The Springfield Files (aka The Earth Says Hello)

"The Springfield Files" (episode 3G01) is a classic example of how the reputation of The Simpsons' eighth season tends to waver among fans. It's a popular opinion that this season marked the end of the show's golden era, but just how close to the borderline between quality and debasement does it fall? Was it the last of the truly great seasons, or the point at which the series' standards started to noticeably slip? It's certainly fair to say that Season 8 had a high number of storylines that were dependent on some kind of pivotal gimmick, and of these gimmicks, "The Springfield Files" boasted the one that seemed most consciously designed for baiting media headlines. The episode involves Homer having an apparent encounter with an extra-terrestrial lifeform following a Friday night drinking session at Moe's. No one else in Springfield is inclined to take his story particularly seriously, but it does attract the attentions of FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who come all the way from Washington DC to investigate Homer's claims. When it debuted, on January 12th 1997, the notion of Homer getting to hang out with the two leads of The X-Files, the hit FOX series that pretty much defined the zeitgeist of the mid-1990s, was treated as an explosive deal. I remember "The Springfield Files" being wildly popular in its day. As far as I'm aware it still is - the scene where Homer spectacularly fails a polygraph test, just by purporting to understand the process, is frequently cited as an all-time favourite series moment among viewers. And according to the episode's Wikipedia page, it currently has the 11th highest rating for a Simpsons episode on the International Movie Database, at 9.0 (if IMDb ratings can be taken to mean anything in the age of review bombing). Among hardcore Simpsons nerds, however, "The Springfield Files" might just as readily be singled out as an early indicator of the show's impending decline. Zack Handlen does precisely this on The AV Club, stating that, "I was struck by how not all that different the episode is from what was to come...material which, while not always bad, didn’t build on anything before or after, and, at its worst, wasn’t even connected to the characters and the show itself." "The Springfield Files" is, if nothing else, an incredibly silly episode, perhaps the silliest The Simpsons had done up to this point. No question that belongs in Season 8 - there's a lot about it that will not necessarily be to all tastes, but it's brimming with those offbeat, experimental touches that make this era so fascinating for yours truly.

If we start by looking at the crossover hook itself, was there any precedent for this kind of thing? At least one - Jay Sherman had shown up to host the Springfield Film Festival and to implicitly plug his own animated sitcom, The Critic, a couple of years prior in "A Star Is Burns". That, though, was a clear-cut case of The Simpsons attempting to give a leg up to another series looking to boost its profile - to be popular by leeching off the popularity of others, as Patty and Selma so delicately put it within the episode itself. In this case, Mulder and Scully certainly didn't need a guest spot on The Simpsons to make themselves more visible to the masses. The X-Files was already a mighty cultural juggernaut; if anything, The Simpsons might be seen as riding on its coattails in an effort to prove that they were still relevant. (If you're wondering why Matt Groening was apparently okay with this arrangement, after making a public show of his opposition to "A Star Is Burns", then I suspect that might be your answer. The X-Files was a series to be seen with. The Critic had arrived at Fox in a precarious position, having already tanked on ABC, and Groening possibly figured that The Simpsons would do well to avoid the association.) At this point I should probably make the embarrassing confession that I've never actually watched an episode of The X-Files. Not properly, anyway. My brother was very into the show back in the day, and I would occasionally overhear snippets of dialogue while I was elsewhere in the room, playing Dangerous Creatures on mute on the family PC. I get the gist of the series, and who Mulder and Scully are, but I can't comment on how accurately The Simpsons represents their characters, or on how satisfying their involvement is for the devoted X-phile. For the purposes of this episode, however, I think that Reid Harrison's script does a fine job of giving them a clear and enjoyable dynamic, with as many stand-out gags built around their own philosophical differences as their mutual discordance with Homer (Mulder scoffing at Scully's suggestion that the FBI should be concerned with matters like drugs and illegal weapons when there are unsubstantiated alien sightings in the heartland of America, Scully rolling her eyes and vamoosing when Mulder starts going off on some drawn-out spiel about how The Truth Is Out There).

The most curious thing about Mulder and Scully's participation is that, despite being the big draw on which the entire episode hangs itself, they don't get to do a single thing that actually forwards the plot. To a point, I could buy that that's all part of the joke. That they get absolutely nowhere in uncovering the truth of Homer's alleged alien encounter and decide to bail out before we've even reached the third act (they reappear at the very end, in a perfunctory crowd scene cameo, but play no part in how the conflict is resolved). But then so much of the episode in general is like that - it takes a long time to get into Homer's alien story, the first act being comprised of a largely disconnected series of gags about what a typical Friday evening looks like for different Springfieldians. Then once Homer's seen the alien and it's established that nobody believes him, the entire middle act is just stalling for time until Homer and Bart obtain the video footage and we can finally get moving again. I'd go so far as to call "The Springfield Files" the least story-orientated installment of Season 8; it's definitely more focussed on its gags than on its narrative, which makes perfect sense when you take into account who produced it. Former showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss (creators of the aforementioned Jay Sherman) were working for Disney at the time, but they were still intermittently returning as guest producers on The Simpsons, and this one has their fingerprints all over it. To be honest, the shortcomings of "The Springfield Files" (the lack of plot momentum, the heavy reliance on desultory gags and non sequiturs, the glib wrap-up) are much the same as they'd always been whenever Jean and Reiss were at the helm, so I wonder if the accusations that the episode signifies the beginning of the decline are really the result of viewers being more receptive to such flaws at this point in the series' lifetime.

