Recently, I looked at
"One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish", which was the first
Simpsons episode to deal explicitly with the issue of mortality, and to base its central conflict on its protagonist having to face up to their limited time on Earth. The first, but certainly not the last. Episode 9F11, "Selma's Choice", which first aired January 21st 1993, likewise pitted its central character in a race against a ticking clock, only this time that clock is biological in nature. "Selma's Choice" is another episode about the onset of a mid-life crisis, one that's less interested in the threat of death per se than in the threat of avenues being closed to us as we get further along in life, and in the fear of shuffling off this mortal coil and leaving behind nothing to ensure the world knows or cares that we were ever there. This is the one in which Selma is convinced that she must get spawning, right here, right now, or face a kind of personal and societal extinction.
I have a lot of affection for "Selma's Choice", which I'd argue is one of the more underrated episodes of the series as a whole. I wouldn't say it's completely overlooked, but what people mainly seem to remember about it is that
sequence involving Homer's perverse love affair with a decaying hoagie
he picked up at a company picnic, which results in him eating himself into a rancid mayonnaise-induced fever and having to sit out a visit to Duff Gardens he's spent the entire episode eagerly awaiting (although he gets the better deal, as we'll soon see). The main narrative, which has to do with Selma's thwarted maternal instincts, feels unusually modest and character-driven for an episode this far into Season 4. Over the course of this season, the series had undergone a significant tonal shift that better suited the talents of showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss, the emphasis being less on narrative (which Jean and Reiss seriously didn't do) and understated characterisation than on colourful antics and rapid-fire humour. Whereas earlier seasons tended to incorporate quieter moments of honest character introspection that would inevitably slow down the plot but, hopefully, build towards a more meaningful and substantive resolution, under Jean and Reiss the show preferred to cram in as many gags as possible and keep the action rolling, even if it meant heading to nowhere in particular. "Selma's Choice" stands out since it's a fairly slow moving episode - it kicks into a marginally more surreal gear in the third act, when we finally get to the fabled Duff Gardens attraction we've spent the episode anticipating, but the preceding acts are comprised largely of the kind of smaller, down-to-earth character moments that seem more characteristic of Seasons 1 and 2. The first act is basically a rumination on the general awkwardness of attending the funeral of a family member with whom you were barely acquainted - I wouldn't say that Aunt Gladys' funeral is an entirely sombre affair, but you can definitely feel the overhanging sense of emptiness that, for much of the family, isn't quite translating into personal loss. The second act follows Selma's increasingly fraught attempts to start her own family, and while there are lots of great gags, they're all tinged with a bitter sense of pathos, and it climaxes in a surprisingly raw and direct scene where Marge and Patty quiz Selma as to whether she's thinking this through.
By now, Selma's relationship troubles were an established through line of the series, her ill-fated attempts at securing a suitor having been the subject of two prior episodes, "Principal Charming" of Season 2 and
"Black Widower" of Season 3. It's a testament to how strong and multi-layered a character Selma was that she was more-or-less able to carry a story by herself at this point - she does receive heavy support from the main family throughout (compared to
"A Fish Called Selma", where she and Troy basically had the episode to themselves), but her quest for a family is very much the driving force behind this story and the middle act in particular almost entirely a Selma show. Back in Season 1, she and Patty were featured prominently in just three episodes, and their characterisation was defined almost exclusively by the mutual animosity between themselves and Homer. "Principal Charming" went some way in fleshing them out as individuals and building a more sympathetic portrait of these two grizzled, embittered, nicotine-dependent women. Not least, it cemented the one critical difference between the seemingly (near) identical twins - Selma was holding onto an increasingly thin thread of hope that Mr Right would eventually come along and whisk her off to a more gratifying lifestyle, whereas Patty had no such aspirations. While Selma has no envy of Marge with regard to the specific husband she landed, she's nevertheless stung that society has deemed her as unworthy of the kind of traditional lifestyle that Marge acquired so readily. Patty, by