For a long stretch of the 20th Century, UK road sense was synonymous with a little red rodent with brilliant manners and an impeccable grasp of the kerb drill. 1953 saw the genesis of Tufty Fluffytail, an anthropomorphic squirrel created by Elsie Mills of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) as part of an initiative designed to instil safety awareness in the very young. By 1961, the character had grown sufficiently in stature that a Tufty Club was formed, and would be an educational powerhouse for the ensuing two decades. Tufty's adventures were detailed in a series of stories, written by Mills and illustrated by Kenneth Langstaff, each with an explicit teaching about avoiding some form of calamity. Tufty lived in a community of creatures known as the Furryfolk, and was frequently seen with his friends Bobby Brown Rabbit, Minnie Mole, Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Though the campaign was predominantly associated with a common concern facing wildlife and small children - how to avoid becoming road kill in a world increasingly dominated by traffic and tarmac - the Tufty tome dealt with all manner of safety considerations, to hidden hazards around the home to playing safe near water to sensible behaviour at firework displays. Attempting to steer these guileless youngsters in the right direction were an assortment of adult authority figures, including Tufty's parents, the perpetually stern Policeman Badger, schoolteacher Mrs Owl and a hedgehog crossing guard whose moniker eludes me.
I recall Tufty being a pretty ubiquitous part of my early childhood - I had multiple books, an audio cassette and I think even a Tufty board game - so I find it interesting just how few other Millennials I've encountered, even older Millennials, who seem to remember who he was. I've entertained the possibility that he might have faded a bit by the late 1980s and I had all this Tufty stuff due to coming into some 70s kid's unwanted junk through a car boot sale. And yet, as per the timeline on RoSPA's official website, Tufty was still around by the early 1990s, when he was subject to a modern redesign that presumably did not resonate well with the Nintendo generation; from there, things dropped off until 2007, when an appearance on the BBC time travel drama Life on Mars gave him momentary relevance.
Whether you regard Tufty as a beloved childhood icon or an archaic obscurity, I hope it won't go amiss if I confess my deepest darkest secret regarding the bright-eyed blighter - I actually didn't like him that much. Oh, I liked the stories and the Furryfolk in general, but there was something about the lead character that I always resented. My big lingering reservation about Tufty, as a child, was that he always did everything right. And that's terrible.
Far be it from me to question the effectiveness of the Tufty campaign. It ran for four decades, at its peak the Tufty Club boasted over two million members and 25,000 branches, and just a year after the club was launched, the director general of RoSPA, Brigadier R.F.E. Stoney, had already noted a significant reduction in deaths among children under 5. That's all very excellent. Go Tufty! For me, though, there was little appeal in a hero who was so stainless and who made so very few mistakes. I appreciate that Tufty was supposed to be a character who modelled good behaviour and whom kids could look up to, but the trouble is that he wasn't at all relatable. I remember precisely one Tufty tale, from that audio cassette, in which Tufty had his turn at being the fuck-up, and it involved him leaving toys on the stairs and causing his mother to take a tumble. That story was one of my favourites, because it was so satisfying seeing the goody two-shoes be knocked off his high horse for a change. Otherwise, you had your occasional example of Bobby Brown Rabbit doing things wrong (often relating to his two younger sisters, whom he was hopeless at looking out for) but duties for modelling bad and unadvisable behaviour typically fell on Harry Hare and Willy Weasel. Harry was basically the anti-Tufty, in that he was a cocky bastard whose understanding of consequence was practically zero, while Willy was a pliable milksop who could be easily led astray with the wrong influence (ie: Harry). Neither character was malicious or actively looking to cause trouble, but they had a heck of a knack for inviting it. The species alignment is unsurprising - squirrels and rabbits are considered cute and innocuous, while hares have an Aesopian association with impulsive bravado and weasels are traditionally depicted as the little seeds of chaos of the animal kingdom (even if, in Willy's case, that chaos has no basis in any predatory instinct). If you're wondering where Minnie Mole fit into the equation, she was the token female friend whom I recall got largely sidelined. Off the top of my head I only remember one story where Minnie was the central character, which involved her getting impatient waiting for her mother to collect her from school and wandering into the street by herself.
To me, Harry was the most interesting character because he was the most fallible of the bunch. Something about his rebellious spirit, however ill-fated, evoked admiration. His naivety and his difficulty in differentiating right from wrong gave him an endearing vulnerability. He was a character the reader could learn along with, as opposed to having the superiority of an already perfect character rubbed in our faces. I found myself rooting for Harry to come through, however probable it was that he was going to come a cropper. Just as any rare instance of Tufty being humbled was received with great satisfaction, any intermittent yarn where Harry was able to demonstrate sound judgement, or at least not become the cautionary example, was something to be savoured.
With the immense popularity of Tufty tales, it was all but inevitable that animated outings would follow, and these came courtesy of John Hardwick and Bob Bura of Stop Motion, an animation team best known for the "Trumptionshire Trilogy", a series of programs comprised of Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley. Their Tufty collaborations began in 1967 with the 12-minute theatrical short The Furryfolk on Holiday, which dealt with various aspects of safety at the beach. In 1973, a series of television fillers followed, featuring narration by Bernard Cribbins. The most infamous of these among public information film connoisseurs is "Ice Cream Van", which depicts what happens when the titular vehicle stops at Tufty's street and Tufty and Willy each go to get a soft serve. Tufty does the sensible thing and asks his mother to accompany him, whereas Willy heads out without adult supervision, with disastrous results. On this occasion, Willy didn't need the peer pressure of Harry to lure him into taking risks, with the promise of ice cream proving incentive enough.
The Tufty fillers were targeted at children under 5, and
were accordingly a gentler breed of PIF, steering clear of the muted eeriness
of the "Charley Says" series or the nightmarish metaphors of "Lonely
Water". There is a warmth and geniality both to the animation and to
Cribbins' narration. "Ice Cream Van" does not, nevertheless, soft pedal
its message, emphasising the van's deceptive duality as a vendor of
exciting treats and a potential deathtrap drawing children to the
hazardous roadside. Having collected his ice cream, Willy makes the
mistake of crossing out beside the parked van, so that an incoming
vehicle does not see him until he's immediately in front of it. The
moment of impact is tastefully obscured by the van, though a dull
telltale thud is highly audible, making it obvious what kind of grisliness is playing out behind it. The good news is that Willy does not
seem too seriously injured - he's last seen sitting upright, fully
conscious - although the sight of his inert leg and dropped ice cream
make for pitiable signifiers of shattered innocence. Cribbins mournfully
observes that, "Willy has been hurt, and all because he didn't ask his
mummy to go with him to the ice cream van", before the PIF ends on a moment
of comfort, in having Tufty and Mrs Fluffytail walk out and stand
compassionately over their wounded compatriot. Significantly, they walk
together and retain their tight hold of one another's hands, a wholesome
gesture that reinforces the PIF's message whilst underscoring the sorry
absence of parental vigilance around our wayward weasel. Cribbins'
narration places the blame for the accident squarely on Willy, but maybe
the greater onus was on his parents to not allow such a young child to
wander the streets unsupervised to begin with (I'm assuming Tufty and his friends aren't meant to be significantly older than
the audience they were aimed at). One notably dated component is that Cribbins explicitly identifies it as the mother's role to look out for young children - the notion of the father having caregiving responsibilities is apparently unthinkable.
