{"id":232,"date":"2017-11-14T23:57:48","date_gmt":"2017-11-15T04:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/f18-engl117-01\/?p=232"},"modified":"2017-11-14T23:57:48","modified_gmt":"2017-11-15T04:57:48","slug":"the-simpsons-blog-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/f18-engl117-01\/uncategorized\/the-simpsons-blog-post\/","title":{"rendered":"The Simpsons Blog Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The 21<\/span>st<\/span> Century Fox logo fades to black as an Apollo spacecraft lands on the moon. \u00a0An anthropomorphic cat, Scratchy, and an anthropomorphic mouse, Itchy, emerge from the spacecraft. \u00a0Evoking another moon landing, Scratchy proclaims: \u201cwe come in peace, for cats and mice everywhere.\u201d When the dramatic music stops playing, Itchy grabs an American flag and stabs Scratchy through the chest and beats him to near-death. \u00a0In short order, Itchy returns to earth a hero, is elected president, and, when he discovers that Scratchy survived the attack, \u2018accidentally\u2019 launches the entire nuclear arsenal. <\/span><\/p>\n

So begins <\/span>The Simpsons Movie<\/span><\/i>. \u00a0Given the the traditions of Simpsons oeuvre, developed over nearly 30 years of television episodes, the choice to begin with Itchy and Scratchy is both telling and completely unsurprising. \u00a0The entire series is rife with slapstick and low humor that connects closely to a host of early cartoons. \u00a0But that first sequence also elides quickly into a scene in which Homer breaks the fourth wall, allowing Homer\u2014and the film\u2014to point out the ridiculousness of charging real audience members to watch a television-adapted movie, but he also points out the ridiculousness of charging audience members to watch a television-adapted movie that features a television-adapted movie:<\/span><\/p>\n

Boring! \u2026 I can\u2019t believe we\u2019re paying for something we get for free on TV. \u00a0If you ask me, everybody in this theater is a giant sucker, [pointing towards us] especially you!<\/span><\/p>\n

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The gag works because of its satirical observation and because it happens while breaking the fourth wall. \u00a0And the \u201cItchy and Scratchy\u201d movie, like the main series shorts, works because of its slapstick humor in the vein of Monty Python and Charlie Chapman. \u00a0Together, these comedic techniques satirize the film industry, its relationship with consumers, cartoon violence, and <\/span>The Simpsons <\/span><\/i>themselves\u2014all within only a few minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u00a0grotesquerie of the opening sequence invites the viewer to connect the Simpsons to a host of lowbrow humor and, in this way, to the \u201ccarnivalesque humor\u201d described by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. \u00a0In examining the work of Fran\u00e7ois Rabelais, Bakhtin draws a connection between the \u201cgrotesque and scatological\u201d jokes of the French humorist and the antics of Medieval carnivals (Duncombe 82). \u00a0For Bakhtin, these carnivals upend social structures, placing the fool in the place of the king, and the king in the place of the fool\u201d (88). \u201cIn this inversion and \u201ctemporary suspension \u2026 of hierarchical rank,\u201d Bakhtin argues, participants \u201cwere considered equal during the carnival\u201d (88). \u00a0The satisfactions of this kind of inversion, according to Bakhtin, support a kind of subversive humor, one centered around upending social dynamics and presenting \u201cworld[s] inside out\u201d and \u201cliberat[ed] from norms of etiquette and decency\u201d (88).<\/span><\/p>\n

The Simpsons<\/span><\/i> clearly appears to share the sort of proclivity for subversion that Bakhtin celebrates\u2014but the movie does not fully adopt a Bakhtinian understanding of humor. \u00a0While <\/span>The Simpsons Movie<\/span><\/i> does employ carnivalesque humor, it too challenges it. \u00a0In its gags, the film shows the strengths of carnivalesque humor, but the film also illustrates its limitations, particularly in relation to other comedic forms. \u00a0By looking at the ways in which carnivals and carnivalesque humor succeed and do not succeed in <\/span>The Simpsons Movie<\/span><\/i>, some insight can be gained on how effective Bakhtin\u2019s argument is in its totality.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The most authentically carnivalesque moments may be those that occur in \u201cexcerpts\u201d from the Itchy and Scratchy Show. \u00a0Consider the cold opening again. \u00a0The opening sequence only provides a few-minute segment from the \u201cItchy and Scratchy\u201d movie\u2014but those moments are memorably graphic. \u00a0In those two minutes, Itchy beats Scratchy to near death using a flag pole, leaves him to die on the moon, and\u2014when it turns out Scratchy is still alive\u2014launches the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States. \u00a0The \u201cItchy and Scratchy\u201d shorts in <\/span>The Simpsons <\/span><\/i>television show are characterized by similar acts of violence. \u00a0In one short, Scratchy is fooled by a sign offering free money only to be neutered; in another, Itchy hooks up Scratchy to a cloning machine in order to kill Scratchy over and over again. \u00a0These violent, yet humorous, scenes demonstrate some of the argument made by Bakhtin. \u00a0Like Rabelais and the carnivals, The Simpsons use crass humor\u2014in this case, through over-the-top cartoon violence\u2014as a means of upending social dynamics and as a form of satire.<\/span><\/p>\n