contrast, was seldom the focus of the kind of in-depth character study that Selma was (for a while, "Principal Charming" was the only episode which placed her at the forefront), so she's an easy character to underestimate, but I think she provides much-needed balance to her sister's desperation. Patty isn't as hung up on leading a traditional lifestyle as Selma because she's long decided that a traditional lifestyle isn't for her, and she's not prepared to let a silly little thing like societal pressure convince her otherwise. Patty of course, was later outed as a lesbian - some viewers think that they were hinting this as early as "Principal Charming", where it was suggested that Patty had no sexual feelings toward men, although if you ask me her depiction there seems to point more to her being asexual (asexuality wasn't widely acknowledged in 1991 - certainly, not by the media - but it would fit with Homer's observation that Patty "didn't like to be, you know, touched"). Having said that, in an alternate universe where
The Simpsons was axed after just one season and we had only those three appearances to go on, I've no doubt that more people would be interpreting Patty and Selma as a sort of coded gay couple (just as they did with
George and Martha, and Frasier and Niles initially). In fact, there is a part of me that seriously wonders if that
was the intention early on, before Selma's perpetual lovesickness became a factor. As it is, Patty and Selma have a co-dependency that resembles a marital relationship - they are, effectively, one another's significant others, and to that end they probably have one of Springfield's healthiest relationships. There's not a lot the twins don't like to do together. But this particular path is one that Selma must walk alone. And therein lies the rub, for this is one thing that she cannot do alone.
"Selma's Choice" continues the thread of Selma's forlornness on the magnetism front, but from a slightly different angle - here, Selma isn't on the prowl for a long-term partner, she just needs a man who'll stick around for long enough to sow his seed in her, although even that may be asking too much. "Selma's Choice" is all about how Selma's failure to net a man, even for a few measly seconds, is preventing her from accessing that other rite of passage she's anxious to experience before her time is out, ie: motherhood. The paradox is underlined during that aforementioned scene where Patty asks Selma point blank why she's so desperate to have a baby, and Selma responds, "I've got a lot of love to give." Selma does not tend to inspire love in others, in part because as a person she doesn't radiate a great deal of warmth. She is a cold, cold fish called Selma. But she feels that she does have a lot of potential to give love, if she could only be given the chance in turn. This is what makes her struggle so compelling - Selma is not a particularly pleasant character, but she's sympathetic because she's so vulnerable, and what she wants is so human and relatable.
What triggers Selma's reproductive crisis is the death of her Aunt Gladys, whose demise at the beginning of the episode throws a spanner into the family's plans to visit Duff Gardens that weekend. Deaths of random family members we've never heard of until now and their entailing inheritances are usually a convenient means of getting plots into motion (the series would take arch swipes at this very device in "Homer Loves Flanders" and "Bart The Fink"), although here Gladys' status as a non-entity seems to be precisely the point. Who was Aunt Gladys? Patty states that her legend will live on forever, but what legend is she talking about (aside from the one that Homer volunteered)? At one point, Marge suggests that they all take a moment to remember Aunt Gladys, but finds that her personal memories of her aunt have been hijacked by imagery from Barbra Streisand's 1991 film
The Prince of Tides (more on that
here - the episode as a whole seems to have a Streisand motif going, as Marge later rents a copy of Streisand's 1983 film
Yentl, which the febrile Homer gets surprisingly into: "That Yentl puts the "she" in Yeshiva"). The general indifference of the world toward Gladys' memory is summed up in the generic eulogy given by the minister at the funeral, who even gets her gender wrong, and though the funeral seems well-attended, most people clear out the instant they hear she wasn't a rich woman. One of the few able to afford Gladys some genuine humanity is Patty, who lauds her ability to live and die alone as an indication of strength ("I guess you could say she was a role model for Selma and me"), but Gladys' own look was clearly more in line with Selma, as becomes apparent during the reading of her videotaped will. The video, though it should give the deceased Gladys a voice from beyond the grave, in practice provides further opportunities for the mourners who've lingered this long to desecrate what's left of her (her reading of a Robert Frost poem goes unappreciated - see below - and her executor Lionel Hutz even attempts to drown her out in an effort to nab a share of her savings). Even more troubling is how Gladys' worldly legacy is immediately ripped apart - her only companions, in her twilight years, were an iguana named Jub-Jub and her collection of potato chips that resemble celebrities, which she's elected distribute among kin who've already demonstrated their matronly mettle. This proves to be an enormous error of judgement on Gladys' part. The chips, which Gladys explicitly identifies as her children, go to Marge - unfortunately for Gladys, Homer is the kind of patriarch who
willfully devours young he didn't sire. Meanwhile, she leaves Jub-Jub in
the care of Jacqueline, who sardonically remarks that Gladys would have done better
to leave her the bowel obstruction that killed her and, we later
discover, was attempting to off her new reptilian charge with a hat pin (Jackie's disdain for the lizard seems at first like a passing gag, but it sets up perfectly for the resolution). The one area where Gladys' words don't fall on deaf ears, however, is with Selma - to she and Patty, Gladys leaves the heavy-handed gift of a grandfather clock, the perfect companion to her cautionary message that they must get to work on starting their own families asap, lest they end up expiring in solitude like herself. Patty's response to her aunt's imploring immediately reinforces her own stance on the matter. If she grasps the deeper significance of Gladys' gift, then she is immune to it, and she's perfectly satisfied just to have the clock. Selma, on the other hand, has been cut to the quick, for Gladys has stoked every one of her pre-existing anxieties about her decreasing chances of acquiring a mate and a litter as she enters middle age. On the journey home, she confides to Patty that there is something missing in their lives, although Patty is not on the same page: "Don't worry, we'll get that barking dog record tomorrow." (Barking dog record? Is Patty talking
about this, per chance?)
If we backtrack for a moment, we might give more consideration to the Robert Frost poem Gladys had intended to share with her prospective audience, but which everyone (sans Marge) elected to fast forward through. We hear only the first and last lines, but Gladys hasn't exactly picked an obscurity - it is Frost's most well-known poem, "The Road Not Taken". In this poem, we have a narrator tasked with choosing which of two paths to follow while traversing a woodland. The two paths are not astoundingly different, although the narrator's mind is eventually swayed on observing that one path "was grassy and wanted wear". He reasons that he can always walk the other path on a different day, but understands intuitively that he can only keep on moving forward and will never have the chance to make this choice again. The poem ends thus:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Has it, though?
As
this article written by David Orr for
The Paris Review observes, the ending is commonly interpreted as a celebration of the narrator's willingness to go against the grain and forge his own destiny in the process, but this is not supported by the lines preceding it, which suggest that the narrator's decision did not, in practice, make a whole lot of difference - he admits that "Though as for that the passing there, Had worn them really about the same." Frost, then, appears to be commenting on personal vanity and our tendency to suppose that the individual choices we made were the single greatest factor in determining our destiny, whether we live to regret them or not (there is ambiguity as to whether the "sigh" in the final verse of Frost's poem indicates regret or satisfaction), as opposed to the more probable deduction by Kurt Vonnegut, in
The Sirens of Titan, that, "I was a victim of a series of accidents, as we all are." The title of the poem, and the narrator's fascination with that alternate path, suggest that we will forever be taunted by the possibility of things turning out radically differently because the mere presence of choice gave us the illusion of control. In Gladys' case, the point is made all the more bluntly, and the journey rendered irrelevant by her family's decision to skip the portion of the reading in which the narrator deliberates on the choice, making her final declaration of "And that has made all the difference" seem hilariously, cruelly ironic. Her life has amounted to seemingly little in the long-term, and nobody cares to hear the finer details that led her to the end point. But perhaps we should also take the implicit suggestion that Gladys is fundamentally misguided in her supposition that it was her decision to stay single and childless that led to her feeling lonely and unfulfilled. (For one thing, she is basing her outlook on the naive assumption that one's offspring will necessarily stick around and offer their support after your usefulness to them has expired - I'm sure Abe Simpson could have told her
a thing or two about that.)