Admittedly, there are at least a couple of throwaway gags that would have likely been considered a bit much for The Simpsons back in Season 4. They might have fit more comfortably into The Critic, with its somewhat looser grip on reality; more than anything, though, they feel like antecedents to the kind of gags we would soon be seeing a whole lot more of in Family Guy - gags that are random, nonsensical and steeped in a deep love of popular culture. The first of these occurs when Mulder and Scully ask Homer to identify the alien he saw from a line-up of extra-terrestrial beings that includes the likes of Chewbacca, Gort and Marvin The Martian. Mulder and Scully being real people within the Simpsons universe is one thing - at least they're regular humans. But these guys? C'mon, that's maybe just a little too silly. It's a gag that also makes very little sense in the context of Mulder and Scully's arc; if the implication is that they're involved in some government conspiracy to keep the existence of these aliens under wraps...isn't that kind of at odds with what Mulder later says in his "The Truth Is Out There" speech? If he's met Marvin The Martian in the flesh, then doesn't he already have a definitive answer to the question he raises? You're not supposed to give it more than a moment's thought, I know. So we'll move right along to the second of those particularly out there gags, which may well be the episode's most baffling - the one involving the trio of talking frogs from that popular contemporary beer commercial. While Bart and Homer are camping in the woods, the Budweiser frogs show up, only to get eaten by an alligator who apparently works for Coors (that, or the writers are making some point about Coors being higher up in the beer food chain that Budweiser). On its own terms, it's a pretty amusing joke. But it's just so out of place with everything else going on around it. What do talking frogs who shill beer have to do with a story about an ostensible alien encounter? Unless of course the implication is that the Budweiser frogs themselves are aliens...which might actually explain a few things. It's also funny how accurately it foreshadowed the future trajectory of the actual campaign; in 1998, the frogs gained a reptilian nemesis (a chameleon rather than a gator) who was also out to kill them (not because he worked for a rival beer, but because he wanted to shill Budweiser in their place). Were you watching, Goodby, Silverstein and Partners?

And yet it's strange...if you took the frogs out of the picture, then it feels as though the episode would lose an essential part of its character. "The Springfield Files", more so than other episodes of its era, plays like an overview of contemporary zeitgeist as much as it does a Simpsons adventure. As the mid-90s started to fade and we were headed for whatever the late 90s had to offer, this one seemingly aspired to be a veritable time capsule of the various fixations that kept us occupied through the middle of the decade - so, The X-Files, the Budweiser frogs, FOX's blunder in broadcasting Alien Autopsy, the budgetary hubris of Waterworld and the downward trajectory of Kevin Costner's Hollywood career (his wilderness era wouldn't fully kick in until the disaster that was The Postman at the tail-end of 1997, but you can be sure that The Simpsons would be there to comment on that too). More than anything, though, I have to give "The Springfield Files" points for the fact that it's genuinely kind of weird and spooky, in ways that are unusual for a non-Halloween episode. Talking frogs who shill beer might not have anything obvious to do with Homer's alien encounter, but they do feed into the overall aura that there's something very off-kilter about the characters' world in general.

For starters, it has a bizarre opening, one that breaks the fourth wall and straight-up acknowledges the fictionality of what we're about to see. At this point in the series, it was rare to see this kind of framing device used outside of a Treehouse of Horror, or one of those special episodes hosted by Troy McClure. The events of "The Springfield Files" are set up as a story being presented by a third guest star, Leonard Nimoy (previously seen in the Season 4 episode "Marge vs The Monorail"), who prefaces it with this beautifully contradictory statement: "The following story of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies, and in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is no." Nimoy's presence is going to immediately put us in mind of In Search of..., the paranormal series he narrated throughout the late 70s/early 80s, and really, "Its all lies, BUT they're entertaining lies" is as wonderfully succinct a summary of that show's appeal as you're going to find (in all seriousness, I have an awful lot of affection for In Search of...). But I believe this was also a nod to something The X-Files did in their first episode, which opened with a title card claiming to have been "inspired by actual documented accounts." This eyebrow-raising caption was already a familiar narrative device to fans of the horror genre, having been used in The Last House on The Left (1972) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) (John Kenneth Muir has a collection of such title cards in this blog post), who thus should know to be wary of their authority. At the time "The Springfield Files" first aired, the Coen brothers' 1996 film Fargo had recently illustrated just how easy it was to preface your story with such a claim when it was all completely fabricated. In The X-Files' case, the claim of "actual documented accounts" is vague enough that it could mean anything, and the viewer is unlikely to enter in with the expectation of seeing a true story; the title card serves the purpose of more of a wink and a nod, encouraging the viewer to suspend their disbelief and to go along with its professed take on actuality, pondering where, exactly, truth and fiction might potentially be intersecting. Nimoy's disclaimer at the start of "The Springfield Files" is hilarious, in part, because it is so obviously redundant - of course we're not going to come to a Simpsons episode about Homer seeing an alien and meeting Mulder and Scully with the expectation that it has any basis in truth. It is a joke at the expense of the viewer's willingness to play along with such claims and our desire to believe that the events depicted could happen, even if we suspect deep down that what we're seeing is nothing more than some very entertaining lies. It is as Bart's chalkboard gag states during the episode's opening sequence: "The Truth Is Not Out There". Truth is not what we're looking for in entertainment, but escapism. (And just to make Nimoy's credibility even more ridiculous, his opening narration also evokes that of Jeron Criswell King at the beginning of Ed Wood's 1959 film Plan 9 From Outer Space, one of the most notoriously nonsensical pictures of all time.)

