Dog of Death (aka Operation Scapegoat)

It's recently dawned on me what an uncharacteristically dark turn The Simpsons took in its third season. I tend to think of Season 8 as the one in which the tensions in the writers' room became startlingly manifest, and Frank Grimes (and others) served as handy whipping boys. But maybe there was something in the air in Season 3 too. Al Jean and Mike Reiss had taken over as showrunners, and we know that they tended to favour more extreme situations, with less obligation to realism than their predecessors; I'd hazard a guess that one of their starting approaches was to make the drama of the early series a notch edgier by throwing in a heightened sense of peril. (Unlike Oakley and Weinstein, who got steadily more cynical and pessimistic as they went along, Jean and Reiss seemed to get the darkness out of their system by the second half of their tenure, with Season 4 being a considerably lighter collection.) As a result, the series entered a phase in its burgeoning life in which it was suddenly prepared to get malevolent on a regular basis. Specifically, we had three episodes - "Bart The Murderer", "Dog of Death" and "Black Widower" - which (as their titles might imply) all entailed the threat death calling on a particular denizen of Springfield. In all three cases that threat was not ultimately realised, but the possibility that it could have gone that way was nevertheless palpable. It's not that the previous seasons weren't prepared to go to morbid places too. Season 2 had one episode, "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" that was all about Homer having to face up to his own mortality, having learned that his latest dining experience might have deadly consequences. Elsewhere, Bart had a near death experience in "Bart Gets Hit By a Car", while "Old Money" had a character actually die (albeit a one-off one). But Season 3's own Death Trilogy feels different. The threat of mortality comes from characters being very active and very willing hazards to one another. In the case of "Dog of Death" (episode 8F17), the danger to Santa's Little Helper originates from natural causes, with the kink in his digestive system that could be remedied with a costly operation. The real danger, however, rests on whether or not the Simpsons would choose to abandon him to his gruesome fate because he's suddenly become a financial burden. Then by the end the tables have turned, and the episode title is revealed to have a sinister double meaning. We've entered a situation in which Santa's Little Helper might become a dispenser of death, and Bart's life hangs on whether or not the dog will lose the urge to rip his erstwhile master's throat out.

"Dog of Death", which first aired on March 12th 1992, can be viewed as an uglier variation on the previous season's "Bart's Dog Gets an F", with the family once again at loggerheads as to whether they can keep Santa's Little Helper. The issue this time isn't the dog's desire to chew everything in sight, but his medical bills jeopardizing such luxuries as beer, ham night and weekly lottery tickets, when a trip to the vet reveals he has a twisted stomach. Realism in television: as a child, "twisted stomach" sounded to my ears like some fucked-up, made-up illness, but this is actually a legitimate disorder of which dog owners need to be wary. The technical term would be Gastric Dilatation Volvulus, when the stomach fills up with gas, causing it to expand and twist. All dogs can be affected, but the greyhound's body structure makes it one of the more susceptible breeds. The Simpsons clearly hadn't prepared for this possibility by having Santa's Little Helper insured, but maybe that wasn't such a big thing in 1992. Marge and Homer's initial response is that the $750 operation that will save the dog (about $1,676 in 2025 money) is too much to ask, and they instead turn to preparing the kids for the likelihood that they'll have to let their pet go. The kids aren't quite so accepting of this outcome, with Bart once again being the most motivated to fight in Santa's Little Helper's corner. Marge and Homer eventually relent, and figure out how they can afford the operation, if each member of the family is prepared to give up a regular expenditure. It's an easy enough thing to agree to upfront, but when the dog is restored to a clean bill of health and the family are having to adjust to a deluge of lifestyle changes, resentment starts to pile up toward their four-legged chum. Thus, "Dog of Death" explores a possibility that "Bart's Dog Gets an F" left untouched - what if Bart, whose bond with the dog is clearly the strongest, momentarily lost patience with Santa's Little Helper? The upshot is that Santa's Little Helper, feeling unwanted in the Simpsons' home, takes to the streets and ends up in the ownership of Mr Burns, who is set on transforming the gentle family pet into a savage attack dog.

Right now I'm revisiting the Santa's Little Helper episodes, which have traditionally been some of my least favourite episodes of the series, in the hopes that I might find something new in them now that I am myself a dog owner. But I'm already no stranger to the trauma of pet illness and the inconvenience of costly vet fees, so in many regards this is an episode that cuts close to the bone for me. Too close, in fact. I find this one rather difficult to watch, to the point where I'm compelled to automatically consign it to the bottom of my SLH rankings. It's a paradox, honestly, because compared to its competitors, "Dog of Death" does have quite a few things going for it. A criticism I'll often make of the Santa's Little Helper episodes is that they're prone to flimsy plotting, but that's not a charge I can really lay against "Dog of Death". Of the four SLH episodes from the classic era, this one has by far the strongest narrative bones. The stakes are high from early on, each act flows logically into the next and the lottery subplot is a perfect thematic complement in an episode where financial struggles play such a vital role. It's a basic story, but up until the last 90 seconds or so it is decently told, which gives it the edge over the greatly more sluggish "Bart's Dog Gets an F". The major disadvantage "Dog of Death" has next to "Bart's Dog Gets an F", and indeed every other SLH episode, is that it is an immensely difficult episode to like. Here's the most damning thing I can personally say about it: other than for the purposes of this review, I'm not sure that I've ever chosen to watch "Dog of Death" on my own terms. I've sat through it whenever it's on, but it's not an episode I've found myself scrolling to whenever I've felt like sticking on a Simpsons disc; there are at least 200 other episodes I'd be more inclined to give my time. Even "Secrets of a Successful Marriage", which is officially my least favourite of the classic era, has elements that make it more rewatchable.

Part of the problem is that the central scenario, while highly relatable, is bleak all over. The writers certainly had their work cut out in finding the humor in the matter, and most of the best jokes occur in the first act, in the lottery B-story (Kent Brockman is on particularly good form here). There's certainly nothing wrong with taking a dramatic approach and allowing a situation that's naturally downbeat to be so, but "Dog of Death" doesn't get the balance quite right. In fact, it frequently tips over into being downright mean-spirited, despite the production team explicitly stating on the episode commentary that their intention was to make it heart-warming, like the Christmas episode. Ostensibly, the Santa's Little Helper episodes were written to appeal to the animal lovers in the series' viewership, yet there are jokes in here that feel like they were purposely designed to rub animal lovers the wrong way, particularly if their affections lie with non-dog life. If you paid attention to some of my quibbles with "Bart's Dog Gets an F" and "Bart The Genius", you might have guessed that there were two jokes in particular I was going to take issue with, so let's just get them out of the way now. First, the black cat in the room. Writes Nathan Rabin in his review on the AV Club: "Santa’s Little Helper has it rough. He’s only trotted out when it suits the plot and more often than not he’s in some sort of terrible scrape." Not to sound like a broken record, but I once again feel the need to point out that Snowball II has it so much rougher. She (as far as we knew, still a he at this stage) seldom gets to be the centre of attention, and is usually only trotted out to be the target of some gratuitous put-down in episodes centred on her canine counterpart, a tradition originating with "Dog of Death". In this case, it's the punchline of the entire episode. As Santa's Little Helper is welcomed back with open arms and the entire family is clamoring to lay their loving hands upon him, Marge suggests that Homer pet the cat instead. Homer retorts, "The cat? What's the point?" Hey, just leave Snowball II alone, okay? She never did anything to hurt anyone. It seems an unnecessarily sour point to me that these dog episodes should be at such pains to assure us that the Simpsons love Santa's Little Helper deep down, whilst simultaneously implying they feel nothing but contempt for the family cat - a sentiment that's honestly not that evident outside of Santa's Little Helper episodes. It seems blatant enough that the Simpsons felt attachment to the original Snowball, so I'm not buying them as a clan of cat haters. The issue might be that Snowball II isn't living up to her predecessor's greatness, but since the series never cared to elaborate much on the household's feline dynamics, the family just come off being as inexplicably mean to an animal that's so unassuming. Yes, it's as clear as day that there are some strong anti-cat feelings amongst the writing staff, but I kind of feel that if they wanted the Simpsons to be vessels for that, they shouldn't have made them cat owners in the first place.

Are cats the most abused animal in all Simpsons history? That might depend on whether we're counting Scratchy among those mistreated critters. If so, there isn't much of a contest. If we're only including animals that are real, flesh-and-blood entities in-universe, then there is another creature the writers seem inordinately fond of harming. I've noticed that gags about hamsters being imperilled, abused or killed happen with surprising frequency within the series. By "Dog of Death", we were up to at least our third incident of hamster misfortune, and we already seem far removed from the cautiousness of "Bart The Genius", in which the hamsters were allowed to escape before the threat of dissection could be carried out. In this case, we actually have a dead hamster onscreen, getting zapped repeatedly by a defibrillator before a vet picks it up and tosses it through a basketball hoop into a waste bin, accompanied by squishy little sound effects. Damn, that's just cold. (This same clip works its way into "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", which is another reason why "Another Simpsons Clip Show" is superior.) If the former cat person in me gets a little miffed with certain assumptions in "Dog of Death", then the lifelong rodent lover is absolutely going to recoil. I can't imagine what the writers' beef with hamsters could be, but they obviously have it in for them (gerbils too, judging by "Who Shot Mr Burns? Part One").

