Treehouse of Horror '90: Hungry Are The Damned (aka Have Your Cake And Eat It)

"Hungry Are The Damned" is a frustrating Simpsons Halloween segment. To a point, it's frustrating by design. Conceived as a loose kind of homage to the vintage Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man", it sees the family being abducted by a race of squid-like extra-terrestrials known as the Rigellians (fronted by two particularly prominent individuals, Kodos and Kang), who purport only to wish to indulge them with gourmet cooking and electronic entertainment. It spends much of its duration dropping anvil-sized hints that something significantly more unsavoury is going on, only to then hit us with a narrative twist that declares us to have been at fault all along for our disgracefully leery human minds. The more generous interpretation is that it ends up being a sort of anti-twist, the classic shaggy dog story in which the joke's on us for allowing ourselves to be strung along for essentially nothing. The less generous reading is supplied by segment writer Wallace Wolodarsky himself on the DVD commentary, where he openly describes the solution as "the biggest cheat".

It's not hard to see where Wolodarsky is coming from. There's a distinction to be made between artful misdirection (getting the viewers to look one way at a red herring, whilst laying the ground for a more surprising plot development right under their noses) and outright cheating (bombarding the viewer with evidence that one thing is happening, only to largely discard said evidence in favour of a "Gotcha!" at the end), and I'd argue that "Hungry" leans more heavily into the latter. To be fair, this isn't the only example of a Simpsons episode cheating with regard to a narrative twist. Take "Bart of Darkness", in which we were taunted to believe that Ned Flanders might actually be a "mur-diddly-urdler" - what's never accounted for, in the closing revelation that he was attempting to conceal an overwatered ficus plant, is why he had to excavate so much earth to do so. That was quite blatantly a tomb for a human corpse he was digging, not a houseplant. Still, the mystery in "Darkness" was working on two separate levels, anticipating (and explicitly calling out) the viewer's expectations that there would be an entirely innocent and thoroughly mundane explanation for Ned's suspicious behaviours, whilst dragging the scenario so ridiculously far that you almost felt dared to suppose otherwise. It also helps that the explanation, when it comes, is so beautifully in character for Ned that it scarcely seems to matter if not all of the smaller pieces fit. Kodos and Kang, on the other hand...well, it's a tricky issue. They've been hostile aliens ever since, and it has to be said that they are a lot more fun that way. The notion of them having benevolent intentions, even for the purposes of a single, self-contained segment, is a difficult one to swallow with hindsight. But given that this was their first appearance, and the writers were unlikely to have been thinking about a second when they penned it back in 1990, it does demand to be judged on its own merits.

