Team Homer (aka Birds of A Feather)

It's finally time for us to talk about "Team Homer" of Season 7 (episode 3F10), and we might as well start by leaping straight to the main attraction - yes, this is the episode with that amazingly inspired sight gag where Jacques, Lurleen, Mindy and Kashmir are seen competing in the Springfield bowling leagues under the team name "The Home-Wreckers". That alone makes this one of the most important installments in the history of The Simpsons. No hyperbole, if you feel any kind of affinity or attachment for the characters in question then it can't be underestimated just how mind-blowing powerful this deceptively small moment is. Not only do we have "Team Homer" to thank for applying the term "Home-Wreckers" to handily denote these characters as a collective, it's really down to this episode that we're able to think of them as a collective at all. It's not as though they ever encountered each other in their respective adventures in coming between Marge and Homer. Perhaps it was always inevitable that Lurleen and Mindy would get together for the sake of a sly background gag, but "Team Homer" really went the extra mile in assembling all four of these characters and depicting them as a literal team battling what are always insurmountable odds. Everything about how the gag plays out is absolutely perfect. Their presence isn't lingered on and their significance as a unit isn't made any more explicit than in their team name - the episode trusts that you'll recognise each of these characters and connect all of the necessary dots yourself. Not so surprisingly, none of the Home-Wreckers get any dialogue, but their expressions as they exit the Bowlarama, having been knocked out of the league by the Pin Pals (coupled with Kashmir's impulse to take the loss out physically on Jacques) mark them out as rather sore losers. Maybe no more so than the Channel 6 Wastelanders, but it adds just an extra dash of personal acidity to their participation. If you look at the scenario from the Home-Wreckers' perspective, then the stakes for three of their four members would have been gut-churningly high. Lurleen and Mindy were both rejected by Homer, who just so happens to be the Pin Pals' honcho, while Jacques was rejected for Homer (and if we must retroactively factor in the happenings of "Pin Gal", then he presumably knows who Homer is). Once again, these characters have been pushed out to the sidelines to fester in their bruising defeat. Ironic then that Kashmir, who shouldn't logically have the same degree of personal investment in the match-up, seems to take the loss the hardest. Kashmir has always been the somewhat square-shaped peg among the Home-Wreckers, in that she wasn't interested in a relationship with her associated Simpson, and I have a sneaking suspicion that if this gag were done much later in the series' run, then she might have been looked in favour of one of Marge's jilted admirers, Artie Ziff (the reason why Artie didn't qualify at the time is, I suspect, because he had yet to create any serious trouble for Homer and Marge after they were married). But it's a gag works so much more aptly with Kashmir on board - her voluptuous form meshes better with the seductive aura of the team. As a bonus, it gives the Home-Wreckers the additional distinction of being the only team we see competing with a majority of female members (even if the lone male is quite blatantly the team captain...after all, he is the pro).

The real genius of the Home-Wreckers gag is in how it simultaneously speaks to both the richness of Springfield's wider community - to the idea that all of these little character connections are being constantly interwoven off of screen and that the show's world is so much bigger than the Simpsons' eye-view of it - and to just how fundamentally small and narrow in scope the Simpsons universe really is. I love the idea of Homer-Wreckers all being friends and would gleefully take an entire spin-off about their singledom exploits. But coupled with the revelation that the Home-Wreckers all know each other is the eyebrow-raising implication that they also all know what they have in common. That they call themselves "The Home-Wreckers" would suggest that they are entirely aware that they've each created apocalyptic mayhem for a family unit at some point over the past seven years (in Kashmir's case, not even purposely). Whether they're aware that it's the same family unit in all cases is more ambiguous (if so, can you imagine the sheer awkwardness of the conversations that must have gone on between them?), but it is nevertheless telling that the basis for their solidarity and self-definition should be the relatively minor point in their respective lives in which they tangled with a Simpson. It's not like we, the viewer, ever got a chance to know them for doing much else. It's a sly acknowledgement that the world does indeed revolve around that one cursed clan, and that all of its denizens exist in some form of service to them - even if, in the Home-Wreckers' case, that service was antagonism, to test the marital bonds between Homer and Marge. The Home-Wreckers understand exactly where they stand in the scheme of things, and they recognise how much it bites.

The Simpsons had already come a long way by the time "Team Homer" dropped, but the Home-Wreckers' cameo is a heartening reminder that the show hadn't forgotten its roots (Mindy being the only member who'd had her star turn in the latter half of the series' contemporary run). This was the second episode in which the topic of bowling took centre stage (technically, it was the third episode in which the Bowlarama was a major setting, but in "And Maggie Makes Three" the bowling itself largely took a backseat to Homer's short-lived stint as a non-divine pinspotter), and while Jacques' appearance is as close as it comes to explicitly referencing its predecessor, there are other subtle ways in which the episode is indebted to "Life on The Fast Lane". There's a nice continuity nod when Homer is telling Marge about the Pin Pal's initial victory over the Channel 6 Wastelanders, and Marge demonstrates herself to be very knowledgeable about bowling. Elsewhere, exterior shots of the Bowlarama are still being recycled from "Life on The Fast Lane".

The Home-Wreckers' appearance constitutes only a fleeting portion of the overall story, and yet it is very much the heart of the episode. Oh true, I do have a ton of bias on that point, but I don't think it would be overly controversial to suggest that the narrative tensions surrounding the Pin Pals' league prospects aren't half as delectable as observing how the various different team alignments fall among the Springfieldians - how they "quad off", in the words of showrunner David Mirkin, and what it says about each character's broader sense of personal identity. Some of these team formations seem perfectly natural and logical within universe - Patty and Selma, for example, are part of the DMV Regulation Kings, alongside a couple of unnamed male colleagues who seem every bit as grouchy and terminally bored with life as them. Others offer a more ostentatiously novel mix of characters, like the Channel 6 Wastelanders, a team comprised of Springfield's most prominent television personalities: Krusty the Clown, Kent Brockman, Arnie Pie (in The Sky) and Bumblebee Man (is Scott Christian sore that he didn't make the cut?), who happen to be the most obnoxious and self-aggrandising of the competitors, outside of the Pin Pals themselves. Other teams are linked by humorous gimmicks that suggest a surprisingly candid self-awareness on the part of their members (those aforementioned Home-Wreckers, but also the Stereotypes). In most cases, it is really fun to speculate how these teams might have come together and what kind of internal dynamics they would have (we get to see so few of them in action). The quad-off requiring the greatest suspension of disbelief are reigning league champs and ostensible episode antagonists, The Holy Rollers, a team made up of Reverend Lovejoy, Helen Lovejoy, Ned Flanders and Maude Flanders (none of them characters whom I would have pegged as having even a casual interest in bowling, much less being this proficient at it). What they obviously have in common is that they're representatives of Springfield's religious faction...which doesn't automatically make them birds of a feather. All signs point toward Maude and Helen getting along just fine, but it was well enough established by now that Timothy isn't so keen on Ned; the notion that he'd choose to hang out with Ned socially and work this well with him as a team is a glaring contrivance we'll just have to overlook. For the purposes of the story, the Holy Rollers make for effective final opponents because they radiate a moral purity that puts Homer and his scruffy lot in well the shade - the self-satisfaction of never having been caught driving without pants, as Moe so eloquently phrases it. Plus, it's implied that they might literally have God on their side - Ned explicitly calls on God for special favours during one bowl - making the Pin Pals the definitive underdogs.

