Rabbit In Your Headlights (aka I Get Knocked Down...)

Even with Jonathon Glazer's directorial mettle being as playful and as intermittently demented as it is, there are few entries in his filmography quite as hauntingly enigmatic as the visual accompaniment he cooked up for "Rabbit In Your Headlights". A 1998 single by electronic outfit Unkle (then comprised of founder James Lavelle and collaborator DJ Shadow), the mournful tune featured the vocals of Radiohead's Tom Yorke (who co-wrote the song with DJ Shadow) and sampled dialogue from Adrian Lyne's 1990 psychological thriller Jacob's Ladder. The video starred French actor Denis Lavant, who'd previously worked with Glazer on the Stella Artois ad "Last Orders", featured here as a muttering, parka-clad pedestrian attempting to navigate his way through a road tunnel whilst enduring an onslaught of punishment from the passing traffic. At once, this a video of contradictions - the setting and the imagery have a drab, downbeat realism, yet the tone quickly becomes uncanny and nightmarish. What's also striking is just how muted the song itself is, so that it plays less a like a promotional video for the Unkle single than a short film that happens to use said single as its soundtrack. The music becomes ambience, the visuals and the journey of Lavant's character being the components that most command our investment.

The titular metaphor of a rabbit caught up in a vehicle's headlights is a harrowing one, its implications perhaps most aptly explained by one of literature's most esteemed leporines, Bigwig from Watership Down:

 

"...at night the hrududil have great lights, brighter than Frith himself. They draw creatures towards them and if they shine on you, you can’t see or think which way to go. Then the hrududu is quite likely to crush you. At least, that’s what we were taught in the Owsla. I don’t intend to try it.’

 

To be a rabbit in a headlight suggests confusion, paralysis and the inability to get out of the path of impending calamity; the sheer force of what is coming for you has already overwhelmed you and sealed your fate before the moment of destruction has even occurred. The treatment this metaphor receives in Glazer's video is in some respects quite a literal representation, but also runs somewhat contrary to the precise implications. We don't see any actual rabbits - it takes place in a world that, save its human transients, seems entirely divorced from nature - but Lavant's protagonist has entered into a situation where he is in constant danger of becoming roadkill. Headlights are omnipresent, but are mostly shown from behind the protagonist, and he does not look at them. The repeated battering he receives from car bonnet after car bonnet seems to come less as a result of his being transfixed by the vehicles than his being doggedly determined to shut them out altogether. Instead, the headlights are the force that appear to reanimate him after each fall; the first time he is hit, he seems dead, until his motionless body is bathed in the Heavenly glow of an approaching headlight and he is miraculously revived. But as the sampled quote from Jacob's Ladder (not audible in the video) would suggest, the distinction between the angelic and the demonic is perhaps not always clear-cut. The protagonist is revived to repeat the same process over and over. The landscape he inhabits is Hellish; he wanders onward in search of a light at the end of a tunnel that likely does not exist, for there is nothing to indicate the tunnel itself has an end. He seems doomed to carry out this cycle of revival and destruction ad infinitum.

We get intermittent glimpses of the occupants of each vehicle - that these cars even have drivers makes the nightmare all the more perturbing, because it indicates a pervasive indifference toward the plight of the protagonist. While some of the drivers blare their horns or swerve to avoid him, a harsh constancy emerges in that whenever he is knocked down, nobody ever pulls over and attempts to help. One of the drivers who hits him is seen to acknowledge him but continue on unfazed. To most, he is simply a nuisance obstructing their paths, and once eliminated he is to be afforded no more concern. The most familiar reaction he gets is when the occupants of one car (our obligatory cameo from Lavelle and his mates) drive alongside him and query where he is going, and even then it is not clear if they have any intention of assisting him or are regarding him as a passing curiosity; either way, they eventually lose interest and drive on when he fails to engage with their questioning. The protagonist is an outcast in his society - he is out of his element on that road and distressingly vulnerable, lacking the protection and prestige offered to those who are safely contained inside their cars, but it's also evident that he has no aspirations of joining them. We suspect that, in an incongruous way, his refusal to acknowledge the motorists, and his determination to keep treading this path, even if it means being repeatedly knocked down, offers its own form of defence against the cruelties of his world. 

At the same time, the protagonist gives off the impression that he might be mentally ill, partly through his ostensible inability to understand what's going on around him, and through his frenzied and incomprehensible rantings. It is this designation that perhaps makes him so undesirable to his world, which has little tolerance, much less compassion, for those who do not conform to its standards. Mental illness is also one of the key themes of Jacob's Ladder, where the titular Jacob (Tim Robbins) is a Vietnam veteran wrestling with the traumas of both his wartime experiences and a family tragedy that occurred before the war; while we get no direct insight into what is going on inside the mind of the video's protagonist, we sense that the real battle he is waging is happening on a psychological plane, and this takes precedence over the immediate happenings inside the tunnel. What is written off as madness by detached onlookers might likewise conceal a deeper understanding; Lavant stated in an interview included on DVD release The work of Jonathan Glazer that the character's verbal ramblings amount to an equation that he is attempting to solve. (He also shared that as he speaks no English, his dialogue was fed to him through a walkman for him to repeat.)

The dialogue sampled from Jacob's Ladder in the Unkle track is spoken by Danny Aiello's character, in reference to the German Catholic philosopher Meister Eckhart: "If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth." On that same note, there are different ways we might look at the video's scenario - is it a rueful condemnation of a society that discards those it views as inferior, leaving them trapped in a cycle of relentless cruelty and indifference, or as a testament to the endurance of those who have been discarded by their society but who have the tenacity to go on existing? What eventually makes the difference for Lavant's protagonist is that he  decides to shed his parka and leave it on the roadside. This is a paradoxical move, one that leaves him more exposed but seems to bare his survivor status all the more starkly, so that we see the muscular form underneath, and the various scars from the previous hits he has weathered. Finally, the protagonist stops walking, ceases his ranting, and stands in the middle of the road with his arms outstretched, as if anticipating and embracing the next impact surely coming his way. Another vehicle slams into him at full speed - on this occasion, however, the protagonist withstands the impact, while the car crumples behind him as though it hit a brick wall.

It is a tremendously cathartic ending, yet the getting there naturally proved too intense for some sensibilities. Lavant laments that the video was censored in his home country, while James Lavelle (who also supplies an interview on Glazer's DVD compilation) talks about it being denied a spot in MTV's daytime line-up, less because of the violence per se than because the protagonist was "too realistically fucked". A grungy realism pervades the film, keeping its more fantastical elements swathed in a sense of desolation. The protagonist is uncomfortably reminiscent of the kind of mumbling derelict we might find wandering along the roadside in real life and would probably sooner drive past than get acquainted with. The hardship he's subjected to is brutal and bleak, no matter how persistently he gets back on his feet. We might question if that desolation has really been conquered at the end, in spite of the catharsis it throws us. After all, we never do find our way out of that tunnel. We don't discover if there is any light at the end or a better world beyond it. But then we never actually saw the protagonist enter into the tunnel from anywhere else. For the purposes of this video; that tunnel is the only world that exists and he's always been traversing it.

Lavelle and Lavant each offer different interpretations of the ending. According to Lavelle: "You can get beat down, but you know, if you fight through it then you're gonna win." Lavant's view is that the character has finally solved the equation, which doesn't make him invincible, but enables him to break the cycle and attain an ending. Meaning what? He'll awaken from the nightmare? Or he'll finally die and stay dead? The video's final arrangement certainly seems to offer us incongruous imagery - the character's outstretched arms as he is hit make him into a none-too-subtle Christ figure, indicating transcendence, yet he is ultimately engulfed by the dust, which seems evocative of death ("ashes to ashes and dust to dust") and implies that he and the car have shared the same fate. There is an apocalyptic finality to that closing image, as if the order of the tunnel has been subverted and the entire structure must now come down in smoke (which, if the tunnel is all there is of this world, means The End). Pitchfork, who named the video the 8th best of the 1990s, suggested that the spectre of death was the video's dominant theme, observing that the setting recalled the Pont de l'Alma tunnel where Princess Diana had been killed a year prior, and that, "any tunnel is metaphorically a riff on walking toward the light at the end of one's life." (Without going into the ending of Jacob's Ladder, yep, that's a pertinent theme there too.) Is the protagonist's journey a matter of coming to terms with his own mortality, an act that paradoxically makes him empowered? Is it through freeing himself of his lingering baggage, in the form of that parka, that he finds his peace and accepts what is inevitable? Is the video conveying a broader message about the necessity of letting go of shame and regret? Does the protagonist need to endure all of those hits in order to become as strong as he does, or is it specifically the act of forcing himself to keep going along this futile path that reaps such self-destructive consequences?

We might think back to the question Lavelle had previously put to the protagonist, which he had no interest in answering: "Where are you going?" The question the protagonist might have put to him, had he so cared, is where Lavelle and his mates were going. Where is there to get to in a world that consists of nothing more than an endless tunnel? The implication is that the motorists share a delusion that they are on their way to something beyond, when in reality they are caught up in the exact same entrapment. The enlightenment the protagonist achieves at the end enables a simple turning of the tables. He stops still, having realised that the journey is in vain, and becomes an observer of the world falling to pieces around him.

