The Simpsons turns 20, remains relevant
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“Do they give a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?” asks Sideshow Bob on the phone during a prison riot, just before a toilet sails into the wall above him, smashing into pieces. He’s talking to Springfield’s right-wing talk show host Birch Barlow, (“the fourth branch of government, the 51st state”) a man who quickly advocates for Bob’s release. ‘Sideshow Bob Roberts’ (or episode 2F02) of the Simpsons aired over fifteen years ago, but its satire feels as fresh as last week’s Daily Show.
In fact, it’s difficult to think of a program that captured not only its contemporary surroundings so eloquently, but that has given us a glimpse into the absurdities of culture that appeared years later.
This summer, as the world watched the infamous (but now virtually forgotten) Mylar balloon sail through clear Colorado skies, collectively holding its breath for the fate of the boy apparently inside, all I could think of was the Simpsons episode 8F11, ‘Radio Bart.’ In it, Bart gets a microphone for his birthday that can transmit to radio, and subsequently tricks the town into thinking that there’s a boy (Timmy O’Toole) stuck down a well. What follows is a frenzy of media hype, celebrity fundraising songs (“We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well”), and the eventual bitter taste left when the hoax is revealed. The whole thing would seem eerily prophetic, except that it was as much a stinging commentary in 1992 as it is now. In other words, we really haven’t changed.
Over at CNN, Todd Leopold writes,
For many fans — particularly hard-core followers in the mold of the show’s sneering Comic Book Guy — the glory days are long past. Some refuse to watch anymore; others admit they still find it funny, but they’re disappointed the show didn’t bow out at the top of its game.
The reason it feels stale now is because our culture has gone basically nowhere, so the jokes appear tired, even if they’re as prescient as ever – the show still satirizes the same things it did fifteen years ago because it can. We’ve only traveled further down our weird spiral, directly into the absurdist heart of the Simpsons cultural zingers. 1993’s “School of Hard Knockers” is 2007’s American Pie: Beta House; Birch Barlow is no longer just a parody of Rush Limbaugh, but of Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity as well.
Late in his book, Planet Simpson, Chris Turner writes,
Simpsonian satire is a mirror held up to society, and that mirror is frequently set opposite a TV screen – itself a kind of cultural mirror. The two mirrors double and redouble each other, creating an image of infinity – a media vortex. A glimpse, that is, of the parallel universe that is modern media culture and a potent metaphor for the trap media culture creates.
[…]
Think of Huxley’s soma not as a drug that’s ingested but as an all-pervasive narcotic force called the mass media, and you begin to wonder if the Panopticon functions not by allowing our captors to watch us but by allowing us to constantly watch ourselves. Or, more precisely, to watch some idealized version of ourselves that has become more compelling to us than our own lives.
That mirror which The Simpsons has held up for twenty years is staggering in its accuracy, but also its size. Nothing escapes it – not our mob mentality, not our obsession with everything sordid, not our specious reasoning, not our eating, shopping, or work habits, and certainly not our narcissism. Not even Menachem Bagin’s eyeglasses were free from the Simpsonian cultural glare. It’s all there for us to see, including our collective unwillingness to change any of it.
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I’ll have to respectfully disagree on our culture going “nowhere.” Sure, there are periods of brief obsessions with “balloon boy” phenomena, but how is that any different from the massive amount of time that was spent covering the O.J. case (you know, aside from, say, the fact that that was a murder case.) Both involve levels of celebrity, it’s just now there is a surplus of media outlets with a lack of a ceiling for coverage, looking for something, anything to cover.
As far as the Simpsons now versus fifteen (or even ten) years ago, well, I think it just comes down to a matter of focus. Or perhaps lack of focus. Take a recent Simpsons episode and you’ll find the plot all over the place, with a large portion of episodes focused on side jokes that do little to advance the plot or characters. Look at “Sideshow Bob Roberts” and you can see a well-focused story-line that’s driven by characters, not throwaway side gags. The reason old Simpsons episodes continue to be relevant today is because they strike at a certain element of human existence, with all its flaws intact. The writing was excellent and it managed to really reflect ourselves as individuals and not, as, say consumers of iPods (which an episode of recent memory happened to be focused on.) There’s a reason that The Simpsons Movie was as great as it was, and that’s because they brought in some of the show’s old writers who have long since gone: They manage to channel some of that original ingenuity and make a story-line that wasn’t terribly bogged down in pointless jokes.
…But, that’s just my two cents! If I happen to be watching TV and it’s a new Simpsons episode, I’ll still check it out.
great article!
such a true analysis too, it’s really no wonder that the cnn article didn’t see it the same way.
Thanks, Jeremy!
In response to another comment. See in context »Mr. Horgan,
The Simpson have become what they used to make fun of, a shot that is “stale and repetitive” and where the writers “aren’t even trying anymore”. It is a show well past its prime that is desperately imitating itself by retreading old episodes and trying lame gimmicks.
When Lisa became a vegetarian it was funny because the show could make incisive cuts into our culinary conventions and prejudices but the episode where she became a Buddhist because is was in fact the same episode withe word “vegetarian” replaced with “Buddhist”. The same could be said of when Bart goes to military school (funny and insightful) vs. the later episode when Bart goes to Catholic school (dull and superficial). Recently they had a contest to let their fans design a new character, how “Poochie” is that?
“He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.” The Simpsons have become the monster they used to mock.
Leor and David, you both raise excellent points regarding the new plot-lines and stories in the Simpsons… unfortunately! I think I agree that the writing has faltered, taken over by too many “the Simpsons are going to ______ !” plots. I’ll concede to that.
Having said that, it doesn’t mean that the show is completely irrelevant. If anything, apart from all the reasons that I argued for its relevancy, it’s an example of how our media system works – it takes something interesting and witty, and eventually dumbs it down to the lowest common denominator. Most of the time, it just doesn’t take 20 years.