Rick and Morty: Who’s the Real Beth?

Rick and Morty’s Beth Smith is a character full of contradictions, shaped by the trauma of being abandoned by Rick as a child. Support ScreenPrism on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=7792695​

Paradoxically, Beth’s identity struggles eventually lead her to become exactly the person she wanted to be all along.

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Transcript provided by Youtube:

00:00
“What the hell?
00:01
What kind of question is that?!”
00:05
Beth Smith sure doesn’t like being analyzed.
00:07
“[Bleep] you.”
00:08
But we’re going to try anyway.
00:10
“Take that back!
00:11
You do not think that about me!”
00:13
As we’re watching “Rick & Morty,” one of the first things we notice about Beth
00:17
is that she was clearly deeply shaped by the childhood trauma of her father, Rick, abandoning
00:22
her.
00:23
And on top of being absent for big stretches of time,
00:25
Rick wasn’t emotionally available when he was around.
00:28
“It’s called a hug dad, it won’t kill you.”
00:30
So adult Beth clings to any scrap of attention or affection she can get from her dad,
00:35
however insincere it might be.
00:37
“You really made the crap out of those eggs.
00:39
I wish your mother was here to eat them.”
00:41
“Oh, dad.”
00:43
“What?
00:44
For real?”
00:45
She’s driven by a deep-seated fear of losing him again.
00:47
“Guess who dismantled the government?”
00:49
“Please don’t leave me again.”
00:52
Rick takes advantage of his daughter’s neediness, living rent-free and using Morty for his adventures.
00:57
And he actively drives a wedge between Beth and Jerry
01:00
because he wants to become the only patriarch of the family.
01:04
Beth makes excuses for Rick’s behavior,
01:06
and when she does stand up to her father it’s always with a tentative edge.
01:10
“I know I sound like mom, but I can’t sacrifice this whole family’s safety just because I’m
01:14
afraid you’ll leave again,”
01:15
But even though Beth strikes us as the definition of “needy,”
01:18
she doesn’t like neediness in others, and she even admires Rick’s ability to detach.
01:24
“He doesn’t need anything from anyone.”
01:26
“You admire him for that.”
01:29
“It’s better than making your problems other people’s problems.”
01:32
This contradiction can be explained by the mix of forces that shaped Beth, as she was
01:37
growing up.
01:38
Her childhood was defined more by Rick’s absence than his presence.
01:42
So when she sees him as an adult, all of her independence goes out the window
01:45
and she’s back in that abandoned child mindset.
01:47
But at the same time, whether thanks to her genes or the time she did spend with her dad
01:52
as child,
01:53
Beth has a lot of Rick in her.
01:55
She has quite an ego, like Rick.
01:57
“I will use it to dominate the universe.”
02:00
She’s very intelligent.
02:01
“Are you saying Tommy survived here by having sex with Froopy creatures,
02:04
creating Froopy-human hybrid offspring, and then consuming their proteins,
02:07
sustaining himself with an endless cycle of cannibalistic incest?”
02:09
And she can be just as rude and dismissive.
02:12
“Tommy, I’m sorry you think you deserve an apology.
02:14
Oh, my God.
02:15
I’m my father.”
02:16
So who she’s become now is a confusing mix of the Rick-like qualities in her,
02:20
and the little girl who couldn’t deal with her pain and guilt after her father left.
02:26
When we look at Beth, it’s like she’s always clenching, always tense,
02:30
holding herself together as some persona that she thinks she should be.
02:34
She’s like a self-created Stepford Wife.
02:36
“I am not a bad person, and I’m fixing this.”
02:39
We have a theory about why she’s like this, based on what we know about Beth’s youth.
02:43
“I can’t believe you used to lock me up in this glorified chicken coop.”
02:47
“Chicken coop?”
02:48
When Beth confronts Rick about Froopyland, he tells her that she was essentially a psychopath
02:52
as a child.
02:53
“You were a scary [bleep] kid, man.”
02:54
He says that he left her to her own devices in Froopyland because he needed to keep her
02:58
isolated from society.
03:00
“I didn’t make Froopyland to get rid of you, Beth.
03:02
I did it to protect the neighborhood.”
03:04
So basically Rick used any of Beth’s bad behavior as a pretense to abandon her in Froopyland.
03:09
“Look at some of the [bleep] you were asking me to make you as a kid:
03:12
ray guns, a whip that forces people to like you, invisibility cuffs, a parent trap…”
03:18
“Has it occurred to you that I asked you to make those things because I wanted you to
03:21
spend time with me?”
03:22
Maybe baby Beth was acting out to get her father’s attention, or maybe she did have
03:26
murderous tendencies.
03:27
But in any case, young Beth internalized that the reason her dad left was her misbehaving.
03:33
A natural perfectionist, Beth would have decided subconsciously or consciously to become “perfect”
03:38
for her dad,
03:40
hoping that this could bring him back.
03:41
“I feel like I’ve spent my life pretending you’re a great guy and trying to be like
03:46
you.”
03:47
Beth forced herself to become her idea of the perfect daughter, the perfect wife — the
03:51
perfect person.
03:52
And this is what we see when we look at her — a person who’s constantly trying hard
03:57
to be perfect.
03:58
“I will reach into heaven and yank your screaming deer soul back!”
04:02
Beth ended up creating what amounted to a false identity.
04:05
She married a guy who she had nothing in common with but who seemed like a safe choice.
04:09
She got a respectable job.
04:11
She tried to be a good mom.
04:13
And she completely repressed who she really was.
04:15
And that’s why it’s no surprise that Beth’s adult life ended up a little half-assed.
04:20
If you’re not living anything close to a life you really want,
04:23
