Round Springfield (aka Make My Pain The Same As Yours)

The recent passing of Simpsons composer Alf Clausen got me wanting to cover an episode in which music plays a significant part. The most obvious candidate was already taken - and besides, I did ideally want it to be an episode in which music is celebrated as something expressive and transcendental, not one in which we simply have a good giggle about how camp and silly musical storytelling is. So "Round Springfield" (2F32) of Season 6 seemed like the best possible option, with bonus points for the fact that it is a story about bidding farewell to a musical legend who maybe didn't get the full recognition he deserved within his lifetime. Debuting on April 30th 1995, this was a historic episode, marking the first occasion on which one of the show's established characters was killed off. It was not the first episode to deal with the subject of death and bereavement - "Old Money" of Season 2 can claim that honor, although the theme of grief was far less pivotal in that episode, with the narrative focus being primarily on Abe's estrangement from Homer. Here, the issue is all the more stark and hard-hitting for being presented from the perspective of one of the show's younger and more ingenuous characters. Lisa left contemplating matters of life, death and resilience when a chance reunion with her mentor, the enigmatic blues musician Bleeding Gums Murphy (guest voice of Ron Taylor), is cut tragically short by an unspecified terminal illness she did not see coming. 

I confess that I know very little about how "Round Springfield" was marketed in the run-up to its airing. I personally did not get to see the episode until roughly a year after its Sky 1 premiere, and with the internet still being this weird and slightly alien-sounding rumble on the horizon, I had no means of accessing spoilers online. Later instances in which the show pulled this same macabre move tended to be preceded by promotional blitzs designed to drum up suspense about the identity of the condemned character (Maude Flanders and Rabbi Krustofsky spring to mind, although neither example worked out anywhere near as well as the King of The Hill "Propane Boom" cliffhanger). I would hazard a guess that this did NOT happen here, if only because the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter was right around the corner, and why would they risk stealing that publicity stunt's thunder? I do not know if viewers were made aware in advance that a character was going to die, let alone if there was any mystery regarding who it might be. Perhaps the title offered a clue to those hip to the 1986 picture Round Midnight, which follows the final days of a drug-addicted saxophonist (played by jazz legend Dexter Gordan) and his friendship with the fan he encounters after travelling to Paris. All I can say is that, having entered into the episode blind, I can attest that it really is the best way to first experience it, with your perspective actually aligned with Lisa's. There are clues, certainly, that something more troublesome might be unfolding (not least in that Lisa finds Bleeding laid out in a hospital bed) but we are at first inclined to share in her naivety, being too caught up in the joyfulness of the reunion, and the robustness of the characters' rapport. Alarm bells might start to ring should we pick up on the fact that the one thing the characters are emphatically not discussing is the nature of Bleeding's condition, as if it's something that neither party can bring themselves to acknowledge. But Bleeding certainly never presents as a man who is at death's door (to the point that it requires some suspension of disbelief that he'd still be able to belt out such a vigorous jamming session on his saxophone in what transpires to be his last meeting with Lisa). He seems much too alive, still so full of passion for his craft and with warmth and wisdom for Lisa. So when tragedy strikes, it comes with a devastating abruptness that feels all-too real. The line between this world and the next is such a fragile one, something this episode captures so bitterly. One moment he's giving Lisa some pointers and encouragement before she plays in her school recital, the next she's rushing back to tell him how well her performance went, only to discover that he's no longer there.

What fascinates me about "Round Springfield" is that it's an episode that allows itself time to be sad, in a way that was honestly quite unusual for this point in the series. There's comic levity in the subplot, which involves Bart suffering at the hands of yet another shoddy Krusty product (a jagged metal hoop that's inexplicably included as a freebie in his brand of cereal), and in whatever Homer is up to on the sidelines (of note, there's a running gag where a hot dog vendor seems to seek him out in the most inappropriate of places), but the loss of Bleeding and its impact on Lisa are treated with genuine reverence. There are points where it honestly seems reminiscent of the more melancholic tone endemic to the first three seasons of the show; it has a certain moodiness of atmosphere, and an eye for emphasising the loneliness and finer disappointments of the characters' lives in a way that was so central to early installments like "Life on The Fast Lane", "Colonel Homer" and Bleeding Gums' debut episode "Moaning Lisa". I tend to think of this model of Simpsons storytelling as having bowed out with "A Streetcar Named Marge" at the start of Season 4, but with the reappearance of Mr Murphy it momentarily lives again. And this would be the big twist - I'm forever blaming this shift in tone on then-showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss and their preference for sillier, rapid-fire humor over character-driven storytelling, yet they were actually the minds behind this episode. The script itself was written by Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia, but the plot was Jean and Reiss's brainchild, and they receive a story credit. Credits for story alone were unusual on The Simpsons, and it's explained on the DVD commentary that Jean and Reiss requested it on this are occasion because they'd envisioned the episode being a big winner on the awards front and wanted their names attached. (It was all in vain; the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year was scooped up by another Lisa-orientated episode, "Lisa's Wedding", which offered something even more novel than the death of a jazz musician - a hair-raising peek into the distant dystopian future of 2010). By Jean and Reiss's standards, "Round Springfield" is a remarkably grounded narrative. Even the lighter touches, such as the hot dog vendor, seem deliberately smaller and more restrained than much of what we'd seen them do throughout Season 4. That is, until we get the ending. With the closing sequence, the episode is suddenly immersed in the signature off-the-wall humor that was all over Jean and Reiss's own series The Critic (a perception bolstered in how it is essentially an extended parody of a popular moment from a contemporary movie). That ending is the key element that disqualifies it from playing like a total throwback to those earlier seasons. It is such a deeply bizarre way to conclude this story. I don't even mean that as a criticism. It's weird in ways that are grand, fun and very moving. But if you stop to think about it, what is even going on in that ending? Because surely Bleeding didn't really...well, we'll get to it.

"Round Springfield" is, admittedly, another example of an episode where the optics maybe aren't so great when viewed from a particular angle. I mean, think about this for a moment. They made the bold decision to kill off a (semi) recurring cast member, and they chose one of their few African American characters. In other words, the black guy died first. That had never been done before, right? Adding fuel to the fire is that, when Bleeding Gums Murphy was introduced in "Moaning Lisa", he was a textbook example of the Magical Negro, being a somewhat mysterious black character whose sole function within the story was to make Lisa feel more confident about her place in the world. Now, to an extent, all supporting characters are bound by the law of Simpsons-centrism - the Simpsons ARE the centre of this confounding little universe, and everything the rest of Springfield gets up to must in some way relate back to them and be in service of them. But it's felt particularly strongly with the Elliotts, a group of characters who effectively serve as the family's guardian angels. I went over my reasoning in more detail in my review of "Moaning Lisa", but to recap, "Elliotts" was a term I came up for a foursome of characters from the show's early years (named for the cartoon dragon from Disney's Pete's Dragon), whom I'd clumped into a collective as a sort of counterpoint to the Home-Wreckers - in addition to Bleeding Gums, the others are Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), Bergstrom (from "Lisa's Substitute") and Kompowsky (from "Stark Raving Dad"). What they have in common is an uncannily benevolent, otherworldly aura and that they are, significantly, all outsiders to the Simpsons' White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heteronormative domesticity. Bleeding's a Magical Negro, Karl's a Magical Queer, Bergstrom's a Magical Jew, Kompowsky's a...hmm, is the Magical Psychiatric Patient a thing? It could be. The point is that each of the Elliotts represents a marginalised figure within the Springfield community. Their outsider status might have given them a strength and a perspective on life that would otherwise be unknown to the Simpsons, but all that matters is that they're able to share those pearls of wisdom with one or more of the family and go merrily on their way, satisfied that their work is done. They can help to prop up the central dynamic, but they have no business in sticking around to be a part of it. Of the four, Bergstrom is the only one who could be feasibly described as having anything even resembling an agenda of his own (in that he doesn't lose sight of the fact that his time with Lisa is only a short-term job assignment and he'll soon have bigger fish to fry in the projects of Capital City). For clarity, I like the Elliotts and think they're all great and beautifully realised characters, but there's little downplaying that this dubious convention informs a huge part who they are and how the narrative regards them.

Bleeding Gums retains the honor of being the only Elliott to ever be brought back to any significant capacity, even three decades on from the episode's debut, although this wasn't for a lack of interest on the writers' part. (Returns for Karl and Kompowsky were on the cards but fell through. I am not, though, aware of there being any serious motions for a Bergstrom sequel; I suspect that Dustin Hoffman - sorry, Sam Etic - regarded it as a one-and-done gig.) His reappearance in "Round Springfield" might have been an opportunity to expand on his character and have him grow a little outside of his role as a mentor figure to Lisa - but nope, if anything they only doubled down on his Magical Negro credentials, sacrificing him so that Lisa could undergo character growth of her own, before finally depicting him as a literal spirit in the sky, jamming with his newly-enlightened protege to a Carole King tune (like I say, we'll get to that goofy ending in due course). 

