"Lisa's Rival" (1F17) is a strange episode. I don't think it receives due credit for just how strange it really is - presumably because it boasts what is, ostensibly at least, one of the more down-to-earth A-stories of Season 6. A new pupil joins Lisa's class and transpires to have an uncanny amount in common with the precocious Simpsons middle child - she also plays the saxophone and possesses an intellect well beyond her years. On the surface, it seems as though Lisa might finally have found a kindred spirit, but things are ever more complicated than that. The new girl, Allison Taylor (guest voice of Winona Ryder, of Mermaids fame), is talented and advanced in ways that seem to persistently undermine Lisa's own distinctions, not least in that she's better at netting adult recognition for her abilities - one of the greatest daggers to Lisa's heart comes in learning that Allison is actually a year younger than her, and was moved up from the 1st Grade because she found it unchallenging. The worst thing about it all, though? Allison is a lovely person, and 100% sincere about wanting to be friends with Lisa. Which makes it so much harder for Lisa to come to terms with the fact that she basically hates Allison's guts. The episode is very much a character study, in exploring how Lisa copes with emotions that, intellectually, she figures she should be above, and the story is accordingly modest in scope, climaxing with a sequence set around an entirely arbitrary school diorama contest, in which the real stakes have more to do with whether or not Lisa's conscience will prevail over her petty desire to see Allison fail just this once. There's no shortage of cartoonish wackiness, but it exists largely on the sidelines, with a subplot about Homer attempting to cut it as a door-to-door sugar salesman and a running gag where Milhouse is hunted by the FBI. In a season that also sees Homer becoming the prophesied leader of a masonic society, Springfield nearly being crushed by a comet, and a trip to an amusement park where the animatronics attempt to eviscerate the guests, the world in "Lisa's Rival" feels remarkably sedate.
Make no mistake, though, "Lisa's Rival" goes to stranger territory than all those episodes, but it's strange in subtler, more understated ways that hinge upon there being a disturbance in the very fabric of the show's reality. On surface, life carries on seemingly much as normal, yet clearly the world as we know is being shaken to its very foundations. I'd put it within the same category of Simpsons adventure as the previous season's "The Last Temptation of Homer", in that its plot revolves around the Simpsons universe appearing to have rewritten the very rules by which it operates. Allison feels as though she were cut from the same cloth as Mindy Simmons, with both gals proving impossibly deadly adversaries for their episode's respective protagonists - Mindy in repeatedly undermining the fundamentality of Homer's union with Marge, and Allison in demonstrating to Lisa that her allotted role as overachieving outlier isn't as set in stone as she's had the privilege of thinking for the past five seasons. In both cases, Homer and Lisa are forced into a position in which everything they've taken for granted about themselves and the world suddenly seems to hang queasily in the balance. And when things are decidedly off in Camp Simpson, the universe as a whole seems significantly less balanced.
The cataclysmic nature of the crisis is slyly hinted in the episode's beginning, which kicks off with a sequence based around Lisa disturbing each of her family (Maggie included) in succession with her saxophone-blowing, until finally she decides to take her practising outside to the backyard; this culminates with a throwaway gag where her playing is overheard by Ned Flanders and his sons, who mistake it for Gabriel's trumpet and joyously exclaim that Judgement Day is upon them. The Flanders clan might well be onto something there, because the following day does indeed transform into one of reckoning for Lisa - in her case, she appears to have woken up with the wrath of the universe raining down on her head for no other reason than the cosmos is bored and desires a new plaything. This much is reflected in Miss Hoover's weary reaction to the prospect of yet another day with Lisa being the only student in her classroom to display any degree of appetite for learning; far from something to be cherished or encouraged, Lisa's singularity in that regard is simply a reinforcement of that never-ending cycle of monotony. Allison's interjection is welcomed by Hoover because it signals a break from this inertia. At this point, we have no reason to believe that Allison is in any way superior to Lisa - as far as we know, she would have correctly answered Hoover's question on Columbus, had the universe followed its conventional course. The real disturbance comes in Hoover's open display of favouritism toward Allison, with Lisa being bothered by the fact that she has never made Hoover "Yowee". The universe as a whole seems to vastly prefer Allison, in spite of the fact that she isn't doing things massively different to Lisa, and with Hoover's reaction it's tempting to see the entire arrangement as a gigantic conspiracy against Lisa, something that's frankly no harder to swallow than the likelihood of a girl with such an uncanny amount of common ground entering her life in the first place. However you slice it, Lisa has become the victim of a particularly cruel cosmic joke.