"Team Homer" boasts an exceedingly simple premise, but it is nothing if not a busy episode, and we certainly do have a lot to unpack with it. There are multiple ways in which this unassuming adventure represents a significant turning point for the series, both in-universe and out. When it debuted, on January 7th 1996, it came attached with a note of immense sadness. The Simpsons was in its seventh season and had spectacularly exceeded early projections for its life expectancy; "Team Homer" arguably marked the point at which the march of time was felt so much more painfully than ever before, for reasons outside of the show's control. It was the first episode to air after the death of script supervisor/voice actress Doris Grau, on December 30th 1995, and was dedicated to her memory. The first Simpsons cast member to pass on was technically Christopher Collins, the original voice of Mr Burns and Moe, who parted ways with the show after only a few episodes - reportedly because he didn't get along with the rest of the crew - and died in 1994 due to encephalitis (side-note: Collins' place within Simpsons lore and his premature death are something that I think about a lot, and might be worth a whole blog post in itself some day). Grau, though, marked the first loss among the long-term players (although Phil Hartman's untimely death wasn't far on the horizon), and while her signature character, Lunchlady Doris, never had as much chance to shine as her character in The Critic (also named Doris), it was sad knowing that a particular avenue in the show's ever-burgeoning community was already closed off. It makes it all the more poignant, then, that "Team Homer" should be a rare episode to give Doris a spot of actual development, hinting at her own sense of broader identity outside of her designated position at the school cafeteria (not only is she competing in the league, but she's apparently the mother of Squeaky-Voiced Teen). Alas, this was as far as it could ever go, at least with this particular incarnation of the character. The luncheon lady was eventually reinstated to the show, with Tress MacNeille as her vocals, but under the revised moniker of Lunchlady Dora, a tacit admission that the character could obviously not be the same now that Grau was gone.

Within the episode itself, we can also see the subtle but impactful ways in which the sands of time were shifting and rearranging the balances between the show's supporting players. "Team Homer" marks the first significant step in what I like to term the "Life After Barney" phase - the fact that Moe, and not Barney, gets to be the character who accompanies Homer to the alley is a far bigger deal than it might seem at first glance. If you've listened to enough Simpsons DVD commentaries, you'll have picked up that Barney was a contentious character behind the scenes, and it's around this point that a conscious decision looks to have been made to pack him off into a soft retirement. The show never went as far as jettisoning Barney altogether (despite the efforts of incoming showrunners Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley to get him stitched up for the attempted murder of Burns), but he was effectively relieved of his duties as Homer's best friend, with Moe being eyed up as a viable replacement. I tend to think of this as something that only got properly underway once Weinstein and Oakley had taken hold of the reins, but I have to remind myself that "Team Homer" was actually a holdover from Season 6, back when Mirkin called the shots, so perhaps there was more overlap in their intentions than I've given credit for. For Homer to have any kind of one-to-one socialisation with Moe outside of the bar was unusual at the time and, coupled with his recent B-story in "Bart Sells His Soul", indicated that Moe was going to become a much more prominent player from now on. As for Barney, he isn't completely forgotten - his absence is explicitly accounted for, when Homer notes that he stopped coming to the bar after acquiring a girlfriend. What's interesting is that Lenny and Carl's participation is ruled out within the same statement, and for the same reason. Although they would eventually become two of Homer's closest and oft-seen companions (replacing Apu and Otto as the other half of the Pin Pals), at this point the writers still seemed to want to maintain a clearer division between Homer's work life and his social life.

On that note, "Team Homer" functions as a neat little study into Homer's friendship values and where he's inclined to look for solidarity. He's first inspired to form the Pin Pals, along with Moe and Apu, on the recognition that they've been excluded from the league because they don't have teams of their own. The premise that initially binds them is that they are all outcasts. Their ragtag origins and downtrodden status are inadvertently advertised in the cheap uniforms for which they have to settle, inviting the derisive attentions of the Channel 6 Wastelanders. (At first glance, I thought it odd that Sideshow Mel wasn't among them, but then they are the bullying team and I couldn't see Mel getting in on that or being this outrageously nasty about the Pin Pals' uniforms. It's not within his nature. I'm disappointed that it is apparently in Arnie's). On their own, they would be losers, but through coming together and openly celebrating that connection they're able to turn the tables on teams who might easily have bested them. It's worth noting at this point that "Team Homer" was another Mike Scully script, if you squint you can discern his version of Homer coming into play, just put to a more constructive and benevolent purpose than usual. The watershed moment for the Pin Pals comes when Homer suggests that they carve out a niche as the team that supports each other. There's actually nothing to suggest that the other teams don't, they just don't make a loud and obnoxious a display of it with an arsenal of team chants, as Homer is able to rally his fellow Pin Pals into doing, and apparently that's where most of them are going wrong. For a while, this morale-boosting technique is enough to overcome what might be the Pin Pals' obvious deficiency - not the teams' shoddy, homemade uniforms, but rather its distinctly arbitrary formation. Otto Mann (I was never sure if his name was intended as a pun on "automan", or a reference to the Ottoman Empire) remains the odd man out of the group. He gets roped in because he happened to be in the right place at the right time, and had seemed to be more interested in the contents of the Bowlarama's claw machine than in the game itself. He isn't someone whom Homer, Moe or Apu would ordinarily interact with, and it's really not surprising that he's the one who later gets booted from the team to make way for Mr Burns, a development that engenders a lesser sense of betrayal than perhaps it should. One suspects that just about any character other than the loathed and decrepit Burns could have filled his vacant position to begin with.

