If the original Simpsons short that aired on April 19 1987 was all about establishing America's soon-to-be favourite family as a grotesque, if recognisably human subversion of traditional family values, then the second short, which aired on May 3 1987, cut directly to one of the concerns at the heart of their endearing dysfunctionality - namely, just how mutually besotted the family was with the blinkering light box at the forefront of their living room. "Watching TV" saw the genesis of a preoccupation that was to remain prevalent for a significant chunk of the series proper, and which would appear to bear out an argument presented by Wilson Bryan Key in his 1973 pop-psycho classic Subliminal Seduction - that the television set had become such a revered and omnipotent component of family life that it was practically a member of the family now. The TV, which Key identifies as "the one-eyed monster resident in every well-furnished living room", is clearly posited as the authority to which each individual Simpson will ultimately answer. Bart and Lisa time their petty squabbles in order to coincide with commercial breaks; Homer waxes poetic about the joys of family togetherness but obligingly submits when the box is talking. Throughout all of this, the TV screen throbs and pulsates with the sickening energy of a radioactive mutant. Just a typical night within the Simpsons' walls.
At its heart, The Simpsons has always been about the banality of television, and how slavishly our lives revolve around the chattering cyclops, right down to the show's opening sequence, in which the individual family members are depicted rushing home in order to amass before it on the couch (what are we to make of that, exactly? Is the implication that they are rushing home to watch themselves upon the box?). As viewers, our own relationship with the family's tube addiction is two-fold - we recognise the vapidity of their non-stop TV consumption while equally acknowledging the mirror they hold up to our own media-watching habits (after all, are we ourselves not participating in the same activity as these bug-eyed neon demons at this very point in time?). Writes Key: "Television is a major consideration as to when the family goes to bed (after the 11:00pm news), when the family goes to the toilet or engages in conversation (during commercials), when the family eats meals or snacks, what family activities will be on weekends (relative to games, program schedules, and sports seasons), when parents do or do not have sex (who wouldn't be tired after a night's hard work in front of the tube's window, pushing beer and potato chips down one's throat?)" (p.66)
Before we go any further, there is something I should probably clear up - yes, this is the same Wilson Bryan Key who wrote a series of books between 1973 and 1989 proposing that advertisers insert all manner of phallic and vaginal imagery into their campaigns in order to exploit our subconscious sexual desires and convert them into cravings for gin and designer jeans. Because deep down, you're a sexually frustrated dupe who can be aroused by strategically arranged images of ice cubes, and advertisers know exactly how to manipulate that Achilles heel to their own commercial ends. Nowadays, it's tough to encounter anyone who'll take Key's arguments particularly seriously, his body of work having been regulated largely to the slag heap of dubious 1970s pop psychology. Does this make Subliminal Seduction and its sequels any less obligatory reading? Of course not. Dubious or not, they're still entertaining as hell. If nothing else, Key taught me to look at the world a little more closely and to see the hidden smut in everything, and for that much I salute him.
Probably not.
The Simpsons' relationship with the TV, and its indispensability in maintaining the family's entire domestic equilibrium, had a major role in the conflict and resolution of the fourth episode of the series proper, "There's No Disgrace Like Home", which first aired on January 28 1990. This episode sees Homer pawning the sacred television set to fund a family counseling session, an act that seems egregiously out of character for him now but was entirely consistent with his characterisation in the Ullman shorts. Embarrassed by his family's unruly behaviour at a company picnic, Homer grows despondent over his perceived failure as patriarch, but his attempts to promote better conduct only cause his family to regress even further in social graces, to the extent that he transforms them into a legion of peeping toms whose voyeuristic behaviour petrifies the neighbourhood. "Why did you smite me with this family?" Homer laments to the omnivorous man upstairs, and is met with only silence. Instead, it is the all-powerful television that offers up salvation, in the form of a commercial for Dr Monroe's Family Therapy Center*, something Homer explicitly acknowledges when he reminds himself that, "the answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a glass; they're on TV!" He later assures Marge that Dr Monroe is reputable because "of all the commercials I saw, his was the best." The TV may have answered Homer's prayers, but paradoxically it also stands between him and his own credibility as family patriarch. Earlier in the episode, Homer had attempted to assert his authority by prying the family away from their TV dinner viewing (albeit an educational nature show, with narration mixing traditional notions of family values with the grotesqueness of nature: "The father of the family has worked all day to find this food for his children...unable to fend for themselves, the baby bald eaglets are dependent on their mother regurgitating food which she has found...") and ordering them to eat a traditional family dinner at the table instead. Homer effectively competes with the TV for his family's respect and attention, so it is hardly surprising, in this context, that he would be willing to sacrifice the TV to boost his own standing.
