The DVD commentary for The Simpsons' "Mountain of Madness" (episode 4F10) is a bizarre one for sure - and not because of the presence of a layperson who's sitting in on the recording because he won a contest (it's actually quite charming to hear this guy, who sounds nervous as hell when he's introduced, come out of his shell and interact more with the crew as the commentary goes on). We learn that this episode had a troubled development at the scripting stage - it made it to air on February 2nd 1997, but only after being subject to an "infamous rewrite", necessitated by what showrunner Josh Weinstein describes as their mishandling of the "finely tooled crazy German machine" that is a John Swartzwelder script. It's observed that the episode has "a really crazy, crazy plot", and yet we're told that it could have been crazier still. The story underwent a continuous revamp, with Burns and Homer's hallucinations going to considerably more feverish places in intermediary drafts, yet for as infamous as this rewrite purportedly was, it seems that no one who worked on it can remember what those preliminary efforts were all about. When we get to the scene where they trapped individuals have dressed a couple of snowmen in their own outer garments, there's a LOT of hushed murmuring about the "big crazy thing" that was supposed to happen around this point, but no elaboration on what that big crazy thing actually was. That is, until Weinstein concedes, "I think it was so crazy that I banished it from my brain." Swartzwelder himself has this thing about not doing DVD commentaries, so it doesn't help that he's not there to weigh in on his original vision. "Mountain of Madness" once reached deep into the mouth of insanity, but it was an insanity the world was clearly not meant to know.
It's funny really, because from my perspective "Mountain of Madness" has always been one of the more moderate entries of Season 8, which I don't exactly mean as a criticism. It's a solidly entertaining episode, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it and it yields more than its fair share of classic Simpsons moments. But given how experimental and, at times, borderline dangerous this particular season was determined to get, "Mountain of Madness" feels like The Simpsons working squarely within its comfort zone. I would have guessed that it was purpose-designed as a safer installment right from the start, to balance out the more daring likes of "You Only Move Twice" and "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase". The basic trajectory is easy enough to predict, the premise is an all-purpose one that could have fitted in with just about any season (although the climactic detail with the so-called rocket house bursting from the snow is very much of the latter half of Weinstein and Oakley's era), and we don't learn anything radically new or interesting about the characters along the way (with the possible exception of Lenny and Carl). It has a reassuring air of familiarity, playing as it does like a variation on the Season 1 episode, "The Call of The Simpsons", which also had the family breaking off into different splinter groups whilst enduring the perils of the great outdoors. If anything I'd say that "Mountain of Madness" tones down the absurdities of its Season 1 counterpart, which by its third act has swelled into a pure farce - there's nothing quite as outrageous in here as Homer being mistaken for Bigfoot, or as bizarre as that subplot with Maggie being adopted by a sleuth of grizzly bears. Instead, "Mountain of Madness" approaches its scenario from a darker, more sinister angle, and to that end its understated hand proves a sensible choice. The central breakdown of sanity isn't oversold to us, manifesting not as a collection of wild hallucinations, but as a creeping sense of apprehension that's at once patently silly but also genuinely eerie. The finished script gives us all the claustrophobic fun of a classic cabin fever set-up while keeping a beady knowing eye on its numerous contrivances.
