Snoot and Muttly (Birds of A CGI Feather)

My recent piece on "Homer³" got me thinking about just how strange and downright disorientating a lot of those early experiments in computer generated animation were. A new horizon of boundless potential was opening up before our eyes, bringing with it a positively futuristic means of representing our hopes, dreams and passions, and the results often felt as though they had been plucked straight out of a surrealist nightmare - which could, of course, be an entirely beautiful thing in its own right. Take Adam Powers, The Juggler (1981), a nascent demonstration in motion capture techniques from Richard Taylor and Gary Demos. Motion capture has come a long way since Taylor and Demos' pioneering efforts, but it still holds up splendidly as a short animation by virtue of how mind-bogglingly weird it is. It's practically exercise in taking something recognisably human and having reality bend all around it. The future was exciting, but also alien and uncanny.

On the flipside of the equation was Snoot and Muttly (1984), one of the first films to really push the envelope in exploring the technology's potential to tell stories, with characters capable of conveying emotion to which viewers could relate. The story being told was, appropriately enough, about finding familiarity within the unfamiliar, by illustrating a moment in which connection is forged between two characters operating on ostensibly disparate dispositional wavelengths. Snoot and Muttly was created by Susan Van Baerle and Douglas Kingsbury of Ohio State University, with music by John Berton. It's a deceptively simple piece - two flightless birds, each the other's polar opposite, cross paths, and genial antics ensue - but incredibly busy in its ambitions. Characters who interacted with their environment and one another, who were equipped with their own individual characteristics and mannerisms, and were expressive enough to carry a visual narrative for three and a quarter minutes (in a way that clearly illustrated how said characters had grown and developed by the end) were weighty undertakings for CG animation at the time. There is no dialogue in Snoot and Muttly, but it seems obvious enough that "Snoot" refers to the red and orange bird - ie: the snooty one who walks with their head held high - while Muttly (as the name implies, the more humble of the two) is the blue and yellow one in search of a companion. The characters' silence also has them remain androgynous; I'd always assumed Snoot to be female because of that very feminine-looking hat the character dons at the end - but really, who knows? I notice that in this contemporary article from The Lantern, Van Bearle avoids assigning either bird a gender, so I will do the same here.

Snoot and Muttly was clearly conceived with an eye toward demonstrating how two computer-generated characters, similar in design, could exhibit distinct differences in personality, and for as basic as the animation might seem now, it gives you a strong impression of who each bird is. Muttly's initial reaction, on noticing Snoot, is to imitate their very uppity mode of walking, but even as Muttly copies Snoot, there is a definite jauntiness to their movements that makes plain their more jovial intentions. The world the birds inhabit likewise feels fresh and alive, combining the vibrancy of its tropical greenery with touches of idiosyncratic whimsy, such as the multi-coloured array of propeller-operated spheres that hover around like swarms of insects. The row of buildings (suggestive of a somewhat wider community of unseen characters), are simple in design, looking like a collection of boxes stacked atop one another, but have a whimsy of their own, with their rainbow colouration and doors and windows of assorted shapes - they look like like a surreal cross between a themed children's play area and a disco light box (as a bonus, there's a nice detail in which Snoot's house is seen to tilt shortly before they emerge at the front). It's a world that seems perfectly self-contained for the purposes of the story, while giving the sense that there might be a whole lot more that could still be explored. Playful, innocent discovery is the theme bolstered by Berton's twinkly synth score, which strikes me as notably similar to the soundtracks that would later accompany the earlier Rugrats adventures. Berton does a nice job of giving each of the characters their own musical identity; the notes echoing Snoot's prim movements feel harsher and more blaring, conveying their grandioseness and initial hostility, while Muttly's have more of a peppy energy, with just the right hint of solitary yearning, as they attempt to endear themselves to the distant Snoot.

The range of emotions the characters exhibit are beautifully realised, lucid enough to support the narrative progression, but subtle enough that it doesn't feel forced or overbearing. Snoot is at first surprised to find Muttly trailing behind them, before making it clear that they want nothing to do with them. The swarm of spheres then flutters overhead, and Snoot's expression softens; already you can see the flickers of curiosity in their eyes, cluing us in that there's a well of untapped larkiness within that starchy avian form that has yet to be embraced. Muttly, meanwhile, might be predominantly a free spirit, but they get to display their share of confusion and an inkling of hurt at Snoot's reluctance to join them in the chase. Van Bearle and Kingsbury manage to work in a bit of viewer misdirection at the end - Snoot retreats back into their funky abode and for a moment we think they've ditched Muttly, when in actuality they've gone in to get dressed for the occasion. The flowery pink hat they emerge wearing provides one of the film's quirkiest visual touches, allowing Snoot to undergo a visible change of heart while retaining their characteristically dapper disposition. The film ends with the two birds running after the spheres together, as the camera pans to an overhead view showing two spheres, one red, one yellow, appearing to bounce off one another's energy, a further symbol of the connection forged between our heroes. Actually, I'm surprised that they didn't make the second sphere blue, just to make the visual echo all the more obvious, but I suppose yellow works as Muttly's secondary colour (beside, none of the spheres in the swarm are blue; that particular variation is apparently non-existent around here).

Again, not a lot happens in terms of narrative, but Snoot and Muttly moves along with such an earnestly impassioned charm. There's something about these birds, and the guilelessness of their primitive yet sprightly world, that draws me in every time.

Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives: Dave

We're at the end of my coverage of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" campaign, and I've put off "Dave" (perhaps the most notorious of all the D&DWL films, sparring only with "Eyes") for last, simply because it is the one I find the most challenging to watch. It's an easy one to sit on for most of the year, since it is technically another Christmas edition (of sorts - there are seasonal cards and decorations in the backdrop, but it doesn't weigh too heavily on the narrative). I couldn't bring myself to face it last December, when I did "Christmas Pudding" and "Mark". If I let it drift another year I'll probably never touch it, so in the interests of completism I gotta act now. Let's just get this over with and move on.

"Dave" was one of the later additions to the D&DWL campaign, arriving circa 1994/1995, and focussing on a young man, played by Daniel Ryan, who made the fateful decision to have "just one more", even though he was driving, and apparently hit his head real hard in the resulting collision. As with "Mates", "Dave" was one of the D&DWL films that was on my radar at the time, chiefly because they went all-out with their promotional blitz. There was no escaping Dave. They slapped his expressionless face on billboards all up and down the UK, and it haunted me so. I was a kid, and absolutely not the target audience for this sort of thing, but by the mi-90s I had an awareness of what drink driving was and why it was such a bad idea. I was also old enough to understand what brain damage was, so I could look up at that billboard, with its minimal narrative detail, and appreciate exactly what it was getting at. It was all very grim and ruined multiple days out to various cities, but unbeknownst to me at the time, the billboards had spared me the most repellent details of their television counterpart. The TV ad itself I don't think I saw until my morbid curiosity for all films public and informative exploded in the mid-00s, and I started to snap up every online upload I could find. I scoured the D&DWL campaign in its entirety and, of the lot, "Dave" was the one I most wished that I could unsee.

