Terwilliger Tales: Black Widower vs Black Widow

Let me tell you about these guys named Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood. In 1997 they published a book called I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, which beat the first official Simpsons episode guide book, The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family, to the shelves by several months. The book was printed by Virgin Publishing and aimed primarily at British audiences (hence the inclusion of a "Notes for Brits" sub-heading, which was rolled out for any gag that "relies on the audience's knowledge of a certain American public figure or institution for its comic impact"). As episode guide books go, it's a fairly modest example, breaking into each episode down into a series of readable, systematic notes while inevitably lacking the visual vibrancy of the official publication. Once A Complete Guide had arrived, I Can't Believe didn't have much to help it stand out above the competition; it made for nice enough supplementary material, but A Complete Guide was very much the main event. For one thing, the first edition only goes up to about two thirds of the way through Season 8, then it stops abruptly with "My Sister, My Sitter", suggesting that Martyn and Wood had a deadline to meet and couldn't wait around for the current season to end (possibly because they knew that an official guide was coming and needed to get their foot in the door first), whereas A Complete Guide provides a complete overview of the first eight seasons. Where I Can't Believe might have excelled was in the unique and personal insight Martyn and Wood could have offered as fans of the series - as the official publication, A Complete Guide gives a detailed but entirely uncritical overview of the series, and there's no room for the writers' individual personalities or perspectives to shine through; ultimately, it exists to promote the series, not critique it. Unfortunately, Martyn and Wood didn't fully realise this the first time around; each episode entry concludes with a generic "Notes" sub-heading, where the authors give their overall opinions on the episode, but these tended to be very brief, with no more than one or two sentences apiece. To be fair, I believe that the original idea was to keep everything as concise and non-intimidating as possible; I Can't Believe was aiming to be a handy reference guide, not an in-depth study. And yet occasionally the book does show tiny flashes of the authors' personalities - I picked up that they're Dexy's Midnight Runners fans and that they seem to have a particular fondness for Moe - and their work becomes all the more charming for it. In 2000, Martyn and Wood came back with a revised edition, titled I Can't Believe It's A Bigger And Better Updated Unofficial Guide, in which they finally completed Season 8 and covered all of Seasons 9 and 10. This time round, Martyn and Wood did attempt to play up the fan analysis angle a lot more; their final notes got a fair bit longer, and they seemed a lot less coy about highlighting which aspects of the episode hadn't worked for them (then again, Seasons 9 and 10 were the ugly transition point in which the series was beginning to lose some of its lustre - to my knowledge, Martyn and Wood never came out with a third edition covering Seasons 11 onward, so perhaps they bowed out as ardent viewers from here).

Oh, and just to make things unnecessarily confusing, I see that some copies of the first edition of I Can't Believe are credited to these guys named Gareth Roberts and Gary Russell. This vexes me a lot, because the revised edition, which is the only version I currently have to hand, credits the original 1997 text to Martyn and Wood. No mention of any Roberts and Russell. I do not know what the story is there (pen names, perhaps?), but if I've incorrectly credited anything in this article, then my sincerest apologies.

As a Simpsons buff, I owe a lot to Martyn or Wood (or Roberts and Russell). Back in 1997, when I was still a kid and still pretty terrified of this strange new thing called the world wide web, it was a useful guide for keeping track of which episodes went where in the series' run, and it also helped me to view the show more systematically; thanks to I Can't Believe, I became a lot more attuned to the various cultural references and subtexts in each episode, and I also compiled a long list of books and movies I wanted to check out purely because The Simpsons had referenced them. Nowadays, though, I feel that I've long outgrown I Can't Believe as a resource and I find myself getting more frustrated with the stuff that Martyn and Wood actually get wrong. Take their description of my favourite character, Sideshow Bob, for example. "Krusty's silent stooge for many years. He revealed himself to be a well-read, plummy-voiced Englishman with a mad desire to seize power, raise cultural standards, and to kill Bart." I actually think that's a very good and concise summary of Bob's character, but for one detail - namely, that SIDESHOW BOB IS NOT ENGLISH! To me, this seems like a pretty careless mistake to make, as in the episode "Brother From Another Series" Bob explicitly identifies his nationality as American, and that episode was included in the first edition of I Can't Believe. There's also the problem that Bob doesn't sound English; given that I Can't Believe is a British publication, I Can't Believe that the authors mistook Bob's accent for one of their own (unless they also think that Frasier is English, because he has the exact same accent). Then again, the specific accent that Bob has - Mid-Atlantic - does tend to trip people up. I've seen a number of Disney villains get falsely identified as Brits because they have a refined, darkly pompous way of speaking (to clear things up, Scar from The Lion King has a British accent, while Jafar from Aladdin has a Mid-Atlantic accent like Bob). In a nutshell, the Mid-Atlantic accent is a very swanky American accent associated with the US cultural elite (although its use has declined since the 1940s); it was heavily influenced by British Received Pronunciation (also known as the BBC accent), so there are some similarities, and that's where the confusion factors in. But Sideshow Bob is not a Brit, and it kind of annoys me that Wikipedia still cites Martyn and Wood's description of him as such. (Side-note: they also have Sideshow Mel down as an Englishman, but the same applies. Mel's voice is actually Dan Castellaneta's attempt at impersonating Kelsey Grammer.)