Walter's Story (A Found Footage Nightmare In 60 Seconds)

"Walter's Story" is the most singularly peculiar of a series of ads that ran on UK television in the late 1990s, showcasing the array of anal retentive German weirdos (supposedly) responsible for bringing the VW Passat to fruition. The campaign tagline assured us that the Passat was "a car born out of obsession", with each ad giving us a portrait of the assorted perfectionists who'd endeavored to give the world the exemplary driving experience. Each was an individual in their particular fixation, a running feature of the ads being a close-up of their worker ID tag, to specify their esteemed place within the company process. In some cases, there was an endearing air of genius to the obsessiveness (see that one ad with qualitatskontrolle expert P. Fischer, the man determined to engineer just the most sonically pleasing effect when you shut your Passat door). "Walter's Story", has a sadder, more sinister quality in a way that seemingly anticipates the found footage boom that was all set to take horror cinema by storm with the impending release of The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project. This ad is keenly aware of the camera's function as a grotesquely intimate confessional and a device that, far from passively recording reality, actively obscures and distorts it.

Meet W.I. Froegel, aka Walter, our resident Detail Meister. His ad takes the form of a video diary, documenting his journey from 20th October 1994 to 14th February 1996; within that span of 16 months he's able to perfect a number of ancillary details, including the car's pump-adjustable seats and fan-shaped water jets that help reduce the weight of the car. On the surface, his fastidious monologue offers a playful means of listing off the Passat's various mundane perks. It is, however, a notch more narrative-driven than others in the series, since it's effectively telling two stories at once. There's an underlying narrative thread that is, as it turns out, being literally overridden by the one we see, but which still makes itself known throughout and emerges especially plaintively at the end. Walter's titular story is not simply a document of how he went through all of the Passat's tinniest features with a meticulously fine comb, but of how he destroyed his marriage in the process. At least, we're given enough information to arrive at that conclusion, but it exists largely within the cracks of the ad.

We get only a fleeting glimpse of Walter's presumed spouse, in a single entry of his video diary. Walter is in what appears to be his own living room, talking to the camera about what a wonderful innovation the fan-shaped water jets are, when she sneaks up behind him in a dressing gown and is visibly annoyed to find him blathering into the void about that infernal car. This is our first direct clue of the tensions arising from the overspilling of Walter's work life into his domestic life. It takes on sharper significance at the end, as Walter is being applauded for his achievements by his fellow technicians, and his ostensibly triumphant image is suddenly swallowed up by a barrage of VHS lines, to reveal the butchered remains of the recording he was taping over all the while - a family wedding that took place in the decade prior, on 16th August 1985. His own wedding, I presume? There are certainly enough seedy details in the subtext of the ad that point us to that conclusion - the sequence in which he demonstrates his pump-adjustable seats feels eerily evocative of a beak-seat make-out session, and it's likely not a coincidence that Walter's final recording takes place on Valentine's Day. Walter's interests have clearly moved on, the car he's played a crucial role in birthing having replaced his wife in his affections. The blissful promises from that summer of 1985 lie now lie in ruins; what remains haunts Walter's present-day obsessions like a ghost, undermining whatever triumph could be gleaned from within. The chapel bells in the wedding video seem to actively counteract his colleagues clapping - no longer the sounds of joyful celebration, they become a mournful ode to what was abandoned en route to the Passats's being.

Which is really a bit weird as a selling point for the Passat, is it not? True, it wouldn't be the first time Volkswagen used a relationship in unsettling peril to promote one of their models, and I've no doubt that it was all intended as an elaborate joke, the wedding video being the final punchline in illustrating the full ludicrous extent of Walter's fixations. But with that as our closing image, it all feels rather poignant, almost as if the ad is conceding that it it couldn't have commanded such unrelenting obsession without breaking a few hearts on the side. It's notable that, while the campaign obviously wants to present the Passat's creation as a worthwhile endeavor, Walter himself is portrayed as a broadly ridiculous figure throughout. At best, you can say that he has the enthusiasm of a small child at play, most prominently seen in the sequence in which he's fiddling repeatedly with the locks (a shorter version of the ad existed comprising only this sequence, allowing Walter's kiddish indulgence to stand as a self-contained thing). But there is an uglier side to his kid-like demeanour, a self-absorption that's totally averse to any form of intrusion from the outside world. Walter is, above all, depicted as foolish, his self-importance persistently undercut by the hustle and bustle unfolding around him - his introductory recording climaxes with him having to shout down his colleagues, while another entry has him totally inaudible. So long as he can hear the sound of his own voice, he seems oblivious to whatever is behind him, both directly and temporally - at the end of his diary, as he stands there smirking like an idiot while clutching that headlight as though at an award ceremony, one wonders if he's even noticed that his marriage has been disintegrating around him. But then the final status of Walter's relationship, while doubtlessly not rosy, is never revealed. It is an unknown piece of the narrative puzzle that lurks tauntingly within the blank space of those ominous VHS flickers. What we're left with is a series of images that force us to get uncomfortably up close and personal with Walter, immersing us in the overwhelming awkwardness of his Passat-dominated world. We come away grateful that we don't know the Detail Meister, even if we do feel a lingering curiousity about the car on which he was working. Obsession, the ad illustrates, can be an ugly and merciless thing, yet the campaign hinges on the notion that it delivers the goods nevertheless. Obsession fuels the drive for making those little details function - even if we do end, hauntingly, by giving the final word to the bigger picture bypassed along the way.

Treehouse of Horror '90: Hungry Are The Damned (aka Have Your Cake And Eat It)

"Hungry Are The Damned" is a frustrating Simpsons Halloween segment. To a point, it's frustrating by design. Conceived as a loose kind of homage to the vintage Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man", it sees the family being abducted by a race of squid-like extra-terrestrials known as the Rigellians (fronted by two particularly prominent individuals, Kodos and Kang), who purport only to wish to indulge them with gourmet cooking and electronic entertainment. It spends much of its duration dropping anvil-sized hints that something significantly more unsavoury is going on, only to then hit us with a narrative twist that declares us to have been at fault all along for our disgracefully leery human minds. The more generous interpretation is that it ends up being a sort of anti-twist, the classic shaggy dog story in which the joke's on us for allowing ourselves to be strung along for essentially nothing. The less generous reading is supplied by segment writer Wallace Wolodarsky himself on the DVD commentary, where he openly describes the solution as "the biggest cheat".

It's not hard to see where Wolodarsky is coming from. There's a distinction to be made between artful misdirection (getting the viewers to look one way at a red herring, whilst laying the ground for a more surprising plot development right under their noses) and outright cheating (bombarding the viewer with evidence that one thing is happening, only to largely discard said evidence in favour of a "Gotcha!" at the end), and I'd argue that "Hungry" leans more heavily into the latter. To be fair, this isn't the only example of a Simpsons episode cheating with regard to a narrative twist. Take "Bart of Darkness", in which we were taunted to believe that Ned Flanders might actually be a "mur-diddly-urdler" - what's never accounted for, in the closing revelation that he was attempting to conceal an overwatered ficus plant, is why he had to excavate so much earth to do so. That was quite blatantly a tomb for a human corpse he was digging, not a houseplant. Still, the mystery in "Darkness" was working on two separate levels, anticipating (and explicitly calling out) the viewer's expectations that there would be an entirely innocent and thoroughly mundane explanation for Ned's suspicious behaviours, whilst dragging the scenario so ridiculously far that you almost felt dared to suppose otherwise. It also helps that the explanation, when it comes, is so beautifully in character for Ned that it scarcely seems to matter if not all of the smaller pieces fit. Kodos and Kang, on the other hand...well, it's a tricky issue. They've been hostile aliens ever since, and it has to be said that they are a lot more fun that way. The notion of them having benevolent intentions, even for the purposes of a single, self-contained segment, is a difficult one to swallow with hindsight. But given that this was their first appearance, and the writers were unlikely to have been thinking about a second when they penned it back in 1990, it does demand to be judged on its own merits.

Alas, even on its own merits, "Hungry" has always been my least favourite of the original "Treehouse of Horror" edition, and that bothers me so. It bothers me because there is so much to enjoy about it up until that invalidating denouement, not least that it is the most authentically unsettling of the three establishing segments. The atmosphere is so charged with sickly, oversaturated hues, the imagery so ripe with ghoulish foreshadowing - there's the barbecue and the bug zapper at the segment's opening (reminders of the perils that await those lower down the food chain), and that particularly disturbing shot in which the heads of an unwitting Homer and Marge are framed to look as though they've been chopped off and served on the very platters they're about to dine from. The design of the Rigellians themselves is also an unmitigated triumph, a combination of the most grotesquely inhuman of qualities - giant cycloptic beings with squid tentacles, shark teeth and over-active saliva glands, the most benign physical quality they probably have going for them are their pointy Spock-esque ears. Their non-stop drooling around the Simpsons transpires to be yet another red herring - this is something the Rigellians simply do, as confirmed by their subsequent appearances, and we've had plenty of time since to get used to it - and yet within the specific context of "Hungry" it's a fabulously eerie touch, implying that it does that, no matter how ostensibly civilised these aliens' demeanours, their Pavlovian reflexes keep telling a very different story. For much of its running time, "Hungry" pulls off a masterful balancing act; in some respects, the life and culture aboard that Rigellian spaceship is entirely, mundanely familiar, often to the point of absurdity (according to Kang, it's an astonishing coincidence that the English and Rigellian languages just happen to be the exact same), but all the while there's a pervading sense of these galaxy-hopping molluscs embodying something more distant, unknowable and dangerous. "Hungry" persistently indicates that we're headed for an outcome beyond our wildest nightmares. So when it's all revealed to be nothing more than a means to a confoundingly ambivalent punchline - well, it can't help but feel a little deflating. Maybe it's akin to how a few sick-minded viewers felt when Cocoon: The Return (1988) showed up in theatres and shut down their theories that the Antareans had similar intentions for that band of retirement home absconders they carried off in 1985.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for narratives in which things that appear strange and grotesque turn out to be benign, and where the precarious nature of human judgement is called into question. I just don't think that particular moral goes with this particular story, and the rather tepid ending sequence, which fails to produce any witty rejoinders to Lisa's platitude about the Simpsons being the real monsters aboard that ship, would appear to confirm that the writers weren't feeling it too strongly. It seems to me that there is a missing piece of the puzzle tucked away on that aforementioned DVD commentary, in which we learn that an alternate version of the story was at one time pitched where the dust-blowing duel between Lisa and Kang revealed an additional component. There, the book's full title read How To Cook For Forty Humans And Then Eat Them. The crew don't elaborate on where the segment might otherwise have gone, other than to acknowledge that it would obviously have had very different implications. Yet it's a production tidbit that speaks volumes to the arbitrariness of the conclusion, and how easily it could have been tipped in the other direction. The script feels conflicted; clearly, it's having a lot of fun in making those aliens appear sinister and ghoulish, and it's for this reason, I suspect, that they were characterised as such on subsequent Halloweens - it just seems a whole lot more natural and more in keeping with the spirit of the season (and the show at large). For now, "Hungry" feels obligated to pull back and pour a bucket of ice water on the audience's expectations, even if it's not the route you sense the writers necessarily wanted to go. I put that down, in part, to an early cautiousness when it came to ending these Halloween segments - in spite of their openly fictitious nature within universe, there seemed to be a rule that nothing truly untoward could happen to the Simpsons, and that things always needed to be reset more-or-less to status quo by the fade-out. Still, the ending to "Hungry" offers one genuine delight, in the form of a delectable performance from the late James Earl Jones as a third, non-recurring Rigellian, Serak The Preparer (Jones' vocals, both here and in "The Raven", helped to elevate The Simpsons' first Halloween outing into something truly, hypnotically out of the show's regular world). Serak's distraught plea, "I slaved in the kitchen for days for you people...you aren't the only beings who have emotions, you know!", is by far the most convincing ingredient of that sour denouement.