then it’s hard to make yourself care when you don’t get everything right.
04:27
Beth married Jerry because he got her pregnant,
04:29
and she ended up having Summer because her car broke down on the way to the abortion
04:33
clinic.
04:34
She wanted to be a surgeon for humans, but stopped her education and settled for horses.
04:38
She considered cheating on Jerry, but didn’t even go through with that.
04:42
Her lack of agency to fix her unhappiness would seem to be at odds with her hard-working
04:47
nature and her obvious intellect.
04:49
But on some level Beth knows that she isn’t really being true to herself.
04:52
“I want to be a more complete woman.”
04:54
Her efforts to be “perfect” have made her very unhappy.
04:57
Basically, this Beth, trying to be this Beth, resulted in this Beth.
05:02
Beth has nothing if not mixed feelings for her husband, even in the same moment.
05:07
“What are you an idiot?!
05:08
[Sighs] I’m sorry.
05:09
I’m sorry.
05:10
That was so rude.
05:11
I came to you for help, and now I’m insulting your intelligence —
05:13
and look what intelligence gets you.”
05:15
Sometimes Beth is grateful for Jerry, and sometimes she just can’t respect him.
05:19
“Does everybody see what I mean?”
05:20
The question in everyone’s mind when watching Beth is,
05:23
if she idolizes her dad so much, then why oh why did she marry a man like Jerry?
05:28
“See that?
05:29
I’m peeing all over your special guns!”
05:32
It does make sense that Beth would try to find a man who is nothing like her father
05:35
—
05:36
because she wants a husband she can be sure won’t abandon her.
05:39
Still, because there is that piece of Rick in Beth,
05:42
that person in her also sometimes hates Jerry just for being who he is.
05:46
“Jerry, get a job!
05:47
Jerry, don’t look for a job at an alien wedding.
05:50
I don’t get you!”
05:51
Beth is at her most disgusted with Jerry when his lack of intelligence is on display,
05:55
because Rick’s refusal to suffer fools has infiltrated her thinking.
05:59
The struggle between her “Good Beth” and “Real Beth” identities is externalized
06:04
in Rick’s and Jerry’s competition to dominate the Smith household.
06:08
“Beth — it’s him or me.”
06:09
Rick’s presence in the house reminds Beth of who she was and makes her feel distant
06:14
from Jerry.
06:15
“You’re saying I should leave Jerry.
06:19
I can’t believe I’m finally having this conversation.”
06:23
When Beth chooses Rick and divorces Jerry, she’s choosing to resurface her old, pre-Jerry
06:28
identity.
06:29
“Dad, I’m out of excuses to not be who I am.”
06:33
Things come to a head when Rick refreshes her memory about who she was as a kid,
06:37
and Beth realizes she has been missing out on her true self.
06:40
“And the ugly truth has always been–”
06:41
“That I’m not that great a guy and you’re exactly like me.”
06:44
At this point though, things get complicated.
06:46
“I can make a clone of you, a perfect instance of you, with all your memories.”
06:49
“I don’t know if I can do it.
06:51
Then stay, and luxuriate in a life you can finally know you’ve chosen.”
06:55
In the next episode, Beth is enjoying the family life she’s chosen so much,
07:00
that she actually starts thinking she is the clone.
07:03
[Screams]
07:04
Could she be a clone, or has “Good Beth” actually quietly somehow become the Real Beth?
07:11
We all start out life with an idea of who we are.
07:13
But over the years Beth’s life turned into something so far removed from the self-image
07:18
she had growing up,
07:19
that it only makes sense to her to think of her adult life as a lie, a choice that sold
07:24
out her real self.
07:26
It seems more probable that she is a clone than
07:28
that authentic Beth could possibly like being a mom, married to Jerry.
07:32
We’ve all seen those movies about spies or cops that infiltrate a criminal operation
07:37
and start to feel that’s their real life.
07:40
Beth is like the suburban version of that.
07:43
She paradoxically faked her way into a real life that she does want, without knowing it.
07:48
Something like this happens to many of us as adults — we take paths that weren’t
07:52
what we planned.
07:53
We still think we’re the same person we were when we started forming a self-image,
07:57
but our lives move on and —
07:59
consciously or unconsciously — we made choices that led to where we actually wanted to be.
08:05
Beth’s story proves that, at the end of the day, we aren’t what we think, we’re
08:09
what we do.
08:10
A fake identity ends up being your true identity, if you’ve lived it long enough.
08:15
Because any identity we have is really just a construct, a choice.
08:18
Beth’s idea of who she was as Rick’s daughter ended up being false
08:22
because she chose not to live as that person.
08:25
Beth also represents the pressure to live up to certain expectations, that many people,
08:30
especially women or the children of alcoholics and divorced parents are likely to feel.
08:36
Under all this pressure, it can be easy to lose sight of who we originally wanted to
08:40
be.
08:41
But people can and do change, even so drastically they don’t recognize themselves.
08:45
In the end, Beth’s arc is heartening, because it shows us that we’d probably end up better
08:50
for the journey we’ve taken,
08:52
even if our lives don’t look like anything what we thought we wanted once,
08:56
eventually we end up in the place we do want to be.
09:02
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09:03
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09:07
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09:08
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09:12
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09:16
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This post was previously published on Youtube.
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