22 Short Films About Springfield (aka The McWhat?)

The first thing to be said about "22 Short Films About Springfield", aka episode 3F18, (aside from the fact that it contains what has, in the succeeding years, become a strong contender for the internet's favourite Simpsons joke) is that the title is a lie. It does not actually contain twenty-two short films, about Springfield or otherwise, and it is futile to try to compile them, as many a Wikipedia contributor has discovered to their detriment. So, why does the title appear to be under that impression? For one, it was a reference to François Girard's Canadian arthouse classic 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993), the title of which seemed to resonate with the zeitgeist of the time (enough for a contemporary episode of Animaniacs to supply its own variation), even if the film itself was only likely to appeal to an esoteric audience (personally I love it, but I am an admirer of Gould). It also alluded to the fact that your average Simpsons episode was (roughly) twenty-two minutes long, meaning there was room (in theory, anyway) for twenty-two one-minute stories. In actuality, the writers had already settled on the title before they began compiling stories, and so many were rejigged or excised from the final edit that in the end they failed to keep track of whether they had twenty-two of them or not (they admit this much on the DVD commentary), and this had remained a point of confusion for fans ever since (as a kid, I once tried to keep track and thought I had them all, but I had to include the interludes with the bee's eye-view and the sewer-traversing donut as their own separate films, which felt like a cheat). What we do get is one of the most unique and pleasingly experimental of the series' run, one that, in place of the standard A to B narrative centred on the titular family, offers up a barrage of skits and sketches depicting the assorted goings-on of a perfectly typical noon in Springfield (presumably on a weekend, given that none of the kids or teaching staff are in school). The skits segue deftly into one another, but only two develop into recurring narrative threads (three if you count the episode bookends with Bart and Milhouse) - first, an ongoing saga with Marge attempting to extract a wad of wayward bubblegum from Lisa's hair, and second, a perilous journey into Springfield's seedy underbelly, seen through the eyes of Chief Wiggum and assembled from pastiches of one of the defining flicks of the era. Wiggum and Lisa's stories are each told in three separate chunks, although to get anywhere close to the alleged total of twenty-two, these all need to be counted as their own individual shorts.

The nominal shout-out to 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould has greater significance still, in the sense that "22" can, on one level, be understood as The Simpsons' love letter to the wave of independent cinema that was taking the multiplexes by storm in the early/mid-1990s, peaking with the breakout success of Quentin Tarantino's sophomore feature, Pulp Fiction, in 1994. By the time the episode aired, on April 14th 1996, everybody in the world had seen Pulp Fiction and everybody wanted the world to know they had seen Pulp Fiction, which is why you had references to the film popping up in the most random of places, from Spice Girls videos to Space Jam. And The Simpsons was certainly no more immune to the lure of the big PF, the homages in "22" being as slickly implemented as you would expect from the series that was arguably an even more avid devourer of pop cultural detritus than Tarantino himself, but perhaps of a somewhat more self-consciously showy nature than was typical for the show's numerous cinematic pastiches. It really wants you to sit up and notice how faithfully it has recreated a number of key sequences from the movie, just as it wants you to feel cool and in on the joke because you recognise it as being lifted from Pulp Fiction, to the extent that it's not consistently accessible to those unhip to Tarantino - which is definitely not the case for the numerous Hitchcock references sprinkled throughout the series. "Bart of Darkness" makes no strict requisite for you to have seen Rear Window for it to be enjoyed on its own terms as the story of a particularly aggravating summer viewed from the Simpsons' backyard. You obviously need to have seen Psycho to get the full benefit of the sequence in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" with Maggie bludgeoning Homer in the garage, but it can still be easily appreciated as its own self-contained slice of weirdly unsettling absurdity. But if you did happen to miss out on the whole Pulp phenomenon, then I can't see how the part of "22" where Herman has Snake and Wiggum gagged and bound inside his store is going to do anything other than confuse the heck out of you. And while you probably could take an educated guess at exactly what kind of party Herman has in mind for when his mysterious friend Zed arrives, there is something terribly, fundamentally off about stumbling across a scene of this nature in an episode of The Simpsons, and not just because of its decidedly adult implications. Part of the issue, I think, is that in order for the allusion to work, it requires Herman to behave in a way that's very...if not exactly out of character for the one-armed antique dealer (Herman being something of a dark horse), is definitely unprecedented based on what we do already know about him. One of the episode writers, Rachel Pulido, points out as much in the DVD commentary, when Josh Weinstein comments on how tremendously lucky it was that Herman was already an established character, and that he was "exactly like that guy [Duane Whitaker's character] in the movie". Pulido retorts, "I thought he was nicer than that. He seemed a lot nicer in "Bart The General"". It's fair to say that, even at his very nicest, Herman's always been something of a creep. But I would never in a million years have suspected he was THAT much of a creep. As sparkling and lovingly-observed as the episode's Pulp Fiction pastiches are, let's face it, the whole thing does end up doing poor Herman slightly dirty.