None of this was done maliciously, of course. But what is just as telling is how Bleeding Gums was singled out as the kind of perfectly expendable character who could be jettisoned for the feels (and the awards bait). The Season 7 clip show "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular", would infamously mock him (alongside Dr Marvin Monroe) for never having been a popular character, and therefore not one that viewers were presumably expected to care about, although the truth with Bleeding really lands somewhere closer to the middle. On the DVD commentary, Jean does indeed state that they obviously weren't going to kill off a character like Mr Burns whom they'd be wanting to use again, but he also recounts that Bleeding was chosen because he was a character whom people felt warmly toward, in no small way thanks to Taylor's performance. He offered the best of both worlds, in not being integral enough to the core universe that it would be an especially startling development to retire him to the jazz club in the sky, but being sympathetic enough that it would still hurt viewers to see him go. If Reiss had had his way, then the show would have taken a very different path and killed off Marge's mother (a move that Julie Kavner might actually have been fully on board with, as I understand she hated doing Jackie Bouvier's voice), but he concedes that Bleeding turned out to be a better choice. Perhaps bumping off someone within the family, however seldom seen, was deemed too radical. Or maybe it came down to the fact that Bleeding is a fundamentally gentle soul, which Jackie is not. He expresses no outward bitterness or regret for the life that he's led (other than his $1,500 a day Faberge egg habit, which is the closest we get to a heroin allusion), and his legacy is complicated only in the sense that his inherent goodness went under most people's radars. He's a wholly angelic being we're intended to shed a tear for but also conversely write off as a character of no genuine consequence. Outside of what he meant to Lisa, that is.

The Lisa factor is another big reason, I'm sure, why Bleeding was ultimately the one placed on the chopping block. She is such a compelling character around which to craft emotional stories, possessing a wisdom well beyond her years but still having all the vulnerabilities of a child. The loss of a friend like Bleeding would hit her tremendously, even with life already having dealt her so many blows with its cruel impermanences. As Kompowsky's episode made clear, she was very deeply affected by the death of the original Snowball (and her hamster named Snuffy, though he comes up less often). There are also those losses she'd suffered that didn't entail mortality, with her being all but forced to surrender her beloved pony Princess and the man she'd looked up to as a substitute father figure abandoning her for a job in Capital City. In both instances, Lisa's distinctly child-like naivety regarding the impending heartbreak was such a powerful factor. She was so thrilled to have Princess that it seemingly never occurred to her just how difficult and impractical it was for her family to afford such a high maintenance animal. She was so besotted with Bergstrom that she lost sight of the fact that he was never going to be there on a long-term basis. Here, she's so overjoyed to have Bleeding back in her life that she doesn't question what he might be doing in the Springfield Hospital, and it seems that Bleeding doesn't have the heart to outright tell her. Was he himself aware that he wasn't going to make it? Yes, and I think there is a specific moment in the episode where we can pinpoint him making what seems like a conscious farewell to Lisa. It's a scene that hits so hard on repeat viewings, when we know what's coming. As Lisa prepares to go off to her recital, Bleeding hands her his saxophone and tells her to take it with her for luck. While Lisa is honored, she does not grasp the full significance of this gesture, presumably thinking that he's just lending it to her for the recital. With hindsight, it seems obvious that Bleeding gave it to her because he knew he wouldn't be needing it. In addition, by giving her his saxophone he is in effect passing the torch to her to go out and perform great music in his stead. There's a more macabre foreshadowing in his telling Lisa that she's going to "knock 'em dead" (by which he likely to alludes to Lisa's potential to go far in life, not just at this particular recital), followed by an ominous cough, the only symptom of ill-health he's seen to exhibit. Finally, as she leaves his side, there's a lingering emphasis on him waving to her, as if he knows this will be their last goodbye.

What always made the relationship between Lisa and Bleeding so affecting is in how they were ostensibly so mismatched, yet connected so readily as social misfits with a mutual appreciation for jazz and the importance of creative expression. When Lisa first encountered Bleeding back in Season 1, he gave her the much-needed assurance that she was not alone in the world, at a time when she felt that no one understood her. (Perhaps fearing that newer viewers wouldn't know who Bleeding was, the episode incorporates a small clip from "Moaning Lisa", leading to a jarring clash of art styles; I suppose it's not so strange when we consider that for several years the series still felt the need to keep reminding us who Sideshow Bob was every time he showed up.) In "Round Springfield" we see how Lisa is eventually able to return the favour, in demonstrating to Bleeding that his life and music had value, at a time when he seemed destined to die alone and all forgotten. ("You've had some career...although the moral seems to be that a lifetime of jazz leads you sad and lonely." "Well, before you came to visit I would have agreed with you.") Before Lisa, nobody had come to visit Bleeding at the hospital; when she asks about his family, he tells her he doesn't really have one. (In what can only be a deliberate callback to a joke in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", it's heavily hinted that Bleeding and Dr Hibbert are brothers who lost contact a long time ago, although neither party seems to connect the dots. This also means that Bleeding had a second brother he possibly didn't even know about.) The grim reality doesn't fully set in until after his death, when Lisa attends his funeral and discovers that she's the only mourner there; nobody else in town knew who Bleeding was or cares that he's gone. It's a realisation that transforms Lisa's grief into red-hot grit and takes her on her first step toward healing, with the knowledge that responsibility for keeping her friend's memory alive rests solely on her.

Before then, we get a series of short scenes that feel reminiscent of "Moaning Lisa", with the family all showing awareness of Lisa's suffering and doing their bit to try and help, even if they don't necessarily have the kinds of answers she's seeking. Homer looks as though he might have a sensible response, in reminding Lisa of how she coped when Snowball died, but ends up reaching the most inappropriate possible conclusion from that train of thought: "All we have to do is go down to the pound and get a new jazzman." Maggie attempts to soothe Lisa's aching soul the only way she knows how, by offering Lisa her pacifier (it doesn't help Lisa, but the tactic later proves effective on Homer, who is rattled by his own failure to say the right thing). Bart shares with her his belief in reincarnation - specifically, that when you die you can come back in a form of your own choosing. He's intent on being a butterfly in his next life, because as he sees it he'll be able to commit acts of arson and be totally above suspicion. (Something I find particularly disturbing about Bart's butterfly fantasy is the fact that everyone else in it - Skinner, Wiggum, Lou and Eddie - are all the same age they are in the present, so is Bart banking on dying imminently?). Deciding that she needs to consult someone with a little more experience and wisdom, Lisa turns to Abe, who seems to think he's in a Final Destination scenario, with Death conspiring against him at every turning. (Really, the guises in which he sees Death manifesting aren't that far off. Maggie? Well, she'd make an attempt on Burns' life soon enough. Snowball II? As Homer alluded to above, she's a walking reminder of the grisly fate that befell the original Snowball. The bird bath? Odd are that something drowned in there at some time or other.) Marge, who nearly sent Lisa down a terribly destructive path in "Moaning Lisa", here gets to be the voice of reason, assuring her daughter that the sadness she feels is normal and making the practical suggestion that she might honor Bleeding's memory by asking the local jazz station to do a tribute to him. Lisa immediately runs into a roadblock - K-Jazz is happy to fulfil her request, but they don't have Bleeding's sole album, Sax on The Beach, in their library, and copies are hard to come by. As luck would have it, Comic Book Guy has one for sale in his store, but it comes with a hefty $250 price tag, which is increased to $500 when Comic Book Guy learns that the artist in question is dead. Knowing she could never afford it, Lisa sinks back into despair, only for help to arrive from the aspiring lepidopteran arsonist, whose recent traumatic experience with that piece of jagged metal has brought him a cash settlement of precisely $500.

 

Bart's subplot, which involves him falling ill after unwittingly ingesting the cereal prize from Hell and requiring emergency surgery, is (in spite of its gruesome premise) predominantly there to bring comic balance to a more sombre than usual A-story. It is, though, no arbitrary joke-fest, with the resolutions to these respective stories dovetailing in a way that is meaningful and rewarding. As fate would have it, Bart's swallowing of the metal hoop occurs on a morning before a history test that he's ill-prepared for; when he starts to complain of intense pains in his stomach, Marge and Homer, wary that he's pulled this exact shit to get out of a test before, pack him off to school, although Lisa voices the opinion that his illness might be genuine this time. This in itself feels like a nice callback to the events of "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa was the only character who knew that Bart was faking his amoria phlebitis; it speaks volumes to their sibling connection that she's consistently able to tell the difference. When Bart finally receives a settlement from Krusty (lawyer Lionel Hutz has actually scammed him out of a much more substantial sum, but $500 seems like a huge amount to the trusting eyes of impressible youth), he's all prepared to blow it on the most frivolous purchase imaginable - a limited edition pog (remember those?) with Steve Allen's face on - but his conscience prevails and he instead buys Lisa the elusive album (the sequence detailing Bart's dilemma, which repeatedly shifts between three different leitmotifs, is in itself such a wonderful testament to Clausen's composing talents). He explains to Lisa that he felt he owed it to her for being the only person to take his side when he got sick. It's a lovely gesture that upholds my personal view of Bart and Lisa having the strongest bond out of all of the Simpsons, but it has deeper significance still, as a final affirmation to Lisa that, even with her soulmate sadly departed, she does not have to worry about being alone in the world. No matter what, she can always count on her family to come through for her.