"Dave" gets my vote for the most visually icky of the D&DWL films, even more so than "Eyes", albeit not because of its bodily horror elements. Like "Eyes", and "Kathy", it appreciates the potency of an excessively intimate close-up, and the nastiest element here isn't to do with the drink driving per se. As with most of the D&DWL films, "Dave" incorporates nothing of the accident itself, just the aftermath paired with a bitterly ironic echo accounting for how we led up to this point. A series of disembodied voices make it clear that Dave was the victim of peer pressure - he was conscious of the fact that he was driving and that he needed to depart soon for dinner with his mother, but his so-called friends mocked him for his caution ("Half's what girls drink!"), until eventually he caved. In the present, we can see that Dave ultimately made it for dinner at his mother's, but it's not exactly a sumptuous feast she's serving him.

Disgust is a funny emotion. It's amazing what images will push you to your limits and what won't. Earlier this autumn, I made it through that entire sequence in Saw X where Valentina has to stick a tube up her own femur and drain out her bone marrow without ever once averting my gaze. It had me squirming like crazy, sure, but I couldn't take my eyes off it. After all these years I still can't quite do "Dave". It frankly hurts me not to pull away during the close-up shots of the liquefied dinner his mother is spoon-feeding him. The mere sight of that stuff has my gag reflex reeling, eager to heave up something that would no doubt look quite similar. All very deliberate on the part of Safety on The Move, I'm sure, who want us to appreciate the total lack of relishing in Dave's post-crash existence, and to forge some kind of Pavlovian association between the nauseous images on display and the toxicity of the overheard discussion. It was a fairly unusual installment of D&DWL, where it was rare enough for the drink driver to be given corporeality of any kind, let alone be represented as the victim of the scenario. Its implicit concerns are very similar to those conveyed in "Mates", where the ostensible camaraderie between young drinkers was exposed as highly treacherous. Compared to "Pier", in which the wheelchair-bound protagonist was well-supported by his mates, Dave's friends are conspicuously absent in the present; his mother, whose nurturing relationship with Dave was treated as a subject of mockery among his fellow drinkers, is the only one who's clearly there for him, with his now total dependency on her being played up as a kind of backhanded consequence for his embracing of his mates over her. Like the unseen protagonist of "Mates", Dave's communication is restricted to a monotonous breathing, heard at the film's climax right before his mother produces the sardonic punchline, "Come on Dave, just one more." His existence now is a matter of mere survival, with sustenance that keeps him going, but offers no delectation; such is the price he's paid for his single moment of indulgence.

THINK! include "Dave" in their official website's campaign timeline (although it should be noted that THINK! weren't established until the new millennium and thus didn't make this PIF - D&DWL was way too cool to have been the work THINK!, for serious), claiming that the ad was controversial, and was taken off the air when enough viewers registered their distaste for it. This is, currently, my only source for that particular tidbit and while it's all very interesting, THINK!, I do need more information. What was the nature of the controversy? I'm not sure if this is what people back in 1995 would have objected to, but I could certainly see the tactics in "Dave" being considered problematic now - it has the same issue as quite a few of the D&DWL films, including "Pier", "Mirror" and, to a more muted degree, "Jenny". If you're going to focus on the possibility of incurring life-changing injuries as a deterrent (with the insinuation that this is a more nightmarish outcome then actually being killed in a crash), then the onus is on you to tread carefully. At what point do you slip past the line between making a powerful statement about human fragility and objectifying disability as grotesque, stigmatising and invalidating? For all of its emotional potency, it's hard to deny that "Dave" is reliant on shock value regarding the details of Dave's living with disability. Unlike the protagonists of "Pier" and "Mirror", he isn't in a position to be telling his own story, with the viewer being invited to gawk at his dependency and appreciate that they're not him. Obviously that's not great, but the billboard side of the campaign managed to be even more horrifically on the nose about it - one of the accompanying slogans was "How would you like to do nothing for the rest of your life?" And I accused "Mirror" of being kind of tone-deaf.

Anyway, it's been masochistic. I now require another long-running series of public information films to go through and dissect one by one in similar nauseating detail. Except, I don't think there are many that offer quite the same rich variety of mind-bending horrors as "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives". It truly was a remarkable campaign. What are my options? I suppose there are a whole bunch of THINK! ads on a broad range of road safety issues I could look at, but I'm not quite that stuck for new content just yet. "Fire Kills", then? Bloody hell, I'm not that much of a masochist.

A Milhouse Divided (aka With Apologies To Deacon Blue)

The first thing I want to highlight about "A Milhouse Divided" (episode 4F04), which debuted December 1st 1996, is an early moment where the Simpsons visit a kitchenware store with the obliviousness (or perhaps the audacity) to operate under the tantalising moniker of Stoner's Pot Palace. Leaving the store as the Simpsons enter is Otto, who is clearly not a satisfied customer. He glances up peevishly at the storefront and mutters, "Man, that is flagrant false advertising!" I'm flagging this up not merely because it's a hilarious gag in itself, but because I frankly feel the same way about this episode's title. I remember looking it up in my TV guide shortly before catching it and thinking, "Cool, we're getting a Milhouse story!" It seemed reasonable to assume that Milhouse himself would be front and center; when I clocked that it was about his parents divorcing, I figured it would deal with his divided loyalties to them, or something. It's a case of cute pun, deceptive title. Because actually, Milhouse is barely in this one at all. Despite Marge's observation that Milhouse is the real victim of his parents' acrimonious split, the episode brushes over him very quickly - there are are two small scenes covering how he's coping amid the emotional fall-out, and by the third act, when things have developed into the standard Homer and Marge show, Milhouse is all but forgotten. We get no indication if he's still mired in stage 4 (Anger), or if he's worked his way onto stage 5 (Self-Pity...or maybe Bargaining).

This seems to have been a matter of contention in the writing room, judging by the DVD commentary. At one point, showrunner Bill Oakley asks those present if they still feel that switching focus to Marge and Homer was the right thing to do, or if the story might have worked had they stuck with the Van Houtens, as does seem to have been the original intention. Co-showrunner Josh Weinstein admits that he's "gone back and forth over the years" on this. He feels that the episode ultimately needed to relate back to the Simpsons in some way, and that the story they came up with for Marge and Homer does work, but he's also very conscious of the plot opportunities that were not explored, acknowledging that an arc where Bart and Lisa supported Milhouse in seeing the light at the end of the tunnel might have been an equally valid way of developing the scenario. Writer Steve Tompkins offers his two cents; he indicates that there was some sentiment at the time that tertiary characters like the Van Houtens were not strong enough to hold an audience's interest on their own, although he believes that by planting them in such a dramatic situation, they did make them sufficiently compelling. He observes that the route they went was "a little familiar", which I think is the most brutally honest assessment of the lot - using the Van Houtens' predicament as a springboard for anxieties that Homer and Marge might be headed in the same direction does strike me as the most predictable of all their narrative options. By now, we'd had a number of episodes dealing with the questionable state of Homer and Marge's union (although to be fair, not for a while - at the time, the most recent qualifying episode was "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" of Season 5), and I wouldn't say that "A Milhouse Divided" accomplishes anything radically different in that regard. Oakley suggests that if they had stayed with the Van Houtens it would have been "masturbatory", then wonders if he's allowed to say that word on a Simpsons commentary. It is a strong word, and I had to think about what he meant by it. I suppose that it would have been excessive to have devoted so much time to a couple they'd never intended to redeem. For, despite the wavering feeling on where they should have gone with it, the episode was conceived with a definitive punchline in mind. Weinstein is very clear that they wanted to do a show in a which a couple divorced and stayed divorced at the end, as a parody of "old sitcom conventions where...it looks like the main characters are gonna get divorced, and then by the end of the episode they're gonna get back together" (as had happened with Homer and Marge on at least three prior occasions, by my count).