What "22 Short Films About Springfield" has in common with Pulp Fiction, besides a fascination with fast food and the kind of unsettling bondage that goes on behind closed doors, is an interest in the multi-stranded narrative, in grander stories constructed from smaller parallel threads intersecting at various points. Pulp Fiction follows three different narrative trajectories, not all of which are relayed in a strictly linear fashion, but which all come together to create a more-or-less coherent picture of interlocking lives in Los Angeles' seedy underground crime circuit. All three of the stories feature Vincent Vega, a somewhat dim-witted hitman played by John Travolta, to varying capacity, and all three circle back to Vega's boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), and the intimidation he inspires in those reckless enough to cross him - although Marsellus himself remains an abstract threat in all but one of the narratives. "22" is a comparatively more basic affair, attempting none of Tarantino's tricks around perspective and chronology (The Simpsons would try something along those lines in the Season 12 episode, "Trilogy of Error"), but like Pulp Fiction wishing to convey a sense of parallel lives and stories that are constantly brushing up one another; the intuition that whatever is going on right around the corner could be of equal interest, and potentially part of something bigger. It's this interest that marks it out as not simply The Simpsons' attempt to get on the Pulp bandwagon, but to replicate something of the spirit of contemporary indie cinema as a whole, which was continuously seeking new ways to subvert the enduring Hollywood modes of storytelling. Tarantino might have succeeded in making the multi-stranded narrative more accessible to mainstream audiences, but he by no means invented the technique, which was already a popular plaything among his peers in the indie landscape - Jim Jarmusch, for example, had attempted something quite similar in his 1989 film Mystery Train, and in 1993 long-time maverick Robert Altman released Short Cuts, an adaptation of multiple short stories by Raymond Carver dramatised as a collection of intersecting lives across a brief period in Los Angeles, itself recalling Altman's 1975 film Nashville. The 1990s indie that the structure of "22" most closely resembles, whether intentionally or not, is Richard Linklater's 1991 feature Slacker, which depicts a day in the life of various denizens of Austin, Texas, with particular focus on its downtown hipster community. As with "22", the camera never lingers on a subject for particularly long, before another individual, meters away, commandeers its attentions - although, unlike "22", Slacker boasts no recurring story threads, merely thematic echoes. The philosophy of the film is outlined in the opening sequence, by a character played by Linklater himself and credited, humorously, as "Should Have Stayed At The Bus Station". He muses on what kinds of possible alternative narrative trajectories might have opened up in The Wizard of Oz had Dorothy and friends taken different paths on their route to the Emerald City, and theorises that life follows a similar pattern, with parallel universes opening up for every idle thought a person has, with even the most mundane of decisions having the capacity to seriously alter how things eventually develop. In the case of Slacker, we never see how any of the roads taken by the characters, literal or metaphorical, work out for them in the longer-term, because we're constantly being tugged toward whatever is happening in the opposite direction.