For the rest of the family, Homer's decision to pawn the TV constitutes a grave threat to their own sense of domestic stability; as such, during their counseling session with Dr Monroe, they are unanimous in identifying Homer as the source of their unhappiness (Marge even accuses him of driving a stake through the hearts of those who love him). By the end of the episode, Monroe has tired of the Simpsons and declared the family a hopeless case, but Homer holds him to his commercial's guarantee that they should expect either family bliss or double their money back. Ultimately, the two go hand in hand, for the final scene sees the family unified in their dsyfunctionality, proud that their eccentricities have proved financially beneficial - as Lisa so disarmingly puts it, "It's not the money as much as the feeling that we earned it." Marge is quick to suggest that they return to the pawn shop and restore that absent member of the family, the TV, to its rightful place, but Homer has other plans - he proposes they use the money to buy a new TV, one with a twenty-one inch screen, realistic flesh tones (ironic, no?) and "a little cart so that [they] can wheel it into the dining room on holidays". Far from wishing to keep the TV and family mealtimes in their respective territories, Homer now goes so far as to extend a place to the TV at the table. Thus, the episode closes with a truce between Homer and the TV, the two warring authorities having reached an arrangement that is mutually beneficial - the television is restored to its spot at the centre of the Simpson household, and Homer gets to claim a stake in his family's affections by facilitating that return in a new and improved guise (noteworthy is that the family's worship of television does not translate into a sentimental attachment toward the set itself, with the Simpsons' older model being left abandoned at the pawn shop). The ending reaffirms Homer as a breadwinner for the modern ages; he becomes the daddy bald eagle who works all day to provide for his family, only in place of nourishment he proves his patriarchal mettle by enriching their lives with the best possible televisual entertainment.
Five years on and another episode, "Homer Badman" of Season 6, would revisit the premise of the television having supplanted Homer as family patriarch, albeit from a much more madcap, sharper-toothed perspective that also satirises the media's tendency to create narratives to suit its own sensationalist ends. Here, Homer is wrongly accused of sexual harassment and undergoes a relentless crucifixion by the media, whom Lisa astutely identifies as being more interested in entertainment than truth. Nevertheless, seeing himself vilified on the tube, whose authority he is accustomed to trusting, proves deeply confusing to Homer. Bart admits to Homer that his own loyalties are divided - obviously, he would like to believe his father, but ultimately TV must have the final say, for it "spent so much more time raising us than you." Homer does not dispute this, agreeing dejectedly that, "TV's always right." In the end, salvation comes from an unlikely source - it's revealed that Groundskeeper Willie has a penchant for secretly videotaping couples in cars ("In this country it makes you look like a pervert, but every single Scottish person does it!") and can provide visual evidence of Homer's innocence. Homer is exonerated in the eyes of the TV-watching world, but he subsequently disappoints his family when he demonstrates that he has failed to grasp the obvious lesson from his experience about not believing everything he sees in the media.** "Homer Badman" ends, once again, with a moment of reconciliation between Homer and the TV, only here Homer goes so far as to physically embrace the set and fondly suggest that they never fight again. That the rest of the Simpsons clan are last seen slinking away in quiet dismay does not seem to matter, for the real hardship from this whole ordeal, for Homer, has come not from his friends and family's loss of faith in him but from his own inability to see eye-to-eye with what the TV is dictating. All Homer wants is return to a state of affairs where he can accept the Almighty Tube's interpretation of reality without question - for him to actually take the lesson suggested by Marge about not automatically taking the media's word for granted would be entirely counterproductive in this regard.