Alas, even on its own merits, "Hungry" has always been my least favourite of the original "Treehouse of Horror" edition, and that bothers me so. It bothers me because there is so much to enjoy about it up until that invalidating denouement, not least that it is the most authentically unsettling of the three establishing segments. The atmosphere is so charged with sickly, oversaturated hues, the imagery so ripe with ghoulish foreshadowing - there's the barbecue and the bug zapper at the segment's opening (reminders of the perils that await those lower down the food chain), and that particularly disturbing shot in which the heads of an unwitting Homer and Marge are framed to look as though they've been chopped off and served on the very platters they're about to dine from. The design of the Rigellians themselves is also an unmitigated triumph, a combination of the most grotesquely inhuman of qualities - giant cycloptic beings with squid tentacles, shark teeth and over-active saliva glands, the most benign physical quality they probably have going for them are their pointy Spock-esque ears. Their non-stop drooling around the Simpsons transpires to be yet another red herring - this is something the Rigellians simply do, as confirmed by their subsequent appearances, and we've had plenty of time since to get used to it - and yet within the specific context of "Hungry" it's a fabulously eerie touch, implying that it does that, no matter how ostensibly civilised these aliens' demeanours, their Pavlovian reflexes keep telling a very different story. For much of its running time, "Hungry" pulls off a masterful balancing act; in some respects, the life and culture aboard that Rigellian spaceship is entirely, mundanely familiar, often to the point of absurdity (according to Kang, it's an astonishing coincidence that the English and Rigellian languages just happen to be the exact same), but all the while there's a pervading sense of these galaxy-hopping molluscs embodying something more distant, unknowable and dangerous. "Hungry" persistently indicates that we're headed for an outcome beyond our wildest nightmares. So when it's all revealed to be nothing more than a means to a confoundingly ambivalent punchline - well, it can't help but feel a little deflating. Maybe it's akin to how a few sick-minded viewers felt when Cocoon: The Return (1988) showed up in theatres and shut down their theories that the Antareans had similar intentions for that band of retirement home absconders they carried off in 1985.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for narratives in which things that appear strange and grotesque turn out to be benign, and where the precarious nature of human judgement is called into question. I just don't think that particular moral goes with this particular story, and the rather tepid ending sequence, which fails to produce any witty rejoinders to Lisa's platitude about the Simpsons being the real monsters aboard that ship, would appear to confirm that the writers weren't feeling it too strongly. It seems to me that there is a missing piece of the puzzle tucked away on that aforementioned DVD commentary, in which we learn that an alternate version of the story was at one time pitched where the dust-blowing duel between Lisa and Kang revealed an additional component. There, the book's full title read How To Cook For Forty Humans And Then Eat Them. The crew don't elaborate on where the segment might otherwise have gone, other than to acknowledge that it would obviously have had very different implications. Yet it's a production tidbit that speaks volumes to the arbitrariness of the conclusion, and how easily it could have been tipped in the other direction. The script feels conflicted; clearly, it's having a lot of fun in making those aliens appear sinister and ghoulish, and it's for this reason, I suspect, that they were characterised as such on subsequent Halloweens - it just seems a whole lot more natural and more in keeping with the spirit of the season (and the show at large). For now, "Hungry" feels obligated to pull back and pour a bucket of ice water on the audience's expectations, even if it's not the route you sense the writers necessarily wanted to go. I put that down, in part, to an early cautiousness when it came to ending these Halloween segments - in spite of their openly fictitious nature within universe, there seemed to be a rule that nothing truly untoward could happen to the Simpsons, and that things always needed to be reset more-or-less to status quo by the fade-out. Still, the ending to "Hungry" offers one genuine delight, in the form of a delectable performance from the late James Earl Jones as a third, non-recurring Rigellian, Serak The Preparer (Jones' vocals, both here and in "The Raven", helped to elevate The Simpsons' first Halloween outing into something truly, hypnotically out of the show's regular world). Serak's distraught plea, "I slaved in the kitchen for days for you people...you aren't the only beings who have emotions, you know!", is by far the most convincing ingredient of that sour denouement.

Serak might put on a good display for his species, and yet a question I've repeatedly asked myself, on revisiting "Hungry", is whether I actually trust Kodos and Kang, in spite of their final assertions. All of those prior insinuations that they were looking forward to sinking their pointy, drool-covered teeth into the Simpsons' hides are laid on just a little too thickly to be easily discarded, and surveying the segment with foresight of that twist, becomes less an exercise in pinpointing the misunderstandings so much as noticing how many of the details don't add up. Let's look at the case against the Rigellians:

1. First, the big one, and a problem the twist ending completely dances around - the Rigellians flat-out kidnapped the Simpsons. Even if their intentions were benevolent, the family didn't ask to be taken aboard their ship and whisked off to a purported paradise in the far reaches of space. Apparently, it never dawned on those aliens to consult their helpless captives on whether they wanted to be permanently separated from everything they knew and loved back on Earth. I mean, they do have a dog and cat who are dependent on the Simpsons to be there to feed them - is everyone happy with Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II being left to rot?
   
2. The "Your wife is quite a dish" remark seems hella inappropriate whichever way you slice it.
3. Why are the Rigellians so joyfully obsessed with seeing the Simpsons gain weight? If it's meant to be an indicator of how much the family are savouring the Rigellians' cooking, then that's possibly undermined by Kang's assertions in the following paragraph.
   
4. When grilled by Lisa over why the Rigellians were constantly trying to make them eat, Kang indignantly responds: "Make you eat? We merely provided a sumptuous banquet, and frankly you people made pigs of yourselves!" Suggesting that this was this all a Spirited Away-type deal, and that the Simpsons would have demonstrated better character if they'd resisted the temptations laid out before them? Why do I get the impression that any kind of polite refusal would have been unacceptable to the Rigellians? Kang's rebuttal seems to be imply that the Earthlings are accountable for their own gluttony and the Rigellians were secretly repulsed by their willingness to gorge themselves. The problem there is that we'd just observed Kang freaking out the instant the humans stopped eating, so his condemnation doesn't hold water.
5. Why would the Rigellians want to treat the Simpsons like gods anyway? And why the Simpsons in particular? Were they just a random unit of humans they happened to come across whilst scanning the Earthly suburbs for potential abductees, or was there a reason they singled them out? Did they intend to harvest more humans in this manner, or was it just the Simpsons they took a shine to?
   