Slacker is a first class example of what I would term a "channel surf" picture. Not in the sense of Amazon Women on The Moon (1987), a collection of television spoofs presented via the format a faux channel surfing session, or its predecessor, Disco Beaver from Outer Space (1979), but rather a film that makes a point of continuously abandoning one narrative thread for another, the key driving forces being a curiosity as to what we are currently missing out on in the nearest parallel trajectory and, having satisfied that curiosity, an inability to stick with it for long. Simply put, a channel surf picture is a film that refuses to settle and is constantly roaming in search of new subjects, as if fascinated by the mere existence of parallel trajectories and what could potentially be if a different course were pursued (the act of channel surfing itself being commonly posited as one of the defining pastimes of the Gen-X experience, the mark of living in an age addled by media saturation - hence its inclusion in contemporary twentysomething-geared comedies Wayne's World and Reality Bites). Linklater would eventually create another film along the channel surf format in 2001 with Waking Life, a sort of spiritual sequel to Slacker (or should that be a spiritual prequel, given that it seems to have been modelled on the very dream that Should Have Stayed At The Bus Station describes in his opening monologue?), but in between, the worthiest successor to the format could well have been this very episode. "22", too, is a channel surf project, a showcase of alternative possibilities as to what type of cartoon we could be watching if any one of these given supporting characters just so happened to be the focus instead. It is less upfront on the matter than Season 8's "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", but in many regards it plays as a precursor to that episode. Several of the skits give off the air of being their own self-contained mini-sitcoms. The central joke of the vignette centred around Bumblebee Man's domestic life is that, even with the bee costume off, his existence is virtually indistinguishable from that of his TV counterpart. Other segments - the three that open each act - receive their own introductory title sequences (the Apu intro was severely truncated for the finished episode, but the full audio was included as a track on the CD release Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons), suggesting faux pilots for sitcoms that might have existed in alternate realities.

On that note, "22" can also been as the culmination of what seemed to be an increasing preoccupation of the series heading into Oakley and Weinstein's tenure as show-runners - that is, an awareness of The Simpsons' fully fleshed out and expansive supporting cast, and their capacity to hold our attentions with nary a Simpson in sight. The much-hyped "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter that had bridged the transition from Mirkin's reign to Oakley and Weinstein's was founded on a similar principle - that Springfield was swarming with characters with dynamics and agendas of their own that could all be harnessed to bring them all into conflict with the same maniacal businessman. And while "Who Shot Mr Burns?: Part Two" does ultimately end up upholding the law of Simpson-centrism, in having one of the family be the shooter, the first two acts are actually more focussed on Smithers and Wiggum, with Sideshow Mel doing much of the important detective work. Likewise, Season 7 has at least two episodes that convey an interest in giving members of the supporting cast their own stories in ways that didn't have to be dominated by the shadow of the titular family - "A Fish Called Selma", which focuses on Selma's ill-fated marriage to washed-up actor Troy McClure, and makes the highly unusual move of allowing said characters to resolve the matter on their own terms, with surprisingly minimal input from the Simpsons themselves, and "Homer the Smithers", an episode that's ostensibly about Homer's attempts to fill in as Burns' personal assistant while Smithers is on vacation, but is actually about the perfectly symbiotic relationship between Burns and Smithers. That being said, the genesis of "22" can be traced all the way back to the Season 4 episode, "The Front", which ended, somewhat bizarrely, with a self-contained skit starring Ned Flanders and his sons. The skit was created purely out of necessity, to keep the episode from running too short, and was modelled on those one-page quickies you would occasionally find at the back of Archie comics looking to fill up a spare page. And it blew my mind when first I saw it, since it seemed to open up the possibility of more of the same, given that they went to the trouble of creating theme music and all (incidentally, "22" contains a pointed reminder that Homer isn't the only person who doesn't love Ned Flanders; Reverend Lovejoy can't stand him either, something he demonstrates by actively encouraging his Old English sheepdog (another one-off pet I don't think we ever saw again) to foul the Flanders' lawn, only to get caught in the act by Ned). Reaction to the skit was so positive that the show staff had indeed considered making them a regular feature, but never found themselves in a position where they were in danger of running so short again (or so they claim - didn't they have a really hard time getting "Cape Feare" to over 20 minutes? Now that I think about it, an epilogue where Bob and Snake are reunited in jail really wouldn't have gone amiss). Eventually, they got tired of waiting around and decided to create a whole episode that was nothing but skits of the variety seen at the end of "The Front". Hence, "22 Short Films About Springfield" was born, with an unusually extensive line-up of writers leaping at the opportunity to write sketches for their favourite supporting characters. The episode immediately became a firm fan favourite (even before the whole "Steamed Hams" phenomenon), although we're told on the commentary that two of the show's higher-ups really disliked it, by which I'm going to assume they mean James L. Brooks and Sam Simon. I'm guessing not Groening, since he seems genuinely happy and proud to have received a writing credit for the episode (one of eleven).