What is obviously important is that all of the team members are in perfect sync with one another, and this is presumably why Homer's chants prove so formidable. They give the Pin Pals a persistent point of synchronisation, the sensation that they are working actively together at all times on exactly the same page. Any cracks in that unity are going to risk exposing serious weaknesses. The team that suffers the most embarrassing loss - the Springfield Police Framers - makes the grievous mistake of attempting to force one thing that is not like the others into the mix and doesn't even have the honor of getting to bowl a full game (a shackled Snake, for some reason, is having to fill in for one of the police officers, and takes the opportunity to escape custody, forcing Wiggum to forfeit). But just as a breakdown in unity may be fatal to the team, it might also prove damning to the individual. To lose your team is to lose a chunk of your identity which, as is exemplified by all of the teams competing, is fortified by the company you keep. For the outlier Otto, being exiled from the Pin Pals means being banished back to his place beside the claw machine to hunt for lobster-shaped harmonicas, but for the other members the stakes are higher. For Moe, a place on a successful bowling team is his means of demonstrating that he's better than dirt (maybe not that fancy nutrient-loaded dirt you can apparently buy in the stores). The most revealing moment for Apu, meanwhile, has less to do with Burns' intrusion than it does an off-screen drama to which we are mostly not privy. As it turns out, he was invited to join another team, the Stereotypes (a name even more flamboyantly on the nose than the Home-Wreckers, denoting the heavily caricatured likes of Captain McCallister, Groundskeeper Willie, Luigi the Italian chef and Cletus the slack-jawed yokel), but turned them down, apparently feeling that he could do better than to identify with such a shameless parade of human cliches. He later rethinks that position, once Burns enters the scene and the Pin Pals start to lag behind the Stereotypes.

The plight Apu faced with the Stereotypes - the prospective flattening of his identity through the degrading integration into a unit than champions conformity over individuality - is echoed by the episode's B-story, in which Bart's "Down With Homework" t-shirt, courtesy of a MAD Magazine iron-on, causes such a violent uprising at Springfield Elementary that Skinner insists on having his students wear uniforms. This in turn causes the children to lose all sense of singularity, to the point where, as observed by the outgoing Lunchlady Doris, they even start blinking in unison. I don't have quite so much to say about this subplot on its own, aside from that I find its overblown take on the subject inherently nonplussing, because a) I'm from the UK, where schools requiring students to wear uniform are the overwhelming norm and not the exception, and b) trust me when I say that the uniform worn by the kids at Springfield Elementary is considerably LESS dorky than the uniform I had to wear. The school I attended had this thing about ugly and uncomfortable blazers. I would have killed for Mr Boy of Main Street! The most interesting thing about this story, to me, is in how it parallels the themes present in the A-story. Both are concerned with how the individual's identity and self-perception is molded by the wider group and, as Erik Adams points out in his review on The AV Club, uniforms prove equally integral to how that group is defined. They reach for opposite conclusions, however. For the students of Springfield Elementary, putting on a uniform means becoming part of a faceless mass and being denied any form of personal expression. For the league contenders, a uniform signifies acceptance and the possibility of finding one's place in the world (or even acceptance of one's place in the world, as with the Stereotypes). The result is an episode where the values of the young are implicitly contrasted against those of the fully grown. There's an unspoken tension between the children's youthful urge to rebel against every which way authority should attempt to pigeonhole them, and the sad neediness of the adults in finding their purpose and affinity in whatever group might be prepared to have them.

Nowhere is that sad neediness more evident than in the figure who threatens to bring the Pin Pals' empire crashing down, all because he aspires to be a part of it. You don't tend to see a lot of sincere analysis for how Burns is characterised in "Team Homer", possibly because Scully's script insists on putting quotation marks around it. When Burns approaches the team and requests that they accept him as one of them, he is entirely upfront about the fact that his desire springs from an "unpredictable change of heart". This is Scully both admitting to the narrative contrivance and foreshadowing how the scenario is likely to end - it's all very slick, but I can't help but feel that it sells Burns a little short. Is it so inconceivable that Burns might notice the camaraderie among the Pin Pals and become curious about what he's missing out on? "Team Homer" did not, after all, air terribly far ahead of "Homer The Smithers", an episode that on the one hand illustrates just how painfully out of touch Burns is with the common man (as seen in his encounter with Lenny) but also implies that he isn't entirely satisfied with life in his ivory tower, and there's a side of him that yearns to step just a little out of his shell. For the most part, Burns lacks the capacity to forge real connections with others, something that could, under certain circumstances, have him come off as vulnerable. Here, he's is so inept at traversing the ins and outs of human interaction that he doesn't seem to pick up on the fact that the rest of the Pin Pals don't want him around. He goes through the motions of what he assumes to be jovial interplay and accepts the feigned camaraderie he gets in return. Maybe I'm in the minority, but every time I watch this episode I always feel just a smidgeon of sympathy for Burns. There's a sliver of pathos in his trajectory that isn't played up too heavily due to the emphasis being on how he inconveniences the team, but it does have a moment of genuine emotional pay-off...even if the way things will ultimately end is always a foregone conclusion.

