Miracle on Evergreen Terrace (aka There's No Shame In Being A Pariah)

"Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" (aka 5F07) is yet another example of a Simpsons episode where the title is basically a lie. There is no miracle therein, on Evergreen Terrace or anywhere else. Marge thinks there's been a miracle a couple of times, but she's proven wrong on both occasions. The lack of miracles is precisely the intent - they aren't going to happen in a burg as rotten as Springfield, Christmas be damned. Miracles are so banal anyway, a point made when Marge first insists that one has occurred, and Homer assumes she's talking about a particularly effective brand of silver polish.

"Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" aired on December 21st 1997 as part of the series' ninth season, yet it constituted only its third foray into festive storytelling. For years, The Simpsons had purposely steered clear of going back to the Christmas well - such was the reverence with which "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire", the episode that had kick-started an entire cartoon empire, was regarded. When "Marge Be Not Proud" finally dared to breach that barrier in 1995, the floodgates were opened, and seasonal Simpsons outings would become a far more common feature of the series going forward. Of course, the show was already a markedly different beast to what it was in the days of "Marge Be Not Proud", let alone "Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire"; by the time "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" showed up, we were in the early stages of Mike Scully's reign as showrunner, and for those viewers who weren't exactly wild about the direction he was about to take things (yours truly included), this episode came as quite the bucket of ice water. "The Principal and The Pauper" had created its share of controversy earlier that season, but since it was technically a holdover from Season 8, you could blame that one on the outgoing showrunners (and on writer Ken Keeler, who stands resolutely by his vision to this day). "Miracle" would, in its own lower-key way, prove just as divisive, and while you could say that about a lot of Season 9, considered by some to be the last truly classic season, and by others the beginning of the end, I find that this episode seems to bring out particularly strong feelings in people. Either it's an ingenious slice of seasonal black comedy or an ill-judged spite-fest and our first uneasy indicator of what was to come under Scully's tenure. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide seemed mostly bored by it, calling it "a deliberately mawkish Christmas episode that is low on good jokes...and a retread of any number of episodes where Bart does wrong, feels guilty and eventually has to fess up." At the same time, "Miracle" is undoubtedly old enough to be a beneficiary of nostalgia (25 years old, to be precise!); I was still a kid when it debuted, and while I never much cared for it even then (particularly that downer of an ending), it apparently made enough of an impression for the sounds of "Santa's On His Way" by Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys to give present-day me a case of the melancholic fuzzies.

I get, and to an extent can even respect, what "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" is attempting to do, which is to be the anti-It's a Wonderful Life. Strife on Earth and ill-will to all men is what it swears by - or, to borrow a quote from Phoebe from Friends, "It's a sucky life and just when you think it can't suck any more, it does". "Miracle" contains numerous jabs at the commercialisation of Christmas, for which the family's plastic tree and its flame-broiled fate provide the perfect metaphor. There's a joke about aluminium Christmas trees, and how people once sneered at those for being artificial, while batting not an eyelid at the prospect of a Yuletide smothered in plastic. "Miracle" is deeply distrustful of plastic, which it shows to be cheap, disposable and ultimately not destined to return your emotional investment. But "Miracle" is no redemptive tale of seeing past the materialistic trappings of the holiday and discovering what really matters - if anything, it's doubly suspicious of the notion of seasonal goodwill and of Christmas as a time that brings out the best in humanity, a notion it gleefully eviscerates as being as artificial as any factory-made Christmas tree, plastic or aluminium. Humans, "Miracle" has it, are fundamentally scumbags, at least the ones who reside in Springfield. Which honestly isn't that much of a revelation - it's been a pretty consistent component of the show's DNA since as far back as Season 1's "The Telltale Head" that Springfield is a deeply unpleasant community that jumps upon any excuse to get its pitchforks out and do evil in the name of the mob. "Miracle" pushes it to a particularly pointed degree, however. When Bart first sells his ridiculous lie about the family falling victim to a burglary at the crack of Christmas dawn, Marge's immediate reaction is to wonder how anybody could do something so unconscionable. And the obvious answer, from the viewer's perspective, is that nobody did; narrative tension is, for a short while, driven by the knowledge that there was no such burglar and that the family's crisis of faith in humanity is over nothing more than a really dumb accident. And yet, when Homer later says of Bart's phantom burglar, "You do exist," he's more correct than he possibly realises. The specific burglar described by Bart (with hooks for hands, a striped convict shirt and a bag with a dollar sign) is pure fiction, but that burglar is manifest, on a figurative basis, in the hearts of every friend and neighbour who had only yesterday dug deep into their pockets in order to replenish the family's loss. In the episode's cleverest moment, Homer delivers his statement to the burglar via Kent Brockman's newscast, addressing the camera and by extension the viewer, thus implicating them, pre-emptively, in the mean-spirited twist ending, which sees the entire town unleashing their inner burglar and looting whatever they can from the family's house. To answer Marge's original question, stealing from a family at Christmas is apparently something we ALL would partake in, given the right provocation. For it is within our basic nature to be as petty and vindictive as we are greedy and grasping.

And all credit to "Miracle" for being so thoroughly committed to its cynicism. Unfortunately, I think the episode ultimately suffers because the story just isn't very good; the central conflict is weakly constructed and runs out of narrative momentum well before we've even reached the third act. And its unrelenting cynicism ultimately comes across as rather forced and hollow, a feel-bad ending for the sake of a feel-bad, as opposed to having anything truly honest or meaningful to say about our Yuletide hypocrisies.

The first thing that "Miracle" has riding against it is that it falls back extensively on plot points borrowed from the Christmas shows before it - and, given that there were so very few Christmas shows before it, it can't help but seem a little galling that they were already having to repeat themselves. In that regard it feels like the Simpsons' festive equivalent of one of those Greatest Hits compilations from a band that only ever did two albums. Like "Roasting", it's about the family having to deal with a Christmas stripped bare of material luxury. It's also about Bart doing something very bad, struggling to conceal his very bad action from his family, and then spending much of the episode in a depressive funk while grappling with that ugly little feeling called remorse - sound familiar? I acknowledged when I covered "Marge Be Not Proud" that there are some viewers who find that episode to be overbearing its treatment of Bart's transgression, but at least it had the sting of emotional authenticity - it was based on an incident from Scully's childhood and was, for all intents and purposes, his belated apology to his late mother in recognition of the hurt he realises he could have caused her with his own misadventure in shoplifting (Scully was clearly capable of bringing real sensitivity to the table as a writer, so it's surprising that he favoured such a crass approach as showrunner). It also works as a thoughtfully-constructed character study, focussing on one of the lesser-explored relationships of the Simpsons household. "Miracle" can't really hold claim to any such credentials - it is, on some level, an episode about how the Simpsons are intrinsically a unit and destined to all go down together if just one of them royally screws things up. But in the end its real interests lie less in the usual Simpson solidarity than in the meanness of the townsfolk, and how their ostensibly compassionate hearts will turn cold as stone if the narrative changes and their egos take a bruising. But even then The Simpsons already did a story of this very nature, with heaps more wit and precision and much less of a heavy hand, in Season 3's "Radio Bart" (not a Christmas episode, but in my coverage I made the case that it makes for appropriate festive viewing), which makes more-or-less the same point and follows a lot of very similar narrative beats. Where the two episodes diverge is in their respective outcomes - one is redemptive, the other unapologetically cruel - but then I wouldn't say that they radically contradict one another either. The people of Springfield inevitably bend to the will of the mob, seemingly indifferent to whether it's bent on being helpful or malicious, and the strength of that mob is always a thing to behold.

For all of my issues with "Miracle", the first act is basically fine. The parts that land the best tend to be parts that have little to do with the plot itself and are mostly scene-setters dealing with what a typical Christmas looks like inside the Simpsons house, and most of those occur within the first few minutes. One particularly good gag involves Marge serving the children two different kinds of Christmas cookies - tree-shaped cookies for Lisa and Maggie, and bloody spear-shaped cookies for Bart. Bart thanks Marge with such loving reverence before pretending to brutally skewer himself with his cookie, and the contrast is irresistible. This is preceded by another, neatly understated sight gag in which the children are seen watching a fireplace on television, obscuring the real fireplace right behind them. We don't get a whole lot of focus on Lisa in this episode (that makes three Christmas shows in a row where they've given her next to nothing to do) but her revulsion at the thought of unwrapping yet another yellow sweater always raises a smile. I like Bart's dedication to his absent aunt: "Oh, Aunt Selma. Always good for a fin." Bart's bathroom-fixated dream sequence probably goes on a mite too long, but you've got to admire how amazingly risqué it is, filled with various phallic objects squirting water. I also enjoy the moment with Marge mistaking the sounds of Maggie's expiring moo box for the weird noises Homer makes in his sleep, followed by Homer jabbing Marge for her comparatively inoffensive snoring. And of course, Homer's toddler-like incomprehension upon finding the tree and presents gone: "Lisa, where's Christmas?!" All of which comes together for a fairly solid set-up. It's just too bad that it doesn't go anywhere; past the first act, there's nowhere for this story to go, except through fourteen dragged-out minutes of largely humorless misdirection. You can practically feel the narrative wrong-footing itself when the word "burglar" slips out of Bart's mouth, and the family rallies around him with no further questioning. Like Bart, it's bitten off more than it can conceivably chew.