The single most unsettling thing to happen in "The Springfield Files" ironically has nothing to do with Homer and his alien, and no bearing on the internal narrative at all, in fact. We cut to a scene outside Moe's, where onscreen text obligingly fills us in on the contextual details. "Moe's Bar. 3:02pm. Temperature 72o." Then the typist apparently snaps and starts typing "All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy" over and over in the style of Jack Torrance (as portrayed by Jack Nicholson). We could, just as easily as with those Budweiser frogs, question what this random reference to The Shining is doing in the mix; Kubrick's film deals in all manner of weird and eerie occurrences, but the occasional far-out fan theory notwithstanding, there were no aliens involved (the script's prior Psycho reference, while just as gratuitous, feels slightly less random, Bernard Herrmann's strings having become our universal cultural signifier for when things are about to get seriously twisted). Again, though, the episode wouldn't have half as much personality without it. It's another fourth wall-breaking gag, one that makes us conscious of the individual behind the scenes whose job it is to include this dry factual information and which, unlike the scene with the Budweiser frogs, it comes with its own implicit narrative. Apparently they've just suffered a mental breakdown, possibly induced by the pedantic tedium of having to specify that it was 72o outside Moe's on that day, and if we make the connection to The Shining, and to the character trajectory of Jack Torrance, we can suppose that this typist isn't going to be much fun to be around. This might not mean anything for Homer and co, but it adds to the overall atmosphere of strangeness and uncertainty. It also seems noteworthy that in the scene it parodies, Jack's descent into madness is expressed through his inability to overcome his writer's block. His aspiration to be a novelist is driven by his desire for escapism and self-reinvention (he'd previously had alcohol for the former, but that's gone out the window); his failure to create (to play) instead leads to his entrapment in the endless cycle of violence that characterises the Overlook. This reference to stifled creativity could be interpreted as yet another nod to one of Season 8's favourite recurring themes - the production team's prevalent anxieties that The Simpsons might already have reached its creative peak. But I'm more inclined to connect it to the monotony experienced by the characters throughout the episode, foregrounding the need for escapism. The early, protracted sequence showing the various characters going about their individual business on a Friday sets up a theme of endless looping, be it the literal video loop that Homer wires up to the power plant's security monitor (inspired by a similar scene in The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down), or Milhouse's willingness to keep feeding an arcade machine 40 quarters just for the momentary buzz of getting to advance a sprite shaped like Kevin Costner by a single step. The Waterworld game might be a total rip-off, but what else is he going to be doing on a Friday night? Staying home and watching television isn't a more attractive option - Bart assures Lisa that she only needs to age a couple of years to see ABC's weekly T.G.I.F. Line-Up for the interminable banality that it is. Homer swaps his Duff for Red Tick Beer in an effort to add more variety to his Friday, but it draws him into the same cycle of drinking he always uses to stave off the prospect of having to return to his living room and actually spend some quality time with his family. Lisa argues that it is a common theme that people who claim to have had alien encounters typically have boring jobs, suggesting that tedium is one of the biggest factors in driving a professed connection with the paranormal. The truth may be out there, but it is precisely the truth that we are looking to get away from. The truth is vapid and unfulfilling, and it will completely consume us if, like our unfortunate typist, we gaze too long and hard into its monotonous abyss.

The twist here, however, is that this may not actually be the case. The truth, at least as it stands in Springfield, might be just as off-the-wall as anything our idle minds could concoct, albeit in ways that underscore the simple absurdities of the characters' lives. When the revelation regarding the true nature of Homer's extra-terrestrial encounter finally comes - the peace-loving "alien" is actually Mr Burns, roaming the woods on a painkiller-induced high - it seems both fitting in context, and in its own class of total ridiculousness. It's also tied to that overarching feeling of monotony, being a result of the standard procedure that Burns goes through every Friday. I wonder whether or not it's fair to suggest that the answer is still something of a cheat. On the one hand, the notion of someone in the dead of night mistaking the skeletal form of a delirious, radioactive Burns for an extra-terrestrial being doesn't seem at all far-fetched (not by this show's standards, anyway). On the other hand, it does come more-or-less out of nowhere. With hindsight, it's strange that we see Burns at the beginning of the episode, asking Smithers what he intends to do on a Friday, and the script doesn't take the opportunity to work in even an oblique clue as to his own routine. While it doesn't serve much of a direct narrative function, that drawn-out collection of Friday-themed sketches nevertheless manages to justify itself, in giving us a flavour of the parallel lives that are constantly unfolding in the town (not too unlike "22 Short Films About Springfield"), and the various oddities that accompany what constitutes routine for these folks. Dr Hibbert leaving his practice and accidentally abandoning Hans Moleman in the x-ray machine (possibly for the whole weekend) is something I could believe happens on most, if not every Friday in Springfield.