Despite my misgivings on that particular point (by now, you know my feelings on Homer and Marge and their marriage's vexatious plot armor), I do really like "A Milhouse Divided", and I'll hold it up as another example of why Season 8 represented such a gutsy and ambitious time in the series' history. I tend to think of this one as the darker, bitterer cousin to "Grade School Confidential", which occurs at the opposite end of the season and deals with love's optimistic beginnings. Like "Grade School Confidential", it shows a willingness to delve into a sensitive premise with a maturity and a flair for the dramatic that harks back to the more grounded approach of the first three seasons. The characters feel real and vulnerable, their actions have weight and gravitas, and the decisions that they make reap genuine consequences - so much so that both episodes close by doing the unthinkable and allowing their developments to stick. For better or for worse, things can't always go back to the way they were just because our twenty-two minutes are up. Was there any particular reason why the Van Houtens were singled out as the couple at the end of their tether? Apparently it was inspired by a small moment from the previous season's "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", where Milhouse was implied to be harbouring a startling deluge of unexpressed anger at his parents. Maybe the Van Houtens were picked on because there is something inherently unsettling about their union, looking as they each do like the other's gender-swapped doppelganger (there was a popular fan theory making the rounds that they were brother and sister). On the commentary, it's suggested that they were also chosen because they were the most developed of the parents next to the Lovejoys, although it seems imperative that they were still relative unknowns enough for this whole other side to their domestic life to be suddenly revealed and feel entirely plausible. Their dark horse status is explicitly evoked in the episode itself, when Luann urges Marge to forget everything she thought she knew about Luann Van Houten, and Marge can only murmur, "Actually Luann, I don't really know anything about you." Pointed, although I would argue that Luann had probably had more of a chance to shine by now than Kirk - there was that deliciously awkward scene in "Marge Be Not Proud" where she and Bart attempt (and fail) to fill a few of the respective emotional voids in their lives by scraping a bit of stilted companionship from one another. Did we know anything much about Kirk before this episode, other than that he was allegedly a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory?

The first act of "A Milhouse Divided" is undoubtedly the strongest, because it's here that the episode is at its most raw and painfully honest. It all begins with Marge looking to host a dinner party since she's hungry for a little adult conversation, only to discover that there are some adult conversations to which you really don't want to be privy. The Van Houtens show up in an absolute funk with one another and each insist on being really unpleasant about the other's shortcomings. Things come to a head during a game of Pictionary, where, in the cruellest of cosmic twists, Kirk is assigned with creating a visual representation for the word "dignity". Dignity is the one thing that is sorely lacking in Kirk and Luann's present arrangement and that each sees themselves as being denied by the other, although at this point it becomes all-too clear which of them is justified in their resentment and which is just being a jerk. Throughout the dinner, both parties were pretty much evenly matched in their non-stop viciousness, but here it gets increasingly difficult to side with Kirk. He's so outrageously churlish over Luann's inability to make sense of his ridiculous doodle ("Do you want me to show this to the cat and have the cat tell you what it is? Cos the cat's gonna get it!"). He's also very rude to Reverend Lovejoy, who makes a perfectly genial attempt to diffuse the situation by reminding Kirk that it's only a game (this is a curiously punishing evening for Lovejoy; not only does Kirk insult him, it also comes to light that Luann has been stealing clothes from his church's donation vent). But then Lovejoy is wrong on that point - clearly, there is so much more at stake for Kirk and Luann than simply losing a silly party game to Ned and Maude. Kirk is a man who neither exudes dignity nor delights in bestowing it on others - his end goal is not to have himself look better, but to drag Luann down with him. By proving that she is as out of touch with the entire notion of dignity as he, he gets to mark her out as his equal in degradation. Luann, meanwhile, might be stuck in the gutter with Kirk, but her gaze is very much directed at the stars. She still has some fire and spunk left in her, and her time with Kirk has not entirely crushed her willingness to expect better out of life. When Kirk challenges her to create an apter signifier of the word dignity, she stands up and produces a drawing that has the others in awe and is declared by Dr Hibbert to be "worthy of Webster's". (Kirk, naturally, is so churlish that he denies the viewer to opportunity to even see her drawing and form their own opinions.)

The Pictionary sequence constitutes the perfect balancing act between humor and squeamishness, the sheer absurdity of what the characters are squabbling about pitted against the unbridled acidity billowing its way to the surface. Much of it is hilarious, but on the whole it's not an easy sequence to watch. You feel for Marge, who'd worked so hard to make the evening perfect, much as you feel the awkwardness of the other guests who have to sit there and bear witness to this debacle (for me, the unsung MVPs of the episode are Ned and Maude, who beautifully capture the anguish of the moment by staying huddled together on the sidelines, saying nothing but blatantly wishing they were a million miles away). Finally, Marge makes a last ditch attempt to salvage the evening by summoning Lisa to the room to perform "You're A Grand Old Flag", but the appearance of a singing child only seems to incense Kirk further - apparently he's well familiar with this particular social tactic. "Oh great, you got the kid singin', I hope you're happy now!" "I am not happy, and I haven't been happy for a long time," Luann retorts, with Maggie Roswell absolutely slaying it. She pauses, as if surprised by what she's about to say next, but has it out: "I want a divorce!" For just a moment, Kirk doesn't have a snide comeback.  It should be noted that, for as ugly as their Pictionary blow-up gets, it could have been uglier still. A few years ago, Weinstein shared an earlier draft of the scene on his Twitter account, and if I recall correctly, it was heavily implied that a) Kirk was an arsonist who had set the cracker factory ablaze and b) he had killed Luann's father in the process. I'm not at all surprised that they toned that down for the final version. Kirk is not a sympathetic character by any stretch, but there's no need to make him totally despicable. If it were the case, then Luann should have run, not walked from him a long time ago.

Despite Kirk's insistence that he gave up dignity when he married Luann, the aftermath makes it plain that Luann was actually the single factor keeping his debased head above water. With her gone his life plummets to unforeseen levels of degradation - he loses his job at the factory, is reduced to sleeping in a bed shaped like a race car (which is still a step up from where Kearney's son reportedly sleeps), and gets it into his head that he make a fresh start as a singer on adult contemporary radio, only to be scammed by the station temp who'd promised to help with launching his career. By contrast, Luann absolutely relishes the life of the divorcee, reclaiming her self-respect and bagging a macho new boyfriend in the form of Chase (better known to Bart as Pyro from American Gladiators). The best Kirk gets from the deal is a neighbor named Jerry, who is a major player down at the sewing store.