But are these moments authentically Bakhtinian? \u00a0In his chapter in<\/span> Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture<\/span><\/i>, William Savage argues that the effectiveness of the \u201cItchy and Scratchy\u201d cartoons lie in their ability to satirize [many things] in their violence. \u00a0\u201cItchy and Scratchy\u201d plays off of the older <\/span>Tom and Jerry<\/span><\/i>, but it also critiques corporate culture, cartoon violence, in a knowing way that an informed consumer of culture would immediately recognize. \u00a0There is an obvious subversion, of course, in which mouse triumphs over cat. \u00a0But there is also a knowing confirmation in which \u201cgetting\u201d the full joke is an affirmation of the viewer\u2019s superior position. \u00a0Read in conjunction with Bakhtin, Savage\u2019s argument suggests that the satirical power of the \u201cItchy and Scratchy\u201d cartoons lies more with the audience member, rather than the carnivalesque elements of the gags.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Of course, pure bawdy humor and comedic violence is a cornerstone of the Simpsons history, from Dr. Nick Rivera\u2019s disastrous medical interventions to the endless radioactive anomalies\u2014and worker injuries\u2014caused by the nuclear power plant. \u00a0But the most prevalent example of \u2018grotesque\u2019 humor appears in the relationship between Homer and Bart. \u00a0In an early scene from <\/span>The Simpsons Movie<\/span><\/i>, Homer engages Bart in a game of dare, after Bart laughs at Homer, who unintentionally hit himself with a hammer in eye while repairing their roof. \u00a0The two try to best each other by forcing the other to perform the most painful and humiliating tasks: Homer has to carry a pile of bricks on his back while Bart shoots him with a pellet gun, and Bart has to skateboard to a burger restaurant and back completely nude. \u00a0The humor of the scene rests squarely on the physical pain the two inflict on to each other\u2014but the scene also functions by subverting the standard relationship between a father and son. \u00a0Homer and Bart are in turns overpowered by one another, in much the same way as the \u201cItchy and Scratchy\u201d cartoons. \u00a0And, unlike those shorts, the funniness of the scene is not predicated upon the viewer having inside knowledge: the subverted relationship between the father and son is implicit in the scene itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nonetheless, it\u2019s clear from this scene too that grotesque and physical humor alone is unable to subvert social dynamics. \u00a0Homer remains the father figure in the film as in the television series and is responsible, ultimately, for the happy ending that keeps his family and his town intact. \u00a0He may be a fool, but he also inhabits a position of \u201cauthority\u201d that is never seriously shaken. <\/span><\/p>\n

A Bakhtinian reading of <\/span>The Simpsons<\/span><\/i> is also challenged by the film\u2019s central narrative, which exists outside of individual gags. \u00a0In brief, the film tells the story of an averted natural disaster, one that is both caused by and ultimately resolved by everyman Homer Simpson. \u00a0After an attempt by the townspeople of Springfield to clean-up their polluted lake, Homer drops a massive silo filled with pig feces into the lake\u2014the lake is quickly covered in a bubbling green ooze and a giant skull-and-crossbones appears in the water. \u00a0The head of EPA, Russ Cargill, decides to intervene by sealing Springfield under a glass dome. \u00a0While the scenarios and scenes surrounding the glass dome offer opportunities for exploring carnivalesque humor, it is the interactions of Cargill with other characters that more so capture a Bakhtinian argument. \u00a0Cargill gives the president\u2014here Arnold Schwarzenegger\u2014five sealed envelopes, asking him to choose one at random. \u00a0Later on, Cargill\u2014after being foiled by Homer and Bart\u2014claims that there are \u201ctwo things they don’t teach you at Harvard \u2026 how to cope with defeat, and how to handle a shotgun.\u201d \u00a0But before he can shoot Homer and Bart, Maggie pushes a boulder onto him.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In each of these instances, a government official is subverted and undermined\u2014the president is told what to do by an EPA official; Cargill makes fun of his Harvard education; and Maggie drops a boulder onto him. \u00a0These are successfully subversive acts, surely, akin to examples that Bakhtin provides. \u00a0In \u201cUnderstanding Satire with the Simpsons,\u201d Carl-Filip Florberger specifically highlights the connection between the Simpsons subversion of officials of varying kinds across its episodes in connection with Bakhtin:<\/span><\/p>\n