Rick and Morty: Why Is Rick Such a Rick?

Rick and Morty, the immensely popular Adult Swim cartoon, has yet to flesh out the backstory of Rick Sanchez, the egotistical, alcoholic, and exploitative grandfather to the long-suffering Morty Smith. In this first of our Rick & Morty Character Studies, let’s look at a few theories that could explain what makes Rick such a Rick.

Transcript provided by Youtube:

00:06
Rick Sanchez is a brilliant scientist, but also an egotistical, callous, envious man,
00:12
alcoholic, and exploitative grandfather to the long-suffering Morty Smith.
00:22
So why is Rick such a Rick?
00:24
[Play something.]
00:25
[God, grandpa, you’re such a dick.]
00:27
[I’m sorry, Summer, your opinion means very little to me.]
00:31
Rick appears to fit the definition of a narcissist.
00:34
Let’s take a quick look at the criteria. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
00:39
Mental Disorders,
00:40
a narcissist thinks he or she is special and can only be understood by other unique people
00:49
A narcissist Is entitled, expects everyone to comply with his wishes.
00:57
Takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends.
01:10
Lacks empathy: doesn’t appreciate the feelings and needs of others.
01:23
Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him.
01:30
Exaggerates his own achievements and talents, expects to be recognized by others as superior.
01:35
And is “preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance etc.”
01:44
Rick is also an alcoholic.
01:46
Substance abuse is common in people with defined narcissistic traits, possibly because they
01:50
tend to overestimate their own resilience to these substances and believe that nothing
01:54
bad will happen if they abuse them.
02:01
Obviously we’re not doctors, but even if we were to “diagnose” Rick as a narcissist, or attribute some
02:08
of his behavior to his addiction, it doesn’t really tell us why his personality developed
02:12
this way.
02:13
So ultimately it’s an unsatisfying answer to the question of why Rick is so Rick-ish.
02:19
Rick feels he’s alone in the universe because he believes there is no one around him who
02:23
can match his genius.
02:24
There could be some truth to this idea, as other characters support it.
02:29
Yet, despite complaining that he has no mental peers, Rick chooses to spend most of his time
02:35
with his intellectually mediocre grandson, so Rick is constantly frustrated with Morty
02:40
for not keeping up with him.
02:46
He does reveal in one episode that Morty’s brainwaves help hide Rick’s genius, but
02:51
that doesn’t explain why Rick doesn’t seem to have a single friend who is anywhere near
02:55
the same intelligence ballpark.
02:56
There’s a case to be made that Rick actually prefers less intelligent companions so he
03:01
can feel superior.
03:02
From what we witness anyway, Rick’s loneliness has less to do with his smarts and more to do with
03:07
his abrasive personality and tendency to push people away.
03:11
This is reflected in Rick’s storyline with Unity, a creature that takes over a planet
03:15
and becomes completely autonomous to eliminate the need to interact with anyone else.
03:22
In the end, she suggests that this is precisely what Rick does by keeping his loved ones at
03:26
arm’s length and treating everything as a joke. But whether or not his brains are the root of the
03:32
problem, what is clear, is that Rick has deluded himself into believing that it’s because
03:36
of his intelligence that he can’t maintain lasting relationships.
03:49
In Rick’s mind, being antisocial is proof of intelligence, while being nice and open
03:54
is dumb.
03:59
After all he’s seen and experienced, Rick has learned that it’s a bad idea to trust
04:04
anyone.
04:05
To be open-hearted is to be naive, is to get hurt.
04:08
At Bird Person’s wedding, he shows a rare moment of vulnerability:
04:17
But when Tammy turns out to be an undercover agent for the Galactic Federation, Rick suggests
04:21
that opening himself up to others was a mistake.
04:24
It’s even possible he’s tried letting himself be vulnerable and got burned before,
04:29
maybe many times, and that would explain why his guard is always up.
04:43
Rick struggles to make meaningful connections because human beings are essentially disposable
04:48
to him.
04:49
There are infinite versions of everyone he comes across, and anyone can be easily replaced.
04:54
Just six episodes into the series, Summer, Beth and Jerry literally are replaced when
04:59
Rick and Morty have to abandon the family they started out with.
05:02
This devastates Morty, but Rick doesn’t seem to see it as a big deal.
05:06
After all, how could Rick still see someone like Jerry as one of a kind knowing that there’s
05:11
a daycare center out there full of countless Jerrys exactly like him?
05:15
In fact, Rick and Morty don’t even know for sure that they take home the right Jerry
05:19
because Morty lost their ticket.
05:33
And in the opening credits of season three, Rick is seen casually shopping for a new Morty.