"Homer Badman" echos Key's warning that television, by its nature, does not foster individual thought or perspective; rather it thrives on the substitution of personal first-hand experience for a distilled recreation that has strategically filtered through someone else's lens for all-purpose consumption. He reflects that: "Everyone who watches the screen experiences precisely the same event...when you see a parade, a war, a concert, or whatever on television, you are not perceiving the event but a preprocessed and edited cameraman's, writer's, director's, sponsor's single-lensed version of the event communicated to viewers via only two sensory inputs - the eyes and ears." (p.66-7) Homer is at his most comfortable when allowing television to do his thinking for him; the recognition that the TV's presentation of events is a lie is disturbing enough, but what is really alienating about Homer's experience throughout "Homer Badman" is the knowledge that, in finding himself at odds with the media's image of him, he has been excluded from the overriding perspective that unifies TV viewership as a whole. As Key puts it, "The TV machine regulates time, channelizes or unifies perceptual experience and establishes (all subliminally) an entire range of desirable human expectations, value systems, identities, relationships, and perspectives toward the entire world." For Homer, to go along with the TV's take on events is to be part of a greater shared experience, to see and understand the world as everyone else does, to laugh at and disapprove of whatever the world at large is prompted to laugh at and disapprove of. Otherwise he is truly on his own, and this is frightening. Is it any wonder that he takes such giddy delight in rejecting the message that is explicitly extended to him at the end?
A common charge made against the rise of television, by both Key and within The Simpsons, is that it has led to the death of conversation. When Sideshow Bob launches his one-man crusade to have television obliterated from the face of the planet (or at least all of Springfield) in "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" of Season 7, he explicitly declares his intentions to revive the lost art of conversation (and scrimshaw). Key would certainly agree with Bob, stating that, "With everyone perceiving precisely the same image on a TV screen, there are no unique perspectives for individuals. There is, therefore, really nothing to talk about. Try discussing a program you have seen on TV with someone who saw the same program. You can cover three hours of viewing in a handful of sentences." (Oh, if only that were so. Key passed away in 2008, so he never knew the pain and confusion of overhearing two work colleagues talk at length about the latest episode of Game of Thrones. Many of Key's statements seem charmingly quaint from a modern perspective.) There is a running gag throughout the series where, in order for the Simpsons to sit and reminisce about the old days, the TV must first be removed from the equation - a trip down memory lane cannot possibly hope to compete with the latest episode of Knightboat, after all. In "The Way We Was" of Season 2, Marge and Homer get to regale their offspring with the story of how they first became item, but only because the TV randomly blacked out as the family were watching "the bald guy argue with the fat tub of lard" (and Bart clings to the TV with all the desperation of a cocaine addict, insisting that if you stare closely enough you can still make out an image). In "And Maggie Makes Three" of Season 6, Marge purposely banishes the TV in favour of an hour of family reminiscing, but this has a slow start, for the Simpsons have now spent so many years huddled dutifully around the telly box that their memories are firmly entrenched in it - she opens the family album to find it filled with snapshots of the family watching Knightboat (a thinly-veiled pastiche of 80s action drama Knight Rider). Noteworthy is that the family are not unanimous in their enthusiasm for the show - Homer cheers it on with the excitement of a transfixed six-year-old, but Bart and Lisa are more indifferent and prone to pick holes in the internal logic of series; nevertheless, all three family members cluster around the TV every bit as obediently to watch a man chase starfish smugglers with the aid of a talking boat, as if there were really nothing better to do with their time.
The Simpsons repeatedly returns to the idea, expounded by Key, that the television stifles initiative and individuality, and yet television is an obvious emblem of stability in the Simpsons universe. It is the ultimate unifer (Key would say "pacifier"); take it away and everything crumbles. "There's No Disgrace Like Home" demonstrates just how integral the television is to maintaining relative peace and order within the walls of the family home; Homer's tactic of uprooting the TV in an effort to better his family has only detrimental consequences, and by the end of the episode Homer has seen the light and concluded that the answer to their problems is not to remove the TV but to make it bigger. By "Homer Badman", Homer's relationship with the TV has strengthened to the point that he has effectively placed it at the centre of the universe; his daily dosage of television viewing is more than just a means of whiling away a few hours but a matter of reaffirming the functionalities of the world and his own place in relation to this. By the time we get onto Sideshow Bob's attempt to eradicate television in Season 7, the gag has been expanded so that TV is no longer a family ritual or personal habit but the entire institution upon which modern civilisation is founded. "Would it really be worth living in a world without television?" queries Krusty the Clown, in contemplating the demands of his former sidekick. "I think the survivors would envy the dead!" Clearly, a perverse worship of the televised image pervades the entire culture of the series. Those who do not fall in line with this Springfieldian religion are posited as being deeply nefarious threats to society (like Bob) or doomed to a life of solitude and ostracisation (as was Homer during his brief rift with television in "Homer Badman"). And yet, The Simpsons is equally at pains to remind us that, by tuning into the show on a regular basis, we are participating in that very same culture. The Simpsons may be freakish little monsters, but so long as their adventures continue to occupy a place in our weekly schedules, they become objects of our own habitual TV worship.