"The Springfield Files" is most in its element when it's exploring the thin balance between weirdness and banality that characterises life in this seemingly nondescript burg. In this regard, the episode fits in perfectly with another of Season 8's favourite recurring themes - what an inherently freaky and perturbing place Springfield must be to anyone who approaches the community from somewhere outside of the show's regular dynamics. Mulder and Scully can be viewed as a kind of precursor to the role that Frank Grimes would have a far more gruelling time playing later in the season, as can Sherry Bobbins of "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious". (This does not apply to Cecil Terwilliger, incidentally, who was no outsider. He was right at home in his brother's world.) While they get nowhere in uncovering the alien, the two agents become momentarily transfixed by Homer himself and what a disturbing specimen he is. ("His jiggling is almost hypnotic." "Yes, it's like a lava lamp.") Meanwhile, the visual of Moe having a live killer whale concealed in the backroom of his bar may be the episode's most patently ludicrous. But this too is just business as usual in Springfield - the seasoned Simpsons viewer will recognise this as a callback to a joke made three years prior, in "Cape Feare", where Moe was apparently involved in another underground operation in smuggling exotic wildlife, only to similarly bail out when he thought the law was catching up with him. In both cases, the character who causes Moe to panic (Lisa in "Cape Feare", Mulder here) actually has no knowledge of what he is doing, and his actions remain firmly on the sidelines of the plot. The pandas are immediately forgotten in "Cape Feare", whereas here Moe's whale provides a punchline for an additional gag - Mulder's final insistence that "The Truth Is Out There" is comically undercut by the sight of Moe and his two accomplices staggering into view, carrying the hulking orca, as Moe complains, "Who'd have thought a whale would be so heavy?" It is a wonderful moment, simultaneously bringing Mulder back down to Earth while emphasising the intrinsic absurdness of the world playing out right under his nose. The truth is out there alright, but it might not be as noble as the truth Mulder is seeking.

"The Springfield Files" is best consumed, as the title suggests, as an episode about Springfield as a character unto itself. As a Homer episode, it often feels like he's going through the motions of his own story. Compared to the episode that directly precedes it, "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer", it's less interested in functioning as a character study, and in exploring his personal alienation and confusion upon experiencing something he cannot explain. Nor is it particularly interested in exploring what it might mean for his family. The way each of them reacts to Homer's claim to have encountered alien life is rarely forced or out of character, but they do only get to contribute the bare minimum, with no particularly substantial arcs or dynamics exploration. The most we get in that department is a genuinely sweet moment where Bart, despite having teased Homer earlier, admits that he actually does believe him; he senses that his father is being entirely sincere in his testimony. His involvement doesn't amount to much more than having the foresight to bring a video camera to the woods, however. Lisa, who subscribes to Junior Skeptic Magazine, insists on there being a more rational explanation but, other than being the one to shine a literal light on the alien at the end, she doesn't get much of an arc out of this. Marge likewise refuses even to humor her husband on the matter - not because she necessarily requires a more rational answer, but because she finds the story so hard to believe coming from Homer. This particular detail feels as if it was at one point intended to be the emotional crux of the episode - Homer feeling especially despondent that Marge, of all people, won't stand by him - but it doesn't come across too strongly in the final product, seeing how Marge is so thoroughly sidelined for most of the narrative. Following on from "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer", that might even be for the best - we didn't need two stories in a row about Homer being upset because he and Marge weren't seeing eye to eye about some crazy experience he'd had. Which doesn't prevent "The Springfield Files" from falling back on it, rather cheekily, for some illusion of emotional closure. Glib resolutions are par for the course with Jean and Reiss, but if you pay attention to what Marge actually says to Homer at the end - "You said you'd bring them peace and love, and it looks like you did it! I'm proud of you, Homie!" - it really doesn't track with anything the script has been logically building toward. For one, Homer never said that he would bring the Springfieldians peace and love - that was all the claim of the disorientated Burns. Homer also doesn't take much of an active role in the resolution, beyond convincing the townspeople to gather in the woods on Friday night; surely the bulk of the credit, for bringing the actual "peace and love" (heavy quotation marks there), has to go to Dr Nick and his booster?

Still, we get the spectacle of the entire town singing along in unison to "Good Morning Starshine", a classic hippie anthem from the musical Hair (that Burns would even know the lyrics is amusing enough in itself), and that's got to be worth something (I'm going to assume that Jean and Reiss were going through an obsession with that musical at the time, since they also worked the title song into the other episode they produced for this season, "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious"). Is it a hokey way of rounding off our tale? Absolutely, but I could see that insincerity as being all part a of the package. Springfield as a whole is not a place that tends to naturally cultivate peace and love. It comes as no surprise when their knee-jerk reaction, on meeting the seemingly benevolent alien visitor, is to declare war on it and to want to break its legs. So when the "alien" is unmasked as one of their own, it seems fitting that they're left staring their own belligerent natures straight in the face - far from bringing them peace and love, Burns seems intent on invoking the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If Springfield is going to be gripped by a sensation of peace and love, however momentarily, then the only way it's going to happen is via good old-fashioned mob mentality - one of them starts singing and the others, as easily and as mindlessly placated as Burns with his painkillers, join in, because do any of them have anything better to be doing on a Friday?

