This post seeks to do with Arrested Development what Alan Jacobs does with Flight of the Conchords here and what Paul Fry does with Tony the Tow Truck here and here and here

As one of the seminal texts of the early twenty-first century, Arrested Development is fertile ground for readings from a number of critical vantage points. By way of preface, let me remark that one might conduct a robust structuralist reading of Arrested Development. The entire show is clearly built on a series of binaries—individual/community, George/Oscar, Lucille Bluth/Lucille Austero, Bluth/Sitwell, California/Arizona, etc. These binaries, of course, are always deconstructing themselves. George and Oscar, for instance, are mutually constitutive of each other, constantly replacing and being mistaken for each other. However, I will allow others to explore this avenue in favor of pursuing less arid interpretive possibilities. Similarly, Buster’s mistaken belief that the blue on the map corresponds to land, as well as Gob and Michael’s failed attempt to fool Japanese investors with a neighborhood of miniature model homes, reveals Arrested Development’s engagement with Korzybski’s claim that “the map is not the territory” and Baudrillard’s still more radical claim that in the age of simulacra, “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.” Yet, I will not belabor a postructuralist approach either. Instead, I will adopt an intersectional approach that accounts for race, gender, sexuality, and disability.

Blackness and Masculinity in Arrested Development

In its insistent erasure of blackness, Arrested Development participates in the mainstream literary tradition of the American Renaissance. As Toni Morrison observes of Moby-Dick, blackness in Arrested Development is “the shadow of the presence from which the text has fled.” All of the major—and virtually all of the minor—characters are white. The show is both fantasy and nightmare of white America: the rise and fall of the Bluth company stands for the unraveling of the American Dream, represented by home ownership. The shoddy workmanship of the model home in which the Bluths live reflects white anxiety that their once uncontested dominance is being undermined in an increasingly pluralistic world. Yet, blackness is an absent presence (or present absence) throughout Arrested Development. The rare African American character—Carl Weathers playing himself—offers insight into the show’s construction of blackness.

Weathers is most famous for playing Apollo Creed in the Rocky franchise. Although Weathers appears in Arrested Development as himself, constant attention is drawn to his reputation as an actor by Tobias, who wants to take acting lessons from the celebrity. This allows us to follow the logic of intertextuality and read Weathers’ portrayal in Arrested Development as an inverted, parodic version of Apollo Creed. In other words, if Creed embodies (and critiques) the myth of the black savage, then Weathers as depicted in Arrested Development is a trickster figure.

Apollo Creed’s name stands in ironic contradiction to his persona: while Creed epitomizes physical strength, ferocity, and raw sexual prowess, his name evokes art and intellect. “Apollo” obviously alludes to the Greek god of art, music, reason, and poetry, while “Creed” evokes a system of belief. Apollo is a god of light, yet Apollo Creed is black. Apollo Creed’s name is a misnomer, which can be read as simultaneously subverting and re-inscribing the binary opposition which aligns whiteness with reason and blackness with physicality. Creed’s character recalls black boxing champions from Jack Johnson to Muhammad Ali, all of whom had to contend with the myth of black savagery and the long history of white males projecting their own sexual exploitation of black women onto black men. As Gail Bederman has argued, depictions of Jack Johnson demonstrate the transition from a Victorian ethos of manliness to a modernist ideal of masculinity. During Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, black men were portrayed by many white Southerners as rapacious and brutal. The assertion that a black man had raped a white woman served as the standard pretext for lynching. Creed’s characterization as a physically powerful and sublimely confident black male both reflects and defies this discursive tradition. Weathers’ portrayal of Creed serves as what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “dialogic background” against which Weathers’ portrayal of himself in Arrested Development defines itself (one might pursue of similar line of inquiry in terms of the contrast between Henry Winkler’s role as the Fonz on Happy Days and his portrayal of the Bluths’ incompetent lawyer, Barry Zuckerkorn; Barry is constantly disclosing the homoerotic energy that is always already present in the Fonz’s behavior).

