‘Brigsby Bear’ is this Year’s Sharpest Critique of Mass Media

By Cooper Peltz

Unpacking the media theory behind one of this year’s most delightful (and surprisingly pointed) films.

Everyone has that one TV show that taught them everything about life. You grew up with it, and it informs more of your life choices than you’d like to admit. For me, it’s The Office. For others, it may be Friends, or Seinfeld, or whatever. The point is, these shows have made an impact on you, and they’ve shaped how you want your life to be. You want a romance like Pam and Jim (there’s a reason why every other person on your dating app has, “Just a Pam Beesly looking for her Jim Halpert,” or vice versa, as their bio). You want a kooky neighbor like Kramer. You want a group of friends to hang out with at a coffee shop and lament the woes of early adulthood. These shows have a lasting impact on you because odds are you found them around puberty. The old adage that your favorite Saturday Night Live cast is the one you watched in middle school can be applied in a broader sense: the shows you watched in middle school and high school helped shape your worldview growing up.

Going back further in your life you probably watched whatever your parents allowed you to watch. Shows like Arthur, Barney & Friends, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood come to mind for my generation, but each generation has its own sampling of kids shows. And though the fingerprint of these shows may be less distinguishable on your life, they were just as influential as the shows you watched around puberty.

Brigsby Bear plays with this idea by simplifying the formula. What if the influential shows you watched growing up were all rolled into one: a show that you watched as a child but grew up with you, teaching you about life through a warped lens. Through this conceit, the film utilizes the work of media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Dafna Lemish.

Co-writers Kyle Mooney and Kevin Costello may have been aware of the wide swath of theories they were stuffing into their film, but I’d venture a guess that many of these structures simply are ingrained in their psyches and naturally manifested themselves in their work.

We first meet James (Kyle Mooney) as a 25-year-old super fan of a children’s show called Brigsby Bear Adventures. He lives in an isolated bunker, akin to The Hatch from Lost, with his mom and dad—that is, until it’s revealed they are not his real parents. They have kidnapped James, and James’s false father Ted (Mark Hamill) has created Brigsby Bear Adventures to brainwash the young man into willingly submitting to his captors. Though the film only spends the first ten minutes inside the bunker, this sequence utilizes a ton of media theory mixed with cold war motifs to set up James’s character.

Any justification for why James, an adult man, doesn’t question why his parents keep him locked in a bunker would at a glance seem far fetched. However, visual cultural theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff explains why this phenomenon is not so far fetched in his book How We See the World. “Seeing the world is not about how we see, but about what we make of what we see. We put together an understanding of the world that makes sense from what we already know or what we think we know.” So, when James and Ted look out at the desert landscape and see animatronic “gunner foxes” and “grazer bugs” (bogus-looking inventions of Ted’s to reinforce James’s warped worldview), these things conform to James’s altered perception of the world.

This view of the world is further backed up by Mirzoeff’s delineation between biological sight and cultural judgment, which is the difference between what we see and how we make sense of it. The animatronic animals’ overt fakeness that we can see as viewers is lost on James. In his mind these animals are real. Through this detail, we catch a glimpse of how real Brigsby is to James. The gunner fox and Brigsby are of similar production value, so you can assume that James sees Brigsby in a similar light to the fake animals in the real world—that is to say, Brigsby is very real.

The final beat in the bunker sequence is James’s realization that the air outside is not poisoned. Again, this lie has been perpetuated through visuals. Ted, when he leaves the bunker, puts on a gas mask. Because James witnesses this ritual every day, he believes that the air is toxic. Ted’s unwavering repetition teaches James to fear the world outside the bunker. In the words of the father of media theory Marshall McLuhan, “Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.” The world Ted created for his pseudo-son is unbreakable because James knows no other environment until he is forced into the real world.

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