Monologue Of Mr Krabs

“And just when you think you’ve found the land of milk and honey, they grab ya by the britches, and haul you way up high … until you’re hauled up to the surface, flopping and gasping for breath! And then they cook ya, and then they eat ya—or worse!” speaks Mr. Krabs, advising Spongebob to do all in his power to avoid the horrors of man that lay waste at the top of the ocean. Spongebob, justifiably so in this manner, shows a grim expression of horror to Mr. Krab’s comments. He reflects deeply upon the crab’s comments, before asking, “what could be worse than that?” and Mr. Krabs, with a purposeful, bleak stare, tells Spongebob, “Gift shops.” Indeed, albeit a grim situation that these invertebrates discuss in Bikini Bottom, there is a good share
Just as we find ourselves at the bridge of success in our lives, our “land of milk and honey,” we find ourselves trapped on our own hooks, forced with that devastating word: failure. The failure to meet our deadlines, to please our peers, to meet our own expectations, and ultimately to appease society. This is the premise of Judith Jack Halberstam’s groundbreaking thesis, The Queer Art of Failure, dedicated to “all of history’s losers,” which, beyond gift shops and fish hooks, is the foundation for one of the greatest works on capitalism, art, comedy, and ultimately, failure, that I have ever read. In the book, Halberstam seeks to connect the archaeology of social expectation to the investigative forms of queer theory, all in the objective to construct one of the most controversial theses I have ever seen – that failure is not the beast society has made it to be throughout history, but one the most effective methods to change our lives towards newer, better futures. I was first exposed to this book at debate camp over the summer of last year, attending a seminar focused on developing arguments about queer subjectivity, and was immediately
Perhaps this is where my mind wandered and the question that really made my heart slump and my pupils dilate. The Queer Art of Failure made me want to explore myself and my limits, test the waters of my child-like inquisition, and more than anything made me ask, “why?” With SpongeBob’s silly approach to a Bikini Bottom dominated by corruption and the innate capitalism of the Krusty Krab, to Finding Nemo and Dory’s tendency to approach life whimsically and forgetfully, to even the under-the-table Marxist undertones of escape and proletariat uprising towards Utopia in Chicken Run, I think what Halberstam taught me most is that the child is alive in all of us, and it is society that kills them. In my deposition, my ridicule and laughter towards failure, my inner-child was willfully contained. But, upon investigating myself and opening my mind to a possibility of an alternative, I laughed for a much different reason. It was an overwhelming joy and a playful optimism that rose in my gut and made me really think that failure was just a fanciful word for surrender. Halberstam says, in Chapter Three, “Children and Failure,” that, “So while children’s films … are often hailed as children’s fare that adults can enjoy, they are in fact children’s films made in full acknowledgment of the unsentimental, amoral, and antiteleological narrative desires of children.” And this is perhaps the goal of failure. It is an acknowledgment of itself, a means to an