The second thing "Miracle" has riding against it is that, unlike "Marge Be Not Proud", Bart's very bad action has no basis whatsoever in plausibility. He wakes up early, gets a forbidden head-start in unwrapping presents, and ends up accidentally burning down the tree and the family's entire haul; having hastily concealed the evidence beneath the snow in the family's front yard, he then proceeds to blame the absent festive paraphernalia on a fictitious home intruder. Some suspension of disbelief is obviously required here - first and foremost, the one thing Bart wouldn't have been able to cover with his pure, white snow would be the smell of things following his little calamity; the family really should have been able to tell, just using their nostrils, that there'd been this big plastic bonfire inside their living room. Also, ignoring the convenience of the fire engulfing only the tree and the presents and not spreading to anything else, wouldn't there at least be a massive scorch mark on the carpet directly under the tree? Cartoon logic has to factor in somewhere, I suppose, but it still strikes me as a stretch for the family to accept Bart's story as readily as they do, when presumably he can't point to any actual evidence of there having been a break-in? Compare it to Marge's reluctance to accept that Bart was guilty of shoplifting in "Marge Be Not Proud" - her rushing to the defence of her son when a stranger points an accusatory finger his way is completely understandable, as is her insistence that she knows her son and what he is and isn't capable of. She's so passionate and so sincere in her defence that it is genuinely heartbreaking when she's shown evidence to the contrary. (Kavner's performance is so moving too - in particular, I'm always hit by that unmistakable undercurrent of panic in her voice when she challenges Tierney's security guard to play the tape so that everyone can see that he's wrong; Marge still wants to believe the best in her son, but she's clearly already rattled by how far her opponent is willing to take his case.) Here, there's no such payoff when Bart belatedly but inevitably confesses to his destruction of the tree - the family's toe-curling obtuseness, in swallowing Bart's preposterous lie to begin with, makes it difficult to feel much in the way of sympathy for them. The situation is frankly far too overblown to feel much in the way of sympathy for Bart, either, although we do share his sense of what an insufferable bummer it is. And this is, I feel, where the episode makes its most fatal mistake. It takes Bart's misery awfully seriously for such a labored conflict, and appears to be attempting to recreate something of the drama of "Marge Be Not Proud". Since the rest of the episode is low on emotional sincerity - the peak of its willful insensitivity is reached when those two ghastly Dickensian urchins are trotted out to rub Bart's face in his misdeed (they're identified as Patches and Poor Violet, but Ignorance and Want would be about as on the nose) - what we're left with is an ungainly tonal mishmash.  Not so with "Radio Bart", which had the wisdom to play its own silly scenario as a straight farce right up until the climax.

Where "Miracle" does offer something resembling authenticity is in its exploration of Bart as a child, and not Bart as a criminal mastermind. Again, it suffers from comparisons to "Marge Be Not Proud" in that regard, but it's a nice enough plot detail that Bart's mind is recognisably working in the way that a child's mind would be - geared entirely toward the present, and toward delaying repercussions for as long as possible, rather than clearly thinking through how this might play out in the longer-term. His cover-up is doomed to failure - for one, he doesn't seem to have any kind of contingency plan in place for a sudden thaw, or have given any consideration toward relocating the evidence to a more secure hiding place, period - but when you're a child, knowing that you might be in the clear for now is often relief enough. Maybe he's played like too much of a little kid - in this episode Bart's pretty forthright in his belief in Santa, but I happen to think that what he had to say on the matter in "Roasting" ("There's only one fat guy who brings us presents, and his name ain't Santa!") was a lot more authentic to his character, and to a 10 year old child, period. Still, there is a neat gag suggesting that, despite the religious reverence with which he appears to regard Santa, he is ultimately in Bart's eyes yet another authority figure to be undermined - his triumphant cackle that, contra the song lyrics, Santa obviously doesn't have time to check that list twice.

It's this predilection for circumventing authority that gets us into our pivotal jam. At the beginning of the episode, Bart is totally cavalier, shamelessly disobeying Marge's instructions that nobody will be opening any of their presents before 7:00am, with seemingly no regard for how she's is going to feel when she discovers that she's not getting the full family Christmas experience she so desperately wanted - rather, he seems to take it as a challenge when she goes so far as to confiscate the family's alarm clocks in a bid to prevent them from getting up before her. That fearlessness obviously goes out the window when the tree goes up in smoke; as with "Marge Be Not Proud", his immediate concern is doing whatever he can to avoid the wrath of parental authority, but as the day wears on and he sees the chain reaction that his self-serving lie inspires, he gains a deeper understanding of the nature of consequence and of what it might also entail. All the same, when he finally confesses to the family that he burned the tree, it seems to come less from a place of guilt and a desire to put things right than from a more general emotional exhaustion at how ridiculously far the situation has managed to drag itself out. Bart, like "Miracle" itself, gets fed up with the current plot trajectory and figures that a change of course is in order. Which takes us into the the third thing "Miracle" has riding against it - for all the heavy-handed posturing of the second act, it doesn't actually give a toss about Bart and how he faces up to the problem of remorse, to the extent that it all but loses interest in him in the third act. Here, it ceases to be Bart's story and instead focusses on how the family as a whole are collectively shunned and harassed by the angry townspeople. They're mad because they donated $15,000 to the Simpsons' phony cause (in the first of Marge's alleged miracles) and encouraged them to blow it all on an extravagant impulse purchase - which, in another instance of fate having its own ridiculous vendetta against the family this Christmas, went badly wrong and only served to set them back to square one. When the rest of Springfield gets wind of the fact that there was no burglar (by way of an inopportune appearance from Kent Brockman), they want their money back and insist on making the Simpsons' lives miserable until they're able to make good. Thus, the rest of the episode consists almost entirely of Springfield being unbelievably rotten to the family, with a brief interlude where Marge becomes a contestant on Jeopardy so that we can squeeze in our obligatory guest celebrity appearance (from Alex Trebek).

As with "Radio Bart" you could argue that the basic narrative hasn't really changed - we still have a family who lost everything at Christmas and could have benefited from the support of a generous community, but I guess there's less satisfaction to be had in helping the victims of a really dumb accident as opposed to those who have a nice big sob story to accompany their loss. All the same, the wrath of the townspeople feels so disproportionate and arbitrary, given the total lack of malicious intention on the family's part. Four of the five family members were unaware of the truth of the matter until too late, and the other's just a 10 year old child. There's only so far you can reasonably go with your anger. It's not as though there's any obvious misunderstanding on the town's part either; Bart makes it clear during Kent's second newscast that the deception was all his doing (which "Miracle" seems to consider closure enough for his individual arc), and there's nothing to suggest that anybody disputes this, but it all makes little difference in practice - the town donated their money to the Simpsons as a unit, so as far as they're concerned they're equally culpable. Kent's own outrage on the matter is entirely false, as is made clear when the camera stops filming and he turns to the family to thank them for providing such a juicy local story, and we suspect that the rage of every other Springfieldian is every bit as contrived. Mostly (and very much like their infatuation with the non-existent orphan Timmy O'Toole) they're sore because they didn't get the pre-determined feel-good story they wanted from the deal, something to satisfy their own egos and have them feeling good about their generosity. Instead, the Simpsons caused them to feel like total chumps, and that battering to their pride far outweighs whatever mitigating circumstances might have lurked behind that bogus burglar yarn. Now Marge gets to experience the dark reality of her alleged miracle - far from yielding their deliverance, the family's dependence on the goodwill of others has left them at the mercy of a community with little clemency to spare.

