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.