The Crepes of Wrath (aka The Life of A Frog, That's The Life For Me)

"The Crepes of Wrath" was the 13th Simpsons episode to enter production (as indicated by its code name 7G13), meaning that at one time it was presumably pegged as the prospective finale for Season 1. The teething troubles that plagued "Some Enchanted Evening" dictated otherwise (for some reason it also slipped ahead of "Krusty Gets Busted" in the airing order), but it's not hard to fathom how it might have served as an appropriate end point to the show's first chapter. The closing scene is one of family unity, with all five Simpsons gathered together in the same room and on more or less the same page; they're happy to see one another after an episode spent largely divided. The season bows out with a final, heartening affirmation that the ties that bind our titular clan are essentially unshakeable.

There's an argument to be had that "The Crepes of Wrath" was also The Simpsons' biggest and most adventurous episode to date. Up until now, the series had rarely allowed its characters to venture outside of Springfield, the only notable exception being "The Call of The Simpsons", in which the family spends a few days lost in the wilderness after a camping trip goes awry. "The Crepes of Wrath" represented a much deeper broadening of the show's canvas, by looking further afield and opening the door to exploring the characters' relationship with the wider world. Here, the wider world in question happens to be rural France, where Bart is exiled after Homer and Principal Skinner have each had their respective fill of his mischief. Homer trips and injures his back when Bart fails to pick up his Krusty doll, while Skinner's mother Agnes (making her debut appearance and seeming deceptively sweet-tempered) becomes a casualty of Bart's latest prank of detonating a cherry bomb in the toilets at Springfield Elementary. Skinner proposes that they take advantage of the school's foreign exchange program to send Bart to a vineyard in France for three months, purely so they can enjoy a period of respite ("Normally, a student is selected on the basis of academic excellence or intelligence, but in Bart's case I'm prepared to make a big exception!"). Bart is enthused by the idea, only to discover on arrival that the whole thing is basically a dupe; the "fabulous château" he was promised has clearly seen better days, and its unscrupulous owners have signed up to the foreign exchange program as a source of child labour.

 "The Crepes of Wrath" is sometimes credited with being the first in a long and particularly notorious line of Simpsons episodes - the Simpsons travelogue, in which the family jets overseas and dedicates 18-odd minutes to providing a rundown on the people, landmarks and culture of their selected destination through the eyes of crass American tourists, in a world where every crass American tourist's wildest, most prejudicial assumption is accurately realised. Let's just say that such episodes tend to be divisive at best. I would argue that "Crepes" is, at most, a distant cousin, and that the archetypal Simpsons travel episode didn't come into being until fairly late in the game - "Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo", which landed about midway through Mike Scully's reign, feels like the one that properly cemented the formula (with its bitty, meandering narrative and first use of the deliberately vexing catchphrase "The Simpsons are going to__!") and made them a fixture of the series going forward. Prior to that, it's curious just how little interest the series had in exploring how the Simpsons would cope with the world beyond America. Episodes where the family travelled to other countries were rare, and rarer still were the episodes where travelling to another country represented the plot in itself, as opposed to a dash of frivolity on the side, eg: Homer going to India on a deliberately inconsequential tangent in "Homer and Apu", Lisa going to Britain for a small chunk of "Lisa's Wedding". Notably, facing foreign cultures was not something the family typically did as a unit; it was not so much a case of the Simpsons vs the world as individual members temporarily splitting from the clan to pursue personal business. By my count, the "classic" era offered only two instances of the entire family taking an international trip together...and since one of those was in a Halloween episode (the family's vacation in Morocco in "Treehouse of Horror II"), there's effectively only one. "Bart vs Australia" feels a lot closer in spirit to the archetypal "travel episode" than "The Crepes of Wrath"; its treatment of the Australians is significantly meaner-spirited than the depiction of the French in "Crepes" (for all the horrors Bart has to face at the Château Maison, there is no equivalent, on the metre of viciously bad taste, to his remark about hearing a dingo eating a baby - to quote Tropic Thunder, you about to cross some fucking lines). But what "Crepes" does nail straight off the bat, and which set the tone for every travel episode to come, is this basic idea that foreigners are to be regarded with suspicion. On that score, it offers two cautionary examples for the price of one. Bart's nightmarish reception in France's wine country is interwoven with a parallel narrative in which the remaining Simpsons accommodate an Albanian exchange student (Homer: "You mean all white with pink eyes?") by the name of Adil Hoxha, who seems innocuous but is actually a Soviet spy.

