Old Money (aka Modern-Day Saint, Rich Nut or Both? Only Time Will Tell)

If there's one facet of the human experience that The Simpsons has steadfastly refused to romanticise right from the start, it's old age. The series has always been entirely unapologetic in its insistence that there is no joy or dignity to be found in growing old. Make no mistake, the instant you're past your prime and exhibiting your first signs of dependency upon the younger generation to help you through the day, the world absolutely will not hesitate to have you whisked out of sight, so that you can wither away your remaining years in a place where it does not have to acknowledge you, much less deal with anything that could be construed as an imposition. To avoid such a fate, it seems that your best bet is either to be fabulously wealthy, like Mr Burns (in which case you may still require an extraordinarily dedicated right-hand man to literally keep you upright), or to have subjugated your offspring to the point where they would seriously struggle to survive outside of your shadow, a la Agnes Skinner. The situation in Springfield isn't quite Logan's Run, but it's still pretty dire.

The Simpsons' relationship with their own grizzled patriarch, Abraham Simpson, is a fraught one, the family being so negligent and so unwilling even to feign enthusiasm during their perfunctory social calls that it would be extremely easy, in lesser hands, to have them coming off as entirely unsympathetic. Here, though, it's a complicated situation, compounded by the fact that Abe is neither a kindly old gent nor an inexhaustible fountain of wisdom - rather, he's a resentful coot who is at best a mindless bore and at worst, a really, really mean and unpleasant individual. But then there's an awful lot in Abe's life to be resentful about. Society's treatment of himself, and of his fellow seniors, is beyond appalling. The ironically-named Springfield Retirement Castle (in reality, a derelict dive) purports to be a place "where the elderly can hide from the inevitable", and yet its actual modus operandi appears to be the exact reverse - it's a place that conceals the inevitable from the outside world, which really doesn't care to face up to either the responsibility of caring for the infirm or to the inevitability of its own mortality. On a personal level, however, there's no denying that Abe set the precedent for non-caring with his own incredibly rotten behaviour toward his children. Had he nurtured and cherished his sons as they were growing up, then he might have found them better inclined to take care of him in his old age. Instead, he psychologically damaged one son and completely abandoned the other, so there is an extent to which he's merely reaping the seeds that he sowed. And yet, any insinuation that Abe's plight is nothing less than karmic justice for his own lifetime of negligence would in itself be seriously misguided. "Old Money" (7F17) of Season 2 opens with Homer experiencing the horrifying epiphany that, in enabling the cycle to continue, he may be effectively setting the stage for himself to wind up in Abe's position one day, having imprinted the message on Bart, Lisa and Maggie that this is how you treat the aged. It's a cycle that is not going to end until somebody has the moral courage to give an unconditional fuck.

"Old Money", a tale of love, loss, loneliness and discount lions, was the first Simpsons episode to focus extensively on Abe, and to attempt to draw up a more sympathetic side to his character - this was very much-needed, as the last episode in which he'd appeared, "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", really does make him out to be the most despicable son of a bitch in all of Springfield. There, we learn about Herb and how Abe has this other son out there for whom he apparently feels no concern or compassion; that is, until he learns that Herb is now a millionaire, at which point he legs it to Herb's base in Detroit as quickly as possible, only to give up on him the instant he gets wind of the fact that he's not in the money any more (he also rejects Homer's offer of a ride back home, damning both of his sons in one fell swoop). Given that "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Old Money" occur almost back-to-back in the running order of Season 2, if you marathon the episodes then it becomes somewhat difficult to cast off the irony that the world's general treatment of Abe in this episode is not altogether dissimilar from Abe's own treatment of Herb - specifically, his eagerness to sweep his little unwanted love child under the rug, shirking all responsibility for his upbringing and dumping him in the hands of some institution, a tune he swiftly changes when he hears word of all the money to be harvested from this disowned whizkid. Another irony that does not escape me throughout "Old Money" is that the narrative, which sees Abe come into a small fortune of his own after a painfully truncated romance with winsome fellow retiree Beatrice Simmons (voice of Audrey Meadows), ultimately goes in the direction of Abe wanting to use his money to help others but not knowing which needy souls are most warranting, and resolving to give everybody in Springfield a chance to plead their case. That's great and noble of Abe and all, but while all of this is happening, I can't help but think that he has a son living in really extreme poverty whom he could be helping to get back on his feet with just a fraction of that money. Does Herb cross Abe's mind at any point throughout this adventure? There is a slight inconsistency on that - early on, when Bea asks Abe to summarise his life story, he gives this succinct response: "Widower. One son. One working kidney. You?" Wow Abe, you just lied to Bea twice there (possibly thrice - we don't even know if that kidney story checks out), although I suppose we can overlook the discrepancy with Mona given that, as far as everyone, production staff included, was concerned at this point, she WAS dead. However, at the end of the episode, when Homer prevents Abe from blowing his entire fortune on a game of roulette, he tells Homer, "For the first time in my life, I'm glad I had children." Children. Plural. So he's referring to both Homer and Herb. Hmm. I'm pointing this out because, while I do think that "Old Money" is a fantastic episode on its own terms, the very knowledge of Herb's being casts a long and inadvertent shadow over it, made all the more salient in having the two episodes fall so close together.

