Most people tend to agree that representation in popular culture is an important key to social equity. Diversity in film and television promotes diversity at home. Strong, complex female characters are vital to reforming the collective subconscious and reversing rigid gender roles. We at this historical juncture are heir to a school of criticism that views representation as world building: to write nuanced characters into a film, to conjure complex characters on the screen, is to bring them to life in reality.

I came of age during an era that was ripe for the female heroine. The female action stars of the 90s upended traditional representations of women and confronted their audiences with a battle cry for the woman of the future. Such representations might have ostensibly allowed a young girl like me to aspire to a warrior status, to discover my hidden athletic prowess, to burst triumphantly onto the stage of life and assume the role of the protagonist. But reality disappoints. I searched long and hard for my inner warrior and she wasn't there. The truth is that I was shy and sensitive and introverted, and never could pull myself out of my own head for long enough to participate in the world in any kind of vigorous and paradigm-shattering way.

It is perhaps for this reason that I have become skeptical of the idea that representation has any concrete relationship with reality. I don't believe that we can represent our way to social equity, just as we can't think our way into a different personality or will ourselves a different nature. Perhaps we don't consume fiction in order to see ourselves the way we wish we might be. In my case, fiction has often allowed me to see myself the way I am in spite of my best efforts not to be that way.

The fictional character with whom I've felt the truest affinity is Chip Baskets.

Chip Baskets, played by Zach Galfanakis, is the protagonist of the eponymous show that ran on FX from 2016 to 2019. A shy and inarticulate man approaching middle age, Chip has spent several years of his life chasing his dream of becoming a professional clown. We encounter him after he earns a degree from a Parisian école de beaux arts where he trained among the masters in the fine art of clowning. He has returned to his hometown of Bakersfield, California, a collection of dry and desolate strip malls off the highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the primary point of interest is the local Costco. It is in Bakersfield where Chip is obliged to move into his mother's townhouse while he strives to earn a living in his unlikely métier.

It quickly becomes clear that Chip Baskets is not interested in money, but rather in the Art of the Clown, in pushing the limits of the form and in carving a unique spot for himself in the annals of circus clowning. His stage name Renoir conjures the dynasty of French artists who created some of the most avant-garde work of the century prior, and signals the gravity and elitism with which he approaches his art. His sense that clowning is the apex of artistic expression is a conclusion he accepts as foregone, and yet he is ill-pressed to articulate its importance. To Chip, the status of the clown is a sacred, ineffable, explanation-defying absolute.

Chip Baskets' first formal performance at the local rodeo is a distillation of his aesthetic ethos: he enters the scene in a harlequin fat suit, face painted like Pagliacci, illuminated by a single spotlight, while he shakes a basket of glitter that delicately falls in the cone of light surrounding him. It is a haunting moment of renaissance splendor abruptly interrupted by a bull that knocks him over mid-performance. Such instances of slapstick punctuate an otherwise tragic and inward-facing exploration of the delusion required to persist in our age as a clown, or as any type of artist seeking the approbation of an increasingly fickle and attentionless audience.

And therein lies my affinity with Chip. At the risk of drawing too heavy-handed a comparison, I have always had a hard time explaining the value-add of my vocation. It is the absurdity of the clown pursuit that ridiculizes Chip. And yet I cannot help but find his performance artistically compelling. There is beauty, too, in his stubborn self-defeatism, nobility in his refusal to cede to the forces of commercialism and cynicism that overwhelm him. His own willful oblivion to the broader economic and social reality dictates his higher-level decision making; he responds to failure and rejection with an implacable, ill-informed sense of tenacity. Candide-like, he tends the garden of an art that is not only moribund, but that he is attempting to resurrect from a death it died over a century ago.

Galfanakis' performance might be generalized into an allegory for the plight of the modern artist, or aspiring academic, or any other professional whose career was dead-ended by the slow-motion collision of technological advancement and economic collapse to which the past twenty years paid unfortunate witness: those of us who spent the better part of a decade collecting qualifications, shuffling between unstable gig work in a field that nominally offers some kind of personal enrichment, sold the lie that this enrichment is an apt substitute for compensation, and never really forming the negotiating skills to argue with the holders of the purse strings.

Chip Baskets is the archetypal loser-hero that this generation of contingent artist-workers deserves. He is a patron saint for those who saw their creative trajectory unceremoniously uprooted by the automated and asocial turn that our century has taken, by the ways in which the pursuit of artistic fulfillment has been co-opted by algorithms that circumvent the visionary in favor of quick, clean entertainment meant to flatter a madding and increasingly unimaginative crowd.

What do we lose when we erase the clown? Ultimately, Baskets serves a metaphysical reflection on what it means to be an aging creator in a culture that has shed the more nuanced layers of its sensibilities, so that anything original must be cloaked in equal parts tragedy and absurdity in order to land, and even then, just among a niche audience. It is an apt allegory for the plight of the artist who stubbornly pursues her vocation in spite of its decreasing interest to the broader public. Ultimately, it dramatizes the fundamental uselessness of the urge to create according to one’s sense of aesthetics, or to pursue any type of fulfillment that doesn't have a strict monetary end, paired with the fundamental imperative to do it anyway, at the severe detriment to one's financial and social health: the death drive manifest in an oversized clown suit.