All of which doesn't preclude it from also being a really good school-yard drama, where Lisa gets to deal with some of the messiest of human impulses and, finally, to assess what's actually important to her. Viewing the situation through entirely rational lens, her reaction to Allison might seem somewhat petty - after all, Allison being a little better than her as an academic and a saxophonist doesn't suddenly negate the fact that she's still incredibly advanced for her age (and for a Springfieldian, period). And yet, who among us is going to claim that if we were in Lisa's shoes, we wouldn't have grappled with the exact same dilemma? Lisa's life might be one of undervalued solitude, but at least she has her stellar grades and musical flair to reassure her that, no matter how miserable things might get, she is, in fact, doing well. Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa, admits in the episode's DVD commentary that she was quite upset upon reading the synopsis, because she knew this was a situation that Lisa would really struggle with: "It was bad enough that her father doesn't understand her and that she doesn't have any friends, but now suddenly she has this kid who's younger than her and better at everything. And I thought, this is going to crush her soul...I was a bit worried about her."
First, though, let's tackle that whole subplot about Homer and the sugar pile...I will admit upfront that I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. It absolutely didn't surprise me to learn that this episode was written by Mike Scully because, despite the deceptively placid nature of the Lisa A-story, the Homer subplot is a pretty telling indicator of the direction the show would eventually be taking during his tenure as showrunner. It's ridiculous and random as hell, features Homer at his most abrasive and in-your-face (at this point, anyway) and is, let's face it, kind of shallow and really kind of dumb. Having said that, there is something undeniably endearing about the simplicity of it all - Homer pilfers a whole load of spilled sugar from a roadside accident, and really is so stoked to have a mountain of ill-gotten Texas tea-sweetener stashed away in his backyard that he loses his marbles with delirium. There's a brief allusion that, just for a moment, threatens to transform the sugar into some kind of cocaine metaphor (Homer quotes Tony Montana from Scarface), but the episode doesn't hammer too far on this point, content simply to explore whatever rich possibilities arise from Homer getting excited over a big pile of sugar. This produces a handful of classic moments - like everyone else, I can't help but laugh at Homer's misconception that the plant's, "Don't come in on Monday", means he's getting a four day weekend. But at the same time, Homer is so giddy and obsessive in his sugar craze that it borders on being intermittently frightening. His inexplicable "What's to be done with this Homer Simpson?" spiel is another fan favourite moment, although for me it feels uncomfortably reminiscent of that sequence from "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" (boo, hiss) of Season 5, when Marge requests that Homer stop sharing personal secrets about her, and he responds by bleating out an incoherent deluge of non-sequiturs that are all taken from lines from random movies. It bothers me less here, as Homer isn't being quite so jaw-droppingly insensitive to Marge specifically; nevertheless, it's between these two sequences that I think you can pinpoint Homer's descent from relatable underdog to out-and-out Looney Tune. This Homer, larger than life and prone to spewing random movie quotes, could be hilarious and he could be infuriating, depending on what situation he was in, but in neither case does he reason or respond to anything like an actual human being. (Speaking of non-sequiturs, this may be the episode where dispensing them became Ralph Wiggum's defining characteristic. The kid always occupied Cloud Cuckoo Land, but it's here that he seems to derail from reality altogether. Was Mittens the catfood-scented cat ever referenced again? Or did the writers forget they gave the Wiggums a cat, much as they forgot they once gave Smithers a Yorkshire terrier?)
The other notable thing about the sugar subplot is that it really has sod-all to do with the A-story. It's not a strict requisite for a subplot have any kind of meaningful bearing upon the main narrative in order to be successful, but here there's zero intersection whatsoever; the two stories feel lightyears apart from one another. At most, they have a couple of features in common - Marge hovers helplessly on the sidelines of both narratives, unable to find the words that will convince Lisa to see her problem differently, or to talk Homer down from his sugar high, and Skinner also worms his way into both. The most interesting thing the alignment ends up doing is to highlight a somewhat contradictory aspect to Bart, who gets to be both Homer's (overridden) moral compass during his theft of the sugar pile, commending him for his downright decent offer of help to Hans Moleman and questioning the legality of taking of the sugar, and later the force beckoning Lisa into what is, in Bart's own words, "the nether regions of the soul". Bart revels in mayhem, and he whole-heartedly seizes the opportunity to bring out Lisa's own capacity for devilry, but he is just as capable of drawing the line wherever he senses the responsibility ought to fall to him. The all-important factor, one supposes, is in how much gratification there is to be had in subverting the established order - with Homer, Bart is pretty much forced into being the adult of the situation, whereas with Lisa he gets the satisfaction of seeing someone who figures they're too mature to be playing with fire discover just how intoxicating it can be. That, and Bart does seem to genuinely sympathise with Lisa's plight. Despite that he is clearly posited as a corruptive force for Lisa, in encouraging her to play dirty in her one-sided war against Allison, "Lisa's Rival" still contains a really good example of that ever-enduring Simpsons solidarity, with Bart explicitly wanting to help Lisa because he can't stand to see her so miserable (except in matters of a rubber spider being placed down her dress).