This leads us onto Selma, and to the diverging roads she sees herself facing as she traverses her own yellow wood. The title of the episode is a reference to the novel
Sophie's Choice by William Styron, and to the 1982 movie starring Meryl Streep. I have read/seen neither, but it's my understanding that it involves the titular Sophie having to make a heartbreaking decision about which one of her children will live and which one will die. For Selma, it's a matter of choosing either to spawn while she's still capable or doing so or to have her entire existence rendered irrelevant. She believes that how she acts now in the present will make all the difference as to whether she ends up happy or miserable in her distant future, but we might question just how much of this comes down to her own individual ambition, or if she's largely reacting to the pressures of a society that has already decided for her that this is her only route to personal happiness, while also, cruelly, elected to deny her that happiness anyway because, as far as it's concerned, she's too unattractive to be spreading her genes around. In other words, Selma seems to have very little agency of her own in the matter. She's been told that she has to do this, and then that she cannot.
Selma's prior experiences in "Principal Charming" and "Black Widower" have already whittled her self-esteem down to the point that her expectations are low, so much so that her first port of call is a video dating service called Low Expectations. There, her upfront neediness, couple with her stomach-churning demonstration of a variation on the cherry stem knot with a cigarette, instantly kills off whatever prospects she might have had among the equally frustrated (Groundskeeper Willie: "Ach! Back to the loch with you, Nessie!"). After that, her quest can only get more desperate, and she straddles the line between the pathetic and the predatory in targeting males who may be too low down in the food chain to refuse her advances. The embarrassed teenage bag boy she hits on at a convenience store manages to wriggle his way out of her proposition by insisting that it's against store policy for employees to date customers (despite the earnest attempts of his colleague Arnold to support the blossoming romance), but the terminally bewildered Hans Moleman has no such recourse. At the end of their torturous dinner-date, Moleman does appear to have come around to the idea of intercourse with Selma, but she's held back by a nightmare vision of what procreating with Moleman's gene pool would actually entail. Suddenly, she finds herself gazing into the future that could well await if she continues on her current course - a future where, technically, she has met all the requirements laid out by Gladys; Moleman has remained at her side and they have a litter of rambunctious offspring frolicking about their homely quarters. But still, those are Moleman's children, what with their ungainly waddles and their tendency to potentially kill their own by knocking each other out of windows, and Selma decides that there are limits even to her matronly love. She angrily rejects that future, booting Moleman out of her car and leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere (or outside a house that isn't his own, which for Moleman amounts to basically the same thing).
Selma is so disheartened that she gives up on the conventional baby-making route altogether, and considers an alternate option of artificial insemination via the Springfield Sperm Bank. (Apparently, you can purchase Jacques' sperm at this place; also Professor Frink's and Troy McClure's - although if you are tempted by that last one then you might like to consider what he was, in all odds, looking at as he was harvesting that sperm.) Now, getting the sperm cells she needs could be as easily as browsing through a catalogue (the catalogue is entitled "Frozen Pops", which is one heck of a hilariously grotesque pun). At this point, Marge and Patty grow concerned that Selma's desperation may be pushing her into decisions that could be life-altering in more detrimental ways than she has anticipated. After all, having a child is not a decision to be taken lightly. Marge warns her that "A baby can really change your life, " (she would know, of course; she might not have married Homer had he not knocked her up with Bart), while Patty points out to Selma some of the sacrifices that will need to be made if she follows this through. Selma insists that she's prepared to kick her smoking habit, although her oral fixation will still need to be satisfied somehow ("I'll chew"). Patty hits her with a bigger bombshell; having a baby will greatly decrease her chances of ever settling down with a man. To this, Selma responds, "All I've got now is sperm in a cup." It's blunt, it's vulgar, and it's one of the most emotionally searing lines of the episode. Marge and Patty are clearly knocked for six, for they can only respond with an awkward murmur-off. They want to counteract Selma's statement, but find it basically incontestable.
