"Bart The Genius" (7G02) is a Simpsons episode of immense personal significance for me. This is, in part, because it was one of the first Simpsons episodes I ever saw. That in itself isn't too outstanding - I was around when the series debuted; this would have been one of the first episodes seen by most people of my age. It was, after all, only the second installment in the show's protracted history, and its initial airing, on January 14th 1990, marked one of the first really earth-shattering pop cultural turnings of the decade. One 23-minute peek into Bart's academic angst and the world was never quite the same again. "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire" had already weathered the gargantuan challenge of introducing the series as its own standalone thing, proving that the characters could handle longer-form storytelling than sketch show interstitials or candy commercials, but arguably had an easier ride of it in debuting during the holiday season, when tolerance for animated drivel tends to be a lot higher. The question of whether this unassuming cartoon show could cut it as a weekly thing, and as appointment viewing for the adult crowd still hung in the balance. "Bart The Genius" had the task of getting viewers accustomed to that more regular Simpsons flavour - which included, among other things, the first usage of the show's now-iconic opening sequence (or rather, the prototypical version, where Bart steals a stop sign and Lisa makes it home first, but all of the really important beats are already nailed - the chalkboard gag, the couch gag, Marge nearly running Homer down). It could not have gone over more swimmingly. Viewers of all ages were endeared by the underachieving underdog and his penchant for anarchy, and a thousand trashy t shirt slogans were unleashed upon an unsuspecting market.
My own first viewing of "Bart The Genius" was through a VHS release, where it was paired with "The Call of The Simpsons" (remember that The Simpsons initially aired as a Sky exclusive in the UK, so those VHS tapes were the only way most of us were going to see the show). It was an experience that changed my life, both for better and for worse. From the start, I loved the world and its characters and knew that I had to delve deeper into the series' canon. But "Bart The Genius" also sticks out for being the Simpsons episode that left me with something of an indelible psychological scar. I was only six years old at the time, and there is a very specific moment in "Bart The Genius" that went some way in teaching me what a fucked up place the world intrinsically is. To this day, the episode holds a very special place in my heart. I have likewise never forgiven it.
"Bart The Genius" is of course the episode where Bart cheats in an IQ test by exchanging his paper for that of resident egghead Martin Prince. He is subsequently assessed as a misunderstood genius by educational psychologist Dr Pryor, and strings are pulled for him to be sent to a more appropriate schooling environment, the Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children. On arrival, Bart is greeted by his new "learning coordinator", Ms Melon, who straight off the bat has some obvious features in common with his erstwhile teacher, Ms Krabappel. Both are voiced by Marcia Wallace and both have fruity pun monikers, only hers is a lot sweeter on the ears, so it's easy to form the impression that she's Krabappel's nicer counterpart from an all-round gentler universe. But oooooh, she soooooo isn't. Melon introduces Bart to a few of his classmates, including a girl by the name of Cecile Shapiro who's standing beside a couple of hamster cages. Bart, naively assuming that the hamsters are the class pets, asks for their names. Cecile gives a response that's already unpleasant enough in itself, but mostly went over my head as a small child: "Hamster number 1 has been infected with a staphylococci virus. Hamster number 2 is the control hamster." Then the ultimate bombshell. Bart is advised by Melon not to get too attached to the control hamster, since he's scheduled for dissection next week. I had no idea what that meant, so I turned to my dad and asked him to explain. He told me they were going to cut the hamster open and look at what was inside him. And just like that, a little something inside of me died then and there. Until then I'd had no idea that that was even a thing. The hamsters do escape and flee the premises at the end, and that helped to take the sting off, sure (writer Jon Vitti explicitly states on the DVD commentary that they couldn't have gotten away with the dissection remark if they didn't later show the hamsters escaping), but it was like Artax's last-minute resurrection in the coda to The Never-Ending Story. We'd already seen that horse sink into the bog. And I'd already heard Melon announce her intention to slice that hamster open. In both cases the damage was done.