As a side-note, my pettiest nitpick for this episode has to do with the scene where Homer claims that it's his birthday (something that has zero relevance outside of a single isolated gag), only to get upstaged by Santa's Little Helper, with whom he apparently has to share the date. Santa's Little Helper was an abandoned racing dog that Homer and Bart picked up directly off the street, so...how do the Simpsons even know the precise date on which he was born? I suppose it's possible that they have a designated day on which to celebrate it, but if so, then it does seem almost implausibly mean of the family to pick the day of Homer's actual birthday. It's a something of a contrived gag, but at least it doesn't contradict anything we already knew on Homer's end. I could be wrong about this, but I think that Homer was the only family member who, up until now, was never shown celebrating a birthday within the series (for the others, we have Marge - "Life on the Fast Lane", Lisa - "Stark Raving Dad", Bart - "Radio Bart", and Maggie - "Lady Bouvier's Lover").

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Classroom

I've tended to rate "Classroom" as one of the weaker entries in that early wave of "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" PIFs, chiefly because it's always struck me as the one that flirts the most uncomfortably with outright sentimentality. No matter how noble the message in question, when it's being repeatedly expounded by an entire sequence of forlorn schoolchildren, it's hard to shake the feeling that the film is maybe yanking a little too heavily on the heartstring factor. Really though, it's more that the multi-voice format used in "Classroom" (unlike others of its era, it is not a monologue, but a collection of snippets from various different monologues, pieced together to relate a complete narrative) causes it to feel less intimate and more overstated than its contemporaries. "Jenny" works as well as it does for the haunting portrait it creates of the central figure's isolation - for 30 seconds, we're plunged head-first into her world, sharing in her numbness and her disconnect from the activity around her, as she goes about a seemingly nondescript routine that involves having to cope with her daughter's hospitalisation and dull prospects of recovery. "Fireman's Story" has a punchy, genuinely startling performance from Ken Stott, in which he gets to run the gamut of emotions. "Classroom" deploys somewhat a different tactic, in attempting to represent the voice of a collective. Rather than hone in on one damaged individual, the idea was to create a sense of the impact of a drink driving accident upon a young community, as they grapple with the loss of one of their number. The intoxicated driver who hit and killed the absent Matthew is also responsible for shattering the innocence of the multitude of children who now must come to terms with this cruel turn of events. The result is solemn, but nowhere near as brutally as immersive as those aforementioned PIFs; it stakes the bulk of its emotional impact on the fact that its sombre observations are being delivered by children's voices, without attempting to get too up close and personal with any specific one of them.

Which is not to say that "Classroom" has nothing going for it. It manages to inject some teeth into the proceedings, thanks to that one child who makes the purpose of the PIF explicit: "It was the driver that did it. Been down the boozer, hadn't he?" There's a distinct air of jadedness to this kid's delivery, sounding like it comes less from a place of ruptured innocence that it does knowing disappointment. Embedded in there is a searing condemnation of an adult world that should absolutely know better but inevitably lets itself and its younger charges down. "Classroom" is also a fine enough example of the D&DWL campaign playing to its earlier strengths by purporting to show a picture of normalcy and subverting it. Like "Jenny", it deals with the semblance of routine, of characters attempting to carry on with the most banal of affairs when their whole universe has been irrevocably shattered. On a visual level, there's nothing overtly disturbing about the content of "Classroom", although even without the internal monologues we might still pick up that the atmosphere is all wrong. We see a teacher calling out her class register, as the specified children each gesture to confirm their presence, yet as we pan through the rows of children there is an uneasy stillness to their presentation. We would expect a class full of schoolkids to be way more fidgety, to be nudging and whispering among themselves, but the mood around here is one of deadening stiffness. The stinger is in the final reveal of that vacant desk, and the child to the side of it who identifies Matthew as his best friend (their particular closeness is already signalled in his particularly blank-eyed expression). The use of internal voices, pasted atop this sequence of emotional inertia, suggests that, while the loss of Matthew hangs heavily over all of these children, it is not something they are discussing openly; it becomes an unspoken yet omnipresent tension amid the expectation that life continue on in much the same way as it did before the accident happened. The futility of this expectation is underscored in the image of Matthew's empty chair, a constant and tangible reminder of his absence; meanwhile, the registration process, a seemingly nondescript formality, becomes its own grim exercise, in reinforcing the fact that, day after day, one of their number is not showing up.

