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 a 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 together. "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.

TACtics: Girlfriend (Upset, Outrage, Appal)

In 1989 the Transport Accident Commission joined forces with advertising agency Grey Melbourne, and created the 60-second television ad "Girlfriend" with the explicit mission to "upset, outrage and appal". This no holds barred assault on Victoria's cultural nerves was to prove a resounding success. "Girlfriend", a short piece about the perils of driving while intoxicated, might be one of the most important road safety ads ever made. Not only did it kick off a long and ruthlessly traumatic line of televised TAC campaigns, it also birthed the fantastic slogan "If you drink then drive, you're a bloody idiot" - here spoken in the ad's dialogue by a character identified onscreen as Karen Warnecke of The Royal Melbourne Hospital - which sent shock waves through Australia and beyond (we've observed from LTSA's "Gonna Get Caught" series how the phrase also caught on in New Zealand).

For all that, "Girlfriend" seems fairly subdued by subsequent TAC standards. As the campaigns went on, a particular point of notoriety garnered was in their predilection for raw spectacle - they weren't ones to shy away from showing you the accidents themselves in all of their lurid, jaw-dropping horror. Cars crashed, cars crunched, bodies within were brutally mangled. A TAC formula emerged, which could be broken down into essentially three acts - the deceptively innocuous build-up, the literal impact in the middle, and then the aftermath, with its inevitable overflowing of tears, hysteria and the gnashing of teeth. For now, TAC had no interest in those first two acts, leaping head-first into the protracted epilogue and showcasing the happenings in an emergency ward in the late hours, the results of a crash that has already occurred. "Girlfriend" isn't overly graphic when it comes to injury detail, the worst of it being a glimpse of a leg wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage near the start of the ad, but it is high on emotional anguish. With its repeated cross-cutting and intimate close-ups, it replicates a documentary format, the point seemingly being to give us a fly on the wall view of the stomach-churning messiness of the onslaught of emotion that arises at a time of calamity, here allowed to be a spectacle unto themselves.

Compared to the UK's contemporary "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign, the entry it most resembles is "Fireman's Story", with a few shades of "Arrest". Like the former, it centres on a monologue from a professional who is already well-familiar with the tragic consequences of drink driving - the aforementioned Karen Warnecke, who relates to the camera how anyone in her position has to learn to cope with the emotional devastation along with the physical. She maintains her composure better than Ken Stott's firefighter, but is blatantly just as perturbed by the things she's witnessed, hence her damning, campaign-defining final verdict. Meanwhile, her words are juxtaposed with one such example, as a critically injured young woman, Lucy, is wheeled into the emergency room while her unnamed boyfriend, the driver, staggers around uselessly in the foreground, a feeble, whimpering wreckage of a man. Much like "Arrest", we have the perpetrator attempting to navigate his way around an institution where everyone he meets regards him with barely-muted disdain - that is, until he runs into the mother of the woman he's harmed, who is far less inclined to hold back her anger. Karen herself has more of a low-key presence throughout these sequences, but for one fleeting close-up once Lucy's parents are brought up to speed on the possible consequences; her face slips into a harrowed frown, cluing us in that no matter how many times she's seen this scenario play out on previous nights, it still gets to her. The most optimistic thing you could say about the situation is that the injured party is, from the sounds of it, expected to live (at least, it's never suggested that she could die), although the full extent of the damage is not known - the ad fades out with a question mark still hanging over whether Lucy will get to keep both her legs or if her head hasn't suffered some serious trauma.

"Girlfriend" established TAC's approach as one that strove doggedly for realism, and to push the viewer uncomfortably close to the kinds of horrific incidents we'd prefer to convince ourselves could only happen to other people. While their devotion to overstatement could intermittently get a bit heavy-handed for yours truly, in this case there is a certain sense of knowingness to the ad's voyeurism, a feeling that we, like the driver, are intruders amid the family's displays of grief and suffering, witnessing more that we should perhaps be permitted - consider that moment where Lucy lies immobilised whilst subject to the indignity of having her clothing forcibly removed from her chest. A persistent narrative thread throughout the ad is in the boyfriend's efforts to get to Lucy, only to be continually barred, either by the medics or by Lucy's indignant parents - a reinforcement of his status as a persona non grata, and of the barrier we suspect this incident is likely to present in terms of their relationship going forward. Throughout the ad, we're encouraged to empathise with just about every other participant - Lucy, her parents, Karen - yet we end up cast out in the cold with the boyfriend, last seen weeping in the hospital corridor about how sorry he is, his patheticness a grotesque reflection of our own helplessness in the face of such misery. The point is clear - if we're not willing to be a part of the solution, we belong out in the sin bin with the problem.