Occasionally with Season 1 you can spot telltale signs of their being penned while the 1980s was on its deathbed, little snippets of the spirit of the decade right as that spirit was gasping for relevancy. The Happy Little Elves, a pastiche of your typically cute and toyetic 1980s cartoon, were one such example. The early concept of Mr Burns being modelled on Ronald Reagan was another. On account of the Adil subplot, "The Crepes of Wrath" might be the most 1989-into-1990 of all Simpsons episodes, a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of Cold War paranoia from the very last days in which Cold War paranoia had genuine currency. By the time it made it to air, on April 15th 1990, the Iron Curtain had fallen and the non-threatening nineties were in the process of beginning (Albania itself would abandon communism before the year was through). With that in mind, it's not surprising that Adil never made any significant reappearances (though he was seen in the "Do The Bartman" video, dancing by the remains of the Berlin Wall, which seems a nice enough postlude for his character). Bart's story is a lot more evergreen, offering a darker take on the familiar tourist experience wherein the reality of travel does not align with what was shown in the holiday brochure. But "Crepes" ultimately succeeds because it is at its heart about the family and how they are fundamentally stronger as a unit, even when there's an Atlantic ocean between them. It offers yet another variation on a theme that was becoming increasingly familiar in the back end of Season 1 - an exploration of how that unit is at risk of disintegrating whenever one of its members is pushed or drawn out of the equation. We saw it with Marge in "Life on The Fast Lane" and Homer in "Homer's Night Out", and now it's Bart's turn to be the wayward Simpson. The threat to the family here is somewhat lower-key, but no less troubling, and lurks in Homer's outspoken preference for Adil over Bart. Homer's view is that he's effectively swapped out his son for a superior model, one who's polite, helps with the housework and above all takes a keen interest in what he does at the nuclear power plant. His belief that equilibrium has finally been attained through Bart's exclusion is something he's not shy about expressing in the presence of Marge and Lisa, and it disturbs them so. The arrangement is obviously askew, but it goes deeper than they could possibly imagine.

Adil made an appearance as a villain in the tie-in video game Bart vs. The Space Mutants, and was identified in the instruction manual as one of several "totally evil" characters who wanted revenge against Bart for past defeats "even if it means selling out Earth to the Mutants!" The others, for the record, were Nelson, Jimbo, Ms Botz, Sideshow Bob and...Dr Marvin Monroe (WTF? Why did they go with him when César and Ugolin from this very episode were present and waiting?). I remember thinking nearer the time that Adil was likewise out of place with that lot, on the grounds that he'd never even met Bart and had no personal aggro with him (he also seemed entirely loyal to his home country of Albania, so why would he sell them out to the mutants? Was he disillusioned by the political turn his country took soon after his return?). But I suppose their video game enmity works on a symbolic level, when we consider that Adil was effectively Bart's usurper. He took Bart's place within the household, and within Homer's affections, and he used his guise as the perfect surrogate son to gain access to the power plant and take photographs of the nuclear reactor to fax back to Albania (ah, for the days when the fax machine was regarded as cutting edge technology). In reality, he poses a far greater threat to security and to the established order than any of Bart's childish pranks, something that Homer never fully grasps, being so intent on tending to the brood parasite that's infiltrated his nest. Adil might use the codename "Sparrow" for his spying operations, but as bird metaphors go, he's definitely more of a cuckoo.