Burns gets involved in the first place because Homer goes to him on the off-chance that his boss might be persuaded to sponsor the Pin Pals' costly registration. To his surprise, Burns seems entirely willing, but only because he's on an ether-induced high that causes him to perceive anyone he interacts with as delightful advertising mascots - in Homer's case, the Pillsbury Doughboy (addressed here by his less common moniker Poppin' Fresh), whom Burns is compelled to poke in the belly and make giggle (as is the characters' trademark) and in Hans Moleman's case, Lucky the Leprechaun, whom Burns is, far more bafflingly, compelled to trepan with a drill (did those horrible cereal-stealing children ever do anything comparable to Lucky?). Burns later notices the unexplained expenditure and traces it to Homer. He goes to the Bowlarama to confront the Pin Pals, only to shock everyone by revealing that he wants to join the team - a proposition that Homer, being in Burns' employ, isn't in much of a position to decline. Of course, swapping out Otto for Burns disrupts the team equilibrium in a way that no amount of chanting is going to compensate for (not that we see the Pin Pals getting up to much chanting after the exchange; their enthusiasm as a unit is clearly gone), turning the teams' prospects of besting the Holy Rollers into a pathetic pip dream - much to the chagrin of Homer, who laments that he'll never have anything on his trophy case to stand alongside that Academy Award in his dubious ownership. That ill-gotten award, incidentally, provided the basis for the episode's most unfortunate gag - in fact, it's a very strong contender for the Simpsons gag to have aged the most poorly within the briefest space of time (more so even that John Travolta's appearance in "Itchy & Scratchy Land"). For all the modern day hubbub about the Simpsons' alleged ability to predict the future, it's quite astonishing just how unlucky they were with this one. When the episode originally aired, the name on the award was Haing S. Ngor, who won Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1984 film The Killing Fields. Then on February 25th 1996, less than two months after the episode aired, Ngor was murdered at his home in what was thought to be a robbery gone wrong. When the episode next aired, the name on the award had been changed to Don Ameche, who won for the 1985 film Cocoon, lest anybody think that the intended joke was that Homer was Ngor's killer, and had stolen the award while raiding the actor's house. That would be a tremendously dark conclusion to draw about our main character, but I can understand why caution was exercised.

That Burns should suck at bowling isn't much of a revelation. He's a feeble old man who can accomplish very few physical tasks without the aid of his personal assistant, and here he is trying his hand at a game that requires the skilful manipulation of a 15lb ball. The thing that really makes him intolerable as a teammate, though, is that he doesn't appear to see a problem with his not being able to bowl. Until the end of the episode, Burns doesn't actually give two shits about winning. Despite his initial assertion that he was moved to join the Pin Pals because watching them revel in the Home-Wreckers' vanquishing struck a chord with his tyrannical nature, Burns doesn't seem too perturbed by the team's inability to experience that same kind of victory once he's joined. When the Pin Pals take a thorough thrashing from the Stereotypes, he laughs it off and attempts to reassure Homer that the championship is unimportant since "the only ship worth a damn is friendship." I have to wonder what's actually going on with Burns at this point. Is he really as naive as all that? Is his buoyancy a protective measure, to compensate for his uneasy awareness that he can't bowl for toffee? Or is this a testament to just how eager he is to experience the thrill of belonging to a team - that he doesn't see winning as the end goal so much as having a fun time with his companions (even if it's very clear that no one else is having much fun)? That's not to say that he lacks any sense of spirited competition - prior to the deciding match with the Holy Rollers, he tries to rally his team with the glorious battle cry of "Who's ready to kick some Christian keister?" Of course, by this stage the rest of the team's enthusiasm is dead on the floor, and Homer seems prepared to bite the bullet and be rid of the old man once and for all. That is until Burns reaches into a box and reveals that he's bought them all a special gift for the game - uniforms that are not merely presentable enough to be seen in, but as Apu puts it, fine enough to be married in.

The moment where Burns pulls out those custom-designed shirts is a surprisingly affecting one. For one, it indicates that Burns is bearing his soul more nakedly than ever, and just how desperately he yearns for acceptance in these ranks. Somehow, it doesn't register as a pathetic gesture, but an empowering one that elevates all of the Pin Pals above one of their lingering insecurities - the fact that they've come this far and are still saddled with the crummiest uniforms in all the league. Burns' gift serves to unify them as a team, if only fleetingly, by providing the grounds for a common celebration. And when Burns says his bit about how, "I've always been wealthy, but this is the first time I've felt...rich", well, I could almost buy that he genuinely means it, within that specific moment. It just doesn't stick. Against all odds, the Pin Pals go on to beat the Holy Rollers, but it has less to do with Burns than the unwitting assistance they receive from their discarded teammate Otto, whose ongoing efforts to get hold of that infernal lobster harmonica end up sending some good vibrations their way. (Did the Holy Rollers seriously not notice what had gone on with the claw machine? Because surely they would have had grounds to contest the Pin Pals' win? Then again, I don't think Ned's prior tactic of calling on divine intervention to get him a strike was all that sporting either, so call it karma.) The Pin Pals are about to receive their trophy when Burns suddenly claims it for himself, announcing that he's had yet another of his unpredictable changes of heart. Not quite so unpredictable, really. Obviously, Burns has to go back to where the status quo wills him, but he's able to rationalise this transition as an entirely logical one on the pathway to personal growth - teamwork was always essentially a means to end, and vital to the greater game is recognising when to stab your teammates in the back for the promotion of individual glory. The urge to forsake his fellow Pin Pal so that he might he might position himself as the overall victor is, in his words, akin to a boxer shedding "roll after roll of disgusting, useless, sweaty flab before he can win the title".

Wounded, the Pin Pals take solace in the obvious conclusion - that the trophy itself was but a silly trinket, and The Real Treasure Was The Friends We Made Along The Way. The team is reconciled with Otto in the glibbest of fashions; the implication, one supposes, is that Otto's unorthodox support in beating the Holy Rollers shows that the universe was always gravitating toward a natural order, and the final unity of the team in its "true" form represents a moral triumph over Burns' corruption. But all of that is undone (deliberately so) in the story's epilogue, in which the Pin Pals decide that it would be awfully nice to have that silly trinket after all and have Homer break into Burns' mansion to steal it while the others cheer him on. That might be subversion enough, but the script goes the extra mean-spirited mile in having the theft go horribly awry - Homer is unable to clear the mansion grounds before Burns' security dogs catch up with him, at which point the rest of the team up and abandons him, leaving Homer to be savagely mauled. The Pin Pals are exposed as a sham and the episode ends up vindicating Burns, by suggesting that what he did in the Bowlarama is really a variation of what most people would do under the right circumstances - to work as a team for as long as it is convenient, only to put themselves first when it comes to the crunch. As Burns observed, teamwork will only take you so far.

Sky 1 edit alert!: Sky 1 broadcasts in the 90s always used to take out that early exchange where Homer attempts to prostitute himself to Marge in the hopes of raising the $500 registration money. Instead, we cut straight to the part where Marge gives Homer practical advice about asking Burns for a sponsorship. If I'm honest, I find this gag kind of weird and kind of skin-crawling (it's got Scully's trademark crass all over it), and I don't think the episode loses much without it. It was, however, considered an important enough moment to be transcribed in The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family, which is how I first learned of its existence. While we're at it, the same entry also contained the publication's most bizarre mistranscription, of the scene where Smithers is discussing Burns' monthly "boweling". I always heard that line as "Remember that month you didn't do it?", and I think that is the correct dialogue, but whoever transcribed that entry heard something else entirely, and it raises a few icky questions.

