REVIEW: Complicated Friendships In ‘This World Can’t Tear Me Down’

This World Can’t Tear Me Down is the Italian-language Netflix Original follow-up to Tear Along The Dotted Line by cartoonist Zerocalcare about his life with supreme anxiety as personified by a talking armadillo. When the neighborhood Nazis set their sights on having a local refugee center closed down, Zero manages to get roped into a counter-protest and rumble against the Nazis. Having been arrested, he tells us the story of how he found himself in a police interrogation room over the course of six episodes.

Where the first series was focused on what it’s like for people to be friends with Zero as somebody with fairly severe anxiety, This World Can’t Tear Me Down is more about what it’s like for Zero to be friends with other people. The series, above all, revolves around an old friend, Cesare. The two had virtually nothing in common but bonded over their both feeling like outsiders and creating trust in each other that, especially for Cesare, wasn’t replicable elsewhere. But as time went on, they grew apart, and Cesare eventually disappeared for 20 years. He’s back now, and Zero’s other friends, Secco and Sarah, aren’t especially happy about it. Secco hates Cesare, and Sarah is going through her own journey of feeling unfulfilled in life that’s being neglected by her friends.

Cesare was never running in the same circles as Zero, but now he’s truly fallen in with the wrong crowd, and the show is about directing whether or not you can be friends with, empathize with, or convince friends that have been indoctrinated that they’re wrong and that they’re hurting other people, let alone themselves. All the while, Zero’s anxiety makes it harder tenfold to say what he means and to mean what he says.

The message the show is trying to dig at is interesting, and I think it mostly gets it. There’s never a moment where the Nazis are painted as being right or that, on the whole, they should be trusted, forgiven, or liked. And the notion that a lot of people fall into that kind of crowd for a reason, like having bad upbringings, being poor, and having poor influences, is well-trodden. So the fact that the show ultimately goes on to implore that a lot of people have bad upbrings or are poor and they don’t turn into Nazis is a much-appreciated reminder. Too often, I feel that when I’m asked to sympathize with a Nazi or any generally terrible person, it’s asking me to excuse the harm they’re doing. This World Can’t Tear Me Down doesn’t make excuses. It just tries to offer a way to navigate this really complicated type of relationship.

And, of course, the show does that in its great signature fast-talking, tangent-taking fashion. The show takes six episodes to tell its story because, for every detail in the main plot that’s explained, Zero has to go back and explain the history of that relationship, the sociological phenomenon being it, the historical context, the colloquial definition, or some other long-winded, always vastly entertaining back road. Every sidebar is hilarious and accompanied by the show’s most creative and outlandish animation. There’s no way to predict what kind of ridiculous verbal journey you’re going to traverse in any given sequence, and it’s always fun to follow along.

While perhaps not as deep or moving as the prior series, This World Can’t Tear Me Down is a fun trip through the meandering mind of an impressive cartoonist that takes an appreciated approach to a certainly difficult subject,

This World Can’t Tear Me Down is streaming now on Netflix.