A slight quirk of these Tufty fillers is that, for those
who know the squirrel primarily as a PIF character and not from the
Mills books, it is Willy Weasel who's remembered as the neighbourhood
shit-stirrer. By comparison, Harry got off surprisingly lightly in his animated
form. He had a somewhat harder time in The Furryfolk on Holiday,
when an impromptu swimming session necessitated his being rescued by
Policeman Badger. His television presence, however, was restricted to a single
filler, where he himself didn't suffer any repercussions for his
ill-advised actions, outside of the trauma of witnessing Willy being
knocked down by a car...again. Yes, this is by far the grimmest thing
about these Tufty animations - they somehow made Willy being hit by
traffic and breaking his leg into a running theme. The first time it happens, in "Ice Cream Van", it's stark and upsetting. When it happens a second time, in "Playing Near The Road", it takes on a slightly more unintentionally comedic edge, since you rather get the impression that this whole neighbourhood might have it in for Willy (a suggestion not dispelled by Policeman Badger's total indifference to the motorist who knocked him down, or the distinctly unprofessional manner in which he hauls the injured Willy to his feet and lets him stagger back to the pavement). It casts a darker shade upon the Furryfolk - bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and suspiciously slow to brake for weasels.
The recent passing of Simpsons composer Alf Clausen got me wanting to cover an episode in which music plays a significant part. The most obvious candidate was already taken - and besides, I did ideally want it to be an episode in which music is celebrated as something expressive and transcendent, not one in which we simply have a good giggle about how camp and silly musical storytelling is. So "Round Springfield" (2F32) of Season 6 seemed like the best possible option, with bonus points for the fact that it is a story about bidding farewell to a musical legend who maybe didn't get the full recognition he deserved within his lifetime. Debuting on April 30th 1995, this was a historic episode, marking the first occasion on which one of the show's established characters was killed off. It was not the first episode to deal with the subject of death and bereavement - "Old Money" of Season 2 can claim that honor, although the theme of grief was far less pivotal in that episode, with the narrative focus being primarily on Abe's estrangement from Homer. Here, the issue is all the more stark and hard-hitting for being presented from the perspective of one of the show's younger and more ingenuous characters. Lisa left contemplating matters of life, death and resilience when a chance reunion with her mentor, the enigmatic blues musician Bleeding Gums Murphy (guest voice of Ron Taylor), is cut tragically short by an unspecified terminal illness she did not see coming.
I confess that I know very little about how "Round Springfield" was marketed in the run-up to
its airing. I personally did not get to see the episode until roughly a year after its Sky 1 premiere, and with the internet still being this weird and slightly alien-sounding rumble on the horizon, I had no means of accessing spoilers online. Later instances in which the show pulled this same macabre move tended to be preceded by promotional blitzs designed to drum up suspense about the identity of the condemned character (Maude Flanders and Rabbi Krustofsky spring to mind, although neither example worked out anywhere near as well as the King of The Hill "Propane Boom" cliffhanger). I would hazard a guess that this did NOT happen here, if only because the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter was right around the corner, and why would they risk stealing that publicity stunt's thunder? I do not know if viewers were made aware in advance that a character was going to die, let alone if there was any mystery regarding who it might be. Perhaps the title offered a clue to those hip to the 1986 picture Round Midnight, which follows the final days of a drug-addicted saxophonist (played by jazz legend Dexter Gordan) and his friendship with the fan he encounters after travelling to Paris. All I can say is that, having entered into the episode blind, I can attest that it really is the best way to first experience it, with your perspective actually aligned with Lisa's. There are clues, certainly, that something more troublesome might be unfolding (not least in that Lisa finds Bleeding laid out in a hospital bed) but we are at first inclined to share in her naivety, being too caught up in the joyfulness of the reunion, and the robustness of the characters' rapport. Alarm bells might start to ring should we pick up on the fact that the one thing the characters are emphatically not discussing is the nature of Bleeding's condition, as if it's something that neither party can bring themselves to acknowledge. But Bleeding certainly never presents as a man who is at death's door (to the point that it requires some suspension of disbelief that he'd still be able to belt out such a vigorous jamming session on his saxophone in what transpires to be his last meeting with Lisa). He seems much too alive, still so full of passion for his craft and with warmth and wisdom for Lisa. So when tragedy strikes, it comes with a devastating abruptness that feels all-too real. The line between this world and the next is such a fragile one, something this episode captures so bitterly. One moment he's giving Lisa some pointers and encouragement before she plays in her school recital, the next she's rushing back to tell him how well her performance went, only to discover that he's no longer there.
What fascinates me about "Round Springfield" is that it's an episode that allows itself time to be sad, in a way that was honestly quite unusual for this point in the series. There's comic levity in the subplot, which involves Bart suffering at the hands of yet another shoddy Krusty product (a jagged metal hoop that's inexplicably included as a freebie in his brand of cereal), and in whatever Homer is up to on the sidelines (of note, there's a running gag where a hot dog vendor seems to seek him out in the most inappropriate of places), but the loss of Bleeding and its impact on Lisa are treated with genuine reverence. There are points where it honestly seems reminiscent of the more melancholic tone endemic to the first three seasons of the show; it has a certain moodiness of atmosphere, and an eye for emphasising the loneliness and finer disappointments of the characters' lives in a way that was so central to early installments like "Life on The Fast Lane", "Colonel Homer" and Bleeding Gums' debut episode "Moaning Lisa". I tend to think of this model of Simpsons storytelling as having bowed out with "A Streetcar Named Marge" at the start of Season 4, but with the reappearance of Mr Murphy it momentarily lives again. And this would be the big twist - I'm forever blaming this shift in tone on then-showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss and their preference for sillier, rapid-fire humor over character-driven storytelling, yet they were the minds behind this episode. The script itself was written by Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia, but the plot was Jean and Reiss's brainchild, and they receive a story credit. Credits for story alone were unusual on The Simpsons, and it's explained on the DVD commentary that Jean and Reiss requested it on this are occasion because they'd envisioned the episode being a big winner on the awards front and wanted their names attached. (It was all in vain; the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year was scooped up by another Lisa-orientated episode, "Lisa's Wedding", which offered something even more novel than the death of a jazz musician - a hair-raising peek into the distant dystopian future of 2010). By Jean and Reiss's standards, "Round Springfield" is a remarkably grounded narrative. Even the lighter touches, such as the hot dog vendor, seem deliberately smaller and more restrained than much of what we'd seen them do throughout Season 4. That is, until we get the ending. With the closing sequence, the episode is suddenly immersed in the signature off-the-wall humor that was all over Jean and Reiss's own series The Critic (a perception bolstered in how it is essentially an extended parody of a popular moment from a contemporary movie). That ending is the key factor that disqualifies it from playing like a total throwback to those earlier seasons. And it is such a deeply bizarre way to conclude this story. I don't even mean that as a criticism. It's weird in ways that are grand, fun and very moving. But if you stop to think about it, what is even going on in that ending? Because surely Bleeding didn't really...well, we'll get to it.
