Back in 1985, still two years before the Simpson family made their relatively low-key debut on The Tracey Ullman Show, cartoonist Matt Groening went in search of his misspent boyhood, scratching a particularly anti-nostalgic itch by taking readers of his Life In Hell comics on an epic odyssey twenty years into the past, when he was still a sprightly young nipper stuck in school hall limbo. The result was a collection of strips in which one-eared rabbit Bongo sets out to chronicle his daily classroom adventures, in the hopes that he'll one day be able to flog his memoirs for a lot of money (and while Bongo is our protagonist, here he clearly functions as an avatar for Groening himself, although how much of this was taken directly from Groening's actual childhood experiences I could not say - there's a disclaimer in Part Three stating that "Yes, this is true, except the names", but still). The series lasted for eight strips, all of which were later collected and reprinted as part of the compilation book School Is Hell in 1987.
The "My 5th Grade Diary" series presents something of an enigma for me, in that each time I revisit it I am compelled to delve in deep in the fruitless hope of digging out some kind of underlying narrative logic to the utter monotony. Ostensibly, the series is intriguingly structured, enough so to lull you thinking that Bongo's reminiscing is actually going somewhere - it starts out quite sparse on Bongo's narration, but grows progressively text heavy as it runs on, to the point where comparatively little space is allocated to the cartoons themselves. Bongo grows more invested in the diary as he goes, giving the impression that Groening is building toward something, a climax or a final punchline, only the series doesn't have much of a pay-off, ending almost as haphazardly as it began. The closest Bongo has to an arc is that his youthful aspirations of becoming President of the United States are dashed over the course of the series; early on, Bongo identifies this as his main motivation for wanting to document his early years, but in the final installment comes to the realisation, apropos of nothing, that he will never be president and decides to call his writing project quits, only to briefly revive the diary in order to cover his completion of the 5th Grade. Is there actually a deeper subtext to be mined here, or is Groening just stringing together a collection of random anecdotes about the banalities of schooling and pulling the plug once he's dragged it out far enough? I've scanned this series pretty thoroughly, and every time I find myself gazing into a mind-numbing abyss of chocolate toothpaste, X-ray specs and tiger urine (one of the few really joyous memories recorded by Bongo is his pure bedazzled awe at seeing a circus tiger urinate atop a ball which its trainer subsequently puts their hand upon). This isn't the kind of childhood nostalgia you end up yearning for whenever adult life seems bleak and overwhelming. But then as deep down we all comprehend too well, Childhood Is Hell.
There's not much of a narrative thread running throughout Bongo's Diary, but we do see a few prominent recurring themes - chiefly Bongo's disdain for his class teacher, Mr Shute, and the various draconian punishments dished out to any children who dare step out of line. As I've previously noted, Bongo was in many respects a precursor to Bart, in that Groening used him to channel his own rambunctious childhood energies and his lingering thirst for rebellion, although Bongo had a sadder, more philosophical outlook on life than his spiky-haired brain-sibling. Whereas Bart liked to brandish whatever snap judgements were made of him by adult authority and remold them into badges of honor (hence the infamous "Underachiever and Proud" t-shirt, which was widely misinterpreted and caused a mass controversy among education circles back in 1990), Bongo was deeply troubled by the hypocrisies and general indifference of adult society. In fact, Bongo's quiet alienation and precocious inquisitiveness arguably made him more of a direct predecessor to Lisa than to Bart (the scene in The Simpsons episode "Moaning Lisa" in which Lisa hits Homer with a barrage of complex questions about the state of the world and Homer attempts to deflect the issues with a game of "Homer Horsey" is a characteristically Life In Hell exchange). What the two older Simpsons children have in common is that they are each being failed by adult authority, and contained within Bongo's own uneasy relationship with the full-growns in his life is the germ of a common ancestry to their respective malaise. Bongo is an irrepressible rebel with a tendency to rub authority the wrong way, not least because he's too much of an independent thinker for authority's liking.