The point "Crepes" is essentially making is that the Simpson family, for as chaotic and dysfunctional as they might appear, signifies something that is intrinsically wholesome, loving and good. It's a point it bears out by portraying its foreign forces, whether they're interlopers or operating on their own turf, as harmful corruptions of the family unit. This can be seen not only in Adil, but in Bart's French hosts, César and Ugolin. Not for nothing are they the first Simpsons villains who are themselves a family, albeit a distorted reflection of the more conventional family the Simpsons embody. An uncle and nephew team, in practice they function as more of an off-centre married couple (in her letter to Bart, Marge identifies them as his adopted parents) whose pet donkey Maurice makes three, and is positioned firmly above Bart in the maison's hierarchy (in fact, a line from César suggests that Bart was brought in specifically for Maurice's benefit). The privileges that Maurice enjoys over Bart include getting to lounge around with César and Ugolin while Bart toils in the vineyard, sleeping on the bed of straw intended for Bart, and most egregiously, the transgression Bart later feels compelled to cite to the French authorities, being granted ownership of Bart's favourite red cap. As happens in the Adil subplot, Bart finds himself pushed out in the cold by someone else's child, which in this case happens to be a fur (and hoof) child.

It's interesting and perhaps a mite unfortunate that "The Crepes of Wrath" came only two episodes after "Life on The Fast Lane", another story in which a French character proved a disruptor of the family's peace, something that could be perceived as the series having a somewhat Francophobic edge. It's worth noting that this was not the original plan, and that Jacques was written as a Scandi named Björn but improvised as French by his voice actor A. Brooks, who thought that gave him more to work with. What keeps the episode from becoming too repetitious is that César and Ugolin are a deliberately far cry from the archetypal Frenchman that Jacques embodied. Whereas Jacques, the Parisian charmer, was suave and impeccably groomed, they're vulgar, rustic and unkempt. Their antipathy is presented with such broad strokes that they perhaps don't register as the most immediately distinguished of the Season 1 antagonists. They're exceedingly mean, but they're never quite as legitimately threatening as Ms Botz of "Some Enchanted Evening". They're also not characterised with any of the nuance or shades of sympathy that Sideshow Bob exhibited in "Krusty Gets Busted". A possible redeeming quality, their obvious love and kindness toward Maurice the donkey, isn't treated by the plot as a virtue, but as a further reflection of their disdain for Bart. Nonetheless, César and Ugolin get my "Still Waters" award, for having more cultural depth than perhaps meets the eye. For César and Ugolin are borrowed characters, named for and heavily inspired by the antagonists of Claude Berri's 1986 period drama Jean de Florette and its follow-up Manon des sources (the same pictures that inspired the "Reassuringly Expensive" campaign for Stella Artois). There, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) were an uncle and nephew team living in southeastern France post WWI, and also not above carrying out a few dirty deeds to get what they want. For all its ostensibly xenophobic trappings, "Crepes" is the episode in which The Simpsons reveals a passionate, almost clandestine affection for French arthouse cinema (NB: on the DVD commentary, writer George Meyer confesses that he's never seen Berri's films, but it's evident that someone in the production team took a shine to them). At the time it debuted, Berri's two-part saga was still a relatively contemporary cultural touchpoint, but I wonder how many of the show's audiences were going to get the reference? For anyone familiar with Berri's works, it's pretty unmissable, but not something the internal narrative openly advertises or underscores (myself, I was compelled to watch Berri's films because of the Stella Artois campaign - picking up on the Simpsons connection was an unexpected and revelatory bonus that gave me a greater appreciation for "Crepes" with hindsight).

The Ugolin who appears in "Crepes" is a pretty decent caricature of Ugolin as portrayed by Auteuil. The elongated nose is perhaps a little off, and he's here notably taller than his uncle, but you can otherwise see the Jean de Florette character in the design. César's interpretation is a fair bit looser, giving him a curiously cricetine appearance - with his hunched posture, long whiskers and rounded nose, he doesn't resemble a man so much as an overgrown muskrat. How does their characterisation compare? Well, keep in mind that Berri's combined saga runs for just under 4 hours, while "Crepes" only has 22 minutes, so it goes without saying that the Simpsons renditions have considerably less scope for development than their arthouse counterparts. The narrative of Jean de Florette had César (or Papet, as he is more affectionately termed) and Ugolin coveting a plot of land and attempting to drive out its new owner, city boy Jean Cadoret (Gérard Dépardieu), by blocking its water supply - not out of malice, but out of a sense of familial duty and a desire to restore and preserve the Soubeyran line, of which they were the last standing members. Naturally, their actions have no such complexities in "Crepes", which is happy to play them as straight villains - although Ugolin does demonstrate enough of a moral compass to object to his uncle's practice of adding anti-freeze to their wine on the grounds that it might kill someone, which is consistent with his being the more sensitive of the two in Berri's saga.