"Mountain of Madness" opens with the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant running a fire drill, and it becoming painfully apparent that, if this were a real fire, everyone except Burns and Smithers would have been toast. Burns concludes that his employees are lacking in a sense of cooperative spirit, and remedies this by ordering them to attend a corporate retreat at the Mt. Useful National Park. There, the full personnel is divided off into pairs via a random draw and challenged with hiking to a cabin located somewhere up in the mountain, with the carrot that the cabin contains a buffet of sandwiches and moderately priced champagne, and the stick that the last pair to arrive will be fired. A slight flaw in the arrangement is that the plant has an odd number of employees, with Smithers being left without a partner while Homer is paired up with Burns. Burns, naturally, has no intention of playing fairly at his own game - he and Homer arrive at cabin well ahead of the others, off the back of a formidable bit of teamwork that consists of Burns proposing that they cheat and Homer falling in line. (It's not clear if Homer is actually won over by Burns' "cheating
is a gift Man gives himself!" spiel or if he's just saying what he
thinks his boss wants to hear; either way, we get this underrated exchange: "You know, Simpson, you're not as objectionable as you seemed when we first met." "No sir, I am not.") The two of them get to lounge around and sip champagne while everyone else is out there struggling, but their ill-gotten comfort becomes a deathtrap when an avalanche has them snowed in, leaving them enclosed in one another's company and with nowhere to go except down the rabbit hole of delusion and paranoia. Meanwhile, the rest of the Simpson family have been left to amuse themselves at the park's visitor centre, but are subsequently dragged into the action. Bart and Lisa are playing outside when they run into Smithers and offer to accompany him to the cabin, while Marge and Maggie, propelled by Bart and Lisa's apparent disappearance, end up on a chair lift with an ostensibly square park ranger who doesn't have a clue what he's doing.
I have my own theory about what might have changed during rewrites - were Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie intended to tag along from the beginning? This is a story that shouldn't logically involve them, a point the final script is fairly upfront about. Homer brings them to the mountain on a misunderstanding that's explained in the most arbitrary of terms ("I thought I was supposed to"). It's interesting, because the basic premise could, theoretically, have worked without them - the rest of the family does nothing to influence the resolution to the A-story of Homer and Burns being trapped in the cabin. I've a sneaking suspicion that the episode might have been pitched as one focussing exclusively on the plant personnel, only for the family to be worked in following a sentiment that the plant personnel were not developed or defined enough to carry an episode as an ensemble. Perhaps even more importantly, the presence of the other Simpsons allows for a small but critical emotional beat that might otherwise have been lacking, in having someone with a vested interest in ensuring Homer is found (Burns of course has Smithers to be concerned for him). True, you might expect Lenny and Carl to be at least a little worried about their friend and colleague, but they're clearly too wrapped up in whatever it is that's going on with them. When Lenny and Carl tell Smithers that Homer and Burns are unaccounted for, their phrasing is ominous but their tone entirely casual, as if the implications haven't fully sunk in.
The theme of the episode is teamwork (at least on the surface), and the narrative structure is basically an excuse to get the characters divided off into various duos and threesomes and see what hilarious interactions ensue. Homer and Burns aren't such a novel pairing - only last season we had "Homer The Smithers", which for a large stretch was practically a two-hander between Homer and his tyrannical boss. There is even a precedent for the two being able to enjoying one another's company in a more casual setting, in "Dancin' Homer" of Season 2. It is, though, unusual to see Smithers having any kind of prolonged interaction with the Simpsons children. He's met them on enough prior occasions, and he's even been an unlikely source of help to them, as seen in "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacey" and "Sideshow Bob Roberts", but this is the first time he's been in a situation where he's effectively responsible for them. Again, nothing overly dramatic or unexpected comes of it - Bart and Lisa predictably prove more of a hindrance than a help, and Smithers, who's clearly not used to dealing with children but has too much of a moral compass to leave them out in the wilderness, gets increasingly exasperated by their antics - but their dynamic is nice and entirely natural, serving as a lighter counterpoint to the creepier stuff going on in the cabin. Smithers needs the order and structure of an office environment (or else Burns' mansion) in which to thrive; as alien to him as the chaos of children is the chaos of nature, to the point that the abundance of disordered mountain wildlife Lisa keeps bringing to his attention seems symptomatic of some kind of wider cosmic malfunction. This whole subplot culminates in a fittingly quirky gag, with Smithers expressing his resignation to the disarray by standing by as a moose goes up in flames (albeit a stuffed one). Lisa, by the way, is the episode's MVP, for facilitating The Simpsons' first ever onscreen sighting of a shrew. Shrews are a hugely underrated animal, and I wish we saw them represented in animation more often.