Under The Skin (aka The Other From Another Planet)

Here's a thought experiment - I propose that you could swap out the titles of Jonathan Glazer's 2000 film Sexy Beast and his 2013 film Under The Skin and they would, in a way, make every bit as much sense. "Sexy Beast", the subject its own insoluble mystery in terms of where it fits in with the tale of Ray Winstone's retired London gangster, ceases to be a puzzle at all when applied to the odyssey of Scarlett Johansson's seductive night stalker. "Under The Skin", meanwhile, seems a pertinent allusion to the bestial realities forever throbbing below the interplay of Don and his desperately reluctant hosts - the violent past that Gal aspires to transcend but will likely always have a hold on him, which he defiantly attempts to bury deep beneath the surface of the earth. While we're at it, the title of Glazer's 2004 film Birth seems just as interchangeable with Under The Skin. The former picture has Nicole Kidman questioning if the soul of her deceased lover has re-entered the world and concealed itself inside the form of a 10-year-old child. The latter opens with a sequence that evokes a birth (light intersecting with darkness and morphing into something resembling an eyeball) and a human form coming into being. Like Birth, it could be a reincarnation story; at the beginning, the body of a young woman (Lynsey Taylor Mackay), who might be the protagonist's doppelganger, is retrieved from a roadside and stripped of her clothing by Johansson, who puts them on and seemingly sets out to walk the Earth in her stead. Throughout the film, she undergoes an internal transformation, one that suggests she is being born all over again, as she comes to experience the world through new eyes.

This is to say that Glazer's (sparse, but consistently strong) filmography, while encompassing an array of tones and genres, touch on similar themes - horrors that are unspeakable, the troublesome duality of human nature, an awareness of mortality as omnipresent as it is grotesque. Outwardly, Sexy Beast and Under The Skin couldn't be more different creatures. Sexy Beast is a wordier, more character-driven piece, punctuated by intermittent outbursts of violence and a hyperealism that seems reminiscent of Looney Tunes cartoons. Under The Skin has comparatively little use for dialogue, at least dialogue that can be readily understood. Numerous scenes are reliant on stretches of eerie silence, and on Mica Levi's piercing string score. Conversations are frequently muted, and in some sequences all speech is reduced to an incomprehensible babble. The characters therein are more vague silhouettes than individuals we particularly get to know, and most of them are not given names. Sexy Beast plays out mostly in the scorching Mediterranean heat, while Under The Skin unfolds amidst a chilly Scottish haze. Sexy Beast is intense and aggressive whereas Under The Skin is icy and cerebral. Yet there is more overlap between the respective arcs of Gal and Johansson's unnamed protagonist than perhaps meets the eye. Both are ex-patriots looking to abandon pasts that are dark and undefined in favour of a more secluded existence (Gal has settled on this path before his story has begun, while Johansson chooses it throughout the course of hers). Both are pursued by sinister figures who seem intent on reminding them that there can be no escape from the deadly forces with which they have already aligned. Gal is menaced by Don in the real world and by a monstrous rabbit in his dream visions, while Johansson is relentlessly followed by a mysterious motorcyclist (Jeremy McWilliams), who initially appears to assist in her activities but becomes more threatening as she grows more elusive. Early into Under The Skin, Glazer continues a gag implemented at the end of Sexy Beast, when Gal is abandoned at a bus stop in the company of an ad for a Bosch phone, commanding consumers to "Show Your True Colour", a playful allusion to the character's incongruous qualities. In a similar fashion, we see Johansson cruising the streets of Glasgow in her white van, passing several signs that clue us in to her true nature - among them, a poster promoting the video game Space Invaders and another advertising a stage production of Beauty & The Beast (roles that she jointly fulfils). An ad for a grammar school on the rear of a bus, meanwhile, tauntingly assures us that "It's possible".