But let's even out that burst of negativity by putting a spotlight on what "Dog of Death" does right. I do like the realism with which the initial Santa's Little Helper conflict is handled. It was apparently based on a real dilemma faced by writer John Swartzwelder's family when their dog got sick (although in their case it didn't have a happy ending), and there is an appropriate amount of gravitas surrounding Santa's Little Helper's illness. Episodes in which the family's financial troubles played a significant role were set to become a dying breed as we moved further into the 90s (when, with some rare exceptions, such as "Homer vs. Patty and Selma" of Season 6, the Simpsons had the means to do just about anything on a whim), but were a major part of the early seasons' integrity. As per the commentary, the sum of $750 was carefully chosen, as an amount that Homer and Marge would immediately balk at but could plausibly scrape together if they made the right allowances in their budget. The scene in the kitchen where the family argue over Santa's Little Helper's fate is very effectively delivered, particularly Bart's horror on realising that he and his parents aren't on the same page. There's a potent tension between his loving innocence and their more detached practicality. Santa's Little Helper might be a cherished member of the household, but the bitter truth is that Homer and Marge view him as essentially expendable - there is a part of them that would be willing to let him go, if it means keeping up all of their lifestyle habits. Homer's preliminary solution is to paper over the children's impending trauma by attempting to sell them on his vision of a Doggie Heaven, which takes an even more disturbing turn when he decides that there's also a Doggie Hell, and that Blondi and Checkers are likely sniffing at each other's butts therein, alongside a rogue Lassie. (I'm a lifelong fan of Benji, but nowhere near as well-versed when it comes to Lassie lore - does anyone know what the hell Homer is talking about when he brings up the bad Lassie who bit Timmy? Did that happen in one of the movies or was it something reputed to have occurred on set?) Bart's position, however, is the righteous one (something he carefully avoids compromising by expressing it without expletives), and Homer and Marge are persuaded that something more valuable is at risk here than their precious creature comforts - that is, until the stark realities of having to substitute pork chop night with chub night begin to sink in.

I also have "Dog of Death" to thank for introducing me to the work of author Shirley Jackson (if it hadn't, then I might never have written this piece on her story "Charles"). The name drop in this episode encouraged me to seek out and read "The Lottery", and Brockman didn't lie about its contents. "A chilling tale of conformity gone mad" would likewise be a pretty apt summary of a typical day in Springfield - this is the community who were previously prepared to lynch Homer and Bart over the beheading of a statue, so I daresay they are only a hair's breath away from implementing a ritual stoning. For now, "Dog of Death" offers up a relatively mild example of the townspeople's mass conformity, via their hysteria for a state lottery that trades in glib promises of easy wealth but is, as Moe neatly puts it, an exploiter of the poor and ignorant (of course, as a peddler of booze he doesn't quite grasp the irony). The way the lottery set-up first segues into the main story, with the family being too transfixed by the possibility of their numbers coming up to even notice the financial time bomb staggering across their living room, is an especially clever touch. Homer's bizarre fantasy of being transformed into some kind of gold-coated giant via a $130 million jackpot would be absurd under any circumstances, but seems particularly out of touch when the immediate reality is clearly signalling that things are about to get grim. Alas, the lottery win was as a pipe dream as delusional as those aspirations of having 14 karat gold grafted to his skin. Despite forking out for 50 tickets, Homer discovers that the odds were always brutally stacked against him, as the jackpot is snagged by none other than Brockman himself. The question of whether or not obscene wealth is the answer to all of life's ills becomes a touchy one in "Dog of Death", as Brockman's initiation into the millionaire lifestyle is contrasted with the Simpsons' sharp dip into a more frugal standard of living. Seeing the blinged-out Brockman flaunt his riches on TV, Homer churlishly retorts that there's one thing $130 million (plus a salary of $500,000) can't buy, and that's a dinosaur. (Maybe not a dinosaur, although Brockman does get a llama that bites Ted Kennedy, one of multiple Michael Jackson references in this script).

Shirley Jackson's lottery, which caused some controversy when the story her first published in 1948, is of a very different nature. The "winner", Tessie Hutchinson, voices her objections to the process, but is permanently silenced by the onslaught of stones thrown upon her by the very people who, up until a short moment ago, were her friends, neighbours and even family, and who regard her sacrifice is necessary for their collective benefit. It is a terrifying demonstration of the perils facing the individual who has been singled out and turned on by the group, who will no longer recognise them as one of their own, but as a scapegoat on which to vent their darker emotions. The reference in "Dog of Death" feels all the more pertinent for how the plot deals with Santa's Little Helper's own status as a member of the Simpsons family being jeopardized by a simple twist (literal and figurative) of fortune. His GDV leaves them divided - whereas Bart continues to see a beloved companion in dire need of help, Homer and Marge see an inconvenience that must be sacrificed for the family's greater good. Later on, the family all come to jointly scorn Santa's Little Helper, having settled the irrational sentiment that he's to blame for their frugal miseries. It's easier to blame something tangible, at which you can actively direct your rage, than simply fate for dealing you a lousy hand, as Marge discovers when the universe plays another of its sneaky cosmic tricks and has her exact numbers come up the first week after she's been made to give up on the lottery. Lisa likewise is tasked with writing a report on Renaissance astronomer Copernicus just when she was required to skip out on the relevant volume of Encyclopedia Generica (although in her case the universe is also merciful enough to leave a third-rate biography on Copernicus for her to find at the bus shelter, which is it's better than nothing). Homer is reduced to degrading himself for amusement of the patrons at Moe's Tavern, in the hopes that they'll give him change for a beer. Even Bart gets in on the scorn, after a budget haircut from a student barber takes most of the shape from his hair. (Of course, it could be worse. He could have been sent to Jake's Barber Shop, as in the "Deep Deep Trouble" video. Then there would be nothing but stubble.) The experience is enough to reduce his beloved friend into a "dumb dog" in Bart's eyes. When the Simpsons cease showing their dog any warmth or affection, Santa's Little Helper takes the hint that he can't run with this pack any more, and absconds the second the gate is left unsecured.

After an adventure in the wilderness that would make Benji proud, Santa's Little Helper is captured and impounded by the authorities (the Simpsons clearly didn't have him microchipped either, but maybe that also wasn't done in 1992). He's been expelled from his former position as a family dog, but there is a whole new identity on the horizon for him to fill - Mr Burns is looking for a replacement guard dog, now that his long-serving Crippler is about ready for retirement, and when he catches sight of Santa's Little Helper he senses potential in the homely greyhound. It is a mite questionable that Burns should go to a shelter and pick up a stray when it would be much more efficient for him to purchase a dog that had been specially bred and trained for the purpose (Burns doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd have a "Don't shop, adopt" policy). But then I think the unwholesome implication is that Burns gets some sadistic pleasure from personally breaking and transforming a placid pet into a slavering beast. It's here that the script once again gets a little too mean-spirited for comfort, as Burns' procedure for conditioning Santa's Little Helper to want to immediately tear the flesh from the bones of everything he meets frankly makes Winthrop's training methods in "Bart's Dog Gets an F" look positively civilised. That horrifying sequence with him giving Santa's Little Helper the Clockwork Orange treatment is arguably a little too ridiculous and over the top to be taken seriously - and I do get a guilty little smile out of Burns' declaration that it will turn the dog into "a vicious, soulless killer", which was entirely the opposite intention of the treatment Alex received in A Clockwork Orange, but wittily gives the lie to the idea that the process was about healing and not dealing further damage. But we also see Burns punching Santa's Little Helper with boxing gloves and leaving visible contusions on his face, and that's just distressing to watch. To their credit, the animators do an excellent job of making the reprogrammed Santa's Little Helper look genuinely frightening, and like he could potentially do some serious damage to Bart when they inevitably cross paths again. I suppose it's in Burns' abuse of this naturally benign dog that we see some implicit suggestion of how the Simpsons were always much richer than the icy billionaire, even when subsisting on their diet of organ meats and chub. Burns has no understanding of a dog's value as a loving companion; to him, it's just a resource to be broken and turned against the world he wants to keep at bay. The Simpsons have experienced a pleasure that's totally beyond him, even if they are intermittently inclined to take that for granted.