Notably, we're told that their teacher was crying when she'd broke the news of Matthew's demise to his classmates, although there is no indication of her emotional turmoil in what we see in the sequence. We do not doubt that she's had to deal with grief of her own, but for the purposes of the PIF she becomes yet another manifestation of those arduous formalities attempting, in vain, to brush over the trauma of what has occurred. We sense that what these children are struggling to accommodate, in their fractured young psyches, pertains not just to the grotesque inconsiderateness of their elders and the cruelty of the universe, but to the broader indifference of both.

Tuesday (Somewhere, USA)

If I were to pick out my all-time favourite illustration from a children's picture book, then a top contender would absolutely be from David Wiesner's 1991 publication Tuesday. The story, told with minimal words, depicts the events of a seemingly nondescript night, on the titular day, when something truly inexplicable occurs - an army of frogs invades a suburban neighbourhood, somewhere in America, after mysteriously gaining the power of levitation (or, more accurately, the lily pads on which they're perched rise off the ground and into the night sky, and the frogs are only too eager to go along for the ride). The illustration in question shows a man in a bathrobe, seated at a kitchen table and dining on a pre-midnight sandwich, as the frogs float by his window and one of them directs a casual wave his way. The man's expression is in line with what you'd expect from someone who'd been enjoying a peaceful late night snack only to observe a bunch of frogs flying past their abode. Not only does it encapsulate, in one delightful image, so much of the heart and the character of Wiesner's story, but it also constitutes the most revealing intersection between the two ostensibly incompatible worlds integral to the narrative action. The book is concerned with the juxtaposition of the ordinary with the extraordinary, yet the familiar world of after dark suburbia is brimming with its own hidden depths and intrigue. There is something appealingly Edward Hopper-esque about the implicit narrative of the man in the kitchen; his vulnerability is presented comically, but there is a real vividness to his nocturnal solitude, as it rubs shoulders with the quirky fantasy world of the frogs happening right outside his window. Notably, this is the only point in the story in which the collision is mutually knowing, with the frog and human worlds directly contemplating one another. It also represents a rare point in the story in which we witness the frogs' invasion from the perspective of an insider gazing out at the bizarre occurrence; for the most part, Tuesday follows the frogs and their voyage of discovery, as they transform the suburban mundaneness into their vast personal playground. The only text accompanying the illustration, as with the rest of the story, is temporal, indicating that the scene in question takes place at 11:21pm. In one sense, this text is superfluous, as eagle-eyed viewers might pick up on the clock at the back of the kitchen, and take note of where its hands are pointing. But it does clue us in to the significance of the clock, as minor and distant a background detail as it might seem, and to its paramount role in dictating the outcome of the story. For Tuesday is a story as much about clocks as it is flying frogs and nocturnal suburbia. This much is hinted in the cover illustration, which centres upon the large clock within a church tower, with the frogs' participation teased only on the sidelines of the image. Throughout the book itself, clocks are featured regularly but always from a distance - the church tower clock is never more than a glowing speck on the horizon, clocks are just a part of the scenery inside the different houses the frogs drop in on, and we'll possibly notice that the police detective glimpsed toward the end is wearing a wristwatch. The passage of time is a subtle but omnipresent detail. The moral of the story might well be that time waits for no man or frog. Or pig, for that matter, but that particular chunk of the narrative is left predominantly to our imagination.

By the end of the story, the events that unfolded on the Tuesday in question, and on into the early hours of the following Wednesday, might appear to have been a great cosmic gag at the expense of man and frog alike. Come the break of dawn, and the frogs lose their powers as abruptly as they acquired them - their lily pads fall from the sky, giving the frogs no choice but to abandon them and return to their natural habitat. The respective punchlines, so far as both the frog and human narrative arcs go, make them both into the butt of the joke. In their final appearance, the frogs are drawn in a state of visible dissatisfaction - having tasted such exhilaration, the life of an ordinary pond-dweller can't help but seem incredibly dull. Meanwhile, in the light of day, the human world is seen grappling with the impossible task of attempting to make sense of this strange phenomenon. The man in the kitchen is being interviewed by a local news team, as a police detective studies one of the abandoned lily pads with a comical scrutiny. Their efforts are of course futile. The frogs and the suburbanites are both left rattled by the disturbance to their respective realities, yet at the end of the book Wiesner reveals that it wasn't really a disturbance at all, but merely time doing its typical thing.

Wiesner deliberately leaves much of the narrative detail unaccounted for - indeed, part of the charm of the story is in the lack of explicit explanation for why the frogs gained (and lost) their ability to fly. It would be tempting to see the frogs' invasion of the suburbs as amounting to a kind of divine retribution, recalling as it does the Biblical plague of Egypt, but for the fact that these frogs are obviously so benign. The author's answer is offered more implicitly, in the book's final pages, which take place, so the text specifies, on the following Tuesday at 7:58pm, and depict a drove of pigs hovering in the night sky. It would appear that, at dusk on Tuesday, a group of animals somewhere in the world (or maybe just the USA?) gaining the ability to fly is something that simply happens, as much a part of the flow of the time and the rhythms of nature as anything else around them. Mirroring the recurring motif of the clock is the full moon that features in the backdrop throughout the frogs' adventure, another perfect circle emphasising the cyclical nature of the narrative. In my opinion, Wiesner cheats somewhat in the final image - obviously, a week on and we wouldn't be looking at a full moon any more, but he gets around this by having the moon partially obscured behind the treetops, enabling him to maintain the appearance of a full circle and retain the motif. The choice of flying pigs for our closing image carries its own very obvious symbolism, by demonstrating that the impossible has been rendered possible. Wiesner continues his theme of flying animals, but he also clues us in that absolutely anything might happen on a Tuesday. The deluge of infinite possibilities are hinted in the prominent appearance of a weather vane at the end, with the different directions indicating the various ways in which this narrative could potentially go. And yet we already know, having observed how things played out on the previous Tuesday for the frogs, how the pigs' own story will ultimately end. Their own adventure, marvellous as it might be, is set against a ticking clock. At the crack of dawn, they will, presumably, be brought back down to earth. This is the final paradox with which Wiesner leaves us - so much possibility, and yet so much inevitability.