To Key, part of what makes TV such a destructive tool is its practice of creating idealised models of human relationships, with which the viewer is expected to identify and emulate, often for the purposes of making product placement more persuasive. Key calls the television families of the early 1970s - My Three Sons, The Partridge Family, Doris Day and their ilk - "superbly designed products of the merchandising imagination" (p.69), although he acknowledges that there are limits to just how much utopian fantasy an audience is prepared to swallow, noting that divorce and family discord were now so prevalent in American consciousness that the traditional two-parent family was already becoming a threatened species in the contemporary sitcom. Key proposes that "The real-life parent, passively stretched out before the tube before a nightly sunbath in stereotyped imagery, must appear to any child as the opposite polarity of all that is good, worthwhile and meaningful in the night's program schedule." It is a description that seems eerily befitting of the Simpson family's own would-be patriarch. Over its remarkably long lifespan, the animation in The Simpsons has become so clean and standardised (I would say plastic, were I in a less charitable mood) that it is easy to lose sight of just what grotesque little freaks the family were in their earlier incarnations. The characters were gross, ugly and flat-out unpleasant to look at, and yet there was something strangely engaging about their visual crudeness. In that regard, they were very much the subversion of what Key condemns as the impossibly idealised TV families masquerading as the real thing. The early Simpsons barely looked human and, being animated creations, are immediately recognisable as the products of fantasy, but a lot of the early acclaim they garnered was centred upon how much more authenticity they boasted over their flesh and blood sitcom counterparts. The series struck a chord in part because it was fixated on ugliness to the point where viewers were encouraged to feel an affinity with it. The characters are caricatures of the crudeness and vulgarity we fear are unshakeable facets of our own human conditions, and they are given a warmth and familiarity that makes us more at ease with the messiness of our own lives. Imperfection is much more fun when we have our favourite cartoon characters there to validate the perks of not being a demigod.
For all of the furore that originally arose over their so-called dysfunctionality, there is an extent to which the Simpsons embody a very traditional, old-fashioned model of the family unit, one that was already starting to look outdated by the early mid-90s. Indeed, there is little about the basic family structure that would appear to challenge more conservative notions of how a family should function. Homer may be an oafish slob who cannot possibly hope to compete with the television set for his kids' admirations (and by "Homer Badman" he had effectively regressed to being one of the kids himself) but he has held his position at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant for long enough to remain the family's sole breadwinner. By contrast, Marge's main purpose within the family is to be its nurturing, emotional centre. Homer and Marge are still married after thirty-one years, despite numerous challenges to their relationship (and would anyone really have faulted Marge if she'd dumped Homer as far back as the series' ninth episode, "Life on The Fast Lane", instead of going all Officer and a Gentleman with him at the end?). Key proposes that we are genetically predisposed to respond to certain family archetypes, which he sees as being symbolically coded all over the media, writing that, "The human need to project into or identify with the symbolic family structure is used by writers, directors, and other media technicians as a subliminal device to hold an audience's interest and attention and to an effect identification between media content and audience." (p.63) The archetypal family, according to Key, consists of four members: the Father (the family's political leader), the Mother (the family's spiritual/moral leader) and their two children, the Craftsman (who supports the family in a technical and/or artistic sense) and the Clown (who provides comic relief). Key argues that such archetypes are not restricted to actual biological families, nor are they restricted to their associated genders, and goes so far as to identify the pre-Sgt. Pepper Beatles as an example of an iconic foursome that the public found it easy to embrace because they rang so true of the archetypal family, with John being the Father, Paul being the Mother, George the Craftsman and Ringo the Clown. It is easy to see how the Simpsons fall in line with this model - Homer and Marge's roles are self-explanatory, Lisa is the Craftsman and Bart the Clown (appropriately, he worships a TV clown) - although that does leave us with the problem of where to place Maggie in this equation.