Weathers cons Tobias into paying him $1,100 for acting lessons. He recapitulates the smooth-tongued trickster figure who, in the oppressive regime of the plantation, creatively contrives ways to deceive the white master. Tobias plays the role of the white-master-as-buffoon, who (temporarily) fails to perceive Weathers’ chicanery. If Apollo Creed is a triumphant, albeit, ultimately reifying, assertion of black masculinity, Weathers-as-himself deploys the trope of the trickster figure and re-inscribes the image of African Americans as fundamentally dishonest, lazy, and manipulative. All of the advice which Weathers gives Tobias revolves around getting a good deal—“He always buys his cars at police auction.” When Lindsay works briefly at a restaurant, Carl insists that they take advantage of her employee discount. Weathers incarnates the white paranoia that the black masses are economic parasites living large off the welfare state.

Gender proves as productive a lens as race. The relationship between Lindsay and Maeby stages intra-feminist disagreements. Lindsay is a parody of the paradigmatic second-wave feminist (white, upper-middle class, educated, etc.). She is liberal and politically active, hosting numerous charity events for various causes, including anti-circumcision, vegetarianism, illiteracy, freedom of speech, and environmental protection, yet only cares about these causes insofar as they garner her attention. Maeby rebels against her mother’s care-free parenting attitude by feigning interest in traditional signifiers of femininity. When Lindsay suggests that Maeby get a tattoo, Maeby expresses her desire to star in beauty pageants.

George Michael’s lack of pronounced “masculine” traits is a recurring theme throughout Arrested Development. When Gob loses the “legs” for his sawing-a-woman-in-half magic trick (“Two chicks curl up in a box; one’s the head; one’s the legs”), George Michael fills in. George Michael’s masculinity is not recognizable through biological traits alone—his legs are hairless—but only through performance. As Judith Butler has demonstrated, gender is a parodic performance, not a stable essence or a physiological fact. George Michael enacts masculinity by wearing a muscle suit belonging to the Adam costume for the “Living Classics” pageant, in which George, Sr. dresses as God and Buster dresses as Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting of the creation.

Arrested Development and Psychoanalysis

From a psychoanalytic perspective, Arrested Development is a tour de force of neurosis, from Tobias’s repression of his homosexuality to Lindsay’s narcissism to various Oedipal configurations. The incest motif between Lucille and Buster is pervasive throughout the show. George, Sr. remarks that the doctors found “claw marks” on Lucille’s uterus when Buster was born and that he spent eleven months in the womb. Buster has a romantic relationship with a woman who shares his mother’s first name. While Freud’s interpretation of puns—“loose seal” vs “Lucille”—and, of course, the notion of the “Freudian slip” are entirely relevant here, we will not pursue them at length. Perhaps less obviously, Gob’s character is also defined in Oedipal terms: he is bent on replacing his father as president of the Bluth Company, despite his desire to avoid actual work at all costs, and he unknowingly flirts with his mother at a restaurant while posing as a waiter.

While the Freudian overtones of Lucille and Buster’s relationship are obvious, the Freudian undertones of Michael and George Michael’s relationship are more subtle, but no less critical. Michael stands as the superego in relation to George Michael’s ego, with Maeby serving as the id. Maeby embodies George Michael’s pleasure principle, constantly urging him to break the dictates of the superego, or Michael. George Michael implicitly equates Maeby with the id that drives him to defy the Law of the Father when she kisses him in order to scandalize her mother. When George Michael hears the sirens of the police boats approaching the Bluth yacht to arrest George, Sr., George Michael exclaims, “I knew it was illegal,” referring to his kiss with Maeby. Kissing Maeby ignites a longing in George Michael to break the incest taboo. This tension is sustained until it is revealed that Lindsay was adopted and that George Michael and Maeby are not actually cousins. Moreover, the death of Michael’s wife/George Michael’s mother has led to a collapse of the typical Oedipus Complex. Because of his mother’s absence, George Michael’s entrance into an agonistic relationship with his father is delayed. Michael is too attached to his son for George Michael’s healthy development. George Michael is fixed at the anal stage of psychosexual development, never entering the phallic stage. This explains George Michael’s compulsive neatness and minute observation of rules.

Similarly, George, Sr.’s baldness, in contrast to his twin Oscar’s full head of hair, reflects castration anxiety. When George shaves Oscar’s head and Oscar is mistaken for George and arrested, Oscar experiences the same castration anxiety when his hair fails to grow back. It goes without saying that the Banana Stand and corresponding banana suit worn by several different characters at different times is a phallic symbol. Michael’s decision to burn down the banana stand to spite his father is, in fact, an attempt to castrate his father and claim control of the Bluth dynasty.