(Actually, I think it is possible to account for Abe's cherry-picked personal history from a continuity standpoint, even retroactively. Obviously, he doesn't want to have to explain to Bea the circumstances under which Mona left him, or in which he sired Herb and subsequently ditched him. Neither story makes him look particularly attractive, after all.*)

I say that "Old Money" is a fantastic episode, but it's also one that I find difficult to rewatch incessantly, chiefly because it's so downbeat for its near entirety, with heavy focus on the characters' suffering and isolation - mostly Abe's, but Homer also takes things very hard when his father disowns him for the middle portion of the episode. "Old Money" explores Abe's troubled relationship with Homer in greater depth than any preceding episode, although it's not really at the forefront of the narrative. Rather, it deals with a broader need of Abe's to reconnect with a world that discarded him as expired goods long ago. At the start of the episode, we see that Abe's life has disintegrated into a miserable rut of monthly outings with his family that neither party much looks forward to, in between which he's forced to stagnate within the decrepit walls of the Retirement Castle. His blossoming romance with Bea gives him a fleeting sense of renewed purpose, but this is snatched from him before even the second act - and in a cruel twist of fate, Bea's death occurs while Abe is held up in a particularly disastrous family outing, meaning that he misses out on Bea's birthday celebration and what would have been the final evening of her life (hence his disowning of Homer in retaliation). Bea doesn't get a lot of screen time before tragedy inevitably strikes, but from the short montage that she and Abe have, it's clear they've formed a very close and sincere connection, and when we hear news of Bea's demise, it's genuinely painful, a reminder of just how fragile and precarious life can be at any stage, but for those in their twilight years especially. In fact, I believe that this was the first time that the series had dealt so explicitly with the subject of death ("One Fish, Two Fish, Blow Fish, Blue Fish" sees Homer having to look his own mortality in the face, but in terms of a character actually dying and us getting to witness the emotional impact, I think the closest we'd come prior was in Marge's reference to the untimely demise of the original Snowball). There's that mordant and absolutely devastating line from Abe: "They may say she died of a burst ventricle but I know she died of a broken heart." A burst ventricle would of course be a broken heart, in literal terms. But then Abe isn't talking in literal terms here.

Not that the episode doesn't have its share of alleviating moments. There's that borderline surreal sequence in which the family takes a wrong turn at the world's most frugal safari park and are besieged by a pride of lions (I'm not sure, but I think this might even be a nod to the baboon attack from The Omen**), and of course, that wonderful sequence in the third act in which the entire town turns out to Abe's room at the Retirement Castle in an effort to get their hands on the old man's riches. Once the loneliest of social pariahs, Abe suddenly finds his attentions are very in demand indeed. When I say the entire town shows up...pretty much everyone who'd been introduced at this point in the series is there (although Bob's not present for obvious reasons, and I guess that Karl's too altruistic to want to deprive an old gent of his money). Have fun picking out all of the familiar faces.

