Wherein I Blame The Simpsons, Pt. 1
Here is my confession: I find blaming The Simpsons — blaming them irrationally, grandiosely, universally for the world’s ills — to be very therapeutic. The Simpsons helped parent me as it weened me away from the worldview of my own parents, so it makes a perverse sense that I blame them for playing this formative role. This first post in the series covers The Simpsons shorts which aired on The Tracey Ullman Show.
**********************************
Reality in The Simpsons began satirically as a new realism, as an incursion of realist animation onto prime-time TV. Realism is not reality, of course; it is a sobering style that distances itself from the fantastical. Realism on sitcoms for many years was limited to impossibly happy family units like the Cleavers, the Cosbys, or the Bradys. Like the shows All in the Family, Married with Children, and Roseanne, the Simpsons shorts offered a grittier realism: snapshots of a nuclear family in various states of dysfunction. Unlike those shows that filled 30-minute slots, each 1-minute+ short provided only a brief glimpse into the dysfunctions of the Simpson household. And with animation decidedly irregular and rough around the edges, it leaned into a stylistic realism of uglinesses. Its cartoon lens distorted each face unflatteringly, showing cruelty, rage, stupidity, pettiness, and buffoonery, as well as more expressive moments of disappointment and sadness. It was a brutal humanism.
This was a realism designed for Generation X: it delighted in showcasing, in lieu of family perfections, the rudenesses of family life that fall decidedly short of perfection. The Simpsons showcased its family failures not to steer us closer to the light of perfection but to bring us closer to the truth of disappointment: the traditional sitcom image of the perfect family was in fact unachievable, thus unbelievable, thus false, thus garish, thus undesirable. It was a matter of taste. Disappointment felt true, or honest at least. While this was fundamentally a depressive worldview, it was proud in its depressiveness. Who has not reveled in this late-80's realism? But whence its sadness?
Each Simpsons short existed to demonstrate how orderliness, respect, reverence, and the sacred, while they occasionally served as impossible benchmarks or bludgeons, fundamentally held no purchase in this thoroughly modern world of impulse and impatience. The nuclear family unit, long the patriarchal center of bourgeois morality, had been exploded and no longer reflected an orderly and meaningful world. “This family could use a little reverence around here,” Marge mutters at the dinner table, only to be silenced by the blare of the television. The short ends: the television is given the last word at the table. Is this erosion of order a cause for sadness or celebration?
The famous couch gag sequences, which concluded the opening credits of the 1990 reboot, would invariably foreground the Simpson television set as the self-referential focal point and frame of the show, yet the same self-consciousness was already emerging in the early shorts. In one such short, Bart deconstructs the family television to put on The Bart Simpson Show. It ends as Lisa, sitting on the living room couch, watches her father choke Bart’s neck through the frame of the disassembled TV. Appalling abuse of a child? It is, but now there are suddenly air quotes surrounding it, there’s a sense of ironic detachment, and the family trauma is transformed to something new. The television, The Simpsons points out, had become the new symbolic center that displaced parental authority; insofar that it liberated parents from parenting, it liberated children from their parents. By broadcasting a world so exceedingly more vast than the narrow scope of parental knowledge and authority, and yet by compromising this vastness with an ever-crass commercialism, the idiot box awakened a new generation of adolescent irony and detachment. And The Simpsons gave new voice to this generation of ironic detachment. See them revel in trying on all possible genres.
If All in the Family processed generational conflict around racial and sexual equality, The Simpsons processed the expansion of consciousness that children have experienced by watching a lifetime of TV. The Simpsons depicts a world of unruly children ideologically liberated from parental indoctrination, even as they strain under the rule of their parents, who are themselves cast as arbitrary children. Homer, it would later be revealed, was raised by television too (“That’s how I was raised, and I turned out TV”), but it is his progeny who become the liberated generation. In another episode, the best of the early shorts, Bart and Lisa explain that they don’t have to go to church because they are pagans; they strip off their clothes and Bart confesses that his “pagan soul yearns to run free.” There is no denying it here: this is children’s liberation. And there’s such exuberant celebration in this liberation!
What should also be clear: this glimpse of pagan liberation was not written for neo-pagans, whether children or adults. The Simpsons was not made for believers but, rather, for a new generation of skeptics taught to cherish doubts over beliefs. If the children learn to worship, what they worship is not Nature but the power of cultural literacy (thank you, television!) wielded as a weapon of doubt and defiance. Bart and Lisa and Maggie become pagan in this episode only as an act of defiance against Marge and Homer’s lackluster Christianity; their paganism dances upon the sacraments of Christianity, for their conversion is only a satire, and satire is by nature parasitical, surviving upon what it attacks. Without parental religion, there is no children’s paganism. And without parental overreach, their is no truth in disappointment and defiance. We need the misguided attempt in order to deem it a failure.
Within The Simpsons aesthetic, all aspirations toward perfection must be disappointed for the sake of a gritty realism, but such misguided aspirations never fully disappear. All dreams must be punctured, but they survive as an extravagant hope now saddened by its deflation. And importantly, it is not merely the parent who dreams of parental power, but the child too. Each expectation that we entertain, insofar that it exceeds reality, is still preserved in each sting of disappointment felt later on, in ourselves, in others, in the world. Child, parent, we did, for a moment at least, believe in the unalloyed goodness of the familial order, even if now we believe only in its alloyed good. For this reason, we viewers of The Simpsons are forever suspended exquisitely between the hopes and disappointments of both parent and child, reveling in the havoc, the liberation, yes — but also, somehow, still sad to relinquish that wisdom and authority as merely false pretensions. The television set —now the laptop —now the smart phone — still stands between us, interconnecting us even as it fragments our interactions.
From the very start, The Simpsons has traded in a satirical realism tinged with sadness; it exposes familial pretensions to universal truth with its own savvy relativism, and celebrates this exposure — even as it also marks it as a loss. God is dead, killed by mass communication: long live God, our weapons of mass communication. But now a warning, dear Simpsons fans. If you are not, like The Simpsons, enlivened by this unceremonious leveling, as a willful child to its willful parent, then you may eventually feel your own naive hope fester into abject betrayal, a spiritual sucker-punch that hurls you headlong into despair. And it is from the wounded despair of betrayed hope that the tender roots of nihilism do grow. Either way, the image of the perfectly happy family continues to haunt us, for it is baked into our depressive coping strategy of disappointment. The Simpsons is still going strong and we have yet to move far beyond the spiritual predicaments posed by its satire.
**********************************
This is the first installment in a series on The Simpsons and on reality, which will consider how realism in The Simpsons evolved over the years, how The Simpsons has shaped our sense of reality, and even how The Simpsons bears upon the multiverse model of reality. Read my follow-up essay on The Simpsons as alt-media, the rise of the alt-right, and President Trump.