Arrested Development and Postcolonial Theory

Even more than psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory provides revelatory insight into Arrested Development. George, Sr. built houses in Iraq for Saddam Hussein, acting under the auspices of the C.I.A. The Bluth empire was built, therefore, with profits from Iraq, even as the company cloaked the activities of American intelligence operations for the purpose of the neo-colonial subjugation of a foreign nation-state. Not only is the Bluths’ bourgeois lifestyle funded by the profits from their real estate corporation, but the show deploys a postcolonial critique of the global division of labor. Lucille’s housekeeper, Luce, is constantly in the background, drawing attention to the fact that the Bluths’ socio-economic status relies on impoverished Latin American workers. Lucille’s first-world status is so entrenched that at a telenovela awards ceremony, she believes that the male attendees in their tuxedos must be waiters: “A sea of waiters and no one’s taking a drink order.”

George, Sr.’s corporate empire began with a single banana stand. Yet, the Bluths’ adopted Korean son, Annyong, reveals that George, Sr. actually acquired the banana stand from Annyong’s biological grandfather. The Bluth fortune is built on the exploitation of a Korean migrant. Moreover, for a school pep rally, Annyong is cast as Emperor Hirohito—“man who orders strike on Pearl Harbor”—dramatizing the reification of the Oriental Other. The school interpellates Annyong into an Orientalist discursive order by casting him as Emperor Hirohito, despite the fact that he is Korean, rather than Japanese. This interpellation obscures the significant cultural differences between Japan and Korea, promoting a single, homogenous Asian Other, upon whom all fears and hatred can be projected. The historical irony is that Korea suffered far more from Japan’s military aggression during World War II than the U.S. The school, of course, recapitulates the very same logic of the propaganda campaign used by the U.S. during World War II. Annyong, however, unsettles the seemingly neat distinction between colonizer and colonized by performing what Homi Bhabha calls “mimicry”: Annyong avoids playing the role of Emperor Hirohito by claiming the role of Uncle Sam. A Korean boy in an Uncle Sam costume simultaneously mimics and mocks the figure of the patriotic American. The uncanny semblance of Annyong’s assimilation into American culture, embodied by Uncle Sam, reveals nationalism to be a performance, rather than an essence.

Arrested Development and Disability Studies

Beyond its engagement with the postcolonial, Arrested Development touches the central concerns of disability studies. Michael Bluth is a classic example of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the “normate subject.” The normate is white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. The normate is the ideal—and nonexistent—subject position against which all others are found deficient. As the protagonist of Arrested Development, Michael is positioned as the sun around which the other characters orbit, even if they don’t realize it, and the only sane character. He is the one with whom the audience sympathizes, re-inscribing notions of racial and gender hierarchies, as well as standards of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness.

Arrested Development relies heavily on images of physical disability. George, Sr. uses his friend, J. Walter Weatherman, who has only one arm, to frighten his children and teach them “lessons.” These lessons consist of J. Walter Weatherman’s prosthetic arm being violently torn off because the children ignored their father in some way. Michael, Gob, and Buster all employ J. Walter Weatherman in various attempts to use their father’s strategy against him. By staging moments of violence resulting in physical disability, Arrested Development re-inscribes the able-bodied assumption that to be disabled is a catastrophe. Yet, as we shall see, the show is deeply ambivalent, rather than unequivocally hostile, toward disability. This is readily apparent when Buster’s hand is bitten off by a seal. The show reveals the able-bodied logic undergirding it when Buster mourns the loss of his hand and when he repeatedly injures himself and others with his prosthetic hand, which is a metal claw. Arrested Development also dramatizes the process of what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls “enfreakment”: Buster’s family is afraid of and repulsed by the spectacle of his physical disability. He becomes an object of the gaze, rather than treated as a person. Filled with self-loathing, Buster screams, “I’m a monster.” Yet, Buster eventually adapts to his prosthetic hand.