"Round Springfield" is, admittedly, another example of an episode where the optics maybe aren't so great when viewed from a particular angle. I mean, think about this for a moment. They made the bold decision to kill off a (semi) recurring cast member, and they chose one of their few African American characters. In other words, the black guy died first. That had never been done before, right? Adding fuel to the fire is that, when Bleeding Gums Murphy was introduced in "Moaning Lisa", he was a textbook example of the Magical Negro, being a somewhat mysterious black character whose sole function within the story was to make Lisa feel more confident about her place in the world. Now, to an extent, all supporting characters are bound by the law of Simpsons-centrism - the Simpsons ARE the centre of this confounding little universe, and everything the rest of Springfield gets up to must in some way relate back to them and be in service of them. But it's felt particularly strongly with the Elliotts, a group of characters who effectively serve as the family's guardian angels. I went over my reasoning in more detail in my review of "Moaning Lisa", but to recap, "Elliotts" was a term I came up for a foursome of characters from the show's early years (named for the cartoon dragon from Disney's Pete's Dragon), whom I'd clumped into a collective as a sort of counterpoint to the Home-Wreckers - in addition to Bleeding Gums, the others are Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), Bergstrom (from "Lisa's Substitute") and Kompowsky (from "Stark Raving Dad"). What they have in common is an uncannily benevolent, otherworldly aura and that they are all, significantly, outsiders to the Simpsons' White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heteronormative domesticity. Bleeding's a Magical Negro, Karl's a Magical Queer, Bergstrom's a Magical Jew, Kompowsky's a...hmm, is the Magical Psychiatric Patient a thing? It could be. The point is that each of the Elliotts represents a marginalised figure within the Springfield community. Their outsider status might have given them a strength and a perspective on life that would otherwise be unknown to the Simpsons, but all that matters is that they're able to share those pearls of wisdom with one or more of the family and go merrily on their way, satisfied that their work is done. They can help to prop up the central dynamic, but they have no business in sticking around to be a part of it. Of the four, Bergstrom is the only one who could be feasibly described as having anything even resembling an agenda of his own (in that he doesn't lose sight of the fact that his time with Lisa is only a short-term job assignment and he'll soon have bigger fish to fry in the projects of Capital City). For clarity, I like the Elliotts and think they're all great and beautifully realised characters, but there's little downplaying that this dubious convention informs a huge part who they are and how the narrative regards them.
Bleeding Gums retains the honor of being the only Elliott to ever be brought back to any significant capacity, even three decades on from the episode's debut, although this wasn't for a lack of interest on the writers' part. (Returns for Karl and Kompowsky were on the cards but fell through. I am not, though, aware of there being any serious motions for a Bergstrom sequel; I suspect that Dustin Hoffman - sorry, Sam Etic - regarded it as a one-and-done gig.) His reappearance in "Round Springfield" might have been an opportunity to expand on his character and have him grow a little outside of his role as a mentor figure to Lisa - but nope, if anything they only doubled down on his Magical Negro credentials, sacrificing him so that Lisa could undergo character growth of her own, before finally depicting him as a literal spirit in the sky, jamming with his newly-enlightened protege to a Carole King tune (like I say, we'll get to that goofy ending in due course).
None of this was done maliciously, of course. But what is just as telling is how Bleeding Gums was singled out as the kind of perfectly expendable character who could be jettisoned for the feels (and the awards bait). The Season 7 clip show "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular", would infamously mock him (alongside Dr Marvin Monroe) for never having been a popular character, and therefore not one that viewers were presumably expected to care about, although the truth with Bleeding really lands somewhere closer to the middle. On the DVD commentary, Jean does indeed state that they obviously weren't going to kill off a character like Mr Burns whom they'd be wanting to use again, but he also recounts that Bleeding was chosen because he was a character whom people felt warmly toward, in no small way thanks to Taylor's performance. He offered the best of both worlds, in not being integral enough to the core universe that it would be an especially startling development to retire him to the jazz club in the sky, but being sympathetic enough that it would still hurt viewers to see him go. If Reiss had had his way, then the show would have taken a very different path and killed off Marge's mother (a move that Julie Kavner might actually have been fully on board with, as I understand she hated doing Jackie Bouvier's voice), but he concedes that Bleeding turned out to be a better choice. Perhaps bumping off someone within the family, however seldom seen, was deemed too radical. Or maybe it came down to the fact that Bleeding is a fundamentally gentle soul, which Jackie is not. He expresses no outward bitterness or regret for the life that he's led (other than his $1,500 a day Faberge egg habit, which is the closest we get to a heroin allusion), and his legacy is complicated only in the sense that his inherent goodness went under most people's radars. He's a wholly angelic being we're intended to shed a tear for but also conversely write off as a character of no genuine consequence. Outside of what he meant to Lisa, that is.