What I actually intend to investigate in this piece is one of Martyn and Wood's specific observations about a Sideshow Bob episode, "Black Widower" of Season 3. "Black Widower" is kind of a funny episode for me to delve into, as I have more of a love-hate relationship with it than I do the others of its ilk. I would emphasise that I love all of the six original Sideshow Bob episodes (and even some of the later Sideshow Bob episodes) very dearly, but let me put it this way - they have my unconditional love, so you could say they're like children to me, but "Brother From Another Series" and "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" are the favoured kids I'm sending off to college while "Black Widower" is the little bastard step-child I'm occasionally tempted to beat and lock down in the cellar. I do love it, honestly I do, but I also have a couple of serious problems with it. Firstly, Bob's motivation here really irks me, in that it's not overly clear why he wants to murder Selma, and the implied motivation (to get his hands on the money she made from investing in a mace company before society crumbled) seems highly out-of-character for him. I mean, Bob is susceptible to a number of deadly vices (Pride, Wrath and Envy being high on the list), but he never struck me as the avaricious type; that's more Mr Burns' thing. Bob wouldn't kill for money, he'd only kill for power and revenge, dammit! It would be shrewd to keep in mind that this was only Bob's second episode, so his character perhaps hadn't been fully ironed out at this point, but going from framing an abusive, self-indulgent work colleague for armed robbery to attempting to blow up a sad, pathetic lonely heart desperate for a relationship seems like an awfully extreme dive off the deep end to me. This leads me onto my second issue, which is that Selma Bouvier is by far the least deserving of Bob's intended victims. By that, I'm not suggesting that Krusty "deserved" to be framed for armed robbery or that Bart "deserved" to terrorised with countless death threats, just that Bob doesn't have the anything close to the kind of personal bad blood with Selma that he did with either of those other two characters. Bob's willingness to murder Selma seems to spring from an entirely different place to the hot bubbling fury that has him yearning to butcher Bart, or the entitled superciliousness that has him rigging mayoral elections and threatening to blow up Springfield with nuclear devices. For her part, I don't get the impression that Selma genuinely loved Bob, and I suspect she accepted his marriage proposal more out of fear of dying alone (which she very nearly did); at any rate, her love for Bob is blatantly not equal to her love for MacGyver. Nevertheless, there is something unpleasant about seeing Bob manipulate and use someone as emotionally vulnerable as Selma, only to try to bump her off once he's done. Ordinarily with these Sideshow Bob episodes, I'm firmly on Bob's side. It's clear that he's a smart, talented and charming guy who's unfortunately gone down a very self-destructive rabbit hole, and no matter how extreme or misguided his actions, I find myself genuinely feeling for him come his inevitable defeat. Not to mention that, for much of the time, there is actually the intimation of a valid point nestled beneath those nefarious schemes of his (insofar as it involves the low cultural and educational standards championed by the rest of Springfield). "Black Widower" is a rare instance in which I find myself exclaiming, "What the hell, Bob?!"