At last the time has come to dig into that bizarro finale. Even with that copy of Sax on The Beach safely within her mits, Lisa's tribute seems doomed to fall at the second hurdle, that being K-jazz's ridiculously weak broadcast range; even when standing immediately outside the station with a portable radio, she is unable to pick up their transmission of Bleeding's music. That is until a thunder cloud appears in the sky, and a bolt of lightning strikes the K-Jazz antenna, making it so powerful that the broadcast is heard and enjoyed all over Springfield. The Deus ex Thunder Cloud subsequently assumes the form of none other than Bleeding himself, assuring Lisa that her actions made him happy. This much is a parody of the sequence from Disney's The Lion King in which the deceased Mufasa appears amid the night sky and urges the emotionally lost Simba to remember who he really is - a point made salient in having the ghost of Mufasa appear right next to Bleeding, with a message for Simba...or does he mean Kimba? (On the DVD commentary, Jean and Reiss fret that this is a jab that nobody would have gotten after the 90s, but they'd no need to fear - as long as there are animation buffs in this world, that line will always be hilarious and relevant.) They are then joined by the ghost of Darth Vader, making his shocking declaration of kinship with Luke, and then finally...James Earl Jones, giving an announcement on behalf of CNN? This elaborate and totally nonsensical gag is nothing less than a loving tribute to the vocal talents of Jones, who voiced Mufasa and Darth Vader and recorded announcements for CNN. (Jones was imitated here by Harry Shearer, although he had previously guest starred in the Halloween episodes "Treehouse of Horror" and more recently "Treehouse of Horror V". Somewhere out there there's also a parallel universe in which he got to voice Sideshow Bob.) It's a sequence that would seem perfectly suited to the looser, cinema-fixated reality of The Critic, but if feels just a whisker out of place in The Simpsons, no? Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of Bleeding, Mufasa, Darth Vader and James Earl Jones all being besties in the afterlife (Jones himself was very much alive when "Round Springfield" initially aired, but now in 2025 his placement alongside these deceased characters seems less absurd). But what exactly are we to make of this sequence within the context of this otherwise relatively grounded story about grappling with bereavement? Surely Mufasa, Darth and then-still-with-us Jones didn't literally manifest in the clouds above Lisa? Surely not even Bleeding was really there, jamming with Lisa to a "Jazzman" reprise? I recall that Groening made a big thing about that catfish who winked at the camera in "The War of The Simpsons", but that all seems very sensible and subdued compared to the borderline fever dream unfolding here.

"Round Springfield" leaves us with a head-scratcher - have the skies above Springfield really become host to this odd assortment of spectres (most of them culled from popular culture), or is the entire sequence nothing more than a weird and protracted bit of symbolism? Arguably, there was precedent for it in "Old Money", which included a scene in which the ghost of Bea Simmons appears to Abe on a rollercoaster, though its strangeness was of a somewhat lower-key variety and was easy enough to rationalise as representing some kind of internal monologue on the part of Abe. It should also be noted that the Disney moment it's parodying is up for a similar kind of interpretation - Rafiki makes a remark about the weather, leaving some ambiguity as to whether Mufusa's manifestation really occurred, but anyone over the age of 14 would presumably be more inclined to read it as symbolising the soul-searching Simba undertakes in trying to understand what Rafiki means by "He lives in you." It's possible that this too is taking place inside of Lisa's head, but it goes so far with some of its concepts and gags that I fear it all makes Lisa look just a little unhinged.

It is, though, a magnificent ending - triumphant, redemptive, uplifting and poignant. Perhaps it doesn't matter how well it meshes with the series' reality or what sense we make of it, so long as we gather that Lisa has reached the light at the end of the grieving tunnel and realised that she retains her connection to Bleeding Gums and everything that he taught her. I would argue that the intention here is nothing more complicated than to leave us on a spectacular emotional high following such a downbeat experience - it's the episode's markedly eccentric way of letting us know that everything is going to be okay. It helps that Lisa and Bleeding's recurring performance of "Jazzman" is allowed to be a thing of beauty in itself, tussling only with the "Oh Streetcar!" material from "A Streetcar Named Marge" for my favourite musical sequence of all the series (bless the person who compiled the Songs in The Key of Springfield album for putting those tracks right next to each other, so I could listen to them over and over in easy succession). Perhaps it ought to lose the edge for not being an original song, but that seriously doesn't matter. They imbued it with a heart and an aching all of its own. I love Carole King's original 1974 rendition too, but thanks to The Simpsons I will forever interpret it as being about Lisa's yearning to become one with her idol, both before and after his passing.

Cheers to Yeardley Smith, to Ron Taylor and not least to Alf Clausen for making this episode such a transcendental voyage. Jeers to Disney, for a whole multitude of reasons, but in particular for the downright galling manner in which, while watching this episode on Disney+, they always seemed to want to take out midway through the credits and directly into "The Springfield Connection", rather than encouraging me to enjoy the whole dazzling performance of "Jazzman" as the Simpsons gods intended. If Disney had their way, nobody would stick around for the punchline that rounds off the story: "Oh come on, Lisa, I've got a date with Billie Holiday!" Bleeding's parting words, and they couldn't give a mouse's soiled gloves if you hear them. The sacrilege astounds. 

Spanking The Monkey (aka Incest. Why Did It Have To Be Incest?)

Spanking The Monkey (1994) was the debut feature of director David O. Russell. Already I can see a bunch of you directing your cursors straight to your backwards icons. I understand. Russell is nobody's favourite person. But if you'll stay, I do have a funny personal story regarding this movie.

I first came across Spanking The Monkey (1994) in the early 2010s, when Fopp had the DVD on sale for a meagre £3. Having a keen interest in early 90s indie (and also being in the beginning stages of an academic project on the contemporary slacker archetype that unfortunately fizzled) I snapped it up. At the time, one of my favourite toys was a budget portable DVD player that I liked to bring along on long train journeys, and soon after, I went on one such journey to see my family and watched Spanking The Monkey on the way. At some point during my visit, I met up with my brother and sister-in-law, who asked me what DVD I had watched on my journey. "Spanking The Monkey", I responded, hoping that the meaning of the title would be lost on them. No such luck. They both snickered and demanded to know what kind of movie it was. "Or, do you not want to say?" I realised that they thought I'd been sitting there on that train watching a porno flick. Later that evening, my mum asked me the exact same question. I thought about lying, but instead I bit my lip and told her, bracing myself for her mortified judgement. It would be so much more embarrassing to have your mother pondering your willingness to watch dirty movies in public view than it would your siblings. "I haven't heard of that," she responded, with total nonchalance. "Is it an animated film?" It occurred to me that she didn't know what the title was a euphemism for and had assumed it was a children's movie about a monkey named Spanking, the mere suggestion of which sent me spiralling into an internal giggle fit. I mean, maybe the same creative team behind Rocko's Modern Life could have pulled off that off in a bygone era. "Not exactly," I responded. I think I told her it was a drama about a college student calling in on his family, which is entirely true, but I omitted most of the grisly specifics. I had dodged a bullet and didn't intend to tempt fate further. The film might not be pornography, but its subject matter is blue all over.

Spanking The Monkey follows Ray Aibelli (Jeremy Davies, cast off the back of his work in a Subaru commercial), a keen young MIT medical student who has journeyed to his parents' suburban home for what he assumes will be a quick stopover before moving on to a prestigious summer internship in Washington. His parents, though, have little interest in seeing him fulfil his ambitions. His mother Susan (Alberta Watson) has recently fractured her leg in a failed suicide attempt, and his father Tom (Benjamin Hendrickson) insists that Ray spend the summer caring for her and completing various other domestic chores, so that he can get back on the road and resume his occupation as a peddler of motivational videotapes. Terminally bored and mutually abandoned by the self-absorbed patriarch, mother and son slowly come together and forge an unexpected connection. By "unexpected" I of course mean incestuous. Make no mistake, Spanking The Monkey is not a feel-good tale of restoring broken relations, but a comically misanthropic study of vulnerable people making terrible decisions that all but guarantee their own destruction. 

 

The Subaru commercial that got Davies the gig.

Although Spanking The Monkey picked up the Audience Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, getting Russell's career off to a highly auspicious start, the film now seems curiously forgotten amid Gen-X indie cinema, attaining neither the cult status of Kevin Smith's early output or the critical darlinghood of Richard Linklater's. That is a tremendous shame because, putting aside the controversies that have since befallen Russell, Davies and Watson give such beautifully compelling performances as the two malcontented leads - Ray and Susan each feel nuanced and real. And the film's examination of suburban malaise, while well-trodden territory in American cinema, scratches a unique kind of itch. For myself, its appeal has always lain in how deftly it captures that awkward transitional period when your college education has formally begun but you've yet to truly fly your parents' nest; the uncertainties of the outside world are looming, yet retreating back into a former stomping ground imposes distance, not familiarity. Summer becomes a long and tedious chasm in which your maturation is put on hold, you find you've already drifted apart from your old friends and you're eager to get back to independent living. No doubt that Spanking The Monkey was an astute and well-crafted debut. Ultimately, Russell's deliberately muted attitude toward the incestuous relationship, while certainly novel, might have proven too alienating for lasting appeal with viewers. It confounded critics who otherwise had a lot of praise for the film. Emanuel Levy, in Cinema of Outsiders, observes that Russell "handles the incest in an unsentimental, "responsible" manner, as if it were part of a normally painful coming of age. But it's not. The film leaves an uneasy feeling: Did it have to be about incest to precipitate Ray's maturation?" (p.207) Joshua Katzman, reviewing the film in the Chicago Reader, was more bothered by the characters' seeming indifference toward this most startling of developments, feeling it amounted to narrative implausibility: "when Raymond wakes up the following morning, naked and lying next to his mother, the scene has a casual, hung-over quality that rings false...the gap between making out and waking up next to each other the following morning is too wide." Geoff King, in American Independent Cinema, was more amenable to Russell's undramatic approach, identifying it as part of a broader queer cinema movement in which conventional household models were subverted rather than rejected: "Incest is just one ingredient in a blackly comic mix of dysfunctional family relationships...to make it seem relatively natural, and to deny it a full melodramatic treatment, is to enter into the realm of queering the family context in which it occurs." (p.239)