That takes us to the episode's shock ending, where the townspeople resolve to launch a communal burglary on the Simpsons' house in the interests of getting even. One suspects that, like Bart before them, they just grew weary of how tediously drawn-out the matter was getting and decided to supply their own escape clause. I've already indicated that this climax just plain rubs me the wrong way, yet conversely it also contains my personal pick for the episode's stand-out moment - Krusty to Otto: "If you're heading for the medicine cabinet, I've already been there." And, to be fair, there is something amusingly perverse about that final arrangement, which lies less in the townspeople's theft of the Simpsons' property than in them being so cordial to the family as they proceed to rob them blind, about as much so as when they'd attended the home earlier to redeem their Christmas (this is the second of Marge's alleged miracles, as she mistakenly interprets the people's good cheer as indication that they've gotten over their grudge). They act as though they are once again doing the Simpsons a tremendous favour in choosing to settle things this way - they're so civil about being so flagrantly uncivilised. I can, however, point to what has, for me, always been the deal-breaking moment - when Apu walks away clutching Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II. How unfathomably mean do you have to be to steal a couple of family pets? That was a low blow, Apu. In a more tonally consistent episode, such an ending could have worked, but would still have benefited from showing a whisker more restraint. As it happens, the only restraint it does show is in not having any of the Springfieldians attempt to abduct Maggie (although, how much do you want to bet that something like that was included in the original script?).

It's after the townspeople have departed, leaving the Simpsons alone in their ransacked abode, that the episode plays its subtler and perhaps even more cynical card - Marge attempts to bolster the family's spirits with the reminder that "We still have each other", only to be churlishly rebuffed. They would have had each other anyway, Lisa points out. "Plus lots of other stuff", adds Bart. "Miracle" gets across the folly of materialism through the mutually dire fates of the plastic Christmas tree and the swanky new car the family foolishly purchases with their assumed $15,000 bonus, yet it concedes to the fact that, in spite of it all, people do like their creature comforts, and no moralistic lecture about the real meaning of Christmas is is going to change that. And yet, the episode isn't quite so cynical as to leave the Simpsons with no deliverance. Homer finds the one solitary item the Springfieldian mob neglected to take away - a wash cloth, an obvious symbol of cleansing - and the family begin to squabble mindlessly over its ownership. Marge intervenes, purporting to put a stop to their nonsense, only to claim the wash cloth for herself. The rest of the family chase her around the house, and it becomes a fun game for them all, giving us what Martyn and Wood describe as the episode's "only real ray of sunshine...the closing moments when the neighbours get their revenge but the Simpsons find the family spirit after all." "Miracle" is clearly banking on its final images of family togetherness being enough to wash away the bitter aftertaste of the preceding series of unfortunate events, and to convince you that its heart isn't in such a cynical place after all. Still, if I were in Bart and Lisa's shoes I think I'd be too distraught about my dog and cat being stolen to take much interest in a stupid cloth.

Anyway, between this and those two festive editions of D&DWL, I can't help but feel that I served you up rather a sour batch of Christmas cookies this year. Those stealthily-incorporated ads for McDonald's and New Coke in Santa Claus: The Movie wound up being the only fun part of it all. To compensate, I'll close with easily the most appealing image that "Miracle" has to offer - the little rat with reindeer antlers at Moe's bar. This merry murine always does his meagre bit to chase the seasonal blues away.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Mark (A Great Bloke?)

As the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign entered the 1990s, the emotional sincerity of the earlier films began to peter out, with astringent snarkiness becoming the dominant flavour of the series going forward - and "Mark" would be a strong candidate for snarkiest of them all. It's certainly the campaign's most unbridled trip into the surreal. Compared to D&DWL's previous foray into Christmas-themed campaigning, "Christmas Pudding", it doesn't attempt to lure you into a false sense of security by approaching the pivotal accident from the sidelines of everyday banality - it places unusually direct emphasis upon the accident itself, distilled down to its purest, most nightmarish essence, and framed using the visual signifiers of an actual nightmare. The result is the most visually arresting of the D&DWL shorts, and the short that plays most overtly with the codes of horror storytelling. It's a monologue, like those earliest PIFs, but this ghoulish shape-shifter and his taunting sarcasm seem miles away from the faux-documentary approach of "Fireman's Story".

Our baleful narrator tells the cautionary tale of Mark, whose reputation for being a "great bloke", and always so kind and generous toward his friends, was undone one Christmas when he thought he was okay to drive after "a quick one" and his poor judgement wound up spelling tragedy for a family. The misery of the situation is presented bluntly enough, but the suffering of the family isn't really the focus of the short; in the end, those two bereaved children and their glaring, accusatory faces don't serve a much greater purpose than to further accentuate that tidal wave of horror (and to provide a conspicuous metaphor, in the form of a roundabout spinning out of control). The real focus is squarely on Mark, and how his being a nice guy didn't preclude his ability to do terrible damage by driving over the limit, however marginally. In that regard, it takes the opposite approach to the campaign's preliminary installments, in which the perpetrator was frequently presented as an invisible boogeyman, wrecking lives and walking away with nary a scratch. "Mark", by contrast, appears to humanise the drink driver, only to pinpoint that very humanity as the root of his failing - no matter how generous and trustworthy he might have been for 99.9% of the time, Mark had the same vulnerabilities as everybody else when driving with alcohol in his system. And after doing something as horrible as killing a couple and making orphans of their children, suddenly his history of good deeds couldn't help but seem like a bit of a duplicity. He went from being a great bloke to a "great bloke" (with heavy Scottish-accented sarcasm). The implication being that, no matter how comfortable and familiar we might feel with a person (or indeed, with ourselves), a simple moment of ill-judged complacency might be all it takes for us to discover what they're really capable of.

We get some sense of who the drink driver was in this equation - a question that does go unanswered, however, is just who the hell the narrator is intended to be. The campaign's Wikipedia page has him down as Mark's "best mate", but no such relationship is actually established in the PIF itself. To my mind, he seems to be deriving a perverse amount of pleasure from the scenario he describes, so I would presume that he is neither a friend to Mark or to the bereaved family - either way, he doesn't come across as much of a great bloke himself. Rather, I would propose that he is intended to embody those very boogeyman qualities with which the drink drivers of those earlier PIFs were inevitably ascribed, his perpetually-distorting facial features and uncanny radiance holding up a sort of fractured mirror to Mark's latent personality flaws. The narrator refers to Mark in the third person, implying that they are to be seen separate entities; nonetheless, I am inclined to see him as signifying that uglier side to Mark that was always waiting to be teased out with a little alcohol and one fatally unwise decision. He also disappears in a puff of smoke at the end, but there is a deeper reason for that than simply leaving the viewer with one final unsettling visual. "Mark" was also a tribute, to an obscure piece of short animation that you might remember if you'd tuned into Channel 4 during its artsier beginnings.

What's special about this D&DWL entry is that the animation was provided by none other than David Anderson (the film-maker behind the "Sweet Disaster" short, Dreamless Sleep), the style of the PIF being blatantly replicated from Anderson's 1989 film Deadsy (Deadtime Stories For Big Folk). Deadsy is described in the blurb of the VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film as "a graphic interpretation of Russell Hoban's narration of man's fascination with weaponry and the sexual power of military aggression. Using a combination of live action, xerography, hand-rendering, laser xerography and model animation, DEADSY is a powerful and disturbing piece." It is an allegory, of sorts, for the nuclear arms race, with the titular Deadsy developing "grate big sexo-thingys" and forcing the rest of the world to do the same in order to participate in his great cosmic orgy - a lust for domination that's linked to the rush he felt as a small child swatting flies and cockroaches. It is a glimpse, in other words, into the darker side of human nature, with Anderson's warped, uncanny visuals providing the perfect canvas for this twisted dive into our baser impulses. The D&DWL short "Mark" attempts something of the same - we've all got that destructive potential nestled deep down at our core, and if we're at all heedful we might avoid the abasement of exposing it to the world.

Santa Claus: The Movie (aka Guess Who's Coming To Capitalism)

Was there ever a more baffling and endearingly misguided attempt to create a holiday blockbuster than TriStar Pictures' 1985 offering Santa Claus: The Movie? My first Christmas on Earth, and this was what Hollywood had in store as its special festive treat for the families that year. This, and One Magic Christmas. What a jolly holly world I was born into.

Santa Claus: The Movie was realised by a lot of the same creative team who brought us Superman's initial wave of cinematic outings - among them, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, screenwriters David and Leslie Newman, and Supergirl director Jeannot Szwarc (apparently, John Carpenter was at one time in the running to direct, but he requested too much creative control). With the Superman movies losing their box office lustre, the idea was to kick-start a new franchise focussing on another superhuman figure who embodied the same kind of mythical virtue - and Santa has the additional virtue of being in the public domain (unlike Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, aka Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film). Unfortunately, the public themselves weren't hungry for a big budget Santa blockbuster, with Rocky IV knocking the stuffing out of the picture that holiday season, and if it's remembered at all nowadays it tends to be as this curio of 1980s Hollywood for which absolutely nothing went right - although John Lithgow, who plays the film's antagonist, B.Z., has noted with some bemusement that it appears to have acquired a bit of a cult following in the UK ("In England that's half what I'm known for...isn't that odd?"). I have to admit that I wasn't aware of Santa Claus: The Movie being quite as indispensable a part of the local festive zeitgeist as Lithgow describes, but then it is a film that I spent a good three decades of my existence going out of my way to avoid. Santa Claus: The Movie was one of those pictures that I saw very early in my childhood and utterly HATED at the time, although for the life of me I couldn't remember why. All I knew is that whenever I browsed through my parents' collection of home-recorded movies, looking for something to while away the afternoon, if I came across the tape housing Santa Claus: The Movie I'd get this weird, sickly vibe deep inside my gut and immediately pass it over. It wasn't until relatively recently that I started thinking about the movie again, and found my unease transmuting into morbid curiosity. What was it about this exceedingly innocuous-looking picture, from the outset, that could possibly have inspired such lingering horror in me as a small child? Surely the film was ripe for a rewatch after all these years? In December 2021 I finally took the trouble to sit down and watch it, hoping to stare one or two of my childhood demons in the face and to put this mystery to bed once and for all.