Bart might have Lisa's back, but he clearly represents a kind of danger to Lisa throughout the episode - which is to say, Lisa's shadow self, the slippery slope down which she risks descending if she allows her rivalry with Allison to get the better of her. Lisa is effectively caught between two poles, with Allison embodying the kind of moral and intellectual purity that she acknowledges should be commended, and Bart the darker impulses that complicate her ability to do so. At one point Lisa admits that, "I should be Allison's friend, not her competitor. I mean, she is a wonderful person", with which Bart agrees, but in a backhanded manner that cuts directly to Lisa's deepest anxieties: "Why compete with someone who's just going to kick your butt anyway?" Lisa does not disagree with this assessment, but she objects to Bart's phrasing. The fact that Allison is such a wonderful person is, of course, the most offensive thing about the girl; it a sentiment that Lisa later repeats to Allison's face when she is invited over to her house, but with an obvious resignation that barely disguises her deep frustrations. On the one hand, Allison's arrival is a golden opportunity for Lisa to experience the kind of friendship and understanding that she's often struggled to attain among her peers, a fact to which Lisa herself is by no means blind. Allison is, in many respects, her own mirror image (as per the DVD commentary, Allison was named after Scully's own daughters, Allison and Taylor, although we might also note the number of common letters in "Lisa" and "Allison"). But the mirror is distorted; it is as if two parallel universes are undertaking a freak convergence, offering Lisa a tantalising glimpse of the better version of herself she might have been if the stars were just a little more aligned in her favour. Part of what fuels Lisa's jealousy toward Allison is the realisation that she's having a much easier ride of it than her, at least where adults are concerned - she was moved up a grade, she makes Hoover "Yowee", and she has a father who is a professor and likes to play intellectual wordplay games with her. On that basis, she is living Lisa's dream life. Occasionally, though, we do see flashes of vulnerability on Allison's part - not least that, to her peers, she's just a nail sticking out inviting a good hammering down, as Lisa was before her. In being outshone by Allison, Lisa finds that she's also less visible to bullies, who take to harassing Allison in her place. Lisa's observation that, "It used to be my face in that mud", on seeing Allison get pushed to the ground by a couple of girls, is ambiguous - it's not altogether clear if she's bemoaning the fact that her erstwhile tormentors have moved on to another target, or if she's empathising with Allison's plight, in acknowledging that, yes sir, it does really suck being at the top. With that in mind, you can understand why Allison is so eager to make things work between herself and Lisa. It's not as though she has a whole lot of options for making friends elsewhere. This, actually, may be one of the most satisfying things about "Lisa's Rival" - that it takes the time to make Allison a fully human character too. Inevitably, we are limited in the amount of insight we get into Allison's
mindset, since we're seeing the situation exclusively from Lisa's point of
view, but we get inkling enough of what her own anxieties and weaknesses are, particularly at the end of the episode, when Allison makes a casual revelation that, with hindsight, casts her seemingly effortless overachieving in a slightly different light. And Ryder brings such warmth to the character vocally that, although we side with Lisa in understanding exactly what kind of threat she poses, it's extremely difficult to feel much in the way of hostility toward Allison personally.
