when Jeff physically returns to the office for the invisible magical friendship hats and places them on Troy and Abed’s heads that their friendship can be restored and the war can end. What Jeff often has to relearn is that these breaks from the mundane world are actually rituals that carry illocutionary force he has the power to acknowledge or thwart.
When he fails to do this, disaster occurs. The most maddening example of this is “Basic RV Repair and Palmistry” (6x10). When Elroy’s RV breaks down, Abed gets stuck in a time travel loop trying to return to the past to warn them to reinforce the straps securing the giant hand onto the roof of the RV. Jeff gets increasingly hostile to Abed’s attempts, and when he finally convinces Abed to find a more practical solution, he does not realize that Abed still needs to resolve the time travel ritual so he can pursue this new course of action. While he’s trying to tie up that loose end so he can move on, Jeff slaps him. (I have strong opinions about Jeff’s behaviour towards Abed in s6, which is much more abusive; my operating theory is that Abed’s the only available scapegoat for him from the original group.) Frankie’s the one who has to help him complete the ritual, sending envoys from the future to help present!Abed.
What these episodes illustrate is that rituals serve an important emotional, mental, and spiritual function in people’s lives. For example, in “Cooperative Polygraphy” (5x4), we learn that Troy is leaving to sail around the world. This means that Troy and Abed need to find some way to say goodbye to each other that is both meaningful and final. The next episode, “Geothermal Escapism”, Abed awakens to discover he’s surrounded by lava. Knowing he’s hallucinating, he institutes a school-wide game of The Floor is Lava to create ritual context for obeying those rules of reality. While everyone else thinks that this is just one of Greendale’s many chaotic games, Abed reveals the actual stakes of the game when Troy is attempting to concede victory: “It’s not a game for me, Troy. I’m seeing real lava because you’re leaving. It’s embarrassing and I don’t wanna be crazy but I am crazy, so… I made a game that made you and everyone else see what I see. I don’t want it to be there either, I swear. I want you to be able to leave, but I don’t think the lava goes away until you stop leaving.” The only way to complete the ritual is through a sacrifice, which Abed performs by falling into the lava, allowing him to let go of Troy. However, he still needs to find a way to live in the mundane reality, which he cannot do until Britta and Troy get the idea to clone him. Clone!Abed wakes up and is emotionally distanced enough that he can say goodbye to Troy. Troy also jumps in the lava and is cloned, the ritual schism complete. This is a vital moment of closure for them, which is one of the points of having rituals in the first place: moments of birth, death, union, separation, status change, etc. require acknowledgement in a way that has the perlocutionary force to end the crisis (Schechner and Brady 52).
Even if we can usually agree on the rules of reality, our perception of that reality is often coloured by the magic of everyday life. Troy defends his best friend’s eccentricity by saying, “Abed doesn’t need reality. Abed is a magical, elf-like man who makes us all more magical by being near us.” (3x12) When Jeff admits that he, not a hawk, stole Britta’s panties, she laments, “you exploited me, AND made me believe in a slightly more magical world.” These everyday moments of magic are part of the joy of living, and their ubiquity is one of the other themes of Community. The first season is noticeably less unhinged than later seasons, but we start to see moments of whimsy even in these mostly grounded episodes. In “Beginner Pottery” (1x19), Shirley, Troy, Pierce, and Britta are taking a sailing course in the parking lot. When they attempt to rescue Pierce, who has gone overboard, there is a shot of Britta sailing past the window of a classroom. The incongruity of this image reinserts magic into the banality of the classroom. This is what is usually meant by ‘movie magic’, that we can create these fantastical images, but Community’s central point seems to be that this magic is simply enhanced and concentrated by film and television; the magic itself is already all around us.
Works Cited
Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard UP, 1962.
Knode, Mordicai. “Community: Subverting the Genre.” Tor, 20 Apr. 2012. https://www.tor.com/2012/04/20/community-subverting-the-genre/
Schechner, Richard, author, and Sara Brady, editor. Performance Studies: An Introduction, third edition. Routledge, 2013.