There are obvious comparisons to be drawn between Russell's film and Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967). Ray, like Ben, is fresh out of college and forced to subside in the stifling suburban world of his parents. Unlike Ben, Ray enters in with a clear plan and the drive for escaping this world, something that goes badly awry over the course of the film. We sympathise with Ray's desire to get out and make good on his ambitions, even amid the intermittent suggestions that the world beyond is likely just as bleak and screwed up as the one he's looking to flee. Russell's script incorporates a particularly mordant joke that echoes a character's infamous insistence, in Nichols' film, that "the future is plastics" - Ray explains that his personal interest is in organ transplants, but he's chosen to focus his studies on children with AIDS, because he's told that's where the future is. Meanwhile Susan, much like Mrs Robinson, is stranded in a loveless marriage, having been left to stew in endless resentment over her own long-thwarted ambitions. She too was once an aspiring medical student with a bright future ahead of her, but was forced by Tom to pack it in. It's hinted that, as with Mrs Robinson, it was the addition of a child to the equation that interfered with her plans, although unlike Mrs Robinson, Susan had aspirations of motherhood, and sacrificing her career ambitions was a compromise demanded by Tom, who did not want to shoulder any of the responsibilities of parenthood. This certainly tracks with what we see of Tom, who seems more interested in the wellbeing of his dog, a German shepherd with dental issues, than he does in either Ray or Susan. But even then, the responsibility of pet ownership has proven too much for him; the dog and its bleeding gums are also left in the hands of Ray while Tom goes out to sell more videos. (Tom has additional motives for wanting to be on the road besides his career. Whenever he calls Ray from inside a hotel room, a naked woman can always be glimpsed somewhere within the mise-en-scène.)

A contradiction emerges with Susan. She has the opportunity, through Ray, to vicariously live out her unrealised ambitions, but her attempts at commandeering his research seem geared more toward maintaining a hold on him than in enabling him to achieve what was denied her. In one scene Ray asks her to proof read an essay he has written, and they get into a pedantic discussion over the semantics of the terms "stigmatised" and "ostracised", and which is more appropriate for describing the plight of HIV positive children. She is later perturbed to learn that Ray has submitted the essay without her final approval, and that it has impressed the medical authorities in Washington so that they'd be willing to foot the bill for a professional carer in order to secure Ray as an intern. "You got what you wanted, I'm happy for you," she insists, with ill-disguised bitterness. We sense that Susan is too jealous and possessive to genuinely want to see Ray get ahead in life, and that she would be far more comfortable seeing him held back and pulled down to her own defeated level.

Another picture with which comparisons seem apt is David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), as James Berardinelli suggests in his review on ReelViews: "Russell has set up his world as a "normal" suburban community, then caused all sorts of bizarre things to happen. While circumstances aren't taken to David Lynch extremes, one has a sense that the director of Blue Velvet would appreciate what Russell has done with his canvas here." What is notable about Russell's suburbia is how eerily empty it initially seems, as if Ray and his mother have the neighbourhood all to themselves, abandoned not only by Tom but by the wider universe. There is a long stretch in the first act in which the only other occupant seen is Toni Peck (Carla Gallo), a high school student who becomes Ray's romantic interest and an inevitable target of Susan's jealousy (she accurately but ironically advises Ray that Toni is too young for him). Eventually Ray's old friend Nicky (Matthew Puckett) shows his face, along with a couple of cronies (Nicky is, incidentally, of that contemporary slacker archetype I alluded to earlier). In one of the film's subtlest tricks, it is not until after Ray has engaged in sexual intercourse with his mother that a fuller suburban community outside of Ray's family and a scant handful of peers emerges. As he flees the house in his underwear to avoid being seen by his paternal aunt Helen (Judette Jones) in his mother's bedroom (a sly variation on the old routine whereby a young lover flees the scene of the transgression to evade an overprotective parent), he is casually approached by a postal carrier (Carmine Paolini) who clearly thinks nothing of his undressed state. An imposing neighbour (Neil Connie Wallace) later appears to advise Ray and Susan that the dog has gotten loose. We end up in a doctor's waiting room where Susan engages in small talk with acquaintance Fran Gibson (Lleana Stratton), there with her own subjugated son (Jed Resnik), who is afforded no dialogue and belittled by his mother for his love of grunge music. Superficially, this sudden appearance of a hitherto absent community might suggest a broadening of Ray's horizons and his induction into the adult world. What it really signals is the descending of a fresh layer of entrapment, now that Ray has crossed a line into a situation that is all the more desperate and stifling. The falseness and insufferableness of the entire adult kingdom has come raining down on him in full force. His first instinct is to rebel against it, undermining Mrs Gibson's authority by calling her by her first name and reciting a ribald anecdote suggesting a correlation between shoe size and penis length (Sideshow Bob would be flattered, I'm sure), potentially as an expression of solidarity with her silent son, whose broken arm comically echoes Ray's own inability to perform the titular act (see below).

Compared to Lynch's suburbia, there are no swarms of ravenous bugs seen creeping below the ostensibly immaculate grasses. Instead, an omnipresent undercurrent of distastefulness is suggested through another means, one that is not made overt within the script itself, but that Russell expresses more explicitly in the DVD commentary - which is to say the film's queasy relationship with food, and the persistent subconscious reminders of what that food is fated to become. In particular, the sequence that precedes Ray's sexual intercourse with Susan involves the two of them sharing an emotional connection by throwing cheese around the bedroom. The cheese has been forced on them by Aunt Helen, who has been invited to the house (very much against the wishes of her brother) to care for Susan before a hired nurse arrives, and who bangs on a lot about the nutritional value of cheese and pineapple (and about the brilliant things her own children are up to). Hence, their throwing of the cheese is an outlet for their mutual irritation with Helen...and maybe something a whole lot ickier. According to Russell, he went with cheese because it functions as such a perfect shorthand for shit. He makes the wry observation that cheese both smells like shit and feels like shit. When his characters throw cheese at the television, they are in effect throwing their own faeces (like monkeys?) in order to illustrate their entry into territory that is messy, ill-advised and apt to necessitate a ton of awkward cleansing. It is not just cheese subjected to scatological fixation. An early montage depicting Ray's efforts to tend to Susan juxtaposes his bringing her bowlfuls of soup (which go uneaten) with him emptying the contents of her bedpan down the toilet. Eventually he coaxes her into sampling a spoonful of soup, which is immediately followed by her demanding to forgo the bedpan and be carried to the bathroom. Food in general in the picture is associated with disorder, contamination and waste. A sequence where Helen is seen slicing a pineapple incorporates a shot of her discarding the unwanted outer fragments into the trash can. Interspersed amid the sequence depicting Ray's disastrous attempted seduction of Toni are shots of the dog raiding an unattended bag of groceries and devouring its contents; as Ray and Toni later return home, soured by the experience, the dog bears the telltale remnants of ill-gotten cream upon its snout. Just as today's culinary indulgences are destined to become tomorrow's stomach gas and diarrhoea, so too are today's hopes, desires and impulses destined to become tomorrow's regrets and ingredients for self-loathing.

 

This preoccupation with dirt and contamination also prompts the characters to keep finding their way back into the bathroom, which the film positions as the natural centre of the household (more important than the bedroom where the fateful love making occurs). Its purpose is paradoxical, a place of cleansing in which filth also comes spilling out. It is a recurring stage for the preliminary sexual tension between Ray and Susan; while assisting his mother with showering, Ray is made to confront her naked physique and makes the discovery that she has a birth mark shaped like a shopping cart. It is also where Ray goes in a futile attempt to purge himself of his impure impulses. He is seen showering right after a sequence in which he sensually applies ointment to his mother's leg, and later after they have performed the forbidden deed, with Ray scrubbing himself so furiously that he makes his skin red. This is motivated, it seems, less by disgust at his incestuous actions than by frustration with the knock-on consequences - after sleeping with his mother, Ray misses his train to Washington and drives away Helen, jeopardizing his internship. Throughout the film, Ray ritualistically retreats to the bathroom with the aim of channelling private frustrations, a privilege that is continually denied him (by the dog, of all characters).

It is my intention to eventually circle back to the question posed by Levy. Did it have to be about incest to precipitate Ray's maturation? To answer that question, we first have to consider the purpose of the other sexual act that takes narrative centre stage, and from which the picture derives its risqué title. Ray wants to masturbate, but finds it impossible at his parents' house. There is a running gag that whenever he goes into the bathroom to enjoy a private moment, the dog appears at the door, scratching and whining. The dog comes to anticipate his movements so thoroughly that at one point Ray enters the bathroom to find his four-legged nemesis already sitting there in wait for him. There's a hint of absurdist humor in the implication that the dog somehow knows what Ray is up to and is deliberately blocking him, making the creature an obvious extension of his parents' suffocating tendencies. But the dog has something of a dual role, also representing those aspects of Ray's seemingly focussed life that could get out of hand should he let down his guard, hence its own indulgences in forbidden activity whenever Ray makes a move on Toni. In the third act, when Ray has really lost the plot, the dog absconds into the wilderness for a few days. Tom makes an unexpected return home, needing to collect some sample tapes, and he and Ray go out looking for the dog. Ray comes close to finally opening up to his father, who gestures that he is willing to lend a listening to ear to his son's anxieties, only for the dog, right on cue, to choose this exact moment to make a reappearance, reclaiming Tom's attentions and once again shutting down Ray's chance for self-expression.

