Pickle Riiiiick!

What? It's a screencap. Go buy a T-Shirt!

Morty: "I'm just trying to figure out why you would do this ... why anyone would do this?"

Pickle Rick: "The reason anyone would do this ...  if they could, which they can't, would be because they could, which they can't."

If S:3 E:3 works, it's because it couldn't, but it did because it could which it did. It's darker than a sewer and deeper than a mountain of rat entrails.

I once read a piece accusing Apocalypse Now of "having it both ways." The writer finger-wagged at Coppola for making an anti-war film that glorified war. While I suppose it's possible, (with nothing coming to mind at the moment) to make a war film with no war in it, or with no admirable moments of war, I was reminded of another favorite of mine, a film which tackled both the madness of war and the madness of tackling war in cinema: Richard Rush's The Stunt Man.

Eli Cross: We’re shaking a finger at them, Sam, and we shouldn’t. If we’ve anything to say it’s best to slip it in while they’re all laughing and crying and jerking off at all the sex and violence. We should do something outrageous.
Sam: Like what?
Eli Cross: Like catching an authentic stench of madness behind all that good clean fun.

That's what great popular art does. It slips it in. It has to have it both ways. That's how it works. That way those who would get it still get it, those who might not have gotten it might still get it, and those who will never get it still buy tickets and unwittingly support the message.

Anything else would be "preachy."

I don't know what film that critic was watching, but the idea of surfing while munitions were detonating all around didn't send me off to a recruiting office.

No, this isn't the only way. Yes, there can still be pure art, but the art that most people will see costs a bank load and if it's going to have an ROI and thrive then it needs the sex and violence as much as the message. It needs a mountain of rat entrails carved out by a pickle to display a twisted and hurtful family dynamic.

Pickle Rick, indeed.

Season 3, bro.

Bravo, Rick and Morty.

Oh yeah, and have you seen The Conversation?