The most striking visual gag of the episode, however, occurs shortly before the climax, as Abe, moved by Lisa's suggestion that the neediest of people are out there on the streets (like his own first-born???), takes a wander through a particularly poverty-ridden district of Springfield and gets a first-hand glimpse of the suffering not far from his doorstep. It's a short, wonderfully atmospheric sequence that concludes with what was most assuredly one of the slickest cultural references accomplished by the series at this point, as Abe is seen sipping coffee at the counter of a diner immediately recognisable as that from Edward Hopper's iconic 1942 painting Nighthawks. Nighthawks was also evoked in the Season 8 episode "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment", in which a very similar diner provides the setting for what isn't a very happy birthday for Rex Banner. "Old Money", however, boasts the far more faithful recreation of Hoppers painting, to the point that Abe has effectively wandered in and assumed his place among Hopper's own small gathering of insomnious drifters. In narrative terms, the purpose of this entire sequence is to convince Abe that the problems Lisa describes are far greater than his own meagre fortune can redress, inspiring him to head to a casino soon after in the hopes of increasing his wealth. But it's a singularly haunting moment that perfectly encapsulates the entire theme of "Old Money".

In his book Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche, Gordon Theisen argues that the appeal of Hopper's painting, in all its dingy desolation, lies in its evocation of the all-American diner as a kind of sanctuary in a dimly-lit, aggressively urbanised world. In a manner that recalls George Ritzer's model of McDonaldization, Theisen argues that the precise refuge offered by the diner is in allowing those who walk within its walls and take their place on one of its stools to momentarily cast off the burden of being an individual: "Because they are so standardized, so predictable, with a menu that varies surprisingly little from one to another from across the country, they are almost universally democratic...it allows the customers, whatever their lives may be like outside the diner, however troubled or troubling, simply to be someone at the counter, like so many others throughout the city and across the country." (p.84-85) The paradox of this unifying experience is that it does not, by its nature, offer unity. A consequence of this code of anonymity is that everybody is perpetually a stranger, with no sense of connection or affinity to anyone else within the diner. "The customers, the servers, ourselves - were we to enter - are not together, but are people who only happen to be in this particular diner at this particular time." (p.87) People effectively become ghosts (although not the literal sort that Bea manifests as), mere shadows of the lives they've momentarily abandoned as they sit there struggling to forget, or perhaps struggling to recall, exactly has led them to this moment in time. This is important, as Abe spends much of the episode as such a ghost, a husk of the man he formerly was, drifting through a society that's already consigned him to the figurative grave, all the while making a desperate bid to become somebody and finding himself being no one in particular.

Above: Abe Simpson experiences a reflective moment amid the Springfield nightlife.

Below: The original Nighthawks painting by Edward Hopper.

Abe's aspirations are likewise suggested by the bizarre piece of headgear he dons for the latter half of the episode. Having inherited Bea's fortune, the first thing Abe does to exercise his newfound wealth is to head over to the military antiques store and purchase a garish red fez attached to a dubious $400 price tag and an equally dubious story about it once having belonged, briefly, to Napoleon Bonaparte. As an aside, "Old Money" is one of only two episodes to depict a friendship between Abe and crooked antique dealer Herman (the other being "Bart The General" of Season 1), a relationship which was thereafter entirely abandoned, with Jasper replacing Herman as Abe's closest friend in the world and Herman being pushed to the very sidelines of Springfieldian existence (bar "The Springfield Connection" of Season 6, in which he was featured as the villain, and "22 Short Films About Springfield" of Season 7, which showed a very disturbing side to his character indeed). I'll take the opportunity now to go on record as saying that I think Herman's an interesting character and I regret that the series didn't care to delve any deeper into his rapport with Abe; he offers a very different kind of dynamic to that of Jasper, being a military mind of a younger generation and a social link outside of the Retirement Castle. From the sounds of it, Abe doesn't actually buy Herman's cock and bull story about the hat belonging to Napoleon and figures that it can be worth no more than $5, but as soon as he has the funding he doggedly decides he's going to have it regardless, almost as a point of principle after being denied it earlier in the episode. In a curious visual motif, Abe continues to wear the hat for the remainder of the episode, implying that it carries deeper significance than as a frivolous token of Abe throwing his monetary weight around. Rather, the hat becomes a symbol of Abe's desire to transcend his current identity and assume a new one, symbolism that is further enforced in his leaving his old hat upon the counter, enabling Herman to offer it up for sale as the hat McKinley was shot in. Abe literally hopes that he can enter the store as one person and leave as another but, much like Herman's dubious sales pitches, finds that he's just an anonymous vessel drifting through an assortment of adopted guises, each as disposable as the last.