Glazer's great achievement with Under The Skin is in creating a film that scrutinises humanity through the eyes of something that feels distinctly inhuman - in this case, a carnivorous extra-terrestrial who poses as a human female in order to lure unsuspecting men in the outskirts of Glasgow to their doom. Adapted from Michael Faber's 2000 novel of the same name, the screenplay, a collaboration between Glazer and Walter Campbell, uses few of the plot specificities of Faber's novel, stripping it down to its core element of an otherworldly female with a sinister agenda interacting with a world that is unknowable to her, but speaks increasingly to her sense of curiosity. Johansson is perfectly cast as the tantalising space vixen, exuding a beguilement but also a delicateness that is not quite of this Earth. Faber gave the protagonist a name - Isserley - which is never spoken in the dialogue of Glazer's film. His novel also went into greater detail about the nature of the alien race, and the gruesome fates awaiting the humans they harvested, the sole purpose of their covert Earth operations of course being To Serve Man. In Glazer's film, this much is merely hinted - the protagonist ensnares her prey by leading them into a black void and enticing them to remove their clothing, before leaving them suspended in an ominous pool, to be deflated like a balloon, leaving only their skin (is this a symbolic sequence? Or has she literally opened a portal to another dimension?). A queasy but revealing sequence momentarily transforms the process into something more familiar - a stream of bloody innards are seen moving along on what looks like a conveyor belt - and then back into something unfamiliar, as a beam of red light apparently engulfs them. Glazer's film regards the alien world as something that it is predominantly beyond our comprehension, but just comprehensible enough to enable another, macabre interpretation of the film's title, in that it is literally what is under our skin that these extra terrestrials find so appealing about us. It becomes a memento mori, a reminder that beneath it all we are just collections of flesh, bones and viscera - in this foreign species' eyes, little more than bags of offal waiting to be extracted, processed and consumed in some far-off planet's equivalent to a Happy Meal.

The implications are terrifying, yet this extra terrestrial perspective is a fascinating one to experience, for what skilfully unfamiliar work it makes of the familiar. The Glaswegian roadsides by night, stretches of tarmac beneath glaringly bright street lamps, are the kind of perfectly mundane location we'll have seen a thousand times over, but here become frightening, hypnotic and alien, a light show as beautifully realised and as awe-inspiring as any of the spectacles in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977). The world we see in Under The Skin seems alive and intimate but also distant, cold and as impenetrable to its protagonist as any of those alien horrors would be to its denizens. The protagonist's pick-up ritual is as eerily detached; from inside her vehicle, she peruses the streets for prospective prey. Notably, she has just exited a shopping mall, turning her hunt into a dark reflection of the Earthlings' own consumerist rapacity. She ignores the women and carefully assesses each of the men, working according to a meticulous selection process whereby the men chosen are all young, walking alone and, as her chat-up ritual seems designed to establish, unattached. Despite the open reference to Beauty & The Beast, the fairy tale being evoked here is more a gender-reversed version of Little Red Riding Hood, in which a she-wolf seduces and effectively consumes the naive young men who can be tempted to wander astray. She purchases and dons a fur coat (another skin that has been gruesomely detached from its original owner), a jarring choice of attire that openly flaunts her beastly nature.