The Lisa factor is another big reason, I'm sure, why Bleeding was ultimately the one placed on the chopping block. She is such a compelling character around which to craft emotional stories, possessing a wisdom well beyond her years but still having all the vulnerabilities of a child. The loss of a friend like Bleeding would hit her tremendously, even with life already having dealt her so many blows with its cruel impermanences. As Kompowsky's episode made clear, she was very deeply affected by the death of the original Snowball (and her hamster named Snuffy, though he comes up less often). There are also those losses she'd suffered that didn't entail mortality, with her being all but forced to surrender her beloved pony Princess and the man she'd looked up to as a substitute father figure abandoning her for a job in Capital City. In both instances, Lisa's distinctly child-like naivety regarding the impending heartbreak was such a powerful factor. She was so thrilled to have Princess that it seemingly never occurred to her just how difficult and impractical it was for her family to afford such a high maintenance animal. She was so besotted with Bergstrom that she lost sight of the fact that he was never going to be there on a long-term basis. Here, she's so overjoyed to have Bleeding back in her life that she doesn't question what he might be doing in the Springfield Hospital, and it seems that Bleeding doesn't have the heart to outright tell her. Was he himself aware that he wasn't going to make it? Yes, and I think there is a specific moment in the episode where we can pinpoint him making what seems like a conscious farewell to Lisa. It's a scene that hits so hard on repeat viewings, when we know what's coming. As Lisa prepares to go off to her recital, Bleeding hands her his saxophone and tells her to take it with her for luck. While Lisa is honored, she does not grasp the full significance of this gesture, presumably thinking that he's just lending it to her for the recital. With hindsight, it seems obvious that Bleeding gave it to her because he knew he wouldn't be needing it. In addition, by giving her his saxophone he is in effect passing the torch to her to go out and perform great music in his stead. There's a more macabre foreshadowing in his telling Lisa that she's going to "knock 'em dead" (by which he likely to alludes to Lisa's potential to go far in life, not just at this particular recital), followed by an ominous cough, the only symptom of ill-health he's seen to exhibit. Finally, as she leaves his side, there's a lingering emphasis on him waving to her, as if he knows this will be their last goodbye.
What always made the relationship between Lisa and Bleeding so affecting is in how they were ostensibly so mismatched, yet connected so readily as social misfits with a mutual appreciation for jazz and the importance of creative expression. When Lisa first encountered Bleeding back in Season 1, he gave her the much-needed assurance that she was not alone in the world, at a time when she felt that no one understood her. (Perhaps fearing that newer viewers wouldn't know who Bleeding was, the episode incorporates a small clip from "Moaning Lisa", leading to a jarring clash of art styles; I suppose it's not so strange when we consider that for several years the series still felt the need to keep reminding us who Sideshow Bob was every time he showed up.) In "Round Springfield" we see how Lisa is eventually able to return the favour, in demonstrating to Bleeding that his life and music had value, at a time when he seemed destined to die alone and all forgotten. ("You've had some career...although the moral seems to be that a lifetime of jazz leads you sad and lonely." "Well, before you came to visit I would have agreed with you.") Before Lisa, nobody had come to visit Bleeding at the hospital; when she asks about his family, he tells her he doesn't really have one. (In what can only be a deliberate callback to a joke in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", it's heavily hinted that Bleeding and Dr Hibbert are brothers who lost contact a long time ago, although neither party seems to connect the dots. This also means that Bleeding had a second brother he possibly didn't even know about.) The grim reality doesn't fully set in until after his death, when Lisa attends his funeral and discovers that she's the only mourner there; nobody else in town knew who Bleeding was or cares that he's gone. It's a realisation that transforms Lisa's grief into red-hot grit and takes her on her first step toward healing, with the knowledge that responsibility for keeping her friend's memory alive rests solely on her.
Before then, we get a series of short scenes that feel reminiscent of "Moaning Lisa", with the family all showing awareness of Lisa's suffering and doing their bit to try and help, even if they don't necessarily have the kinds of answers she's seeking. Homer looks as though he might have a sensible response, in reminding Lisa of how she coped when Snowball died, but ends up reaching the most inappropriate possible conclusion from that train of thought: "All we have to do is go down to the pound and get a new jazzman." Maggie attempts to soothe Lisa's aching soul the only way she knows how, by offering Lisa her pacifier (it doesn't help Lisa, but the tactic later proves effective on Homer, who is rattled by his own failure to say the right thing). Bart shares with her his belief in reincarnation - specifically, that when you die you can come back in a form of your own choosing. He's intent on being a butterfly in his next life, because as he sees it he'll be able to commit acts of arson and be totally above suspicion. (Something I find particularly disturbing about Bart's butterfly fantasy is the fact that everyone else in it - Skinner, Wiggum, Lou and Eddie - are all the same age they are in the present, so is Bart banking on dying imminently?). Deciding that she needs to consult someone with a little more experience and wisdom, Lisa turns to Abe, who seems to think he's in a Final Destination scenario, with Death conspiring against him at every turning. (Really, the guises in which he sees Death manifesting aren't that far off. Maggie? Well, she'd make an attempt on Burns' life soon enough. Snowball II? As Homer alluded to above, she's a walking reminder of the grisly fate that befell the original Snowball. The bird bath? Odd are that something drowned in there at some time or other.) Marge, who nearly sent Lisa down a terribly destructive path in "Moaning Lisa", here gets to be the voice of reason, assuring her daughter that the sadness she feels is normal and making the practical suggestion that she might honor Bleeding's memory by asking the local jazz station to do a tribute to him. Lisa immediately runs into a roadblock - K-Jazz is happy to fulfil her request, but they don't have Bleeding's sole album, Sax on The Beach, in their library, and copies are hard to come by. As luck would have it, Comic Book Guy has one for sale in his store, but it comes with a hefty $250 price tag, which is increased to $500 when Comic Book Guy learns that the artist in question is dead. Knowing she could never afford it, Lisa sinks back into despair, only for help to arrive from the aspiring lepidopteran arsonist, whose recent traumatic experience with that piece of jagged metal has brought him a cash settlement of precisely $500.
Bart's subplot, which involves him falling ill after unwittingly ingesting the cereal prize from Hell and requiring emergency surgery, is (in spite of its gruesome premise) predominantly there to bring comic balance to a more sombre than usual A-story. It is, though, no arbitrary joke-fest, with the resolutions to these respective stories dovetailing in a way that is meaningful and rewarding. As fate would have it, Bart's swallowing of the metal hoop occurs on a morning before a history test that he's ill-prepared for; when he starts to complain of intense pains in his stomach, Marge and Homer, wary that he's pulled this exact shit to get out of a test before, pack him off to school, although Lisa voices the opinion that his illness might be genuine this time. This in itself feels like a nice callback to the events of "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa was the only character who knew that Bart was faking his amoria phlebitis; it speaks volumes to their sibling connection that she's consistently able to tell the difference. When Bart finally receives a settlement from Krusty (lawyer Lionel Hutz has actually scammed him out of a much more substantial sum, but $500 seems like a huge amount to the trusting eyes of impressible youth), he's all prepared to blow it on the most frivolous purchase imaginable - a limited edition pog (remember those?) with Steve Allen's face on - but his conscience prevails and he instead buys Lisa the elusive album (the sequence detailing Bart's dilemma, which repeatedly shifts between three different leitmotifs, is in itself such a wonderful testament to Clausen's composing talents). He explains to Lisa that he felt he owed it to her for being the only person to take his side when he got sick. It's a lovely gesture that upholds my personal view of Bart and Lisa having the strongest bond out of all of the Simpsons, but it has deeper significance still, as a final affirmation to Lisa that, even with her soulmate sadly departed, she does not have to worry about being alone in the world. No matter what, she can always count on her family to come through for her.