I've already indicated that "Dog of Death" loses its way somewhat in the last 90 seconds; alas, it's here that it falls victim to the same trap as "Bart's Dog Gets an F", in reaching a solution that feels overly convenient and cliche. Naturally, the Simpsons come to miss Santa's Little Helper when he disappears and regret their ill-treatment of him. Bart once again is the most driven to action, and goes about knocking on every door in town on the chance someone has seen him; when he reaches Burns' mansion he has the hounds set on him, and naturally Santa's Little Helper leads the offence. I think this sequence is very well-staged and coveys the danger of the scenario to nail-biting effect - so it perhaps registers as a little hokey when the dog is suddenly and totally placated on hearing Bart say the words, "I love you." All of the Santa's Little Helper episodes, with the exception of "Two Dozen and One Greyhounds", rely on some form of "boy and his dog" triteness to reach their happy endings, but none hammer it in with quite the degree of gruesome manipulation as "Dog of Death". This is supposed to be the redemptive light at the end of a harrowing tunnel, but it feels like the episode taking the path of cheap sentiment after a discordantly malevolent ride, in an attempt to pass itself off as sensitive after all. I will give it that from a thematic sense it is at least more explicable than the solution to "Bart's Dog Gets an F". The Simpsons, especially Bart, had already demonstrated that their love for Santa's Little Helper was stronger than their need for life's various bells and whistles. No matter how much they grumbled about it in the aftermath, they still bought the dog the operation that saved his life. So this is Santa's Little Helper returning the favour by demonstrating that his bond with Bart is ultimately stronger than any of the vicious tendencies Burns has pummelled out of him. If they had applied a subtler had (say, lost the flashback montage altogether), some version this outcome might have worked. The element that I find unforgivably cheesy, though, is when Santa's Little Helper single handedly defends Bart from Burns' remaining guard dogs. We've acknowledged that Santa's Little Helper looks really scary when he's mad, sure, but the notion of him being able to frighten off an entire pack of blood-lustful hounds^[1] is a touch hard to swallow. Oh well, back home to shower the dog with praise and disrespect an inoffensive cat.

As if that particular double standard weren't enough, "Dog of Death" closes with a strange disclaimer, in which we're informed that no dogs were harmed in its making, but that a vomiting cat and a dead duck were somehow associated with its production. There's a fiendishness deep in this episode's heart that really doesn't mesh with its professions of tenderness, but at least it goes out gleefully upfront on the matter.

[1] Come to think of it, are Burns' dogs actually hounds? They look more like they were modelled on some kind of terrier breed. But maybe "Release the terriers!" doesn't have quite the same wham.

DETRiments: Mike and Joy

"Mike and Joy" was the outlier of DETR's "What's It Like?" drink driving campaign of late 1999, for various reasons. It centred on the perspective of bereaved relatives, in a series themed predominately around conversations with perpetrators, and how they accommodated the terrible knowledge that their lack of judgement had resulted in the death of another. It also forwent the baffling expressionism that punctuated the sorry testimonies of Terry, John and David; the surreal images of an undressed performance artist and misplaced eels are replaced by close-ups of the characters' physical surroundings, mostly remnants of the deceased in a manner designed to suggest a ghostly, lingering presence. What immediately connects it to the WIL series is the title card at the beginning. In accordance with the changed perspective, it asks a different, less lurid but equally grave question ("What's it like to lose someone?") and closes with an extension of the campaign tagline that explicitly connects it to the Y2K. As the title would indicate, this is the only duologue of the series, with the titular Mike and Joy telling the story of their daughter Michelle, who was died of head injuries when a drink driver smashed into the back of her car.

"Mike and Joy" is the entry that's the most strongly reminiscent of the campaign's then-recent predecessor, Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives. It too was more interested in the suffering of innocents than the remorse of the perpetrator, to the point where the drink driver's lack of corporeality became a running feature. The focus of D&DWL, at least in the beginning, was the knock-on effects of accidents caused by drink driving, with its earlier installments tending to illustrate how people who weren't directly involved in those accidents were also impacted. We had the quietly devastated family in "Funeral", the lonely mother in "Jenny", the lamenting school friends in "Classroom" and the shaken first responder in "Fireman's Story" ("Pier" was unusual among that first wave in focusing on a crash victim who had survived to tell his own story). "Mike and Joy" most obviously recalls "Funeral" and "Jenny", not only with its depiction of parental grief, but with its closing emphasis on stopped time; just as the watch recovered from Stephen's jacket and Jenny's undisturbed teenage bedroom are reminders of a progression cruelly denied, the photographs of a smiling Michelle convey her own stolen future by reducing her to a series of static images. Like the mother in "Jenny", Mike and Joy are condemned to share in that stagnation, haunted by the absence of their daughter and the loss of the future that should have been. Joy states that life now consists of "a void, and there's nothing to fill it...nothing at all"; they are in a situation in which the world has stopped turning. The explicit reference to the millennium at the end of the PIF represents an attempt to tie this in with the broader concerns of the Y2K, evoking a sense of anticipation that teeters on the apocalyptic. The tagline alludes to the place of the individual within the grander scheme of time, both in terms of our vulnerabilities but also the potentially far-ranging impact of our personal choices. Against a backdrop of cultural celebration, in which our civilisation was giving itself a pat on the back for still being around after 2000 years, WIL served as a grim little countermove, playing on the tension between our best intentions and aspirations, and the world we might inadvertently create through the worst of our weaknesses.

Although "Mike and Joy" avoids the aggressively surreal imagery of the rest of the series, even it can't resist hitting us with at least one baffling and unsettling image. The commencing frame shows the silhouette of a ceramic angel that appears to be missing a wing, presumably a knick knack from Mike and Joy's house, with the sounds of an unseen fly buzzing in the backdrop. The fly obviously signifies death and decay. The angel should be a symbol of purity and salvation, but it seems corrupted, with its dark and broken form, a further indicator of thwarted potential. Elsewhere, "Mike and Joy" captures that distinctively nightmarish qualities that characterised the whole series; the horror of the situation is so uncanny that it appears unreal. Similar tricks are deployed to the other interviews - the alternating proximity to the subjects, and shots in which they appear to speak without moving their lips, suggesting an internal pain that persists below the surface. Most strikingly, the PIF is presented in a queasy purple hue, a representation of the emotional fog Mike and Joy now inhabit. Unlike David, who conducted his interview from a prison hallway, and Terry and John, who spoke in a more generic meeting room, Mike and Joy give their testimony from their living room, and there is a notably more overstuffed mise-en-scene, with the various decorating touches lending as an unnerving a feeling as the institutional backdrop of David's ad. They too are prisoners of a world that's been warped into an unearthly shape, with no prospect of refuge in what lies beyond. The view from window behind the broken angel displays only the vague impression of an oppressive brick wall. Our first glimpse of Mike and Joy shows them gazing from their living room window, into an indistinct space that, save for the outline of some not-so-green greenery, reveals essentially nothing.

DETRiments: David

The imminence of the Y2K engendered its share of anxieties, but what was really inescapable in those waning days of the 20th century was the overstated sense of cultural optimism. The transition from 1999 to the year 2000 wasn't just a time to raise a glass and to hang up a new calendar, but to contemplate the BOUNDLESSNESS OF HUMAN POTENTIAL. "Look how far civilisation has come and imagine what we could achieve tomorrow" was the mood of numerous contemporary campaigns. Seeing in the millennium would be a once in a lifetime event, the year 2000 the start of a bold and promising new era.

"What's It Like?", a drink driving campaign created by the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) for the Christmas of 1999, was unmistakably a product of that premillennial grandiosity. On the one hand, it was designed to be a sobering counterpoint to the endless promotions urging us see in this new age in history by partying ourselves into a stupor, offering a grim reminder of what could go wrong on the very first day. It wasn't the Millennium Bug, but on a personal level its implications were every bit as apocalyptic - the possibility of causing some horrific life-changing accident as we slid back home in the early hours of January 1st. But even while imparting the usual lessons about human vulnerability, those inflated ideas about human potential had clearly gotten to DETR too, and had them as high as a kite. Watching "What's It Like?", it feels as though showing off and making some kind of artistic statement was on the agenda as much as convincing the public that a new millennium was not an invitation to let down their guard about drinking and driving. Compare it to "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", in which the artiest piece on offer was the David Anderson-animated "Mark", a pastiche of Anderson's 1989 short "Deadsy"; there, the surreal visuals were nothing less than a ghoulishly playful means of delivering an exceptionally grim message, placing the narration halfway between a macabre campfire tale and a feverish nightmare. "What's It Like?", by contrast, has an air of thoroughgoing solemnity, its surreal visuals being expressionistic efforts to encapsulate the despair of its subjects. The results feel portentous, as if DETR's objective was to create less a series of public information films than of full-on arthouse vignettes.

Still, as the UK's last major drink driving campaign of the 1990s, a decade in which D&DWL had largely dominated, "What's It Like?" stands out as the last hurrah for a particular variety of PIF. Come the year 2000 and things were never going to be the same. The THINK! campaign was already in motion and set to inherit the mantle as the official face of British road safety. For all of those expressionistic trappings, "What's It Like?" has more in common with D&DWL, with its emphasis on broken souls and long-term emotional consequences, and also its willingness to incorporate flavour and creativity into the mix, ingredients that would become considerably scarcer under the THINK! regime. It reuses a familiar staple of D&DWL, the monologue, although the barebones authenticity of "Fireman's Story" was not desired here. Despite using a more artificial presentation than the Ken Stott PIF, the fiendish twist is that the testimonies in WIL might actually be genuine, or at least that's the conclusion we're being steered toward. "David", the most notable entry of the campaign thanks to its troubling mise-en-scene, included the ominous caption, "This is not an actor", in some edits, which could mean multiple things. It's a safe bet that "David" is probably not his real name, although I'm otherwise inclined to take the campaign at face value and accept this as a legitimate portrait of one man's irrepressible remorse. His performance certainly feels convincing, even if the arrangement has an obviously staged quality. Take that prison guard who's lingering in the backdrop - are they also the real deal? What are they there for, other than atmosphere?