Wrangler '00: Ride (aka I'm Going Back To My Plough)

Ideally, you shouldn't be far along into "Ride", Jonathon Glazer's 2000 ad for Wrangler Jeans, before figuring out that it's a promotion for the denim trousers its protagonist is fond of wearing. I'll admit, though, that when I first had the pleasure of catching it, there was a fleeting moment, just toward the end, when I thought it had taken me to a darker place altogether. That I was looking at a stealth PIF, the kind that wants to catch me off-guard by pretending that everything is sweet and upbeat before hitting me with a heavy dosage of psychological scarring. I've seen this trick used before, I know how it is. Forty-six seconds into the minute-long ad, we're drawn down an ominous black road obscured by smoke, happening on the image of a particularly brutal looking car wreck. I took that as a sign that our heroic backpacker had met a terrible end and was fully expecting a slogan along the lines of "KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD" to flash across the screen. But no. The protagonist is revealed to be alive and well, lapping it up in the warm red glow of roadside hospitality as a herd of buffalo, an obvious symbol for the untamed spirit of the American terrain, charges on unabated. It'll take a lot more than a few horrific images to perturb this drifter's wanderlust, thank you very much.

Truthfully, the feeling that this could, at any instance, turn into a PIF about some kind of unseen peril is integral to the appeal of "Ride", an ad that runs the whole gamut of emotions when it comes to solitary travel. The exhilaration and romanticism are tempered by scenes of loneliness (our protagonist huddled by a deserted bus station in the dead of night) and of drudgery (him attempting to bum rides from flooded streets in the drizzling rain). Whatever the mood, the momentum of the ad absolutely never lets up, the fast cutting from shot to shot meaning that we always feel that we are going somewhere, with further sights ever on the horizon. Yet we never know exactly where we are going (it could be that the protagonist does not either). It is a ride that, joyous though it may be, is constantly threatening to veer out of control. Flirtation with danger, and the omnipresence of risk, is part and parcel of the drifter lifestyle, the appearance of that dreadful smoking wreckage an acknowledgement of what could potentially happen if we allow ourselves to be lured down the wrong path. It is not the only potential bad end that presents itself throughout the ad. In one shot, we see a rattlesnake lunging at the camera. In another, we glide through an ostensibly immaculate suburban neighbourhood, only to pass a house going up a deadly blaze - a warning that danger could be lurking around literally any corner and that we're perhaps no safer in the comfort of our homes than out in those snake-filled grasses. Elsewhere, the protagonist hops aboard a moving train carriage only to find it occupied by a strange figure lurking in the shadows, who could potentially be a threat or a pleasant travelling companion. He transpires to be neither (he's also wearing jeans, so for the purposes of this ad we are presumably to see him as another aspirational figure, but this is clearly no basis for he and the protagonist to make friends).

Glazer's piece is a curiously mind-bending one, given that most of the images are of a fairly mundane variety - motels, road stops, highways - with only intermittent glimpses of genuine weirdness. The choice of accompanying song, "We're Off To See The Wizard" by Victor Young & His Orchestra (taken, of course, from the evergreen Hollywood musical The Wizard of Oz) injects a sense of playful fantasy, that the America the protagonist is traversing might be every bit as bizarre and wonderful as the land of Oz, and at times potentially as fictitious. Of particular note, and key to the ad's philosophy, is the line "Follow the fellow who follows a dream". Our protagonist clearly lives outside of the bounds of society, as signified in a scene where we catch him bathing in a river. He is able to wander in and out of towns and taverns and integrate himself with others here and there. In one scene, we catch him stirring following an episode of physical intimacy, a same sex one night stand in a motel room (queer heroes were an unusual sight in mainstream advertising in 2000, adding to the general subversiveness of both ad and protagonist), but as soon as he slips those pants back on the outside world beckons (his partner, who remains naked, feels no such urge to follow, a point he expresses by turning his head in the opposite direction). His instinct to eventually leave it all behind and trek onward is celebrated as having set him apart. He is a Y2K throwback to that most quintessential of American figures, the pioneering cowboy, setting out across a turf that is still deeply suffused with the spirit of the old West. Glimpses of that old West sporadically make their way to the surface - a car is seen rearing up and down like a bucking horse, suggesting that the march of progress and technology hasn't quelled the fundamental sense of uninhibitedness that a land so vast and filled with possibilities can inspire. Meanwhile, the mysterious figure our protagonist has the pleasure of stowing away aboard a train has the aura of a Hollywood movie star from another era - that the mystery man and the protagonist are never seen in the same frame raises questions as to whether the former is even there, or whether he's a figment of our young drifter's imagination, a lingering image from a bygone slice of Americana. "Ride" suggests an intersection of the assorted mavericks of the American mythos, each very much alive and very universal attuned to the same urge to keep moving in the manner of those noble stampeding buffalo. The distance maintained, in the end, feels less like unfamiliarity than it does a mark of respect, two like-minded, denim-clad souls each acknowledging their right to share a physically and ideological plain in which they may be equally and blissfully untethered to anything, including one another.

Who Is The Sexy Beast? (aka Gangster's Paradise)

There was nothing in this year's Academy Award nominations that delighted me more than seeing The Zone of Interest up for so many big prizes. Jonathon Glazer has long been a firm favourite of mine, ever since he was spooking me with his freakish television ads for booze and banking, but he's a director who, up until now, has never garnered anything close to the recognition he's due. His work has long been defined by a boldness of vision, an eye for the uncanny, and above all an eclecticism - he has never made a feature that feels overly derivative of anything else in his filmography. But then, he hasn't made that many features, period. The Zone of Interest is only his fourth, and comes after a decade-long gap between his third film, Under The Skin. I am optimistic that the amount of praise and attention The Zone of Interest is receiving means that we won't have to wait nearly so long for his fifth. In celebration of its break-out success, I've decided to make 2024 the Year of Glazer. I have, in the history of this blog, covered a very limited selection of his adverts as part of my ongoing Horrifying Advertising Animals series, but it has long been my intention to delve more broadly into his work - his feature films, some of his non-horrifying animal advertising, maybe even one or two his music videos. We'll start with a loving overview his debut feature, Sexy Beast (2000), which might still honestly be my personal favourite of the four. Not because it's necessarily the most ambitious or technically impressive of his filmography, but because it remains the most enjoyable and easy to rewatch. It's the closest Glazer has come to making a "hangout film" (ie: one where getting to spend time with enticing and well-defined characters is the biggest draw), albeit one too deeply steeped in an aura of indeterminate horror for the characters to ever seem overly familiar, or like anything resembling good friends.