Watching that scene more than three decades on, I still feel a lingering twang of young Scampy's pain. Granted, it probably hits me particularly hard because I am both a rodent lover and a hamster owner, but there is something about that line that strikes me as entirely willful in terms of how gratuitously unsettling it is. Clearly, we're not supposed to accord with the Enriched Learning Center as an institution, no matter how ostensibly attractive some of its philosophies, such as its lessened emphasis on punctuality (Bart is told by Pryor to show up at nine-ish) and its encouraging of students to shape their own learning. The kids who communicate in palindromes and backwards phonetics instantly emit warped mirror universe vibes, Melon gives the bombastic instruction that students "discover" their desks, and there's an evident mean-spirited disdain for popular culture in their implied assumption that people who read comic books are effectively illiterate. The hamster remark, though? Doesn't it just completely poison the atmosphere inside that place? I'm not sure that anything could have turned me more vehemently against the Enriched Learning Center. I didn't want to see Bart become a part of this school. Instead, I found myself hoping that Bart would bring the entire institution down by the end of the episode. As it happened, he came close enough in blowing up the science lab, covering its occupants with a revolting green slime and allowing the hamsters to run free. Mission accomplished! As far as I was concerned, this entire ordeal was all worth it, if Bart had managed to save a couple of rodents from the scalpel. Why they insisted on working in that horrible line in is, I suspect, to create greater disparity between Bart and his new environs in a way that paints Bart in a much more wholesome colour. Bart might not explicitly oppose the pending hamster dissection, but it clearly clashes with his first instinct to want to know the creatures by name and to bond with them. That those instincts should prove so out of place within the Enriched Learning Center sets up an ugly side to these young geniuses, in depicting them as being above sentiment. Give these kids a a hamster, and they don't see it as a pet to be cared for and enjoyed but as a resource to be mercilessly exploited. In the end their keenness and their thirst for knowledge comes off as basically cold.
The one saving grace about this school, however? The lunch boxes. One kid, an obvious chess enthusiast, has an Anatoly Karpov lunchbox. Another has one themed around Brideshead Revisited. I love how, right from the start, the series had an eye for such intelligent and miniscule details, and the tremendous amount of character they inject into the furthest corners of each scene. We're not given much of a chance to get to know any of Bart's new classmates as individuals (see below), but low-key details such as this give us a world of insight into who they each are.
It's fair to say that "Bart The Genius" is a less plot-driven
installment than "Simpsons Roasting on An Open Fire". The premise of
Bart being mistaken for a prodigy and whisked away to an educational
setting for the precocious is a strong one, but one that actually isn't
developed all that far, at least in terms of what happens within the
school itself. In one scene, it looks as though the other students might
be cottoning on to Bart's fish-out-of-water-ness, but nothing too
significant comes of it - they dismiss him as "rather a mediocre
genius", as opposed to a total fraud, and apparently decide to shun him
(we hear that nobody will volunteer to be his lab partner). And despite
incorporating a moment where Bart manages to blow up a chemistry lab,
the school arc reaches a surprisingly quiet and civilised resolution,
wherein Bart simply tires of the deception and openly confesses. I
suspect that if this same premise had shown up any later down the line
(even in Seasons 2 or 3), he might have been put through more of a
dramatic noose-tightening before the beans were inevitably spilled. None
of these observations are intended as a criticisms of "Bart The Genius";
the developments within the school are kept reined in by choice,
because they clearly aren't where the emotional heft of the episode is intended to lie. The script has plenty of sharp observations to make about the education system and Bart's endless frustrations therewith, but this is fundamentally a story about how Bart relates to the rest of his family, particularly Homer. Its greatest interests lie in taking valuable time to explore the main cast, the way each Simpson reacts to Bart's newly-declared genius offering a telling snapshot of where their own characterisation would soon be headed. Small scenes centred on the family dynamics, such as the opening one with the Simpsons playing Scrabble (a tribute to Canadian apocalyptic comedy The Big Snit), might feel like remnants of the series' origins as a collection of shorter-form sketches, but they do so much to cement who they are and how it's going to matter for the succeeding twenty minutes. Homer is an ill-educated grouch, Marge is the family mediator, Lisa is precocious and, most importantly, Bart is an audacious rebel with real creativity when it comes to undermining the rules. Bart might not be a genius, but there is an appealing inventiveness in how he plays his made-up word "Kwyjibo". As would be explored in greater depth in the Season 2 opener "Bart Gets an F", the kid's got real talent. Sadly, it's just not the kind of talent that can be channelled into any kind of academic success.