Something they don't bring up until the very end of the DVD commentary, but which had been the subject of fan speculation for some years, is that "22" was at one point considered as the basis of a possible spin-off series, Tales From Springfield, which would have focussed on different supporting characters each week (an idea later realised, incidentally, by the Pokémon spin-off Pokémon Chronicles). Obviously, it didn't happen, one of the cited reasons being that the staff didn't have the time or resources to work on two series concurrently. As intrigued as I am by the idea, I have to admit that the set-up for Tales From Springfield would strike me as a tad redundant if The Simpsons itself was still in production. The scenarios seem so closely interwoven that I'm not sure you could justify breaking them up into two separate shows (I think it might also be something of a logistical headache ensuring that the two series didn't contradict each other's canons). Far easier to do the occasional peripheral character-heavy episode as part of the main series, although I can understand why you maybe wouldn't want to do episodes focussed on the supporting cast at the expense of the title family too often. It is, after all, their show, and too many diversions from the headlining subject would have netted the accusation that the Simpsons themselves were running out of steam as characters (the possibility of the show running out of steam being another preoccupation of the Oakley/Weinstein era). I also find it somewhat telling that one of the suggestions for the kinds of stories we might have seen from the spin-off series, as per the DVD commentary, are stories centred on a young Homer. Homer's already a focal character; why would you need a spin-off to do what could be readily accomplished in a flashback episode within the series proper? Or are they betraying a slight trepidation as to how far you could reasonably hope to take the important happenings of Springfield away from the Simpsons' door? 

Ostensibly, "22" was made with the intention of demonstrating that life in Springfield doesn't revolve around the Simpsons themselves. I say "ostensibly", because of course it does, and one of the fundamental ironies of the episode is that it ends up proving it, whether knowingly or not. The Simpsons clearly do have a privileged position within this universe. It's Bart who sets the sequence of events into motion, by pondering aloud what kinds of adventures are currently unfolding all around the town, and Marge and Lisa get the story that provides the episode with its strongest narrative backbone. The most you can really say is that it's unusually light on Homer, who appears alongside Maggie and Santa's Little Helper in a skit that involves his accidentally trapping the former in a newspaper vending machine, but makes no appearances before or after (although we hear second-hand that he discarded the beer can that gets Lisa indirectly into her sticky predicament). The biggest indication of the Simpsons' centrality, though, occurs in the second Marge and Lisa skit, when the issue of removing gum from Lisa's hair suddenly becomes a matter of immense interest to the entire town. On the one hand, this functions as a means of getting a whole bunch of characters who couldn't be worked in via their own individual arcs (Willie, Otto, Uter and even the Capital City Goofball) a place in the episode. On another, it seems to to be the characters' acknowledgement of just how fundamentally their lives revolve around this one nondescript suburban family that they're compulsively driven to involve themselves in something as non-eventful as getting gum out of a child's hair. If the staff were looking to prove that the supporting cast members were capable of maintaining their own stories, then I honestly think that "A Fish Called Selma" provides a far better model for such a spin-off, since it doesn't depend so extensively upon the input of the family.