Sexy Beast is a picture of several enigmas. Not least among them, what the title is actually getting at. Neither the word "sexy" or "beast" is uttered anywhere within the dialogue, nor is it overtly obvious to which character, if any, it is alluding. It does not, presumably, denote our protagonist, Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), a retired London gangster living the dream life in a chic Spanish villa. His physique certainly dominates the screen as the title flashes across it, but the specific image with which it's juxtaposed, with emphasis on Gal's crotch bulging beneath his speedo, immediately sets him up as more of a figure of absurdity than a particularly persuasive or menacing one (coupled with the choice of opening song, "Peaches" by The Stranglers). Already he has the air of a man who has bitten off more than he can chew and doesn't yet know it. A more probable candidate might be the film's antagonist, Don Logan (Ben Kingsley, in an Academy Award nominated performance), who is certainly the most bestial participant - a man who throws his weight around by urinating on bathroom rugs and by barking obscenities repeatedly with the tenacity of a rabid dog. His is a transfixing presence, but not an especially charismatic or romantic one. It's hard to buy him as a "sexy beast". Some critics, such as Mark Dujsik, have suggested that the title refers less to any specific character than it does the enticement of the gangster lifestyle. Writes Dujsik: "The word "sexy" means primal just as much as it does attractive in this situation. This is a dangerous but alluring profession, and if you aren’t careful, it will get to you—even if you are the baddest of the bad." (Which, of course, Gal isn't.) If that was the intention, then the irony would be that Sexy Beast shows the profession from the perspective of a man who has long fallen out of love with it. Crime has presumably paid for Gal, by paying for luxury retirement, but it's a demon that he yearns to excise from himself, only to discover, throughout the course of the film that there is no escaping.

Heck, maybe the title refers to the film's outright strangest element - the shadowy, jeans-wearing anthropomorphic rabbit that pervades the darkest regions of Gal's psyche, intermittently showing up to point a gun in his face and be a general bad omen. The rabbit (sadly, I can't find an acting credit for the character) plays curiously like a direct precursor to Frank, the uncanny leporine who would haunt the titular character's visions in Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001) - but for the fact that this beast is such a mangy monstrosity that it makes Frank look like a cuddly theme park mascot by comparison. It's in the rabbit that I most see the shades of the characteristic freakiness that Glazer was always accustomed to bringing to his advertisements - the WTF-ness of the Dream Club squirrels combined with the unspeakable eeriness underpinning Samuel L Jackson's monologues. It's such a weird and compelling enigma. But is it sexy? Does it embody the notion on which the entire picture pivots?

There are two different angles from which I'm inclined to explain the presence of that rabbit. The first is that it's a twisted kind of tribute to Bugs Bunny. Which may seem ludicrous thing to insert into a gangster picture, but then the surreal touches in general seem to have been plucked straight out of a Looney Tunes short. Take the opening sequence, where we join a heavily-tanned Gal reclining by his swimming pool. A giant boulder suddenly detaches itself from the adjacent hillside and starts rolling in his direction, while Gal stands in total obliviousness. By a stroke of luck, the boulder just misses Gal and lands with a tranquillity-shattering splash within the pool. The incident is framed with the eye-popping intensity of a cartoon - one could imagine the very same thing happening to Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote. Then in the following sequence, when Gal is extolling the virtues of his Spanish abode while gazing adoringly at his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman), he blows smoke in her direction, which facetiously takes the shape of a heart. Such cartoonish elements add a distinctively playful edge to the film, establishing Sexy Beast as a gangster pic that's going to be as much fun as it is dark and gritty. But they are also clues as to the illusory nature of Gal's present existence. It seems a little detached from reality, and at the same time prone to strange and chaotic intrusions, reminiscent of a wonderful dream on the cusp of being corrupted into a nightmare. Sexy Beast opens with Gal assuming that he's already attained his happy ending, his life in Spain a blissful epilogue to a story he does not want to tell and is all-too eager to banish into oblivion. Here, he has it all - a swanky house in the Mediterranean, a wife he cherishes, the companionship of fellow ex-patriot Aitch (Cavan Kendall, in his final performance) and his wife Jackie (Julianne White), and even a budding son surrogate in Enrique (Alvaro Monje), a local teenager hired to do odd jobs around the villa. That is until Don, an unwelcome figure from that nebulous past, shows up at his door, his sights set on beleaguering Gal into rekindling his connections with the London underground and lending his expertise to the emptying of a bank vault.