At last the time has come to dig into that bizarro finale. Even with that copy of Sax on The Beach safely within her mits, Lisa's tribute seems doomed to fall at the second hurdle, that being K-jazz's ridiculously weak broadcast range; even when standing immediately outside the station with a portable radio, she is unable to pick up their transmission of Bleeding's music. That is until a thunder cloud appears in the sky, and a bolt of lightning strikes the K-Jazz antenna, making it so powerful that the broadcast is heard and enjoyed all over Springfield. The Deus ex Thunder Cloud subsequently assumes the form of none other than Bleeding himself, assuring Lisa that her actions made him happy. This much is a parody of the sequence from Disney's The Lion King in which the deceased Mufasa appears amid the night sky and urges the emotionally lost Simba to remember who he really is - a point made salient in having the ghost of Mufasa appear right next to Bleeding, with a message for Simba...or does he mean Kimba? (On the DVD commentary, Jean and Reiss fret that this is a jab that nobody would have gotten after the 90s, but they'd no need to fear - as long as there are animation buffs in this world, that line will always be hilarious and relevant.) They are then joined by the ghost of Darth Vader, making his shocking declaration of kinship with Luke, and then finally...James Earl Jones, giving an announcement on behalf of CNN? This elaborate and totally nonsensical gag is nothing less than a loving tribute to the vocal talents of Jones, who voiced Mufasa and Darth Vader and recorded announcements for CNN. (Jones was imitated here by Harry Shearer, although he had previously guest starred in the Halloween episodes "Treehouse of Horror" and more recently "Treehouse of Horror V". Somewhere out there there's also a parallel universe in which he got to voice Sideshow Bob.) It's a sequence that would seem perfectly suited to the looser, cinema-fixated reality of The Critic, but if feels just a whisker out of place in The Simpsons, no? Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of Bleeding, Mufasa, Darth Vader and James Earl Jones all being besties in the afterlife (Jones himself was very much alive when "Round Springfield" initially aired, but now in 2025 his placement alongside these deceased characters seems less absurd). But what exactly are we to make of this sequence within the context of this otherwise relatively grounded story about grappling with bereavement? Surely Mufasa, Darth and then-still-with-us Jones didn't literally manifest in the clouds above Lisa? Surely not even Bleeding was really there, jamming with Lisa to a "Jazzman" reprise? I recall that Groening made a big thing about that catfish who winked at the camera in "The War of The Simpsons", but that all seems very sensible and subdued compared to the borderline fever dream unfolding here.
"Round Springfield" leaves us with a head-scratcher - have the skies above Springfield really become host to this odd assortment of spectres (most of them culled from popular culture), or is the entire sequence nothing more than a weird and protracted bit of symbolism? Arguably, there was precedent for it in "Old Money", which included a scene in which the ghost of Bea Simmons appears to Abe on a roller-coaster, though its strangeness was of a somewhat lower-key variety and was easy enough to rationalise as representing some kind of internal monologue on the part of Abe. It should also be noted that the Disney moment it's parodying is up for a similar kind of interpretation - Rafiki makes a remark about the weather, leaving some ambiguity as to whether Mufusa's manifestation really occurred, but I suspect that most adult viewers would be inclined to read it as symbolising the soul-searching Simba undertakes in trying to understand what Rafiki means by "He lives in you." It's possible that this too is taking place inside of Lisa's head, but it goes so far with some of its concepts and gags that I fear this would make Lisa look just a little unhinged.
It is, though, a magnificent ending - triumphant, redemptive, uplifting and poignant. Perhaps it doesn't matter how well it meshes with the series' reality or what sense we make of it, so long as we gather that Lisa has reached the light at the end of the grieving tunnel and realised that she retains her connection to Bleeding Gums and everything that he taught her. I would argue that the intention here is nothing more complicated than to leave us on a spectacular emotional high following such a downbeat experience - it's the episode's markedly eccentric way of letting us know that everything is going to be okay. It helps that Lisa and Bleeding's recurring performance of "Jazzman" is allowed to be a thing of beauty in itself, tussling only with the "Oh Streetcar!" material from "A Streetcar Named Marge" for my favourite musical sequence of all the series (bless the person who compiled the Songs in The Key of Springfield album for putting those tracks right next to each other, so I could listen to them over and over in easy succession). Perhaps it ought to lose the edge for not being an original song, but that seriously doesn't matter. They imbued it with a heart and an aching all of its own. I love Carole King's original 1974 rendition too, but thanks to The Simpsons I will forever interpret it as being about Lisa's yearning to become one with her idol, both before and after his passing.
Cheers to Yeardley Smith, to Ron Taylor and not least to Alf Clausen for making this episode such a transcendent voyage. Jeers to Disney, for a whole multitude of reasons, but on this day for the downright galling manner in which, while watching this episode on Disney+, they always seemed to want to take out midway through the credits and directly into "The Springfield Connection", rather than encouraging me to enjoy the whole dazzling performance of "Jazzman" as the Simpsons gods intended. If Disney had their way, nobody would stick around for the punchline that rounds off the story: "Oh come on, Lisa, I've got a date with Billie Holiday!" Bleeding's parting words, and they couldn't give a mouse's hickey if you hear them. The sacrilege astounds.
Spanking The Monkey (1994) was the debut feature of director David O. Russell. Already I can see a bunch of you directing your cursors straight to your backwards icons. I understand. Russell is nobody's favourite person. But if you'll stay, I do have a funny personal story regarding this movie.