The WIL campaign was comprised of four different segments, three of which focussed on the perspective of the perpetrator, opening with a title card posing chilling question "What's it like to kill someone?" Despite the luridness of this question, the featured individuals aren't murderers. As they point out repeatedly throughout, there was no intent, although in practice this doesn't change the fact that they were responsible for someone's death. The "David" PIF stands out since he's the only interviewee who is visibly imprisoned as a result of his actions. The other two, John and Terry, are featured in a more generic setting, the emphasis being purely on their emotional entrapment. "David" is clearly looking to put the fear of potential legal repercussions into viewers; its titular character actively alludes to it when he speaks of the impact on his family and his children's inability to comprehend the magnitude of what he's done. But the ultimate goal is to have those literal and figurative imprisonments blur into one - the symmetrical, coldly institutional backdrop has a queasy uncanniness, appearing to stretch out into infinity, echoing the subject's statements about there being no way out from his remorse. David opens his monologue with the word "Loneliness", which carries a certain irony when we consider that he is the only interviewed perpetrator who is not depicted alone. That prison guard is only metres away, yet there's an aloofness to his presence. He's an impassive bystander who exists as part of that institutional scenery, emphasising the disconnect that exists between David and the external world. Meanwhile, the camera's alternating proximity to David, which shifts from extreme close-ups to chilly remoteness, suggests an anguish active and throbbing, haunting and regarding its subject from all ranges. The air in here is of a nightmare from which you can't awaken; nothing quite seems real or solid, everything feels oppressive and threatening, the most terrible things are intangible but omnipresent. 

These images of David are so striking in themselves, and the story he tells so powerful that one has to wonder if they would have sufficed on their own, without the need for all the arthouse bells and whistles. But the PIF insists on getting befuddling, punctuating the monologue with an array of abstract visuals in grey and washed-out colours. Among these disconcerting sights (in the full 79 second edit) are hands reaching from the blackness, naked bodies bending and contorting, a splash of red stuff and...uh, eels from the looks of it? The eels are the one detail I can't make sense of - I'm not sure what purpose they serve, other than providing a visual that might make a few viewers squirm. But undressed bodies are an obvious shorthand for human vulnerability and the red splashes a stand-in for blood-soaked carnage. Other images are more direct - a bend in the road with an ominous haze rising above it (the presumable spot at which the accident occurred, refashioned to look a little more like something from a horror picture), a limp hand lying in the grass. WIL follows the D&DWL model, in largely shying away from images of the crash itself; one sequence, a POV shot from a driver's seat that flips into a spinning motion (excised from the 30 second version), brings us teasingly close to the action whilst showing us very little. This, as the monologue makes evident, signifies David's unending efforts to go back and revisit the life-changing incident in his mind, attempting in vain to come to terms with it through memories that are blurred, inaccessible and confounding to his present self. The abstract imagery might seem superfluous to some tastes, and perhaps a little ostentatious, but I appreciate the spooky character they bring to the WIL series. They are attempts to represent what is unspeakable, things that would ordinarily exist only between the cracks of a more conventional monologue.

When the WIL campaign was doing the rounds in December '99, I had yet to develop my love-hate relationship with the public information film. Back then, I straight-up hated them, and quickly learned to change the channel whenever that grim title card appeared. The "David" PIF I happened to tune into right in the middle of, so by the time I'd processed what the ad was about, it was too late to back out of it. I remember thinking then that the closing title, which implored the viewers, "Please don't drink and drive", seemed oddly quaint, less the voice of authority imparting instructions on how to behave than a woeful voice pleading with us to not keeping making the same mistakes when we really should have gotten the message following years of tireless D&DWL campaigning. Despite its macabre energy, I've always felt that WIL, more so than any of the D&DWL installments, betrayed an underlying sense of weary frustration, as if disappointed by the fact that drink driving PIFs were still necessary as we entered the year 2000. In that context, all those abstract images could be perceived as laborious attempts to grab attention more than anything else. Then again, the fourth PIF in the WIL series, "Mike and Joy", opened by asking a different question, and closing with what was effectively the punchline to the entire campaign: "This millennium take a moment to think about the rest of your life". No matter how far we think we've come as a civilisation or a species, we remain as fragile as we've ever been. One thoughtless decision is all it takes to bring our time to a smothering still.

Mountain of Madness (aka I Got Cabin Fever, It's Burning In My Brain...)

The DVD commentary for The Simpsons' "Mountain of Madness" (episode 4F10) is a bizarre one for sure - and not because of the presence of a layperson who's sitting in on the recording because he won a contest (it's actually quite charming to hear this guy, who sounds nervous as hell when he's introduced, come out of his shell and interact more with the crew as the commentary goes on). We learn that this episode had a troubled development at the scripting stage - it made it to air on February 2nd 1997, but only after being subject to an "infamous rewrite", necessitated by what showrunner Josh Weinstein describes as their mishandling of the "finely tooled crazy German machine" that is a John Swartzwelder script. It's observed that the episode has "a really crazy, crazy plot", and yet we're told that it could have been crazier still. The story underwent a continuous revamp, with Burns and Homer's hallucinations going to considerably more feverish places in intermediary drafts, yet for as infamous as this rewrite purportedly was, it seems that no one who worked on it can remember what those preliminary efforts were all about. When we get to the scene where they trapped individuals have dressed a couple of snowmen in their own outer garments, there's a LOT of hushed murmuring about the "big crazy thing" that was supposed to happen around this point, but no elaboration on what that big crazy thing actually was. That is, until Weinstein concedes, "I think it was so crazy that I banished it from my brain." Swartzwelder himself has this thing about not doing DVD commentaries, so it doesn't help that he's not there to weigh in on his original vision. "Mountain of Madness" once reached deep into the mouth of insanity, but it was an insanity the world was clearly not meant to know.

It's funny really, because from my perspective "Mountain of Madness" has always been one of the more moderate entries of Season 8, which I don't exactly mean as a criticism. It's a solidly entertaining episode, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it and it yields more than its fair share of classic Simpsons moments. But given how experimental and, at times, borderline dangerous this particular season was determined to get, "Mountain of Madness" feels like The Simpsons working squarely within its comfort zone. I would have guessed that it was purpose-designed as a safer installment right from the start, to balance out the more daring likes of "You Only Move Twice" and "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase". The basic trajectory is easy enough to predict, the premise is an all-purpose one that could have fitted in with just about any season (although the climactic detail with the so-called rocket house bursting from the snow is very much of the latter half of Weinstein and Oakley's era), and we don't learn anything radically new or interesting about the characters along the way (with the possible exception of Lenny and Carl). It has a reassuring air of familiarity, playing as it does like a variation on the Season 1 episode, "The Call of The Simpsons", which also had the family breaking off into different splinter groups whilst enduring the perils of the great outdoors. If anything I'd say that "Mountain of Madness" tones down the absurdities of its Season 1 counterpart, which by its third act has swelled into a pure farce - there's nothing quite as outrageous in here as Homer being mistaken for Bigfoot, or as bizarre as that subplot with Maggie being adopted by a sleuth of grizzly bears. Instead, "Mountain of Madness" approaches its scenario from a darker, more sinister angle, and to that end its understated hand proves a sensible choice. The central breakdown of sanity isn't oversold to us, manifesting not as a collection of wild hallucinations, but as a creeping sense of apprehension that's at once patently silly but also genuinely eerie. The finished script gives us all the claustrophobic fun of a classic cabin fever set-up while keeping a beady knowing eye on its numerous contrivances.

"Mountain of Madness" opens with the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant running a fire drill, and it becoming painfully apparent that, if this were a real fire, everyone except Burns and Smithers would have been toast. Burns concludes that his employees are lacking in a sense of cooperative spirit, and remedies this by ordering them to attend a corporate retreat at the Mt. Useful National Park. There, the full personnel is divided off into pairs via a random draw and challenged with hiking to a cabin located somewhere up in the mountain, with the carrot that the cabin contains a buffet of sandwiches and moderately priced champagne, and the stick that the last pair to arrive will be fired. A slight flaw in the arrangement is that the plant has an odd number of employees, with Smithers being left without a partner while Homer is paired up with Burns. Burns, naturally, has no intention of playing fairly at his own game - he and Homer arrive at cabin well ahead of the others, off the back of a formidable bit of teamwork that consists of Burns proposing that they cheat and Homer falling in line. (It's not clear if Homer is actually won over by Burns' "cheating is a gift Man gives himself!" spiel or if he's just saying what he thinks his boss wants to hear; either way, we get this underrated exchange: "You know, Simpson, you're not as objectionable as you seemed when we first met." "No sir, I am not.") The two of them get to lounge around and sip champagne while everyone else is out there struggling, but their ill-gotten comfort becomes a deathtrap when an avalanche has them snowed in, leaving them enclosed in one another's company and with nowhere to go except down the rabbit hole of delusion and paranoia. Meanwhile, the rest of the Simpson family have been left to amuse themselves at the park's visitor centre, but are subsequently dragged into the action. Bart and Lisa are playing outside when they run into Smithers and offer to accompany him to the cabin, while Marge and Maggie, propelled by Bart and Lisa's apparent disappearance, end up on a chair lift with an ostensibly square park ranger who doesn't have a clue what he's doing.