Sexy Beast arrived a couple of years after Guy Ritchie revitalised interest in the London gangster picture with his own debut feature, Lock, Stock and two Smoking Barrels, itself a British answer to the Tarantino model that had popular culture so spellbound at the time. From the outset, it would be easy enough to dismiss Sexy Beast as a jump upon a bandwagon, yet as a crime film it defies expectations. The heist is far from the most compelling aspect of the narrative, and takes up little of the runtime. The really juicy elements arise from the psychological chills of the first two thirds, when Gal is having to entertain the house guest from Hell, a character who is intent on dragging Gal from his Costa del Sol paradise and back into the grimy, rain-soaked Hellscape of London. The script, written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, is structured on unspoken tension after unspoken tension; the sequences centred on Don's intrusion into Gal's sun-soaked world have the claustrophobia and intimacy of a stage play. His presence is enough to completely subvert the entire nature of the ostensible paradise. Don muses that Gal's villa is remote, indicating that he knows that Gal has travelled a long way in order to conceal himself from his prior connections. The very remoteness with which Gal has protected himself now becomes a stifling entrapment, when he is alone in the company of Don. Don's arrival visibly terrifies Gal's circle, and while we get only limited insight into what the man is fully capable of, we don't blame them for a second. Kinglsey's performance as Don is remarkably imposing. He isn't that big - physically, Gal and Aitch should be more than a match for Don, but the sheer ferocity with which Kingsley imbues the character makes it clear just how incredibly nasty things may get if those around him don't tread carefully. Yet for most of his visit, that nastiness manifests in Don's ability to confront them with the very demons they'd assumed they'd left behind on the English shore. He is a reminder that the sins of old must be accounted for, that the sinners will not be let off the hook through a mere change of address. It is not just Gal who has a lot of deeply uncomfortable baggage that surrounds him. Don announces his coming through a telephone call to Jackie, a move that confuses the others, until Don reveals to Gal that he and Jackie once had a sexual relationship, something that could potentially put a strain on her marriage to Aitch if he were ever to find out. DeeDee too has a salacious past that, according to Don, still lingers in the present - she is a former porn star, and we are told that her fan club still meets weekly for their ritual Wednesday Wank. Notably, Don's preferred tactic is to undermine the marital ties between the two central couples, something foreshadowed in the opening sequence, when the falling boulder fractures the motif in the swimming pool tiling of two hearts overlapping. The rabbit likewise makes its first appearance as Gal is anticipating Don's arrival, an occurrence that would appear to align Don with its grotesque enigmas. There is something about Don that seems almost supernaturally menacing. He could be the Devil himself...but for the fact that he also possesses an absurdity that marks him out as just as human and overwhelmed as everybody else. In this regard, we find a telling observation hidden away in the accompanying booklet to the DVD release The work of Jonathan Glazer, upon a scan of what I take to be authentic production notes, juxtaposed with concept sketches for the rabbit. As per these notes: "Gal embraces the universe. The sun. Animals. Sea. Don can't. Don feels diminished by its scale and order. Don has to feel paranoia. He has to hear the audience laughing at him." This idea is never more salient than during a sequence where Gal and Don are driving back from a bar in the nocturnal hours and encounter a goat on the road, which Don believes to be staring at him. Gal dismisses the animal as a "fucking nuisance", while Don seems to detect a greater purpose in the goat's gaze, a feeling that the universe is actively conspiring against him. In a subtle gag, the goat is not revealed to the viewer, and Don instead appears to look directly into the camera, breaking the first wall by commenting on the audience's voyeurism. It is as if he understands, on an intuitive level, that he is a spectacle to be gawked at, the butt of some cosmic joke. A goat merely looking in his direction presents a challenge, in being potentially in on something that he isn't, and this makes Don twitchy. As well it should. The goat is looking at Don because it knows he's going to die.

What makes Sexy Beast an uncanny experience, outside of Kinglsey's hair-raising performance, is the sense that there may be some greater force toying with Gal and company, always manifest in the natural world overlooking the villa. The sun is the very first image we see. As the production notes state, Gal embraces it, but the sun is perhaps not as benevolent as he assumes - through a slick visual trick, it appears to be what sets the falling boulder in motion, giving birth to the chain of events that indicate that his paradise is in jeopardy. Is it a matter of the characters being caught up in the perpetual chaos of the universe, or is something more sinister going on? I think it's as simple as the natural world signifying fate, the notion that the characters fundamentally have no control over where they are headed, and of course the inevitability of death. Which is the second meaning I'd ascribe to that rabbit. It echoes an early sequence where Gal, Aitch and Enrique attempt to assert their mastery over the world and fail spectacularly. The two grown men laugh at Enrique's thwarted efforts to shoot a hare in motion. Aitch then spots a runt of a rabbit nestled in the grasses and can't resist what he assumes will be an easy kill, telling the rabbit to prepare to meet its maker just before his gun disintegrates. The rabbit never budges an inch, as if it knows all along that Aitch is not to be seen as a threat. When the demonic rabbit surfaces in Gal's dream, it is a classic example of the hunter and the hunted reversed, although it seems noteworthy that Gal was the only one of the trio who is not seen attempting to fire his gun in the prior sequence. In fact, he objects to Aitch's eagerness to shoot the rabbit on the grounds that it's "only a little tiddler." What Gal empathises with, we suspect, is the rabbit's smallness in the scheme of things; his confrontations with the rabbit's nightmarish counterpart would indicate that the exact same is true for him. If the sun, the boulder and the goat all point to the inevitability of death, then the rabbit is a direct reflection of Gal's own mortality.

Which is a function also fulfilled by Don. He dies at Gal's villa, an outcome that paradoxically seals Gal's own fate. Paradoxically, because it is actually DeeDee, the personification of Gal's haven and the closest the film has to a moral centre, who pulls the trigger on Don (twice), as things boil over into a particularly ugly confrontation. Enrique appears, making a valiant stab at defending Gal, but also the ill-judged move of bringing a shotgun into the equation, which Don manages to pry away from him. DeeDee, who had the foresight to pick up a gun of her own, shoots Don pre-emptively in the stomach, before an incensed Gal is impelled to pulverise his mortally wounded form even further. Don's dying words are, ironically, words of affection - he looks in Jackie's direction and professes his love for her. An enraged Jackie walks over and joins Gal in the beating, while Aitch stands on the sidelines, silently piecing two and two together. Finally, DeeDee points the gun at Don and finishes him off. This might be considered a mercy killing, albeit one that's perhaps more geared toward sparing the characters the horrors of their own latent beasts than to ending Don's suffering. Don and DeeDee are diametrically opposed, each vying to keep Gal grounded in their respective domains, so it seems entirely fitting that she, and not Gal himself, should be the one to deliver the decisive blow. But it creates a new problem. After all, Don was only the messenger - he was there to recruit Gal's services on behalf of crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), whom Gal clearly fears as much, if not more so, than Don himself. Gal now has no option but to return to London and do the job, in the hope that Teddy will not suspect that Don's disappearance had anything to do with him. The mutual devotion between Gal and DeeDee may be the purest thing in the entire story, but it gives birth to the fresh new sin that Gal spends the remainder of the picture attempting to purge. His time in London is marked by different cleaning rituals - showering in a hotel room and of course the heist itself, which is carried out by drilling into the vault through a bath on the other side of the wall. Throughout the film, Gal is drawn to water, that classic symbol of cleansing. Much of his time in Spain is spent beside his swimming pool; clearly, there is a lot of unknown evil in Gal's past that he desires to wash away. His love for DeeDee gives him reassurance, some sense that he is not irredeemable. During a hellish dining reception in the London underworld, he sneaks away long enough to give her a telephone call, and to profess his devotion to her in a rambling and incoherent manner ("I love you like a rose loves rainwater, like a leopard loves his partner in the jungle..."). During this sequence DeeDee is shown entirely in silhouette and is mostly silent - the paradise she embodies is barely accessible to Gal, although a small token of affirmation, the utterance of his name, gives him a thread of hope that it is not irrecoverable.