Maggie Lizer exemplifies the trope of the disability con, in which an able-bodied character feigns disability. Myriad examples of the disability con can be found throughout literary history, from Black Guinea in The Confidence-Man to Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects to Jack Teller in The Score to Chip Sanders in The Ex. Maggie is a lawyer who pretends to be blind to gain sympathy from the judge and jury. Maggie later pretends to be pregnant—a state blurring the line between ability and disability—as part of a plan to manipulate Michael. The disability con is a classic example of what Mitchell and Snyder call “narrative prosthesis,” the use of disability as an essential plot device without which the story could not be told. Yet, it also reveals the abled-bodied phobia toward disability: the audience is relieved that Maggie is only pretending to be blind, rather than actually suffering such a horrific fate. This conception of blindness as a fate worse than death dates at least as far back as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

Michael’s one-time love interest Rita reveals the illegibility of neurodiversity to neurotypical characters. Virtually every member of the Bluth family is delighted with Rita (partly because she is rich), failing to perceive her neurodiversity because it has not been sufficiently marked for them. Although much of what she says seems odd and her behavior often violates social norms, they do not mind because they do not realize that she is neurodiverse. They attribute any strangeness about Rita to her Britishness, failing to realize that the “MRF” on her bracelet stands for “mentally retarded female.” Rita’s bracelet depicts the attempt by the medical establishment to categorize people into “normal” and “abnormal.” Yet, because her neurodiversity is insufficiently marked, the Bluth family merely adapt themselves to the quirks of her behavior. Arrested Development, therefore, mobilizes a version of the social model of disability, which claims that disabilities only exist in the context of particular social structures which fail to facilitate equal access for people of all kinds of physical and mental difference. Lindsay only feels that Rita’s style—wearing clothes inside out—is childish when she is told that Rita is “retarded.” Maeby only feels that Rita’s suggestion for her screen play—that two characters should walk across the ocean—is absurd when she learns that Rita is not “normal.” Michael believes that he is in love with Rita until George Michael shows him a video of her attempting to eat fake fruit.

Arrested Development and Queer Theory

Tobias exemplifies Robert McRuer’s claim that compulsory able-bodiedness is often linked with heteronormativity. While Tobias represses his homosexuality throughout Arrested Development, his emotions simply cannot be contained in an economy of heterosexual desire. Not only do Tobias and Lindsay fail to have sex on several occasions, but Tobias’s self-help book, The Man Inside Me, becomes a classic in the local gay community. A central interpretive question is the extent to which Tobias’s obliviousness to his homoerotic feelings is genuine or performative. In some ways, of course, this is a false dichotomy, as authenticity is merely another kind of performance. Bracketing that question, it is no coincidence that of all the characters it is Tobias who experiences temporary paralysis. After his hair implants afflict him with graft vs. host disease, Tobias begins to lose neuro-muscular control over his legs. The longer his hair grows, the more the rest of his body atrophies, until he must use a wheel chair. This reveals that disability and ability are not binary opposites, but rather that ability itself is an illusion—all of us experience various kinds of disability to varying degrees. We all experience disability at some point in our lives, whether due to trauma, aging, illness, or other causes. Yet, like many narratives which link heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness, Arrested Development co-locates the queer body and the disabled body in the person of Tobias.

The competition between Michael and Gob over telenovela star Marta reflects what Eve Sedgwick calls “gender asymmetry” in erotic triangles. Although one might think that Michael and Gob each desire Marta, she exists merely as an instrument through which they can engage in a quasi-erotic way with each other. Michael and Gob are male rivals in a patriarchal society, while Marta serves as the female love-object, the ground on which they compete. Her presence is necessary to facilitate their homosocial bond. Marta’s subjectivity is ignored or undermined at every turn (her body itself is replaceable, as two different actresses play Marta), culminating in a fist fight between Michael and Gob. The brothers share a physical embrace (rolling on the ground) which fuses aggression and erotic longing, but in a socially acceptable performance (the fight over a lover). The climactic reconciliation is not between either Michael or Gob and Marta, but between Michael and Gob, as they reaffirm their brotherhood and implicit joint commitment to the patriarchy. This same asymmetry is manifested in the George, Sr./Oscar/Lucille love triangle and the Buster/Lucille Austero/Gob love triangle.