Beavis and Butthead Do Melville

; or, school's out for the summer

In an effort to buy myself time to write new posts, and more importantly to prioritize summer activities, I’m going to slow things down a bit here over the next month or two — or at least ease up on the intensity of the research. I still plan to investigate peculiar turns of phrases in Moby-Dick and highlight the strange nooks and crannies where one might find Melville out in the world, it’ll just at more of a… vacation pace. Rest assured I’ll be dreaming up new ideas while floating on a lake, drink in hand.

[In the meantime, be sure to check out the last post, Finding Booble Alley, in case you missed it. I posted it a bit late and it might have gotten lost in the mid-week shuffle]

To start our summer series, what better way to honor indolence and that school’s out spirit than with two of Melville’s most unexpected fans: Beavis and Butthead…?

Don’t laugh (or even uhhhhh-huh-huh-huh-huh) because it really is canon. In one of the very first issues of Marvel’s Beavis and Butthead comic book from 1994, the duo were found reading a copy of Moby-Dick by their hippie teacher Mr. Van Driessen (after destroying his mailbox). Van Driessen is just happy that they’re enjoying the Great American Novel.

What’s more, if you look closely at the bottom panel you’ll see that the artist copied the text of the book exactly, providing two of the more infamous paragraphs from Chapter 94: A Squeeze of the Hand.

As we all know, Melville was hardly above telling an elaborate dick joke, so who are we to judge them for zeroing in on this particular passage?

After their first reading, it seems they continued to seek the white whale. At the very beginning of the Season 5 episode "Hard Sell," first aired November 4, 1994, Beavis and Butthead are interrupted as they’re watching a TV adaptation of the book. An announcer states, “We’ll return to Moby-Dick right after these messages.”

The boys even apparently had a positive influence on their classmate Daria, who was reading it in a Season 1 episode of her own spin-off show a few years later.

Both Beavis and Butthead and Daria were created by Mike Judge, so it might not be too far-fetched to wonder if another of Judge’s best-known works, Office Space, also had a Melville connection. After all, what is Office Space if not a late 20th century retelling of Bartleby the Scrivener? In fact, the comparison was made as soon the film came out, with G.W. Clift of the Manhattan, Kansas Mercury calling Stephen Root’s character Milton "Bartleby-like... moved with his desk to the storage basement."

Writer Eirik Gumeny expanded on the links between the two in this Cracked article from May 2021, finding even deeper connections:

"Bartleby" was satirizing the then-booming financial hub of Wall Street, an "energetic and nervous" sector of business that was changing and growing in importance as the world industrialized. […]

Both the story and movie revel in mind-numbing repetition and dullness, dreary office environs, a palpable disconnection between employers and employees, and both feature a pair of eccentric sidekicks working alongside the main characters. Bartleby's unnamed boss in on his ass about "the copies, the copies" the same way Lumbergh et al. are always going on about TPS reports.

Bartleby, like Ron Livingston's Peter, stares off into space, refuses work without any actual consequences – and, in fact, inadvertently ingratiates himself into the boss's good graces with his slackerdom – and ends up in jail at the end. At one point, Bartleby's boss actually relocates the office rather than confronting Bartleby, just kind of hoping he'll go away. The Bobs take a similar approach to Milton in Office Space.

And last but not least, cubicle walls are also prominent in both, despite cubicles not actually being invented in 1853. Melville writes about Bartleby's boss putting up glass partitions to keep the working-class rabble out of his eyeline and even getting a secondary screen to keep Bartleby extra boxed in at his desk.

Whether Melville inadvertently invented the cubicle is an idea for another post, but as for the plot for Office Space coming from Bartleby… well, Mike Judge would prefer not to go there. He told the New York Times in 2017 that he’d never read it.