I first came across Spanking The Monkey (1994) in the early 2010s, when Fopp had the DVD on sale for a meagre £3. Having a keen interest in early 90s indie (and also being in the beginning stages of an academic project on the contemporary slacker archetype that unfortunately fizzled) I snapped it up. At the time, one of my favourite toys was a budget portable DVD player that I liked to bring along on long train journeys, and soon after, I went on one such journey to see my family and watched Spanking The Monkey on the way. At some point during my visit, I met up with my brother and sister-in-law, who asked me what DVD I had watched on my journey. "Spanking The Monkey", I responded, hoping that the meaning of the title would be lost on them. No such luck. They both snickered and demanded to know what kind of movie it was. "Or, do you not want to say?" I realised that they thought I'd been sitting there on that train watching a porno flick. Later that evening, my mum asked me the exact same question. I thought about lying, but instead I bit my lip and told her, bracing myself for her mortified judgement. It would be so much more embarrassing to have your mother pondering your willingness to watch dirty movies in public view than it would your siblings. "I haven't heard of that," she responded, with total nonchalance. "Is it an animated film?" It occurred to me that she didn't know what the title was a euphemism for and had assumed it was a children's movie about a monkey named Spanking, the mere suggestion of which sent me spiralling into an internal giggle fit. I mean, maybe the same creative team behind Rocko's Modern Life could have pulled off that off in a bygone era. "Not exactly," I responded. I think I told her it was a drama about a college student calling in on his family, which is entirely true, but I omitted most of the grisly specifics. I had dodged a bullet and didn't intend to tempt fate further. The film might not be pornography, but its subject matter is blue all over.
Spanking The Monkey follows Ray Aibelli (Jeremy Davies, cast off the back of his work in a Subaru commercial), a keen young MIT medical student who has journeyed to his parents' suburban home for what he assumes will be a quick stopover before moving on to a prestigious summer internship in Washington. His parents, though, have little interest in seeing him fulfil his ambitions. His mother Susan (Alberta Watson) has recently fractured her leg in a failed suicide attempt, and his father Tom (Benjamin Hendrickson) insists that Ray spend the summer caring for her and completing various other domestic chores, so that he can get back on the road and resume his occupation as a peddler of motivational videotapes. Terminally bored and mutually abandoned by the self-absorbed patriarch, mother and son slowly come together and forge an unexpected connection. By "unexpected" I of course mean incestuous. Make no mistake, Spanking The Monkey is not a feel-good tale of restoring broken relations, but a comically misanthropic study of vulnerable people making terrible decisions that all but guarantee their own destruction.
The Subaru commercial that got Davies the gig.
Although Spanking The Monkey picked up the Audience Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, getting Russell's career off to a highly auspicious start, the film now seems curiously forgotten amid Gen-X indie cinema, attaining neither the cult status of Kevin Smith's early output or the critical darlinghood of Richard Linklater's. That is a tremendous shame because, putting aside the controversies that have since befallen Russell, Davies and Watson give such beautifully compelling performances as the two malcontented leads - Ray and Susan each feel nuanced and real. And the film's examination of suburban malaise, while well-trodden territory in American cinema, scratches a unique kind of itch. For myself, its appeal has always lain in how deftly it captures that awkward transitional period when your college education has formally begun but you've yet to truly fly your parents' nest; the uncertainties of the outside world are looming, yet retreating back into a former stomping ground imposes distance, not familiarity. Summer becomes a long and tedious chasm in which your maturation is put on hold, you find you've already drifted apart from your old friends and you're eager to get back to independent living. No doubt that Spanking The Monkey was an astute and well-crafted debut. Ultimately, Russell's deliberately muted attitude toward the incestuous relationship, while certainly novel, might have proven too alienating for lasting appeal with viewers. It confounded critics who otherwise had a lot of praise for the film. Emanuel Levy, in Cinema of Outsiders, observes that Russell "handles the incest in an unsentimental, "responsible" manner, as if it were part of a normally painful coming of age. But it's not. The film leaves an uneasy feeling: Did it have to be about incest to precipitate Ray's maturation?" (p.207) Joshua Katzman, reviewing the film in the Chicago Reader, was more bothered by the characters' seeming indifference toward this most startling of developments, feeling it amounted to narrative implausibility: "when Raymond wakes up the following morning, naked and lying next to his
mother, the scene has a casual, hung-over quality that rings false...the gap between making out and waking up next to
each other the following morning is too wide." Geoff King, in American Independent Cinema, was more amenable to Russell's undramatic approach, identifying it as part of a broader queer cinema movement in which conventional household models were subverted rather than rejected: "Incest is just one ingredient in a blackly comic mix of dysfunctional family relationships...to make it seem relatively natural, and to deny it a full melodramatic treatment, is to enter into the realm of queering the family context in which it occurs." (p.239)
There are obvious comparisons to be drawn between Russell's film and Mike Nichols' The Graduate (1967). Ray, like Ben, is fresh out of college and forced to subside in the stifling suburban world of his parents. Unlike Ben, Ray enters in with a clear plan and the drive for escaping this world, something that goes badly awry over the course of the film. We sympathise with Ray's desire to get out and make good on his ambitions, even amid the intermittent suggestions that the world beyond is likely just as bleak and screwed up as the one he's looking to flee. Russell's script incorporates a particularly mordant joke that echoes a character's infamous insistence, in Nichols' film, that "the future is
plastics" - Ray explains that his personal interest is in organ
transplants, but he's chosen to focus his studies on children with AIDS, because he's told that's where the future is. Meanwhile Susan, much like Mrs Robinson, is stranded in a loveless marriage, having been left to stew in endless resentment over her own long-thwarted ambitions. She too was once an aspiring medical student with a bright future ahead of her, but was forced by Tom to pack it in. It's hinted that, as with Mrs Robinson, it was the addition of a child to the equation that interfered with her plans, although unlike Mrs Robinson, Susan had aspirations of motherhood, and sacrificing her career ambitions was a compromise demanded by Tom, who did not want to shoulder any of the responsibilities of parenthood. This certainly tracks with what we see of Tom, who seems more interested in the wellbeing of his dog, a German shepherd with dental issues, than he does in either Ray or Susan. But even then, the responsibility of pet ownership has proven too much for him; the dog and its bleeding gums are also left in the hands of Ray while Tom goes out to sell more videos. (Tom has additional motives for wanting to be on the road besides his career. Whenever he calls Ray from inside a hotel room, a naked woman can always be glimpsed somewhere within the mise-en-scène.)
A contradiction emerges with Susan. She has the opportunity, through Ray, to vicariously live out her unrealised ambitions, but her attempts at commandeering his research seem geared more toward maintaining a hold on him than in enabling him to achieve what was denied her. In one scene Ray asks her to proof read an essay he has written, and they get into a pedantic discussion over the semantics of the terms "stigmatised" and "ostracised", and which is more appropriate for describing the plight of HIV positive children. She is later perturbed to learn that Ray has submitted the essay without her final approval, and that it has impressed the medical authorities in Washington so that they'd be willing to foot the bill for a professional carer in order to secure Ray as an intern. "You got what you wanted, I'm happy for you," she insists, with ill-disguised bitterness. We sense that Susan is too jealous and possessive to genuinely want to see Ray get ahead in life, and that she would be far more comfortable seeing him held back and pulled down to her own defeated level.