I thought I'd figured it out early on, during the film's prologue, which gives us a lengthy run-down of the origins of Santa. We open in the late 13th century, somewhere in northern Europe (the exact year and location are never specified), where a woodcutter named Claus (David Huddleston) and his wife Anya (Judy Cornwell) have become local legends for their annual practice of carving toys and delivering them to the children of nearby villages on the night before Christmas. On this particular winter their land has been hit by the mother of all blizzards, which threatens to disrupt the seasonal delivery. Claus can't bear the thought of all those disappointed children, so he makes the brave but foolhardy decision to venture out into the blizzard with the usual sled full of toys. He does not return, at least in mortal terms - Claus, Anya and their two beasts of burden, reindeer Donner and Blitzen, are implied to all freeze to death then and there, only to be mysteriously restored to life in an immortal state by the light of the North Star. They then find themselves in the vicinity of a community of elves ("vendegum" would be the more technical term, but they've rejected it), who invite Claus to continue his annual operations for all eternity, but on a global scale. Immediately, there is this inexplicably sinister aura about the elves, and if I didn't know better I might have hypothesised that this were all a Twilight Zone-type story in which the freezing Claus is ultimately revealed to be hallucinating with his last waning flickers of brain activity. "Mystery solved", I thought. "As a child, I must have been terrified of those elves." But no, it turns out, that wasn't it. Later in the story, there's this narrative development involving Patch (Dudley Moore), a misfit elf who's keen on technological efficiency but has no talent whatsoever for putting any of his grand ideas into practice. Long story short, he screws up a year's worth of toy manufacturing and blights the children of the world with a batch of defective toys that have all fallen apart by New Year's Eve. We cut to a scene where a boy is walking down the street dragging a wagon behind him, and the instant this kid appeared I suddenly felt that familiar weird, sickly vibe deep inside my gut, as if I knew, from some long-repressed memory, that something bad was going to happen. Sure enough, the wagon detaches from its pull and goes hurtling into the road, right into the path of a hulking great schoolbus, which makes swift work of it. And then it all came flooding back to me. THAT was why I hated Santa Claus: The Movie so much as a four-year-old - I had a very strong, very visceral reaction to seeing that child's Christmas present get brutally flattened. As an adult, I stand by that reaction. It is a surprisingly mean-spirited sequence that involves a lot of children suffering mishaps and crying over broken toys, and it still touches a raw nerve in me to this day, I'm afraid.

With that matter settled, here are a few of my assorted musings on Santa Claus: The Movie as a whole:

• The narrative is VERY episodic, to the extent that I can't help but feel that this would have worked a lot better broken up as a mini-series. That entire first act regarding Santa's origins honestly might as well not be there at all. The precise details behind his inception hold very little relevance for what he's having to contend with in Reagan's America.
  
• I was fully expecting Patch to get some kind of redemptive arc in which he demonstrates that he can be good at something. But no, he just sort of remains a screw-up to the end. Donner the reindeer had shown more personal growth by the closing credits.
  
• Lithgow is in full-on pantomime mode as B.Z., but his hammy-ass performance is by and far the best thing about this picture. When he's on screen, the action is certainly never dull.
• In his televised review with Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel complained that the movie lacked conflict, pointing out that there's never a direct face-off between Santa and B.Z.. He suggested his own alternative narrative direction, and inadvertently ended up pitching the plot of future seasonal classic The Nightmare Before Christmas.
• Another critic, Mark Kermode, claimed in one of his old "Kermode Uncut" videos that the reindeer animatronics in this film were made using the hides of actual reindeer (more accurately, he attributed such claims to a colleague of his, whom he did not identify, and then proceeded to back them up), but I'm not sure how serious he was being.
  
• Objectively, Santa Claus: The Movie is red hot mess of a film, but I could understand someone enjoying it as an annual guilty pleasure. If I were ever to watch it again, though, I think I'd be inclined to skip that entire first act and just go directly to when Lithgow appears. Did I mention that he is a hoot in this?
• The film has the most egregious product placement I've ever seen in ANYTHING. That FedEx scene that everybody complains about in Castaway? Mere French fry crumbs compared to what goes on here. And that's really what I wanted to focus on in this particular write-up.
  

In 1985, McDonald's ran a commercial tie-in with Santa Claus: The Movie. This kind of cross-promotional Happy Meal was still a relatively young concept back then (Star Trek: The Motion Picture being the first movie to advertise its existence through Happy Meal boxes, in 1979), and molded pieces of plastic had yet to become the standard incentive. Instead, you got one of four Santa Claus: The Movie-themed books - The Legend of Santa Claus, The Elves at The Top of The World, Workshop of Activities and Sleighful of Surprises. There was also a plush reindeer tree ornament, if you bought a $5 book of McDonald's gift certificates.

And as far as this promotion went, one hand washed the other. For its part, Santa Claus: The Movie straight-up stops the narrative (disjointed though it may be) to bring you a bona fide McDonald's commercial. I'm not exaggerating, once we get into the part of the story set in modern-day New York, we spend 30 gratuitous seconds inside a McDonald's eatery, watching close-up shots of families beaming at one another while shovelling burgers and milkshakes in between their jaws. Product placement this shamelessly heavy-handed really ought to get you onto the Naughty List.

I find the whole McDonald's sequence of Santa Claus: The Movie perversely entrancing for the way it perfectly replicates the visual language of your average 1980s McDonald's commercial, to the point that all that's missing is "It's A Good Time For The Great Taste" splashed across the bottom of the screen in bold white lettering beside the golden arches logo. The bulk of this footage could have been edited quite snugly into the concurrent McDonald's campaign. And yet it's all so hilariously offset by the presence of that homeless child with his face pressed up against the glass. So, the Reagan-era portion of the story involves this kid named Joe (Christian Fitzpatrick) or, as he was dubbed by a contemporary tie-in storybook, The Boy Who Didn't Believe In Christmas. Joe doesn't have masses of Christmas spirit because he's an orphan living on the streets, and to him the season is just a time for having corporate decadence rubbed aggressively in your face. His ethos runs contrary to Santa's own, which is rooted in the unabating assumption that the promise of Christmas brings "not a child alive who's not bursting with joy and happiness." (Tsk, Claus, you've been on this planet for seven centuries and you're still refusing to acknowledge the existence of Jewish children?) Naturally, he and Santa cross paths and the latter does a fine job of straightening him out over the course of the picture. Before then, though, Joe's favourite pastime is standing outside McDonald's restaurants and regarding, with envious desperation, the wonders within. It's not just the sustenance he craves, you understand, although naturally he'd have that too - McDonald's represents the spirit of family togetherness, warmth and security, values with which Santa himself is clearly interconnected, and which up until now have been denied to Joe. The in-universe explanation offered as to why Santa has passed the homeless Joe over year after year is that Joe has never written to him to ask for anything, but as far as subtext goes...well, any viewer over the age of 7 knows that Santa and your parents are really one and the same. The actual reason that Joe doesn't get to participate in the seasonal mythos is because he's an outsider to family life and all of its associated rituals - to which, as Santa Claus: The Movie would have it, regular outings to McDonald's are as indispensable a component as the giving of presents at Christmas. Joe is likewise an outsider to the consumerist forces that Santa also serves and puts the nicest possible face on - but boy oh boy, as that scene at McDonald's shows, does he ever want in.