In one scene, coming right after his failed attempts to wash away his guilt over his arousal in applying ointment to his mother's leg, Ray's masturbation is disrupted not by the dog, but by the unwelcome arrival of Nicky, who announces himself by calling to Ray in a high-pitched, distinctively dog-like manner. Nicky provides our title drop, accurately supposing that Ray has been "spanking the monkey" (or at least attempting to) and taking this, inaccurately, as a sign that Ray has nothing better to do with his time. Masturbation, as per Russell's film, is not the act of an idle hand becoming the Devil's plaything, but a matter of taking one's destiny into one's own hands (as the theatrical trailer cheekily put it, getting a grip on yourself). Self-abuse equals self-care, self-determination, self-preservation. There is a dichotomy between spanking the monkey, the outlet Ray desperately seeks but is perpetually denied, and his submission to his incestuous impulses, a move that serves to further entangle him in his mother's fatally neurotic web. To masturbate, to relieve your sexual tensions on entirely your own terms, is to take the sensible route. Susan advises Ray to always use a condom, reminding him "these are dangerous times", but (even with AIDS reportedly being the future) STDs are not the danger facing Ray throughout the picture. Intimacy with any other person, and whatever chaos they might unleash, entails some amount of risk, but incestuous intimacy represents the reddest, hottest danger zone of all. It had to be incest, really, because it is the single act that mutually debases mother and son, making them both alert to and fully complicit in one another's transgressions. If any act could ensure that Ray and Susan are going down together, with Ray fated to never escape his mother's clutches, incest is it.

The dualling acts of incest and masturbation are finally conflated at the end of the film, when Ray reaches his lowest ebb. Tom, shortly before setting out on the road again, has dropped the ultimate bombshell, that he is no longer in a position to pay for Ray's tuition fees. In addition to missing his internship, Ray won't even be able to return to college once the summer is over. He is now stranded in his parents' world, potentially forever (Tom seems intent on reshaping Ray in his own image, by taking him under his wing as a videotape salesman, an option that is just as unpalatable to Ray as the thought of ending up like his mother). Seeing no other way out, Ray attempts to hang himself in the bathroom, but this is foiled by Susan (echoing all those thwarted attempts at masturbation, with Ray complaining that he can't accomplish anything around here), leading to another sexually charged moment between the two. Ray responds by attempting to strangle his mother, channelling his pent-up frustrations and taking his fate into his own hands by eliminating the source of his anguish (a move that would conversely seal his total debasement from deviant to killer). He is, however, unable to go through with it and releases her, shortly before Nicky appears at the window and asks Ray what he is doing. "Choking my mother", Ray admits. Nicky emits a nervous laugh but seems generally unflustered, possibly mistaking this for yet another masturbation euphemism - and indeed, it sounds deliberately reminiscent of an especially cliched one (again evoking an act of violence against an animal), choking the chicken.

The adult world is an appalling, hypocritical mess, but Russell is likewise not romantic about the adolescent world Ray is in the process of leaving behind. For as much youthful idealism as Ray himself might exude, his attempts at relating to his peers are as fused with awkwardness and mortification as you would expect from kids of his age bracket. His pursuit of Toni is just as ill-fated from the outset as his sexual entanglement with his mother, and I suspect will be even more discomforting to some sensibilities. We see the situation from Ray's perspective, in which Toni is presented as an infuriating tease who insists that she is wanting sex but hastily withdraws her consent when Ray advances, culminating in an incident where Ray pins her down and ignores her as she tells him to stop (he is subsequently shocked when she accuses him of trying to rape her). The reality is, as Susan points out (however hypocritically), that Toni is too young, and her confusion and indecisiveness on the matter is understandable. Her wavering belief that she is ready is later linked to parental misguidance. When we meet Toni's psychiatrist father (Richard Husson), he calmly asserts that he has spoken to Toni about sex and is confident that she knows what she is doing (she blatantly doesn't). Meanwhile, time spent with Nicky and his cronies presents an entrapment unto itself, in which the metaphorical shit being flung about consists of vulgar barbs and empty masculine posturing. Nicky has aspirations of majoring in English literature, but clearly lacks Ray's drive to find a place in the adult realm. When asked if he'd be interested in a teaching career, he scoffs and declines to explain what he would like to do, as if it were an irrelevant question; we sense that he'd be happy to sit about smoking weed in a state of post-adolescent indolence forever. His companions, Curtis (Zak Orth) and Joel (Josh Weinstein - no, not that one) are boorish and obnoxious, as exemplified by their reaction to seeing a herd of deer dart into their path on a nocturnal drive. One of them shouts out, "10 points for Bambi!", inadvertently evoking popular culture's starkest instance of a son's maturation being precipitated by the traumatic elimination of the mother.

In spite of Ray's momentary flirtation with matricide, Susan survives the picture. Ray, on the other hand, is required to go through a metaphorical death and rebirth in order to find a route out of his predicament. It is an act of cleansing more punishing than his previous attempts to scrub himself clean in the shower. On his second night out with Nicky, Joel and Curtis, Ray breaks away from the group and throws himself off a cliff into a body of water below. Unable to locate Ray in the aftermath, Nicky and the others run off to get help; after a fade-out, we see that Ray has made it out of the water unharmed and is intent on wandering away undetected. By dawn Ray has reached a roadside, where he hitches a ride out of town with a trucker (John Schmerling). The trucker, noting Ray's bedraggled state, asks what happened to him, and Ray responds by producing the picture's punchline. "I fell into an old quarry", he states, presumably alluding to more than just his cliff-jumping experience the night before. In spite of that defiant leap of faith, Ray's exit has none of the high adrenalin triumph (however fleeting) of Ben and Elaine's escape from their parents' clutches in The Graduate. Rather, it more closely anticipates the ending of Ghost World (2001), where Enid's departure on the phantom bus has been alternately interpreted as either a successful escape into the wider world or a final definitive sinking into despair. We are left with similarly mixed feelings at the end of Spanking, unsure if Ray's act of courage (or else recklessness) has liberated him, enabling him to move on to something better, or if, having cast himself off from everything (home, family, identity and future prospects), he's subjected himself to a figurative demise, with no scope but to wander the earth as that most desolate of figures, the spectral hitch-hiker.

Compared to Terry Zwigoff's film, Russell's leaves us with a closing crumb of comfort, in the form of the sympathy Ray receives from the trucker, who asks him if he'll be alright (suggesting that perhaps there is value in leaning on others after all, even if it is the kindness of strangers winning out over the kinship of friends and family). Ray nods, assuring the viewer that, no matter what lies ahead, he is a survivor. All the same, we might be troubled by that final image, which shows the truck driving past a "Do Not Pass" sign - obviously, the instruction being conveyed there is to not pass other vehicles, but within context it's difficult not to read it as a signal that Ray is slipping over another potentially hazardous boundary. It takes us back to the beginning of Ray's story when, during his journey with his father to the family home, they passed an airport sign reading "Terminal", indicating that some form of death, whether literal or figurative, lay up ahead. How we interpret the "Do Not Pass" sign might depend on whose authority we are inclined to project onto it. Has Ray transcended the limitations imposed on him by the cold and insipid world he leaves behind, or is he about to discover a whole new terrain of hardship that lies beyond? Ultimately, he has to live in the same world as the rest of us.

Flaming Moe's (aka A Moe-st Successful Formula)

Much like the concoction from which its title derives, "Flaming Moe's" (episode 8F08) was something of an overnight sensation. Debuting on November 21st 1991, it immediately cemented its reputation as one of The Simpsons' most electrifying entries. There was a certain panache to the episode, something that caught fire and captured viewers' attentions in a way that exceeded expectations even for a series that had already garnered such glorious notoriety. On the DVD commentary, it's noted by the production crew that "Flaming Moe's" was a really big deal when first it aired, regularly landing spots in contemporary top episode columns. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide declare it to be "Possibly the best Simpsons episode" (of course, in their expanded edition they bestow that exact same honor on Season 9's "The Principal and The Pauper", which is...a minority opinion, to say the least). What was the reason for its breakout success? Was it the wonderfully self-depreciating guest appearance from Aerosmith? A testament to how much audiences loved Cheers (still yet to close its doors and give way to Frasier) and were willing to extend that love to anything that paid homage to it? Those were delicious extras for sure, but certainly not the main ingredient. The main ingredient was Moe. Slimy, despicable, lewd, greasy, backstabbing Moe. He's essentially a counterpart to the children's cough syrup that, as Homer fortuitously discovered, will transform the most low grade, kitchen-sink of cocktails into a luxury beverage, provided the alcohol is first allowed to get a little burned. You know that syrup, like anything bearing the Krusty brand, is dubious, cheap and in no way trustworthy, and yet there is something about it that keeps bar patrons from Springfield and beyond coming back for more. Moe is, on the surface, every bit as repulsive - the plot of this episode has him stealing Homer's recipe and passing it off as his own brainchild without qualms - and yet he makes for such an engaging, and weirdly sympathetic central figure. We shouldn't like Moe, but there is something so achingly, snivellingly human about the guy that whenever he's onscreen, we're totally absorbed.

"Flaming Moe's" feels like an important episode in the evolution of The Simpsons, being one of their earliest experiments in putting a supporting Springfieldian front and centre. It isn't purely a Moe show - Homer plays a pivotal role, and Marge, Bart, Lisa and even Maggie all get their chances to shine. But the dynamics happening within the household are definitely secondary compared to the dynamics happening inside the tavern, and in the strained friendship between Moe and Homer. The only episode before it that felt quite so radical, in terms of side-lining the Simpsons themselves, was "Principal Charming" of Season 2. By its third season, the series was feeling confident enough to try broadening its canvas further, taking advantage of the town's various other colourful denizens and exploring what kinds of stories could be supported beyond the snapshots of modern family life. Not all of their efforts were successful - a counterpoint to "Flaming Moe's" from the back end of the season is "The Otto Show", an episode centred on a character who doesn't prove strong enough to carry his own narrative, and whom the writers have wisely shied away from using too heavily since. Not everybody has the Moe Factor, that pining desperation to be loved and valued by a world he so bitterly resents. But there is a little Moe in all of us, for sure. (As a bonus, the extensive bar focus gives us the opportunity to see other prominent Springfieldians in bizarre after dark personas. Krusty as a pimp? A drunken Edna K attempting to pick up Homer? A well-groomed Barney with trendy wingmen named Armando and Raffi?)