"22" boasts such a delectable package of skilfully interwoven sketches featuring so many beloved Springfieldians that it's just as intriguing to note which characters are left out. As Bart says, there's not enough time to hear every story in town, but there is an obvious bias in terms of which characters are given the time allotted - if "22" has one real shortcoming, it's that it is an absolute sausage party of an episode. Outside of the skits involving Marge and Lisa, the female character who gets the most dialogue and screen-time is Bumblebee Man's one-time wife. Brandine gets in a line, as does an off-screen Agnes Skinner, but most of the Springfieldian women - Helen Lovejoy, Edna K, Patty & Selma and their ilk - get completely passed over in the spotlight allocation, demonstrating that, though the Simpsons themselves may be a female majority unit, the writers seldom seemed to have as much interest in getting to know the supporting gals. A male character who is noticeably excluded is Krusty (although Sideshow Mel, Mr Teeny and Handsome Pete all show up among the crowd in the Simpsons' kitchen), an absence felt all the more strongly due to his featuring indirectly by way of his Krusty Burger restaurant, which works its way into not one, but two of the vignettes. Script extracts that have since shown up online reveal that Krusty did originally have his own vignette which was among the excised material (Patty and Selma would also have appeared in it, which explains their absence), but in a way it suits the episode that he never appears in the flesh, remaining instead a kind of omnipresent corporate entity hanging queasily over the characters throughout. It's through the reappearing Krusty restaurant that the episode is able to touch on one of the themes nearest and dearest to Tarantino's heart, regarding the kinds of mass consumerism in which we all participate.

One of Tarantino's most striking features as a film-maker has always been his forthrightness in embracing popular culture as a kind of universal language understood and spoken by all. The sequence at the beginning of Pulp Fiction, where Vincent Vega and his partner in crime, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) discuss variations in menu items in McDonald's restaurants across different European locations while on their way to carry out their latest professional killing, speaks of the manner in which the humdrum is interspersed with the brutality that goes hand-in-hand with their line of work. But it is also, in its own right, a fascinating review of an all-dominating consumerist force that has penetrated the world over, in spite of the low-key ways in which different cultures continue to express their individuality (one of the gags being that Burger King, though it has its own established international presence, is very much second in the pecking order - when Jules asks Vincent what the French call a Whopper, he responds, somewhat irritatedly, "I don't know, I didn't go into Burger King"). The Simpsons' take on this very sequence, in which Wiggum is having lunch at Krusty Burger with Lou and Eddie, and Lou shares a recent experience of his own with an unfamiliar fast food locale, offers a clever twist that again seems to touch on the idea of parallel realities, in this case the show's own tentative relationship with the real world. The Simpsons is ostensibly set in the same universe as our own, hence the barrage of shared pop cultural markers, but as Vincent and Lou both say, "It's the little differences." Itchy & Scratchy (also surprisingly absent from "22") take the place of Mickey Mouse, the Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry and every other golden age cartoon creation you can name, McBain fills in for Arnold Schwarzenegger (until the movie), while Krusty Burger substitutes for McDonald's, to the point of having its own grotesque-looking clown for a mascot. So when Lou says, "I went to the McDonald's in Shelbyville last Friday," he is, in effect, violating an unspoken rule of the Simpsons universe, in acknowledging the existence of the very thing for which Krusty Burger was conceived as an obvious shorthand. Humor rises from the trepidation with which the characters regard the world beyond their fictionalised bubble, as the ridiculous names from the Krusty Burger menu are contrasted with the familiar McDonald's items ("Shakes", grunts an incredulous Eddie, upon learning what they call Krusty Partially-Gelatinated Non-Dairy Gum-Based Beverages in McDonald's, "You don't know what you're getting"). Whatever you care to call it - a Krusty Burger with cheese, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, Steamed fucking Hams (despite the fact that they are obviously grilled), it's all the same pile of salted grease. (Curiously, there is another reference to the real-world McDonald's elsewhere in the episode - in one skit, Comic Book Guy sells Milhouse a comic starring a distinctly off-model Hamburglar. Gotta watch out for the Big Mc's lawyers, I suppose).