With the exception of Marge (and Homer, although he does not involve himself in Lisa's story), most of the grown-up folk are in full-on jerk mode throughout "Lisa's Rival", grotesque caricatures of adult insensitivity and indifference toward childhood insecurity. They are required to be, so as to act as mouthpieces for this great cosmic giggle at Lisa's expense. This includes Allison father, Professor Taylor, who yields the most staggeringly condescending response when Lisa struggles to play his ridiculous celebrity anagram game (seriously, I've noodled around with the name Jeremy Irons and, as far as I can see, the only halfway viable answer is the one Lisa gave. How many celebrities, besides Alec Guinness, does it even work with anyway?*). But she has a far more gruelling time of it on school premises, where she not only has to contend with Hoover's partialities, but her band audition escalates into an all-out nightmare, culminating in a fake-out so arbitrarily, disarmingly and inexplicably quirky that it's hard to imagine the episode as a whole being quite the same without it. I speak, of course, of Lisa's false awakening after passing out during her saxophone duel with Allison (on top of everything else, Allison has the better lung capacity); Largo congratulates Lisa on having "made it", before clarifying that he was referring to her regaining consciousness, and that Allison won first chair. Lisa screams in horror, whereupon we fade out, to find her back down on the auditorium floor. "Oh, just a dream", she murmurs in relief...only for the exact same sequence to repeat itself, but with the added detail of Largo getting right up in her face and declaring, with disturbing intensity, "AND BELIEVE ME, THIS IS NOT A DREAM!" There's something about Largo's bulging eyes (complete with the disproportionately large pupils that were endemic to this era of the series), his Muppet-shaped nose and that very Aardman-esque mouth that makes the moment legitimately terrifying.
What's odd - and I am going strictly from memory here - is that I swear Sky 1 used to cut the false awakening part of the sequence, jumping directly to Lisa's "Just a dream" and running from there. I recall it came as something of a revelation to later see the sequence intact and to understand her remark in its proper context. Before then, it wasn't exactly clear to me what Lisa was dismissing as "just a dream" - the disastrous endings to her saxophone audition? Her rivalry with Allison, period? Strangely, though, I never felt that the joke lost anything for it. The punchline - the grotesque fervor with which Largo impresses the reality of the nightmare upon her - stands just as well on its own as a declaration of how violently and malevolently the cosmos is determined to rub its displacement of Lisa in her face. Largo's line may indeed be the episode's all-defining one. (Not that fantasy offers any real refuge for Lisa either, as she later discovers when she tries to imagine how life would be if she embraced her Born To Runner-up status and formed a musical act with Art Garfunkel, Jim Messina and John Oates. Why would they come to our concert just to boo us, indeed.)
Skinner is also on good - if absurdly malleable - form in "Lisa's Rival". His presence permeates every corner of the episode - as noted, he has a cameo in Homer's story, and in the opening sequence his voice is heard on the receiving end of Bart's attempted prank call ("As a matter of fact, my refrigerator wasn't running. You've spared me quite a bit of spoilage. Thank you, anonymous young man!"). At one point, Marge hilariously misunderstands Lisa's suggestion that she might be moved up a grade if her mother were "nicer" to Skinner ("Lisa! I am nice!" Yeah, I have a feeling that Skinner wouldn't go for it, anyway). He even appears at Largo's side during the band audition, and while he doesn't contribute anything to this sequence in narrative terms, I dig the subtle character details of him starting blankly and yawning, indicating just how bored out of his skull he is by the entire process. Where he really peaks, though, is in the climax, when he's tasked with judging the entries for the diorama contest, and gets to rabidly turn on Allison the instant she does something to indicate she might be anything less than perfect (although she is very blatantly being set up). Naturally, he is but a puppet getting his strings pulled by some higher power intent on making the situation as unendurable as possible for Lisa, but he gets a nice revealing moment where he lets slip his bitterness at how his own talents and ambitions have been left in the shade ("Elementary school is where I wound up and it's too late to do anything about that!").
With help from her brother, Lisa is given the opportunity to dispose of Allison and reassert her position as resident overachiever - Bart takes Allison's diorama on the Edgar Allan Poe story, "The Tell-Tale Heart", and replaces it with a box containing an actual cow heart, making Allison look like a bit of a sick prankster in the eyes of Skinner. As their stunt plays out, Lisa faces a paradox - she finds that she cannot destroy Allison without also destroying herself in the process. In that regard, the climax of the episode feels less evocative of "The Tell-Tale Heart" than of another Edgar Allan Poe story, "William Wilson". Here, a man is persistently plagued by his doppelganger, before eventually murdering him and receiving the grim warning that: "from now on you are also dead - dead to the World, dead to Heaven, dead to Hope! In me you lived - and, in my death - see by this face, which is your own, how wholly, how completely, you have killed - yourself!" In engineering Allison's fall from grace, Lisa is called upon to debase her own character and to fundamentally alter who she is - her self-definition is founded on not only her pre-eminence within the classroom, but on her integrity and willingness to always do the right thing. Thus, to defeat Allison in this manner would result not in a restoration of the established order, but the birth of a new and corrupted one, in which Lisa has no chance of recovering all that she was. Malice is never pretty, but it's particularly unpalatable when levelled at someone as sweetly unsuspecting as Allison, who is the very bastion of those values that Lisa herself holds so dear.