The series was onto a winning formula with "Flaming Moe's", but what's curious is that they did not, for some time, make any serious attempt to repeat it. It was the first episode to use Moe as a main character, and for a number of years it was also the ONLY episode that could be conceivably described as Moe-centric. He had the occasional moment of plot significance here and there - he played a key role in the resolution of "New Kid on The Block" of Season 4, and "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" of Season 5 added the intriguing development of him coveting Homer's life, specifically his union with Marge - but was mostly restricted to asides in his bar room. It wasn't until Season 7, with "Bart Sells His Soul" and "Team Homer", that he started to be brought back into the spotlight. And for another episode in which Homer's friendship with Moe was the emotional nexus, we would have to wait five whole years, until "The Homer They Fall" of Season 8. Writer Robert Cohen, meanwhile, would prove something of a one script wonder, at least where The Simpsons was concerned, with "Flaming Moe's" being his only credited contribution (although he worked elsewhere on the series as a production assistant).

It could be that they were reluctant to go back to the Moe well too quickly after "Flaming Moe's" for risk of repeating itself. And while there would be a great many great Moe moments in the years to come (I am particularly fond of the character study he receives in the "The Love-Matic Grampa" segment of  "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase"), there is no other episode that quite so astutely captures the essence of the Homer-Moe dynamic, a relationship that's not so much symbiotic as it is parasitic. It's nicely summed up by Moe's explanation for why his business has lately been being going through such a rough patch: "Increased job satisfaction and family togetherness are poison for a purveyor of mind-numbing intoxicants like myself." Moe is a miserable being who leeches off the misery of others. Somewhat ironically, given that he's later revealed to envy the life Homer has, Moe's success depends on keeping Homer from realising its full potential. He sells a temporary escapism that Homer is all-too willing to buy, and Homer in turn gives him a steady flow of income. Moe is always there for Homer, albeit not in the most wholesome of ways, and Homer is always there for Moe, even as the rest of the world is too contented to be drinking. What makes Moe's betrayal of Homer in "Flaming Moe's" such a searing gut-punch is not so much that he would take a recipe that Homer came up with and market it without procuring his friend's consent or offering him credit - this frankly is only the logical extension of an alliance that has always been fundamentally exploitative. It's that Moe no longer has any need for Homer the instant his own prospects are looking up. The longstanding threat to Moe would be if Homer were to overcome his habitual drinking and find fulfilment elsewhere, be it in either his family, his career or a more constructive hobby. Homer has, unbeknownst to him, always been the more powerful party in the relationship. But it ends up being Homer who gets left behind, once Moe finds fulfilment in a more desirable class of customer. 

For as beloved as the episode is, it contains a sequence that I consider to be highly underrated, seldom brought up when people talk about the most emotionally painful moments in the show. It occurs as Homer is confronting Moe at the counter of his now-packed bar, protesting that if there were any justice in this world, he would be credited as the drink's creator and his face would be featured on a range of crappy merchandise (ha ha, meta). When Moe does not take his objections too seriously, Homer indignantly exercises the power he's harboured all of this time and tells him that he's lost a customer. This is the kind of announcement that, a short while ago, would have absolutely devastated Moe. Now, he tells Homer that he'll have to speak up, as he accepts a seemingly unending rush of cash coming from all angles of the tavern. Moe isn't knowingly taunting Homer; he genuinely can't hear him above the clatter of the cash register or the clamouring of other patrons thirsting for a Flaming Moe. Once the most valuable asset in Moe's life, Homer now finds himself drowned out amid a sea of indistinct voices, a person of no particular importance to a bartender who is soaring his way up to the big leagues. There's a hilarious moment elsewhere in the episode where Professor Frink, attempting to crack the mysteries of the Flaming Moe, has a computer analyse it and declare the secret ingredient to be love. Really, he's only half-wrong. Homer's sharing of the recipe came from a place of guileless love, but Moe did not reciprocate. In some respects it is a love story (albeit a plainly toxic one), with Homer slipping into the archetype of the bitter ex who stood by their partner through times of hardship, only to be cast aside once success was in their grasp. I'd like to think it's not a total coincidence that the name of the beverage, no matter whose name is attached to the end, sounds suspiciously like a gay slang term. (Happy Pride Month!)

It is noteworthy that, while Homer is obviously shocked by Moe's bald-faced pilfering of the Flaming Homer recipe, and his move to rename the beverage to accommodate his own legacy, it does not at first create such a dire rift in their friendship. Soon after, Homer is seen back at the bar, casually chatting with Moe about his recent increase in business and if his drink might have had something to do with it. It's only when Moe is approached by Harv Bannister, a representative of Tipsy McStagger, the major food and beverage chain that wants to purchase the recipe to the Flaming Moe, that we see the seeds of real rancour being planted. Moe refuses Bannister's bid, and is assured by Barney that he made the right call, since "Only an idiot would give away a million dollar recipe like that." Words that, unbeknownst to their speaker, cut Homer to the quick. But is it the money that's really gotten him down? What's tragic about the situation is that it had seemingly never occurred to Homer that his home recipe could be marketed and sold for such a lucrative sum. He was simply sharing his tip for a delicious drink as a friend trying to help out another friend who was struggling with low beer stocks, and for the purposes of them sharing an intimate moment as two best mates. It also seemingly doesn't occur to Homer, until the end of the episode, that he wields another certain nefarious power in this equation, in that he's the only person besides Moe who knows the secret ingredient of the coveted beverage. Homer could very easily have sabotaged Moe's trade out of spite, and yet it takes some serious whittling down to get him to the point where he's prepared to do that. Vengeance is not on his mind, and nor is blackmail. At one point he tries exploring his legal options, but is advised that he has no case by Lionel Hutz, who is amazed to discover that books can be a source of useful information, not just fancy decorations to make an office look better. What Homer really wants is acknowledgement from the so-called pal who used him and discarded him so callously. When he returns to the bar, now the hottest joint in Springfield, and has to enter through the bathroom window on account of not being on the exclusive guest list, and pointedly orders a Flaming Homer, it's not so much a demand for belated shares or credit as a plea for validation. It is jealousy, and not envy (and no, the two are not interchangeable) that drives his reaction.

It is not within Homer's interests to lose the established harmony that he has with Moe. We see the vital function the bartender plays in his life within the opening scene, which has Homer retreating to the tavern to get away from the disorder of Lisa's slumber party. The dealings of the slumber party are their own bit of otherwise disconnected weirdness, showcasing an unusually sinister side to Lisa - being host to four of her schoolfriends transforms the ordinarily down to earth middle child into the cackling leader of what's framed as nothing less than a malevolent cult, dabbling in freaky rituals involving candle wax and attempting to assimilate Bart into their ranks by way of a forced makeover. They also jinx him, albeit in the schoolyard sense (remember how annoying it was to get jinxed as a child, and bound to silence until somebody released you by saying your name out loud? Why did we ever accept that as canon?). It all gets a bit too self-consciously silly once Bart flees to his bedroom and the girls get through the locked door by removing its hinges, but it serves its purpose in creating a situation that's sufficiently strange and chaotic (Bart leaps out the window, potentially injuring himself, and Maggie is seized by the party as a consolation prize and caked in make-up) that Homer's first instinct would be to remove himself entirely. Moe is his go-to diversion whenever he's unwilling to handle the responsibilities of being a parent (consider that it's unclear if Marge was also in the house, so he potentially left those kids unsupervised, or whenever reality in general gets too overwhelming. The cruellest knock-on effect of Moe's betrayal and meteoric rise to bartending stardom is that it subverts the arrangement, transforming Homer's default method of escapism into an omnipresent symbol of personal oppression. We see this during a dinner table sequence where the subject of the Flaming Moe keeps coming up (the other Simpsons at least are aware that Homer is the true creator of the beverage, but not entirely mindful in how they discuss it around him). Finding his family are not soothing his spirits, Homer excuses himself, reflexively, with the announcement that he's going to Moe's...only for it to hit him like a ton of bricks that Moe is, in this instance, the problem and not the (temporary) solution. His attempt to find a new watering hole at the ironically named The Aristocrat (where the bartender threatens him on entry with a shotgun and gets extremely pissed off when Homer has the gall to request a clean glass) confirms that Moe's services won't be so easily replaced. Homer and Moe were once invaluable allies in their mutual loserdom. The cold reality - that Moe has ascended to luscious new heights while he's been left to wallow in the gutter, becomes a force so inescapable that it has a far more potent effect on Homer's perception than any alcoholic beverage, immersing him in a world where everyone (men, women, children and daisies alike) bears Moe's cursed, pug-like mug.