As the Wiggum story progresses, it borrows more heavily from "The Gold Watch", the narrative strand centred on Butch (Bruce Willis), a professional boxer paid by Marsellus to throw a fight, but who instead takes the money, wins the fight anyway and attempts to make a sneaky getaway with his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). Throwing a wrench into Butch's scheme is the realisation that Fabienne has neglected to pack an important family heirloom (the titular watch), so he goes back to his apartment to retrieve it, and on his return journey has the tremendous misfortune of running directly into Marsellus. A violent confrontation breaks out between the two men, whereupon the film takes arguably the most bizarre and unexpected turn in a film littered with bizarre and unexpected twists - Butch and Marsellus take their fight into a downtown pawnshop where they are captured by the shop's owners, a trio of deviants who gag and bind them in the basement and proceed to rape the incapacitated Marsellus. Butch escapes their clutches, but chooses to re-enter the basement and rescue Marsellus, who returns the favour by agreeing to turn a blind eye to Butch's getaway, on the condition that he does not return to LA or tell anybody else about the incident below the pawnshop. The incident in question - Tarantino's tribute to the most infamous sequence of John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance, relocating the menace to the sprawling urban wilderness in which the cast of Pulp Fiction are more at home - is startling because it is so unpredictable, a threat that materialises from effectively nowhere. The three deviants - Maynard (Duane Whitaker), Zed (Peter Greene) and the anonymous gimp (Stephen Hibbert) - have nothing to do with any of the other characters introduced up until now, or any stakes in the established arcs - like Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), the criminal romantics who open the film (but whose significance does not become apparent until the final scene), they are mere opportunists who become involved in the bigger picture because they spy an opening that suits their own independent agenda, the implication being that if you peel back the surface far enough in any given patch of Tarantino's Los Angeles, you'll uncover all manner of unexpected sleaze and vice. The sequence in the pawnshop also adds homophobia to the long list of possible charges that can be levelled at Tarantino, whether rightly or wrongly, by his detractors (as far as "22" goes, I'd like to think it a coincidence that the two featured queer characters - Smithers and, on the basis of this episode, Herman - end their stories sprawled out helplessly upon the ground).

In Wiggum's case, he ends up in a confrontation with Snake (who had appeared earlier in a skit starring Moe and Barney, although the only connection carried over into this story is Snake's Middlebury t-shirt, a nod to his comment about paying off his student debts), before the two of them find a common adversary in Herman, who gags and binds them in a manner so analogous to the equivalent sequence in Pulp Fiction that it is difficult to suppose his intentions are any different. As I've acknowledged, this seems a surprisingly dark turn for the character, even coming off of his previous prominent appearance, in "The Springfield Connection" of Season 6, which had him running a counterfeit jeans ring out of the Simpsons' garage, and thus already no stranger to villainy. Sadly, "22" would prove his last really significant role for some years; other than a bit-part in a segment of "Treehouse of Horror VIII", the upcoming seasons weren't going to see an awful lot of action from Herman. Regarding Herman, as I do, as one of the more interesting supporting characters introduced in the show's earliest days, I consider that a tremendous shame (among other things, he is one of the series' few disabled characters; he also had a unique dynamic going with Abe that I wish the writers weren't so quick to abandon), so I do take solace in the fact that he at least went out, for the time being, making an impression (an utterly nightmare-inducing one, but an impression nonetheless).