I have my own theory about what might have changed during rewrites - were Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie intended to tag along from the beginning? This is a story that shouldn't logically involve them, a point the final script is fairly upfront about. Homer brings them to the mountain on a misunderstanding that's explained in the most arbitrary of terms ("I thought I was supposed to"). It's interesting, because the basic premise could, theoretically, have worked without them - the rest of the family does nothing to influence the resolution to the A-story of Homer and Burns being trapped in the cabin. I've a sneaking suspicion that the episode might have been pitched as one focussing exclusively on the plant personnel, only for the family to be worked in following a sentiment that the plant personnel were not developed or defined enough to carry an episode as an ensemble. Perhaps even more importantly, the presence of the other Simpsons allows for a small but critical emotional beat that might otherwise have been lacking, in having someone with a vested interest in ensuring Homer is found (Burns of course has Smithers to be concerned for him). True, you might expect Lenny and Carl to be at least a little worried about their friend and colleague, but they're clearly too wrapped up in whatever it is that's going on with them. When Lenny and Carl tell Smithers that Homer and Burns are unaccounted for, their phrasing is ominous but their tone entirely casual, as if the implications haven't fully sunk in.

The theme of the episode is teamwork (at least on the surface), and the narrative structure is basically an excuse to get the characters divided off into various duos and threesomes and see what hilarious interactions ensue. Homer and Burns aren't such a novel pairing - only last season we had "Homer The Smithers", which for a large stretch was practically a two-hander between Homer and his tyrannical boss. There is even a precedent for the two being able to enjoying one another's company in a more casual setting, in "Dancin' Homer" of Season 2. It is, though, unusual to see Smithers having any kind of prolonged interaction with the Simpsons children. He's met them on enough prior occasions, and he's even been an unlikely source of help to them, as seen in "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacey" and "Sideshow Bob Roberts", but this is the first time he's been in a situation where he's effectively responsible for them. Again, nothing overly dramatic or unexpected comes of it - Bart and Lisa predictably prove more of a hindrance than a help, and Smithers, who's clearly not used to dealing with children but has too much of a moral compass to leave them out in the wilderness, gets increasingly exasperated by their antics - but their dynamic is nice and entirely natural, serving as a lighter counterpoint to the creepier stuff going on in the cabin. Smithers needs the order and structure of an office environment (or else Burns' mansion) in which to thrive; as alien to him as the chaos of children is the chaos of nature, to the point that the abundance of disordered mountain wildlife Lisa keeps bringing to his attention seems symptomatic of some kind of wider cosmic malfunction. This whole subplot culminates in a fittingly quirky gag, with Smithers expressing his resignation to the disarray by standing by as a moose goes up in flames (albeit a stuffed one). Lisa, by the way, is the episode's MVP, for facilitating The Simpsons' first ever onscreen sighting of a shrew. Shrews are a hugely underrated animal, and I wish we saw them represented in animation more often.

The characters who have the most intriguing arc going on, however, are Lenny and Carl, who were paired up in the random draw - much to the chagrin of Carl, who spends the episode cheesed off with Lenny for reasons that are never explained. This is where "Mountain of Madness" does get slightly radical, since it attempts to delve a little deeper into the dynamics of Homer's two most prominent co-workers and allow them some one-to-one interaction time. Up until now, Lenny and Carl weren't given massively distinctive personalities; they were a duo who'd largely blended into one another, and they nearly always had Homer to bounce off of (often they played the comparative straight men to his cruder foibles). There was some precedent for making Carl the tetchier of the two and Lenny the more guileless (see "Homer The Great" of Season 5), but "Mountain of Madness" saw the origin of a running gag that deliberately played on how much we don't know about these characters. We'd be seeing a good deal more of Lenny and Carl in the years to come (much like Moe, they were beneficiaries of Barney's soft retirement as Homer's best friend), and in a few seasons' time this joke was taken to greater extremes still, with gags based around the implication that Lenny and Carl had this really complicated, emotionally-charged relationship, the nature of which wasn't entirely clear. Were they friends? On and off lovers? Heterosexual life partners? What was evident is that they had a prevailing co-dependency, stemming from the arch observation that they were seldom seen apart. The real theme of "Mountains of Madness" is characters being stuck together and getting on each other's nerves, and Lenny and Carl have been joined at the hip in a meta sense for quite some time; their mysterious head-butting in this episode warrants no deeper explanation than that. This non-stop discord doesn't prevent them from being a functional duo - it's noteworthy that Lenny and Carl would have been the rightful winners, since they were the first pair to make it to the correct location without cheating, not realising that the cabin had been buried in an avalanche. They were also the first pair to scout out the incorrect cabin, the ranger station that everyone convenes in when it transpires to be the only visible building in the mountain (were they disappointed by the lack of sandwiches and moderately priced champagne?). Clearly, Lenny and Carl are a formidable team, whether they're at ease with that or not. It adds an extra layer of injustice to the ending, when Burns fires Lenny for being the last to make it inside the cabin (even if it doesn't stick) and Lenny winds up at the bottom of a hole. That's the other major gag that "Mountains of Madness" gets off the ground - the one about Lenny being a victim of endless physical misfortune. That much he endures without Carl's camaraderie.

The cleverest stroke of irony, in an episode centred on the havoc that arises when trust and cooperation break down, is that the avalanches are triggered by instances of Homer and Burns being perfectly in sync - firstly, when they chink their champagne glasses, and secondly when, having tunnelled their way through the snow pile caused by the previous avalanche, they high five one another in celebration, only to be buried underneath an even deeper pile. It's as sure a sign as any that the alliance is an unholy one. In Homer's case, it's practically Faustian - notice how, at the peak of their delusions, Burns has assumed an uncannily devilish look, complete with fiery red attire and a pointed poking device? Burns was the one who lured Homer over to the dark side, promising him champagne and job security in exchange for twisting the rules; entrapment with his boss becomes a chilling wake-up call as to what kind of innately treacherous being he was cozying up to this entire time. You could apply a similar reading from Burns' perspective, with the avalanches being a karmic retribution for his lowering himself to Homer's standards - the fateful chink was, after all, in response to Burns' gratitude for learning Homer's trick for retrieving a bowl of dip from further up the table without having to get up (by stomping his foot on the table and moving it with the vibrations). If you ally yourself with a boor, you'll get boorishness. Each man regards the other as a ticking time bomb, although we mostly see the situation from Homer's point of view. Clearly, Burns is the more dangerous because he's the more susceptible to cabin fever (presumably because he has a lower threshold for goodwill to begin with). As was noted when I covered "Homer The Smithers", one of the refreshing things about the Burns-Homer pairing is that Burns tends to be so out of touch that he sometimes gives Homer the chance to be the (comparative) straight man. Homer manages to stay grounded for much of the ordeal, and he proves the more adept survivalist; it's off the back of his labour that they're able to tunnel their way out of that first snow pile, something to which Burns is too feeble to contribute. While they have a joint hand causing in the avalanches, Burns has a far more poisonous influence on their deterioration inside the cabin, twisting Homer's innocuous suggestion that they keep themselves occupied by building snowmen into the megalomaniacal endeavour of building "real men, out of snow!" Why go to the lengths of constructing elaborate fantasies when you can convey Burns' slide into insanity through subtler, more unsettling means, such as his grotesque observation on having assembled his so-called real man out of snow: "206 bones, 50 miles of small intestine, full pouting lips...why, this fellow is less a snowman than a god!"

"Mountain of Madness" is at its best wherever it's able to suggest a vague but pervasive sense of the weird and the sinister that goes hand in hand with the monotonous and the mundane. Despite the ranger's insistence that "budget cutbacks have forced us to eliminate anything in the least bit entertaining", the second and third best gags of the episode both involve the collection of hellish exhibits at the park visitor centre. The second best is that Smokey the Bear animatronic that asks visitors "Only WHO can prevent forest fires?" and is apparently programmed to tell them they're wrong no matter what answer they pick. The third is that ancient park film featuring the incomprehensible narration of naturalist John Muir (or, more accurately, Marge's quietly perturbed reaction to it). My pick for the episode's zenith, however, is a moment that I rarely ever see brought up in discussions - when Burns tries using a telegraph machine to contact the outside world, only to get through to a machine housed in yet another hellish exhibit, this one in the Springfield Museum (which is as deserted as ever), alongside a neglected mannequin of Samuel Morse. The specific detail that sells this gag for me, more so than the mannequin's lifeless eyes and the cobwebs dangled across its shoulders, is that static smile visible behind its slightly misaligned beard and moustache. That's a smile that really haunted me in my youth, seeming to greet Burns' unheard distress call with equal parts obliviousness and taunting. What better face for the rescue that will not be coming, from a town that packed all functional communication into a museum exhibit and forgot about it long ago?

In fact, there seems to be something of a running theme about human (or bear) shaped objects taking on a mocking life of their own. The snow gods that Burns and Homer build (and dress in their own clothing) have the same uncanniness:

Homer, who at this point is still hanging onto some fraying line of sanity, reminds us that they're only snowmen. Burns, though, insists that there's more going on behind those button eyes: "Snowmen have peepers. Peepers to watch for a moment of weakness and then BAFF! Comes the knock of the wood on the head and we're down!" If Burns is sounding oddly convincing it's because in a way, he's right. The snowmen have become monstrous reflections of their decaying mental state; Burns senses that things are bound to get ugly because he's projecting onto the snowmen his own escalating desire to put a block of wood to Homer's skull at his first sign of weakness (and his suspicion that Homer would like to do the same to him). Homer asks what they should do; Burns indicates that their alliance is off, with the ominous response: "Oh, wouldn't you like to know..." And just like that, Burns has slipped into the well of raving paranoia, and he's taken Homer down with him.

This is hair-raising stuff, but at its heart it knows how silly it is. The situation hinges on a string of absurdities that are either casually hand-waved or played at as low-key a level as possible. Firstly, it is a bit daft that the avalanche should be activated by a small chink of champagne glasses, when Homer's repeated pounding on the table just a few moments prior wasn't enough to tip the snow over, but I suppose we've already accounted for that in a symbolic sense. Just as convenient is that no one else climbing the mountain should notice these avalanches or be affected by them in any way, something the script cheekily breezes past by including a brief, knowing moment with Lenny asking Carl if he heard something, and Carl churlishly suggesting that Lenny might be schizophrenic. The biggest contrivance, though, is one that's never made even vaguely explicit, which is that Homer and Burns couldn't have been stuck inside that cabin for more than a few hours maximum. Most of the episode takes place in the course of a single day, and there's not even a hint of the skies beginning to darken by the end. I'm sure your perception of time is going to differ when you're trapped indoors with minimal stimulation and you can't even see if it's still daylight out or not, but nevertheless, it didn't take Homer and Burns long to crack, did it? All this fuss because they couldn't tolerate a single afternoon in each other's enforced company.

The crisis intensifies as Homer and Burns enter into a stalemate of silent, mutual suspicion. Homer thinks that Burns is trying to hypnotise him (but not in the good Las Vegas way), while Burns assumes Homer must be plotting to murder him. (More specifically, he thinks Homer wants to kill him so he can ride his corpse down the mountain to safety. A deliriously absurd notion, and yet Homer did in fact ride a corpse down a mountain a mere season later in "King of The Hill". Both scripts were written by Swartzwelder, so I'll assume either he took inspiration from his earlier work or he has an unhealthy obsession.) As each looks into the other's eyes, what he's really gazing into is the abyss of his own brain-rotting paranoia. The "Congratulations Teamworkers" banner hangs in tatters in the backdrop; strip away the tenets of civilisation and it really is every person for themselves. By now, the script has exercised enough restraint to finally allow a dash of feverish fantasy to mingle with the cold realities. Burns openly declares his desire to vanquish Homer, and is perceived by Homer as having amassed his own army of pickelhaube-wearing snowmen. Homer desperately counters that he has powers of his own - political powers! - whereupon Burns perceives him as being flanked by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Ghandi and what I'm guessing is Tutankhamun. The two armies advance on one another, but of course Burns and Homer are the only ones there. After a spectacularly uncoordinated tussle, Burns manages to rupture the propane tank that's heating the cabin, causing it to ignite and propel the entire building out of the snow. At which point both men immediately, almost incongruously call out to one another for reassurance - all it took was the awakening of an external threat to remind them that there are bigger, more destructive forces out there than the two of them. Meanwhile, everyone else has arrived safely at the ranger station and finally realised that Burns and Homer are missing. They are about to organise a search party when the rocket house suddenly comes hurtling in their direction. A brutal collision seems all but inevitable, until the propane abruptly burns out and the cabin glides to a gentle halt. Burns and Homer emerge in one piece, dishevelled and thoroughly humbled in front of everyone who managed to make it to the cabin (albeit the wrong one) off the back of honest teamwork.

Burns, though, isn't willing to let his ascendancy go - as Homer heads outside to embrace the family he feared he'd never see again, he stays put inside the cabin, managing to claim its cursed confines as his trophy by reasserting his condition that the last employee to enter gets fired. Lenny has the misfortune of being right at the back of the ensuing stampede, although even Burns seems to realise the pettiness of this move, since he rescinds it immediately after, thus keeping the status quo safely in order. (In truth, it was a stroke of good fortune that Lenny fell down that hole, otherwise he might have mouthed off at Burns and not been so easily forgiven.) The final sequence is another variation on a Simpsons standard (previously observed in "Black Widower" and "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show"), in which characters laugh in exaggerated ways that barely disguise the traumas of the preceding 20 minutes - an apprehension made all the more salient by having Homer and Burns intermittently stop laughing to glower warily at one another. There's also a bit of sly meta humor in Burn's observation that, "When you've been through something like that with a person, you never want to see that person again." By the next episode, he'll have memory holed the entire affair, as he has every prior Homer encounter, and from his perspective it will be as though he and Homer never met. It's one way of protecting yourself from dealing with the lingering psychological horrors. Still, he's right to be leery, since there's is no escape from the broader entrapment that will make Homer a source of trouble for him again before too long. Sorry Burns, but you're stuck with Homer. No one heard your SOS.

Bushwhacked (aka The Thin Khaki Line Between Morality And Depravity)

I can't be the only person who sincerely wanted the Wet Bandits from the first two Home Alone movies to have a happy ending. Those guys had already suffered enough, you know? They endured the wrath of Kevin McCallister and his custom-made torture devices, and what's more, they endured it twice, the 1990s being a time when sequels weren't expected to do much more than recreate the most popular beats from the previous film, only bigger and louder, and go to the city. Here's something I'll forever say in defence of Harry and Marv - they were not, initially, the kind of villains who'd set out to be cruel or violent toward a child. Kevin provoked that behaviour out of them later on with his own extreme cruelty, but the scene where they narrowly avoided running Kevin over and were shaken up about it clearly established that they had some moral boundaries in the beginning. They were not sociopaths, which is more than we can obviously say for Kevin himself. That kid had an uncanny talent for torture; he could be John Kramer in the making. To a point, I can understand why he didn't attempt to get the police involved, as they had already proven themselves incompetent. But if he was really that much of a prodigy when it came to devising booby traps, then couldn't he have found a way to snare the burglars humanely and with minimal pain? The cruelty, for Kevin, was precisely the point. He revelled in it. His cruelty didn't come from nowhere - he had his own problems to deal with, in the form of an obnoxious and abusive family who, owing to Hollywood superficiality, are forgiven way too easily at the end. Harry and Marv were merely the sacrificial lambs in that most heinous of processes. There's an observation in the Virgin Film Guide review of the original Home Alone that I feel hits the nail right on the head: "This could be the first comedy - it's certainly the first holiday film - which focuses on child abuse. As Kevin shoots pellets into the intruders and takes a blowtorch to their heads, he's directing the hostility he feels toward his neglectful parents at these two guys." (4th edition, p.346-47) Harry and Marv were no angels, but there were greater evils than them at work in this world. Cut them a little slack, alright?

Which is what makes Bushwhacked, an unassuming family comedy from 1995, so very important. The film stars Daniel Stern, better known for playing Marv, the more guileless half of the Wet Bandit duo. Here, he plays a character named Max Grabelski, who heavily recalls his earlier shtick as Marv, and it turns out there might - might - be a wonderful reason for that. For a long time, whenever this film was brought up in online discussions, Dame Rumor was abuzz with the hearsay that this was was originally conceived as a Home Alone spin-off chronicling Marv's further adventures after his traumatic run-ins with Kevin. Somewhere down the line he apparently attempted to go straight, got a job as a courier and, through a string of wacky misunderstandings, was mistaken for a renowned scout master and saddled with a troop of over-inquisitive charges. Seems like a logical progression for a thwarted housebreaker. That the names "Marv" and "Max" are so similar is certainly enough to fuel suspicion. Oh, and get this - Stern's Home Alone co-star, Macaulay Culkin, was to have made a surprise cameo, as the punchline of the entire piece. He'd have shown his evil smirking face, just as Marv had rebuilt his life and salvaged his self-esteem, to remind him that there were some demons he had still yet to conquer (it was around about this time that Culkin took his lengthy hiatus from acting, so in another universe this might even have been his last appearance as a child actor). Sadly, Dame Rumor is frequently full of shit, and what we're largely hearing now is that this was never more than hearsay, with "Max" being scripted as a separate entity from Marv all along (the film's Wikipedia and IMDB pages previously stated the abandoned Home Alone connection as fact, but both have since backed down from that position). Yeah, I feel your disappointment, but we shouldn't let that stop us. I'm all in favour of making Bushwhacked a canon Home Alone sequel anyway. 