Although what's really hysterical about the McDonald's sequence is that it does, inadvertently, make the restaurant's patrons look like complete and utter dickwads. This starving child observing them from the other side of the glass isn't being particularly subtle about his plight, yet they go about crassly stuffing their faces in front of him regardless. Worse still, one of them seems to acknowledge him and get a savage little kick out his suffering; following a close-up shot of Joe up against the window, we cut to a teenaged girl with a mouth full of burger meat, who turns her head and smiles triumphantly, and while it's not clear if she's meant to be smiling at Joe or another patron, the nature of the cut really does make it look like the former (whoever edited this sequence might have wanted to think more carefully about the Kuleshov effect). Clearly, we're being encouraged to see dining at McDonald's as both desirable and virtuous, as analogous to Santa's role in reinforcing family ties, but there is an aura of taunting insensitivity about it. All I see is McDonald's being part of a system that caters to those with cash while happily leaving the needy out in the cold, its patrons gleeful in their complicity.

Oh, but the egregious product placement doesn't stop there. Joe wanders off into the night and ends up outside the house of this rich kid named Cornelia (Carrie Kei Heim), who's more sympathetic toward him than those McDonald's patrons. While her nanny Ms Tucker (Dorothea Phillips) is off watching Masterpiece Theatre, Cornelia takes the opportunity to sneak Joe a plate of leftovers from her dining table, along with a can of New Coke. Joe takes a swig, grasping the can carefully so that the "Coke" lettering is directed legibly at the camera, and lets out a tremendous sigh of satisfaction. Yet another sequence that feels like a self-contained commercial in its own right; it's not at all hard to envision "Coke Is It!" materialising across the screen, these two puppy lovers and their fearless transcendence of social rank providing all the narrative you need for a holiday-themed promotion designed to tug on the heartstrings. It's probably not a coincidence that Santa enters Joe's life shortly after the refreshing taste of Coke does, his small moment of connection with Cornelia having provided a nascent induction into the familial sphere in which Santa (and Coca-Cola drinking) is so perfectly at home. A sip of Coke and it suddenly all becomes accessible to him. McDonald's and Coca-Cola are stealthily presented as extensions of the Santa magic, little bits of jolly old Saint Nick that are manifest all year round and on every street corner. Much like Santa, they are symbols of reassurance and of belonging, both to a family unit and to a broader culture. Santa Claus: The Movie doesn't go as far as suggesting that Santa would prefer it if you left him a Big Mac and Coke instead of the generic milk and cookies...but it might as well have done.

Which is odd, really, because it can't help but undermine what would appear to be the very point of the story - namely that commercialisation is a dangerous thing, and that's where Lithgow's evil, scenery-chewing toy mogul enters in. Following his self-imposed exile from the North Pole, Patch goes to work for B.Z. because he figures that he's the next best thing to Santa, only for their ideals to clash straight out of the gate. B.Z. is in the toy manufacturing business not because he likes making children happy, but because he wants to make money off of them, while Patch's seven hundred years of servitude to Santa have entrenched in him the mindset that toys are to be given away for free. Nevertheless, B.Z. gets the hopelessly naive elf into his pocket and enlisted in a nefarious scheme to drive Santa out of business by launching his own rival holiday, Christmas II (yep, this movie beat The Simpsons to that joke by twelve and a half years). The conflict of Santa Claus: The Movie, as muted as it was for Gene Siskel's tastes, has to do with old-fashioned family values versus corporate consumerism. On a broader level, it's about preserving tradition and resisting the temptations of modernity - Patch gets into his mess in the first place because he wants to revolutionise Santa's workshop into something more efficient and industrial, only to discover that industrialism results in lousy product. This lousiness is echoed in the output of B.Z., whose callous business model extends to such a flagrant lack of regard for the welfare of his young consumers that his toys are manufactured to ridiculously unsafe standards. Corporations, Santa Claus: The Movie teaches, are not to be trusted, with Santa and his operations being likened to that of a smaller family-run business, albeit one that's spiritually aligned itself with corporate giants McDonald's and Coca-Cola. Similar charges could potentially be levelled at them about a lack of regard for the well-being of young consumers, with business strategies that are dependent on encouraging children to adopt unhealthy eating habits. This is a film with mixed ideas about who's Naughty and who's Nice - leery of commercialism, while implicitly surrendering to its sovereignty.

What's telling is Joe's response when Santa asks him why he never wrote any letters to the North Pole. Joe gets halfway through admitting that he never believed in Santa, before backtracking and insisting that there was never anything that he wanted. We know that Joe is only covering here - obviously, he's too embarrassed to admit to Santa's face that he had doubts about his existence, and we've seen from earlier that actually there is something he really, really wants, which is to be stuffing his mouth with McDonald's and Coca-Cola (themselves shorthands for secretly craving a family). But that purported lack of material desire would be as much a threat to Santa as is B.Z. and his Christmas II - his existence is as dependent on this ongoing cycle of insatiability as those of the corporate forces with whom he's sleeping. And besides, to paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I'm aware of the irony of criticising a movie about Santa Claus for being an extended Coca-Cola commercial, so, erm, don't bother pointing that out. Santa himself, at least in his modern incarnation, does have a bit of that stitched into in his red-suited DNA - Coca-Cola, contrary to popular belief, did not invent the red-clad Santa, but they played their part in helping to solidify this particular depiction as the default one. So maybe a Santa-themed feature film that's actually a stealthy sales pitch for the virtues of drinking Coke is its own piece of ingenious meta commentary.

Or maybe Santa Claus: The Movie is just an inherently silly piece of work all over. B.Z. might make it worth the watch, however. I haven't even touched on how fantastically ridiculous his character arc gets (spoiler: it ends with him overdosing on magic lollipops and flying off into outer space).

  

 

PS: A surefire candidate for the Naughty List, if it applied to adults, would be that dad who disposes of his daughter's broken trike by just kicking it into the road. Who does he suppose is going to pick that up, the Broken Trike Fairy?

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Christmas Pudding

I've not yet attempted to sit down and give my definitive ranking of the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" series from best to worst, but I've no doubt that this particular Christmas-themed PIF (circa 1993) would land somewhere within the top five. Of all the shorts in the series, this one does the grandest job at straddling that delicate line between the everyday and the catastrophic, depicting the precise moment in which a mundane situation crosses over into the stuff of full-blown nightmares. It achieves this through a hard-hitting blend of unassuming realism with just the slightest dash of uncanny excess; we get a fleeting glimpse of a busted vehicle going up in flames, a rarity for a campaign that generally aimed to steer clear of violent spectacle - although this, surprisingly, does not end up being the most disturbing element of the short. The horrors here are to be located in the hedonism of a family wolfing down their platter of Christmas indulgences, gleefully oblivious to the carnage unravelling in the streets outside. This is a PIF that deviously flips the Yuletide euphoria on its head, warping it into the basis of a good psychological scarring.

"Pudding" opens so innocuously that you would not, at first glance, be likely to distinguish it from the usual deluge of Christmas-themed advertising clustering up the airwaves all throughout December. We've joined a family at the tail-end of their seasonal feasting, where the only hint of impending trouble is in the acknowledgement of a vacant place at the table; our young and unsuspecting protagonist is asked by a relative (presumably her father) if her boyfriend David is still intending to make it. Her response - that David has "stopped for a quick drink at his sister's" - is our first really solid clue as to where this might be headed, although there is nothing as yet to explicitly implicate David as a drink driver (for all we know, he's getting there by foot, or someone else is driving him). The real giveaway that we're not watching some anodyne spot for anti-indigestion tablets is when the host wanders back from the kitchen, carrying a blazing Christmas pudding and wearing a facial expression that seems a little...over-animated? There is, immediately, something disconcerting about the wide-mouthed giddiness with which she regards the mass of smouldering suet and raisin at her fingertips, and that's going to pay off shortly. The telephone rings and, while everyone else is leering in the darkness at the flaming dessert, the protagonist goes to answer; we never hear the person speaking on the end, but whoever they are they clearly have unfortunate news to share about David's journey going awry. How awry? We cut to a close-up shot of the pudding, which momentarily morphs into the blazing wreckage of a crumpled vehicle wedged up against a streetlight, and then back to the protagonist's pallid face, as she struggles to process what she's hearing (and, we suspect, her Christmas lunch is at dire risk of making a sudden reappearance). It's at this point that the festive atmosphere takes a turn for the borderline demonic, as the laughter and merriment of her family in the backdrop becomes wildly inappropriate, appearing to mock the unspeakable tragedy with which she's just been blighted.

"Pudding" contains what's arguably the most conventionally dramatic shot of all the D&DWL series (no other entry, even of the few that showed us any visuals from the accident itself, went so far as to feature a vehicle being engulfed in a fiery eruption), but it still amounts to only a teaser of the adjacent calamity that's been slowly but surely creeping its way in to make mincemeat of this ingenuous young woman's Christmas. Much of the film's success is rooted in its restraint, and its willingness to stage its pivotal accident from what is still predominantly a distance. We start out, much like the protagonist, having already made it safely to our destination, only to discover that this does not, in fact, make us safe. The fleeting transformation of pudding into burning vehicle serves to obliterate the barrier between innocent domesticity and the omnipresent threat of death and destruction. But the most devious sleight of hand lies in the transformation of the party ambience into an air of cruelty and oppressiveness, as the protagonist's knowledge of what has happened to David sees her shut out abruptly from the celebrations. The sanctity of the occasion offers no refuge, becoming instead a reinforcement her entrapment, as her prospects of further inclusion in the joyfulness and triumph, along with whatever future she'd envisioned for herself and David, goes up messily in smoke, like both pudding and vehicle.