Serak might put on a good display for his species, and yet a question I've repeatedly asked myself, on revisiting "Hungry", is whether I actually trust Kodos and Kang, in spite of their final assertions. All of those prior insinuations that they were looking forward to sinking their pointy, drool-covered teeth into the Simpsons' hides are laid on just a little too thickly to be easily discarded, and surveying the segment with foresight of that twist, becomes less an exercise in pinpointing the misunderstandings so much as noticing how many of the details don't add up. Let's look at the case against the Rigellians:

1. First, the big one, and a problem the twist ending completely dances around - the Rigellians flat-out kidnapped the Simpsons. Even if their intentions were benevolent, the family didn't ask to be taken aboard their ship and whisked off to a purported paradise in the far reaches of space. Apparently, it never dawned on those aliens to consult their helpless captives on whether they wanted to be permanently separated from everything they knew and loved back on Earth. I mean, they do have a dog and cat who are dependent on the Simpsons to be there to feed them - is everyone happy with Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II being left to rot?
   
2. The "Your wife is quite a dish" remark seems hella inappropriate whichever way you slice it.
3. Why are the Rigellians so joyfully obsessed with seeing the Simpsons gain weight? If it's meant to be an indicator of how much the family are savouring the Rigellians' cooking, then that's possibly undermined by Kang's assertions in the following paragraph.
   
4. When grilled by Lisa over why the Rigellians were constantly trying to make them eat, Kang indignantly responds: "Make you eat? We merely provided a sumptuous banquet, and frankly you people made pigs of yourselves!" Suggesting that this was this all a Spirited Away-type deal, and that the Simpsons would have demonstrated better character if they'd resisted the temptations laid out before them? Why do I get the impression that any kind of polite refusal would have been unacceptable to the Rigellians? Kang's rebuttal seems to be imply that the Earthlings are accountable for their own gluttony and the Rigellians were secretly repulsed by their willingness to gorge themselves. The problem there is that we'd just observed Kang freaking out the instant the humans stopped eating, so his condemnation doesn't hold water.
5. Why would the Rigellians want to treat the Simpsons like gods anyway? And why the Simpsons in particular? Were they just a random unit of humans they happened to come across whilst scanning the Earthly suburbs for potential abductees, or was there a reason they singled them out? Did they intend to harvest more humans in this manner, or was it just the Simpsons they took a shine to?
   

The counterargument? I suppose there is no obvious reason why the Rigellians would have returned the Simpsons to Earth if eating them really was on the agenda. At that point, they already had the family safely within their clutches - it's not like they had any means of running and escaping whilst aboard that ship. Unless the Rigellians were too proud to openly admit to what they were doing, and their parting sermon amounted to something of a track-covering hissy fit? That seems as valid an interpretation as anything else.

Admittedly, the chief reason why "Hungry" has always sat uneasily with me has less to do with any holes in its story construction than with how humanity's fall from alien graces is framed as being the fault of one member of the Simpsons clan in particular. Here, Lisa's crime was essentially in activating the Independent Thought Alarm, by daring to question what those aliens were up to instead of mindlessly consuming like the rest of her family. To that end, she serves as the audience surrogate, in perceiving the dangers that should be totally obvious to anyone capable of connecting a few mental dots, but apparently goes above the heads of the other characters. Hence why the ending comes down so harshly on her - the viewer is intended to feel the sting of the "Gotcha!" and the Rigellians' accusations along with her, after having arrived at the exact same conclusions she did. In practice, I come away with an overwhelming sympathy for Lisa. I feel we're not so much mutually at fault as judges of character as we are mutually set up to fail. The reservations she had are perfectly healthy ones - she's small, vulnerable and stranded aboard this alien craft with a bunch of unknown beings and nobody else who seems to share in her anxieties. Again, the Rigellians forcibly abducted the Simpsons aboard their craft, so are they really in a position to complain if any of them had misgivings about the arrangement? Furthermore, one can't help but detect a somewhat anti-intellectual tone to the final assessment, with Marge suggesting to Lisa that she went wrong in being too smart for her own good. Independent thinking is explicitly upheld as the sin that gets the Simpsons expelled from a supposed paradise where the only acceptable mode of behaviour is to shut up and obey. I've toyed with the interpretation that since "Hungry" is contextualised as a story being told by Bart to Lisa, it might have been custom-constructed to strike at his sister's nerves, but I suspect it's futile to read too much into any supposed relationship between the story and storyteller. In my review of "Bad Dream House" I suggested that there is a clunky vanity to the implication that the Simpsons would be telling stories about themselves, although on reflection that probably is a hyperliteral reading of the episode's narrative choices. What's actually going on, I suspect, is that the Simpsons are telling stories about generic characters, and these are being dramatised as stories about the Simpsons for the benefit of the viewer. The ending of "Hungry" is as bizarrely ambivalent as it is, I suspect, because the segment doesn't have a whole lot conviction behind it, beyond delivering its searingly abrupt "Gotcha!". In the preceding "Bad Dream House", which also ended with the alleged monster rejecting the Simpsons because it considered them the real abhorrence, it was clear where the script ultimately stood on the matter. The Simpsons were social outcasts, so much so that even a possessed abode would sooner destroy itself than coexist with them (an outcome that wittily reverberates in "Hungry", when Lisa assures the Rigellians that the family are used to being perceived as lower forms of life all the time on their home planet), but they were outcasts of a feather. "Hungry", by contrast, closes with a moment of discord between our pack of undesirables, with Bart and Homer each churlishly berating Lisa for getting them banished back to the sublunary suburbs, and the last word, or rather the last murmur going to Marge, who purposely withholds making her feelings clear. Does she feel disappointment at the family's ganging up on Lisa, and in their not taking the expulsion as graciously as her, or is that murmur intended to express her private agreement?

Or perhaps it's even in that final disunity among the Simpsons ranks that we sight a few unpleasant parallels with the Rigellians themselves, and confirmation that, in the end, those aliens were all-too knowable. As another (less notorious but just as unsettling) Twilight Zone episode was keen to emphasise, People Are Alike All Over. After all, these beings didn't exactly take the misunderstanding with good, gentle graces, something Marge herself explicitly highlights with her observation that "For a superior race, they really rub it in." If the Rigellians really were that much nobler than the humans, then perhaps they could have found the elegance to laugh it off, understand why they might have given off the wrong impression, and extend forgiveness? Instead, they transpire to be petty AF, casting the humans out with an overbearing spurning. But then the seeds of that were already cleverly sown, during a sequence in which their electronic interactive technology was revealed to be lagging a couple of decades or so behind the Earthlings', and the aliens' response was to childishly assert that they were still running rings around them when it came to intergalactic travel. Maybe that is the best possible takeaway from this entire sorry breakdown of Earthling-Rigellian relations - both sides were as churlish and as unrefined as the other. Were there actually monsters aboard that ship? No, just unflattering reflections whichever way you looked.

Treehouse of Horror '92: Clown Without Pity (aka Potassium Benzoate For The Soul)

Here's something I've always found charming and intensely curious about The Simpsons' third Halloween installment, "Treehouse of Horror III" (episode 9F04, which first aired on October 29th 1992) - the way it structures itself to play like a particularly twisted episode of ABC's 1970s romantic comedy series Love, American Style. The first two segments, "Clown Without Pity" and "King Homer", close in the same gloriously kitschy manner, with a heart-shaped iris out and upbeat jingle, both reminiscent of how Love, American Style liked to sign off each story. The allusion isn't quite as arbitrary as it might first seem; Love, American Style was also an anthology series and, like each entry into the Treehouse of Horror, individual episodes were comprised of multiple self-contained segments, usually three longer pieces with shorter skirts in between. Listening to the episode's DVD commentary, I was a little taken back to discover that this element wasn't implemented until very late into production. For me, those iris outs are the very heart of the episode, the thing that gives it its unique sauce as a Halloween entertainment. It's always preferable whenever these Treehouse of Horror episodes appear to have some kind of underlying theme going, so that the segments work as a package and couldn't be easily swapped out with segments from other Halloween shows, and in the case of "Treehouse of Horror III" that theme is incongruous romance. What could be more delightfully subversive than for a Halloween show to reveal that its so-called tales of horror were actually build-ups to bizarre romantic unions? ^[1] For those stories to take us to truly strange and threatening places, only to consistently whiplash us into punchlines consisting of retro jingles and kitschy heart-shaped fade-outs?