I've seen some people suggest that Bob's motivation for murdering Selma is rooted in his adverse reaction to MacGyver and the fact that Selma was all prepared to dump him over a stupid TV show. That sounds marginally more in-character for Bob than killing for money, but it implies that he was entirely sincere about everything that happened up to that point, including wanting to marry Selma, and I don't think we're intended to come away with that impression at all. Fortunately, the episode is so vague on Bob's motives that it's just about possible to interpret his murder scheme as an indirect means of exacting revenge on Bart. For one, it's clear that Bob (somehow) knew in advance that Selma was a relative of Bart's - note that he isn't in the least bit shocked or surprised to run into Bart when he finally gets to meet Selma's family. During his dinner with the Simpsons, Bob recounts how his revenge fantasies against Bart were the one thing which kept him going in prison, although he also cites the first truth of the Buddha, "Existence is suffering", as a reason for not going so far as to wish Bart dead. There's a hint there that revenge on Bart is primarily what's driving Bob, and that he'd sooner do it by increasing Bart's worldly suffering than by choking him like a chicken (um, kinky?). I've heard it said that killing Selma would be a peculiar means of getting back at Bart, because Selma isn't someone Bart would particularly miss, but to that I say, come on. Bart and Selma aren't amazingly close, but they're still family. Are you telling me that Bart wouldn't care if his aunt was murdered and he knew that a man he really disliked was responsible and stood to inherit her entire bank account? It's a moot point, however, because I don't think the episode does put quite that much thought into Bob's motivation. It's more about the fiendish intricacies of his plot and Bart's efforts to unravel it; the hows rather than the whys. As far as this episode is concerned, Bob wants to kill Selma for no deeper reason than he's evil/sociopathic. It sucks, but I think that's all there is to it.

(Anyway, fun fact - "Black Widower" first aired in April 1992 and the following month MacGyver came to an end. I'm sure that came as consolation to the freshly-imprisoned Bob.)

What of Martyn and Wood's observation? In I Can't Believe they claim that the episode was partially based on a 1987 thriller called Black Widow, "particularly nobody believing Bart's pleas that Sideshow Bob is dangerous." That could well be true, given that the majority of Bob's episodes are at least vaguely inspired by some sort of cinematic or television source, and the clue is usually right there in the title - "Cape Feare" is basically The Simpsons' remake of Martin Scorsese's remake of J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear. "Sideshow Bob Roberts" is a reference to Tim Robbins' political mockumentary Bob Roberts (1992), while "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" borrows several elements from Robert Aldrich's Cold War thriller Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977). "Brother From Another Series" was a massive in-joke based on that other series that Grammer was doing at the time. So I could buy that the plot of "Black Widower" was indeed inspired by this film called Black Widow. But then again, the title "Black Widower" feels like it could just as easily be a direct reference to the black widow spider, a creature with a reputation for sexual cannibalism (I remain hazy as to how much truth there is in that reputation). Where I'm skeptical is in Martyn and Wood's claim that the plot point about Bart being the only one to see through Bob is a nod to this film. I think it's more likely that "Black Widower" was intended to be a direct inversion on "Krusty Gets Busted", where Bart was the only character who kept the faith in Krusty - Marge's statement at the end of the episode clearly underscores the parallel.

Black Widow seems to be one of those films that's long since slipped away from popular consciousness (if it ever made much of a dent there in the first place) as I have literally never encountered any reference to this film other than Martyn and Wood's citation in I Can't Believe. I only recently took the trouble to get hold of a copy, which is probably a reflection of "Black Widower's" lowly status upon my list of favourite Bob episodes - after all, I hunted down and devoured Bob Roberts, Twilight's Last Gleaming and both Cape Fear films ages ago. It has always been at the back of my mind to check this one out, however. Do Martyn and Wood know their 1980s thriller homages or are they as on the money about this as they are about Bob's nationality? Let's find out!

Black Widow was directed by another Bob, last name Rafelson, and stars Debra Winger as Alexandra Barnes, a special agent on the trail of the mysterious Catharine Petersen (Theresa Russell), a professional gold digger who's carved out a nifty little niche for herself, whereby she seduces a unsuspecting rich man, ties the knot, dispatches him and then scarpers the instant his funds are safely in her grasp. If you've seen Addams Family Values then you'll know the drill. Barnes is initially alone in believing that all of these seemingly accidental male deaths may have a far more sinister connection but eventually talks her boss, Bruce (Terry O'Quinn), into allowing her to go undercover in the hopes of catching Petersen red-handed. Shedding her own identity, Barnes tracks Petersen to Hawaii, where the Black Widow is in the process of netting a fresh victim in the form of swanky hotel mogul Paul Nuytten (Sami Frey), and an unexpected friendship develops between the two women. When I say "unexpected", I mean "unambiguously erotic". It's clear as day that these two women feel a pull toward one another, an uneasy tension expressed in the pivotal question the film poses (but isn't too interested in answering): "She mates and she kills. But does she love?"