In The Simpsons' take on this most horrifying scenario, Zed's arrival is promised by Herman, but he never gets there. Instead, Herman inadvertently lets in Milhouse and his father Kirk Van Houten, who are desperately seeking a nearby bathroom where the former can relieve his overloaded bladder. It's here that the nicer, more helpful Herman that Pulido champions momentarily raises his head - he is sympathetic enough to the Van Houtens' plight to allow Milhouse to use his bathroom, something previously denied him by Comic Book Guy (it could be that, for all his implied depravity, Herman is simply a softer touch when it comes to children), thereby creating an intensely awkward moment where Kirk is forced to stand around and make small talk with Herman while his gagged and bound hostages make stifled pleas for help, until finally Herman tires of Kirk and attempts to take him captive too. Ironically, it's the one character to whom Herman has shown kindness that ends up thwarting him -  Milhouse accidentally knocks him unconscious with a mace (see what they did there, all ye Tarantino devotees? They had Milhouse get medieval on Herman's ass!). While Kirk, Milhouse and Snake linger around Herman's unresponsive body, uncertain what to do, Wiggum seizes the opportunity to leg it, albeit in a far less dignified fashion than Bruce Willis' character in the movie. But then the deprivation of dignity is as keeping with the spirit of Pulp Fiction as anything else. The characters there have a veneer of cool that made numerous admirers instantly want to emulate them, yet it's interesting just how often Tarantino is willing to degrade those same characters, and not always to the extreme extent suffered by Marsellus - sometimes, that degradation can stem from something as basic and human as acknowledging that the characters make regular bathroom visits, which in Vincent Vega's case seems to be the root cause of all of his problems. Jules, meanwhile, makes a habit of reciting a particular Biblical passage to his victims before dispatching them, giving him an air of righteous deadliness - yet even he has his moment where he is forced to pander pathetically to his friend Jimmie by praising the gourmet coffee he serves them while hiding out at his abode (a scene that perhaps takes on additional resonance when we consider that Jimmie is played by Tarantino himself, and therefore is the higher power that might choose to save or destroy him by throwing a random plot contrivance his way).

And the Steamed Hams skit? Be patient, I'm getting to it.