Lisa is able to spare herself the fate of William Wilson - her own heart wins out against her eagerness to win, and she returns Allison's diorama. Unfortunately, it's now Allison's turn to discover just how fickle the Simpsons universe can be - no sooner has she been restored to Skinner's good graces, when he suddenly decides that she's lost her lustre. Skinner glances at her meticulously-crafted diorama and declares it, "a little sterile...no real insight." "Meh", agrees Hoover, all out of Yowees. With Allison's welcome having all but expired, the stage appears to be set for Lisa to reclaim her top spot, although Lisa herself is quite miserable at the prospect: "After the way I've behaved, I don't deserve to win." The universe agrees. Instead, it reveals the endgame to this particular round of Status Quo-prodding. Turns out, Allison was merely a pawn in an even more diabolical cosmic joke still - Skinner awards first prize to Ralph, who doesn't know what a diorama is and just showed up with a box of Star Wars action figures (still in their original packages, mind). And really, could there being a more telling sign that life in Springfield is up and running as usual? Perhaps the cruellest aspect of Allison's reign of terror is not in how she honed in so ruthlessly on Lisa's well-marked territory, but in how she taunted Lisa by demonstrating that intelligence and diligence could indeed lead to recognition and reward (if inevitably only to somebody else). Since when has it ever been within Springfield's ethos to value such things? Forced to take her proper place as Lisa's equal in unsung achievement, Allison admits that she's actually relieved to have been upstaged, for once in her life, since it's helped her to see that losing isn't the end of the world. This is an interesting revelation, since up until now, we've never really had any hint that that's what's been driving Allison. Marge's assurance that, "She's more scared of you than you are of her" had previously netted the sardonic response that, "You're thinking of bears, Mom." But maybe Marge was onto something after all. Maybe Allison has lived with the interminable pressure of knowing that one day, if not Lisa, then certainly somebody will come along and prove every bit her own match. That is the real curse of being at the top; to quote the classic Twilight Zone episode, "A Game of Pool", being the best of anything carries with it a special obligation to keep on proving it.
In the end, Lisa apologises to Allison for attempting to sabotage her entry, and Allison, with no hard feelings, asks if the two of them can still be friends. "Only if we're the best," says Lisa. It's a sweet conclusion, but sadly any seasoned viewer knows full well that it's not going to stick. Allison is voiced by an A-list celebrity, and the rules therefore dictate that she will not be staying on as a cast fixture. As with Mindy Simmons, you might occasionally catch her hovering around the background of select episodes, one of her most prominent appearances being in the Season 10 opener "Lard of The Dance", in which she, like everyone else, was wowed over by a new girl named Alex (guest voice of Lisa Kudrow - "Your name's Lisa? Shut up, I love that name!") who puts Lisa in the shade, all while Homer is running around chasing some phantom enterprise in dubiously harvested foodstuff and, jeez, I hope that the writers were at least aware of the irony.
And now for my hottest, spiciest take on anything in "Lisa's Rival". For my money, do you know what's better than the entire sugar pile subplot (Beemobile and all)? Better even than Milhouse's brush with the FBI? Marge reading Love In The Time of Scurvy (a play on Gabriel García Márquez's Love In The Time of Cholera) and her thwarted attempt at saucy fantasy with her imaginary pirate bo. It's a small but charming insight into Marge's quest for alleviation from her own life of thankless solitude (regulated discreetly into the backdrop of the episode, as is often the case with such insights), and I love how it receives a callback a little later on, when we catch Marge reclining with the same tome, only to be jarred back into her pirate-less living room by an anguished Lisa. The theme of corrupted dreaming, of reality ruthlessly hunting you down, no matter how far you attempt to retreat into fantasy, actually seems to be a running one for this episode. To wrap things up with a cheap allusion that takes advantage of our guest celebrity of the week, we might even say that Reality...Bites.
*Although I tried Art Garfunkel and got Feral Gunk Rat. I'm quite pleased with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment