Sunday 15 July 2018

"Is it St Swithin's Day already?" "Tis, replied Aunt Helga..."


"Bart of Darkness" (1F22) is, without doubt, one The Simpsons' most ingeniously-constructed episodes. People mainly remember the Season 6 opener (which was actually a holdover from Season 5, thanks to production delays caused by Mother Nature kicking some asphalt earlier on in 1994 in San Fernando Valley) for its arch pastiche of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, but that doesn't kick into gear until halfway through the story. The first half basically thrives on the fact that nothing much in particular happens. There are a few rudimentary plot points: the family acquires a backyard swimming pool, Bart breaks a leg and Lisa enjoys a sudden (and inevitably ill-fated) boost in social status. But otherwise this is a deliberately dull chapter in Springfield history, and why shouldn't it be? As the episode opens we find the town in the midst of a blistering heatwave, and nobody has the verve or the patience to do much of anything. A good chunk of the episode revolves around us, like the infirm Bart, lying around waiting for first signs of genuine drama to appear.

I think this emphasis on drudgery is one of the reasons why I'm so infinitely fascinated with "Bart of Darkness". I can't think of any other Simpsons episode (or any other episode of anything, for that matter) that so accurately conveys the sheer tedium of summer - the long, slow, monotonous grind through one sweltering day into the next. "Bart of Darkness" goes to great lengths to accentuate the physical discomfort of its characters, beginning with those early shots of the family lounging around their living room, deprived of all energy and enthusiasm, and of Bart, in attempting to answer the (as it turns out, false) salvation calls of a passing ice cream truck, first having to peel himself from the fabric of an armchair. The episode as a whole is not at all clement toward Bart, and he is fated to become increasingly trapped and immobilized as the summer wears on. Bart and Lisa convince their parents to invest in a swimming pool, which has all of the neighbourhood children scurrying over to the Simpsons' household to bask in the watery goodness. Unfortunately, Bart's attempt at a daredevil pool stunt goes horribly wrong and results in him being confined to a cast for the rest of the summer, at which point he immediately discovers that the sheaths of "friends and well-wishers" who'd flocked to his house to share in his chlorinated fortunes actually couldn't give two shits about him. Lisa is left to soak up the fairweather glory alone as Bart, unable to bear being stuck on the sidelines while everyone else is having a jolly good time of it (and heartlessly ignoring his plight), retreats to his bedroom, where boredom, bitterness and desperation swiftly set in. The television, usually a reliable means of escapism, offers no refuge, for Krusty has packed up for the summer and left an endless stream of re-runs from his "klassic" era playing in place of his regular show (although, as always, whenever The Simpsons tries to do something deliberately soul-destroying, you end up wishing that we had more of it - really, who wouldn't want to watch the full conversation between Krusty and George Meany?).

Lisa, still high on her pool-induced popularity, makes a perfunctory effort to ease her brother's suffering by lending him a telescope, at which point anyone with a reasonably decent knowledge of popular cultural can probably figure out where this is heading. And yet, the lurid drama Bart so desperately craves is slow in coming. He peers out through the lens of the telescope, desperate for something of interest to reveal itself in the suburban dust bowl, and discovers only inertia and monotony where it feels like a vibrant community should be. There is nothing out there. And that's a nightmare in itself.

Bart's immurement is physically and emotionally stifling, but there's an extent to which it seems to fuel his creative spirits. We learn that Bart, ever the eager anglophile, has spent part of his entrapment penning a play set in the United Kingdom (albeit one that presents a typically American ideation of how Brits live; the characters eat kippers and have names like Viceroy Fizzlebottom). Included in the short extract we hear is a reference to St. Swithin's Day, the feast day of Swithin (or Swithun), the Anglo-Saxon bishop of Winchester and patron saint of Winchester Cathedral. More than just continue a long-running gag about one of Bart's stranger fixations, the reference to Swithun also contains parallels with Bart's own predicament. For those not in the know, St. Swithin's Day falls on 15th July and comes with a piece of lore that ties in neatly with that fabled British preoccupation with the weather (it might be genuine, although I can tell you from personal experience that that old adage about Brits knowing how to queue is complete and utter bullocks) - namely, that whatever weather occurs on the day should be taken as an indication of the weather the UK can expect for the succeeding 40 days (in that sense, it is quite similar to America's Groundhog Day). There's even a rhyme that goes with it:

St Swithun’s day if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain.
St Swithun’s day if thou be fair,
For forty days ‘twill rain nae mare.

Swithun, who died in AD862, is said to have left instructions that his remains be buried outside, so that the rain could fall upon his tomb, but in 971 efforts were made to relocate his body to a new indoor shrine - an act that caused so much cosmic displeasure that torrential rain is said to have come down from the skies and to have persisted until Swithun's remains were restored to their original resting place. It goes without saying that the authenticity of this story is dubious at best, and that the reliability of the forty-day forecast should also be taken with a pinch of salt, although there is a sliver of scientific basis to the lore (which has to do with the jet stream settling around mid-July and holding relatively steady until the end of August). You don't have to squint too hard to draw the connection between the desecrated Swithun and poor broken-legged Bart, plucked from his natural habitat and sealed away indoors where not a drop of water can reach him (apart from in the bathtub with a garbage bag fastened around his cast). Whereas in Swithun's case the violation was deemed so egregious that divine intervention was in order, to Bart the universe responds only with cold indifference. Not only is it content to leave him to rot in his domestic vault, when he peers out through the telescope, desperate to make some kind of reconnection with the outside world, he finds himself gazing into an abyss of mind-numbing emptiness. Actually, that's not strictly true, for when Bart uses the telescope to look up at the stars, outer space is putting on a spectacular show for him, complete even with physical evidence of extra-terrestrial life. But it is not the kind of stimulation that Bart desires. What he wants is to reimpose himself upon the community that has shunned and forgotten him by stealthily inserting his gaze into their most private and uncomfortable moments. Having denounced the universe as boring, he becomes intrigued at the prospect of staring into "Springfield's seamy underbelly", but is met with only the banality of the adult world and the suspicious eyes of Jimmy Stewart peeking back at him (that in itself feels as if it could be the punchline to the entire Rear Window allusion, if not for that we have to start building to some kind of dramatic happening for the third act). In a neat twist, we can deduce that Bart has been cast as the villain in whatever (we assume, equally uneventful) narrative is unfolding over at Stewart's house. Later on in the episode, when Bart finally escapes his confinement and ventures back into the outside world, we cut to Stewart screaming that the "sinister-looking kid" is coming to kill him, right before collapsing in an undignified heap.

Eventually, Bart locates the drama he was looking for. Or rather, a drama suddenly manufactures itself out of nowhere and forces itself on him. And it is a tactically difficult one to swallow. To go along with Bart's suspicions, the viewer is asked to entertain a scenario which is frankly preposterous to anyone with even the vaguest knowledge of how the series functions - could the perpetual good neighbour Ned Flanders really have murdered his wife? No, of course not. We know the instant that this particular plot point materialises that it will all boil down a big misunderstanding, no matter how ostensibly incriminating the evidence unfolding before Bart's eyes. Bart, starved though he is for stimulation, is initially too genre-savvy to take the bait, opting to shut out whatever is happening at the Flanders' house and instead immerse himself in another long raga by Ravi Shankar. And yet the evidence continues to mount, and the episode anticipates our every reaction from the viewer's seat. When Bart later catches sight of Ned burying the remains of...something in his backyard, openly lamenting his murderous actions, Bart insists that there has to be another explanation, whereupon Ned cries out, effectively in direct response, how much he wishes there was an alternate explanation. We go along this wife-murdering Flanders business, curious as to how far the episode can possibly stretch it while still fully conscious that, despite Ned's insistence to the contrary, there will be a perfectly glib explanation lying in store before the episode is through - that much was already foreshadowed in the banal punchline from the late night comedy show we caught Dr Hibbert watching ("It turned out it was his evil twin..."). Surely enough, it eventually transpires (after Bart has allowed his obsession to consume him and endangered Lisa by having her break into the Flanders' house to collect evidence) that Maude's not dead (yet) and all of Flanders' talk of being a murderer was over an overwatered ficus plant. It's as deliciously, ridiculously innocuous a denouement as we could possibly have hoped for, although there's no denying that the episode flat-out cheats in the getting there. On the one hand, Flanders branding himself a murderer because he overwatered his wife's favourite plant is entirely in-character for him, as is the revelation that he has an unusually high-pitched scream that could be mistaken for his wife's. On the flip-side, it is a bit odd that Ned happened to bury the unfortunate plant in a backyard tomb that just so happened to be the perfect size for concealing a freshly-murdered human corpse, to say nothing of the inexplicably fervid rage he flies into while carrying his axe up to the attic where Lisa is hiding.

"Bart of Darkness" appears to have a strong Hitchcockian vibe going on in general - in addition to all of the story beats pilfered from Rear Window, I've spotted two visual nods to Psycho and I'm not sure, but I think that Lisa hiding behind the birdcage in the Flanders' antic might be a reference to The Birds (maybe?). And yet, despite evoking so many motifs of the dark, murderous forces lurking in the shadows and right beneath our noses, what "Bart of Darkness" emphasises above all else is that adult existence is frightfully dull. After all, the most dramatic thing to happen in the adult community during this particular course of events is that someone had a minor freakout after overwatering a ficus plant. It is a rhetoric best encapsulated in Homer's (as it turns out, entirely accurate) line, "When you get a job like me, you'll miss every summer."  Not that "Bart of Darkness" is any more romantic about the elementary school set. It transpires that Springfield's real "seamy underbelly" is to be located in the backyard politics of the town's children as they dutifully cluster around whichever attention-starved soul it is in their interests to do so at any given point in time, only to cruelly abandon them the instant the tides turn in their disfavour. Bart, Lisa and Martin each learn the hard way just how mean and fickle are the hearts of ten-year-olds. The universe is boring, adults are wet and children are the scum of the Earth: that's the moral of "Bart of Darkness".

The irony is that, for an episode so fixated on reveling in its characters' discomfort, "Bart of Darkness" is also one of the series' most rewarding aesthetically speaking. From Homer's early morning rise to Bart's aforementioned star-gaze to a sequence in which the sheaths of young bathers perform an Esther Williams-style synchronised swimming routine. Suburban banality has certainly never looked so beautiful.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment