One of the first things we hear on the DVD commentary for "Marge Be Not Proud" (episode 3F07) is that The Simpsons was, for a number of years, reluctant to revisit the festive season, owing to the significance of the holiday in the series' personal history. "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire" had established their hugely successful run as a stand-alone act in 1989, and for a while it was felt that the most reverent thing to do was to let the episode itself stand alone, and not attempt anything that would immediately invite comparisons to such an important milestone. In practice, Christmas was hardly being singled out - it's not as though they were in a rush to revisit Thanksgiving in the years following "Bart vs. Thanksgiving", nor Valentine's Day/Presidents' Day after "I Love Lisa". New Year and Easter were not represented at all until Seasons 9 and 10 respectively, with "The Trouble With Trillions" and "Simpsons Bible Stories". Halloween was the only calendar date on which The Simpsons had carved out a fine little niche in acknowledging year after year - perhaps because it's an occasion dedicated to embracing the more warped and off-kilter side of existence, and that's where the Simpsons are right at home (something also born out in "Marge Be Not Proud", where we're not a minute into the episode before we've gotten a joke involving implied cannibalism). Come the show's seventh season, and the production team were feeling confident enough to take a crack at another seasonal installment - hence there was "Marge Be Not Proud", an episode that, rather than consciously try to evoke the eminence of its predecessor, tells a story that feels deliberately small and unassuming, but no less intent on leaving an emotional crater. It aired December 17th 1995, which by coincidence happened to be the sixth anniversary of "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire". Was it a worthy successor?
Not everybody would say so. One particularly prominent venue in the online Simpsons community (I'm sure I don't need to say which) infamously condemned this installment as the "one bad episode" of the first seven seasons, an objection that stemmed largely from how earnestly it treats the morality play element of its narrative, arguably to the point of being worthy of the dreaded "very special episode" tag; in other words, not much higher up the evolutionary ladder, in terms of selling the idea that thievery is bad, than the in-universe anti-shoplifting PSA fronted by Troy McClure (who apparently indulged in some criminal acts of his own at a Foot Locker in Beverly Hills). In my experience, their position is a minority one - "Marge Be Not Proud" might not occupy the top spot of many a favourites list, but overall it seems to be a well-respected episode, and not an especially common contender for the prestigious title of "Worst. Episode. Ever.", even restricting options to the classic era - but nevertheless prominent enough to have had a sizeable enough impact on the discourse surrounding the episode in recent years. I should establish upfront that I am in strong (but respectful) disagreement - to my mind "Marge Be Not Proud" is a very special episode, although not in the sense intended by its most vocal of detractors. It's a special episode by virtue of it being an ultra-rare Simpsons episode in which the main conflict is structured around the relationship between Marge and Bart. In fact, so dominated is the episode by the Marge-Bart dynamic that input from the rest of the family is kept to an utmost minimum. Homer makes his famous observation about eggnog obtainability,
but he isn't heavily involved in the plot here, and (as with
"Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire") Lisa is given barely anything to
do outside of one really sharp moment in which she demonstrates her
psychological astuteness (that, and get sick from overexposure to fake
snow and eggnog). Elsewhere, Maggie gets to freak out when Marge insists on depriving her of her pacifier, and Abe makes one of his more random cameos.
Earlier in 2021, when I reviewed "Moaning Lisa", I noted that Season 1 was extremely lopsided in terms of the spotlight afforded each individual family member. The focus was overwhelmingly on Bart and Homer, with Marge and Lisa receiving only one episode each in which their personal needs were truly at the centre. It's also the case that the relationship between Homer and Bart was, at this point, treated as the crux of the series (as it was in the original Ullman shorts), which is why so many episodes tended to centre on them as a duo. As the series got a better handle on who the other members of the family were, we saw things branch out a little - in the back-end of the season, the series suddenly became very preoccupied with the state of relations between Homer and Marge, Marge and Lisa got some heartfelt bonding time in "Moaning Lisa" and Bart and Lisa were depicted as this formidable team in "Krusty Gets Busted". There were, however, two family relationships that went completely neglected in the show's first season (other than the entire family's individual relationships with Maggie, which unfortunately goes without saying) - Homer and Lisa and Marge and Bart. The writers seemed to figure out very quickly that Homer and Lisa had a lot of potential as a pairing, since they're polar opposites, and the majority of Lisa-centric episodes in Seasons 2 and 3 dealt extensively with her relationship with Homer (to the extent that her relationship with Marge took a backseat). Marge and Bart, though, remained under-utilised, even as the series gathered steam and the characters' personalities became better defined - whenever their relationship was explored in depth, it tended to be regulated to B story fodder (eg: "Homer Defined", "Lisa The Greek", "Whacking Day"). Before "Marge Be Not Proud", the closest we'd come to an episode in which their relationship was actually driving the main narrative was "The PTA Disbands", where Bart's desire to prolong a teacher strike is compounded by having his mother as a substitute teacher. Even then, it's a bit of a stretch to call "The PTA Disbands" a Marge/Bart episode - this particular conflict isn't established until quite late in the game and we don't get a lot of focus on what makes them tick as a pairing.
A shame too, because their relationship is such a poignant one. Marge loves the imperfect child she raised, and she's supportive of him in ways that no other character really could be. Marge is well-aware of what a trouble-maker Bart is, but she's also got a clear window into his better qualities, and his vulnerabilities. As such, when the rest of the world is quick to see the worst in Bart, Marge is fully capable of weighing this up against the bigger picture. "Homer Defined", for example, has a lovely subplot where Marge intervenes on Bart's behalf after Luann Van Houten deems him a bad influence and forbids Milhouse from playing with him. "I can't defend everything he does," Marge tells Luann, "But let's face it, all Bart and Milhouse have is each other. They're too young for girls, they're a popular target for bullies, and in the Christmas pageant they're always sheep." At the end of the story, when Luann softens her position, Bart thanks Marge for standing up for him; Marge asks why he supposes it was her doing, to which he responds, "Who else would?" What would happen, though, if Bart took his mischief-making a step too far, further than Marge had ever anticipated he could go, and this prompted her to reassess her entire perspective of him? Here, we have a scenario in which Marge once again takes a heartfelt stand for her son, only this time it doesn't pay off - he is guilty of the one thing she was confident he would never do.
"Marge Be Not Proud" opens during the rundown to Christmas, with Bart catching a commercial for the latest video game phenomenon, an explosive new fighting simulator named Bonestorm, and his heart going wild with desire. Getting hold of the game, however, is a tricky matter - there's no way he can afford it, it doesn't look as though he'll be able to convince Homer and Marge that the game is worth its $70 price tag, The Android's Dungeon is out of rental copies (although there is still a lot of Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge to go around), and Milhouse has the game but seems deeply averse to letting Bart hustle in on his playtime. So great is Bart's desperation that his inability to experience Bonestorm begins to feel like a great cosmic injustice (the way it does when you're a kid and you really want something you can't have), and when he runs into Jimbo and Nelson at a local department store, the Try-N-Save, and receives a demonstration in just how easy it is to grab items and sneak out without paying for them, it momentarily strikes him as a very practical solution for rectifying this injustice. In his case, it doesn't work out nearly so well - he makes it all the way out of the store with the game, but is immediately accosted by an intimidating security guard (voiced by guest Lawrence Tierney), who leaves a message on the family's answering machine reporting Bart's attempted theft and warns him never to set foot inside the store again. Bart manages to leg it home before Homer and Marge, and squirrels the incriminating evidence away in a place where he's convinced nobody will ever discover it - a cassette case for Allan Sherman's 1963 novelty pop hit "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduah" (poor Allan Sherman, he did not deserve that jab). Bart now wants nothing more than to put the matter behind him, but that's not happening - the following morning he's forced to return to the scene of the crime, when Marge takes the family to be photographed at a booth in the Try-N-Save. Tierney's guard spots and challenges Bart, whereupon the ugly truth he'd tried so hard to bury comes gushing out messily before his family.
Part of what makes "Marge Be Not Proud" so effective is the overwhelming empathy it engenders for Bart, even when we know he's done something totally unjustifiable. The scenario would frankly fall flat if we were sitting there tutting and shaking our heads at him the entire time. Instead, it does a wonderful job of taking you back into the mindset of a 10 year old and depicting the offending action as a relatably human error of judgment - Bart's old enough to know that shoplifting is wrong, although not necessarily wise enough to appreciate the nature of that wrongness beyond it being something he could get into serious trouble for doing. For a moment, he's naive enough to believe that if he can do it without anybody noticing, then it might be okay. And when somebody does notice, and take him aside, the horror and fear is completely mutual. It certainly helps that Don Brodka, the security guard voiced by Tierney, is legitimately terrifying. Technically, he does show mercy in choosing to take the matter to Bart's parents and not the police, but he's exactly the kind of hard-nosed, unsympathetic authority figure we don't want bearing down on us when we've done something we've immediately recognised to be a terrible mistake and would like to be permitted to bail out of.
"Marge Be Not Proud" is in many respects, a more downbeat, down-to-earth counterpart to "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", which explored similar ideas about consequence, accountability and things never being quite the same once certain lines had been crossed, only in the context of Bart's relationship with Homer. There, the precipitating incident (Bart fails to keep an eye on Maggie, leading her to escaping and going for an unlikely joyride in the family car) is not taken at all seriously - the episode is more preoccupied with the punishment than the crime, and there is no sense whatsoever of Bart feeling remorse because he sees any particular wrongness in what he did; the pain he feels comes purely from Homer's disciplinary measure in refusing to let him see a film he was really looking forward to. In "Marge Be Not Proud", Bart's misdemeanour is less over the top, and therefore has much more gravitas than Maggie's ridiculous escapade - it has the sting of realism, as it's something a child actually could do that would make their parents feel sorely let down. When Bart takes the game, both he and the viewer understand that he is behaving in a manner extremely out of character for him; Bart may be a prankster who delights in undermining authority, but he recognises that there are boundaries, and shoplifting is not something he would typically be tempted to dabble in. It would mean crossing a clear line between the playfully mischievous and the unambiguously criminal. Whereas "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" begins with the problem of Bart feeling free to create havoc with wild abandon because he's so used to Homer failing to assert meaningful authority, this time Bart knows in advance that there will be consequences if he is caught and his parents find out, but he misjudges the nature of those consequences severely. He gets the angry tirade he was expecting from Homer - Homer, though, can't follow a train of thought very far and seems to forget about it almost instantly. Marge is less resilient; unlike Homer, she doesn't get angry, which initially leads Bart to believe that he's being let off lightly, but Lisa warns him that Marge's hurt feelings might manifest in different ways. Indeed, the news has come as such a bucket of emotional ice water to Marge that she reacts with a protracted numbness that turns out to be even more unbearable. Suddenly, she becomes a lot more distant in her treatment of Bart - not because she's looking to punish him or even to teach him any kind of lesson, but because she sincerely believes that her oversolicitous parenting, which Bart had objected to earlier in the story, had a major hand in pushing him astray. Bart begins to worry that he might have damaged their relationship irrevocably. And that hurts a lot more than not getting his hands on some dumb old video game.
As with "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", the premise hinges around Bart's assumptions that he's missing out on something monumental, in this case a video game touted as the ultimate in pixelated violence. The reality is that Bonestorm (much like the in-universe Itchy & Scratchy Movie) probably isn't all that good - despite his initial enthusiasm, Thrillho loses interest in the game very quickly - and definitely not worth the trouble that Bart puts himself through in order to acquire a copy. It's not really the point of the story, but nestled at the back of "Marge Be Not Proud" there is a definite condemnation of the crass consumerist culture that's rampant all year round but becomes a particular behemoth during the Christmas period (note the sign on Try-N-Save's window about the store's seasonal opening hours). During a fantasy sequence in which various iconic video game characters come to life and urge Bart into doing the dirty deed, Donkey Kong suggests that, "It's the company's fault for making you want it so much," and while this is clearly not being lauded as legitimate justification for stealing, the barrel-throwing ape does nevertheless raise a valid point in that Bart has been suckered into insatiability by aggressive corporate marketing strategies that thrive on making children (and adults) feel inadequate with what they have. (Note: as hilarious as that sequence is - particularly with Lee Carvallo weighing in as the lone dissenter - if you ask me they missed a trick in not including Link from The Legend of Zelda. That little punk was a shoplifter - or at least he was whenever I played Link's Awakening.)
Despite the omnipresence of holiday paraphernalia all throughout, "Marge Be Not Proud" is not, for the most part, too intrinsically linked to its seasonal setting - unlike "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire", the basic premise could have happened at any time of year. I'd be tempted to suggest that the decision to make it into a Christmas episode was, in part, a calculated tactic to give the story a little more leeway in terms of its melancholic value, which is considerable. "Marge Be Not Proud" is as well-stocked with razor-sharp writing as the next Simpsons script, and yet it seems a stretch to call it an especially funny episode. It's not that there's a shortage of laughs, just that they're offset by the overwhelming glumness of the narrative - there's no attempt to downplay the pain felt by Bart and Marge respectively, nor the seriousness of the rift between them. It plays itself pretty straight, as a drama with comedic touches, as opposed to a comedy first and foremost. In that regard, it could be seen as a throwback to the show's fist two seasons, where episodes often incorporated a more conspicuous element of dramatic honesty, but I don't think they were ever quite this woebegone about it. I would have few qualms in labelling "Marge Be Not Proud" the most downbeat of the series, and I think this has a lot to do with the episode's somewhat decisive reception - it's so naked on the emotional front that it occasionally makes for genuinely uncomfortable viewing. Perhaps that's what makes the story so well-suited for the festive period, when we as a culture are traditionally at our weakest for tales of naked sentiment and intense hardship alike. We all know that nothing goes down more nicely with the mulled wine than a little human misery...provided there is light at the end of the tunnel, of course.
The episode's unusually stark emotional candidness can also be attributed to the fact that it was rooted in such a personal place for writer Mike Scully. If you listen to Simpsons DVD commentaries, then you'll know that the
premise of "Marge Be Not Proud" was lifted directly from his own childhood experience - apparently there was an occasion on
which the young Scully succumbed to the temptation to shoplift (motivated, he says, more by peer pressure than uncontrollable desire) and was
caught and apprehended by a store employee. The employee telephoned
Scully's household, but his parents weren't home - instead, they got
through to Scully's younger brother, who was instructed to pass on the
message. Scully was then released from the store and told never to come
back. Scully spent the rest of the day absolutely terrified as to how
his parents would react when they heard the news - in his case, though,
that never happened, as his brother failed to give them the message. As
Scully relates the story on the commentary, it's not particularly clear
to me if his brother's silence on the matter came from extraordinary
loyalty or just extreme absent-mindedness; there can't be many siblings
out there who would withhold information as juicy as that without
demanding something in return, but maybe his brother was an unusually
good egg. For the time being, Scully assumed he'd gotten away with it.
Then came the day when he was out shopping with his mother and she took
him into the very store where he'd been caught shoplifting. Scully was,
of course, absolutely powerless to explain why this was a bad idea.
While inside the store, he was approached by the employee who had
apprehended him, who asked if he was not the same child they had
explicitly banned a short time ago. Scully flat-out denied the charge
and, fortunately for him, the employee was willing to give him the
benefit of the doubt. Scully indicates that his mother passed away
without ever learning the truth, and with that in mind, "Marge Be Not Proud" can be seen as his own indirect atonement to her, an acknowledgement of how things might have gone had that second encounter worked out differently, and the store employee had been more confident in their accusation. (Note that, in spite of Scully's sorry tale of childhood anguish, the DVD
commentary ends up being one of the funniest on offer, because it's one
of the very few in which the production staff make no bones about what
an all-out nightmare it was to work with the episode's guest actor
Lawrence Tierney. Most of the time, they seem genuinely appreciative of
anybody who's willing to take time out of their busy schedule to appear
in their silly cartoon show, but in Tierney's case...well, the erstwhile Dillinger, who was at the time enjoying a revival in interest following his casting in the 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, had a reputation for being an incredibly loose cannon. He sure did give an immaculate performance, though.)
A good chunk of the episode's distinctly downbeat feel comes from the tremendous sense of isolation that trails Bart throughout. He spends the first third of the episode feeling he's being shut out of a big cultural phenomenon, and the final third from something much smaller in scope yet so much more immense, which is to say his own family unit. When Bart is excluded from family rituals by Marge, on the presumption that he is getting too old for them, he is, by extension, shunned by the entirety of his clan. And with Bart regulated to the sidelines they never look like anything less than a picture of perfect family bliss, something that bothers him profoundly. At one point, Bart complains about being seen as the "black sheep" of the family, although earlier in the episode we'd received a reminder of how, ordinarily, Bart wears his badge as family miscreant with pride. Marge
points out that she's never had a perfect family picture before, and we
can see from her gallery of previous fiascos that this is purely Bart's
doing - his gravitation toward mayhem makes sabotage irresistible, and finding increasingly creative ways of subverting their efforts to look like a well-presented family has become a personal challenge to him. Bart clearly does not see these actions as detrimental to the family's image, but as evidence of a healthy sense of humor that adds liveliness to their routines, but his latest, ill-judged act of rebellion calls all of that into question. Suddenly, Bart feels insecure about his place within the unit, and the possibility that he could be this toxic little seed of destruction whom the others grudgingly tolerate but would privately function better without. There is a sense that, in spite of their imperfections, the family's unity has always prevailed in the past; the preceding portraits are mildly titled, but overall look relatively balanced compared to the newest addition, which immediately slants when Marge hangs it above the fireplace, an obvious reflection of something being drastically out of whack within the Simpson equilibrium, and Marge's personal despair regarding her ruptured connection with her son. An equally poignant visual metaphor, this time reflecting Bart's perspective, occurs when he arrives home to find that the rest of the family have built snowmen in their likeness in his absence (with Homer employing somewhat more artistic licence than the others). Bart wants to build one too, if only to reassert his position as a valid member of this family, but all he has left to work with is the cruddy snow retrieved from under the car. Despite his best efforts, Bart's snowman ends up looking like a grotesque monstrosity, painfully out of sync with the meticulously sculpted specimens with which it rubs shoulders. As a manifestation of Bart's sense of inadequacy compared to the rest of his family, it couldn't be more searing.