There are two different levels in which I'm most inclined to interpret the events Tuesday. One is that it involves a kind of dream narrative intersecting with reality (in that regard, it is not unlike Peter Collington's The Angel and The Soldier Boy), with the flying animals representing a kind of collective dream on the part of the suburban world as it lulls itself to sleep, one that must end when daylight creeps back in. The other is that the frogs' wild bender through the suburbs is to be read as a metaphor for one's uninhibited youth, or some other golden period of one's lifetime, when the world seems alive with surprises and possibilities. When it is over, the frogs are left mired in their nostalgia, with the pigs representing the incoming generation about to get their turn in the Tuesday spotlight. In both scenarios, our celebration of the fantasy on offer is tempered by our understanding that it is impermanent. Tuesday, and of the fleeting magic that it yields, must pass. Of course Tuesday will come again, but no Tuesday is ever exactly the same. Wiesner's book acknowledges the impassivity of time, but ultimately embraces the sequence of change that it brings.

Tuesday was a smashing success on release, achieving massive acclaim and winning the 1992 Caledcott Medal (an honor Wiesner would replicate with two subsequent publications, The Three Pigs in 2002 and Flotsam in 2007). The book's immense popularity and enduring images made it inevitable that somebody would eventually use it as the basis of an animated project; this happened in 2000, when it was adapted into a 13-minute short, directed by Geoff Dunbar and produced by Paul McCartney, who also composed the short's music. It was dedicated to the memory of Linda McCartney, who died during its production. The short was later compiled into the home media release Paul McCartney: The Music and Animation Collection, alongside Tropical Island Hum and Rupert & The Frog Song, two other animated projects created by the director/producer team of Dunbar and McCartney (the latter production of course provided the origin of the infamous "We All Stand Together"). Do you know what else these three shorts have in common? They ALL feature frog characters prominently. Two frog-related films might be a coincidence, but three...well, it definitely feels like the mark of a fetish on Dunbar/Macca's part.

For fans of Wiesner's book, Dunbar's film is as lovingly faithful to the source material as you could hope. The narrative trajectory has been followed accurately, while most of the key images from the book have been recreated wholesale, if expanded on to take advantage of the animated format. The film mines more sight gags out of the frogs' collision with a washing line, for example, and the scene with the frogs watching television in a sleeping woman's living room (as one of them operates the remote control with its tongue) also includes the frogs surfing through the channels and laughing at David Letterman. While Dunbar's film contains little dialogue, in keeping with the wordless nature of Wiesner's book, it deviates from its source slightly in incorporating some discernable speech, firstly in the form of background noise emitting from the suburbanites' TV and radios, and from the human figures themselves in their final scene (we hear a sample of what the man in the kitchen says to his interviewers). Dustin Hoffman also shows up to offer some closing narration in which he ruminates a little more overtly upon the themes that Wiesner only hinted at, so that we get this final takeaway in the voice of Mr Bergstrom:

"The events recorded here are verified by an undisclosed source to have happened somewhere, USA on Tuesday. All those in doubt are reminded that there is always another Tuesday."

An obvious question the story begs is why Tuesday in particular? I would presume that Wiesner chose it, out of all the available options, because it registers as an entirely arbitrary day of the week (unlike Friday, Saturday or Monday, which each convey their own immediately identifiable cultural niches), which pertains the pivotal mergence of the humdrum and the fantastical. There was, apparently, nothing overly special about the events of Tuesday that Wiesner focusses on - the book is, after all, named "Tuesday", not "This One Tuesday", indicating that it relates to something intrinsic to the character of Tuesday. But of course, those events mattered to those who experienced them. What the ending ultimately points to, implicitly in Wiesner's book and more explicitly in Dunbar's film, is the multitude of different stories out there waiting to be uncovered. By its nature, it prompts the reader (or viewer) to construct their own narratives about the goings-on of other Tuesdays in other locations, the smaller stories in the bigger picture. I see the man in the kitchen as as significant a figure in this process as any other, a lone individual stirring in a world as indifferent to his existence as the passage of time is to any of its subjects. Tuesday itself might come and go impassively, but by witnessing its effects on those who experience it, we become invested in their individual plights, and in their lack of control in the broader scheme. What Wiesner captures, as effectively as the quirky cuteness of his flying frogs, is the kind of lonely alienation that accompanies your late night sandwich cravings, while you anticipate nothing in particular manifesting in the dark void outside your window.