I'm always intrigued by the fact that we never see anything of Gal's passage from Spain to the UK. We simply cut away abruptly from the scene outside his villa to find him underneath the grey London skies. His return to Spain at the end of the film is conveyed through an equally abrupt cut - one moment, Gal is standing beside an otherwise deserted bus stop in the dead of night, having been discarded by Teddy with a piddling £10 for his vault-cracking efforts, the next he's back in the warm embrace of the Mediterranean with the genial company of DeeDee, Aitch and Jackie. This is in contrast to Don's own travels, in which we actually see Don leaving the airport in Spain, and that squeamish episode from his aborted return flight to England (where Don causes a scene, gets arrested, and then claims to have been sexually assaulted in order to get out of trouble). I am reminded of Barton Fink, and how its lack of a clear transitional sequence showing the protagonist setting off for Hollywood has some questioning if he even leaves New York at all. The theory goes that Barton's Californian adventures represent some kind of fantasy vision playing out within Barton's head (I certainly suspect this to be the case for the scenes inside the Hotel Earle). In the same way, Gal's return to London seems to represent the jarring awakening from a dream, the dreariness of the city registering as a particularly harsh rebuke from reality next to the vibrancy of the Costa del Sol. Then at the end, when Gal finds himself cast out of Teddy's underworld, at least for now, he is permitted to retreat back into that dream. I am not proposing that the episodes in Spain are literal fantasies of Gal's, but that there is a deliberate sense of unreality to them that implicates the precariousness of Gal's escape; he could be plucked from his blissful haven at any moment.

On the surface, the conclusion of Sexy Beast would appear to uphold the notion that love conquers all. Not only does Gal make it back to DeeDee at the end of the film, he is even able to cheat Teddy's crew by secretly pocketing a pair of precious earrings during the heist and presenting them as a gift to DeeDee. We also see in the final scene that the hearts at the bottom of the swimming pool have been repaired. And yet it is precisely due to a lack of love that Gal even survives his return trip to London. For Teddy is not fooled by Gal. He makes it clear that the only reason he is allowing Gal to live, in spite of Don's damning disappearance, is that he ultimately did not value Don's life enough to consider him worth avenging. Don was right to be so paranoid about his place in the universe. The grim implication is that the exact same applies to Gal. Teddy makes his contempt for Gal known by paying him such a paltry sum for his efforts (not only does he pay him only £10, he gives Gal a £20 note and demands change) and abandoning him at the bus stop to make his own way to the airport. Gal is released on the basis that he also matters little in the scheme of things - if the outcome were reversed and Don had killed Gal, we suspect that he too would go unavenged. Teddy also makes the troubling remark that he might visit Spain himself in the future, with its implicit suggestion that he will potentially be calling on Gal's services again down the line. So we might question if Gal is even entirely off the hook. As he returns to his Paradise Regained there is a vague threat already hanging over it. As for those repaired hearts at the bottom of the pool, they now conceal a dark secret, for it is revealed at the end that Don's body lies buried underneath. The pool now seems to be less about cleansing Gal's sins than pretending they're not there, something that the characters are all cheerfully participating in. On the surface, Don's intrusion does not appear to have left too much of a stain on their lives. Aitch is telling Jackie about an experimental hair formula, with no hint of any lingering tension as a result of Don spewing his dirty laundry. Is this a testament to the strength of the relationship between Aitch and Jackie, something Don might have underestimated, or to their mutual willingness to bury the uncomfortable truths Don presents along with his murdered body?

Don, though, is not compliant in maintaining his silence. Even from his water-covered grave, he continues to undermine Gal, who acknowledges that Don technically did succeed in convincing him to do the job, but asserts, "You're dead. So shut up". The camera then dives under the pool and travel down a literal rabbit hole, where the demonic leporine is shown busting into a tomb and revealing Don to be very much alive within. This is the film's ultimate punchline - Don, the man who, up until now, might have passed for the Devil, suddenly becomes a twisted Christ figure, miraculously raised from the dead. All the same, the last laugh is conspicuously on Don, as he puffs passively on his cigarette, seemingly indifferent to the rabbit's intentions to rouse him. He does not look like a raging beast, ready to roar back to life and lay waste to everyone on the surface, but a dumbfounded individual who can barely take in anything around him. Gal's closing words are an attempt to reassert mastery over his situation, by insisting that Don is defeated and gone, but that final sequence, with Don and the rabbit both below him, and stirring, would imply that he will never truly be free of his demons. The blissfulness of the final arrangement around the poolside, while it pleases our desire for a triumphant outcome, seems improbable. After all the characters have been through, there is something deceptive in how they sit around discussing monkeys with Beatles haircuts and snickering as though nothing happened, as though they weren't confronted the unspeakable barbarism buried deep within their own psyches. The rabbit, as confoundingly surreal an image as it might be, is the very embodiment of reality, countering Gal's assertion by demonstrating that, no, Don is very much alive, even if the film cannot help but end on an image that revels in the absurdity of the character, as Don becomes once again the butt of a great cosmic joke. Somewhat facetiously, his resurrection underlines the inevitability of death; the rabbit reawakens him as a reminder to Gal that the issue of his own mortality is not one that he can sit on forever. One way or another, and whether or not his criminal credentials should come clawing back to the surface, he and the moth-eaten coney are destined to do business again.

In the meantime, we're left none the wiser as to the identity of that elusive sexy beast. Instead, the title comes to signify the abstract danger that hangs over the characters all throughout, undefined and omnipresent. Whatever form this beguiling beastie might take, it is seemingly as endemic in Gal's Costa del Sol paradise as it is in the grimy streets as London; Gal's narrative journey is in discovering just how little separation exists between the two. Not only do his historic demons encounter no difficulty tracking him down to his remote villa and infiltrating its grounds, the violent murder of Don, and Gal's part in it, prove that he was not successful in purging himself of their contaminants. Don's murder allows the cycle of brutality that Gal aspired to transcend to continue, and when he makes it back to his villa and life is apparently permitted to carry on as normal, Don's continued presence, albeit out of sight, presents a permanent blotch in his idyll. In the end, this may amount to nothing more dramatic than Gal having to accommodate his reignited awareness that he too must eventually die, and the precariousness of his place in the world. The prospect of procuring a happy ending that is not at the mercy of a fundamentally callous and chaotic universe is appealing, but leaves itself open to a dreadfully rude awakening.