Ghost Pal (Part One)

This is the first part of an analysis of Butters and Cartman.

Parker and Stone have commented on their love for the relationship between Cartman and Butters because they are so opposite. And they are, in many obvious ways. Eric - devious, Machiavellian, cynical. Butters - naive, trustworthy, gullible. But perhaps less obvious is the differing attitudes to their own sexual identity.

Butters has no hang-ups about his gender experimentation. In “Marjorine” he happily dances in female attire at the girls’ slumber party and revels in it. Whereas Eric, in “Awesomo”, goes to increasingly desperate lengths to hide his own flirtation with cross-dressing in order to avoid being exposed as “a fag” -he dresses as Britney Spears and dances with a cardboard cut out of Justin Timberlake.

In this episode everything Eric does to try and find the video Butters has made of this, merely involve him in more potentially “gay” encounters. He has to insert Butters’ suppository for him – Butters: “Yeah, yeah that, that's pretty good. Get it up there good and deep”, he is propositioned by one of the Hollywood producers, he is forced to sleep in the same bed with Butters who then lovingly puts his arm around him and, in the finale, to complete the tragic arc of his downfall, the whole school as well as the armed forces watch the video with a humiliated Eric and a jubilant Butters.

This scenario was played out again, a few seasons later in “Cartman Sucks”. A follow-up, in a sense, to "Asspen". Eric is drugging Butters to sleep, and then photographing him with animal faeces on his face, a tampon in his mouth and with Eric sitting on his face and planning his “coup de grace” putting his penis in Butters’ mouth and photographing them both. He is perusing his photo album whilst explaining his work to Kyle and Stan:

Kyle: Is this all you brought us here to see?

Cartman: Oh no, there's much more. [flips the page] Let's see- Oh yes, look at this one: I call it "New Moon Rising." [a shot of Cartman hanging his ass over Butters' face] I did a whole study using my ass. [Cartman's ass over Butter's face from the left side] Here it is using some high-contrast stuff. [next, Cartman wearing darker pyjamas, mooning Butters] trying out some... different light filters here.

This is difficult material because it is so shocking and funny at the same time. Shocking because Cartman acts like a paedophile drugging a child so he can abuse them. But, of course, Eric is not consciously doing it for this reason. Otherwise he wouldn’t be showing the pictures to his friends. However, it should be noted that one of the photographs he shows to Kyle and Stan he calls hot fudge monday. Although of course we don’t actually see it, we are forced to examine, tentatively, our own imagination.

But this aside, Eric is merely trying to humiliate him. Eventually though, Eric’s friends convince him his actions make him gay. Terrified, he’s tricked by Kyle into “(cancelling) the gay polarity” as he suggests Cartman needs to put Butters penis in his mouth. The outcome of all this for Butters is that he’s sent to a camp to have his homosexual urges expelled.
The great irony here is that Butters never actually realises what has happened, as he was blindfolded during Cartman’s attempts to reverse the gay polarity, yet although he is sent to the camp he, unlike the other kids there, is the only one who isn’t struggling with -and being punished for- examining his sexual feelings. In fact he is probably the most vehemently heterosexual and sexually mature of all the kids, with the exception of Kenny perhaps. He falls deeply in love with the Raisins girl, is the first character to successfully masturbate and in "Stupid Spoilt Whore" experiments with Paris Hilton’s vagina. In fact he acts like a male teenage adolescent a lot of the time, re “Return of the Fellowship...” becoming addicted to porn.

Back to the bed though...

Robin Wood wrote this about Laurel and Hardy: “Charles Barr argued the essence of their subversiveness lies in their connotations of the childish or childlike: they are children arrested somewhere in the middle of the process of socialization, still committed to the pleasure principle but extremely uneasy about it, vaguely grasping the reality principle but instinctively resistant to its domination, more polymorphously perverse than homosexual (for all their scenes in bed together)... and although continually at loggerheads, they know they are two of a kind however different in temperament”.

Now Charles Barr was a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian as you can obviously tell and I haven’t atttempted to argue from that perspective. But, the quote “they are children arrested somewhere in the middle of the process of socialization” describes the main kids’ characters quite well and it seems that Butters and Cartman’s relationship is turning into the marvellous relationship that Laurel and Hardy had in their movies.
Barr's comments can quite easily be fitted to describe all the kids in South Park but it seems more fitting as a description of the relationship between Butters and Cartman.