The allure of the protagonist, and her dark deadly portal, are not the only forces in the world that threaten to engulf its inhabitants, nor is carnal desire the single impulse that can prompt an individual to walk willingly to their destruction. Emotional attachment is shown to be its own slippery slope, prompting those affected to act in ways that are contrary to their self-preservation. The film's most disturbing sequence has little to do with the protagonist's hunting ritual, with which there is only incidental intersection. The protagonist is on a beach, talking to a potential new target in the form of a Czech swimmer (Kryštof Hádek), when her seduction is interrupted by a crisis from further along the shore. A family's dog has been caught up in the tide; the wife (Alison Chand) has entered the waves in an attempt to save it, but become caught up herself. The husband (Roy Armstrong) then follows to try and save her, but certainly awaits a similar fate. Meanwhile, the couple's baby is left unattended on the beach. The swimmer intervenes and manages to get a hold of the husband and drag him back to shore, but his heroic gesture is rejected; the husband immediately charges back into the waves, presumably to his doom. His devotion to his wife is such that he would sooner join her in her watery grave than abandon her - which might be more laudable if it didn't completely override his devotion to his infant child, who is left abandoned. The protagonist takes advantage of the swimmer's exhausted state to make a shortcut with her abduction process - she walks over, knocks him out with a stone and drags his body away, all while ignoring the distressed howls of the baby. The point of this sequence, so shocking and so gratuitous to so many viewers, is commonly thought to be to demonstrate the aliens' lack of humanity, a crying baby being the one thing that is practically guaranteed to arouse our human sympathies. When the motorcyclist later arrives on the scene to remove all traces that the swimmer was there, he too takes no interest in the baby, who is still there and still howling as the dusk sets in. Its prospects now seem harrowingly grim - either it will be claimed by the waves itself or it will freeze to death during the night. But there is another, more subtle purpose to this interlude that reveals itself slightly later in the film, when the protagonist listens to a radio broadcast reporting on what we presume to be the same tragic occurrence. The body of the husband has since been washed up on the shore and identified as a chemistry lecturer from Edinburgh University, while police continue to search for his wife and son. We might be so preoccupied with the open (although obviously inauspicious) fate of the abandoned infant that we might not immediately pick up on one individual's absence from this news report - yes, the dog, but there is also no mention of the swimmer, who would have disappeared at the same time, and whom we might have expected to be included in the police search. But then no one knew that he was there (any more than they knew about the presence of the protagonist), and the motorcyclist has acted to make sure it remains that way. Notably, this is the only instance in the narrative in which we hear any kind of commentary on a death we've witnessed after the fact. There are no news bulletins on any of the missing young men the protagonist has abducted, the implication being that their absence has not been noticed, or at least not deemed worthy of making the news. A distinction is drawn between the everyday chaos of the universe and the meticulously clean efforts of the aliens, who go about their business in a way that ensures they will not be detected. The motorcyclist ignores the crying baby because its plight has nothing to do with the protagonist's actions, and it is not on the aliens' agenda to intervene with Earthly matters that extend beyond their own practices - this is just universe being its typically indifferent self.

I wonder if Glazer included this horrifying sequence, which has effectively no consequence in terms of how the protagonist's story progresses (the news report is the last we hear of it), as a deliberate means of testing the viewers' sensibilities and illuminating our own empathic blind spots. We don't like to see babies, dogs and idyllic families become the victims of terrible tragedies. But perhaps we feel a certain indifference to the kinds of victims the protagonist seeks out - those who lack familial ties and (compared to the university lecturer) are not distinguished enough to inspire much concern. We might be disturbed by the squeamish fates awaiting her abductees, but do we necessarily feel the same sympathy for them as we do the drowning family? Are these character types that we are happy to treat as dispensable? In the grander scheme of things, there perhaps is little difference. The film moves on quickly from the family's tragedy, and we suspect the news cycle will also - the radio broadcast has already switched to a more cheerful discussion before we've cut to another scene.

Before his untimely, undetected demise, the swimmer imparts enough autobiographical information to establish himself as a prospective soulmate to the protagonist, and to Gal of Sexy Beast - he's another ex-patriot who, in his own words, is looking "to get away from it all". He does not specify what he is looking to get away from in the Czech Republic, but states that he has settled in this Scottish locale because "It's nowhere". His remoteness and anonymity, the very things that mark him out as viable prey to the protagonist, are to him defence mechanisms. Notably, he is the first character who says anything of genuine resonance to the protagonist, in letting her in on the possibility of escape. This possibility becomes increasingly relevant, as the more time she spends with the Earthlings, the more her perspective is seen to evolve and draw her away from her given directive. She begins to notice women and observe them from her typically chilly distance, but in a way that feels curious rather than predatory. Later, whilst walking, she trips and lands face-first on the pavement, and a group of passers-by help her to her feet. A dramatic change occurs; the world momentarily blurs out of focus, and suddenly she is seeing the denizens of downtown Glasgow up close, male and female alike, going about their nondescript business. She is seeing people, not prey, and from an intimate enough proximity to suggest that she feels like a participant in their world, not an interloping observer. Was it the kindness of strangers that triggered the change, or the impact of the fall? The most game-changing incident involves an encounter with a man with facial deformities (Adam Pearson), whom the protagonist talks into accepting a ride in her van and subjects to her usual seduction routine. We've seen this ritual enough times by now to know what kind of danger the man is in, but on this occasion the process seems particularly cruel. He admits that he has no friends, has never had a partner and shops at night because the daytime crowds would not accept him; she tells him he has beautiful hands. The cruelty is double-edged - are we more troubled by the alien's willingness to take advantage of this man's isolation, with kindness that is presumably feigned, or by the callousness of his fellow human in making him an outcast for his physical appearance? The man's lack of social connections make him an ideal candidate for the protagonist's deadly harvest, and yet this time she can not see it through to its conclusion. She lures him into her portal and entices him to undress, but ultimately leaves him alive (albeit to be picked off by the motorcyclist the following morning).