Of course, this being an afterthought might also account for why the episode doesn't follow the allusion all the way through. The final story, "Dial Z For Zombies", completely disregards it, by ending with a bog-standard black-out. I don't know if it was intentional, but that always seemed so unsettling to me, having this weird, dead space where I'd already been primed to expect a heart-shaped iris. That alone is enough to make "Dial Z" my least favourite of the three, which is doubtlessly petty and probably a mite unfair of me. The Love, American Style allusion came about when the original ending to "Clown Without Pity" was sent back for revision, having been deemed unsatisfying, and perhaps it was only happenstance that the second segment ended with yet another love story. The third segment didn't fit the pattern, and the writers may have been unable or unwilling to readjust it - although if it was me, I think I'd have stuck a heart-shaped iris out on there anyway, just to complete the set (I mean, it's kind of a love story, the stupefaction the family feels for their television). Thankfully, the story doesn't quite end there. In the back-end of the Season 4 we had the episode "The Front", and its second act closes with Abe having some cross-dressing western fantasy that fades out to a certain familiar jingle and heart-shaped iris. There, the allusion feels a heck of a lot more random, but I've long rationalised it as the elusive third iris shot leftover from "Treehouse of Horror III", managing to squeeze itself in before the season was through. So everything worked out.

My favourite of the three segments is "Clown Without Pity", and that's in no small way down to the ending. It has one of the strangest, most unexpected endings in all the Treehouse of Horrors, and I frankly don't even want to think about how the segment was ever supposed to work without it. The evil Krusty doll that's spent the segment terrorizing Homer is finally seen retiring to Lisa's doll house and sharing a tender moment with the Malibu Stacy within. The mere idea of ending a story about a killer doll with it finding a gentle romance in a knock-off Barbie is so ingeniously weird, but if you think about what's going on in this sequence, it's also kind of sad. Hilarity, pathos, sweetness, WTF-ness - I get the full gamut of emotions in watching this unearthly doll snuggle up to that chunk of molded plastic, and I probably should explain.

"Clown Without Pity" is based primarily on the "Living Doll" episode of The Twilight Zone. The premise of a knife-wielding doll with murderous intent obviously had a more contemporary cultural reference point in the Child's Play franchise, but "Clown" follows the "Living Doll" plot of having the demonic toy take up a personal vendetta with the household patriarch while being nothing less than the perfect companion to its child owner. In "Living Doll" it was never clearly explained why Talky Tina took such a malevolent turn, but there was a subtext (implicit in Serling's closing narration) that the doll's powers were to be seen as manifestations of little Christie's aversion toward her emotionally abusive stepfather. The most disturbing element of the story comes at the very end when, having vanquished the stepfather, the doll redirects those malevolent energies to Christie's mother, insinuating that she might be next if she fails to act in her daughter's interests - the doll's final declaration, "My name is Talky Tina, and you'd better be nice to me!", conflates the girl and doll as a single entity. In "Clown" we actually get a clear-cut explanation for the doll's homicidal tendencies, and it is every bit as ludicrous and arbitrary as you would hope - eventually, it's discovered that the doll has a "Good/Evil" switch concealed behind its clothing, and behaves according to whichever setting it's on. Of course, what's never explicitly accounted for is why the evil-inclined Krusty directs its malevolence at Homer, and Homer alone, but perhaps we can dredge up an explanation if we look closely enough into the story.

First, though, another interesting tidbit from the DVD commentary is that "Treehouse of Horror III" might never have been, for showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss had some doubts about whether a third Halloween episode was warranted. That's easy to scoff at now, but I do understand where they might have been coming from at the time. Whereas two Halloween shows in a row could be chalked up to happenstance, with three you've basically cemented it as an annual tradition, and I don't blame Jean and Reiss for questioning if they really wanted to commit the series to that expectation of having to do a new one every October, regardless of whether the ideas were forthcoming or not. "III" was given the green light anyway (Jean and Reiss themselves penned "Clown Without Pity"), and these Simpson-ised tales of terror proved that they had life and value in them yet. True, certain aspects of the early Halloween shows were already nearing their end ("III" has the penultimate wraparound narrative, and the last to have basis within the show's regular reality), but in other regards the writers were only beginning to realise the full creative possibilities of dropping the established cast into macabre situations without continuity or consequence. "King Homer" and "Dial Z" contain our first notable instances of characters being killed in Treehouse of Horror segments. The examples here are fairly mild - Lenny and Smithers are both devoured by King Homer (as are Shirley Temple and Clancy Bouvier), but he downs them in clean, tidy bites (seriously, how much more horrifying would it have been had King Homer chewed with his mouth open?), and while the zombified Ned presumably gets his head blown off, the results are purposely withheld from us - but I'll admit to finding these moments a little shocking back in the day.

Watching our beloved characters get violently dispatched in ever-more gruesome fashions is a novel experience, sure, but a greater attraction of the Halloween series still lies in those characters getting to realise the darker possibilities within themselves, things that wouldn't be permitted in the series proper, but which nevertheless feel like logical expansions on the Springfieldians we know. What's impressive and frankly startling about the "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI" is how convincingly Willie slips into the persona of Freddy Krueger. It's almost as though we're delving into a hitherto untapped layer of the groundskeeper's psyche, like he could have been a legitimately terrifying villain in another reality and just happened to get boxed into a more benign niche in the one we got. ^[2] Krusty, by contrast, makes a somewhat more reluctant Chucky - he can't handle being dumped into a bag with Homer's dirty socks, and he allows himself to get sidetracked with attempting to seduce Malibu Stacy - but "Clown Without Pity" is one the few venues where his eccentricities are played for uncanniness as much as humor. He is a clown, and whether we love them or loathe them for it, clowns do tend to have this intrinsic grotesqueness about them (as do dolls). For much of this segment, he makes for a bone-chilling visual, with a gaping mouth and eerily vacant expression. The aspiring killer at the centre of "Clown Without Pity" isn't the real Krusty, of course, but the doll has enough of Krusty's personality in it, including his lecherousness and general ineptness, to feel like an ugly extension of its inspiration's soul. This is the crass commercialism of Krusty's brand, manifesting as a miniature demon in his likeness, a corruptive presence infiltrating the home of the unsuspecting consumer and laying waste to the order within. This concern was near and dear to the heart of the first Child's Play (1988), in which the possessed doll hailed from a mass-marketed toy line, the Good Guys (a send up of the Cabbage Patch Kids and My Buddy). It also seems pertinent that the scene with Homer buying the doll at the House of Evil is drawn from the opening sequence of Gremlins (1984), another tale where consumerism is linked to corruption. The second golden rule, to not get the Mogwai wet, is first violated by accident, but when Mr Peltzer sees the results (it causes them to multiply), he seems to disregard that he was specifically told not to do this and starts devising plans to create more Mogwai and market them to every child in America, all while understanding little about this animal's nature or its lifecycle.

Unlike his Gremlins counterpart, the keeper of the House of Evil is willing to sell Homer the coveted item as a gift for his son, but warns him that it comes with a terrible curse (and a free frozen yoghurt, and all that jazz). He does not actually elaborate on the nature of the curse, and indeed, the suggestion that the doll's behaviour is caused by any supernatural curse seems invalidated by the final reveal that the doll has a Good/Evil switch on its back. Are we do assume that the old shopkeeper doesn't have a clue what he's talking about? Is it just a misdirect? Or is there something else he might be getting at through his talk of a curse?

The presence of the Good/Evil switch likewise seems to rule out any potential reading that the doll's mischief is linked to Bart's outlook, a la Talky Tina (although what do you want to bet that he was the one who set the doll to Evil in the first place?). Despite being introduced, by Lisa, as a story about a boy and his doll, "Clown Without Pity" actually has very little to do with Bart past the opening stages involving his party. There is, nevertheless, a sense that the doll might be reacting to something in Homer's slipshod parenting. We get a reminder of his paternal negligence at the beginning, when he admits that he forgot about Bart's upcoming birthday and rushes out to buy him a gift at the last minute. Thus, the Krusty doll represents a hasty attempt to paper over those cracks in his parenting, and it seems to work, with Bart proclaiming it to be the best birthday he's ever had. The appeal of the doll, besides its resemblance to Krusty, a television personality Bart idolises, is in its superficial reassurances of love. But this is a facade, and the doll is willing to demonstrate its insidious nature to Homer after witnessing a snapshot of his own, through his response to an environmental newscast in which Springfield's air is deemed to be toxic to children and the elderly. Homer's only reaction is to cheer, presumably relieved that he isn't among the affected, and not giving any thought to the possible impact on his own children and father. At that, the doll is suddenly and inexplicably at his side, ready to declare its distaste for him. Its declarations of love are mechanical, produced on demand at the pull of a string, but its declarations of murderous hate are apparently very real, produced by the doll's own volition. Keep in mind that Krusty's character was purposely designed to look like Homer in clown make-up, making this little monster a reflection of his parental negligence as much as the falseness of Krusty's brand. There is a complicity to the consumerism - the parent is aware of the shallowness of the arrangement but buys into anyway it in order to placate the child, all while turning their back on far greater issues, like air that apparently isn't even breathable to the younger generation. Consumerism is a game we're conditioned to play from a very young age, as a means of numbing ourselves to grim realities; the immediate gratification of a product is presented as preferable to the implementing of sustainable solutions to the social, economic and environmental threats that plague us day by day. The long-term cost being that those threats aren't going to simply go away because we've chosen to ignore them. At one point Homer attempts to bury his problem, by dropping it down a dark pit, but it immediately finds its way back up to him. Perhaps this is what that old shopkeeper was really alluding to when he mentioned that the doll came with a terrible curse? In general, consumerism does.