It just makes perfect sense to me. If only one Wet Bandit could end up happily, you would want it to be Marv, wouldn't you? Harry was played by Joe Pesci, and as such he was always going to exude some level of that Goodfellas-grade intimidation. Marv, though, was way more of a child than Kevin was - remember when Harry was talking about all of the stereos and expensive jewellery they might find in the McCallisters' home, and Marv's eyes lit up at the thought of all the toys? And when Harry reminded him that he was afraid of the dark? And how, during that how escapade in New York, he just wanted to make it to Central Park Zoo? Marv was the closest thing to an innocent in the Home Alone equation (an equation in which just about everyone, children included, are complete and utter dickwads). He was precious and should have been protected, and what better way to accomplish that than to give him his own movie where he's lost in the wilderness and gets mauled by a grizzly bear? You don't even have to squint too hard to see how this movie would have functioned as a vehicle for Marv - it's hardly surprising that the rumor, irrespective of how much merit it actually had, gained as much traction as it did.

If we are to accept Bushwhacked as a legitimate extension of the Home Alone continuity, then the most obvious question is where is Harry in all of this? Presumably the Wet Bandits (or Sticky Bandits, as Marv later attempted to re-brand them) have disbanded, and it wouldn't surprise me if Harry had initiated the break-up - when you're in the cat burglary game, Marv maybe isn't the hottest wingman material, owing to his annoying tendency to voluntarily confess when apprehended, and his prioritising of notoriety over discretion. Eventually Harry would get sick of it, and Marv clearly wouldn't be able to mastermind these ambitious plundering schemes on his own, so getting a real job would be his only recourse. The second biggest question is why is he now calling himself Max? Well, given his criminal history, it figures that he might want to create some distance from his former identity. Speaking of which, Marv's tendency toward voluntarily confessing might well have worked in his favour, enabling him to cop some plea bargain that had him back on the streets less than three years after the events of Lost in New York. You see, just about everything here is watertight. In the end, we're left with only one plot detail that requires any particularly substantial suspension of disbelief. Following his experiences in Home Alone and Lost in New York, I would fully expect Marv to have PTSD flashbacks on finding himself surrounded by children. He's not thrilled at being stuck with them, sure, but he doesn't seem in the least bit wary of anything the kids themselves could potentially do to him. He possibly appreciates that Kevin McCallister was an abnormally sociopathic child and that kids in general are harmless, but still, after two pictures of extensive punishment at the hands of a grade schooler, you might have anticipated a slightly more visceral reaction. But then the Home Alone series in general called for copious amounts of suspension of disbelief, particularly the second one. The notion that the McCallisters would lose Kevin all over again and that he would end up in New York City, where he would just so happen to cross paths with the Wet Bandits, out of all the places in America they might potentially have fled to, was one hell of a contrivance to swallow. Anything that happens in Bushwhacked is peanuts by comparison.

And again, it's all so intuitively correct. If Marv was to have his own redemption story, then doesn't it only seem fitting that it should entail him forging a connection with a group of children? Under a different set of circumstances, Marv could have been really good with children, given that he is such a child at heart himself. It seems a tragic twist of fate that his former life was derailed through his enmity with an unnaturally diabolical child; for him to find renewed purpose and fulfilment through his friendship with a much nicer set of children frankly feels like the cosmos balancing itself out. As a premise and as a sequel, Bushwhacked is absolutely sound.

Having established all of that, how does Bushwhacked hold up as a film on its own merits?

(I know trailers routinely borrow themes from other movies, but that use of the Back To The Future theme is weird.)

The term "product of its time" would not be an unfair assessment. Even without its alleged connection to the Home Alone cinematic universe, Greg Beeman's film feels unmistakably like the kind of family picture Hollywood favoured in the years immediately following Home Alone.  Oh baby, did Home Alone have a lot to answer for. The surprise success of the Culkin flick led to a barrage of like-minded comedies centred on cunning kids having the upper hand over bungling adults - from your Dennis the Menace (1993) to your Baby's Day Out (1994), to your Blank Check (1994), the early-90s truly were the age of the idiot adult. By the time Bushwhacked came along the formula had inevitably worn out its welcome; the film did little to impress critics and left nary a dent in zeitgeist. (I'm not sure if Bushwhacked even got a theatrical release in the UK; if it did, then it must have been an extremely low-key one. I personally didn't know of the film's existence until the early 00s, when it showed up routinely on Sky television.) The thing is, Stern is an exceptionally fun idiot adult, and Bushwhacked will always have that in its favour.

The premise of Bushwhacked has Marv - or "Max", as he'd sooner we now call him - framed for the murder of millionaire Reinhart Bragdon (a cartoonishly oily Anthony Heald), to whom he'd been delivering a succession of shady packages, and evading arrest by FBI agent Palmer (Jon Polito). Knowing that a final package is still due for delivery at Bragdon's cabin in Devil's Peak, Max flees for the mountains in the hopes of intercepting it and clearing his name - only for things to get all the more complicated when he's mistaken for an expert survivalist hired to accompany a Ranger Scouts troop on an overnight hike, and forced to accept six young travelling companions so as not to blow his cover. Pursuing him all the while is Palmer, who has joined forces with seasoned outdoorsman Jack Erikson (Brad Sullivan), the actual person hired to lead the troop. Needless to say, Max is as out of his depth in the wilderness as he is everywhere else in the world, and the kids begin to have their doubts about his credentials when he makes such potentially lethal rookie mistakes as attempting to pet a young grizzly bear and confusing a bee hive for a pine cone. As you probably expected, there are multiple set pieces that involve Max enduring some manner of physical punishment for his idiocy. The script (earlier drafts of which were reportedly penned by the Farrelly brothers, but their names were taken off the final product) also incorporates a few instances of edgy scatological humor, notably a sequence where Max gives the kids an enthusiastic pep talk on the art of pissing out of doors: "Eat your veggies, eat your starches! Lean back, boys...GOLDEN ARCHES!" You won't feel proud of yourself for laughing at much of Bushwhacked, but that's par for the course with this type of movie. Did you feel proud of yourself for laughing when Kevin fired his pellet gun into Harry's testicles in Home Alone? Or when Baby Bink kicked Fat Tony in the groin?

Bushwhacked is crude and lowbrow, but it's nowhere near as viciously mean-spirited as Home Alone, and that much puts it at something of a disadvantage if we're determined to view it as a furthering of the Home Alone universe. After all, we've already seen Max (Marv) take on worse. Once you've endured Kevin McCallister's labyrinth of horrors twice over, what terror can the wilderness possibly hold? A tenderfoot? Not this tiger! As I recall, his bare feet were on the receiving end of some of the most horrifying traps in that kid's arsenal and he just kept walking. Bushwhacked is a relatively gentle adventure, right down to the fairly agreeable bunch of kids Max has to contend with, none of whom are anywhere near as horrible as Kevin, or indeed any of the children in the McCallister household. It also has to be said that none of them have the same force of personality as Kevin either. The child actors all do a good job, and their chemistry with Stern is likeable, but somewhat inevitably for a script that's having to juggle with six different kids at once, there are points where their personalities appear to blend into one another. The kid with the most distinct presence is Milton Fishman (Ari Greenberg), the bookish nerd of the group who's constantly consulting the scout manual for guidance and is in one scene tasked with overcoming his fear of plummeting off of a rope bridge. Another child, Kelsey Jordan (Janna Michaels), is notable for being the troop's sole female, although her personality never much transcends her designation as token girl. Then there's Gordy (Blake Bashoff), who I think is supposed to be the lead kid, and whose mother (Ann Dowd), manages the troop's activities at their suburban base. Otherwise we've got the kid who takes the occasional ribbing for his weight but is really efficient in an emergency, the pint-sized Scrappy Doo type with the over-protective father who wouldn't sign his permission slip, and Gordy's sidekick whom I'm forever confusing with Gordy himself. Not the most distinguished young assembly, but tolerable company for ninety minutes.