As fascinating as the Van Houtens' drama is, its ultimate purpose is to hold up an uneasy mirror to the possible state of affairs within Camp Simpson, and it's here that "A Milhouse Divided" could be accused of playing things a trifle safe. As Tompkins notes, the final conflict is a familiar one, with a number of story beats that feel like retreads of ground already covered in previous Homer/Marge episodes. The episode most obviously recalled, at least for the first act, is "The War of The Simpsons", where Marge was also naive enough to believe that she could host a sophisticated party for adults without suffering some form of stomach-churning social horror (to be fair to Marge, and to Homer, it wasn't their fault that the Van Houtens couldn't keep their two-way disdain in check for an evening - if they'd declined their invitation then all signs point to this being a wonderful dinner party, North Korean fortune cookies notwithstanding). Some moments seem reminiscent of "Secrets of a Successful Marriage", notably Homer struggling to take care of himself in Marge's absence (to the point that he can't locate the hot dog buns in the cabinet) and turning to his 8-year-old daughter for marital guidance, with Lisa declining to give him a straightforward answer in either case. There are also shades of "Marge on The Lam", with Homer's failure to accompany Marge to a social event being the catalyst that has him fretting about what he assumes to be Marge's agenda, and "Homer's Night Out", with its leery gazings into the seediness of single living. Finally, the issue of parental overcompensation rears its head, as it did in "Life on The Fast Lane", and if you squint you can just make out the edges of an excised subplot where Bart was yearning for Homer and Marge to separate because he envied how Milhouse seemed to be profiting from his parents' divorce. You'll find quite a lot from this subplot in the deleted scenes feature on the Season 8 DVD box set, and it is a testament to just how many narrative threads the writers were evidently attempting to juggle at once with this premise. The scrapped scenes account somewhat for the episode's curiously truncated interest in Milhouse, but as a compliment to the main Homer conflict I'm not convinced it would have added anything particularly fresh or insightful. Mostly, it feels redundant after Bart's small but telling arc in "Life on The Fast Lane", where he professed indifference to his parents' marital crisis, if it meant he was making out like a bandit, only to realise that it wasn't worth it when he caught a glimpse of the emotional turmoil it was entailing. "A Milhouse Divided" still captures something of Bart's growing fascination with Milhouse's new lifestyle, but has it culminate with a scene where he whacks an suspecting Homer across the back with a chair, providing punchline enough and, a little later on down the line, the basis for a popular internet meme.

The parental overcompensation scene that does survive involves Milhouse driving a toy car recklessly around the living room and breaking a lamp; not only does Luann decline to discipline him, she seems reluctant to even challenge him, sheepishly suggesting that he might not want to drive his car inside the house. It's a small moment, but a revealing one, being as far as the episode ever goes in exploring Milhouse's state of mind in the wake of his parents' divorce; buried beneath his seemingly free-spirited rough-housing is a torrent of messy emotion that Bart, lingering silently in the backdrop, is not attuned to. It's also our only inkling as to any self-doubt on Luann's part; despite her outward display of revitalised prosperity after leaving Kirk, there is a part of her that clearly feels intensely guilty for what it might be doing to Milhouse. It goes to show how much narrative potential was left untapped. "A Milhouse Divided" is, on the one level, a frustrating episode, acknowledging that there are other people in the world besides the Simpsons and that they have lives and dilemmas of their own, but finally regulating that acknowledgement to the backdrop, so that you have to strain your neck to see what's going on with it. The strategy of switching to Homer and Marge's perceived crisis, as a distraction from the Van Houtens' problems, might come off as glib, since it downplays their story and excuses the episode from having to deal in-depth with the issues it raises. Alternatively, the refusal to offer any kind of easy answer (or an answer at all) to Milhouse's troubles could be seen as a more honest approach, in suggesting that sometimes there isn't a solution, and that time and space are the only things that can potentially heal such wounds. All the same, it bothers me that we don't get any further check-in with how Milhouse is coping. He isn't completely overlooked in the third act, since he attends Marge and Homer's second wedding, but we don't hear a peep from him. Maybe Tompkins and co felt too much guilt of their own, for the fact that his parents' acrimony ends up amounting to such a knowingly mean-spirited punchline, and desired to leave Milhouse out of the final arrangement.

A Homer and Marge episode is what we got, and to give due credit to "A Milhouse Divided", it is able to differentiate itself from those aforementioned examples by virtue of the fact that the crisis here is so patently one-sided. It's not one-sided in the sense of "The Last Temptation of Homer", where Homer was in on something that Marge wasn't. It's also not quite the same situation as in "Marge on The Lam", where Homer's assumptions about Marge's intentions were blatantly not reflected in the developments we were seeing play out. For Homer, the penny simply drops that the way he's treating Marge might not be altogether dissimilar from the way Kirk professed to have treated Luann, and his imagination runs away with him from there. Lisa raises the question that should be obvious to any viewer who's already sat through enough of these Homer/Marge crises to know the drill: "You've done a lot of crazy stuff over the years and she stood by you. Why would she leave you now?" Why indeed? Unlike "The War of The Simpsons" or "Life on The Fast Lane", the perceived crisis isn't preceded by any egregiously bad behaviour on Homer's part, nor does Marge have any single moment of outwardly expressed anger. But are any of those things strictly necessary for Marge to suddenly realise that she's had enough? What gives the final conflict of "A Milhouse Divided" teeth is that, while we suspect that the problem probably is all in Homer's paranoid noggin, it leaves open the possibility, ever so marginally, that it isn't. We're given no actual evidence to indicate that Marge is considering divorcing Homer...but at the same time, we aren't given the means to completely rule it out either. For much of the episode we don't actually know what Marge is thinking, and that is a little disconcerting. The note she writes for Homer, and her gesture of leaving the hot dogs thawing in the sink do come off as passive-aggressive, but maybe it just feels that way following on directly from Kirk's sorry tale. "A Milhouse Divided" toys with the idea that a marital break-up needn't be the result of a traumatic incident that pushes you noisily past the point of no return - sometimes it can be as simple as a couple drifting in different directions over a sustained period of time. Kirk admits to Homer that the warning signs were there, if only he'd cared to see them. The tone for this is set early on in the narrative, when Marge expresses some muted dissatisfaction with how her married life turned out. She gets no sympathetic or even halfway sensible response from Homer - he admits that married life didn't live up to his expectations either, but only because he'd envisioned it being more like Scooby Doo. (You know who really loved that line back in the day? HMV. I seem to recall it adorning the walls of multiple stores for a stretch in the 2000s, so that whenever you rode their escalators, you had it hanging above you in oppressive lettering. Clearly someone at their head office deemed there to be some kind of grand, poetic truth to Homer's total non-sequitur.)