The counterargument? I suppose there is no obvious reason why the Rigellians would have returned the Simpsons to Earth if eating them really was on the agenda. At that point, they already had the family safely within their clutches - it's not like they had any means of running and escaping whilst aboard that ship. Unless the Rigellians were too proud to openly admit to what they were doing, and their parting sermon amounted to something of a track-covering hissy fit? That seems as valid an interpretation as anything else.

Admittedly, the chief reason why "Hungry" has always sat uneasily with me has less to do with any holes in its story construction than with how humanity's fall from alien graces is framed as being the fault of one member of the Simpsons clan in particular. Here, Lisa's crime was essentially in activating the Independent Thought Alarm, by daring to question what those aliens were up to instead of mindlessly consuming like the rest of her family. To that end, she serves as the audience surrogate, in perceiving the dangers that should be totally obvious to anyone capable of connecting a few mental dots, but apparently goes above the heads of the other characters. Hence why the ending comes down so harshly on her - the viewer is intended to feel the sting of the "Gotcha!" and the Rigellians' accusations along with her, after having arrived at the exact same conclusions she did. In practice, I come away with an overwhelming sympathy for Lisa. I feel we're not so much mutually at fault as judges of character as we are mutually set up to fail. The reservations she had are perfectly healthy ones - she's small, vulnerable and stranded aboard this alien craft with a bunch of unknown beings and nobody else who seems to share in her anxieties. Again, the Rigellians forcibly abducted the Simpsons aboard their craft, so are they really in a position to complain if any of them had misgivings about the arrangement? Furthermore, one can't help but detect a somewhat anti-intellectual tone to the final assessment, with Marge suggesting to Lisa that she went wrong in being too smart for her own good. Independent thinking is explicitly upheld as the sin that gets the Simpsons expelled from a supposed paradise where the only acceptable mode of behaviour is to shut up and obey. I've toyed with the interpretation that since "Hungry" is contextualised as a story being told by Bart to Lisa, it might have been custom-constructed to strike at his sister's nerves, but I suspect it's futile to read too much into any supposed relationship between the story and storyteller. In my review of "Bad Dream House" I suggested that there is a clunky vanity to the implication that the Simpsons would be telling stories about themselves, although on reflection that probably is a hyperliteral reading of the episode's narrative choices. What's actually going on, I suspect, is that the Simpsons are telling stories about generic characters, and these are being dramatised as stories about the Simpsons for the benefit of the viewer. The ending of "Hungry" is as bizarrely ambivalent as it is, I suspect, because the segment doesn't have a whole lot conviction behind it beyond delivering a searingly abrupt "Gotcha!". In the preceding "Bad Dream House", which also ended with the alleged monster rejecting the Simpsons because it considered them the real abhorrence, it was clear where the script ultimately stood on the matter. The Simpsons were social outcasts, so much so that even a possessed abode would sooner destroy itself than coexist with them (an outcome that wittily reverberates in "Hungry", when Lisa assures the Rigellians that the family are used to being perceived as lower forms of life all the time on their home planet), but they were outcasts together. "Hungry", by contrast, closes with a moment of discord between our pack of undesirables, with Bart and Homer each churlishly berating Lisa for getting them banished back to the sublunary suburbs, and the last word, or rather the last murmur going to Marge, who purposely withholds making her feelings clear. Does she feel disappointment at the family's ganging up on Lisa, and in their not taking the expulsion as graciously as her, or is that murmur intended to express her private agreement?

Or perhaps it's even in that final disunity among the Simpsons ranks that we sight a few unpleasant parallels with the Rigellians themselves, and confirmation that, in the end, those aliens were all-too knowable. As another (less notorious but just as unsettling) Twilight Zone episode was keen to emphasise, People Are Alike All Over. After all, these beings didn't exactly take the misunderstanding with good, gentle graces, something Marge herself explicitly highlights with her observation that "For a superior race, they really rub it in." If the Rigellians really were that much nobler than the humans, then perhaps they could have found the elegance to laugh it off, understand why they might have given off the wrong impression, and extend forgiveness? Instead, they transpire to be petty AF, casting the humans out with an overbearing spurning. But then the seeds of that were already cleverly sown, during a sequence in which their electronic interactive technology was revealed to be lagging a couple of decades or so behind the Earthlings', and the aliens' response was to childishly assert that they were still running rings around them when it came to intergalactic travel. Maybe that is the best possible takeaway from this entire sorry breakdown of Earthling-Rigellian relations - both sides were as churlish and as unrefined as the other. Were there actually monsters aboard that ship? No, just unflattering reflections whichever way you looked.