As per Key's model, Maggie is a fifth wheel, and perhaps she is quite an easy character to ignore (as Homer does, for much of the time) because she gets no dialogue (in the conventional sense) and she is seldom the focus of a Simpsons adventure. What purpose does Maggie serve in the series (other than to provide the punchline to the heavily-publicised mystery of Who Shot Mr Burns)? I think back to Key's description of the TV as "the greatest pacifier of them all" - in his words "a total substitute for thumbsucking and toying with one's genitals" (p.67) - and I am inclined to consider this in relation to Maggie's oral fixation and her attachment to a literal pacifier. For the most part, Maggie sits on the sidelines of the Simpson family, passively sucking at her beloved mouthpiece while the rest of the family fixates on the TV. Maggie is an addict of a different nature, although the object of her addiction is a double-edged sword. The pacifier is Maggie's weapon, and she uses it in lieu of any actual communication. Maggie's non-stop sucking has become her characteristic means of expression - she suffers terribly when deprived of it at an authoritarian daycare centre in "A Streetcar Named Marge" - and yet her need to have that pacifier in her mouth at all times is stifling to her personal development, denying her the incentive or physical capability of developing any genuine language. In that sense, the pacifier keeps her permanently an infant. On occasion Maggie will attempt actual language, eg: the ending of "Lisa's First Word", where she can be heard gurgling "Daddy" (courtesy of Elizabeth Taylor), but she is clearly contented with the status quo (as is Homer, who advises Maggie to never say a word). It is not hard to read a parallel between Maggie's pacifier addiction and her older kin's preoccupation with the television set. On the one hand, TV is a peacekeeper and a unifier, but in keeping its viewers sedentary and constantly feeding out of its paw, it has them stranded in a limbo where nothing much ever changes. TV is status, but it is also status quo. Episodes consistently end by reaffirming the formidable dominance of television as an institution - for example, episodes focused on Itchy and Scratchy might test the cartoon cat and mouse's prevalence in the lives of young Springfieldians, but will inevitably end with the characters right back where they started, stretched out on the living room floor and laughing themselves silly at what are essentially variations on the same ultra-violent antics. Characters can either accept television's place at the top of modern life's food chain, or risk ending up like the show's perpetual rebel with a cause, Sideshow Bob, as he laments about how his latest crusade came to an end so formulaic it could have spewed from the power book of the laziest Hollywood hack.
The Simpsons has been on the air for just shy of three decades now, and within that time relatively little has changed about the content of the series, for better or for worse. But then the media landscape has changed considerably since Key and The Simpsons' respective heydays. What with the advent of catch-up TV and online streaming, "appointment television" of the nature depicted in the series' opening sequence is no longer such a prevalent facet of day-to-day life. Why on earth would the Simpsons be in such a rush to get home for their show when they could watch it a few hours later on demand, at their own leisure? We still turn to our favourite electronic toys for our endorphin fixes, but these days the tablet and the iPhone have replaced the television as the main objects of our affections. Key's Sideshow Bob-esque assertion that television is a threat "every bit as disastrous for the future of mankind and what we have come to call civilization as is pollution, overpopulation, or atomic and biological warfare," (p.68) might seem hopelessly naive to the reader living in the age of social media. As a love letter to the age of television, The Simpsons was slow to catch onto the rise of personal computers and the internet - the Johnny Cash-voiced space coyote was at pains to point out to Homer, in 1997, that he did not have a computer - and perhaps it's not a coincidence that the series' evergreen touch started to be called into question at around the point that interest started to shift away from the television screen and onto the PC Monitor. Nevertheless, in the era of Fake News, etc, some of The Simpsons' teachings about the media's role in dictating our world perspective (as in "Homer Badman") may remain as relevant as ever. Perhaps instead of fondly embracing our TV sets (or tablets and iPhones) it wouldn't hurt to call the little light boxes out on their nonsense sometimes. Or to go out and run a marathon or something. Life is short, kids.
* I used to think that the dysfunctional family depicted in Dr Monroe's commercial were hilarious, but now, no way, they just hit too close to home. That's not funny, that is my life.
** It is a little hypocritical for the family to get as hung up on it as they do, mind. Given that they themselves were at one point prepared to believe the TV over Homer.
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