"Pudding", like "Summertime", offers a rare D&DWL scenario in which the drink driver themselves is shown to be the one who perishes as a result of their actions - although since David receives no corporeality, featured victim status, for all intents and purposes, ends up being delegated to our protagonist, the helpless receiver of bad news. The film's most chilling detail is in how this victimhood renders her the butt of a joke that the entirety of the world around her appears to be in on - far from offering her comfort in a time of despair, her family betray her with their continued merriment. The juxtaposition of pudding and wreckage, coupled with their diabolical laughter, makes it difficult to shake the interpretation that the family are in the process of sacrificing David at their festive alter, evoking the sense that they are, in some way, complicit in the disaster. While drinking and driving is clearly being posited as a corruptive force, poisoning the Yuletide cheer and transmuting it into something more sinister, I've no doubt that the film is, on another level, attempting to forge a link between the carefree revelry of the family's feasting and the heedless indulgences that have engineered David's ruination, reminding that us that, however innocuous our intentions, there comes a point where we risk tip-toeing over the line. Hence the significance of having the family cackle like hellspawn at the end - what's happening up the road with David is really just the darker underbelly of what we've seen playing out in their dining room.

A superior PIF, and I'm sure that, back in 1993, catching it amid a round of festive viewing was more than enough to ruin anybody's day.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Mirror

"Mirror", from 1996, is popularly regarded as the last film in the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" canon, although it's worth noting that the slogan itself makes no appearance, suggesting that Safety On The Move were already in the process of figuring out a new campaign strategy. For now, they were still adhering to the template forged through the D&DWL series, with the final fade to black and stark white titles above the Safety On the Move logo. From a strictly formatting standpoint, "Mirror" represented a fitting enough conclusion to the campaign's run, in pursuing a "back to basics" approach, with a return to the barebones monologuing that characterised the initial wave of films from 1987. Unfortunately,"Mirror" lacks the emotional clout of "Jenny" and "Fireman's Story", seeing the series peter out with the standard whimper rather than a truly fender-bending bang. I will say that it made a significantly more effective print ad (see above) than it did a television short; I can still recall seeing that young woman's heavily scarred face glaring at me from the back of a bus, and just how rotten and uncomfortable it made me feel.

I tend to think of "Mirror" as the weakest of the D&DWL series, and not because it offers up a lower-key form of wreckage than any of its predecessors. Not every anti-drink driving PIF has to result in a pile-up with mangled bodies and shattered glass left and right, and there's certainly nothing wrong with attempting to examine how an ostensibly less dramatic accident could still prove life-changing for those who've suffered it. In the case of "Mirror", we learn how a collision caused by off-screen drink driver Nick left his girlfriend (our protagonist, who like all of those early monologuers goes unnamed) with severe facial scars, putting a dent in her self-esteem and casting a dark cloud over their relationship, which has endured, albeit for reasons other than true love conquering all. Nick, the protagonist suspects, is only with her because he feels guilty about having caused her injuries. For her part, she isn't totally unconvinced that she's with him because her facial scars have otherwise put a crimp in her social popularity.

I wouldn't call "Mirror" a total failure - if nothing else, I like how the titular object ties into the monologue in a thematic sense. The literal mirror, where our protagonist is applying make-up in a futile attempt to cover up her scars, ironically ends up becoming something of a confessional in which the unloveliness of their situation is laid bare. There's also the metaphorical sense in which Nick and the protagonist have become unwelcome reflections of one another's broken hearts and broken dreams, despite their alleged attempts to present as a functional couple. But that does lead me into my first qualm with this PIF - is it seriously suggesting, as the protagonist herself does, that the two characters are to be seen as mutually complicit in the whole sorry affair? That when the protagonist says, "It's as much my fault, I guess...", her words are to be taken at face value, with her scars representing a kind of deserved stigma for her questionable life choices? I can't help but think back to another D&DWL film, "Mates", which appeared to outright reject the insinuation that the passengers of an over-the-limit driver should bear equal responsibility if they get horribly mangled (the protagonist, fading in and out of consciousness in an intensive care ward, has this put to him by his "mate", the drink driver looking to alleviate his own guilt, but the ending makes it very clear that the film is not going for ambiguity on the matter), so it's curious that Safety On The Move should be legitimising this particular victim-blaming angle now. It's not that the passenger has no part to play when it comes to mindfulness of the driver's condition, I'm just not wild about the implication that these scars should be considered a source of shame for the protagonist, and that anybody judging her on the basis of her injuries is valid in doing so.

 

That being said, a question that repeatedly nags at me all throughout "Mirror" - and this does have the potential to alter our perception of the pivotal relationship - concerns whether or not it's possible that the protagonist is actually being gaslit by Nick into saying these things. Unlike the protagonist of "Mates" (who has no recourse to retort with anything other than heavy breathing, a response that's as damning as any explicit rebuking), might she have bought into the drink driver's attempts at self-excusing, or at the very least is prepared to play along with it in order to maintain their relationship? One of the most confounding aspects of "Mirror" is how it intermittently appears to evoke an analogy between the endangerment of your partner through drink driving and harming them through domestic violence, without seeming overly alert to the presence of this subtext. The film's opening - which has the protagonist applying make-up atop visible wounds, whilst maintaining that, "Nick - he's my boyfriend - he still feels bad about it", looks all-set to play on our immediate expectations that this will be a PIF addressing domestic violence, just as her downplaying of Nick's responsibility seems uncomfortably reminiscent of the kinds of minimisation sometimes used by victims of domestic abuse to cover for partners they feel unable to leave. Such an analogy has potential, but the impact goes unrealised, with the ad's fairly flat execution making it difficult to entertain the idea that we're being asked to interpret the monologue at anything other than the most surface of levels.

 

This ambivalent approach ultimately causes "Mirror" to come off as rather tone-deaf, particularly when we reach the end and the protagonist confides her grandest fear - that with her disfiguring injuries, it's now a choice between Nick's piteous but unloving company or total isolation. As with everything else, it's not clear if we're expected to view this as indicative of the protagonist's knocked confidence, or to be nodding along in agreement with the base assumptions that her prospects of happiness are dashed because her looks are gone and no one could possibly love her with her disfigurement. I mentioned in my coverage of "Pier" that some of the D&DWL films rely on shock value from depictions of disability that arguably reinforce their own set of prejudices, and it's much the same story with the facial scarring here. At only 30 seconds, the ad is somewhat limited in terms of how deeply it can delve into a character, but as a portrait of a victim recovering from physical and emotional trauma, it feels reductive. Pity, as opposed to empathy, is indeed what it appears to be looking to engender, and it in that regard it's not a whole lot more wholesome than her relationship with Nick.

Bart The General (aka Are You Boys Through Playing War?)

"Bart The General" (episode 7G05), which premiered on February 4th 1990 as part of The Simpsons' first season, marked a significant milestone in the then-fledgling series' lifespan - the first script penned by John Swartzwelder, who would go on to make more contributions to the Simpsons canon than any other member of the show's writing team. Renowned for his particularly subversive sense of humor, the proudly riotous "Bart The General" was in many respects the perfect launching pad for his Simpsons-writing career. The episode follows Bart's battle to reclaim his confidence and self-esteem when he becomes the favourite target of local bully Nelson Muntz (making his debut appearance), who takes to routinely pulverising our hero's face and stuffing him into a garbage can. Homer urges Bart to fight back using underhanded tactics, specifically by throwing mud in Nelson's eyes and pounding him square in the crotch, but this doesn't work out, as Nelson is still too great a match for Bart physically. Lisa suggests he take his consultation up a generation and visit Abe, so-called "toughest Simpson alive". Help then arrives from an unexpected source, when Abe takes Bart to meet a friend of his, a shady one-armed antique dealer named Herman, who instructs Bart to stand up to Nelson by way of a full-blown military attack, and to set about training the neighbourhood children to handle the stresses of battle, and water balloons. Bart is perturbed by the fact that Herman is blatantly mentally ill, but Abe assures him that under the circumstances that is to be seen as a tactical advantage: "General George S. Patton was a little nuts. And this guy is completely out of his mind. We can't fail!"

