What We Talk About When We Talk About Garfield
The safe bet as a cool person is to think Garfield is bad. Certainly nobody has ever decided to have sex with someone else because they said Garfield rules. Many would tell you that Garfield is bad, and their argument makes sense. Garfield is often cruel in his thoughts and actions. He is a lazy animal, a hairy orange blob that lays around horking down food that would immobilize fully grown human beings. His outlook on the world is that of an IT guy who looks down on people who don’t read but only reads Star Wars tie-in novels himself.
Another safe bet is that you didn’t always hate Garfield. You were a child once, and children love Garfield. He is a silly cat who behaves badly. His misadventures were easy to get from the library, and being able to read the jokes, maybe the first time you read a joke, it was a special feeling. What changed? Certainly not Garfield. Garfield is the Coca-Cola of cat drawings, consistent and omnipresent. It was you. When you were young, you were innocent and free, like Odie. You loved Garfield freely, without fear. But you got older. Your heart was at some point broken. You faced actual problems for the first time and they froze you up. You ate for comfort and you hurt people you loved because you didn’t know how to feel this way without taking it out on others. You became Garfield.
It’s very hard to love yourself. We have all indulged in cruelty and sloth, and we are all haunted by it. To see your sins pulled out of you and turned into an orange cat, that is painful enough, but to see that cat exist as branding is a next level horror. There is also the fact that, objectively speaking, Garfield is corny. To the palate of the sophisticated self-hating adult, he is bland and inoffensive, but in the same way as Jay Leno or Garrison Keillor, that is to say, he just boils your fucking blood. To see the sins of your heart wrapped up in this corny package and then branded with wild abandon onto t-shirts and the like is a bizarre hell. You are not on trial here. No one is here to make you say that Garfield is good.
Look at him. He is our failure to be good manifest. Confront him and yourself! Not with a cat-killing shovel, but with an open, gentle hand. See yourself in him. You both want the world to be good, deep down, a better place for everyone. But you don’t know exactly how to do it, so you make it into a joke. It’s smarmy & gross, but it is one moment in an entire life. The difference between you and Garfield is that he is frozen like this. Garfield will never be better. You can be!
What you must do is forgive Garfield. You must look upon him with a gentle heart. He is a cat. An idiot beast that humans project their emotions upon. He doesn’t know any better. The fact he has such a strong concept of time that he even knows about Mondays is actually incredible. Learning to look at the world, including yourself, with love is hard, but if you cannot forgive an imaginary cat for hating a dog and loving lasagna, how can you ever begin to forgive yourself?