To answer my own central poser, then long story short, no, I don't think that Black Widow was a terribly big influence on the episode "Black Widower", or even at all, and I think what Martyn and Wood identify as homages are really just vague coincidences. All the two have in common is that they both involve homicidal deviants who enter into marriages with the intention of offing their new spouse. Oh, and some of the action in the later half takes place in a hotel. That's it! You could make the tenuous connection that Catherine, like Bob, devises murder schemes according to the individual weaknesses of her victims (for example, one of her husbands has an allergy to penicillin, so she loads his toothpaste with the stuff), but surely that same plot point could have been plucked from any number of Agatha Christie novels? As for the part about "nobody believing Bart's pleas that Bob is dangerous", again, I think that has more to do with the events of "Krusty Gets Busted" than anything anything in Rafelson's film. "Krusty Gets Busted" was clearly used as the model for this episode; both episodes follow a similar structure in which Bob's nefarious intentions are revealed two thirds in through a private outburst of manic laughter; the viewer, along with Bart, then has the remainder of the episode in which to connect the dots and piece together the incriminating evidence against Bob.

Black Widow is a strange and frustrating film, in that it spends much of its running time pointing toward a particular outcome which it subsequently doesn't deliver on - that is, the mutual attraction between Barnes and Petersen, which fizzles out so blandly that it seriously looks as if screenwriter Ronald Bass got cold feet and decided to back out and take a more conventional route. I was relieved to read Roger Ebert's review of the film and discover that he had similar sentiments. There are scenes early on where Barnes is forced to endure comments about her lack of a relationship (from Bruce, who may have self-serving reasons for wanting to impress this point on her), which looks to laying the ground for a sexual awakening when she finally comes face-to-face with Petersen, yet all hints of latent lesbianism are ultimately deflected by having her fall (unconvincingly) for Nuytten. The romance between Barnes and Nuytten is straight out of a daytime soap, and Nuytten is honestly such a one-dimensional character that it's hard to care terribly whether Petersen murders him or not - in fact, William McCroy (Nichol Willamson), our aforementioned penicillin hater, has a far more likeable screen presence and one ends up regretting that he wasn't used as the story's main male. It's in the interplay between Barnes and Petersen that the film assumes an odd and beguiling life of its own, one that takes it above the film's routine thriller elements and into something more intriguing - an exploration of the dark magnetism of the Black Widow and what it is to live in her shadowy, merciless world. These are issues the film doesn't delve into, yet it lingers just long enough for us to pick up on Barnes' fascination with Petersen's lifestyle, with the well-concealed cracks in which this woman thus far has managed to survive, and Petersen's own cautious bemusement in having roped in such an ardent follower. These are women who each see through the other's facade; Petersen susses out quickly who Barnes is and what she came here for (there's even a sequence where she looks all set to murder Barnes in a scuba diving "accident", but ultimately chooses to save her life). Yet there's a sense of two isolated souls forming a genuine connection - each well-accustomed to using their wiles and ingenuity to get what they want and each so invested their respective professions that they haven't allowed themselves much of an emotional outlet elsewhere (the closest Petersen comes to shedding light on her murderous mindset is when she claims to have felt an attachment to each of the men she killed but hints that this was overridden by what she saw as professional dedication). The dangerous, unspoken tension with which each character regards and scrutinises the other is given momentary form in the visual metaphor of a sea urchin, which Barnes and Petersen playfully bat back and forth between them during one of their undersea explorations. And flat though the ending of Black Widow may fall, it does offer a vaguely curious final image in which (-spoilers-) Barnes, having finally implicated Petersen, evades the enthusiastic attentions of the press and goes her own solitary way. We get no real closure with regards to her emotional bond with Petersen. We likewise don't learn if her relationship with Nuytten is still on, but then again we have no real reason to care. The film ends with Barnes slipping away and disappearing, in a manner which seems evocative of Petersen's own lonely lifestyle. Ultimately, professional dedication wins out over slippery temptation. In this case, that's too bad - the film would have done well to dig deeper into the parallels between the two leads instead of just scratching perfunctorily at the surface. I would have been fine with an ending in which Petersen corrupted Barnes.

