User blog:Mattalamode/A Second Opinion: The Dress

Nothing says Mattalamode like an erratic schedule that comes whenever it wants. Moving right along...

"The Dress" is an incredibly difficult episode to talk about because it epitomizes how Season 1 operates. There's nothing particularly smart about it, the jokes are easy, and the characters end up stuck compromising parts of their character - those three things form the Season 1 triumvirate, as far as I'm concerned, so what makes it work in spite of that?

Well, that's where things get complicated. I could just brush it off as effective just because and discuss how it embodies Season 1 at its best, but I already did that with "The Refund" in an admittedly less-than-stellar effort, so at this point, I'm sort of just trying to prove something to myself: can "The Dress" be properly defended as possessing legitimate merit? Well, yeah. You just have to be able to get in the same mindspace that the episode occupies.

And this was a difficult episode to figure out, mind you. I was viciously working my way up and down the whole thing trying to get anything out of it, but for the longest time, nothing really came. I’d like to think, though, that I came out of it with some stroke of genius.

The Actual Start of the Article


In the expected Season 1 fashion, "The Dress" makes its general crux clearly almost instantly from the get-go without much set-up. Basically, Richard does the thing where he's dumb and manages to drastically shrink all of Gumball's clothes in the laundry machine. Somehow at the expense of a fully-furnished wardrobe, this forces Gumball to go to school in Nicole's wedding dress. In a "shocking" twist, though, his embarrassment gives way to excitement when nobody notices that he's Gumball by what I can only assume is voodoo, and he quickly comes to embrace his new life filled with admiration and peers all-too-easily bending over backwards in his wake.

Tragically, though, among those peers is Darwin, who ends up entranced with the purported foreign exchange student in the white wedding gown, and things quickly take a turn for the worse as his affection for Gumball becomes frighteningly more obsessive. It doesn't take long before Gumball is made painfully aware of his accidental lover, and in a last-ditch effort with Anais, attaches the dress to a balloon and sends it off on a bus as a decoy. The plan... somewhat backfires when the balloon is let free and flies directly into the sun... but the status quo is fulfilled once more, even if that means the whole town's caught a glance of Gumball's peacemaker and Darwin's inexorably in love with a fire hydrant. Oh, Season 1.

Analysis


First of all, let's address the first major complaint: Darwin doesn’t come out of this looking all that great. For me, though, the extent with which the episode gave rise to Darwin's blind naivete means I can sort of brush it over. Season 1 episodes like this constantly have issues that boil down to how willing you are to tolerate the lack of integrity with which the characters are deployed, but I feel like, when there's actually a point to it all (as opposed to the characters being blindly idiotic), I can tolerate it. It's not too terribly out-of-line for the show to distort how a character behaves anyway - look at "The Bros," for instance - so Darwin in "The Dress" at least has some level of depth applied, however aimless at times. The stalkerish undertones, though, added a nice bit of cringe comedy and tension to proceedings, which at least provides in a nice change of pace beyond another tired "comedy of errors" plot.

Speaking of changes in pace, "The Dress" also seeks to delve beyond the simple joke of "dude in a dress" by instead exploring how it gives Gumball a sense of vanity - the joke is less, in a shocking twist, the dress he's wearing so much as the external and psychological effect of the dress he's wearing, and it keeps the premise from getting too hacky. Compare it to other cartoons where the joke is simply the fact that a character is mistaken for a chick; here, it shows, most primarily, the consequences and digging oneself out of the hole.



As such, Gumball and Darwin, in an interesting and rare turn of events, serve as foils at their most proper: Gumball's actions convolute Darwin's, and Darwin's eventually convolute Gumball's. Even more rare is how this set-up doesn't victimize either party - there's no high road being taken so much as both parties equally feeding into each other's downfall, and even if Gumball starts out with the upper hand, in only a matter of time, he’s trapped in the cycle.

Ultimately, though, stripping it all bare, removing all of those pesky layers... this is just a dumb episode, but a gleefully dumb one. There's no sense of trying to make some happy character moments like in "The Genius," nor are we supposed to be laughing entirely at watching Gumball and Darwin act haphazardly, as in "The Spoon" or "The Picnic." There's a clear understanding that nothing in the episode carries any weight nor harbors anything against the characters themselves (even if Darwin gets the short end of the stick), and it happily goes along with not trying to make a point. In a season plagued with hokey lesson-learning in one way or another, "The Dress" stands out as an episode that's self-aware of its idiocy.



That might be a bit convoluted to wrap your head around, but one thing I've deduced over and over again is that the more minuscule the point a Season 1 episode is trying to make, the better off it usually goes. Granted, "The Dress" doesn't encroach on "The Curse" and its sheer, near-nihilistic tendencies, but more from the standpoint of its composition, there's nothing that's trying to be meaningful and nothing to really take away. Even within the universe of "The Dress" itself, all of its events are so far removed from Gumball that he walks away mercifully unscathed, nudity notwithstanding. Simply put, there's nothing wrong with an episode where nothing happens.

Alright. I think we’re good here. Special shout-out, by the way, to Normie for going through the mental strain of helping me brainstorm godawful jokes at 3 in the morning. I'll chalk it down as "creative consultation."

Here's his mandated five seconds of screentime to self-promote and aid the general effort:

"i didn't do it for the fame. i rarely help out on blogs, but when it comes to "the dress", who wouldn't want to break the habit?"

Truly words to live by.

Next week we’ll be taking a gander at “The Girlfriend,” so if any of y’all have some valid complaints about it that I can incorporate into the article, please do tell - it seems to be one of those episodes people aimlessly lambast without providing any legitimate complaints in the process, so I’m bound to get a few points wrong.

Until then, stay nice, slick, and crispy.