I get the impression that "Bart The General" is one of the more fondly-remembered installments in the show's terribly undervalued first season. This would be in spite of the fact that, of the germinal thirteen, it may well be the lightest on plot. The central problem remains an intrinsically relatable one...to a point. We all know what a thoroughly rotten experience it is to get on the wrong side of a bully, but at the same time, Nelson's approach to schoolyard tyranny is all about fisticuffs and physical intimidation, which I suspect might actually seem quite quaint to children of the digital age who've been reared with the bugbear of cyberbullying. Nelson is depicted here as a straight-up villain, and while it's interesting seeing him played as a legitimate threat (compared to subsequent appearances, where he's still fundamentally a bully but on somewhat chummier terms with Bart), if not for the sheer gusto of Nancy Cartwright's performance I fear he'd be rather a one-dimensional antagonist. His two cronies, known formally as "the Weasels", frankly do more of the heavy-lifting on the quirkiness front (their noting that Nelson has four other beatings scheduled besides Bart and their final invoking of the Nuremberg Defense - which, in their case, pays off). Enter Abe and Herman, and the whole thing suddenly takes off in an a deliriously anarchic direction, but the build-up to that point is fairly slow, and something that really stuck out to me on my most recent viewing is how dependent this episode is on padding. The first act has not one, but two dream sequences emphasising just how terrified Bart is of Nelson, and the Patton-inspired training montage, while easily the episode's highlight, runs on for a whisker too long. And yet that concluding act really is a top notch example of The Simpsons coming into its own and finding its voice this early on in the series' lifespan, the training sequences and the climactic showdown with Nelson being particularly neat exemplars of the zesty undercurrent of youthful rebellion that characterised those nascent days when Bart, and not Homer, was seen as the show's representative. Unhurried though the build-up may be, it goes to places I'll wager no other cartoon of the time would have dared to tread.

Despite its vibrant displays of audacity, I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide authors Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood accuse the episode of being "a bit unsure of itself, particularly towards the end". Really, I think it's more that "Bart The General" comes off as being a particularly rough example of primal Simpsons due to the high number of formatting kinks that are inevitably going to seem jarring to anyone who joined the show in subsequent seasons. You can tell that the series formula was not yet set in stone and that the crew were still fiddling around with various ideas - right from the opening titles, when, in lieu of the familiar introductory sequence with chalkboard variant and couch gag, we pan directly to the Simpsons' house. This in itself isn't massively unusual, for a Season 1 episode - "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" lacks a full opening credits sequence, as does "Life on The Fast Lane". "Bart The General", though, goes the extra mile in also yielding the most singularly strange ending of all the season - a disclaimer where Bart breaks the fourth wall to assure his viewership that, contrary to what they have just seen, war is not the answer to all of life's problems, but does not make his point with total coherence (he insists that war is "neither glamorous or fun" but also recommends that you check out the "cool gory pictures" in the books about war at your local library). It's an odd, odd note to close on as, watching it, it's not altogether clear if this entire sequence was intended as a parody of the tag-on PSAs that were endemic to cartoons in the 1980s, in which the protagonists spoke directly to their viewers in an effort to make the moral intentions of the preceding twenty minutes crystal clear ("And knowing is half the battle!"), or if it represents a sincere statement on the part of the production team with a few jokes sprinkled in - although the DVD commentary would appear to imply the latter. There, the team have a good laugh about how this disclaimer enabled them both to have their (cup)cake and eat it, but they also acknowledge that, eleven years on, they probably wouldn't make this episode at all, for fear of being misunderstood. (Irrespective, a gag I'm fairly certain they wouldn't include today is the one recreating the "V-J Day in Times Square" photograph - even with Lisa getting the last word and forcefully rebuking the offender, having this kid visibly hold Lisa in a headlock while he kisses her, however accurate to the original image, is maybe too gross and disturbing a detail to get past.) It's also noted that they had, at one point, considered making these post-episode discussions with a library-bound Bart a regular feature, but obviously that didn't happen - possibly because, like the Happy Little Elves, their relevance dried up almost immediately, with "And knowing is half the battle!" type epilogues becoming less common among cartoons of the 1990s (although Animaniacs still had a lot of fun lampooning them with their Wheel of Morality), but then we also know that creator Matt Groening wasn't wild about instances of characters openly acknowledging their own fictionality.

Immediately after, the episode bows out with another, more subtle experiment, this time regarding the end credits - in place of the usual black void, we see a still of the Simpsons' house lit up at night. Of all the alternate presentation ideas kicked around in "Bart The General", this is the one that I most regret not becoming a fixture of the series going forward. There's something about the warm ambience of that nocturnal backdrop that I really dig; the diurnal cycles being used as a cozy signifier for narrative closure, instead of dragging us head-first into oblivion. But alas, you can't have it all.

Eight years before The Simpsons provided a more elaborate spoof by way of Season 9's "Das Bus", "Bart The General" strikes me as being a loose sort of variation on the themes of William Golding's Lord of The Flies; it too deals with the savagery children inflict on one another when prompted to take matters into their own hands - with the insinuation, implicit in the final line of Golding's novel, that what these children have done to one another here is nothing more than an extension of what adults have been doing to one another for all of human history. Bart is reluctant to take his case to Principal Skinner, the proper authority on all matters within school walls, on the grounds that it would "violate The Code of The Schoolyard" - and, to be fair, we've already seen first-hand evidence that Skinner probably isn't going to be of much help to him anyway, since he straight-up heard Nelson threatening Bart and dismissed it (note: I don't think that Skinner is being malicious, he's just too much of a square to grasp the significance of Nelson's words). We later hear a more thorough description of what The Code of The Schoolyard actually entails from Homer, who seems to feel even more strongly about it than does Bart - one of the episode's big revelatory gags being that the gap between the mentality of your average schoolchild and your average adult looking to blend their way into conformist society is practically non-existent. According to Homer, the rules that teach a boy to be a man involve not tattling, a total intolerance toward any and all differences and never saying anything unless you're absolutely positive that popular opinion is on your side (I don't know about you, but to me this all sounds highly reminiscent of the kind of 1980s-era cartoon moralising that Mark Evanier warned us about). The rules that supposedly maintain order and build character instead seem structured to engender hostility, distrust and division. Meanwhile, Marge's more pacifistic approach, which theorises that kids might not feel so inclined to wail on one another if they talked things out and established common ground, goes untested. Is she vindicated by the end of the episode? Possibly - after Herman has negotiated a peace treaty that both Bart and Nelson are willing to sign, Marge enters the room to ask them if they are "through playing war". Is this joke at Marge's expense, for interpreting the procedure (which involves tying Nelson up and basically kidnapping him) as more innocuous than it really is? Or do her words ultimately put their posturing antics into perspective, as an elaborate series of games and rituals designed to settle what is essentially nothing more than an elevated playground squabble? With the hostilities dropped, the characters mark peacetime by acknowledging the one thing they all assuredly have in common, which is to say a mutual weakness for Marge's cupcakes. It rounds the narrative off on a neatly cyclic note, given that this whole ordeal started with a dispute over the food item in question. Moral implications: perhaps we would all be better inclined toward one another if we each received an equal bite of the cupcake.