The one thing that's notably absent from Bongo's assorted classroom anecdotes is any sense of an obviously functional educational system. If this class are actually learning anything amid the ongoing power struggle between teacher and students, then for the most part Bongo doesn't regard it as notable enough to go in his diary. There are fleeting references to the class watching outdated films on Brazil, paramecia and social awareness, but most of the essays written by Bongo and his classmates are on entirely arbitrary subjects and handed out by Shute as punishments - which, as a final statement on the futility of their personal endeavors, he proceeds to rip to shreds the instant they are handed in. Shute isn't concerned with supporting his charges' learning so much as forcing them to come to terms with the fact that they are at the whims of a hierarchy where the empowered kick mercilessly downward. And yet, the great irony of the series is that Bongo's ostensible indifference toward his school education is belied by the highly academic nature of his interest in the number of students who fall foul of Shute's authority, providing daily statistics and even going so far as to compile his data into a graph. In fact, I would argue that this is the real underlying gag of the series (aside from the obvious, "Christ, childhood was dull! If you ever catch me getting nostalgic for that time then you know that I've lost it"). Bongo is quite clearly implementing his own education throughout the series, one that seems preoccupied with the cosmic cruelty of the universe, and with the general chaos lurking behind the adults' insistence on a veneer of order and respectability. Shute may be mean and unpleasant, but he's clearly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those wild and wacky adults. In one strip, Bongo stumbles upon a discarded newspaper filled with lurid stories about parents spanking their children to death, among other things; his morbid fascination with the item appears to be fueled by it confirming his suspicions of the barely-concealed sadism and brutality underpinning grown-up jurisdiction, and that adult existence is anarchic and nihilistic to a degree that puts his own schoolyard banalities in the shade (the same paper contains a story about a man who was decapitated while crawling under a train). The adult duplicity documented by Bongo throughout his diary ranges from the tediously exploitative (the false X-Ray specs that Bongo is dissuaded by his friend Spike from blowing a full dollar on) to the just plain daffy (the promotional piece he reads on The Hollow Earth, an actual book published in 1964 and written by a Dr Raymond Bernard - real name Walter Seigmeister - positing that the Earth is hollow and was once home to alien civilisations; Bongo dismisses Bernard's assertions as fake, which is probably a good call).
Such is Bongo's dedication to his independent research that the real punchline of "My 5th Grade Diary" occurs not in the eighth and final installment, but in the seventh, wherein the final panel includes an entry noting the mysterious obliteration of his project: "When I got to school I couldn't find my graph. I looked all over for it, but it was gone. I don't think anyone took it." The single lifeline that gave Bongo's 5th Grade existence purpose and structure winds up being inexplicably swallowed up by the merciless abyss that threatens to engulf them all. Bongo's efforts were all in vain, with no explanation being offered for this vanity; his graph's sudden non-existence is nothing more than yet another facet of the entirely arbitrary cruelty of this meaningless universe. Still, life goes on, and Bongo's mournful ruminations on the fate of his graph are immediately succeeded by a seemingly sincere observation about a female classmate, Annie (represented by Snarla, Bongo's Lisa Simpson-esque feline companion), whom Bongo identifies as "pretty nice for a girl, I think". Perhaps Bongo is broadening his horizons and learning to look beyond the preconceptions which have governed much of his schoolyard ken up until now (very little mention is given to Bongo's female classmates throughout, but where they are brought up, they clearly are regarded as the other). A less elevating approach is that these are the first fledgling signs of puberty rearing their head in our leporine hero, signalling that Bongo's slow-burning induction into the adult world he distrusts and abhors has just begun, and undermining his naive assumptions, in the final installment, that his completion of the 5th Grade equals the acquisition of freedom for his preteen id. For Bongo, the nightmare is merely gearing itself up for renewal, the 5th Grade being but one of many rites in an inevitable succession, but for now Groening is happy to leave us with the final image of Bongo racing merrily through the street, exalted in the belief that the hardest years are now firmly behind him. Don't get too complacent, Bongo, for there are plenty more Shutes lurking further along that road. (Actually, one comes away with the impression that Shute wasn't quite the cold-blooded monster that Bongo made out. Some girls in the class liked him enough to want to buy him a radio to mark their leaving the 5th Grade, although in the end he had to settle for pencils.)
PS: There is a gag in the eighth installment in which Bongo runs afoul of Mr Shute simply for groaning and is kicked out of the classroom, whereupon he muses that "Until I write again, I remain Matt Groening!" I'm sure there's a cute pun in there somewhere. Actually, my main takeaway from the online reaction to Disenchantment last year was just how many YouTubers are apparently confused to the correct pronunciation of Groening's name. Such was my frustration that I exercised a strict policy whereby any reviewer referring to him as "Matt Groaning" was immediately abandoned. That may seem harsh, but they've spoken his name a few times on The Simpsons, so no excuses.
PPS: I don't watch review videos on YouTube much any more.
No comments:
Post a Comment