With that, the nature of the narrative drastically alters. The protagonist leaves the city and flees into the Highlands, abandoning her van and shedding her skin in the form of the fur coat. Her days of luring and ensnaring human victims now behind her, her new aspiration is, like the swimmer before her, to get away from it all and find some refuge in the world beyond. She is pursued by the motorcyclist - frighteningly, there is revealed to be more than one of them at work - yet they never quite get close enough to burgeon into an immediate threat, rather a distant but relentless one. For now, the greater dangers to the protagonist come from the people themselves, and from her inability to blend in with them. Minus her beastly coat, the locals  are aware of how she is ill-dressed for a Highland winter. Elsewhere, we see her attempt to adjust her diet. She visits a tea room and tries a slice of cake, but this is clearly, at best, going to be an acquired taste for her - her reflexive reaction is to noisily reject the foreign foodstuff, garnering her quizzical looks from her follow diners.

Man, meanwhile, might not necessarily be the warmest place in which to hide. A paradox emerges; the protagonist's latent capacity for empathy is what prompts her to break away from her alien directive and attempt to assume some kind of place among the humans (it is implied that she spares the deformed man because she identifies too much with his plight as an outsider), yet humans are not themselves shown to be a uniformly empathic species. They too are governed by predatory impulses, and seem just as primed to sniff out and take advantage of her loneliness and vulnerability as she is theirs. Shortly before her encounter with the deformed man, the protagonist narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a gang attack, when a young man approaches her van and gestures at her to wind down her window, and several accomplices descend violently upon the van's bonnet. Other interactions are more ambiguous, and it is hard to distinguish which are rooted in genuine benevolence and which conceal more sinister objectives. While caught in a traffic jam, a fellow motorist has a rose delivered to her by a roadside flower salesman, although his motive for doing so (a random act of kindness? An attempted seduction?) is never established. Later in the film, while on the run from her former life, she is approached by a man on a bus (Michael Moreland) who seems drawn to her vulnerability and offers to help her. He treats her with great compassion, allowing her to stay at his house and serving her food (although she is not seen to eat it), and taking her out on a day trip to the remains of a castle, where he delicately picks her up and carries her over a puddle. He also seems entirely ready to have sexual relations with this non-commutative and potentially damaged stranger, adding a question mark to the purity of his intentions. The attempted intercourse is ultimately thwarted, in a somewhat comical fashion, when the protagonist becomes preoccupied with her own (non-functioning?) genitals.

Before that, the man's attempts to integrate her into his domestic space lead into what I personally rate as the film's funniest, most quietly unnerving and most underrated sequence, when he introduces her to the televised antics of Welsh comedian Tommy Cooper. Cooper holds up a jar and a spoon and makes a barrage of incomprehensible stuttering noises. The man snickers. The studio audience is uproarious laughter. The protagonist stares blankly at the screen, unsure what she is even intended to be perceiving. I'd imagine that Cooper (certainly Cooper out of context) would be a baffling enough experience to anyone who didn't participate in the UK zeitgeist of the 1970s, but the scene touches on far more sinister nerves still. The focus on the protagonist's bewilderment and the continued roaring of the studio audience turns their laughter into a reaction to her reaction. That she isn't in on the joke makes her squarely the butt of it. These noises are a communal expression of emotion from which she is excluded; her status as a perpetual outsider renders her a subject of almost cosmic derision. There is a dark side to this communal expression that perhaps becomes more salient when we consider the circumstances of Cooper's unfortunate death; he collapsed during a live television broadcast in April 1984 and his audience responded with the same uproarious laughter, believing it was part of the act.

