I get to write about two episodes this week, which is good because I think it’s really instructive to look at them together. They have a lot to say about love and repulsion and beauty and disgust, and one says it much better than the other. I’ll get into all that in a minute, but first:

Stunts!

The youthful exuberance and freedom of motion we see in this opening is short-lived, though, as our boys get snagged in what Jake inaccurately refers to as “a vertical trampoline.” And not even Finn’s usually upsetting fingernails can get them out of this pickle.

This web belongs to a pair of spiders—Ed and Barb—who are going through some typical relationship problems. They’re having trouble communicating. Each feels like the other no longer finds them attractive. They argue about perceived inequities in how their house/web work is divided up. They accidentally say hurtful things and then feel bad about them. Setting aside the fact that we’re watching huge talking spiders, it is an incredibly grounded portrait of a relationship in crisis.

In their brief conversations, we get the sense that Barb feels underappreciated and irritated with Ed’s inability to understand her. Ed also feels underappreciated and misunderstood, and his pride seems hurt. As he puts it, “All I have is Barb, and she treats me like a dingus.”

Fixing Barb and Ed’s problems becomes a matter of life and death for everyone caught in the web, and so there’s a lot of wise words about relationships spoken in this episode. Like, for example, when Ed pleads with Glob to answer his desperate pleas to understand his complicated feelings about Barb, one of the bugs caught in the web observes, “It’s hard to step outside of yourself when you’re enmeshed with another being.”

Finn also offers some sage advice to Ed, telling him, “You need to think about what you say and how that affects your lady.” Finn is also full of dumb wisdom ideas in this episode, and dumb-wise Finn is maybe my favorite version of Finn. For example, when he comes up with his genius idea of spitting at passing birds to knock them out of the sky, he muses, “I have a dumb idea.” And the dumb idea kinda works! Finn’s got some really saliva marksmanship skills! Also, when he’s admonishing Barb as she’s about to kill and eat Ed, he exclaims, “Yeah I’m stupid! But I know something real: you shouldn’t eat your husband!” Such powerful insights!

And then Barb’s butt explodes.

A huge egg sac flies out and rains about a billion baby spiders all over the place. It is super gross, and, as Jake puts it, “Something we’re not supposed to see.” But it’s also a really great moment for reasons I’ll get into in the “Dream of Love” review below. Anyhoo, let’s watch, shall we:

Ultimately, Jake gets the final words of wisdom when, as he and Finn are gradually buried in freshly hatched spider babies, he observes of Barb and Ed: “Love like theirs will always find a way. It’ll crawl all up over you and drain your body fluids, poisoning you slowly until you pass out. Circle of life, Finn. Circle of life.”

What do y’all think? Are Barb and Ed gonna make it? 1My guess is no.

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If you must think about “Dream of Love,” it might best be thought of as a counterpart to “Web Weirdos.” For one thing, they are both about romantic relationships. “Web Weirdos” is an examination of a couple perhaps nearing the end of their relationship—or at least reaching some kind of plateau in their level of commitment to one another. And “Dream of Love” is about a couple experiencing the passionate beginnings of their relationship. For another thing, “Dream of Love” kinda picks up where “Web Weirdos” left off. We ended the last episode with a nauseating cascade of spider babies erupting from a palpating spider abdomen, and that sense of nausea and the affect of disgust carries over into the very beginning of “Dream of Love” and is explored throughout the entire episode.

We, the viewers, are nauseated from the get-go via a POV shot as Finn rolls down a hill. When’s the last time you rolled down a hill? Maybe you remember it as a fun childhood activity. I think I remember it being fun for a much younger Ralph. But for anyone over the age of, say, eight it’s horrible. It’s painful. It’s nauseating. I swear I got motion sick right away as I rewatched this episode. Why start off this way? We might think of this choice to begin with such a jarring shot that produces such a visceral feeling as the episode preparing us for the disgust that is to come.

A former chair of my academic department, Natalie Eschenbaum, studied disgust. She argued that the feeling of disgust is an under-examined affect in media. She wrote about disgust as an illuminating concept in Early Modern literature, and she reminds us that it was around the end of the 16^th century that the French term “desgoust” began to enter the English lexicon. English writers before this time (including Shakespeare) frequently wrote about what we would call disgust or the disgusting using terms like “loathsome, loathly, qualmish, beastly, [and] vile.” Consider those terms, and look upon these creatures and their debauched actions:

Loathsome:

Loathly:

Qualmish:

Beastly:

Vile:

Eschenbaum is interested in analyzing disgust in Early Modern English literature because the way characters react with disgust to, for example, picking up a deceased court jester’s skull and freaking smelling it might tell us something about the Early Modern English threshold for disgust. 2In Act V Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull and remembers the good old days, and he says, “how abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it.” And then, after sniffing the skull, he says, “And smelt so? Pah!” and then he puts the poor dude’s skull down. “What draws Hamlet to smell something that has nauseated him,” she asks, “and why does Shakespeare have him do this? What does the action reveal about disgust in this historical moment?” Eschenbaum continues:

Were early moderns comparatively less disgusted than us because they bathed less, witnessed more death, and were inured to the smells and sights of decay, infestation, and putrefaction? Or are we witnessing an example of “broad vulgar comedy,” or the Bakhtinian, life-affirming grotesque? Hamlet’s expression of disgust is related to death and the fecund cycle of life, which one could argue is a major theme of the play and characteristic of disgust in general.