The Yuletide setting pays off more directly, in narrative terms, in the final scene, when resolution is facilitated by an exchange of presents between Bart and Marge. Bart has returned from his third excursion to the Try-N-Save with something visibly concealed inside his jacket; Marge, fearing that her son is now a repeat offender, demands he hand it over, and receives a framed photograph of Bart himself, an attached receipt demonstrating its honest acquisition, which Bart had intended to give Marge for Christmas to compensate for her disastrous photo shoot. The earlier set-up of the slanted family portrait is also resolved satisfyingly, when Marge places Bart's picture at the edge of the frame, covering the previous blemish and restoring the balance both literally and metaphorically. Marge is so moved by the gesture that she wants to give Bart an early present in return - knowing how much he loves video games, she went to the local electronics outlet and asked the clerk for the hottest title going. Bart and the viewer alike are momentarily taunted into thinking that he's getting Bonestorm after all - until the wrapping is off, that is, and he finds himself staring at a copy of Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge (incidentally, I like the implication that the clerk might have lied to Marge in an effort to shift a copy of a slow-selling game). This is less a cruel slap around the face than the story concluding in the only way it logically can - honestly, if Bart had been given Bonestorm at the end, it would have felt profoundly wrong. He needed to demonstrate that he's risen above the kind of voracious materialism that started this whole ordeal. His interest in Bonestorm hasn't completely waned and he would accept the game in a heartbeat if it was offered to him. But he no longer places it at the centre of universe as he did at the start of the episode; instead, he's happy in simply having that reassurance of Marge's unconditional love. Bart has, in a way, taken another step toward adulthood, in being initiated into that most prevalent of grown-up Xmas traditions, one summed up deftly in the song "Christmas Time (Don't Let The Bells End)" by The Darkness - "Feigning joy and surprise/At the gifts we despise". Marge herself has already been set up for such a disappointment, albeit one that's going to have to play out off-screen - we might have forgotten about this, what with all the emotional trauma we've been through in the third act, but earlier on we saw Marge drop a hint to Homer that she wanted a watch for Christmas. We also know that he's actually planning to give her an ironing board cover. I suppose it's a step up from giving her a bowling ball with his own name engraved on it, but all the same, I couldn't imagine a more underwhelming gift to receive instead of a shiny new watch.
The episode closes with an extra festive cherry in top, in the form of
an end-credits epilogue where we see footage from the Lee Carvallo game,
as Bart attempts to make the most of his new present. This sequence really
resonates with me as, growing up, the first console my family owned was
an Amiga Commodore, which had a ton of cheesy sports-related titles.
Later, we upgraded to a Sega Mega Drive and got Mortal Kombat, the title I presume Bonestorm was spoofing. I played it enough, but
looking back, I have to admit that I have far fonder memories of those
sports titles, in all their unabashed dorkiness. In my heart of hearts, I know I would have preferred to receive Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge over Bonestorm.
Finally, there is a small but important point I wish to make regarding the 1997 book The Simpsons: A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family. Inconveniently, I don't have a copy to hand right now, but I seem to recall that, in Marge's character profile, it was stated that she briefly "stopped loving" Bart during the events of this very episode. But that's ridiculous. Of course she didn't - the bedroom scene with Marge and Homer makes it clear that the former's revised treatment of Bart wasn't motivated by a reduction in love on her part. As beautiful and invaluable a resource as A Complete Guide was, it had its faults like any other tome. The unfortunate wording seems to have been lifted from one of the episode's most underrated moments, when Bart attempts to articulate to Milhouse his fear that he might have lost his mother's devotions, only for Milhouse, who is still in the privileged position of getting to take his parents' displays of affection for granted, to not get it at all and to start spouting some delicious non-sequitur about piranhas (which, as we've discussed, are generally only worth fearing if you've been mangled by a jaguar in advance). I couldn't tell you why, but I was, for the longest time, under the erroneous impression that he was describing a scene from an actual existing movie, which I had in mind to seek out and watch some day. Alas, I've come to the regretful conclusion that no such flick exists, although maybe that is just as well - I doubt that any fully realised piranha periscope movie with a prophetic old lady could ever match the one I'd always been left to picture inside my head.
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