The real Krusty makes no appearance in this segment, but by now it was well-established what made his brand such an odious sham - away from the studio lights, he's generally depicted as a vulgar, spendthrifty sleazeball with no time or patience for his devoted young fans. The point where the doll's personality is most recognisable as Krusty's own is in the scene where it first attempts to seduce Lisa's Malibu Stacy, which is itself its own bit of absurdity. Does the Krusty doll believe the Malibu Stacy to be alive like itself, or is it engaging in some kinky fantasy with the non-living doll? Either way, its lusty impulses are an obvious perversion of the innocent play pretence we'd sooner associate with childhood ^[3]; we see the real Krusty poking through and puncturing the facade of his kid-friendly brand. Yet the killer doll's relationship with the inert Malibu Stacy is what ultimately forms the basis of our tender conclusion, following a fake-out happy ending where it looks as though Homer and the doll (now reset to Good mode) might be able to happily coexist. This is really paving way for a characteristically cynical Simpsons twist, in which Homer takes advantage of the doll's newly-awakened inclination to do good by making it into his personal slave, forcing it to bring him snacks, give him sponge baths and walk Santa's Little Helper. This was where the original script ended, but there was some sentiment among the production crew that the joke was falling a little flat, and the decision was made to expand on it by crafting an additional scene with the Malibu Stacy.  (For an idea of how late the revisions came, you can see where they've also pasted new dialogue onto finished animation in the penultimate scene - when the doll calls Homer a "stupid idiot" its lips don't move). The image of a weary Krusty returning to the doll house and hanging his coat upon the rack furthers the original joke about where being a nice guy gets you - the doll's situation is now analogous to that of your average put-upon shmuck working 9 to 5 for a tyrannical boss. There is a certain sitcom-esque banality to this arrangement, which calls to mind the ending of the Simpsons' previous Halloween, where Homer was shown attempting to live with the fact that he now had his own tyrannical boss's head grafted onto his shoulder. In both stories, the joke stems from the absurdity of these freakish, otherworldly occurrences infringing on the family's lives, only to end up conforming to a kind of normality - in the case of "Clown Without Pity", the absurdity that the likes of Chucky or Talky Tina, having made peace with their human adversaries, would go on to emulate the normality of a working shmuck. But I think this joke works on more levels still. Consider that only one of the two dolls in that closing frame is even alive. When Krusty tells Malibu Stacy that getting to come home and be with her is the one thing that makes its situation tolerable - well, that poor doll is flat-out delusional. The relationship is all in its head.

There is a moment, right before the iris out, in which the seeming wholesomeness is suddenly interrupted by the Krusty doll accidentally knocking off Stacy's head, before awkwardly reattaching it, potentially indicating that the inclination to dismember is still ingrained somewhere deep within its nature, even when set to do Good. This is intermixed with another, quieter subversion, in the reminder that the Stacy doll is but a fake, and that the Krusty doll is reacting to the cruel exploitation it faces daily at the hands of Homer by retreating into fantasy. It is engaging in its own play pretence as means of coping with those harsh realities, evocative of both the imaginative possibilities that a toy opens up for a child, and the specific purpose that consumerism has already served for the segment's human characters, in covering over the more unpalatable aspects their lives. In both scenarios, we're essentially navigating our way through a chaotic world by clinging to our dumb playthings; the little demonic Krusty doll emerges as no different, and it gets our final sympathies for that. The prosaic domesticity in which it immerses itself, coupled with the nostalgic sitcom jingle, are immediately familiar, recalling one of our favourite adult playthings, the kinds escapist fantasies packaged and sold to us on a nightly basis via television airwaves. It all points toward the segment's greatest irony, one that completely turns the workings of the story on its head - that this doll, the very emblem of corruptive consumerism, should end up discovering that humans (insofar as Homer represents them) are such an innately horrible bunch that it needs to construct its own insipid fantasies just to get away from them.

As Moe would say, it's funny, and it makes you think.

[1] Someone on the Simpsons Archive episode capsule suggested that it might as well have been a Valentine's Day episode, which seriously cracks me up.

[2] The one character who doesn't convince as a Treehouse of Horror villain is, surprisingly, Snake. We can do "Hell Toupee" some other Halloween, but for now I'll just say that I've always felt that segment did him kind of dirty. Maybe he's too obvious a target.

[3] It doesn't escape my notice that it's Lisa who's supposedly telling this story, and her playthings that are subject to this perversion. Make of that what you will. Also, where is Lisa going to sleep? The doll house is still on her bed at the end.

TACtics: Glasses (See Clearly Now?)

"Glasses" (circa 1993) is one of TAC's most baffling advertisements, and the first I would likely point to when making my case that their preferred strategy for piling on the emotional outbursts can sometimes work to the detriment of the final impact.

Not that there isn't a really ingenious idea in "Glasses", an ad built around a cunning bit of conceptual irony hinted in its deceptively unassuming title. Shot from the perspective of a driver attempting to navigate an urban highway, the view is repeatedly obstructed by a series of beer glasses positioned in front of their windscreen. The more glasses are added, the more blurred the road ahead becomes, until we're on our fourth glass and have our inevitable crash into the back-end of a lorry. The "glasses" at the centre of the ad are presented as a reversal on the kind of "glasses" that make eyesight more focussed, as a metaphor for how alcohol impairs your ability to make sound judgements.

It's a playful set-up, and one might argue not especially TAC-like in its approach. TAC are notorious for the unflinching realism of their campaigns; the more abstract devices used in "Glasses" immediately makes it one of the curious outliers of their portfolio. It makes more sense when you realise that the concept originated from outside sources, this being a remake of a drink driving ad first used by the Singapore Traffic Police in 1992 - one that attracted enough overseas admiration that it was also recycled for a Canadian campaign from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). It's not surprising - the Singapore original is inventive, memorable and sharply to the point. It's also a fine example of how you can concoct a punchy drink driving campaign without any onscreen death or violence. Sure, it's implied that you, the driver, got into a horrendous, possibly fatal accident (the original version sees you swerving directly into the path of a bus), but the lack of corporeal figures means that there aren't any external characters to make those consequences solid and manifest; the horrors are directed inward, with that final ugly screech and queasy fade to red saying it all. For their part, MADD were content in contributing a straightforward repackaging of the Singapore original, but TAC? Let's face it, that isn't their thing. Does it sound in the least bit in character for them to put out an ad where no one is seen to be brutally killed or maimed, leaving everyone around them permanently traumatised? Oh no, they went the extra mile and attempted to implement a brand new, fully TACian twist to the scenario, so that we actually get to see the narrative continue beyond the first-person simulation, introducing real-world consequences into a set-up that had looked as though it might be entirely self-contained.

In other words, they tried to TACtify the unTACtable, and the results are awfully telling.

The original "Glasses" ad from Singapore.

The TAC version of "Glasses" has not one, but two narrative extensions. In the first, we see a bystander approach the scene of the accident and reel in horror at what they find. This section isn't so overdone, being not altogether different to the trucker's shoulders shrinking at the end of "Nightshift". It's in the second extension, when we're witness to a couple of police officers showing up at the door of the driver's family, that the ad frankly degenerates into a deluge of cliches, to the point that you might as well have come prepared with a Bingo card. We see the bereaved spouse having the obligatory emotional break down. All that's left is for a child to wander onto the scene and act all innocent. Oops, right on cue. Go to bed Jessica.^[1]

In theory, there is something pretty clever about showing how life continues beyond the driver's perspective, with insight into the consequences for those left behind. And yet, the individual pieces don't gel - the realism of the epilogue is so at odds with the abstractness of the opening sequence that the two effectively invalidate each other. It isn't a case of the closing realism signifying some stark return to earth after the giddiness of the opening, but two discordant styles uneasily occupying the same air time. Its Singaporean predecessor works as successfully as it does because it's committed to its concept and so elegantly immersive in its execution. The TAC remake plays like two, perhaps even three different ads stitched together - to the point that I have to theorise that that is, in essence, what we're looking at. It wouldn't surprise me if the original plan was to do a straightforward recreation of the Singapore ad, before someone argued that the lack of emotional aftermath was too great a departure for TAC's brand, so they created an extra scene from another proposed script they had laying around. It also wouldn't surprised me if that reaction from the second motorist was an early attempt that got sent back with notes when it was deemed to not go far enough. All in all, it reads as there being too many cooks in the TAC and Grey Melbourne kitchen, with the end-product revised and reassembled so many times over that it came out lacking any coherent vision (ironic?). If that epilogue had been allowed to function as its own stand alone piece, then I daresay it would have worked a whole lot better (although the girl's unconvincing "Mummy, what's wrong?" would still have been a sticking point - you might expect a small child who had witnessed her mother breaking down in that manner to be significantly more unsettled). Here, it feels like a display of self-indulgence on TAC's part.

The TAC remake of "Glasses".

It's also noteworthy that, for whatever reason, the TAC version doesn't implement the same sonic tricks as the Singapore original. The Singaporean version has the audio getting gradually more distorted, merging with that of a bar atmosphere, as a further indicator of the alcohol's dominating influence. In TAC's ad, the audio stays consistent throughout.

