Here's something I've always found charming and intensely curious about The Simpsons' third Halloween installment, "Treehouse of Horror III" (episode 9F04, which first aired on October 29th 1992) - the way it structures itself to play like a particularly twisted episode of ABC's 1970s romantic comedy series Love, American Style. The first two segments, "Clown Without Pity" and "King Homer", close in the same gloriously kitschy manner, with a heart-shaped iris out and upbeat jingle, both reminiscent of how Love, American Style liked to sign off each story. The allusion isn't quite as arbitrary as it might first seem; Love, American Style was also an anthology series and, like each entry into the Treehouse of Horror, individual episodes were comprised of multiple self-contained segments, usually three longer pieces with shorter skirts in between. Listening to the episode's DVD commentary, I was a little taken back to discover that this element wasn't implemented until very late into production. For me, those iris outs are the very heart of the episode, the thing that gives it its unique sauce as a Halloween entertainment. It's always preferable whenever these Treehouse of Horror episodes appear to have some kind of underlying theme going, so that the segments work as a package and couldn't be easily swapped out with segments from other Halloween shows, and in the case of "Treehouse of Horror III" that theme is incongruous romance. What could be more delightfully subversive than for a Halloween show to reveal that its so-called tales of horror were actually build-ups to bizarre romantic unions? [1] For those stories to take us to truly strange and threatening places, only to consistently whiplash us into punchlines consisting of retro jingles and kitschy heart-shaped fade-outs?
Of course, this being an afterthought might also account for why the episode doesn't follow the allusion all the way through. The final story, "Dial Z For Zombies", completely disregards it, by ending with a bog-standard black-out. I don't know if it was intentional, but that always seemed so unsettling to me, having this weird, dead space where I'd already been primed to expect a heart-shaped iris. That alone is enough to make "Dial Z" my least favourite of the three, which is doubtlessly petty and probably a mite unfair of me. The Love, American Style allusion came about when the original ending to "Clown Without Pity" was sent back for revision, having been deemed unsatisfying, and perhaps it was only happenstance that the second segment ended with yet another love story. The third segment didn't fit the pattern, and the writers may have been unable or unwilling to readjust it - although if it was me, I think I'd have stuck a heart-shaped iris out on there anyway, just to complete the set (I mean, it's kind of a love story, the stupefaction the family feels for their television). Thankfully, the story doesn't quite end there. In the back-end of the Season 4 we had the episode "The Front", and its second act closes with Abe having some cross-dressing western fantasy that fades out to a certain familiar jingle and heart-shaped iris. There, the allusion feels a heck of a lot more random, but I've long rationalised it as the elusive third iris shot leftover from "Treehouse of Horror III", managing to squeeze itself in before the season was through. So everything worked out.
My favourite of the three segments is "Clown Without Pity", and that's in no small way down to the ending. It has one of the strangest, most unexpected endings in all the Treehouse of Horrors, and I frankly don't even want to think about how the segment was ever supposed to work without it. The evil Krusty doll that's spent the segment terrorizing Homer is finally seen retiring to Lisa's doll house and sharing a tender moment with the Malibu Stacy within. The mere idea of ending a story about a killer doll with it finding a gentle romance in a knock-off Barbie is so ingeniously weird, but if you think about what's going on in this sequence, it's also kind of sad. Hilarity, pathos, sweetness, WTF-ness - I get the full gamut of emotions in watching this unearthly doll snuggle up to that chunk of molded plastic, and I probably should explain.