I'll also credit "A Milhouse Divided" for doing something unusual, and building directly on the established continuity of the Simpsons' backstory - Homer has a flashback that incorporates a scene from Season 3's "I Married Marge", where he and Marge (the latter heavily pregnant with Bart) were depicted giving their wedding vows at a sleazy Vegas chapel. Outside of clip shows and the openings to Sideshow Bob encounters, it was rare for the series to directly recycle past footage in this manner. I bring this up because even in the early days, The Simpsons wasn't great at adhering to its own internal continuity, and the circumstances surrounding Homer and Marge's wedding had long been a particular wavering point. Case in point: "I Married Marge" was itself a contradiction of what we'd heard in "The War of The Simpsons", where it was implied that Homer and Marge's wedding was a reasonably extravagant affair. I think it shows extra care on Tompkins' part that he wanted to connect his conflict back to a long-standing feature of Homer's relationship - namely, his inability to give Marge a taste of anything special. Naturally, there is some devious retconning going on here - in "I Married Marge", there was no hint whatsoever that Marge was disappointed with how the ceremony turned out. There, her exact words were "I'd be lying if I said this was how I pictured my wedding day, but you are how I pictured my husband...you may not look like Ted Bessell but you're just as nice." Here, we see an epilogue to their wedding, when Homer took Marge to a truck stop for a cheesy cake in the shape of a whale, in lieu of a proper reception, and Marge indicates that, actually, the day fell well short of how she'd envisioned it - sure, they couldn't afford anything fancy, but she was hoping that Homer would at least have the initiative to get some of their friends together for a surprise party. With hindsight, it does colour the events of "I Married Marge" in a decidedly more sour light, if this was how Marge really felt about things, but I had to remind myself that in both cases these are stories Homer is telling to his offspring without Marge present - they reflect his perspective, and from disparate frames of mind. "I Married Marge" shows him relating the tale from the presumption that everything worked out a-okay, while "A Milhouse Divided" has him going back and re-examining the memory with fresh eyes, wondering if maybe there was something there that he'd always glossed over. This kind of retroactive plundering is always dicey, but it's an interesting avenue to go down and Tompkins handles it with grace.

Eventually, Homer decides that the only way he can make good is to give Marge the ornate wedding she deserved from the beginning. He surprises Marge by assembling a bunch of friends and relations in the family living room and inviting her to marry him for a second time. As a bonus, she gets to have the genteel party she desperately wanted at the start of the episode but the universe denied her. Marge seems touched by the gesture but asserts that she and Homer don't need to get married again to demonstrate their love for one another. Homer reveals that actually they do - he went to the marriage bureau and had them divorced earlier that day. This is his way of acknowledging that their union has, to date, been crummy, and he'd like to wipe the slate clean and start anew. In theory it's a nice enough sentiment...and yet I'd argue that Marge would have valid reason for refusing to go along with it, on the grounds that that is absolutely NOT something you'd do without your spouse's consent. But then I question what kind of marriage bureau would have allowed it in the first place. Springfield is screwy, I tell you.

To no one's surprise, things work out well for Homer and Marge, but what of the couple whose domestic woes started this entire chaotic affair? The spotlight swings back to the Van Houtens for the episode's coda, and finally we get to see where its real interests lay all along. Kirk seizes the opportunity to leech off of the goodwill of the evening by performing his would-be chart hit "Can I Borrow A Feeling?" to a nonplussed Luann and asking if she'd consider remarrying him. On a lesser sitcom Kirk's ridiculous gesture might have paid off. Here, Luann vehemently refuses, repulsed that Kirk would even have the gall to ask. I'll admit, this caught me off guard the first time I saw it. Kirk's tuneless crooning and hilariously inept lyrics ("jar of love" indeed) are so on the nose that initially it's hard not to read his overture as one of genuine naked honesty. At the same time, the guy just can't stop with the unbecoming self-debasement. Can I borrow a feeling? What does that even mean? Can't you own your own feelings, man?

The ending of "A Milhouse Divided" is (appropriately enough) a divisive one. Some viewers deem it awfully unsporting of the script to tease us into thinking that Kirk and Luann might have an eleventh-hour make-up and feel that it ends on such an evil little downer, others admire it for sticking to its guns and allowing there to be longer-term consequences. By the black-out you'll probably end up feeling some pity (if not exactly sympathy) for Kirk, now that they've insisted on degrading him to the umpteenth degree. On being rejected by Luann, his only recourse is to implore feebly if he can at least have his shirts back (the same shirts that Luann set fire to earlier? Yeah, lots of luck), before being ejected from the party by Chase. Even his vow that the party-goers haven't seen the last of him is immediately undercut by his awkwardly-stammered addition of "Probably." It's a sardonic outro, testing our expectations for warmth and familiarity against our aversion to phoniness wherever we see it. Ultimately, you've got to ask yourself if you'd have really been satisfied with an ending where Kirk and Luann are suddenly all smiles and rainbows after all of the grief they put one another (and everyone around them) through in the opening act. By transmuting them into the darker, gnarlier shadows of Homer and Marge, the episode gets to do with the Van Houtens what the series would never in a million years have the stomach to do with Homer and Marge themselves - give a massive FU to pat endings everywhere. Sometimes things get so out of whack that not even the status quo has the authority to drag them back to how they were (well, at least not until Al Jean's back in town). Besides, as Helen Lovejoy might say, think of the children. "A Milhouse Divided" is significantly less interested than "Life on The Fast Lane" in exploring how children process this kind of upheaval (despite it being advertised right there in the title), but children do watch this show, and I think it would be kind of unfair to give them the impression that a couple who'd split so acrimoniously could be reconciled that easily, or at all. Better to look to what Mrs Doubtfire said, about how so long as there is love, those are the ties that bind. Except there isn't really a whole lot of love here, is there? Just resentment, social cruelty and a child who gets completely buried underneath those messy adult emotions. Such is the lot of the tertiary character - you've typically got to settle for working this shit out off-screen.

Anyway, I know (somewhat) what The Simpsons has against Arby's (not that I've ever set foot in one of their restaurants personally), but an evening with Philip Glass? Gimme your tickets, I'll go.

The Last Broadcast (aka If You Go Down In The Woods Today...)

The archetypal write-up on The Last Broadcast, the 1998 pseudo-documentary from Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, will tell you that this is an intriguing and well-crafted piece of horror cinema right up until the closing few minutes, at which point the entire thing suddenly and irrevocably goes to shit, with a galling twist ending that Avalos and Weiler seem to have plucked right out of their asses. I'll advise you upfront that this is not my own stance. I'm of the opinion that The Last Broadcast is an oft-misunderstood film, and I'm going to try my hand at defending it, controversial twist ending and all. Think I have my work cut out? Game on.