Another picture with which comparisons seem apt is David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), as James Berardinelli suggests in his review on ReelViews: "Russell has set up his
world as a "normal" suburban community, then caused all sorts of bizarre things to happen. While
circumstances aren't taken to David Lynch extremes, one has a sense that the director of Blue
Velvet would appreciate what Russell has done with his canvas here." What is notable about Russell's suburbia is how eerily empty it initially seems, as if Ray and his mother have the neighbourhood all to themselves, abandoned not only by Tom but by the wider universe. There is a long stretch in the first act in which the only other occupant seen is Toni Peck (Carla Gallo), a high school student who becomes Ray's romantic interest and an inevitable target of Susan's jealousy (she accurately but ironically advises Ray that Toni is too young for him). Eventually Ray's old friend Nicky (Matthew Puckett) shows his face, along with a couple of cronies (Nicky is, incidentally, of that contemporary slacker archetype I alluded to earlier). In one of the film's subtlest tricks, it is not until after Ray has engaged in sexual intercourse with his mother that a fuller suburban community outside of Ray's family and a scant handful of peers emerges. As he flees the house in his underwear to avoid being seen by his paternal aunt Helen (Judette Jones) in his mother's bedroom (a sly variation on the old routine whereby a young lover flees the scene of the transgression to evade an overprotective parent), he is casually approached by a postal carrier (Carmine Paolini) who clearly thinks nothing of his undressed state. An imposing neighbour (Neil Connie Wallace) later appears to advise Ray and Susan that the dog has gotten loose. We end up in a doctor's waiting room where Susan engages in small talk with acquaintance Fran Gibson (Lleana Stratton), there with her own subjugated son (Jed Resnik), who is afforded no dialogue and belittled by his mother for his love of grunge music. Superficially, this sudden appearance of a hitherto absent community might suggest a broadening of Ray's horizons and his induction into the adult world. What it really signals is the descending of a fresh layer of entrapment, now that Ray has crossed a line into a situation that is all the more desperate and stifling. The falseness and insufferableness of the entire adult kingdom has come raining down on him in full force. His first instinct is to rebel against it, undermining Mrs Gibson's authority by calling her by her first name and reciting a ribald anecdote suggesting a correlation between shoe size and penis length (Sideshow Bob would be flattered, I'm sure), potentially as an expression of solidarity with her silent son, whose broken arm comically echoes Ray's own inability to perform the titular act (see below).
Compared to Lynch's suburbia, there are no swarms of ravenous bugs seen creeping below the ostensibly immaculate grasses. Instead, an omnipresent undercurrent of distastefulness is suggested through another means, one that is not made overt within the script itself, but that Russell expresses more explicitly in the DVD commentary - which is to say the film's queasy relationship with food, and the persistent subconscious reminders of what that food is fated to become. In particular, the sequence that precedes Ray's sexual intercourse with Susan involves the two of them sharing an emotional connection by throwing cheese around the bedroom. The cheese has been forced on them by Aunt Helen, who has been invited to the house (very much against the wishes of her brother) to care for Susan before a hired nurse arrives, and who bangs on a lot about the nutritional value of cheese and pineapple (and about the brilliant things her own children are up to). Hence, their throwing of the cheese is an outlet for their mutual irritation with Helen...and maybe something a whole lot ickier. According to Russell, he went with cheese because it functions as such a perfect shorthand for shit. He makes the wry observation that cheese both smells like shit and feels like shit. When his characters throw cheese at the television, they are in effect throwing their own faeces (like monkeys?) in order to illustrate their entry into territory that is messy, ill-advised and apt to necessitate a ton of awkward cleansing. It is not just cheese subjected to scatological fixation. An early montage depicting Ray's efforts to tend to Susan juxtaposes his bringing her bowlfuls of soup (which go uneaten) with him emptying the contents of her bedpan down the toilet. Eventually he coaxes her into sampling a spoonful of soup, which is immediately followed by her demanding to forgo the bedpan and be carried to the bathroom. Food in general in the picture is associated with disorder, contamination and waste. A sequence where Helen is seen slicing a pineapple incorporates a shot of her discarding the unwanted outer fragments into the trash can. Interspersed amid the sequence depicting Ray's disastrous attempted seduction of Toni are shots of the dog raiding an unattended bag of groceries and devouring its contents; as Ray and Toni later return home, soured by the experience, the dog bears the telltale remnants of ill-gotten cream upon its snout. Just as today's culinary indulgences are destined to become tomorrow's stomach gas and diarrhoea, so too are today's hopes, desires and impulses destined to become tomorrow's regrets and ingredients for self-loathing.
This preoccupation with dirt and contamination also prompts the characters to keep finding their way back into the bathroom, which the film positions as the natural centre of the household (more important than the bedroom where the fateful love making occurs). Its purpose is paradoxical, a place of cleansing in which filth also comes spilling out. It is a recurring stage for the preliminary sexual tension between Ray and Susan; while assisting his mother with showering, Ray is made to confront her naked physique and makes the discovery that she has a birth mark shaped like a shopping cart. It is also where Ray goes in a futile attempt to purge himself of his impure impulses. He is seen showering right after a sequence in which he sensually applies ointment to his mother's leg, and later after they have performed the forbidden deed, with Ray scrubbing himself so furiously that he makes his skin red. This is motivated, it seems, less by disgust at his incestuous actions than by frustration with the knock-on consequences - after sleeping with his mother, Ray misses his train to Washington and drives away Helen, jeopardizing his internship. Throughout the film, Ray ritualistically retreats to the bathroom with the aim of channelling private frustrations, a privilege that is continually denied him (by the dog, of all characters).