Theisen understands this need for liberation from the self, as it offers the opportunity for a personal rebirth: "That we might be anyone suggests that we might become anyone, leave ourselves behind for someone new and better." (p.96) This is something that Abe spends the entirety of "Old Money" attempting to accomplish; to transcend his degrading entrapment inside the body of a maligned senior citizen and become something else entirely. The really pressing urge driving Abe throughout "Old Money" is the grim reality that his life, as it is, is not very fulfilling. Having been discarded by a society that figures he's used up all of his functionality, Abe's living environment offers him no greater impetus than to run out his retirement clock by his lonesome. The very process of being anchored to a retirement home that serves primarily to keep the elderly segregated from younger society has resulted in the erosion of his identity. We saw evidence of this earlier in a Season 1 episode, "Bart The General", in which Bart goes to the Retirement Castle and asks to see "Grampa", only to discover that half of the residents there answer to that moniker (and are all equally desperate for acknowledgement from the outside world). As far as society is concerned, Abe is a nobody, with no further role that he can offer. His tenure as a husband came to an early close when Mona left the picture. His prospective new identity as Bea's suitor has also been cut short and, in severing ties with Homer, he has willfully surrendered his identity as a family man. Having come into money and claimed the fez as his own, Abe hopes that he's on his way to the start of something more gratifying, a lifestyle imbued with the full-on thrills of mud-wrestling clubs and imitation Disneylands. And yet he drifts through his new life of non-stop adrenaline-baiting just as impassively, failing to connect with any of the sights, sounds or people around him. He finds every bit as much fulfillment as a rich old gent as he did a poor one, to the extent that even Bea is compelled to put in a posthumous appearance and prompt him to rethink the path he's choosing. Incidentally, I'm not quite sure what to make of that sequence in which Bea manifests in spectral form to Abe; it softens the blow of her untimely demise, for better or for worse, but I don't know how at ease I am with the whole notion of a character talking to another from beyond the grave outside of a Halloween episode. Fond though I am of "Round Springfield" of Season 6, I sometimes wonder if the ending, in which the spirit of Bleeding Gums Murphy literally manifests in the clouds for one final saxophone jam with Lisa, is perhaps a little too much for those very reasons, but if ever I'm tempted to dismiss it as symptomatic of the looser realism of Season 6, I have to remind myself that it does technically does have a precedent right here in the more grounded Season 2. Having said that, I can see how their exchange functions on a symbolic level. As I say, Abe has effectively become a ghost himself at this point, a man floating from locale to locale with no robust emotional anchor to anything. He's entered a whole other plane of existence, and it seems oddly fitting that it would take an encounter with a literal ghost to bring him back down to Earth.