All while Homer's sanity is slowly degrading, Moe is living his dream life. He becomes the toast of Springfield, a community that typically struggles to be the subject of positive conversation, as illuminated in an opening interview with boxing champion Dedrick Tatum ("That town was a dump. If you ever see me back there, you know I really [bleep]ed up bad!" Yeah, I feel the exact same way about the town I grew up in.) He even gets a romantic interest, in the form of an alluring bar maid named Colette, an obvious parody of Diane Chambers, the character played by Shelley Long on the popular NBC sitcom Cheers. Colette was originally intended to be voiced by Catherine O'Hara (best known for her roles in the Beetlejuice and Home Alone films), who had recorded a vocal track, but she was ultimately replaced by regular cast member Jo Ann Harris due to a feeling that there was an insurmountable mismatch between O'Hara's performance and the character's visual presentation. The prospect of female companionship has Moe at his most skin-crawlingly lecherous; the very public job interview he conducts with Colette is comprised of nothing but wall-to-wall sexual harassment, although Colette seems unfazed and capable of holding her own against him. With that in mind, the optics of having her eventually sleep with Moe maybe aren't so great, even as a nod to the Will-They-Won't-They between Diane and Ted Danson's character Sam Malone, but having them enter into a relationship ups the poignancy in terms of what Moe has to lose on an emotional level when his fortunes inevitably crumble. It pays off at the end. The purpose of Colette's character is, ultimately, to get us to an unsubtle swipe at Long's decision to leave Cheers in 1987. Alone again, Moe informs Homer that Colette "left to pursue a movie career. Frankly, I think she was better off here." This could be perceived as a little mean-spirited, given that Long's cinematic career never reached the same heights as her work on Cheers (although it should be noted that Long also left Cheers because she wanted to spend more time with her family, which she was struggling to do on the show's shooting schedule, so exceeding her success on Cheers was maybe not her top priority). The statement is, however, contextualised as an expression of pathos on Moe's part - Moe might have been happier with Colette around, but of course she wasn't better off with him. Having gained a fleeting taste of intimacy, Moe is restored to his former solitude, left to ruminate on the likelihood that, in the end, he might have amounted to only a stepping stone on someone else's path to glory.

Colette's arrival turns out to be only the beginning of what later becomes a more intricate homage, complete with a Simpson-ized recreation of the iconic Cheers title sequence and a parody of the theme song, "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" by Gary Portnoy. It has to be said that this portion of the episode is a little peculiar, as it's not altogether clear what this is supposed to represent within the context of the episode. The first time I saw it, I remember thinking it was meant to be a TV promo for the Flaming Moe, but it isn't directly framed as such (despite the song playing like an advertising jingle). Now, I think it plays more like the opening to an alternate reality sitcom in which Moe's bar is the focus (a forerunner to some of the concepts later explored in Season 7's "22 Short Films About Springfield") and the hub of a thriving and welcoming community. We see the beginnings of what looks like a typical Cheers installment, with Barney walking the bar in the manner of the late George Wendt's Norm and being greeted enthusiastically by everyone within, including a bartender who is blatantly meant to recall Woody Harrelson. There is, however, an unsettling subversion to this sense of social kinship, suggesting that while Moe might be drawing in bigger and hipper crowds, they are still fundamentally there for release from life's cruelties, and probably no better of for their reliance on the Flaming Moe. The accompanying stills paint an ugly picture of bar life and the intoxicating effects of alcohol, with bar patrons fighting and making one another bleed (anticipating our trip into the actual Cheers bar in "Fear of Flying" of Season 6, in which Norm got drunk and angry and threatened to kill everyone inside the bar). The seemingly disarming ditty, meanwhile, is replete with troublingly bleak lyrics. Compared to the Cheers theme, which was about finding solace and belonging with like-minded souls who valued your existence, these lyrics are focused on the diversionary powers of the drink itself. Get a load of this: 

 

"When the weight of the world has got you down,

and you want to end your life.

Bills to pay, a dead end job,

And problems with the wife.

But don't throw in the towel,

Cos there's a place right round the block

Where you can drink your misery away." 

 

The closing hook, which insists that "Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away", is juxtaposed (amusingly and harrowingly) with a final still showing Homer peering in from outside the bar, his face pressed up against the glass with all the plaintive longing of that kid outside the McDonald's in Santa Claus: The Movie, the patrons within every bit as indifferent to his suffering. Ultimately, the purpose of this sequence is to further accentuate Homer's loneliness, excluded from the celebratory culture surrounding the drink  he personally devised, its touted release from reality totally inaccessible to him.

Colette ends up serving as the moral centre of the story, when she discovers that Moe owes everything to the friend he wronged and continues to mistreat. She convinces Moe that he could put things right by selling the Flaming Moe recipe to Bannister and splitting the profits evenly with Homer. Moe agrees to do so, but is thwarted by Homer, whose despondency has reached its boiling point. Just as Moe is about to sign a contract with Bannister, he appears from the top of the tavern, his coat draped over one half of his face in the style of the Phantom of the Opera (a neat little visual hint at how severely his status as an outcast has warped him), loudly bellowing that he knows the secret to the Flaming Moe to be "nothing but plain, ordinary, over-the-counter children's cough syrup". Bannister gleefully tears up his contract and scarpers. A week later, the high street is awash with vendors selling their own versions of a Flaming Moe, as Homer sheepishly returns to his old hangout to find it devoid of life or business. The only reason anyone would have set foot in Moe's bar was for the joy of downing that exclusive beverage. The community was all a sham, and nobody was going because they liked the tavern itself. Levelled to Homer's lowly status once more, Moe invites his old friend and former greatest customer back inside with open arms.

I will admit that as a child, although I liked the episode as a whole, I was never totally satisfied with how it ends. It comes down to this one simple point - Moe never explicitly apologises to Homer for stealing his recipe, nor does he admit to any wrongdoing. The closest he came to that was when he'd earlier conceded to Colette, "He may have come up with the recipe, but I came up with the idea of charging $6.95 for it." Homer apologises to Moe for his act of sabotage, which Moe graciously accepts, but it's easy to get the impression that Moe still isn't completely reciprocating Homer's goodwill. In truth, the episode ends the only way it can, not with any overtly tender displays of reconciliation, but with two wounded exes finding their way back to each other's arms on the understanding that they're the only ones who actually will lick one another's sores. The Homer-Moe arrangement is imperfect, and there's not much pretending otherwise (Homer's proclamation of "You're the greatest friend a guy could ever have" seems designed to ring a little hollow), but both men recognise that they need the security of other to fall back on. Moe might have betrayed Homer and dropped him like a rock at the first whiff of prosperity, but when all of that's been stripped away from him, he's happy that Homer's still there, and ready to take advantage of that all over again. For now, he makes one concession, in the form of a complementary beverage, which he identifies as a Flaming Homer, giving his sole patron the belated validation he'd desperately craved. We leave our heroes in their deserted dive, mutual underdogs grateful for a little taste of sour affinity.

PS: I dedicate this review to the late George Wendt, who gave a surprisingly unnerving performance in "Fear of Flying".

 

 

PPS: It dawned on me that I got through this entire review without so much as a mention of Mr Hugh Jass. That won't do, since the man is such a class act. The prank calls (one of Moe's earliest raison d'êtres) were now nearing the end of their initial run, with the following episode, ""Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk" boasting the last of the season, not long before "New Kid on The Block" brought them to a formal conclusion of sorts. At this late stage we were getting into overdue payoff variations where things went awry for Bart, and what a pleasure they were. The most disarming detail here isn't the improbability of Hugh showing up, or even his nonchalance about the whole encounter. It's Bart's brutal honesty in explaining to Hugh that this was a prank call gone wrong and how he'd like to bail out right now, when he could so easily have hung up then and there and left Hugh flummoxed. At heart he really is a nice young man.

Let's solve a Frasier mystery - what is going on at the end of The Placeholder?

 

A long time ago, back when this blog wasn't even a year and a half old, I made a post about a Frasier end credits sequence (from the Season 5 episode "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do") that left me totally flummoxed, and which I declared then and there to be the series' weirdest. Looking back nearly nine years on, the whole piece now seems a little naive - in part, because I was still in the vulgar habit of double spacing between sentences in 2016, but more so because there is another Frasier end credits sequence that I've since decided would be a stronger candidate for the series' most baffling. Eddie barking incessantly at an hors d'oeuvre stand shaped like a moorish idol is an awfully random way to round off an episode focussed on Martin ending a long-term relationship, sure, but it doesn't add anything in the way of mystifying plot detail. It's a weird choice because the stand's presence is so incidental within the story proper that most viewers probably didn't even notice it was there on their initial viewing, but what's going on in the sequence itself is really straightforward enough. Eddie is barking at the fish-shaped stand because it spooks him. Why it would spook him so is unclear, as it's hardly the most outlandish prop ever featured in the series, but then as Groucho Marx so humorously observed, inside a dog it's too dark to read, and that goes double for a neurotic dog like Eddie. We could tack on some added significance, as I attempted in 2016 - if we assume that the stand in question belonged to Sherry, then we could interpret that final showdown as a visual metaphor for the ultimate incompatibility between herself and Martin (since Eddie, Martin's dog, regards it as out of place in his domain). I suspect, though, that this is likely a case of a "filler" ending. The writers wanted that final contemplative moment with Frasier and Martin at the bar to be where we left them for this particular installment, and there weren't any B-stories with Niles, Daphne or Roz they could have exploited. End credits sequences are often where we see glimpses of things happening on the periphery of the story, and I'd speculate that the idea here was to show us something of the party Sherry and Martin were preparing for earlier. In lieu of anything too elaborate, they simply had Eddie barking in its aftermath at the fish, now stripped of its hors d'oeuvres. It's a curious choice, but it succinctly communicates that the party is over, in more ways than one. 

