Most Simpsons seasons, even the best regarded ones, have their episodes that just sort of fall through the cracks of popular consciousness. Episodes that aren't necessarily regarded as weak, they simply get overshadowed by the heavier-hitters in their roster. How strange to me that "Bart On The Road" (episode 3F17), which first aired March 31st 1996, seems to occupy that camp for Season 7. As is even brought up on the episode's DVD commentary, it's an installment that most fans seem to feel warmly about, when they're reminded of its existence, but it seldom seems to feature in anyone's favourites lists. So let me say this for "Bart On The Road" - it might just get my vote for the most purely, consistently funny episode in all the series. On that front, it's as good as The Simpsons ever gets. Overall, it seems that this episode is best remembered for the gag with the cranky Canadian driver who abandons his family's road trip to Cape Canaveral on an incredibly petty impulse. And true, that is a fantastic moment (thanks, mainly, to Dan Castellaneta's performance as said Canadian). But it's just one of many in an episode that keeps on giving. The plot flows at a breezy, effortless pace (impressively so, given how busy it is), and the endearing character moments and sharp cultural observations never let up. I've never been to Branson, Missouri and know next to nothing about it, but Homer's pronouncement about the place being like Vegas, if it were run by Ned Flanders, seems like such a biting second-hand snapshot of the city's psyche that I almost feel as if I do know it.
The episode opens with Skinner eagerly awaiting Spring Break, which he's planning to spend vacationing in Hong Kong ("Custom-made suits at slave labor prices!"). Due to a mix-up in the booking, however, he's required to close the school a day early, something he devilishly disguises by declaring the day in question a "Go To Work With Your Parents Day". It's a prospect that doesn't exactly knock the school-aged Simpsons out. Lisa isn't thrilled about being obligated to spend a day with Homer at the nuclear power plant, because ATOMKRAFT? NEJ TAK. Bart, meanwhile, had anticipated an easy day of watching TV with Marge laboring somewhere in the backdrop, and is disappointed to instead get stuck with Patty and Selma at the DMV. Both of them, however, find unexpected perks in their predicament; Lisa gets to spend some meaningful time with Homer and discovers that she actually enjoys his company, while Bart, less wholesomely, is left unsupervised with the licence printer for long enough to manufacture his own fake ID. Before long he and a bunch of friends have acquired a set of wheels and are hitting the road to see what the wider world has to offer.
At this point, it's worth acknowledging that "Bart On The Road" is one of the more...out there episodes of its era, which might possibly be saying something. All Simpsons episodes, to varying degrees, require some suspension of disbelief. "Bart On The Road", however, hinges on the viewer swallowing two especially egregious improbabilities:
- Bart can drive a car more or less flawlessly. Physically, this should be way more of a challenge for him. (I'm less bothered about the revelation that he also speaks Chinese.)
- All of the adults Bart encounters are apparently so stupid that it never occurs to them that his ID might be fake. Although the script does hang a nice lampshade on this round about the point where it risks becoming too ridiculous. ("You sure don't look 25, but your unlaminated, out-of-state driver's license is proof enough for me...")
But then, as showrunner Bill Oakley points out on the DVD commentary, "I've seen a lot of action movies with many more holes in them than this. This is a cartoon for peep's sake." And okay, I will accept that. "Bart On The Road" is still more plausible than all five of the top-grossing movies at the 1996 domestic box office (not a great year, but it was better than 1998).
The allure of the fake ID, of course, is that it opens a door to all kinds of forbidden fruit that seem wild and exciting precisely because they're reserved for strictly the adult set. But if there's one lesson The Simpsons has taught us repeatedly, it's that life in the adult camp perhaps isn't as fun or as thrilling as one assumes it will be as a child; the ID quickly threatens to lose its lustre once the fruit ceases to be forbidden and transpires to have been a little rancid and maggot-infested all along. Bart and friends buy a round of beers at Moe's Tavern, but catch a sobering glimpse of what habitual alcohol consumption has done to some of its regular patrons, and wisely leave their drinks untouched. Other aspects of the adult palate are just flat-out disturbing to them. They go to see David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Boroughs' Naked Lunch, having drawn conclusions about what kind of movie it is from the title alone. Of course, they're wrong, and Nelson's critique, when they emerge two hours later, is priceless. Incidentally, this guy who collects Simpsons scripts posted proof on Twitter that in the earlier drafts the film they go to see was not Naked Lunch, but Mrs Parker and The Vicious Circle, which I guess they mistook for some kind of hyper-violent action piece (says Milhouse on emerging, "Aww, they weren't so tough"). That disappointed me, as I had desperately wanted to believe that the whole gag about Naked Lunch being mistaken for a raunchy porn flick on the basis of its title was derived from an actual anecdote to which one of the writers had been privy. Imagine going to see that movie because you were in the mood for something titillating and getting...well, that movie. If you're into centipedes, then fine.
Things pick up when Martin, who's cleaned up during his day of shadowing his father at the stock market, wheedles his way into the group, and the kids have enough money to do something really ambitious - ie: rent a car and ditch adult supervision altogether for a few days. Bart constructs a ludicrous cover story about them going to a national grammar rodeo in Canada; Lisa immediately smells the bullshit and challenges Bart's claim, but to her chagrin all adults are in outrageously credulous mode for the purposes of this particular narrative, including Marge, so his alibi flies. After consulting an old AAA guide he's discovered in the glove compartment, Milhouse proposes that they use their time to head to Knoxville, Tennessee, to visit the World's Fair and the Sunsphere erected as its symbol. The boys are convinced that this is a better bet than their alternate destination, Disney World , so off they go. Even if you're unfamiliar with the history of the Sunsphere or the Knoxville World's Fair, it's easy to see, from the outset, how this is all destined to go wrong - the guidebook from which Milhouse is reading is visibly dated to 1982. One suspects that the world might have moved on a little in fourteen years. Or then, again, maybe it hasn't moved on much at all. And that could well be the problem.
"Bart on The Road" was an early example of a Simpsons travel episode, a genre that was still something of a rarity at this point in the series' run - the now-infamous "the Simpsons are going to [insert location]!"
formula, in which the family do little more than breeze through a
checklist of familiar landmarks and stereotypes, wasn't really cemented
until "Thirty Minutes over Tokyo" of Season 10 (with "Bart vs Australia" and,
to a greater extent, "The City of New York vs Homer Simpson" as the precursors). I remember that, at some point in the late 1990s, Sky 1 filled up a vacant evening by having Danny Baker introduce four back-to-back Simpsons episodes based around the theme of world travel, and to give you an idea of how limited his options were, one of them was "Deep Space Homer". For as nonsensical as its premise is, as a travel episode "Bart On The Road" probably has more authenticity than any of its brethren, in that its focus is less on how strange and eccentric other cultures and locales seem when viewed through the lens of the American suburbanite, and more on the image of the destination versus reality; what you read about in the travel guide versus what you actually get upon arrival. I'm put in mind of a line from Jim Jarmusch's 1984 film, Stranger Than Paradise: "It's funny...you come to some place new, and everything just looks the same." The boys leave Springfield in pursuit of a good time and find it every bit as elusive in Tennessee as whatever the hell state they set out from.
Having them travel to the site of a World's Fair that folded fourteen years ago, of all things, has deeper significance than their timing being a little unfortunate. The 1982 World's Fair, aka the Knoxville International Energy Exposition, ran for a six month period starting May 1st and was lauded by Ronald Reagan - as per the official guide book, which I confess I am enough of a geek to have gotten a hold of - as "help[ing] to bridge that gap between our energy needs and the resourcefulness of human creativity." (Note: I've read through the guide, and while there was a lot of stuff in that fair I would have undoubtedly have eaten up had I been around to experience it, in other regards it sounds like a total joke - did you know that religious proselytizers were allowed to set up venues there promoting their faith as a form of energy? I don't know, that strikes me as a pretty flagrant twisting of the central energy theme...perhaps Branson isn't the only thing that might as well have been run by Ned Flanders.) While the event was happening, it was considered a success. The problem came once the fair had packed up and left town and Knoxville was left with a whole lot of vacant space and few enterprises interested in filling it. When Knoxville was selected to host the fair, the hope was that it would lead to a major boost in the city's development, making Knoxville the hottest destination in the American Southeast, but that didn't exactly work out as planned. Two years after the event, William E. Schmidt wrote in The New York Times: "These days, the site of the fair, which follows a narrow valley that runs beside the downtown area, has all the warmth and atmosphere of a ghost town. In addition to the city's new, 107,000-square-foot convention center, which served as an exhibition hall in the fair, only two restaurants and a small art shop inside a splendidly renovated railroad station at the edge of the fair site are still doing business." I can only assume that the situation hadn't changed too drastically by 1996. The Sunsphere, meanwhile, though it remained a prominent fixture of the city's skyline, just stood there empty for about a quarter-century, before it was finally reopened as an observation deck in 2007. Since the time of Bart's dropping by, I believe that the site has undergone some renovation and now houses mainly office buildings.
So, the real slap in the face for Bart and co. isn't simply that they arrived in Knoxville too late for what had promised to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but that the fair turned out to be something of an empty promise in a much broader sense. What our young heroes did experience, thanks to the time loop facilitated by the outdated travel guide, was the optimism of another era, for an outcome that never was. The fair might have gone, but Knoxville is depicted as being very much stuck in its shadow, lacking the means to move on and forge a fresh cultural identity. The Sunsphere, which seemed so bold and alluring on the pages of that AAA Guide, now stands as a symbol to the ravages of time, neglected and steeped in decline. What makes it particularly salient is that there's an obvious intersection between the underwhelming legacy of the 1982 World's Fair, and Knoxville's stagnated hopes and prospects, and the kids having their pre-adolescent fantasies of a world of limitless possibilities cruelly eviscerated by a crushing reality. The whole journey is a metaphor, see, for the childhood expectation of adulthood versus actual adulthood. Bart and friends start out as children masquerading as grown-ups, but ultimately become men along the way...in that they get a taste of how disenchanting the destination really is, to the point that Bart ends up having to shoulder the actual responsibilities that come with coming of age. Alas, it isn't all beer and naked lunches.
It is important, of course, that the world they discover beyond Springfield is disturbing only because it is desolate and unfulfilling, and not because it's fraught with peril. For all of our heroes' callow naivety, "Road" seldom plays the vulnerability card too prominently on their journey. For the most part, it's happy to treat the kids, as the grown up characters clearly are, as miniature adults who've yet to have their innocence completely ruptured. The reality of the situation - that they are ten year old children out there on their own in the world, and all manner of terrible things could easily befall them - is downplayed. There is a single, startling moment where the script punctures through the facade and reminds us just how young and helpless these pint-sized joyriders are - when the group loses their car and realises that they're stranded in Knoxville, Milhouse lets out an abrupt sob. But otherwise the viewer is encouraged to feel less concerned about the boys than to wallow in the guileless wish fulfilment, vicariously enjoying the sensation of being ten years old again, and with the means to go anywhere and do whatever you want. The road trip plays like a direct inversion of that in "Itchy & Scratchy Land", which emphasised the drudgery of long-distance travel by denying Bart and Lisa a stop over at Flickey's. Here, Bart indulges every childish whim that his passengers throw at him, be it stopping for ice cream or to weigh the car at a weighing station. He is, for all intents and purposes, the designated adult of the group, and yet he shares their jejune delight and curiosity for each and every roadside attraction. Even when the fantasy dips explicitly into nightmare territory - they pick up a hitch-hiker, who is none other than Nubbins Sawyer from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - that wild abandon remains too exhilarating for it to sour the tone. Besides, they seem to have found Nubbins in an unusually clement mood; he's quite happy to chill with the boys, eat ice cream and share his own tale of bitter disappointment ("I didn't think I was rehabilitated, but I guess they needed the extra bed...").
The real disruption of the fantasy inevitably occurs once the kids actually arrive in Knoxville and discover that the highly-anticipated World Fair came and went fourteen years ago, and that the former site is now largely deserted, save for a wig salesman who's using the sphere to store his unsold stock. The other hard, cold adult truth they have to swallow is that $600 doesn't go nearly as far as you always assumed it would as a child - by the time they've reached Knoxville, they're nearly out of cash anyway. Nelson vents his frustration by hurling a rock at the Sunsphere and causing it to topple, destroying this decadent symbol of cancelled dreams and squandered opportunities, but also flattening their car in the process. Now the boys realise that their callow self-indulgence might actually reap serious consequences, with their only means of escape cut off, leaving them permanently marooned in this decaying urban wasteland. It's as Thomas Wolfe said. You can't go home again.
Or not. Martin points out that there is, in fact, a very simple and obvious solution to their problem - they just have to telephone their parents, admit what they've been up to, and accept whatever retribution is distributed their way. Bart, though, isn't prepared to throw in the towel that easily, attempting to rally the support of his comrades by appealing to the same inflated sense of self-determination that torpedoed them directly into this whole wretched mess: "We got here on our own so we can survive here on our own. We need money, food and a way to get home." It's at this point that Bart discovers that survival as an adult means having to settle down with a dead-end job, albeit one that enables him to see even more of that unfulfilling world; on Lisa's long-distance advice, he gets a job as a courier in the hopes of bumming a free ride to Springfield. It doesn't take long for the flaw in Lisa's suggestion to become apparent, however - unless someone from Springfield places an order from Knoxville, and unless their order is big enough for Milhouse, Martin and Nelson to stowaway inside, none of them are going to get anywhere. In the meantime, Bart is bounced all over the Pacific, delivering human eyes to scientists in Hong Kong and Big Macs to Marlon Brando. Another slight narrative implausibility is in the notion that Milhouse, Martin and Nelson are allowed to effectively live in the entrance to the courier depot while Bart is out delivering packages - why does nobody ever approach these blatantly unaccompanied kids to ask where their parents are and if they don't have their own homes they can go to? Then again, none of the adults in this episode ever seem to question anything. The only adult who sees anything wrong with this picture is Skinner, who happens to catch sight of Bart at the Hong Kong airport, a chance encounter that severely threatens Bart's prospects of getting out of this scot-free. But that remains to be seen.
The idea that adulthood is a wasteland of perpetual disillusionment is echoed in the respective narrative arcs of Marge and Homer. Homer is wrestling with the daily dissatisfaction of a 9 to 5 job (for the purposes of this story, he also apparently works night shifts, something I'm not totally sure if there'd ever been a precedent for). When Lisa is brought in, he struggles to fake both incompetence or enthusiasm, eventually admitting that, "I guess watching me isn't any more fun than being me." Homer's working life is depicted as being not only dull, but also thoroughly lonely, a point emphasised by having the plant seem unusually unpopulated; the only other employee to appear at any point is Smithers. Lisa makes the job more palatable by enabling Homer to reconnect with his inner child, relieving him from the burdens of adulthood by encouraging him to role play by envisioning his radiation suit as astronaut gear, and to indulge in a game of Truth or Dare (which facilitates a welcome throwback to the Moe prank calls, a classic running gag from the show's early years that had been largely abandoned since Season 3). This narrative thread serves as a quieter, more down-to-earth (relatively speaking, given the backdrop) counterpoint to the Bart A story, one that feels like an honest attempt to give these characters some benevolent one-on-one time. Lisa's relationship with Homer is an oft-explored one, but most episodes that do so require them to be at odds at some point, whereas here their interactions are refreshingly conflict-free. Lisa bonds with Homer to the point where she eventually feels comfortable enough to confide in him her crush on one Langdon Alger, one of the series' most intriguing unseen characters. He's a quiet boy who enjoys puzzles. Also, Lisa later goes off him for reasons unknown. He serves his narrative purpose when Homer and Lisa work together to find a solution to Bart's problem, and order new equipment from Oak Ridge (was it just a "happy" coincidence that Knoxville happens to be located right by the Atomic City, of all places, or did the writers purposely choose to centre around the Knoxville World's Fair for that particular bit of plot convenience?), having it sent under the unwitting child's moniker.