05:38
In a world where another Jerry or Morty can just be picked up like a piece of furniture, an individual
05:44
becomes fundamentally less significant..
05:49
At the root of Rick’s cynicism is an existential depression — caused by his awareness of these
05:54
infinite families, as well as infinite dimensions and alternate versions of himself.
05:59
Rick’s actions are those of a person who is plagued by meaninglessness, and doesn’t
06:04
place value on individual lives.
06:12
This is how he can justify making an entire sentient race for the sole purpose of powering
06:16
his car battery.
06:18
The psychologist Erich Fromm wrote that the problem of human existence lies in the fact
06:22
that we are mortal and self-aware — when you know that whatever you do, you’re going
06:26
to die, and so will everyone you love, it can be pretty hard to find meaning in life.
06:40
For Rick, this problem is infinitely worse — it’s not just that he’s going to die;
06:45
he’s also aware that there are billions of other Ricks just like him.
06:49
So even though he tries to assert his importance with the claim that he’s much smarter than
06:53
all the other Ricks, his life is still just a blip on the time-space continuum,
07:01
and he knows it.
07:10
This same awareness explains Rick’s penchant for breaking the fourth wall and speaking
07:14
directly to us, the audience.
07:21
A popular theory speculates that if Rick can wrap his genius brain around multiple dimensions
07:27
and time travel, he can easily conceive of the possibility that his whole universe is a simulation, or
07:33
even an animated TV show, so his “Rickness” could stem from knowing that we’re watching him
07:38
in this show. Knowing the events in your life are being written all to make an audience laugh, you’d
07:45
be acutely aware that the “characters” in your life are not only not “real,”
07:50
but also subject to the whims of a team of writers, a network and viewers.
07:55
Understanding all this would result in detachment, fear, and sense of futility.
08:01
The show has not yet revealed the full backstory of Rick and his wife, but it’s implied that
08:06
she did not approve of his science-fiction exploits and he abandoned her; when Beth scolds
08:11
Rick about being reckless with alien creatures, she says…
08:18
In season three, Rick explains that his wife died in an accident and that this is what
08:24
drove him to build his portal gun.
08:26
This is soon revealed to be a made-up story, but it could imply that Rick really did abandon
08:30
his original universe after some sort of tragedy, and this loss made him afraid of ever becoming
08:36
so emotionally invested in someone ever again.
08:40
That abandonment of the original universe may or may not have involved Evil Morty, who
08:45
is the subject of numerous fan theories about Rick’s past.
08:49
The Evil Morty Theory posits that, just as Rick is not interacting with his original
08:53
Summer, Beth and Jerry, he’s not going on adventures with his original Morty — that
08:58
Evil Morty is in fact Rick’s original Morty.
09:01
At one point we see Rick cry while looking at memories of him holding a baby Morty.
09:05
But Rick has been absent from the family for decades, so the baby Morty he is holding couldn’t
09:10
be the show’s Morty.
09:12
It’s suggested that Evil Morty was the one killing off all the Ricks, so we know that
09:16
Evil Morty holds contempt for Ricks of all kinds.
09:19
This could mean Rick abandoned Evil Morty, before hopping over to the dimension we see
09:24
at the start of the series.
09:25
According to this theory, Rick doesn’t want to get close to another Morty knowing that
09:29
something could happen to him just like something happened to the original Morty, for whom he
09:33
clearly had affection.
09:35
Regardless of the ultimate facts of the story, the character dynamics reflect the
09:39
fundamental challenge of finding meaning in relationships when we know that they
09:43
will eventually end.
09:54
When we try to imagine what it would be like to have infinite families in infinite universes,
09:59
to know that there are countless others out there (almost) just like us, to feel smarter
10:03
and more special than everyone but also know that nothing really matters, we can start
10:08
to wrap our heads around why Rick is such a Rick — and we might be, too, in his situation.
10:13
His “Rickness” is actually an understandable response from a person who’s lived through
10:17
what he has, and who’s a big enough genius to really grasp the existential implications
10:21
of those experiences.
10:24
Despite all this, Rick still has a deep need for some affection and meaning.
10:28
Because while he has has a much longer-than-average list of reasons not to care about anyone or
10:33
anything, he’s still human, and we can’t go on living with a total absence of purpose or love.
10:53
In our next video we’ll explore Rick’s character growth over the first three seasons
10:57
to ask the question, has Rick changed?
11:00
So subscribe to watch more!