So let's move over to our newly-declared champ of confusing codas, the sequence seen following "The Placeholder" of Season 11, the last season of Frasier, ever. (I am still in deep denial about the 2023 revival, because I will not accept Freddy Crane as either Jack Cutmore-Scott OR Martin 2.0, any more than I will accept him as Luke Tarsitano. Sorry, but we are fiercely for Trevor Einhorn in this house.) Debuting on October 14th 2003, this episode sees Roz attempting to pressure Frasier into dating an acquaintance of hers, an obnoxious insurance claims adjustor named Ann Hodges (Julia Sweeney). Frasier is loathed to date anyone for the sake of it, insisting that he's quite happy biding his time until Ms Right comes along, but Roz opines that he might regard Ann as a placeholder, so to keep flexing his dating muscles for when Ms Right finally does rear her head. Frasier later decides that he is in fact lonely and desperate enough to take Ann up on the offer, but immediately regrets it on realising quite how challenging it will be to keep his teeth gritted through each protracted second of her company. Things are further complicated when Kenny shows up with his visiting cousin (Krista Allen), whose name so happens to be Liz Wright (hardy har har), and who would clearly be a much better match for Frasier. Cue the awkward sitcom hi jinks, with Frasier attempting to blow off Ann and take a place at Liz's table. He inevitably ends up making a dire impression on both women, and while Liz makes an indignant exit, an opportunity forever squandered, Ann insists that he meet with her again tomorrow morning for coffee as compensation for their botched date.

The end credits sequence depicts the aftermath of Frasier's disastrous dinner; left alone at the restaurant, Frasier is approached by a man who takes a seat at his table and immediately starts sharing some photographs he has on hand. Frasier, who is perturbed by this development, gets out of the situation by faking a telephone call informing him of urgent business elsewhere, and leaves the man alone with his photos. Who was this man? What did the photographs he shares with Frasier have to do with anything we'd just seen? And what about the combination was so repellent to Frasier that he had to immediately high tail it out of there? There is nothing in the preceding twenty minutes to make it overtly obvious what is going on.

I'll admit that the credits sequence for "The Placeholder" was never one that stuck with me (not in the enigmatic way that the image of Eddie barking at that fish did), until I became aware of how many threads there were inquiring about it on the Frasier subreddit, and with no particularly conclusive answers being offered. The KACL 780 episode transcript was just as hazy, identifying the intruder as a man in a sports jacket who's attempting to push his photos on Frasier, but not linking it directly to anything else from the script other than Frasier's use of "the cell phone trick". We had seen Frasier pretend to receive a phone call with urgent news at two prior points during his date with Ann, so this part of the sequence is at least decipherable. The mystery lies with the man and the significance of his photos. I was intrigued enough to rewatch "The Placeholder" several times over, treating the whole arrangement as a puzzle that could be solved if I scrutinised the pieces long and hard enough.

I don't think it's unfair to say that "The Placeholder" is a fairly by-the-numbers installment of Frasier. Aside from introducing Ann, who would return in a more openly antagonistic role a few months down the line in "The Ann Who Came To Dinner" (I noted in my previous piece that Sherry is a divisive character among Frasier viewers, but oh boy does Ann make Sherry at her worst seem truly innocuous), the most notable thing about it is a sequence in which Frasier interacts extensively with a cat named Mr Bottomsley, whom Frasier is pet-sitting while his owner is out of town. The feline actor playing Bottomsley is such a delight - his reaction on being teased by Frasier about the prospect of a hot bath is simply priceless - and he and Frasier have such delectable chemistry that you really wish it hadn't taken this long for his latent cat person to come out (but then Frasier apparently had allergies back in 1996 when he met Kate Costa's cat). The rest of the episode is devoted to hitting largely familiar notes. For now, Ann herself plays like a cruder version of Poppy, an aggressively garrulous character we'd spent a couple of episodes with in Season 7, Frasier screwing up a date is certainly nothing we've never seen before, and the first act incorporates a sequence that heavily recalls the Season 4 finale "Odd Man Out", with Frasier once again having to contend with the stigma of being the only unattached adult in a restaurant. There's also a subplot with Martin agreeing to interrogate Niles and Daphne's Czech housekeeper Mrs. Gablyczyck (Lauri Johnson), whom they suspect of stealing; it's an agreeable enough diversion from the Frasier A-story, but is introduced fairly late into the runtime, what with Martin, Niles and Daphne also playing principal parts in that preliminary restaurant scene.

Even Frasier's tactic of staging a telephone call, purportedly from Niles after suffering a back injury, comes with built-in deja vu. We've seen variations on it in other episodes. In "Merry Christmas, Mrs Moskowitz" of Season 6, Frasier and Faye had each arranged for third parties to call them during their introductory meeting, to give them a quick out if their prospects weren't looking so rosy. "Cranes Unplugged" of Season 8 has a subplot with Niles and Daphne attempting to set Roz up with a man who is strongly implied to have resorted to this very trick after a single glance at Roz. This is a classic Frasier standby. So what does our mystery man do to warrant it on this most peculiar of occasions?

The first thing to note is that the man doesn't emerge from completely nowhere. If you pay attention to the extras in the backdrop during the date with Ann, you'll see that he's seated at the table behind Frasier. He isn't seen doing a whole lot other than toying with a wine glass and interacting with a waiter, but there is a shot where Frasier moves past his table that establishes that he's there by himself. He doesn't appear to take any interest in what's going on over at Frasier's end until Ann starts making a scene. And then when the credits are rolling he makes his own move. It would be helpful if we'd gotten a closer glimpse of what's actually in the pictures he shares with Frasier, but in my opinion they look like ordinary family photos (if you squint, I swear I see a child standing beside someone in a rabbit costume). This isn't a case of an overly zealous KACL fan wanting Frasier to sign his glossies, nor does it look like he's trying to set Frasier up with someone he knows. Whatever he's attempting to talk about with Frasier, he comes across as being somewhat down in the mouth about it (notice the dejected head shake as he takes his seat). A couple of possibilities spring to mind - the man might be trying to locate a missing person (in which case Frasier is acting like a bit of an arse in fervently not wanting to help him) or he's a lonely guy reaching out to another solitary restaurant patron by trying to strike up a conversation about his kids (in which case we're potentially meant to fill in the blanks that he's divorced and the kids are likely living with their mother). Frasier isn't in the mood for this; he was enjoying his consolation prize, in the form the souffle Kenny had ordered, and which Ann had previously declared was to die for, and this stranger is little more than an unwelcome intrusion in this moment of peace. Overwhelmed by the neediness of this man, he pulls out his phone and pretends that something's just come up, even if means having to abandon his souffle.

If that all still seems rather random, I do have a theory about how it might be more closely linked to the happenings in the episode, more specifically the sequence where Frasier is alone with Mr Bottomsley. During the initial restaurant scene, we learn that Frasier is very excited about his recent antiques purchase, a late Regency fruitwood mirror - a thread that transpires to have been implemented in service of a sight gag where Frasier, feeling the chill, has wrapped himself up in an afghan and, cradling the cat in his arms, goes to inspect his new mirror, only to recoil in horror at what he finds staring back at him. The realisation that he might be transforming into a crazy cat lady (ie: his aunt Shirley) is what spooks him into accepting the date with Ann. No literal mirrors figure in the final uncomfortable restaurant interaction, but we see Frasier being spooked by yet another frightful reflection of his own desperation. This time, the caricature it assumes is not that of a crazy cat lady, but another stereotyped figure of social impoverishment, the downtrodden divorced father. It's enough to scare him away, not simply to escape a dull conversation with an overbearing stranger, but because he fears that this is the kind of culture into which he'll be assimilated if he gets too accustomed to dining alone. (Not that dining by one's lonesome is any near as stigmatic as either this episode or "Odd Man Out" would suggest.)

If only Frasier had had the willpower to stick to his guns when he told Roz in the episode's opening that he was quite happy living the single life. The saddest thing about this whole situation is really not that Frasier missed out on an auspicious relationship with Ms Wright, but that he ultimately wasn't willing to settle for a quiet evening in his apartment with the company of Mr B and his hearty bowl of nine-vegetable winter soup. I don't know about you, but it all sounds positively idyllic to me. The only intrusion he had to put up with was a fleeting appearance from Eddie, who was easily sent scurrying. There's a reason why the scene with Mr B stands out to me as the highlight of "The Placeholder" - sandwiched in between the cavalcade of human awkwardness and the non-stop pressure to conform to the standard of doing everything in duos, the tranquility of cat-sitting is a long, cool drink of water, a respite in which Frasier is able to enjoy night of privacy on entirely his own terms. What it absolutely is NOT is a sign of Frasier hitting rock bottom on the personal well-being scale. He was doing perfectly fine until the judgements of the outside world crept in, via the memories of how he had once (presumably) judged his aunt Shirley. Because we all know that there's nothing wrong with favouring the companionship of an animal friend over a dubious avalanche of social stresses. Later in the episode, Martin mentions how he'd confided in Eddie his concerns that Frasier needed to get a life, and while this is clearly intended as a hypocritical echo of Frasier's prior interactions with the cat (with the laugh track responding accordingly), all that Martin does here is confirm that talking to a pet is no big deal. At this stage Martin was also involved with Ronee, so surely the implication isn't that he's also lonely and desperate?

Odds are that Aunt Shirley didn't have to deal with the kind of grotesque social blow-ups that Frasier endured at the hands of Ann, any more than she did bizarre interludes where strangers approached her and attempted inexplicably to talk her through their family snapshots, and I suspect she was all the merrier for it.