The characters who have the most intriguing arc going on, however, are Lenny and Carl, who were paired up in the random draw - much to the chagrin of Carl, who spends the episode cheesed off with Lenny for reasons that are never explained. This is where "Mountain of Madness" does get slightly radical, since it attempts to delve a little deeper into the dynamics of Homer's two most prominent co-workers and allow them some one-to-one interaction time. Up until now, Lenny and Carl weren't given massively distinctive personalities; they were a duo who'd largely blended into one another, and they nearly always had Homer to bounce off of (often they played the comparative straight men to his cruder foibles). There was some precedent for making Carl the tetchier of the two and Lenny the more guileless (see "Homer The Great" of Season 5), but "Mountain of Madness" saw the origin of a running gag that deliberately played on how much we don't know about these characters. We'd be seeing a good deal more of Lenny and Carl in the years to come (much like Moe, they were beneficiaries of Barney's soft retirement as Homer's best friend), and in a few seasons' time this joke was taken to greater extremes still, with gags based around the implication that Lenny and Carl had this really complicated, emotionally-charged relationship, the nature of which wasn't entirely clear. Were they friends? On and off lovers? Heterosexual life partners? What was evident is that they had a prevailing co-dependency, stemming from the arch observation that they were seldom seen apart. The real theme of "Mountains of Madness" is characters being stuck together and getting on each other's nerves, and Lenny and Carl have been joined at the hip in a meta sense for quite some time; their mysterious head-butting in this episode warrants no deeper explanation than that. This non-stop discord doesn't prevent them from being a functional duo - it's noteworthy that Lenny and Carl would have been the rightful winners, since they were the first pair to make it to the correct location without cheating, not realising that the cabin had been buried in an avalanche. They were also the first pair to scout out the incorrect cabin, the ranger station that everyone convenes in when it transpires to be the only visible building in the mountain (were they disappointed by the lack of sandwiches and moderately priced champagne?). Clearly, Lenny and Carl are a formidable team, whether they're at ease with that or not. It adds an extra layer of injustice to the ending, when Burns fires Lenny for being the last to make it inside the cabin (even if it doesn't stick) and Lenny winds up at the bottom of a hole. That's the other major gag that "Mountains of Madness" gets off the ground - the one about Lenny being a victim of endless physical misfortune. That much he endures without Carl's camaraderie.
The cleverest stroke of irony, in an episode centred on the havoc that arises when trust and cooperation break down, is that the avalanches are triggered by instances of Homer and Burns being perfectly in sync - firstly, when they chink their champagne glasses, and secondly when, having tunnelled their way through the snow pile caused by the previous avalanche, they high five one another in celebration, only to be buried underneath an even deeper pile. It's as sure a sign as any that the alliance is an unholy one. In Homer's case, it's practically Faustian - notice how, at the peak of their delusions, Burns has assumed an uncannily devilish look, complete with fiery red attire and a pointed poking device? Burns was the one who lured Homer over to the dark side, promising him champagne and job security in exchange for twisting the rules; entrapment with his boss becomes a chilling wake-up call as to what kind of innately treacherous being he was cozying up to this entire time. You could apply a similar reading from Burns' perspective, with the avalanches being a karmic retribution for his lowering himself to Homer's standards - the fateful chink was, after all, in response to Burns' gratitude for learning Homer's trick for retrieving a bowl of dip from further up the table without having to get up (by stomping his foot on the table and moving it with the vibrations). If you ally yourself with a boor, you'll get boorishness. Each man regards the other as a ticking time bomb, although we mostly see the situation from Homer's point of view. Clearly, Burns is the more dangerous because he's the more susceptible to cabin fever (presumably because he has a lower threshold for goodwill to begin with). As was noted when I covered "Homer The Smithers", one of the refreshing things about the Burns-Homer pairing is that Burns tends to be so out of touch that he sometimes gives Homer the chance to be the (comparative) straight man. Homer manages to stay grounded for much of the ordeal, and he proves the more adept survivalist; it's off the back of his labour that they're able to tunnel their way out of that first snow pile, something to which Burns is too feeble to contribute. While they have a joint hand causing in the avalanches, Burns has a far more poisonous influence on their deterioration inside the cabin, twisting Homer's innocuous suggestion that they keep themselves occupied by building snowmen into the megalomaniacal endeavour of building "real men, out of snow!" Why go to the lengths of constructing elaborate fantasies when you can convey Burns' slide into insanity through subtler, more unsettling means, such as his grotesque observation on having assembled his so-called real man out of snow: "206 bones, 50 miles of small intestine, full pouting lips...why, this fellow is less a snowman than a god!"