I think it says something of just how awkwardly cobbled together TAC's "Glasses" is when you look at how it fared in the 1999 study conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre. There, the most notable response from test subjects to "Glasses" came in the disparity in its perceived pleasantness between recall-based and viewing-based data. Subjects asked to recall this one from memory rated it as one of TAC's most pleasant ads, but that rating dropped like a rock amongst subjects who had only just viewed it. As the study notes: 

"The recalled and viewed responses were similar in all cases except for the Glasses
advertisement, where it was recalled to be relatively pleasant but viewing the advertisement resulted in a substantial reduction in the mean factor score. This is most likely the result of failing to recall the ending of the advertisement, where there is an emotive response from a bystander. Seeing this during the viewing of the advertisement may have resulted in a reduction in the perceived pleasantness of the advertisement."

In other words, the central conceit of the glasses being stacked one by one before the windscreen is what tended to stick with viewers about this one. The emotive epilogue was so disconnected that it was easy to overlook that it was part of the same advertisement. I'd say the moral here is not to mess with the classics.

[1] I know, that one's RTA, not TAC. Different part of Australia.

TACtics: Tracy (Speed Kills)

TAC's premier ad, "Girlfriend", might have launched with the explicit intention to "upset, outrage and appal", but you could argue that they pulled a significant punch in not introducing the possibility of death to the featured scenario. Lucy was at risk of losing her leg thanks to her boyfriend's bloody idiocy, but the only reference to fatalities as a prospective outcome came from charge nurse Karen Warnecke's comment about how, if the driver survived, they were the ones who had to live with the damage they'd caused. TAC were clearly in a more emboldened mood when they put out "Beach Road" and "Tracy", two anti-speed ads from the dawn of the 1990s, which saw them shifting in a palpably harsher direction. The TAC formula was still undergoing refinement - meaning that, as with "Girlfriend", we're not witness to the crash in either - but both are bleaker pieces than their predecessor. Not only were their victims shown in all the more critical condition, they also upped the emphasis on the howls of despair that would become TAC's trademark as much the blood and the crumpled bits of metal.

Of the two, "Beach Road" adheres more closely to the formula of "Girlfriend", by including an in-person narrator to act as Warencke's equivalent, a paramedic who talks to the camera and explicitly introduces TAC's anti-speeding tagline, "Don't fool yourself, speed kills." Again, it's the enlightened authority figure who's seen it all and is required to take it in their stride as part of their job, but is evidently appalled at how people keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over. "Tracy", whilst retaining the pseudo-documentary feel of its brethren, dispenses with the narrator altogether, instead putting all of its focus on the perspective of the irresponsible driver. Like the boyfriend in "Girlfriend", they've emerged from the crash they caused relatively unscathed, and spend much of the ad pushing to be brought up to speed on the condition of their passenger, who has taken a much more brutal pummelling, although (very much in contrast to "Girlfriend") the viewer is kept in the dark along with them until the end. The first responders have a more muted presence here - the faces of the paramedics questioning the protagonist are not clearly shown, and their voices, while discernible, are notably more subdued than that of the protagonist, whose hysteria is allowed to be the ad's dominating force. Neither "Beach Road" or "Tracy" shows the victim making it as far as the hospital - in "Beach Road", the unfortunate kid is pronounced dead at the roadside, while the titular Tracy is last seen being loaded into an ambulance, with the driver panicking about the possibility of her not surviving the journey. Technically, Tracy's fate is left hanging, which should, in theory, make it a less upsetting piece than "Beach Road", but it's hard to look at the final arrangement and envision any kind of positive outcome. Of interest is the plot description given in the Monash University Accident Research Centre's 1999 study:

"Shows a crash scene identifying that an inexperienced female driver, with her best friend as passenger, has been speeding, gone to change a tape and consequently crashed into a tree. She calls out “Tracy, Tracy” and that she really wants to go and see her. Tracy is trapped in the car, is freed, but dies. The driver is overwhelmed that she has killed her best friend."

 

The writer of this description appears, ostensibly, to have jumped the gun in declaring Tracy dead, because the paramedics within the ad don't; it is the distraught driver who makes that final harrowing assessment. Is the above summary a testament to just how much more persuasively her voice comes across above the low-key murmurs of the first responders, or to how the open-endedness of the scenario doesn't actually equate to hope? The ending leaves us stranded in an uncomfortable dubiety; much of the ad's bitter, lingering aftertaste comes in giving the final word to the driver, in lieu of that jaded, fourth wall-breaking professional who's seen it all before and could interject a degree of certainty into the proceedings. The narrating paramedic in "Beach Road" was ultimately powerless to prevent the bleak outcome of that ad, but his authoritative presence nevertheless gave the viewers some form of emotional grounding. He represented the voice of reason amid the mindless chaos, as was Karen Warnecke in "Girlfriend". Here, the paramedics are still enforcers of decency and common sense, providing equal parts admonishment (insinuating to the driver that she was going too fast) and protection (they want to keep the driver from seeing Tracy to spare her the horror), but their downplayed role makes them less of an obvious counterbalance to the protagonist's outbursts. Notably, they offer no real certainty on the outcome; the protagonist asks one of the paramedics if Tracy will die, and receives only a non-committal, "I don't know." We are left to fixate on the emotional state of the driver, and while she is the character with whom our perspective is most firmly aligned, there are points where her messiness throws us off, becoming its own show of perturbing fluctuation - when questioned if she was aware of the speed limit in this zone, her face momentarily contorts into a nervous snicker. The onlookers in the backdrop are also a nice touch; while presumably concerned about the situation, in practice they come off more as gawkers to the horrific spectacle, their relentless gaze but another stiffening of the driver's entrapment.

The scenario in "Tracy" is a slight variation on that later seen in the Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives PIF "Mates", with a driver pleading for forgiveness from an injured friend who is in no position to answer. Here, the severed relationship is between two teenage girls, and the driver has a more overt sense of vulnerability; all-round less snivelling than her "Mates" counterpart, we do not doubt the sincerity of her remorseful wails, but her words are certainly no more effective. In "Mates", the labored breathing of the injured party came to function as a condemnatory response in itself, whereas here the final damning rejection comes in the abrupt slamming of the ambulance doors. It is a cold conclusion to a friendship rendered meaningless by one party's willingness to endanger the other through their own reckless decision-making. Again, it goes back to what I was saying in my coverage of "Nightshift" about less being more and the little things being what should ideally get to you in a safety ad. We don't need to be outright told that the driver, as the survivor, will have to live with the consequences - that much is discernable from the desolate denouement.

For as well put-together as "Tracy" is, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, I have questions about how effectively it works as an anti-speeding ad. Although the closing title makes it clear this is the intended takeaway, anyone attentive to the details will pick up that what caused this accident was a real hodgepodge of improper judgement. It could just as easily have worked as a warning against distracted driving - the driver mentions that she was in a hurry and attempting to change a cassette when the crash occurred. Furthermore, there is a P-plate visible on the front of the wrecked vehicle, meaning that she is a provisional driver, and thus inexperienced. It could be that "Tracy" was always designed to speak foremost to those fledgling drivers so intoxicated with the thrill of being able to drive that they've forgotten their vulnerability. I wonder how many older viewers saw this and thought, "Well, those kids were obviously stupid. I'm an experienced driver and I would never change a tape while speeding, ergo this doesn't apply to me," and stuck with their bad habit.

Bart's Dog Gets an F (aka Mr Universe Takes A Walk)

I've said in the past that I don't particularly like Simpsons episodes that focus heavily on Santa's Little Helper. "Bart's Dog Gets an F" (7F14), which first aired on March 7th 1991, has long languished as my pick for the weakest of Season 2. There was a time when it might have competed for that honor with "Dancin' Homer", but that's an episode I've found to improve with each viewing, whereas "Bart's Dog" has never outgrown its status as the runt of the litter. With their first attempt a misfire, I never understood why the writers remained so intent on making these Santa's Little Helper tales a regular occurrence, with a new one cropping up every other season or so (although they seemed to drop off during the Scully era). There was, however, always one major factor that might have stood in my way of being able to fully appreciate what these episodes had to offer, and that was my wholly dog-free existence. Until a year ago, I'd never owned a dog. I grew up in a cat household. Cats are what I related to. Over time, I grew bored with all the episodes centred around Bart and Santa's Little Helper and wondered when we'd be getting one about Lisa and Snowball II (the moral there is to be careful what you wish for). So I will freely admit that at least part of my coolness toward the Simpson mutt's repertoire was informed by the seeping grudge I felt on behalf of his feline compatriot, who is the real forgotten Simpson and not Maggie. As of September 2023, I've become the owner of a wonderful Chinese Crested, and now I couldn't imagine life without him. So maybe the time has come for me to go back and give the Santa's Little Helper episodes a thorough reevaluation through the eyes of a born again dog lover?