The allusions to Berri's cinema were a gratifying confirmation that The Simpsons did not underestimate its audience. But they also functioned as sly rebuttals to those critics of the show who felt that the popularity of the series represented a lowering of standards, by playfully demonstrating that its production crew were learned and had an appreciation for more highbrow fare. This much is also flaunted in an early sequence - one of the showiest and most visually inspired of Season 1, next to Marge's dream sequence in "Life on The Fast Lane" - when Ugolin goes to collect Bart at the Parisian airport, and their journey away from the city and deep into provincial France is represented as a ride through the scenes of various paintings by (mostly) French artists. Let's see, we have Claude Monet's water lilies, Henri Rousseau's dream and Édouard Manet's luncheon. Vincent van Gogh's wheatfield gets in, presumably on the basis that it was painted in France, even if van Gogh himself was Dutch.

And, contrariwise to the episode's gleefully xenophobic front, it is specifically through his embracing of the French culture and language that Bart finds his deliverance, and makes a connection with a much more benevolent local. Having been sent to a nearby town in a downpour to acquire a bottle of César and Ugolin's illicit ingredient, he passes a man whom he identifies as a police officer and attempts to reach out to him about his dire situation. Alas, the police officer speaks no English and Bart cannot make himself understood. He bemoans his inability to communicate in French, despite having been exposed to the language for two months, only to discover that he is in fact capable of speaking it fluently. (Bart has long struck me as something of a natural polyglot. I recall he could apparently speak Chinese in "Bart on The Road". In "Blame It On Lisa" he also mastered Spanish with remarkable speed, even if he forced himself to forget the language with self-inflicted brain damage...oh, Season 13). He runs back to the police officer and gives him a thorough account. There is a slight back-handedness in the sympathy he receives; while the police officer is clearly aghast at what Bart has endured, the crime he explicitly identifies as most serious is the addition of anti-freeze to wine. Nevertheless, he comes to Bart's aid and enables him to return to Springfield with his own back-handed remark of having encountered one nice French person on his travels.

For me, the most harrowing aspect of Bart's predicament is the revelation that it's gone on for two whole months, which frankly feels like an eternity in Simpsons time. Did nobody seriously catch wind of what was happening over those 60-odd days? (Likewise, did no one in the Simpson household have any inkling of what Adil was doing?) Watching the episode recently, I had a bleak thought that had honestly never occurred to me before - does Skinner know what kind of place the Château Maison is when he sends Bart there? It seems a bit of a stretch that he would do it on purpose, no matter how incensed he was about the mishap with his mother (Skinner dispenses discipline because he's a stickler for order, not because he's in any way vindictive), but there's nothing in the episode that explicitly rules it out (and "Crepes" does showcase a particularly dickish side to Skinner, as evidenced in his speech "welcoming" Adil to the school). In the end, maybe it isn't important - Skinner is complicit in Bart's ordeal simply through not caring enough to look into where he's actually sending his students. You could lay the same charge against Homer and Marge, who also don't seem to demand too much oversight of their son's experience. Marge cares enough to write Bart a letter (in which she sells him a half-truth about Homer going to sleep talking about how much he loves him), but that's all the communication from home he apparently gets. Granted, contact means were more limited in the days before email and social media, and we don't know for certain that the maison has a telephone, but you'd think they might have made a bit more effort. To a point, there's a sense that this lack of oversight stems from Homer's feelings of having moved on, now that he has Adil, and being happy to leave Bart to his lot. This ties in with another favourite theme of the series, present pretty much from the start - that of adult indifference to childhood anxiety, and the various strategies those shrugged off children must fall on to survive, be it Lisa's need for artistic expression or Bart's itch for rebellion.