Max, naturally, isn't keen on having them for even five. The kids could only be dead-weight on his mission to Devil's Peak; they also come dangerously close to exposing him as a fraud straight off the bat when they insist on calling him "Spider", understanding this to be the nickname of their scout leader, and then immediately demand to know the backstory. (Max: "Because I once killed a kid who dropped a spider onto my face who called me "Spider" one time too many!") He attempts to ditch the troop, but quickly discovers that the wilderness is scary and that he cannot go it alone. A role reversal occurs, in which Max becomes dependent on the children's expertise for his own survival. Meanwhile, back at civilisation, news reaches the parents that the man with whom they entrusted their children is really a suspected killer on the run from the law, and they handle it as calmly as you would imagine. Like Home Alone, Bushwhacked deals humorously with situations that reflect a parent's darkest nightmares, and are really chilling indictments of their own failure to keep their guard up at all times about the whereabouts of their children and the company they keep. Max might not be a killer, but he's probably not the first person you'd want as a role model for your kids. He's a few dirty habits, including that he's a smoker (something that Marv was not, although he did share Max's gum-chewing habit). He knows all those vulgar pissing chants, he's obviously sleazy enough to endanger the children by duping them into accompanying him to Devil's Peak, and he's made some questionable choices in life. Even if we don't take into account his possible history as a career cat burglar, we know that he willingly entered into a crooked deal with Mr Bragdon (for which he cites boredom as his primary motive). The adult community routinely dismisses him as a lowlife, from Erikson's relatively genteel assessment that he's an "inconsiderate person" when he catches Max's vehicle in a disabled parking space, to Bragdon's more damning opinion (when it's revealed that he faked his death to cover up his money laundering, and purposely set Max up to take the fall) that Max was the perfect patsy because he's a loser and expendable to society. The kids offer judgements of their own when Max opens up to them about how he came to be involved with Bragdon (albeit framing it as a hypothetical scenario); they note that the situation was blatantly a trap, and the terms "criminal", "sleazeball" and "sucker" get tossed around. Nevertheless, when Bragdon moves to have Max killed, the kids decide that they like him regardless and come to his aid. He has, after all, provided them with a valuable crash course in the messiness of adulthood. Which is the real wilderness we're traversing here; by comparison, the ravines and the grizzlies are a doddle.

Obviously, a big part of the appeal of those Home Alone wannabes that cluttered the family cinema of the 90s lay in their being simple exercises in table turning. Among other things, adults are prone to condescending children, so what could be more cathartic to a child than seeing adults getting their comeuppance precisely because they underestimated children? But they were also tales about the fallibility of adults; the gruelling physical humiliations inflicted on the grown-ups therein were reminders that adults are a foolish, chaotic and ridiculous bunch, and this has ramifications for how children are expected to relate to them and to cope with their foibles. Even the ones whom we're encouraged to think we can trust, like our own family members, can't always be counted on to make the right calls. Home Alone itself stands out because it is such a bitter concoction, part nightmare scenario, part escapist revenge fantasy (Lost in New York doesn't work half as well because it's too much of the latter, not enough of the former). Kevin copes as well as he does with his abandonment, we suspect, because this is all just business as usual to him. Ignored by his parents, except when he is the cause of trouble, and antagonised by his older siblings, he's already accustomed to surviving in a world where he is fundamentally on his own. Kevin does not even construe his family's disappearance as abandonment, but as the overcoming of adversity on his part - they were never his protectors, just obstacles to be removed. Kevin spends much of the film grappling with a paradox - he's been forced to become an adult so early in life, and yet he still feels all of the vulnerabilities he erroneously assumes to be unique to children. Eventually, he decides that he misses his family, in spite of their failings (a development that's completely unmotivated, unless Kevin was moved by something in that Johnny Carson sketch), and tries bargaining with a higher power (a grotto Santa) to have them restored. He makes his peace with the fallibility of adults by coming to understand the ways in which they remain as vulnerable as children, both in a physical sense (through the torture he inflicts upon Harry and Marv) and emotionally (his conversation with Old Man Marley, whose estrangement from his son echoes Kevin's own feelings of alienation within his family). For its astute recreation of a child's-eye perception of life's injustices, Home Alone is really an impassioned plea on behalf of adults, for kids to accept that they can't be perfect and to love them anyway (unless they're designated bad guys, in which case vent your repressed hostilities like there's no tomorrow).

Still, there was one aspect of adulthood toward which Kevin maintained his innocence, or at least his indifference, that being the matter of sexuality. That was something that interested his loathsome teenage brother Buzz, who wanted to know if the Parisians went in for nude beaches, but that Kevin himself couldn't begin to comprehend. There's a scene where, exploring the forbidden items in Buzz's bedroom, he happens across a copy of Playboy magazine and briefly turns the pages, before tossing it aside with the indignant verdict, "No clothes on anybody! Sickening!" This is not so with the children in Bushwhacked. They already have a nascent interest in sexuality - one of them has even snuck along a copy of said magazine on the trip - although their understanding of how sexual intercourse works is poor, and Max proves his value to them in being the one to explain it, when they convince him that sex education is part of the scout master job description. In the film's second most infamous scene (after the pissing one), Max talks to the children about the birds and the bees using Barbie and Ken dolls that Kelsey conveniently brought along as props, in a move that reads less like the violation of childhood innocence than the uncomfortable admission that these innocuous toys were avatars for certain thorny realities all along. A moment in which the parents freak out about what this homicidal weirdo might be doing to their children is intercut with this very sequence; the real danger, it's implied, is in the initiation into the adult world, with all of its messy, awkward and confusing habits and inclinations (things that Kevin's odyssey never even touched on). Max is the very walking embodiment of that chaotic adulthood, dangerous because he doesn't always know where to apply a filter when dealing with children. Even when he's attempting to do right by them, he can't help but threaten to push them over that rockiest of edges - for example, he encourages Fishman to counteract his acrophobia by proclaiming himself a "super stud". As Erikson suggests to Palmer, there is a thin line between morality and depravity, and Max spends much of his adventure straddling it.

The children nevertheless respond to Max's unorthodox approach; his daffiness and his forthrightness cut through the adult facade and make the prospect of coming of age more accessible to them. They also learn that the greater peril lies not with adults who don't necessarily present as upstanding role models, but with adults who pretend to be upstanding as a ruse. The story's bombshell betrayal comes not with the revelation that Bragdon set Max up - that much was always patently obvious, and Max is hilariously obtuse in coming to realise it - but that Agent Palmer, an authority the kids and adults alike presumed they could trust, was in cahoots with him the whole time. In Home Alone, Harry and Marv were easily coded as the designated bad guys, because they were obvious outsiders to the McCallisters' swanky lifestyle and familial domesticity (Harry does appear to be wearing a wedding ring, and I would love to know the story behind that, but the script never goes into it). Their sacrificial lamb-iness lay in sentiments that were frankly not far-removed from Bragdon's judgement that Max is a loser and fully expendable. Bushwhacked, by contrast, extends a hand of acceptance to the unkempt misfit living somewhat beyond the pale. That's why it's so appealing to read this as Marv's redemption story - it feels like a deliberate loosening of the rules that disqualified him from the magnanimity the first couple of times around. The villains here are the law enforcer and the guy who lives in the decadent mansion; the inversion is simply delicious.

So Max becomes a metaphor for the sinuous trajectory into ripeness that lies ahead of these kids - dubious, volatile and at times beyond all comprehension, but ultimately worth embracing. Their newfound willingness to get to grips with their impending puberty is no better typified than in a sequence where the kids fight back against Bragdon and Palmer by using Kelsey's training bra as a slingshot (again, Kelsey's function is to supply all the story's best props). On that same token, Max's journey into the wilderness presents his own opportunity to come to terms with those elements of adulthood that still confound him. His problem up until now is that he has been too childish in his perspective on life; he got into his predicament with Bragdon because he treated it as a game, and not as something that could potentially get him into trouble. Having a bunch of pubescents in tow naturally teaches him a thing or two about responsibility, and as the kids rally around him with their unwavering loyalty, he responds by stepping up and aspiring to be the leader and protector they need. In one scene, he even carries the weight of all those kids upon his back (albeit not all at once) by using his own body to bridge a gap in the mountain and enabling the whole troop to pass safely across. Eye-popping physical punishment thus becomes redemptive, as an opportunity to test one's endurance, rather than a means of cutting down a would-be authority. Together they foil Bragdon and Palmer, and also save Gordy's mother, who'd gotten herself kidnapped by said villains just to up those third act stakes. In the final scene, Erikson is awarding the troop badges of honor for their heroism, including Max, who becomes a fully ordained scout leader. Max is excited to learn that his first assignment will be to accompany the kids on a camping trip to Yosemite, until Erikson specifies that he won't just be supervising his own troop, but every kid in the ceremony hall, at which point they all at rush a horrified Max and we cue the obligatory freeze frame ending. As per the old rumor, this is where Kevin McCallister would have shown up, as one of the new scouts Marv was about to have his hands full with. In another, better universe I'm sure there's even a Bushwhacked 2 where Marv persuades Harry to join them for an overnight in Death Valley, and hilarity ensues.

Bushwhacked won't impress all sensibilities, but I'm happy to live in a world where it exists. I'd be happier still if it were an official Marv adventure, but conditions are thankfully amenable enough that I can comfortably headcanon it as such (although I will stop short of attempting to mentally insert Kevin into that final stampede, since I think Marv's earned the right to be free of that little sociopathic shit forever). Would it be a controversial opinion if I admitted to regarding it as a better Home Alone sequel than Lost in New York? At the very least, I'm sure most of us can agree that it's better than Home Alone 3 (if you know me, then you'll know the one thing I obviously do love about that movie - but trust me when I say that it's the only thing).