THINK! (Freedom! Freedom!)

1999 saw the genesis of "THINK!", the bold face of UK road safety designed to take us into the new millennium, by saying everything we needed to hear in just five letters (plus exclamation point). The elegance of the campaign (some would say the insipidity) was in the provision of an easy catch-all term under which you could plug all manner of traffic-related concerns, distilling them down to the most brutally basal of messages lurking at the heart of each and every PIF - namely, don't be a bonehead. Navigating your way along the road or across the road is definitely not something you can afford to do on autopilot. Come to your senses, dummy. Accidents will only stop happening when you people stop doing stupid things.

Despite the longevity of the slogan, it would be something of an understatement to say that the campaign's output has evoked a distinctly divisive reaction over the years. The "THINK!" logo may be one of the most universally dreaded in 21st century television, but the reasons for that dread vary from viewer to viewer. Some think they're a brilliantly hard-hitting range, filled with shocking twists and eye-grabbing tactics, while others think they're at best bewildering and at worst just kind of naff. Occasionally, they'll produce a film that everybody is united in assessing as just kind of naff ("Moment of Doubt" being the most notorious example). In my experience, the most outspoken "THINK!" detractors tend to be ardent connoisseurs of classic public information films; there seems to be a scarcity of "THINK!" enthusiasts among the same ranks who revere "Lonely Water" and "Joe and Petunia". I think I understand their sentiment. As PIFs go, "THINK!" just isn't very lovable. While certain individual films made under the banner are quite exemplary ("Slow Down", an early installment in the campaign charting the extended distance travelled by a speeding vehicle, with gut-wrenching consequences for the child unfortunate enough to be ducking out right in front of it, has all of the right ingredients for a memorable PIF), on the whole the campaign has a certain clinical coldness that leaves you feeling a bit distant. What the "THINK!" campaign really wants for, on the whole, is character. It lacks the bite (dare I say, the heart) of the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign proliferated throughout the preceding decade by Safety on The Move. Still, I wouldn't deny that it got off to an auspicious enough start with "Signs", the PIF tailor-made to parade the slogan and not much else - which doesn't prevent it from being one of the most authentically hair-raising entries in the campaign's spotty canon.

The obvious disadvantage of naming your campaign "THINK!", in big, abrasive capitals, is that a sizeable portion of your viewership is going to be immediately primed to start belting out a certain Aretha Franklin number. I REFUSE to believe that this wasn't brought up as a potential issue at the campaign's pitch meetings. "Signs" sets out to counteract that urge, by re-conditioning you to perceive the slogan as something intensely ominous. We're shown a series of road-related scenarios in which things clearly have the potential to get incredibly ugly. Children sprint out obliviously across the street in pursuit of stray footballs, a mobile phone lights up tantalisingly as a vehicle is in motion, a hulking cement truck galumphs through a nondescript pedestrian crossing, a couple of roads with signs indicating sharp bends ahead hang with an eerie, deserted stillness (note: there were at least three variations of this PIF, offering a slightly different combination of baleful scenarios; there were alternate versions of the children at play sequence, and the mobile phone wasn't always present). "Signs" doesn't make its message totally explicit, but most of the scenarios seem to relate implicitly to the dangers of speeding, with bits and pieces in there about not giving the road your full attention (hence that horrible intrusive phone) and, thanks to the audio, not wearing a seatbelt. Mostly, it's an all-purpose PIF about the various dangers one might encounter on roads of all stripes - highways, city roads, country roads, roads in the absolute middle of nowhere. It emphasises the inescapablity of that potential for disaster, wherever you are, and it does so by sustaining an aura of apprehension that it never needs to see out to its logical conclusion in order to make its point.

The twist in the case of "Signs" is that nothing bad actually does happen. Viewers sensitive to graphic or emotionally upsetting imagery have little to worry about here. For this is an exceedingly genteel safety film, at least if you focus purely on the visuals. The audio, in which first responders are heard relaying a sampling of unpleasant detail from a variety of accidents, tells a different story (in this regard, "Signs" appears to have taken inspiration from a then-recent campaign about drinking and driving, which purported to show you footage of an actual car wreck, as first responders attempted to make sense of how the accident played out). The effectiveness of the film hinges on the narrative mismatch between what we see and what we hear - the calm before the prospective storm, coupled with murmurs of its grisly aftermath. Each scenario, while devoid of visual shocks, is a haunted one, littered with foretokens of the accidents waiting all too eagerly to unfold. The insinuation of what could happen lingers in that omnipresent slogan, which manifests in the roadside signage; ostensibly a call to individual empowerment, and to our ability to navigate through each of these problems by simply using our noggins, it reads more as a signifier of the ever-present calamity that threatens to happen anywhere that unwariness and vulnerability have scope to intersect. The accidents in "Signs" might exist only in suggestion, but their juxtaposition with such brutal audio implies that they already have happened, that there is a sense of uneasy fate about them. We should think in such situations, we all know full well that we should think, and yet bad things end up happening anyway, because somehow or other we allow that train of thought to go astray.