For as sweet and sincere as the Homer-Lisa bonding arc is, it's not without its downside. The episode makes it clear that Homer and Lisa's newfound rapport comes squarely at the expense of Marge, who is repeatedly ignored and excluded by both. To an extent, Marge being overlooked by her family is merely business as usual - Marge flags up that Homer never calls her from work under ordinary circumstances - but here we find the Simpson matriarch in a desperately isolated state, to the extent that she's compelled to watch an infomercial about cornering the real estate market through hypnosis as a substitute for real human interaction. Of the generous assortment of crazy delights this episode offers, it's Marge's premature glimpse of empty nest syndrome that strikes me as being the real heart of the story, as it's here that the narrative holds up an especially salient human mirror to that deserted fair site over in Knoxville. It's such a low-key but effective sequence, with Marge wandering from darkened bedroom to darkened bedroom, abandoned on the lonely sidelines of a story that's happening wherever she is not. It culminates in a surprisingly mean (by Marge's standards) moment, where she hones in on a sleeping Maggie and forcibly awakens and unsettles her, just so that she can feel needed (Maggie bearing the brunt of Marge's neediness seemed to become something of a running gag in late Season 7 - there's another variation on this joke in "Summer of 4 ft. 2").
Something else I really admire about "Bart On The Road" is that not only does it juggle such a flurry of concurrent narrative material, it brings it all together seamlessly in the third act, when the Bart and Lisa stories collide, and even the opening story beat with Skinner manages to deftly work its way back in. Marge's arc is resolved more passively than the others - her family all come crawling back to her by their own means - but the payoff is still satisfying. By the end of the episode, Marge is the only family member (sans Maggie) who remains in the dark as to the true nature of the story that's just unfolded - perhaps willfully so, given the ease with which she accepts Bart's ridiculous yarn. We have a great penultimate scene with all the family reunited at the dinner table, and Bart continuing to keep up the pretence that he's been at a grammar rodeo this entire time ("I don't think I'd go back again next year...it's gotten too commercial; they've forgotten it's supposed to be about the grammar"). Lisa and Homer exchange seething glances, outraged by Bart's gall and by the trouble he's put them both through, but each having too much honor to act on their indignation. Marge, by contrast, smiles warmly at Bart, happy simply to have him back at home with her. In spite of the jaw-dropping gullibility demonstrated by Marge, and every other adult, throughout "Bart On The Road", I'm tempted to interpret Marge's closing acceptance as her willingness to suspend all judgement in exchange for the restoration of her family. At the very least, it's indication that, no matter how badly he's screwed up out there in the world, Bart can always depend on his home and family. The muted resentment of both Homer and Lisa suggests that there will be lingering bitterness for his actions, even if it is not expressed directly, but Marge's smile acts as a final reassurance that he'll always have a home to come back to (kind of like that hot supper Max receives at the end of Where The Wild Things Are). Which is just as well, really, because as the episode fades out, it's implied that the truth might ultimately out after all - Marge receives a barrage of phone calls in which the various loose ends begin to boil over, with Skinner, the Tennessee state police and Bart's old boss at the courier service all struggling to make sense of the very odd situation from their ends. Marge dismisses them out of hand, but has gotten wise to the fact that Homer is clearly in on something that she isn't.
Still, I don't think we exit on too apprehensive a note. Underneath it all, "Bart On The Road" is actually a very sweet story about the lengths to which the family will go to come through for one another. Lisa, by all rights, knows that Bart should face a severe reckoning for the stunt he's pulled, but she puts her resentment aside and remains loyal to him in his darkest hour. Homer's immediate instinct is to dispense that very reckoning, but he too manages to bottle his fury out of loyalty to Lisa, who points out that she would be exposed as a traitor should Homer reveal his complicity. This family have each other's backs, even if they do largely seem to be protecting them from one another.
"Bart On The Road" might be pretty underrated as Simpsons episodes go, but one arena where it did find an appreciative audience was among the Simpsonwave movement, in which the image of Bart, Milhouse, Martin and Nelson cruising along on their ill-gotten wheels came to practically define the aesthetic. In fact, a vine utilising a clip from "Bart On The Road" is frequently credited with starting the whole Simpsonwave movement in the first place, or at least with popularising it. I can understand the appeal of the episode to the dreamy, nostalgic world of wave - it's ridiculous to the point of surreality, but there is something highly entrancing about the carefree optimism of these kids as they mosey toward their inevitable rude awakening. It's a moment that warrants freezing, examining, extending - to the point where Bart and co are living that endless summer of bygone youth in which all of us so desperately yearn to get lost.