Black Widow doesn't play itself as a mystery - we learn from the very first scene that Petersen is a killer and a fake, and the tension derives more from seeing her close in on prospective victims as Barnes endeavors to get up to speed with her. I want to say that the same is more-or-less true for "Black Widower", in that we know from the start that Bob's intentions are none too savoury and that it's a simple matter of watching the cat steadily gearing up to pounce upon the pigeon, but I'm not sure as I didn't have the benefit of seeing this episode "fresh", as it were. I saw the first six Bob episodes out of order, so I already knew from the recap at the beginning of "Sideshow Bob Roberts" how this was going to go down. I wonder if fans who were watching when it premiered in April 1992 saw the situation any differently (assuming they didn't see the title as a tip-off)? Personally, I think it's evident that Bob's devotion to Selma isn't genuine from the very first act, when he compares kissing her to kissing a divine ashtray; the sweetness of Bob's tone can't disguise the obvious snarkiness in that comment, giving us our first hint of physical revulsion on Bob's part. That's why I can't get behind the argument that this was purely about MacGyver. What isn't clear is at what point Bob actually did start planning to murder Selma. Was this his intention from the very beginning? Or did he initially feel warmth toward Selma but went off her the more closely he got to know her (possibly because he learned of her connection to Bart)? The episode provides no answers, and that frustrates me so.

I'd say that for the most part, the viewer watches Bob through leery eyes because we're encouraged to empathise with Bart's unease, much as we were encouraged to side with his blind faith in Krusty's innocence in "Krusty Gets Busted". As with "Krusty Gets Busted", Bart initially doesn't have any evidence to support his gut reaction. His suspicion of Bob stems squarely from his inability to forgive him for his crimes against Krusty, and from his (entirely accurate) intuition that Bob likewise isn't going to forgive him any time soon and isn't someone he wants getting particularly close to himself or his family. With regard to Bart, Bob lets the mask slip just once - when he makes that "choked you like a chicken" remark (a double entendre which I'm sure had all those Bort shippers out there - with whom I do NOT identify - squealing with delight), a smidgen of genuine anger appears to seep its way through. But otherwise Bob pays curiously little attention to Bart throughout this episode. Unlike Black Widow, which thrives on the two-way fixation between Barnes and Petersen, the enmity here is largely one-sided. Bart watches Bob intently from a distance, but there's no real sense that Bob is watching Bart back, or that he's in any way relishing the discomfort he's milking from the shamus in short pants. The only point at which the episode appears to directly connect Bob's scheme to Bart is when he first alludes to his murderous intentions while driving off with a sleeping Selma, and we cut to the IH8 BART license plate we saw Bob manufacture earlier - a hint that this is all really about Bart, or merely a reminder of Bob's capacity for malice? You can take your pick.

Moral of the story: do watch Black Widow. It's an intriguing slice of forgotten 1980s neo-noir. Just don't expect to be satisfied by the ending. The other moral: I'll always love "Black Widower", to the point that I'm driven to pick it apart in painstaking detail, but there's something about its outcome that I too find unsatisfying. When I think about it, perhaps my real issue with this episode has less to do with the ambiguity/OCC-ness of Bob's motives and more to do with just how overwhelmingly depressing an episode it is. Like Black Widow, it has something to convey about solitude, as seen in the mutual despondence from which Bob and Selma's ill-fated relationship is formed. They come to one another from such sad places that it kind of smarts that both of them are ultimately destined to end up right back where they started. But then again, "Black Widower" is an episode with an enormous amount of cynicism toward the idea that one can grow and change for the better, particularly those who become caught up in the criminal justice system, and the outcome (in which Selma is spared precisely because of Bart's insistence on holding Bob's past against him to the finish) seems gleefully sardonic in that regard. I think the episode's true intentions are betrayed early on in a line spoken by Lisa, when she tells Bob that he's "living proof that our revolving-door prison system works." Bob comes out with ten dollars and an axe to grind. And he goes back with unbridled hysteria and that prescient taunt about the Democrats. For all her charms, it seems somewhat improbable that Selma was ever going to turn this around.