The Last Broadcast concerns a group of tech-savvy Gen-Xers who go missing in the woods while on a mission to document some local paranormal phenomenon, and the recovered footage from their cameras that might hold the key to deciphering what became of them. You can probably already tell where I'm going with this, and yes, to make another tired point, the film bears several striking (albeit largely superficial) similarities to The Blair Witch Project, the found footage feature that debuted the following year and left a much more significant dent in zeitgeist. The Last Broadcast might have made it to the party first, but it is forever fated to live in the shadow of The Blair Witch. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez's low-budget horror was the unlikeliest of success stories in the summer of '99, gaining traction through a creative marketing campaign that made innovative use of the internet at a time when the web was shedding its erstwhile reputation as a plaything for idle college nerds. It was quickly followed by the likeliest of backlashes - amid the initial wave of hype, audiences were supposedly swept up in speculation as to whether the footage in question might actually be genuine, and when it became apparent that it wasn't (no shit, Sherlock), some considered it most unsporting of Myrick, Sánchez and their crew. The film's promotional tools, including an official website with numerous faux police reports and interviews regarding the pivotal missing persons case, were widely denounced as at best, hollow gimmickry and at worst, false advertising, as opposed to playful extensions of the picture's internal narrative. One of the most interesting parallels between The Blair Witch Project and The Last Broadcast is that, despite their disparate box office fortunes, they seem to have a common problem in convincing a sizeable portion of their viewers to buy into their visions to the finish. With both films, unimpressed viewers tend to cite the endings as the reasons for their respective failings, arguing that after so much build-up and intrigue there simply isn't sufficient pay-off. The Blair Witch Project, infamously, never reveals what malignant forces have been screwing with the three young film-makers at its centre, and viewers who came to the picture in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the titular witch were severely disappointed. The Last Broadcast, by contrast, actually does reveal the nature and identity of its own monster within the last few minutes. It just wasn't the kind of monster that a lot of audiences were hoping for, which is to say the Jersey Devil (otherwise known as the Leeds Devil). The Devil didn't do it. And that's made a lot of people mad.

To an extent, The Blair Witch Project was a victim of its own unprecedented success. It paid the price for being a frugal indie that drew in a sizeable portion of the multiplex crowds. Crowds who, accustomed to Hollywood budgets and modes of storytelling, weren't necessarily disposed to buy into the narrative and stylistic choices made. A film like The Blair Witch Project is, frankly, an acquired taste, the kind that might have done better to have built up an appreciative following as a cult oddity on rental VHS (I know it was 1999, but I ardently believe that VHS, and not DVD, is the best format for this type of thing); its mistake was in getting too much exposure too soon. The Last Broadcast obviously doesn't have that excuse - what makes its ending so divisive, I'd imagine, is that it arguably tries to be a little too clever for its own good. Compared to the closing sequence of Blair Witch, it's an ending that serves to much more actively and aggressively pull the rug out from under the viewer, making the preceding 75 minutes feel like the extensive build-up to a joke that's very much at its audience's expense (April 1st proves a significant date within the narrative, which ought to tell you something). A lot of people, having become invested in the story's intriguing mystery, don't like that it culminates in such a smart alecky punchline. It is absolutely not an ending to suit all tastes, and I cannot begrudge anyone who wishes that the film had gone with something a little less tricksy. The specific charge that I do take issue with is the accusation that Avalos and Weiler pulled this ending in from basically nowhere. I find that accusation a bit odd, frankly, because The Last Broadcast is not an amazingly subtle film in terms of its themes and preoccupations. It frequently and explicitly states what it is about, and there is quite a lot of foreshadowing leading up to its final revelation.

The titular last broadcast belongs to paranormal-themed public access show Fact or Fiction, hosted by Steven Avkast and Locus Wheeler (Avalos and Weiler themselves), two aspiring young media personalities whose lives were tragically cut short while attempting to treat their viewership to something different. Acting on the suggestion of an anonymous message sent by IRL, they teamed up with Jim Suerd (James Seward) a self-proclaimed psychic and Rein Clackin (Rein Clabbers), a self-proclaimed paranormal sound technician, and ventured into the Pine Barrens on December 15th 1995 to film a live broadcast on the Jersey Devil. Somehow or other, things went horrendously wrong on the night in question. At least two of the party, Wheeler and Clackin, became the victims of a bloody massacre, and while Avkast's body was never found, enough of his blood was discovered at the scene for the authorities to presume him dead. Suerd, the only participant to make it back to civilisation alive, was immediately singled out as the prime suspect (the only suspect, in fact) and subsequently convicted of the murders of Wheeler and Clackin. But this is not where the story ends - or so insists one man, film-maker David Leigh (David Beard). Leigh professes to have approached the case as convinced of Suerd's guilt as everyone else and from the position of wanting to comprehend what drove the man to commit such violent acts. His findings have since pointed him toward a very different conclusion - that Suerd was actually the victim of a blinkered police investigation, a trial by media and a nefarious political agenda designed to demonstrate to the public, during an election year, that the authorities could yield a definitive response to an inexplicable crime. The intention was never to understand what really happened but to create and market a narrative that was superficially plausible enough to suffice as the truth.

What The Last Broadcast is assuredly not about is the Jersey Devil. Honestly, I would argue that it barely even qualifies as a red herring. There is, I think, a pretty big clue all throughout the picture indicating that its interests don't really lie with the legendary creature reputed to roam the Pinelands of South Jersey, and that is that it never takes the time to explain what the Jersey Devil is, or to delve into any of the lore surrounding the being. The most famous image of the Jersey Devil, the Philadelphia Bulletin drawing from 1909, is briefly shown, but no additional context is given. This implies one of two things - either the viewer was expected to come to the picture already knowing all of this information, or that it was never important in the first place. The name "Jersey Devil" sounds sufficiently ominous in itself, and that's all that's needed for a narrative in which the creature never becomes anything other than a symbol for the dark and allegedly unknowable. What The Last Broadcast is, underneath all of its found footage horror trappings, is an old-fashioned whodunnit with a cast of human suspects. Leigh interviews a variety of people with personal ties to the victims and the accused, a number of whom have managed to profit from their connections. Notable are Sam Woods (Sam Wells), a washed-up television director enlisted to help with the live broadcast, who reports that the surrounding publicity has since led to the reignition of his career, and Tom Branski (Tom Brunt), the video engineer for Fact or Fiction, who seems appalled by the law's treatment of Suerd but also cheerfully admits that the job offers now coming his way "may have helped me out of here". There's also the matter of the no corpus delicti regarding Avkast, which was enough of a sticking point to get that specific charge against Suerd dropped. What became of Avkast remains open to discussion, and Branski confides that he always had "bad vibes" about the man.

During Leigh's investigation, two startling new developments occur that threaten to impact perception of the case. Firstly, Suerd dies in prison "under mysterious circumstances", which for many seems to close the book on the matter, dulling remaining interest in re-addressing the formal conclusions now that an appeal's not going to happen. Secondly, a box containing additional camera footage from the night in the Pine Barrens is left on Leigh's doorstep by an anonymous donor. Although the footage has been badly damaged, Leigh enlists the services of a video technician, Shelly Monarch (Michele Pulaski), who goes about doggedly repairing the tape, confident that she can fill in the gaps in the narrative and that the facts will eventually out. Of the figures interviewed by Leigh, Monarch stands out as by far the most sincerely committed to uncovering what really happened, spelling out the horrifying implication that everyone else, regardless of their position on Suerd's culpability, seems mostly indifferent to - if Suerd was wrongly convicted, then it means that the real killer is still at large. She's also appealingly down to earth in her approach, refusing to get drawn into the vague insinuations that there were supernatural forces at work. When the possibility is put to her that the men might have been killed by something monstrous, she responds, "Yeah, I think this person's a monster."