Here are my two favourite takeaways from the Scrabble game:
- The "Oxidize" joke is brilliant (a variation on the "CARROST" gag from The Big Snit) but even if Homer had recognised the word, he wouldn't actually have been able to play it. If you study the tiles on the Scrabble board, you'll see that he had no way of inserting it into what was already on there.
- Having said that, there's also no way that Homer should have been able to play "Do" either. The layout of the Scrabble board changes between shots. An F disappears. The word "My" appears. Ah well, this must be a magic Scrabble board.
That Lisa remains the least vocal on the episode's pivotal development (after Maggie) might strike one as its most jarring facet from a modern perspective. It's hard to imagine a latter day version of this scenario where Bart is sent to a genius school and Lisa doesn't resent the shit out him. But you know, still waters run deep, and in Lisa's deceptively minimal role she gets to speak volumes. The middle Simpsons child remained something of a dark horse going into the series proper, and you can see how they were using that as a springboard for her hidden depths. Vitti's script is already laying the groundwork for Lisa being the unsung genius of her
family (and to a lesser extent Maggie, who, in a wonderful sight gag, spells EMCSQU with her alphabet blocks at the start of the episode). It just doesn't place it front and centre, layering it amid the various episode subtleties for viewers to pick up on themselves. It's Lisa who plays the most advanced word during the family's otherwise vapid game of Scrabble (the girl did love her psychological parlance back in the day). She also knows that "nurturing" is the word Marge wants when she talks about encouraging Bart to grow (Marge compliments her "brainy brain", but immediately goes back to Bart). Most revealing of all, Lisa is the one character who isn't duped by Bart's test scores (Skinner too has his reservations, but brushes them aside when he learns that he can offload Bart onto another school). She knows her brother too well not to know that something is up. Bart, just as revealingly, doesn't put up any pretence in front of Lisa. When she taunts him at the breakfast table with her insistence that, "I don't care what that stupid test says, Bart, you're a dimwit", he does not refute her observation, instead retorting, "Maybe so, but from now on this dimwit is on easy street." Lisa makes no active effort to expose part as a fraud, in part because she's blatantly savvy enough to know that it isn't needed. She operates on an unspoken trust that the truth will eventually out itself, as indicated by her totally unfazed response to seeing Homer blow his top with Bart at the end: "I think Bart's stupid again." Where the episode is locked into a more prototypical version of her character is in her relationship with Bart feeling a little too fundamentally antagonistic. Her battle cry of "Yeah, Bart!" whenever Marge or Homer put him in his place was briefly carried over as her catchphrase from the Tracy Ullman days. Compare it to "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa's purpose was still to
explicitly remind Bart of his failings, but from the perspective of wanting to
steer him in the right direction. And yet Lisa isn't entirely at odds with Bart throughout the episode. When the family attend their first opera and Bart and Homer are inclined to riff their way through the utterly alien experience, Lisa ultimately succumbs to the same temptation and giggles along with them. On this occasion she can't help but see the funny side to Bart's subversive desire to rewrite the rules of the game.
The character who I do think comes off as really undefined at this point is Marge. She's a little all over the place in this episode. The most significant character development she gets is in interpreting Bart's alleged genius as a cue to start introducing the family as a whole to more highbrow cultural fare like opera and Scandinavian arthouse. During the Carmen sequence, she gets to be the solitary sensible Simpson with an ideal of how she'd like the family to be, and is inevitably mortified when they fail to conform to it. Homer would be cast in the exact same role in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", suggesting that the writers were still fairly open at this stage with regard to the family's internal dynamics, but this is an important first step for Marge, in establishing that she privately hungers for something outside of her bland domestic sphere. Elsewhere, I kind of get the impression that Vitti wrote her to be as much of an airhead as Homer, just from a sweeter-tempered angle. Take Marge's response on being summoned to Skinner's office on account of Bart's vandalism: "He's a good boy now and he's getting better, and sometimes even the best sheep stray from the flock and need to be hugged extra hard." It's a much nicer and more sensitive response than Homer's go-to angry outbursts, but as a solution feels every bit as vacuous. Marge, like every other adult in this episode, is applying her own preconceived narrative to Bart's behaviour and is failing as much as anyone to get to the root of why he's acting out the way he does. It's this tendency toward preconceived narratives that keep the adult characters from realising the truth staring them square in the face the whole time - that Bart is not a kid genius, just a kid with a particular adroitness for subversion and bluffing.