This isn't to say that the series' unabashed favouritism for Santa's Little Helper over Snowball II doesn't remain a sticking point. Ultimately, my sympathies are still with the Simpson moggy. Fact is, she was a member of the central household, and it strikes me as only proper that she should have been included a whisker more actively in their life and dynamics. Consider that it took until a Season 8 episode, the "Thing and I" segment of "Treehouse of Horror VII", for a script to even confirm the sex of the Simpsons' cat (IIRC - sure, the original Snowball was confirmed as a female in "Stark Raving Dad" of Season 3, but did they say anything about her successor before then?). For years, I'd automatically assumed that Snowball II was male (a reasonable assumption, because most solidly black cats are, or so I've heard) and remember being surprised when Lisa referred to the cat using female pronouns. Even then, I suspect that there wasn't actually a hard consensus among the writers on this point, given that Marge describes Snowball II as a male just a few episodes later in "Bart After Dark". Some fans will argue that Snowball II had little personality compared to Santa's Little Helper, but my response to that is they never gave her much of a chance to exhibit any. I think a lot of it comes down to how Santa's Little Helper was purposely conceived as an extension of the Simpson's own beleaguered doggedness, allowing him a more privileged position within the family pecking order. In "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", Santa's Little Helper was initiated into the clan on Homer's observation that, "He's a loser, he's pathetic, he's...a Simpson." A racing greyhound who struggled even to finish his races, he was a totem of everything that made the family themselves such lovable societal misfits. Snowball II, whose very moniker is a commemoration of a tragedy in the family's past, is a silent, ominous reminder that Death Is Coming For Us All. In her way, she's every bit as a reflective of the dysfunction of the Simpsons' household (right down to the "Snowball" part of her name being a grotesque misnomer), but in a slightly less endearing, more macabre way. I've no evidence that greyhounds became a more fashionable breed off the back of Santa's Little Helper, but I'm sure that (all things considered) he was seen as a positive representation of a former racer getting a second chance as a family pet. I doubt that Snowball II did much to bolster the public image of black cats, a feline class associated with a heap of negative superstitions and a reputation for being less popular among prospective cat adopters, and maybe that's to be viewed as a missed opportunity.

My catty grievances aside, there were a number of reasons why I'd feel a sense of disappointment whenever an upcoming Simpsons episode was revealed to be Santa's Little Helper-orientated. For one, they typically don't allow for brilliant plotting. Even when overshadowing Snowball II, Santa's Little Helper really isn't that strong a character, his range basically limited to looking cheerfully oblivious whilst harbouring the destructive urge to chew up every household item in his path. Matt Groening was vocally opposed to the presence of anthropomorphism in The Simpsons, believing it would undermine the reality of the series (he made no attempt to hide his disdain for the winking catfish on the commentary for "The War of The Simpsons"). He was probably right, but it did severely curb what they could feasibly do with the dog. More fatally still, Santa's Little Helper episodes have a predilection for the hackneyed in a way that feels at odds with the rebellious spirit of The Simpsons, their resolutions often falling back on the kinds of well-worn cliches you might expect to encounter in any number of "boy and his dog" type stories. Take Santa's Little Helper defending Bart from an entire pack of hounds at the end of "Dog of Death", or being asked to choose between Bart and the blind stoner at the end of "The Canine Mutiny". As for this episode, the development that saves the day is nothing short of an eleventh-hour miracle, and it's played curiously straight for a show that, right from its opening episode, regarded the omnipresence of miracles in television with a healthy leeriness.

But hey, the whole point of this review is to give the first Santa's Little Helper episode a fair shake, so I want to at least start by covering those aspects of "Bart's Dog Gets an F" that I find interesting and that set it apart from other episodes. It seems noteworthy to me that this is the Simpsons episode most likely to invite comparisons with one the show's earliest rivals, Family Dog. The CBS spin-off series created in order to get aboard the Simpsons bandwagon was then still stumbling its way through Development Hell (destined to eventually become a punchline in "Treehouse of Horror III"), but the original "Family Dog" episode of Amazing Stories will forever have the honor of beating the first Simpsons Ullman short to air by about two months, and can be seen as one of the first major heralds of the dawning age for primetime animation. Like Family Dog, "Bart's Dog Gets an F" makes the stylistic choice of showing us what a stranger, all the more alienating place whitebread suburbia becomes when viewed from the eyes of a displaced wolf descendant. Scattered throughout are a series of intermittent cuts that attempt to get inside Santa's Little Helper's head, usually whenever he comes into conflict with one of the family, and give us a glimpse of the Simpson household as perceived through his vacant peepers. Happily, The Simpsons accomplishes this without indulging the long-debunked misconception that dogs only see in black and white; Santa's Little Helper's vision is more colour-limited, but whoever was responsible for the design in these sequences was clearly aware that they can see blue, with the tints of Marge's hair and Homer's pants being discernible features (having said that, I think dogs can also see yellow, so the family themselves should have appeared as normal to Santa's Little Helper). The point of these POV shots is to get across the language barrier that prevents Santa's Little Helper from being a well-behaved pet; to him, every word that spews out of the Simpsons' mouths is incomprehensible blather, much as everything they leave lying around is either food or a chew toy for letting loose with his insatiable oral urges. They also create a fine balance between the dog as a fundamental innocent (like when he steals Homer's breakfast because he can't distinguish between Homer's food and his own) and the dog as a terrible, chaotic force that seems bent on sniffing out and destroying everything the family holds dear. Nowhere is the latter more lovingly illustrated than in the sequence where he commits his most egregious act of destruction, laying waste to the cherished quilt that's formed the basis of Bouvier family tradition across six generations, and when his inhuman gaze is momentarily transmuted into that of a slasher movie villain sidling up to a prospective victim. As Santa's Little Helper closes in on the defenceless quilt, a sound chillingly reminiscent of "Ki-Ki-Ki Ma-Ma-Ma" works its way into the soundtrack, cluing us in that the Simpsons have taken into their abode nothing less than the four-legged equivalent of Jason Voorhees.

Other moments with Santa's Little Helper are less overtly menacing, but firmly establish that he's no Disneyfied critter, a point made salient in the very first scene, which incorporates a moment obviously designed to recall Lady & The Tramp. Unlike Jim Dear, when Homer peers through the dog-inflicted hole in his morning newspaper, he's greeted not by the devoted eyes of Man's best friend, but the dog's rear end as he inspects his reluctant master's breakfast. He's also a duller beast than many of his television contemporaries, neither a heroic defender a la Spike from Rugrats, or in possession of any of the strange neuroses of Eddie from Frasier. He's instead content to ramble mindlessly through life, never missing an opportunity to make a nuisance of himself while remaining plaintively oblivious to the trouble he causes. A huge chunk of the first act is taken up by the random acts of havoc Santa's Little Helper inflicts, both within the Simpsons' backyard and around the neighbourhood when he slips his tether. These include such non-cute endeavors as ingesting a ladybug, stealing jerky from the counter of the Kwik-E-Mart and harassing ducks at the park. Eventually he finds his way into the Winfields' swimming pool, paving way for Sylvia Winfield's most protracted appearance (here voiced by guest star Tracey Ullman rather than her regular voice actress Maggie Roswell), when she telephones Homer and lays down her judgement that a lawless dog is but the extension of a lawless family: "There's only one family on this block - no, on Earth, inconsiderate enough to let a monster like that roam free!"

Already I find myself getting into the flaws of "Bart's Dog Gets an F", the most obvious being that the first act feels particularly slow, setting up the plot point of Lisa coming down with the mumps and getting to spend her days being initiated into the art of cross stitching by Marge, but otherwise belabouring the same point about Santa's Little Helper. There's some pleasant mother-daughter bonding happening in the subplot, but those moments too are a bit uneventful, and would have benefited from having a more urgent A-story unfolding around them. An amusing narrative thread emerges involving Homer blowing $125 (about $289 in 2024 money) on a pair of Assassins sneakers, a neat bit of satire of the Air Jordans craze that had consumers gripped at the time, for no other reason than to keep up with the Flanders. And yes, to partially agree with a point made by Nathan Rabin in his review on the AV Club, this interaction does feel like a relic of Ned and Homer's earliest dynamic, when Ned's aspirations were a lot more worldly and his role in the series largely involved stoking Homer's envy with his latest flashy purchase. I'd argue, though, that Homer spending that much money on sports shoes that he blatantly has no intention of using for exercise was always the point. As for Ned, I kind of like how much more balanced he was at this stage. They didn't call it "Flanderization" for nothing, I know, but it was nice how, even with "Dead Putting Society" already establishing him as a pious Christian type, this didn't immediately define all aspects of his character and he was still allowed to be a regular guy who got excited about frivolous things like designer footwear. Naturally, as soon as Homer gets a pair of his own those shoes are doomed, but it's surprising that they don't even last out the first act, rendering them something of a pointless plot diversion. There's a subsequent sequence where Homer attempts to return the savaged sneakers for a refund, only to be told, by that spiky-haired character who served as a predecessor to the Squeaky-Voiced Teen, that the warranty doesn't cover fire, theft or acts of Dog. Right after, something new catches his eye in the form of a Macadamia nut ^[1] cookie from Cookie Colossus, and this ends up being the ill-fated purchase that tips us into our third act conflict. No doubt it's all meant to be part of the joke that Homer weathers the loss of his designer sneakers but reaches his breaking point over a cookie that set him back by one measly dollar, but it leaves the story feeling as rambling and unfocussed as Santa's Little Helper's attention span.

This takes us into the other really interesting thing about "Bart's Dog Gets an F", and that's that it's a rare episode in which Homer is effectively cast as the villain of the piece, with the added nasty twist that he successfully enlists Marge to his side. Even with the shorter temper that accompanied his early characterisation, there aren't many other episodes that he spends in such a perpetually grim mood - when he's not viciously at odds with Santa's Little Helper, he's mostly either stewing in resentment toward Ned, being belligerent with Mrs Winfield, or being rude to a cookie salesgirl who is seriously only doing her job in offering him free samples before telling him where he can buy them. And, for all the vapidness of the first act, when Homer lays down his ultimatum at the end of the second (that the dog has to go), it genuinely hurts. Bart's flailing cries of protest ("I'll set fire to my clothes! I'll put sugar in the gas tank!") also hurt. The cruellest axe falls when Lisa appeals to Marge for support only for her to admit that nope, she's siding with Homer on this one. It becomes a matter of the kids versus the adults, a match-up that's bitterly skewed in that one side wields all of the power. For now, anyway. Homer prefaces his bombshell with the mean-spirited declaration that "We've never had a problem with a family member we can give away before", although that much isn't exactly true, is it? The family already hoisted Abe off onto the retirement home, a connection that was explicitly made in a later Santa's Little Helper episode, "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", but here goes without comment. Lisa does, however, make Homer conscious of the likelihood that he could one day be on the receiving end of his offsprings' mercy, when she asks him if the implicit lesson being taught is that the way to solve a problem with someone you love is to get rid of them. "If they're ever going to pull the plug on me", Homer admits, "I want you in my corner." Thus, Santa's Little Helper gets a reprieve. If he can pass his course at the Canine College, he gets to remain under the Simpsons' roof.