"Clown Without Pity" is based primarily on the "Living Doll" episode of The Twilight Zone. The premise of a knife-wielding doll with murderous intent obviously had a more contemporary cultural reference point in the Child's Play franchise, but "Clown" follows the "Living Doll" plot of having the demonic toy take up a personal vendetta with the household patriarch while being nothing less than the perfect companion to its child owner. In "Living Doll" it was never clearly explained why Talky Tina took such a malevolent turn, but there was a subtext (implicit in Serling's closing narration) that the doll's powers were to be seen as manifestations of little Christie's aversion toward her emotionally abusive stepfather. The most disturbing element of the story comes at the very end when, having vanquished the stepfather, the doll redirects those malevolent energies to Christie's mother, insinuating that she might be next if she fails to act in her daughter's interests - the doll's final declaration, "My name is Talky Tina, and you'd better be nice to me!", conflates the girl and doll as a single entity. In "Clown" we actually get a clear-cut explanation for the doll's homicidal tendencies, and it is every bit as ludicrous and arbitrary as you would hope - eventually, it's discovered that the doll has a "Good/Evil" switch concealed behind its clothing, and behaves according to whichever setting it's on. Of course, what's never explicitly accounted for is why the evil-inclined Krusty directs its malevolence at Homer, and Homer alone, but perhaps we can dredge up an explanation if we look closely enough into the story.
First, though, another interesting tidbit from the DVD commentary is that "Treehouse of Horror III" might never have been, for showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss had some doubts about whether a third Halloween episode was warranted. That's easy to scoff at now, but I do understand where they might have been coming from at the time. Whereas two Halloween shows in a row could be chalked up to happenstance, with three you've basically cemented it as an annual tradition, and I don't blame Jean and Reiss for questioning if they really wanted to commit the series to that expectation of having to do a new one every October, regardless of whether the ideas were forthcoming or not. "III" was given the green light anyway (Jean and Reiss themselves penned "Clown Without Pity"), and these Simpson-ised tales of terror proved that they had life and value in them yet. True, certain aspects of the early Halloween shows were already nearing their end ("III" has the penultimate wraparound narrative, and the last to have basis within the show's regular reality), but in other regards the writers were only beginning to realise the full creative possibilities of dropping the established cast into macabre situations without continuity or consequence. "King Homer" and "Dial Z" contain our first notable instances of characters being killed in Treehouse of Horror segments. The examples here are fairly mild - Lenny and Smithers are both devoured
by King Homer (as are Shirley Temple and Clancy Bouvier), but he downs
them in clean, tidy bites (seriously, how much more horrifying would it have been had King Homer chewed with his mouth open?), and while the zombified Ned presumably gets
his head blown off, the results are purposely withheld from us - but I'll admit to finding these moments a little shocking back in the day.
Watching our beloved characters get violently dispatched in ever-more gruesome fashions is a novel experience, sure, but a greater attraction of the Halloween series still lies in those characters getting to realise the darker possibilities within themselves, things that wouldn't be permitted in the series proper, but which nevertheless feel like logical expansions on the Springfieldians we know. What's impressive and frankly startling about the "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI" is how convincingly Willie slips into the persona of Freddy Krueger. It's almost as though we're delving into a hitherto untapped layer of the groundskeeper's psyche, like he could have been a legitimately terrifying villain in another reality and just happened to get boxed into a more benign niche in the one we got. [2] Krusty, by contrast, makes a somewhat more reluctant Chucky - he can't handle being dumped into a bag with Homer's dirty socks, and he allows himself to get sidetracked with attempting to seduce Malibu Stacy - but "Clown Without Pity" is one the few venues where his eccentricities are played for uncanniness as much as humor. He is a clown, and whether we love them or loathe them for it, clowns do tend to have this intrinsic grotesqueness about them (as do dolls). For much of this segment, he makes for a bone-chilling visual, with a gaping mouth and eerily vacant expression. The aspiring killer at the centre of "Clown Without Pity" isn't the real Krusty, of course, but the doll has enough of Krusty's personality in it, including his lecherousness and general ineptness, to feel like an ugly extension of its inspiration's soul. This is the crass commercialism of Krusty's brand, manifesting as a miniature demon in his likeness, a corruptive presence infiltrating the home of the unsuspecting consumer and laying waste to the order within. This concern was near and dear to the heart of the first Child's Play (1988), in which the possessed doll hailed from a mass-marketed toy line, the Good Guys (a send up of the Cabbage Patch Kids and My Buddy). It also seems pertinent that the scene with Homer buying the doll at the House of Evil is drawn from the opening sequence of Gremlins (1984), another tale where consumerism is linked to corruption. The second golden rule, to not get the Mogwai wet, is first violated by accident, but when Mr Peltzer sees the results (it causes them to multiply), he seems to disregard that he was specifically told not to do this and starts devising plans to create more Mogwai and market them to every child in America, all while understanding little about this animal's nature or its lifecycle.