In the end, it takes the icy shower of hands-on experience for Selma to awaken to a few of the harsher realities that reproduction entails - babies rapidly become children, and children are rowdy little monsters who don't always return affection or respond to adult authority. She discovers this the following weekend, when Homer's toxic relationship with that infamous sandwich puts him out of commission and leaves him unable to take the kids to Duff Gardens as promised, so Selma volunteers to take them in his stead. The concept of Duff Gardens, a beer-themed amusement park, was inspired by Busch Gardens, a duo of theme parks located in Florida and Virginia conceived as elaborate marketing vehicles for the Anheuser-Busch brewing company (Anheuser-Busch sold the parks to Blackstone Group in 2009, whereupon the beer-shilling practices were largely terminated), but it also presents multiple opportunities to take swipes at the granddaddy of hideous and disconcerting amusement parks, ie: Disneyland - the "It's A Small World" attraction in particular gets a merciless skewering. Still, the pastiche seems fairly mild when you consider how far the series was willing to go when they re-examined the subject just two seasons later. The most repugnant thing about Duff Gardens (aside from the fish cruelty and its ties to the clean-shaven sounds of Hooray For Everything*) is the obvious commercial crassness of the enterprise - its attempts to dress up alcoholism as family-friendly entertainment and, as a presumed knock-on effect, indoctrinate a generation of devoted young drinkers. And yet it looks positively wholesome compared with the Disneyland stand-in we would encounter in "Itchy and Scratchy Land", a grotesque hellscape populated by murderous robots and manned by a sinister squadron of underground-dwelling fascists. Duff Gardens is an ill-conceived and badly-managed amusement park, but no more than that, whereas Itchy and Scratchy Land really does feel as though it's gestating some kind of truly apocalyptic evil (by which I don't mean the renegade robots).
As it turns out, Duff Gardens is a seriously crappy amusement park (the TV advertisements, which feature celebrity daredevil Lance Murdoch deriving no discernable enjoyment from the experience, didn't exactly lie in that regard) and Homer blatantly dodged a bullet in getting to stay at home and watch Barbra Streisand movies and Graeco-Roman porn videos. At the park, Lisa experiences her first acid drip after drinking the water from the aforementioned "Small World" knock-off, while Bart ends up literally hanging for dear life after sneaking into an attraction he's too small for. Despite all the trouble the kids put her through, Selma stands up for them when they are reprimanded by the park's security, attributing their rowdy behaviour to their own cursed genetics - "Don't blame these kids, it's not their fault. I think their father is missing a chromosome." Although she places the blame on Homer, when Selma returns to Evergreen Terrace after the disastrous trip, she finds herself actually having to hand it to Homer; he's succeeded in the area that she now realises that she isn't cut out for (although it is easy enough to pinpoint where Selma really went wrong - she's the one who ordered Lisa to drink that suspicious-looking water). This leads to a rare moment of connection between Selma and Homer, as she bears her soul to him and laments that, throughout this whole traumatic experience, all she was seeking was "a little version of me I could hold in my arms".
Turns out, the answer to that problem was right there all along, in the form of a creature every bit as unloved and misunderstood as she - Jub-Jub, the lizard Jackie was earlier so repulsed at being saddled with. Selma realises that having a child may not be the right solution for her; she indeed has a lot of love to give, but there are other outlets for love besides kids and ham radios, and the world is full of outcast beings that require compassion (in that sense, the solution is not altogether dissimilar from that of
"Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" - in both cases, redemption is obtained through a simple act of empathy for a mistreated animal). Jub-Jub, as Selma heavily telegraphs through her "little version of me" remark, is the perfect reflection of Selma. But he's also a symbol of Aunt Gladys, being one of the few remaining relics of her existence, and the lizard's reversal in fortunes a sign that her legacy hasn't faded into obscurity after all. Instead, that legacy is undergoing a symbolic rebirth, no longer the foreboding omen of a despondent future, but an indication of renewed purpose and optimism. This is reinforced in the episode's closing moments, where Selma sings "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" (originally a 1967 hit for Aretha Franklin) to Jub-Jub in a nod to contemporary sitcom
Murphy Brown, in which the title character had recently done the same for her newborn child. Obviously, there is intended to be a slight inversion, in that she's singing this adoring tune to a scaly green iguana. But then if you've ever seen a newborn baby, you'll know just what unsightly-looking beings they are. Love is all about getting past surface appearance and forging a deeper connection. Perhaps that's the lesson Homer was also able to demonstrate with that revolting sandwich of his.
* ie: Up With People.