"Bart The Genius", much like "Bart Gets an F", deals with the cruelties of the school system and its eagerness to pigeonhole students into categories that stifle personal development more than encourage it. We get some insights into the horrors of being pegged as an underachiever in the first act. Edna Krapabbel, making her debut appearance, has already written Bart off as incorrigible and is astoundingly upfront in her acidity ("There are students in this class with a chance to do well. Will you kindly stop bothering them?"). We can see just how callous and unsupportive her remarks are, following a visually inspired nightmare sequence in which Bart makes a sincere attempt at working out a math problem before the process overwhelms him. And then when Pryor pigeonholes him into another category, that of the misunderstood genius, Bart soon grows just as weary with having to live with that designation. It drives a wedge between himself and his peers, leaving him friendless and alone; the prodigies won't accept him, and his old friends Milhouse, Richard and Lewis no longer want anything to do with him (for reasons that the script doesn't make overtly clear, but they're presumably angry at Bart for how he upped and abandoned them). The adults, meanwhile, prove frustratingly obtuse in picking up on Bart's fraudulence, something that should make it easier for Bart but in practice gives him nowhere to go; much like Edna K, they've already made up their minds about Bart, and their responses are every bit as unhelpful in weighing up his educational needs. When Bart can't make a simple experiment work, Pryor's immediate assumption is that the Enriched Learning Center isn't challenging this brightest of sparks enough. Eventually, Bart learns to play into Pryor's preconceived narrative, when he advocates his reinstatement to Springfield Elementary, on the understanding that he'll be conducting some kind of covert scientific enquiry into the psychology of the average child (like Jane Goodall and the chimps, as Pryor so condescendingly puts it). But he's only willing to play along so far. In the end, Bart decides that maintaining the ruse is more trouble than it's worth and just confesses, stating what should always have been patently obvious to Pryor, Melon and co. Still, for as woefully as Pryor misconstrued the situation as a whole, there is one matter on which he probably was always entirely correct, and that's that Bart's rap sheet of unruly behaviour represents his lashing out at a system that doesn't value him. For this much, Pryor has no solution, nor any enthusiasm for understanding Bart's discontent, and this is the bleakest thing about the episode's resolution. Bart must return to a normality in which he was already flat-out told that he had no future social status or financial success. When the narrative can't be spun into something as joyously positive as your disobedience being a symptom of latent genius, you're very much on your own. Bart's trajectory ends up upholding the one nugget of paradoxical wisdom he was able to bestow on his classmates at the Enriched Learning Center - you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
Somewhere at the back of Bart's sorry tale is the tale of a real young genius who's also ignored, at least by the narrative progression. "Bart The Genius" introduces us to Martin Prince, who good as disappears after the first act, but dominates every scene he's in (Russi Taylor was a legendary voice actress and is very much missed). He's another character who doesn't seem to be fully nailed down at this stage - obviously, he's the anti-Bart, but the script seems to vary on just how knowing he is in his anti-Bartness. He can't help being an insufferable goody two-shoes, compelled not only to report Bart's act of vandalism directly to Skinner but to comment on the carelessness of his vandalism in not using the preferred spelling of "Wiener" with the i before the e (though conceding that "Weiner" is an acceptable ethnic variant). To begin with, Martin doesn't come off as being motivated by spite; he simply can't bare to see such flagrant disrespect for the school grounds, and makes a sincere, if socially inept attempt to get Bart to see it that way. The next thing you know, he's reminding Krabappel that Bart is supposed to face the window during exams, lest he be tempted to copy his neighbour's paper, and there's such unmistakable joy in Taylor's delivery that you just know the little snot is doing it on purpose. Then later on, he's making rude faces at Bart from beneath the tree. Given that Martin is basically the victim of the story, I would guess the intention was to make him a little unsympathetic. But that's a loose end the script leaves hanging - we don't find out what the consequences were for Martin when he gets saddled with Bart's miserable score, and it's something that's always nagging at the corner of my mind whenever I watch the episode. His narrative is allowed to fade into the backdrop, a brief reappearance with his parents among the spectators of Carmen being the nearest thing he gets to closure. It's not clear if Martin was even vindicated in the end; Bart admits to cheating but doesn't explain how he accomplished this. Here, Martin doesn't get to be a whole lot more than a plot device and a further reflection of Springfield Elementary's endless hostility toward Bart. But what an enduring first impression.