So much of Pulp Fiction deals with the creation of really big messes, usually by total accident, and having to clean up all the evidence before an authority figure gets wise. This is such a common hazard in the world of organised crime that one character, Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel), even specialises in restoring order after all unforeseen chaos has broken loose. In one of the stories ("Vincent Vega and Marseullus Wallace's Wife"), Vincent is tasked with taking Mia (Uma Thurman), the flirtatious, coke-snorting wife of his fearsome boss, to dinner at a 50s-themed restaurant; Vincent resists the temptation to sleep with Mia, speculating that Marsellus is deliberately testing his loyalties, but gets into hot water anyway when Mia snorts a packet of heroin uncovered from Vincent's clothing, believing it to be cocaine, and sends herself into a coma. Another story, "The Bonnie Situation", concerns the avoidance of the wrath of a very different authority figure - Vincent ends up accidentally killing an underling, Marvin (Phil LaMarr, the future voice of Hermes from Futurama), and he and Jules attempt to hide the evidence at the house of the aforementioned Jimmie, who fears that his wife Bonnie will divorce him if she returns home and learns of his involvement with gangsters. Meanwhile, the circumstances in "The Gold Watch" under which Butch runs into Marsellus (recycled from Marion Crane's attempted getaway in Psycho and recreated wholesale in "22") are nothing if not hilarious, and while the narrative ultimately dips into full-blown horror territory with the developments in the pawnshop, even those images have an eye-popping, cartoonish ridiculousness to them. So often, the world of Pulp Fiction resembles less that of a gritty crime thriller than episodes of a sitcom from an altogether more twisted universe (an interpretation I must credit to Dana Polan's 2000 book on the picture), with its inhabitants repeatedly getting themselves into all manner of far-out jams and doing everything in their power to avoid getting caught. The film's repeated evocation of sitcom convention displays a recognition of the sitcom's dual role as both comfort food and a spectacle of human folly at its most grotesque, a paradox Pulp Fiction seems intent on underlining through the sheer gruesomeness of the scenarios on offer. It is a paradox that The Simpsons likewise understands to a tee, and displays a particular awareness of throughout "22". Outside of the Wiggum narrative, none of the segments feature the kind of lurid brutality in which Tarantino specialises, but they are just as fixated on the underlying chaos and cruelty that drives the characters' universe, and the characters doing their darnedest to pretend otherwise. I've no doubt that one of the reasons for the Steamed Hams skit's remarkable memetic afterlife is that it is such a perfectly condensed pastiche of the sitcom form, complete with the standard sitcom cliche of the boss coming to dinner and the host having to flub his way through various upsets to keep whatever horrors are bubbling below the surface from coming to light. It's a great skit because it also understands what is specifically so effective about the dynamic between these two characters - as Bill Oakley puts it, Chalmers was the one character, before Frank Grimes, who was willing to question the insanity of the Simpsons universe; unlike Grimes, though, he never goes the full mile with his incredulity, appearing always to just about swallow whatever absurd explanation is offered him. Indeed, Skinner somehow manages to get through this calamity - Chalmers walks away concluding that, while Skinner is an odd fellow, he steams a good ham - but all at the expense of suffering an even greater one. Throughout his unforgettable luncheon, the situation backstage has swollen from one of mild embarrassment (a ruined roast) to something potentially life-threatening (a house fire), and the vignette ends with Skinner giving Chalmers the thumb-ups, while behind him we have the troubling sight of his house going up in flames, and the sounds of Agnes, presumably trapped upstairs, screaming for help.

It's not just the Steamed Hams skit that exhibits this fascination with the point at which an inconvenience crosses over into something altogether nastier. Many of the miniature-sitcoms in "22" rely on evoking an increasing sense of discomfort in the viewer, as if daring us to question at what point we should perhaps stop laughing at these appalling scenarios. Lisa getting gum in her hair is a mundane, albeit uncomfortable problem that takes an unsettling turn when Ned Flanders, of all characters, is seen whacking her hair with a hammer, in an arrangement that resembles not so much assistance as torture (although Marge instructing her daughter to take her mayonnaise-soaked head out into the sun was already kind of questionable). The conclusion to Smithers' skit is even more disturbing - sure, there is a lot of fun to be had in the antiquated slang Burns flings at him while getting him to pedal to the hospital, but we leave Smithers in a truly dire situation, barely conscious, murmuring for help and being mistaken for a vagrant by Dr Nick, who throws him spare change for the booze he erroneously believes he needs. And for all the comic quirkiness of Bumblebee Man's mishaps within the home, it goes in a harsh direction, with his wife divorcing him and his house collapsing, resulting in a punchline where Bumblebee Man acknowledges his own very real need for booze ("Donde esta mi tequila?"). Like Pulp Fiction, "22 Short Films About Springfield" is enamoured of the violent outpouring of chaos the town over, and with watching its denizens lose all control (the final example being a fourth wall-breaking Frink's loss of control against the looming fade-out threatening to plunge his prospective story into oblivion). Just as seeing these allegedly professional gangsters struggle to deal with the absurdities of their day-to-day existence (catching them with their pants down...in Vincent's case, quite literally) made them more accessible and fun, so too watching Springfield go to pieces, fragment by fragment, reminds us of why, over the past seven seasons, we'd built up so much investment in this array of cartoon freaks. They are, like all of us, so wretchedly vulnerable, and in the end what else are you gonna do but laugh?