In one scene, coming right after his failed attempts to wash away his guilt over his arousal in applying ointment to his mother's leg, Ray's masturbation is disrupted not by the dog, but by the unwelcome arrival of Nicky, who announces himself by calling to Ray in a high-pitched, distinctively dog-like manner. Nicky provides our title drop, accurately supposing that Ray has been "spanking the monkey" (or at least attempting to) and taking this, inaccurately, as a sign that Ray has nothing better to do with his time. Masturbation, as per Russell's film, is not the act of an idle hand becoming the Devil's plaything, but a matter of taking one's destiny into one's own hands (as the theatrical trailer cheekily put it, getting a grip on yourself). Self-abuse equals self-care, self-determination, self-preservation. There is a dichotomy between spanking the monkey, the outlet Ray desperately seeks but is perpetually denied, and his submission to his incestuous impulses, a move that serves to further entangle him in his mother's fatally neurotic web. To masturbate, to relieve your sexual tensions on entirely your own terms, is to take the sensible route. Susan advises Ray to always use a condom, reminding him "these are dangerous times", but (even with AIDS reportedly being the future) STDs are not the danger facing Ray throughout the picture. Intimacy with any other person, and whatever chaos they might unleash, entails some amount of risk, but incestuous intimacy represents the reddest, hottest danger zone of all. It had to be incest, really, because it is the single act that mutually debases mother and son, making them both alert to and fully complicit in one another's transgressions. If any act could ensure that Ray and Susan are going down together, with Ray fated to never escape his mother's clutches, incest is it.
The dualling acts of incest and masturbation are finally conflated at the end of the film, when Ray reaches his lowest ebb. Tom, shortly before setting out on the road again, has dropped the ultimate bombshell, that he is no longer in a position to pay for Ray's tuition fees. In addition to missing his internship, Ray won't even be able to return to college once the summer is over. He is now stranded in his parents' world, potentially forever (Tom seems intent on reshaping Ray in his own image, by taking him under his wing as a videotape salesman, an option that is just as unpalatable to Ray as the thought of ending up like his mother). Seeing no other way out, Ray attempts to hang himself in the bathroom, but this is foiled by Susan (echoing all those thwarted attempts at masturbation, with Ray complaining that he can't accomplish anything around here), leading to another sexually charged moment between the two. Ray responds by attempting to strangle his mother, channelling his pent-up frustrations and taking his fate into his own hands by eliminating the source of his anguish (a move that would conversely seal his total debasement from deviant to killer). He is, however, unable to go through with it and releases her, shortly before Nicky appears at the window and asks Ray what he is doing. "Choking my mother", Ray admits. Nicky emits a nervous laugh but seems generally unflustered, possibly mistaking this for yet another masturbation euphemism - and indeed, it sounds deliberately reminiscent of an especially cliched one (again evoking an act of violence against an animal), choking the chicken.
The adult world is an appalling, hypocritical mess, but Russell is likewise not romantic about the adolescent world Ray is in the process of leaving behind. For as much youthful idealism as Ray himself might exude, his attempts at relating to his peers are as fused with awkwardness and mortification as you would expect from kids of his age bracket. His pursuit of Toni is just as ill-fated from the outset as his sexual entanglement with his mother, and I suspect will be even more discomforting to some sensibilities. We see the situation from Ray's perspective, in which Toni is presented as an infuriating tease who insists that she is wanting sex but hastily withdraws her consent when Ray advances, culminating in an incident where Ray pins her down and ignores her as she tells him to stop (he is subsequently shocked when she accuses him of trying to rape her). The reality is, as Susan points out (however hypocritically), that Toni is too young, and her confusion and indecisiveness on the matter is understandable. Her wavering belief that she is ready is later linked to parental misguidance. When we meet Toni's psychiatrist father (Richard Husson), he calmly asserts that he has spoken to Toni about sex and is confident that she knows what she is doing (she blatantly doesn't). Meanwhile, time spent with Nicky and his cronies presents an entrapment unto itself, in which the metaphorical shit being flung about consists of vulgar barbs and empty masculine posturing. Nicky has aspirations of majoring in English literature, but clearly lacks Ray's drive to find a place in the adult realm. When asked if he'd be interested in a teaching career, he scoffs and declines to explain what he would like to do, as if it were an irrelevant question; we sense that he'd be happy to sit about smoking weed in a state of post-adolescent indolence forever. His companions, Curtis (Zak Orth) and Joel (Josh Weinstein - no, not that one) are boorish and obnoxious, as exemplified by their reaction to seeing a herd of deer dart into their path on a nocturnal drive. One of them shouts out, "10 points for Bambi!", inadvertently evoking popular culture's starkest instance of a son's maturation being precipitated by the traumatic elimination of the mother.
In spite of Ray's momentary flirtation with matricide, Susan survives the picture. Ray, on the other hand, is required to go through a metaphorical death and rebirth in order to find a route out of his predicament. It is an act of cleansing more punishing than his previous attempts to scrub himself clean in the shower. On his second night out with Nicky, Joel and Curtis, Ray breaks away from the group and throws himself off a cliff into a body of water below. Unable to locate Ray in the aftermath, Nicky and the others run off to get help; after a fade-out, we see that Ray has made it out of the water unharmed and is intent on wandering away undetected. By dawn Ray has reached a roadside, where he hitches a ride out of town with a trucker (John Schmerling). The trucker, noting Ray's bedraggled state, asks what happened to him, and Ray responds by producing the picture's punchline. "I fell into an old quarry", he states, presumably alluding to more than just his cliff-jumping experience the night before. In spite of that defiant leap of faith, Ray's exit has none of the high adrenalin triumph (however fleeting) of Ben and Elaine's escape from their parents' clutches in The Graduate. Rather, it more closely anticipates the ending of Ghost World (2001), where Enid's departure on the phantom bus has been alternately interpreted as either a successful escape into the wider world or a final definitive sinking into despair. We are left with similarly mixed feelings at the end of Spanking, unsure if Ray's act of courage (or else recklessness) has liberated him, enabling him to move on to something better, or if, having cast himself off from everything (home, family, identity and future prospects), he's subjected himself to a figurative demise, with no scope but to wander the earth as that most desolate of figures, the spectral hitch-hiker.
Compared to Terry Zwigoff's film, Russell's leaves us with a closing crumb of comfort, in the form of the sympathy Ray receives from the trucker, who asks him if he'll be alright (suggesting that perhaps there is value in leaning on others after all, even if it is the kindness of strangers winning out over the kinship of friends and family). Ray nods, assuring the viewer that, no matter what lies ahead, he is a survivor. All the same, we might be troubled by that final image, which shows the truck driving past a "Do Not Pass" sign - obviously, the instruction being conveyed there is to not pass other vehicles, but within context it's difficult not to read it as a signal that Ray is slipping over another potentially hazardous boundary. It takes us back to the beginning of Ray's story when, during his journey with his father to the family home, they passed an airport sign reading "Terminal", indicating that some form of death, whether literal or figurative, lay up ahead. How we interpret the "Do Not Pass" sign might depend on whose authority we are inclined to project onto it. Has Ray transcended the limitations imposed on him by the cold and insipid world he leaves behind, or is he about to discover a whole new terrain of hardship that lies beyond? Ultimately, he has to live in the same world as the rest of us.