The universal characteristic that seems to lurk beneath the skin of the various individuals our protagonist encounters is not really empathy, but vulnerability. Each one is as intrinsically destructible as the next. The realisation that this vulnerability extends to her is what causes the shift in her perspective. Safety in numbers (consider the group of girls the protagonist meets outside of the nightclub) and membership within communities represent one of our most primal, longest-standing tactics for combatting our fragility as individuals. Under The Skin is concerned with the plight of the other, with those for whom such communities are basically impenetrable and offer their own oppressions in place of solidarity. The protagonist never overcomes her loneliness; the disconnect that keeps her from mingling with the humans is not something she figures out how to straddle. After her failure to physically connect with Moreland's character, she appears to give up on integrating herself into civilisation altogether, choosing instead to follow the swimmer's suggestion and to seek out her "nowhere" in a remote stretch of woodland. The solitude that made her human quarry fair game, and expendable in the eyes of their own society, now becomes her sole means of sanctuary.

(Spoilers now follow)

The climax of the film sees a return to the Little Red Riding Hood allusion, with the roles now completely reversed. Here, the wolf seeks refuge amid the seclusion of the woods, only to be greeted by a woodcutter (Dave Action), who attempts to engage her in ostensibly benign small talk. The clue that his intentions are anything but is in how reminiscent his tactics are of her earlier chat-up routine; crucially, he is looking to establish that she has come to the woods all alone. The protagonist is too fatigued or perhaps too fundamentally naive herself to pick up on this. She walks on and comes to what we presume to be the woodcutter's bothy. Curling up inside, she seems to momentarily find her peace; a dissolve shot juxtaposes her with the swaying trees outside, depicting her as a giant in the landscape, comfortably nestled in this perfectly impassive nowhere. This is interrupted by the reappearance of the woodcutter, who attempts to sexually assault her. She flees and he pursues. The reversal is a little further-reaching than the hunter becoming the hunted. The woodcutter is clearly positioned as the interloper in this scenario (the wolf was, after all, the one in its natural habitat), his hulking logging truck an alien vessel on the wooded terrain (one that nearly becomes another trap for the protagonist when she attempts to escape in it), his objective a threat to the equilibrium and to the trees that have provided cover and solace to our protagonist. When he wrestles her to the ground and starts to forcibly tear off her garments, the confrontation is carried through to its grimmest of fairy tale conclusions. Like the wolf in the story, she is physically ruptured; the woodcutter manages to rip open her human skin, giving him a misbegotten glimpse of the dark, uncanny form hidden underneath. He is so repulsed by what he sees that he sneaks away and returns with a can of gasoline and a lighter to set her ablaze. Tellingly, his reapproach is represented via a POV shot that regards his fractured prey with the same chilling detachment as she formerly did her own prospective victims. In aspiring to obliterate what is strange and incomprehensible to his earthly perception, he affirms himself as the inhuman one in the equation.

In spite of the protagonist's demise, the final sequence is not presented as a bleak outcome, but as one of unspoken triumph (a contrast to the more ambiguous ending of Sexy Beast). We see the motorcyclist standing out in the snow-covered horizon, scanning the terrain but apparently not locating her; she has evaded the grasp of her pursuer. We cut to the her charred remains, as smoke rises toward the sky and becomes intermingled with falling snowflakes; the final shot shows the snowflakes falling directly onto the camera, some of them visibly darkened with the protagonist's ashes. This closing image evokes the reincarnation theme of Birth, indicating that this is not the end but the beginning of a renewed cycle; the protagonist has fallen to Earth all over again and has finally found her place within it. It is the same place that awaits all beings that are subject to the same forces of death and decay - the frailty of the flesh and its inevitable breakdown a unifying process that keeps us bound within a natural rhythm as impassive and insurmountable as the thrashing tides, rustling winds and falling snow. Neither human nor other, she now simply is.