Unlike his Gremlins counterpart, the keeper of the House of Evil is willing to sell Homer the coveted item as a gift for his son, but warns him that it comes with a terrible curse (and a free frozen yoghurt, and all that jazz). He does not actually elaborate on the nature of the curse, and indeed, the suggestion that the doll's behaviour is caused by any supernatural curse seems invalidated by the final reveal that the doll has a Good/Evil switch on its back. Are we do assume that the old shopkeeper doesn't have a clue what he's talking about? Is it just a misdirect? Or is there something else he might be getting at through his talk of a curse?
The presence of the Good/Evil switch likewise seems to rule out any
potential reading that the doll's mischief is linked to Bart's outlook, a
la Talky Tina (although what do you want to bet that he was the one who set
the doll to Evil in the first place?). Despite being introduced, by Lisa, as a story about a boy and his doll, "Clown Without Pity" actually has very little to do with Bart past the opening stages involving his party. There is, nevertheless, a sense
that the doll might be reacting to something in Homer's slipshod
parenting. We get a reminder of his paternal negligence at the
beginning, when he admits that he forgot about Bart's upcoming birthday
and rushes out to buy him a gift at the last minute. Thus, the Krusty
doll represents a hasty attempt to paper over those cracks in his
parenting, and it seems to work, with Bart proclaiming it to be the best
birthday he's ever had. The appeal of the doll, besides its resemblance
to Krusty, a television personality Bart idolises, is in its superficial
reassurances of love. But this is a facade, and the doll is willing to
demonstrate its insidious nature to Homer after witnessing a snapshot of
his own, through his response to an environmental newscast in which
Springfield's air is deemed to be toxic to children and the elderly.
Homer's only reaction is to cheer, presumably relieved that he isn't
among the affected, and not giving any thought to the possible impact on
his own children and father. At that, the doll is suddenly and
inexplicably at his side, ready to declare its distaste for him. Its
declarations of love are mechanical, produced on demand at the pull of a
string, but its declarations of murderous hate are apparently very
real, produced by the doll's own volition. Keep in mind that Krusty's
character was purposely designed to look like Homer in clown make-up,
making this little monster a reflection of his parental negligence as
much as the falseness of Krusty's brand. There is a complicity to the
consumerism - the parent is aware of the shallowness of the arrangement
but buys into anyway it in order to placate the child, all while turning
their back on far greater issues, like air that apparently isn't even
breathable to the younger generation. Consumerism is a game we're conditioned to play from a very young age, as a means of numbing ourselves to grim realities; the immediate gratification of a product is presented as preferable to the implementing of sustainable solutions to the social, economic and environmental threats that plague us day by day. The long-term cost being that those threats aren't going to simply go away because we've chosen to ignore them. At
one point Homer attempts to bury his problem, by dropping it down
a dark pit, but it immediately finds its way back up to him. Perhaps this is what that old shopkeeper was really alluding to when he mentioned that the doll came with a terrible curse? In general, consumerism does.
The real Krusty makes no appearance in this segment, but by now it was well-established what made his brand such an odious sham - away from the studio lights, he's generally depicted as a vulgar, spendthrifty sleazeball with no time or patience for his devoted young fans. The point where the doll's personality is most recognisable as Krusty's own is in the scene where it first attempts to seduce Lisa's Malibu Stacy, which is itself its own bit of absurdity. Does the Krusty doll believe the Malibu Stacy to be alive like itself, or is it engaging in some kinky fantasy with the non-living doll? Either way, its lusty impulses are an obvious perversion of the innocent play pretence we'd sooner associate with childhood [3]; we see the real Krusty poking through and puncturing the facade of his kid-friendly brand. Yet the killer doll's relationship with the inert Malibu Stacy is what ultimately forms the basis of our tender conclusion, following a fake-out happy ending where it looks as though Homer and the doll (now reset to Good mode) might be able to happily coexist. This is really paving way for a characteristically cynical Simpsons twist, in which Homer takes advantage of the doll's newly-awakened inclination to do good by making it into his personal slave, forcing it to bring him snacks, give him sponge baths and walk Santa's Little Helper. This was where the original script ended, but there was some sentiment among the production crew that the joke was falling a little flat, and the decision was made to expand on it by crafting an additional scene with the Malibu Stacy. (For an idea of how late the revisions came, you can see where they've also pasted new dialogue onto finished animation in the penultimate scene - when the doll calls Homer a "stupid idiot" its lips don't move). The image of a weary Krusty returning to the doll house and hanging his coat upon the rack furthers the original joke about where being a nice guy gets you - the doll's situation is now analogous to that of your average put-upon shmuck working 9 to 5 for a tyrannical boss. There is a certain sitcom-esque banality to this arrangement, which calls to mind the ending of the Simpsons' previous Halloween, where Homer was shown attempting to live with the fact that he now had his own tyrannical boss's head grafted onto his shoulder. In both stories, the joke stems from the absurdity of these freakish, otherworldly occurrences infringing on the family's lives, only to end up conforming to a kind of normality - in the case of "Clown Without Pity", the absurdity that the likes of Chucky or Talky Tina, having made peace with their human adversaries, would go on to emulate the normality of a working shmuck. But I think this joke works on more levels still. Consider that only one of the two dolls in that closing frame is even alive. When Krusty tells Malibu Stacy that getting to come home and be with her is the one thing that makes its situation tolerable - well, that poor doll is flat-out delusional. The relationship is all in its head.
There is a moment, right before the iris out, in which the seeming wholesomeness is suddenly interrupted by the Krusty doll accidentally knocking off Stacy's head, before awkwardly reattaching it, potentially indicating that the inclination to dismember is still ingrained somewhere deep within its nature, even when set to do Good. This is intermixed with another, quieter subversion, in the reminder that the Stacy doll is but a fake, and that the Krusty doll is reacting to the cruel exploitation it faces daily at the hands of Homer by retreating into fantasy. It is engaging in its own play pretence as means of coping with those harsh realities, evocative of both the imaginative possibilities that a toy opens up for a child, and the specific purpose that consumerism has already served for the segment's human characters, in covering over the more unpalatable aspects their lives. In both scenarios, we're essentially navigating our way through a chaotic world by clinging to our dumb playthings; the little demonic Krusty doll emerges as no different, and it gets our final sympathies for that. The prosaic domesticity in which it immerses itself, coupled with the nostalgic sitcom jingle, are immediately familiar, recalling one of our favourite adult playthings, the kinds escapist fantasies packaged and sold to us on a nightly basis via television airwaves. It all points toward the segment's greatest irony, one that completely turns the workings of the story on its head - that this doll, the very emblem of corruptive consumerism, should end up discovering that humans (insofar as Homer represents them) are such an innately horrible bunch that it needs to construct its own insipid fantasies just to get away from them.
As Moe would say, it's funny, and it makes you think.
[1] Someone on the Simpsons Archive episode capsule suggested that it might as well have been a Valentine's Day episode, which seriously cracks me up.
[2] The one character who doesn't convince as a Treehouse of Horror villain is, surprisingly, Snake. We can do "Hell Toupee" some other Halloween, but for now I'll just say that I've always felt that segment did him kind of dirty. Maybe he's too obvious a target.
[3] It doesn't escape my notice that it's Lisa who's supposedly telling this story, and her playthings that are subject to this perversion. Make of that what you will. Also, where is Lisa going to sleep? The doll house is still on her bed at the end.
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