Leigh, for his part, arrives the conclusion that the victims were killed by "something more horrendous than possible to imagine", although if you pay attention to his words, you'll notice that he rather glibly avoids committing to any concrete notion of who or what butchered Wheeler, Clackin and, possibly, Avkast. The Jersey Devil is factored in purely as a (ham-fisted?) metaphor: "Perhaps the demon we call the Jersey Devil did kill them in the Pine Barrens, but if so, the Jersey Devil is the electronic image, the sound, the communication to the masses, somehow twisted into a surrealist electronic world." The real villain of the piece, so far as Leigh is concerned, is the media, and the technology which, far from documenting the truth, made it possible for those with a vested interest to reconstruct their own self-serving interpretations of what went on. Amid his high-minded assertions that his project "has become more than just a search for the truth behind the Fact or Fiction murders - it has become an indictment of truth and how it is viewed through the lens of the media," there is a thread of irony, in that Leigh seems no more interested than most of his interviewees in understanding what did kill these people. This is something he ultimately downplays, satisfied with his conclusion that "the media upon which these events were recorded, the media that should have been able to provide a truth more pure than ever before, has somehow become the story." So long as there was a compelling story to be harvested, then Wheeler and Avkast themselves were hardly immune to this indifference to the truth; their show was titled Fact or Fiction, as opposed to Fact or Fiction?, implying an apathy toward distinguishing.

Unlike The Blair Witch Project (where, once those kids had taken us into that ominous woodland, we never found our way out again), The Last Broadcast deals with the return to civilisation, revealing it to be every bit as inhospitable and laden with peril. The film is about a wilderness of our own making, a new frontier forged by a reliance on technology to dictate how we should perceive and relate to the world around us; technology that should, in theory, create greater intimacy with reality, yet somehow makes the truth more elusive. One character for whom this seems particularly pertinent is Clair Deforest (Mark Rublee), a video editor hired by the prosecution to assemble an odious piece of character assassination from the camera footage recovered by the authorities; any recordings of Suerd that could be construed as negative were added in, just to make it easier to sell to the jury the image of Suerd as a killer. The name "Deforest" is an obvious gag, alluding to the character's supposed role in clearing the wilderness while only obscuring the truth further. Perhaps more telling still is the morbidly humorous moniker bestowed on him by the press, the "Killer Cutter", sounding as it does like the kind of nickname given to a serial killer, and suggesting as it does a kind of implicit violence to his own actions. He hasn't merely obscured the truth, but butchered it entirely. Adding to the tension is that Rublee plays him as a nervous overgrown school boy, with awkward, smirking mannerisms that seem reminiscent of Norman Bates (speaking of Norman, the killer's apparent ambidexterity comes up as a plot point). The real revelation is that Deforest was not even totally convinced of Suerd's guilt. He admits upfront that while the evidence against him seemed reasonably damning, he was troubled by the absence of Avkast's body and never able to rule out the possibility that he might have been the culprit. All the same, he absolves himself of responsibility in a possible wrongful conviction by redirecting Leigh's accusations back at him. "With a documentary film...ultimately, it's what the film-maker perceives as the truth. I mean, don't you think...that's what you're trying to do, right?", he asks, with a final smirk that seems deliberately taunting. He is, notably, the only character to actively question Leigh's role in the equation; in implying a kind of kinship between their merciless gutting of reality, however standoffishly, he cuts closer to the truth than he could possibly realise.

On one level, The Last Broadcast is a commentary on the same kind of television-saturated world that Oliver Stone was critiquing in Natural Born Killers (1994), in an age in which the OJ Simpson trial had become a media event (there's an oblique but unsubtle reference to the Simpson case here, when Leigh speculates that the jury was "anxious not to ignore DNA evidence, as had happened in other trials"). But its suspicions are also directed at that other small screen that was now becoming a pervasive part of our everyday lives - the home computer, and the rise of the internet it was bringing with it. The internet, which promised to open up a brand new avenue of global connection and communication, was yet another place in which to lose yourself, an untamed wilderness with legions of Jersey Devils lurking behind every corner. Leigh himself makes such an allusion when he notes that, "It is as though the Jersey Devil is a monster reborn in a digital age, reborn on the internet." The anonymity of the internet user, and the prospective peril of not knowing who you are really conversing with online, becomes a monster in of itself, as signified by the eerily robotic voice used to convert into speech the viewer messages sent to Fact or Fiction via Internet Relay Chat. Branski admits that he had bad vibes about that thing too. He also questions why the police never attempted to identify the anonymous individual who made the suggestion that they do a show on the Jersey Devil, essentially kicking this story into motion. The implication is that it was easier not to; Jay McDowell (Jay MacDonald), the Fact or Fiction web designer, explains that there was ultimately no trail. The monster was able to strike and then slink away, without leaving footprints (as Leigh claims the killer also managed to do at the scene of the crime).

Part of the reason that I feel compelled to defend The Last Broadcast is because it is a film that I find genuinely unsettling. We might not get the Jersey Devil, but to me there are monsters aplenty lurking within the picture's nooks and crannies. Its power is built not on thunderous jump-scares that have me jolting upright in my seat, but on little things that get under my skin and fester. The inhuman unpleasantness of the IRC voice. A freeze frame allegedly pinpointing the specific moment in which Wheeler becomes aware of the attacker lurching at him from the darkness, which becomes so much more chilling paired with Leigh's assessment on why, in his opinion, Avkast was not the killer ("I see no recognition in Locus's face...I see Locus, a man larger than Steven, turn tail and run, as does Rein"). A moment in Leigh's final monologue when, having travelled to the Pine Barrens himself, he suddenly pauses and turns, as if distracted by some unseen movement in the distance, before resuming. It is an immensely creepy piece of work. But it's also nothing if not a playful picture, with numerous jokes purposely designed to prod at the fourth wall and create a tongue-in-cheek intersection between fact and fiction. You might notice, for example, that a chunk of the characters have monikers that play like variations on the names of the actors portraying them. If that weren't enough, there's also a title card at the beginning of the film informing us that "The following people are not actors", an allusion to the fact that the cast was made up predominantly of non-professionals. An additional thread humor (and unease) pervades with Leigh's acerbic and possibly hypocritical commentary - the first time I saw The Last Broadcast, something that stood out and immediately amused me was how much disdain he evidentially had for the parties involved. His criticisms of the police investigation could be seen as stemming from a place of righteous indignation, but he comes across as just as scornful of the victims of the matter, putting down the production values of Fact or Fiction and the competence of its hosts at every given opportunity. Given the visibly frugal production of his own documentary, and his occasional dabbling in tacky visual effects, I felt Leigh wasn't one to talk.

Here's where I'm going to discuss the controversial twist ending, so if you'd like to avoid SPOILERS you are advised to bail out right now.