Now, look, Shakespeare this episode of Adventure Time ain’t. I know. There seems to be some consensus that it’s pretty bad. On IMDB, it is the second-lowest rated episode in the whole series. But it is a halfway sensible story, and in any halfway sensible story there has to be a cultural logic at work that’s worth examining. The cultural logic driving the citizens of the Candy Kingdom’s response to Mr. Pig’s and Tree Trunks’s nonstop canoodle-fest has to do with disgust. Look, for example, at how the Creatrix of the Candy People herself, Princess Bubblegum, responds to witnessing TT’s and Mr. P’s display of affection:

I find myself a little disgusted by this kind of derision. What is PB’s problem? Who cares? What is the threshold for disgust among the denizens of the Land of Oo? They don’t seem disgusted by the banal. They happily watch a movie where some guy points at various cups and says, “Look at this cup. Look at this cup. Now look at this one!” Table manners don’t seem to matter much, as Jake demonstrates when he dives face first into an apple pie. But, as Finn advises TT, “You two need to hide your love or else you’ll end up making the whole world throw up.”

I’m realizing that my inquiry into the causes and effects (and affects) of Tree Trunks has so far centered on this question of disgust. Why are viewers so disgusted by her? As I’ve mentioned before, she is a cute, teeny tiny, beady-eyed pigmy elephant who bakes and gives away pies and speaks with the gentleness of a lace doily atop a cherry wood end table. 3Unless she’s transformed into a crystal demigoddess monster thing. It might just be that this is a not very good episode. The story seems to want to say something about the tension between letting people express their love freely while also needing to adhere to social convention, but it doesn’t really do much with that. TT’s duet with Mr. Pig is one of the longer songs in the series, and it’s not terribly interesting lyrically or musically. The few jokes in the episode don’t seem to land. So perhaps people just associate TT with episodes like this one.

It’s possible, maybe, that the problem with TT (and her non-stop pda-fest with Mr. Pig) is that it is not disgusting enough. Here’s Natalie Eschenbaum again, drawing together some other cultural theorists to examine the relationship between disgust and desire in art:

In Savoring Disgust, (Carolyn) Korsmeyer argues that disgust, in and of itself, exerts ‘a paradoxical magnetism’: ‘aesthetic disgust is a response that, no matter how unpleasant, can rivet attention to the point where one may be said to savor the feeling.’ She disputes Kant’s famous assertion that art cannot transform something disgusting into something desirable, arguing that ‘there are many ways that disgust converts from pure aversion to paradoxical attraction while retaining its trademark visceral shock.’ Literature in particular holds this transformative power. [Julia] Kristeva describes the power of horrific literature as cathartic rather than desirable or pleasurable: ‘One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on enjouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.’ But Korsmeyer believes that more than catharsis is at work in the transformation because crafted ‘eloquence [can convert] onerous subject matter into beauty.’ Disgusting things ‘become beautiful not just because the rendering is deft or poetic but also because they capture in a breathtaking manner something terrible that we may recognize as true.’ As Hamlet seems to understand, beauty, or something desirable, may reside in the disgusting.

I think this recognition of a terrible truth via disgust is much better explored in “Web Weirdos.” That the entirely typical relationship woes of Barb and Ed culminate in the horrific, disgusting spider baby eruption that caps the episode really does get at something about—as Jake puts it—“the circle of life.” In “Web Weirdos” 180 degrees of that circle comprise beauty and desire in the cute baby spiders’ gleaming baby eyes and the sense of connection and purpose those eyes instill in their parents, and the other 180 degrees comprise disgust and repulsion in the exploding abdomen that brings a terrible rain of new life into the world. If the titular “dream of love” in “Dream of Love” is to be fully realized by the viewers—and if the primary barrier to achieving that dream is disgust—we could use more of that disgust. I feel like we might be expected to simply understand that it’s gross that TT is elderly (and maybe Mr. Pig is, too, though it’s not as clear) and has sexual desires that she acts on. And there is some broad cultural distaste around that idea that warrants some aesthetic and critical examination. But you can’t half-ass it. If you want to draw people to some kind of truth about the resiliency of physical love among elderly, you have to show what old age looks like, and neither TT nor Mr. Pig gets us there.