"Mountain of Madness" is at its best wherever it's able to suggest a vague but pervasive sense of the weird and the sinister that goes hand in hand with the monotonous and the mundane. Despite the ranger's insistence that "budget cutbacks have forced us to eliminate anything in the least bit entertaining", the second and third best gags of the episode both involve the collection of hellish exhibits at the park visitor centre. The second best is that Smokey the Bear animatronic that asks visitors "Only WHO can prevent forest fires?" and is apparently programmed to tell them they're wrong no matter what answer they pick. The third is that ancient park film featuring the incomprehensible narration of naturalist John Muir (or, more accurately, Marge's quietly perturbed reaction to it). My pick for the episode's zenith, however, is a moment that I rarely ever see brought up in discussions - when Burns tries using a telegraph machine to contact the outside world, only to get through to a machine housed in yet another hellish exhibit, this one in the Springfield Museum (which is as deserted as ever), alongside a neglected mannequin of Samuel Morse. The specific detail that sells this gag for me, more so than the mannequin's lifeless eyes and the cobwebs dangled across its shoulders, is that static smile visible behind its slightly misaligned beard and moustache. That's a smile that really haunted me in my youth, seeming to greet Burns' unheard distress call with equal parts obliviousness and taunting. What better face for the rescue that will not be coming, from a town that packed all functional communication into a museum exhibit and forgot about it long ago?
In fact, there seems to be something of a running theme about human (or bear) shaped objects taking on a mocking life of their own. The snow gods that Burns and Homer build (and dress in their own clothing) have the same uncanniness:
Homer, who at this point is still hanging onto some fraying line of sanity, reminds us that they're only snowmen. Burns, though, insists that there's more going on behind those button eyes: "Snowmen have peepers. Peepers to watch for a moment of weakness and then BAFF! Comes the knock of the wood on the head and we're down!" If Burns is sounding oddly convincing it's because in a way, he's right. The snowmen have become monstrous reflections of their decaying mental state; Burns senses that things are bound to get ugly because he's projecting onto the snowmen his own escalating desire to put a block of wood to Homer's skull at his first sign of weakness (and his suspicion that Homer would like to do the same to him). Homer asks what they should do; Burns indicates that their alliance is off, with the ominous response: "Oh, wouldn't you like to know..." And just like that, Burns has slipped into the well of raving paranoia, and he's taken Homer down with him.
This is hair-raising stuff, but at its heart it knows how silly it is. The situation hinges on a string of absurdities that are either casually hand-waved or played at as low-key a level as possible. Firstly, it is a bit daft that the avalanche should be activated by a small chink of champagne glasses, when Homer's repeated pounding on the table just a few moments prior wasn't enough to tip the snow over, but I suppose we've already accounted for that in a symbolic sense. Just as convenient is that no one else climbing the mountain should notice these avalanches or be affected by them in any way, something the script cheekily breezes past by including a brief, knowing moment with Lenny asking Carl if he heard something, and Carl churlishly suggesting that Lenny might be schizophrenic. The biggest contrivance, though, is one that's never made even vaguely
explicit, which is that Homer and Burns couldn't
have been stuck inside that cabin for more than a few hours maximum. Most of
the episode takes place in the course of a single day, and there's not
even a hint of the skies beginning to darken by the end. I'm sure your
perception of time is going to differ when you're trapped indoors with
minimal stimulation and you can't even see if it's still daylight out or
not, but nevertheless, it didn't take Homer and Burns long to crack, did
it? All this fuss because they couldn't tolerate a single afternoon in each other's enforced company.
The crisis intensifies as Homer and Burns enter into a stalemate of silent, mutual suspicion. Homer thinks that Burns is trying to hypnotise him (but not in the good Las Vegas way), while Burns assumes Homer must be plotting to murder him. (More specifically, he thinks Homer wants to kill him so he can ride his corpse down the mountain to safety. A deliriously absurd notion, and yet Homer did in fact ride a corpse down a mountain a mere season later in "King of The Hill". Both scripts were written by Swartzwelder, so I'll assume either he took inspiration from his earlier work or he has an unhealthy obsession.) As each looks into the other's eyes, what he's really gazing into is the abyss of his own brain-rotting paranoia. The "Congratulations Teamworkers" banner hangs in tatters in the backdrop; strip away the tenets of civilisation and it really is every person for themselves. By now, the script has exercised enough restraint to finally allow a dash of feverish fantasy to mingle with the cold realities. Burns openly declares his desire to vanquish Homer, and is perceived by Homer as having amassed his own army of pickelhaube-wearing snowmen. Homer desperately counters that he has powers of his own - political powers! - whereupon Burns perceives him as being flanked by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Ghandi and what I'm guessing is Tutankhamun. The two armies advance on one another, but of course Burns and Homer are the only ones there. After a spectacularly uncoordinated tussle, Burns manages to rupture the propane tank that's heating the cabin, causing it to ignite and propel the entire building out of the snow. At which point both men immediately, almost incongruously call out to one another for reassurance - all it took was the awakening of an external threat to remind them that there are bigger, more destructive forces out there than the two of them. Meanwhile, everyone else has arrived safely at the ranger station and finally realised that Burns and Homer are missing. They are about to organise a search party when the rocket house suddenly comes hurtling in their direction. A brutal collision seems all but inevitable, until the propane abruptly burns out and the cabin glides to a gentle halt. Burns and Homer emerge in one piece, dishevelled and thoroughly humbled in front of everyone who managed to make it to the cabin (albeit the wrong one) off the back of honest teamwork.
Burns, though, isn't willing to let his ascendancy go - as Homer heads outside to embrace the family he feared he'd never see again, he stays put inside the cabin, managing to claim its cursed confines as his trophy by reasserting his condition that the last employee to enter gets fired. Lenny has the misfortune of being right at the back of the ensuing stampede, although even Burns seems to realise the pettiness of this move, since he rescinds it immediately after, thus keeping the status quo safely in order. (In truth, it was a stroke of good fortune that Lenny fell down that hole, otherwise he might have mouthed off at Burns and not been so easily forgiven.) The final sequence is another variation on a Simpsons standard (previously observed in "Black Widower" and "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show"), in which characters laugh in exaggerated ways that barely disguise the traumas of the preceding 20 minutes - an apprehension made all the more salient by having Homer and Burns intermittently stop laughing to glower warily at one another. There's also a bit of sly meta humor in Burn's observation that, "When you've been through something like that with a person, you never want to see that person again." By the next episode, he'll have memory holed the entire affair, as he has every prior Homer encounter, and from his perspective it will be as though he and Homer never met. It's one way of protecting yourself from dealing with the lingering psychological horrors. Still, he's right to be leery, since there's is no escape from the broader entrapment that will make Homer a source of trouble for him again before too long. Sorry Burns, but you're stuck with Homer. No one heard your SOS.
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