After consulting with the ghost of Bea (literally or figuratively) Abe decides instead to reach out to the community, use his wealth to help others and assume a whole new identity as either a modern-day saint, a rich nut or both. This works to the extent that Abe is no longer a nobody as far as society is concerned - to the contrary, he is hailed as a local celebrity - but it does little to alleviate his lingering sense of purposelessness and isolation. For although Abe gets to converse with a vast array of Springfieldians, as they shuffle in and air their frivolous and occasionally malevolent proposals in a drawn-out succession, he experiences no sense of genuine permanency or connection in their interactions - that is, aside from a threat issued by Mr Burns, who assures Abe that he's made a very powerful enemy in rebuffing him. They do not pretend to be interested in anything other than Abe's money and Abe, for the most part, isn't willing to humour any of these avaricious hopefuls for a second that they're in with a chance. When Abe decides to escape his latest entrapment and takes his place among the characters in the Nighthawks painting, what he experiences is a momentary reprieve from the burdens of being Abraham Simpson, whatever that might mean. He finds himself connecting with similarly lost souls by not connecting at all, as he stands at the crossroads, pondering exactly what kind of person he should aspire to be next, in a world that's so much more broken and despairing than he'd ever imagined.

The excursion instills Abe with a sense of purpose - having realised that there are more needy people out there than he has the means to help, he aspires to take action that will increase his money, and thus his ability to help - but his resolution, to take a day trip to a casino in the hopes of multiplying his funds, borders on a kind of self-destructive savior complex. It nearly ends in disaster, with Abe coming dangerously close to losing his every penny on a game of roulette, but he is prevented from placing that fatal bet through the intervention of Homer. The hardest lesson Abe has to learn is that he is not Superman. He cannot fix the fundamental failings of the world at large. Instead, Abe's final revelation comes from the acknowledgement that he is in fact mortal. At the end of the episode, he observes his fellow seniors boarding the bus back to Springfield and then studies his own withered hands, as if contemplating for the first time in ages that he is indeed one of them. Abe ends up making the connection he sought by looking inward at the damning hellhole he's spent the episode trying to transcend, and realising that the neediest souls, and the ones that he's best equipped to help, are the ones he's been impassively rubbing shoulders with this entire time. The Retirement Castle may be a place where the elderly go to be depersonalised, but Abe figures he can redress that by transforming it from a drab dumping ground into a livable community. As such, Abe finds fulfillment in wholeheartedly accepting his status as a senior citizen and reminding his peers that they matter as much as anyone else. Hence his final line, one renovated retirement home and newly-installed Beatrice Simmons Memorial Dining Hall later: "Dignity's on me, friends." Abe is still wearing the ridiculous fez he bought from Herman as he says this, but it doesn't look quite so ridiculous now that he has the bow-tie and dinner jacket to back it up. Abe truly has transcended himself and become a better person. He promises dignity, and he exudes it.

EXCEPT ABE, YOU HAVE THIS DESTITUTE SON SLEEPING IN A GARBAGE DUMP, USING RATS AS A PILLOW AND EATING CHEESE OUT OF DISCARDED PIZZA BOXES. HOW ARE YOU SLEEPING AT NIGHT? HOW IS THIS NOT TEARING YOU APART??? Sorry to keep on flogging this horse, and not to undermine the beautiful gesture that Abe makes to his fellow seniors, but I figure that Herb's impoverished existence should still be acknowledged. I'm sure that Abe could have sent a bit of cash his way and still given Bea her commemorative dining hall.

In his review of the episode on The AV Club, Nathan Rabin accuses "Old Money" of concluding on a "semi-sappy note". The final sequence, which shows the residents of the Castle adjusting to their greatly improved living conditions, is played entirely straight, bereft of a closing punchline or some subversive last minute gags thrown in, but then there aren't enough words in the English language to describe how little I care about that after the sheer emotional purgatory this episode has already put me through. All told, "Old Money" is a rigorously woebegone episode, albeit an intelligent one with a lot of heart and just enough humor to keep it from descending into total cheerlessness, and I think its final uplift is both earned and entirely necessary. Growing old is not something that we as a culture tend to look forward to, and The Simpsons gives us absolutely no reason to. But then the only alternative is dying young. "Old Money" suggests that, with a little respect and regard for our fellow humans, we can do our bit to make even the bleakest of situations more tolerable.

* Although I think the more brutal explanation is that, while Abe may be aware that biologically he has more than one kid, he does not, in practice, recognise Herb as his son because he never had that relationship with him.
** Implying that one of the family is the Anti-Christ. Care to guess which one?