The Gothic Nature of SpongeBob Squarepants
I‘ve come to feel that the cartoon that left the deepest impression on my generation was SpongeBob Squarepants. Throwing a SpongeBob reference to an unfamiliar room has come to feel like a safe bet for breaking the ice with my peers. “They’re selling chocolate” is always a crowd pleaser. “Is mayonnaise an instrument?” will definitely get you some laughs. This influence we’ve felt has often left me wondering what we all collectively gleaned from SpongeBob, and contrary to what every mommy blogger of the 2000’s had to say on the matter, I don’t think it was brain rot.
SpongeBob has been in the news again lately because Nickelodeon waited all of two seconds before opting to strip for money all over Stephen Hillenburg’s grave. Hillenburg’s wish, that SpongeBob Squarepants would never spawn any spinoff shows or sequels, has been outright disrespected by Nickelodeon. Since his death in 2018, they’ve started production on two spinoff cartoons.
Still, this is simply part of a larger trend for the cartoon since Hillenburg’s departure in 2004 after the release of The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie. While it has upheld a certain whimsy in the years since, it has never come close to the absurdity and darkness that the show once possessed. It is my firm belief that when Hillenburg left SpongeBob, he took the gothic part of it with him.
Unfortunately this is the part where I need to write about Sigmund Freud. In 1919, Freud wrote an essay where he posits that base human horror is derived from uncanny feelings. The uncanny is the combination of the “heimlich” with the “unheimlich” or the familiar with the unfamiliar. I read this essay for a horror literature class in college and I’ve basically never stopped thinking about it. The uncanny manifests in many ways — with half-human monsters, with doubles, with body modifications, etc. Essentially, some of the greatest hallmarks of gothic literature draw on uncanny themes, and SpongeBob is full of them.
Let’s start with a recurring phenomenon of the show, the ugly still, lovingly called “gross-ups.” The show never shies away from the grotesque, instead featuring highly-detailed still shots that distort the characters far beyond how usual animation depicts them. We are given the familiar, an adorable little yellow sponge, and shocked with the unfamiliar, a porous and craggy man who we’ve never seen before. We know him and we don’t. This is the uncanny.
The gross-up is not a method exclusively reserved for our underwater friends either. Not even something as holy as the Krabby Patty is safe from this bizarre and disgusting trend. If these images eeked you out as a kid, and I know they did for me, then rest easier knowing that the animators were using one of classic horror’s oldest tricks to get to you. They took what you knew and held dear and warped it into Frankenstein’s Krabby Patty.
Even SpongeBob himself isn’t safe from the uncanny in this show. Notably, in “Welcome to The Chumbucket,” in which he’s forced to work at the Krusty Krab’s rival restaurant, The Chumbucket, SpongeBob goes so far as to directly sing about the unnerving experience of being a fry cook in an unfamiliar place:
“This grill is not a home
This is not the stove I know.”
He directly addresses the uncanny to such an extent that I can’t help but feel the writers must have been signaling it for the viewer. In his essay, Freud draws on the “unhemlich,” which we often translate to unfamiliar, but more directly translates as “unhomely.” Spongebob declares that his experience at The Chumbucket is not just unknown, but “not a home.” This connection has, for lack of a better word, haunted me.
In one of the most iconic episodes of this show, we harken back to the great gothic literary tradition of evil twins. If the Chumbucket is a double for The Krusty Krab, then surely it’s an evil one. Still, as with many stories of the gothic genre, this never precisely terrifies the viewer. Instead of fright, there is a kind of eerie melancholy, which seems to serve this moment of the show well. We return to this theme of doubling over and over. Who could forget Robot Krabs? Evil twin. Squilliam Fancyson? Evil twin.
In a show so devoted to the beauty and whimsy of an underwater world, one of the most unfamiliar places is land. The show continues to deliver on this front, giving us plenty of unhinged scenes with Patchy the Pirate during specials and even occasionally throwing our beloved marine friends into the immensely lonely “overwater” shot pictured below. Although these moments are no where as disgusting as the gross-ups, they are still unsettling and off-putting in their own right, and deserve their place in the gothic canon just the same.
All this being said, what precisely did we gain from watching SpongeBob? The gothic quality seems to set it apart from other children’s shows of the era. It has contemporaries with horrific themes like “Courage The Cowardly Dog” and “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy,” but neither provokes the same odd combination of disgust, eeriness, melancholy, and whimsy that SpongeBob did. Looking back on the craze that surrounded the show and the ire that many parents had for it, I suppose it activated something primal in us all. If the gothic genre is marked by the half-human/half-animal, then it would only be fitting that something as gothic as SpongeBob belonged to a generation of feral people. This show did not lower my IQ, but it did show me the parts of myself that were animal and it loved them.