I suspect that what throws many viewers off about the ending of The Last Broadcast is two-fold - by the very nature of the narrative, the expectation is engendered for there to have been supernatural elements involved, for the Fact or Fiction team to have encountered something in the Pine Barrens that was less than human and defies all rational explanation. The revelation that the killer was Leigh himself, and human all along, not only negates that but sets a very different expectation in place - that there has to be a rational explanation for everything we've seen. Instead, there are multiple mysteries and loose ends that remain unaccounted for as the picture fades. The circumstances of Suerd's death. The whereabouts of Avkast's body. How on earth Leigh managed to pull off the brutal, single-handed slaying of three men while (in his own words) leaving no footprints and no evidence of a struggle. Some viewers hang uneasily in the middle, wondering if Leigh is actually the Jersey Devil lurking in plain sight, having gained the ability to assume human form.

For sure, the ending is not an airtight one. The major question for which I've never been able to produce a remotely satisfying answer has to do with how Suerd died. If the implication is that Leigh was responsible, then it's not at all clear how, and yet it seems too convenient a development for the narrative he is attempting to construct for him not to have had anything to do with it. But other issues that viewers will commonly insist go unaddressed actually do have implicit answers if you pay close attention to Leigh's commentary. For example, the issue of Leigh's motive. He does hint at one: "It is as though the real killer planned a media event so amazingly cunning that it could be thought of as scripted. A kill ready for primetime, so to speak." It's important to keep in mind that the real red herring of this scenario was never the Jersey Devil, but Avkast. Even before Deforest explicitly imparts his theory that Avkast might have been the killer, we're given reason to perceive him as a dubious character with ambitions of hitting the big leagues, enough to illicit suspicion that this "primetime-ready kill" might have been his twisted masterpiece. In reality, Leigh sacrificed the persons involved so that he could make his documentary about the case and establish himself as an investigative film-maker with something important to say. Noting his aforementioned disdain for Wheeler and Avkast, it seems logical to infer that Leigh targetted them because he resented their success and felt that he could do better. The discrepancy between the narrative he presents in his documentary and what is later presented as objective truth all boils down to the fact that he is the one manufacturing the narrative in front of us. Certain developments in his documentary, such as the lost footage being "mysteriously" dumped on his doorstep, were staged (ie: Leigh took the tape from the scene of the crime, and it was in his possession all along). He gives the tape to Monarch to repair so that he can document new narrative twists emerging, but is careful to monitor her progress, so that if she ever gets too close to discovering his role in events, he can swoop in and put a stop to it. As is evident from Leigh's final conclusion, getting to the truth was never what he was seeking to do - he wanted to tell a story, like everybody else.

Is it an overly elaborate scheme that would never get anywhere close to succeeding if some sordid hotshot tried it in real life? Oh heck yes. I'm certainly not going to credit The Last Broadcast with being realistic, of all things. But then I think to get too bogged down with the particulars of how Leigh managed to pull this off is to miss out on the broader symbolic significance of his character arc. It is, on the one level, a gigantic practical joke at the expense of the viewer (there is a title card indicating that the final reveal happens on April Fools Day, after all). The message that we've repeatedly heard throughout is that you cannot completely trust anybody who is attempting to sell you their version of reality, a point it exercises to the extreme by exposing our narrator as unreliable to a horrendous degree. On another level, Leigh is representative of both a media that prefers to create the narratives over simply recording them, and the emerging technological landscape giving a frightening anonymity to those with less than savoury intentions. The viewers who theorise that he might actually be the Jersey Devil are kind of right, but only in the same clunky metaphorical sense that Leigh himself attempts to put the Jersey Devil at the centre. He puts a troublesome face on everything that's warped and wrong about the electronic media dominating and shaping our world. And there are certainly hints aplenty as to his true nature. At one point, whether deliberately or not, Leigh veers dangerously close to spilling the beans: "I know Jim is not guilty. I know that the truth is still at large, potentially closer than anyone can realise." He speaks in an emotionless monotone that, on reflection, seems eerily reminiscent the robotic vocals used by the IRC (Beard's subtle but wholly uncanny performance is great; I would go so far as to call his one of the most authentically spooky presences in all horror cinema). Various sequences in which the camera is seen to follow its subjects as they go about their daily lives take on a chillingly voyeuristic quality, particularly his tracking of Monarch. In The Blair Witch Project, the camera offered false solidarity to the prey (in the film's most famous and frequently parodied scene, Heather weeps directly into the camera, as though it were the shoulder of a sympathetic friend), who came no closer to comprehending what was going on around them, despite having the ability to document all of it in full detail. In The Last Broadcast, it is the real ally of the predator looking to make themselves inconspicuous.

For all of its innovations, there are points where The Last Broadcast seems only too eager to indulge the hoariest and most objectionable cliches of the horror genre, most notably a fascination with spectacle involving the violent slaughter of women. The film manages to incorporate one protracted onscreen murder sequence, and some might find it troubling that the victim should happen to be its most prominent female character, Monarch the video technician. Her death is bloodless, but brutal (that it was chosen as a popular cover image for the film's home media release is something I'll admit does give me pause). From a thematic standpoint, Monarch's death makes sense - she dies because she is the only character who cares about uncovering the truth, which nobody else wants, not least Leigh himself.

Despite the miraculous proficiency of Leigh's scheme, the film closes by depicting him not as an evil genius bringing a deserved reckoning upon a media-addled world, but as a fundamentally chaotic and nonsensical figure who probably isn't going to attain the success he desires. Eventually, he runs into a limitation, in that his documentary must forgo an ending. He chooses to head out to the Pine Barrens, and to the site of the murders, in order to "re-enact" events, admitting that he does not know quite what he hopes to achieve. He wraps things up with a final monologue in which he makes another glib attempt at defining the Jersey Devil: "What is the Jersey Devil? It's a man wandering into the Pine Barrens never to be seen again. It's a mangled animal found on one of these access roads. Perhaps it's something that rests within our psyche, and we'll never truly understand." Within Leigh's documentary, the matter of Monarch and her quest to identify the killer simply fizzles; Leigh's insistence that "It's a mystery and it may permanently remain so" seems strangely at odds with her confidence that a definitive answer was in reach. As noted above, something in the distance seems to catch Leigh's eye, leaving him momentarily diverted; initially, we might take this to mean that Leigh is getting dangerously close to a Jersey Devil encounter of his own, and that something really is stirring amid those trees. At the very end, when we revisit the same scene from an objective third person perspective, aware that Leigh had actually travelled to the Pine Barrens to dispose of Monarch's body, it seems more likely that Leigh was glancing over his shoulder for potential witnesses. We see him attempting to film his closing monologue, but is unable to get past the opening without flubbing and having to start over: "This site is a close approximation to the one chosen by Steven and Locus as the site of their Fact or Fiction Jersey Devil broadcast..." The film ends with Leigh going around in an interminable circle, getting nowhere. He does always seem to have more of the electronic than the human about him, and I guess you could say this is him in malfunctioning mode. Eventually, he's drowned out by the sounds of chirping crickets, as dusk sets in, and finally we fade to black. Leigh simply disappears into the darkness, not with the triumph of a cunning murderer who's pulled the perfect crime and walked away scot-free, but with the disarray of a deeply muddled man who has no idea where he's ultimately going with any of this. He takes with him his carefully constructed version of the truth, and the actual truth itself - life moves on pretty fast in its search for the next lurid fixation, and it is indifferent to both in equal measures.