One of the internal conflicts that seems to best encapsulate the spirit of "Bart The General" (in what it suggests about the messiness and hypocrisies of the adult world) is the one that's only vaguely alluded to, and exists exclusively at the back of the story, this being the first real hint we're given of the ongoing animosity between Homer and Abe. For viewers who had followed the series over from its roots on The Tracey Ullman Show, Abe was already something of a veteran face, being one of the few supporting characters to have featured alongside the family in the original crudely drawn filler. Had Season 1 followed its intended narrative path, this would have been his first appearance in the series proper - and, like a handful of characters casually dropped into the action of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", he was robbed of a far more elaborate introductory sequence, which as a bonus enabled Abe to act as a derisory mouthpiece for the moral guardians who decried the enthusiastic welcome afforded the series by zeitgeist as indicative of some kind of broader social failing. We catch Abe typing a letter to an advertising agency, complaining about how the elderly are represented in the media and lamenting the passing of the "good old days when television was bland and inoffensive". It's a hilarious sequence, if somewhat contrary to Abe's role in the story, which is to usher Bart down the path of utter anarchy. Like everyone else, Abe's personality was not set in stone at this point, and "Bart The General" finds him in intermediate mode, with shades of both who he once was and the embittered, nonsensical coot he would shortly become. Carried over from the Ullman shorts was his tendency to ramble on ad nauseam about his bygone years, which remained a staple of his appearances going forward, but the Ullman shorts also depicted him as rather a wily character who was not above his share of pranks and mischief - as we see here, when he seizes the opportunity to launch his own personal war against Homer, pelting him with water balloons when he steps outside to complain about the children running amuck beside his front lawn. It's played as a simple role reversal gag, with Homer, who does not appear to recognise his father, berating "the tall grey-haired kid" for his misbehaviour, but embedded in this seemingly insignificant moment is a telling snapshot of the kinds of cruelties, intolerance and resentment that fuel the more "civilised" conflicts buried beneath the surface of everyday adult interaction. The Ullman short "Shut Up, Simpsons" had hinted that Homer's own shaky parenting techniques were passed down to him from Abe; "Bart The General" puts the boot on the other foot, incorporating the first explicit acknowledgement that Abe was offloaded by the family into a retirement home, with Lisa's line, "Remember the fight he put up when we put him in the home?", being discomforting for the manner in which, just for a moment, it seems to cast the Simpsons themselves in a subjugating light. As noted, Nelson is an archetypal school bully, and the episode's exploration of bullying as a subject, in consisting only of physical beatings, is fairly reductive, yet it does, ever so subtly, tip its hat to the understanding that bullying is something broader and more omnipresent, taking on many different forms, as illustrated through the sorry plight of the grizzled Simpsons patriarch. Abe advises Bart to stand up for himself, lest he have bullies picking on him his entire life, immediately before becoming a cautionary example, when Jasper (debuting as a foe, and not a friend, to Abe) steals his newspaper for dibs on the crossword puzzle. Deeper than his scuffle with Jasper, I wonder to what degree we're meant to be mindful of Abe's status as a victim of bullying as extending to his forced resignation to second floor, third dank room on the left, at the hands of a family (and a society at large) who've exercised their intolerance with abandonment? To that end, Abe's assault of Homer with the water balloons gives him a moment of triumph against the man he recognises as his own oppressor. (Homer, it's true, also has legitimate reason to see himself as the victim of this particular equation, but for now let's let Abe enjoy the moment.)

I also think of "Bart The General" as an important transitional episode for Lisa, despite her getting little to do past the first act. Coming right before "Moaning Lisa", the first proper attempt to get to grips with her middle child psyche, this was effectively the last hurrah for the bratty Lisa from the show's Ullman beginnings ("Some Enchanted Evening"'s displaced air date notwithstanding). Compared to those Ullman shorts, where she was seldom more than Bart's female echo, Lisa was by now becoming more of her own character - it's established here that, unlike Bart, she has a positive outlook on school, and likes pleasing the very authority figures that Bart strives to undermine - but her mutually rambunctious sibling rivalry with Bart had yet to fully peter out, hence their back-and-forth at the start of the episode, in which Lisa pettily refuses to share her cupcakes with her brother until she's milked her share of flattery from him. I find it hard to imagine the bluesy girl of "Moaning Lisa" - who explicitly refuses to get into disagreements over baked goods on the grounds that "a simple cupcake will bring me no pleasure" - being as flagrantly immature as she is here. Even so, "Bart The General" does a nice job of cementing the fact that Bart and Lisa, though they may not always see eye-to-eye, fundamentally do care about one another. Bart gets into his jam in the first place by defending Lisa when one of the Weasels steals and destroys the cupcakes she'd made for Miss Hoover (or Mrs Hoover, as she's referred to here). Lisa, for her part, hails Bart as a hero for standing up to Nelson and the Weasels...which doesn't prevent Bart from later airing a few passive-aggressive grievances at Lisa, by way a fantasy sequence in which he imagines her standing over his embalmed corpse at a hypothetical funeral, filled with remorse for the fact that, "If I had just given [a cupcake] to you in the first place, this whole horrible tragedy could have been avoided" (not exactly the case, as I'm sure the Weasel would have targetted her box of cupcakes anyway, but survivor's guilt and all that).

Of the duplet of dream sequences added in to fill out the first act, the second, set at Bart's funeral, is easily the juicier of the two, in part because it's so fantastically morbid. The crosses substituting for the dead Bart's eyes are a wonderfully absurd but grisly visual touch, but the sequence is even more compelling for what it potentially reveals about Bart's psyche, and his perception of his personal standing with each of the attendees (I note that these are restricted to characters who'd already appeared in this episode, which is why Skinner and Otto are the only school staff we see - I guess that this early into the series the writers were still very conscious about making sure that viewers were able to keep track of who each of the supporting cast were). Despite his overwhelming terror at what lies in store this afternoon, he still finds room to vent a few petty ill feelings, including his aforementioned potshot at Lisa, and in getting Skinner to admit that, "I guess you were right...all that homework was a waste of your time." More telling still is that Nelson does not actually appear to be the real overarching threat that's plaguing Bart throughout most of the fantasy - rather, he looks to be more troubled by the question of how many of his family and peers would actually care if he died, which seems a surprisingly weighty and existential concern for a ten-year-old. Apparently Bart feels insecure enough to suspect that his classmates would be happy simply to have the day off of school, and that Homer would be equally buoyant at the excuse to skip a day's work. In spite of Bart's doubts about how little he matters in the scheme of things, "Bart The General" contains some nice character-building moments with both parents responding to his vulnerabilities and doing their utmost to be supportive - although Swartzwelder is always careful to balance out the sentiment with a little wry subversion. The scene where Bart, having endured an emotional bruising along with his physical beating, retreats to the bathroom, to be found in the midst of a private crying session by Homer, is genuinely affecting, but the tenderness is immediately mitigated with a particularly gruesome example of Homer's parenting, when he attempts to dry Bart's tears by blasting his face with a blow dryer (and he would do the same to Lisa in a later episode). Meanwhile, those displays of vulnerability go a long way in making the t-shirt-ready pop icon Bart seem as fleshed out and human as the rest of us. I've no doubt that part of the thinking behind "Bart The General" as a story was to show that, while Bart may be a gleeful little hell-raiser, he is at heart a good kid who'll stick his neck out to protect those who need it. His earlier starring episode, "Bart The Genius", had introduced Martin Prince as a possible long-term rival, him being something of an anti-Bart (studious, respectful of authority and impeccably groomed and presented); Nelson, by contrast, is less the anti-Bart than he is the dark extension of the kind of unruly childhood bracket into which Bart himself is frequently pigeonholed (a parallel reinforced in having them share the same voice actor). Nelson also struggles in school and is drawn to bending the rules as a result, but unlike Bart he channels his frustrations with the system into lashing out at those weaker than himself. For all of the hand-wringing that went on at the dawn of the 1990s about Bart providing a poor role model for children, this episode demonstrates that, next to Nelson, he's really not such a bad apple.

Finally, in addition to Nelson and Jasper, "Bart The General" introduces us to Herman, who wouldn't get a generous amount of starring roles in the series ahead, but whom I've long championed as one of Springfield's most underrated denizens. His friendship with Abe (which, alas, would not extend beyond the following season's "Old Money") provided a welcome opportunity for the latter to socialise with somebody outside of the Retirement Castle milieu, and as a character he's always been so steeped in mystery and intrigue. He's also one of the series' few disabled characters, and to that end he could arguably be seen something of a negative stereotype, in that his missing limb is clearly intended as a visual indicator that there's something off about his personality. "Bart The General" might be the single instance of his eccentricities being used for heroic purposes, with subsequent appearances tending to cast him as a criminal of increasingly dangerous stripes - for now, though, there is perhaps something gratifying in having someone so unconventional facilitate Bart's deliverance, given Homer's prior remarks about how those with differences are to be treated primarily as objects of scorn. Here, Herman explicitly comments on his lost arm, telling Bart that: "Next time your teacher tells you to keep your arm inside the bus window, you do it!" As a point of curiosity, on the DVD commentary, it's revealed that the writers had initially intended for this to be the start of a running gag whereby Herman would be routinely asked about his arm and give a different story every time (they cite another scenario - possibly included in an earlier draft of "Life on The Fast Lane" - in which Herman insinuates that he lost his arm by inserting it into the ball return system at a bowling alley). I'll admit that I was actually a little disappointed to hear that, as I'd always liked how this line functioned (whether by design or not) as a call-back to the third episode of the series, "Homer's Odyssey", where Edna Krabappel cites a tragic bit of lore about a boy who stuck his arm out of a bus window and had it ripped off by a truck travelling in the opposite direction. From what we have to go on, you are perfectly free to conclude that the child from Edna's story grew up to be Herman. Coming off of Bart's assumptions that Herman's missing arm is indicative of an old war injury, the joke is, presumably, supposed to be that Herman lost his arm through extremely dumb and arbitrary means - although, if the implication is that Herman was only a child at the time, it would still have been one heck of a traumatic thing for him to have experienced at such a young age. Incidentally, I'm also aware that a flashback in a Season 24 episode, "To Cur, With Love" depicted Herman getting his arm ripped off as an adult whilst hitch-hiking, but I don't see that as anything more than a throwaway gag. The schoolbus maiming is still canon to me!