Bart doesn't get any opportunities for his usual mischief-making whilst abroad; his act of rebellion against César and Ugolin ends up being a noble one that has him recognised as a hero by the French authorities. With that in mind, his vineyard ordeal can be viewed as your basic grind toward redemption - he gets banished to the dingy confines of the Château Maison for a show of unruliness that has him deemed unfit to live with decent, civilised society. His pride and humanity are stripped away (it may be the life of a frog to which he aspires, but he's saddled with the life of an unfavoured donkey), but he earns his way into the world's good graces by demonstrating what a tremendous force for righteousness he can be (in this case, by upholding the integrity of France's wine trade). César and Ugolin are last seen being apprehended and assured by Bart's cop buddy that their future wine-making will be happening in prison (now there's a joke that went over my head as a child). But then again, maybe not. César and Ugolin made a cameo appearance fairly soon after, in the Season 3 episode "Lisa The Greek" (in which they exhibit the stereotypically French trait of spurning American football but loving the comedy antics of Jerry Lewis). They are visibly not in prison in that episode (also still stockpiling the anti-freeze), indicating that they got a light sentence and/or a really ace lawyer. That's all well and good, but we sadly don't find out what became of Maurice. Was he ever reunited with his folks?

Adil's narrative, meanwhile, takes the opposite trajectory to Bart's. He gets a comparatively warm reception in America. Skinner's school hall speech is obviously the worst of it; he also gets into a dinner table dispute with Lisa about which of their countries uses the better system of government, which descends into a childish back and forth but is resolved amicably enough (by way of a glib compromise offered by Homer). On the whole, he's thrilled by just how trusting his American hosts are, and how little trouble he has getting them to accept him and his strange fascination with nuclear blueprints and civil defence plans. His strategy is to get close enough to Homer to get what he wants, but his success is equally dependent on adults not taking too keen an interest in the particulars of  what he's doing. Through no ingenuity whatsoever on the Simpsons' part, he ends up being exposed as a villain, when an investigation by the US authorities leads them to Evergreen Terrace, although they mistakenly target the Flanders' house (Ned, disappointingly, doesn't even seem to be in) and it's Homer who inadvertently gives Adil away. It works out okay for Adil, though - the US authorities agree to release him and return him to Albania in exchange for the release of one of their own spies captured on Albanian soil. The American spy turns out also to be a child, presumably sent to Albania under similar pretences to Adil, which I guess makes both countries even in their duplicity (and maybe also comparable to César and Ugolin, in their willingness to exploit children). A brief verbal exchange between Adil and the unidentified American spy indicates that they've met each other under similar circumstances before, and there's a discernible level of familiarity and connection in their dialogue. Adil shares that he thinks he's "getting too old for this game", which is on the one hand an acknowledgement of the threat an impending adolescence poses to the aura of innocence necessary to maintain his ruse. But it reads equally as a world-weary desire just to see the Cold War end; that Adil says it to the character to whom he should see himself as most diametrically opposed feels significant. He's fatigued with the conflict, and he recognises that he and the American spy are basically no different. They each understand what the other has been through. Given that the end of the Cold War was in sight by the time it aired, "Crepes" could be viewed as an expression of hope and optimism for the potential peace and understanding that lay ahead. Then again, Adil bids the Simpsons farewell by imploring that they not be put off accepting further students from the foreign exchange program, presumably to leave the door open for more of his allies to sneak their way in, so maybe they were hedging their bets after all. 

PS: Here's another nice postlude - in the aforementioned scene in the "Do The Bartman" video, the American spy is seen dancing alongside Adil, and I'd take that to mean that they're openly the best of friends now.

PPS: For some reason the scene with Adil and his American friend does not appear in the version of "Do The Bartman" that's included in the Season 2 DVD box set. I was so bummed when I found out. Why would you deny Adil his coda?