The kids versus adults conflict is an interesting and relatable one, but the unmistakably sour tone of the parents' position is a major reason why I find this episode so difficult to warm to. I think it shows a very mean and petty side to not only Homer, but to Marge as well. I understand Marge being upset about the loss of the Bouvier quilt, but let's be real here - it wasn't Santa's Little Helper's fault. He's just a dumb dog, and he didn't know what the quilt was or why it mattered to Marge, any more than he could read Homer's stupid cookie missive. If you've got a pet with destructive tendencies, the onus is on you to implement a little basic damage control by not leaving precious items where the pet might get to them. Marge could have avoided the entire outcome if she'd just had the foresight to close the bedroom door before leaving the quilt unsupervised and within the dog's reach. She insists that it's not just the quilt, and gives a list of the various transgressions that make Santa's Little Helper an undesirable pet, but that all just makes me wonder how well the Simpsons are meeting the needs of their dog in general (the more unfortunate way in which this episode reminds me of Family Dog). Something that isn't brought up in the script but weighs heavily on my mind throughout is that Santa's Little Helper is an ex-racing dog, and as such he wouldn't have been raised to be a family pet. The Simpsons strike me as the kind of family who wouldn't necessarily do the research and take into consideration that a former racer is going to have had a very different background to a regular house dog (in light of the fact that this was an impulse adoption on their part), and that special attention might be needed to ensure that it can make the transition. Marge observes that Santa's Little Helper is "not even housebroken", which isn't so unusual for an ex-racer that hasn't before lived in a home environment. Factor in that Santa's Little Helper was very clearly mistreated by his original owner, and it's hardly surprising that the dog is going to have some behavioural problems. When Marge is scanning the telephone directory for a reputable obedience school, she passes over one run by Dr Marvin Monroe, with the philosophy that "Your dog isn't the problem, you are!", and let's face it, there are some uncomfortable truths in that.

Instead, the family enlists the services of starchy dog trainer Emily Winthrop, a parody of Barbara Woodhouse by way of a parody of Margaret Thatcher. She (like Mrs Winfield) is voiced by Tracey Ullman, the TV comedian who, to use her own analogy, had breast-fed The Simpsons during its germinal years (funnily enough, I think they were undergoing a messy divorce at around this time, with Ullman unsuccessfully suing the network for a cut of the series' profits in 1992...which didn't seem to interfere with her working relationship with James L. Brooks, given that she was later in I'll Do Anything). Ullman's bristly performance is by and far the highlight of the episode. Winthrop is not a particularly likeable character - she advocates flagrantly cruel methods for bringing dogs to order, instructing her students to yank on their choke chain whenever their mutt shows any inkling of disobedience (and there's a line of dialogue indicating that she would use comparable methods on a child) - but her vocal liveliness gives the torpid narrative a much-needed shot in the arm.

Oh hello Jacques. A random Jacques cameo is always good for a few extra points in my book, and naturally I appreciate the confirmation that he's also a dog lover (being the archetypal Frenchman that he is, of course he would have a poodle), but this is all we see of him at the Canine College. I've checked the other obedience school scenes thoroughly, and he isn't featured anywhere else (although his poodle's design is reused here and there). Just so we're clear, that's a GOOD thing. If Jacques doesn't reappear in any subsequent classes then it can be assumed that he dropped out after the first session since he didn't approve of Winthrop's training methods. Mind you, I don't think consistency amongst the background extras was ever a top priority during production. Martin is always seen with a Shar Pei, but pay close attention and you'll notice that Sam the barfly's dog changes with every scene he's in - first he has a large grey mutt, then a smaller terrier-type, and finally a bloodhound at the graduation scene.

Even with the stakes raised in its third act, "Bart's Dog Gets an F" never quite settles on what it's supposed to be about; again, it's that meandering focus that keeps it from attaining greatness. The title betrays what it perhaps set out to be, but didn't completely realise, implying as it does that it's intended as a companion episode to "Bart Gets an F", which dealt with Bart's struggles within a similarly indifferent educational system. Until Santa's Little Helper enrols at Canine College, Bart himself has a fairly minimal role in the narrative, seeming more interested in Lisa's mumps than in anything Santa's Little Helper is up to, but as soon as schooling enters the picture, suddenly he's the one on the firing line on with the dog. Sole responsibility for getting Santa's Little Helper into order apparently falls to Bart, who is the only family member seen working with him at the training sessions, and that's kind of messed up when you think about it. Bart's only 10; shouldn't he be due some parental oversight in all of this? Presumably, the underlying idea is that Bart feels a particular empathy for Santa's Little Helper because he's able to project his own feelings of academic inadequacy onto the dog; his telling Santa's Little Helper, "Sorry boy, you can't help being dumb", seems reminiscent of his despairing cry of, "I am dumb! Dumb as a post! Think I'm happy about it?", from earlier that season. Once again, it's insinuated that this lack of progress might have less to do with dumbness on the dog's part than with Bart's inability to work within another rote learning institution with little sympathy for individual difference. He gets nowhere because he's not willing to fall in line with Winthrop's vile methods, the use of which hurts him as much as it hurts Santa's Little Helper, and no doubt strikes him as redolent of the kind of daily chastisement he experiences at Springfield Elementary. It makes good sense to present the struggle to turn Santa's Little Helper around as a particularly personal one for Bart; he sees so much of himself in the dog.

This feels like it should have been the emotional hook of the episode, yet the script doesn't delve too deeply into it. For one, the connection is never explicitly raised; the single reference to Bart's own academic troubles comes when he attempts to sneak his remedial reading assignment into the pile of homework Lisa had specially requested for her sick leave. In "Bart Gets an F", there was also a sense that Homer and Marge weren't exactly doing a great deal to help Bart, which existed largely in the subtext of that episode, through a small moment where, after failing to ensure that Bart devoted an evening to studying (and in Homer's case, actively dragging him away from it), they wonder why he keeps on failing despite his good intentions. Their apparent disinterest in getting their hands dirty with Santa's Little Helper creates a similarly stark impression of it being Bart against the world, but comes with the added sting that, on this occasion, Homer and Marge are the final authority. Winthrop might be uncompromising when Bart implores her to go easy on them during the upcoming examination, but she isn't the one laying down the condition that Santa's Little Helper either passes or gets booted. While Bart is making his last-ditch effort to save his chum, there are a bunch of scenes with Homer already advertising the dog and showing him to a prospective new owner (although purposely concealing that this is a problem dog, which raises questions about how long Santa's Little Helper would have lasted in his new home). I suppose it makes the threat of losing Santa's Little Helper feel more real and urgent, but it adds an extra dash of mean-spiritedness to Homer's actions, as though he has a vested interest in seeing the dog fail.

Of course, in the end the dog doesn't, but it takes a remarkably convenient bit of plot development to facilitate that ending, with Santa's Little Helper suddenly becoming capable of discerning commands amid the usual human blather, but only after Bart has delivered a heartfelt speech about how much he's going to miss his friend. So what made the difference? Is the implication that Santa's Little Helper, sensing from Bart's tone that something is wrong, is finally giving his master enough focus to overcome their communication barrier? Is Bart's persistence in attempting to train the dog humanely getting a delayed payoff? Or are we merely seeing a last-minute miracle plucked out of thin air because hey, we've only got 30 seconds left, and obviously we're not interfering with the status quo, so let's just wrap this up happily (the B-story's solution, with Lisa taking it upon herself to start a new family quilt, lands a notch more naturally). An out and out miracle also played a significant role in the resolution to "Bart Gets an F" (as Bart said, at least part of his C- belonged to God), but there it came with a much more subversive double-edge, the snow day he was apparently granted via divine intervention becoming less a reprieve than another temptation - at best, he was being tested by the Powers That Be, and at worst, toyed with. Bart learned repeatedly that there was no easy way out of his predicament, and that's what made his success at the end feel so well-earned. Here, I suspect that hearing intelligible words come through on Santa's Little Helper's end was meant to be the payoff in of itself; how we got there is regarded as secondary.

Still, the graduation ceremony has room for a classic Homer moment, with his slow, grudging clap gradually giving way into a genuinely rapturous one, as he comes to terms with the fact that, deep down, he's glad to see the dog succeed. The part with the dogs casting off their chains like mortarboards is an equally nice touch. And then, the really subversive element comes with the Animal House-inspired epilogue, as a series of onscreen titles fill us in on what later became of the Canine College graduates. As it turns out, their futures weren't so rosy - Buddy the terrier (one of the three dogs seen with Sam) ran away from home, Martin's Shar Pei Lao-Tzu possibly died after eating a poisonous toad, and Santa's Little Helper continued his anti-social streak by biting the one hand that helped him through this entire ordeal. It's an admittedly unsettling note on which to end our story, with its insinuation that none of these dogs really benefited from that rigorous training, and that their feral leanings, possibly augmented by the hardships they endured at the Canine College, still found ways of acting itself out. That feel-good sentiment of overcoming the odds doesn't quite make it past the final hurdle, and it's in effect Homer who has the last laugh.

EDIT: Small correction - I've just remembered that Bart called Snowball II a "him" in "Treehouse of Horror II". Obviously it didn't stick.

[1] Those are toxic to dogs! Seriously, since becoming a dog owner, I'm shocked to discover just how many things are.