There are probably a heap of different directions in which the scenario might have been further developed, but it would have overcomplicated what's ultimately a straightforward study of the love-hate relationship between Homer and Bart. Bart might be dejected and lonely as a perceived genius, but the one bright spot of the experience is that he and Homer suddenly find it a whole lot easier to relate to one another. Homer's ill-gotten pride at the prospect of having sired this pint-sized brainiac might be based on a lie, but what it effectively gives him is leeway for connecting with Bart on the basis of the talents he genuinely has, now that he's no longer an embarrassment who gets him summoned to Skinner's office on a weekly basis. We see ample evidence that Homer actually enjoys and identifies with Bart's penchant for mischief, so long as he isn't the butt of the joke (as was the case with the "Kwyjibo" incident). He might be incensed by Bart's vandalism (particularly when Skinner indicates that the Simpsons are financially liable for the damage), but he also accords with the observation, in Bart's graffiti, that Skinner is a "weiner". And Homer and Bart are on an equal wavelength in their inability to see the production of Carmen as anything other than a snooty ritual to be taken down. There's also a genuinely tender sequence where they play baseball after dark, having ducked out of an evening at the film festival, and the two engage in some very natural father-son banter. I guess it doesn't surprise me that Rabin would go after this sequence in his AV Club review, calling it "sweet if overly sentimental and incongruously sappy", but I'm inclined to defend it. From a story perspective, it establishes what's really at stake for Bart, since he was on the verge of coming clean with Homer before their bonding exercise caused him to reconsider; even with genius school having lost his lustre, he sincerely regrets the idea of disturbing his newfound connection with his father. I also think that a little emotional vulnerability was entirely warranted in order to give the story's very gleefully unsentimental resolution its sting. We've already witnessed how Homer and Bart are fully capable of seeing eye to eye, and having the ideal father-son bond, should the circumstances allow it. But in the end that all gets thrown out the window, as their respective worst traits each get the better of them. When Bart finally confesses the truth to Homer, he points out that the two of them have grown closer as a result of the lie, and on that basis it shouldn't be seen as a bad thing, but Homer doesn't fall for it. As he shouldn't. It's amazing just how quickly Bart's confession slips from a place of brutal honesty to barefaced manipulation.
We conclude, then, with the disturbing sight of a raving Homer chasing a butt-naked, literally off-colour Bart through the house. Bart's final victory comes in being smart enough to one-up his father, who changes tactics and plays his own emotional card when his quarry conceals himself in his bedroom, promising that if Bart comes out, he will comfort him and make him feel better. Bart points out that he isn't dumb enough to fall for that, and Homer collapses into a violent rage once again. The episode bows out with the two of them still at their ridiculous impasse; Homer slamming his body repeatedly against the bedroom door, and Bart committed to the dubious endeavour of having to stay in there forever. Equilibrium restored!
As a final note, a feature carried over from the Tracy Ullman shorts that would soon be discarded was the practice of inserting prominent framed pictures into the backdrop of each scene. Unlike in the Ullman shorts these pictures no longer appeared to possess a life and animation of their own, but they were still rather odd and dislocating in their way. Check out that Droste effect going on in the one in the Simpsons' kitchen. Doesn't it just speak to the infinitely monotonous entrapment in which the characters find themselves?
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