For this one review, I guess I should forgo my usual practice of complementing the official Simpsons episode titles with an awkward alternate title of my own. On this occasion, it feels as though the actual title already did the job for me, and is consequently enough of a mouthful without me adding to it. Instead, let's consider what episode 1F08, which first aired on December 13 1993 as part of the show's fifth season, gains through its quirk of boasting two proposed titles, one concise, the other more deliberately unwieldy. "$pringfield", with the "S" stylised in a manner that I presume was intended to pay homage to the 1978 Michael Mann-created private detective series Vega$, is the less interesting of the two, although it neatly establishes that a) the episode is going to be more focussed on the character of the town at large and not specifically the Simpsons, and b) for those who get the reference, there is going to be a strong Las Vegas theming. It would have sufficed as a title on its own, yet they insisted on adding that extra layer, transmuting it into a parody of Dr Strangelove (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb), for reasons that feel less inexplicable once you've absorbed the implications. You've got to love the subtlety with which legalised gambling is equated with the atomic bomb, with the implicit suggestion that the outcomes of embracing it may be similarly apocalyptic. The double title becomes a sly joke in itself, in which the glitz and decadence promised by that alluring dollar sign is counterbalanced by the threat of where this could potentially all be headed. The consequences of Springfield legalising gambling and erecting a glamorous casino upon its waterfront do indeed prove nigh-apocalyptic, for it ends up attacking the most fundamental tie that binds, jeopardising the Simpson unit by prompting Marge to turn her back on her responsibilities. We have another scenario in which Marge's devotions to her family are tested by the arrival of a seductive new presence, one that has no corporeality but does eventually gain a name, thanks to Homer: Gamblor, the neon-clawed entity who wills that Marge's fingers are never far from the slot machine lever.
On that note, we might also want to consider to whom the "I" in the secondary title actually refers. In the case of the Stanley Kubrick film it's homaging, it was intended to sound humorously reminiscent of the titling conventions of self-help manuals, and perhaps there is no deeper significance here. It would, nonetheless, be a natural assumption to suppose that it refers to Marge, who succumbs the hardest to gambling fever despite her strong set of established values, yet it doesn't quite match with how her arc plays out. For one, Marge does not seem particularly worried about the introduction of gambling to Springfield - at the town meeting where the motion is approved, she shocks everyone by offering no opposition (a callback to the events of the previous season's "Marge vs. The Monorail", in which she was the lone opponent of an idea that had everyone else unreasonably excited). It would likewise be a stretch to suggest that Marge ever grows to "love" legalised gambling - the really chilling thing about how her gambling addiction is depicted is that it doesn't seem to bring her much in the way of exhilaration. We see only momentary flickers of a buzz - she gives a joyful little murmur when she first uses the slot machine on a whim and scores some extra change, and later reports with pride to Homer that she won sixty dollars in a single night. But, for the most part, Gamblor ensnares her by making her totally impassive, shutting down her awareness of anything unfolding around her and cancelling out whatever drive or emotion she might have outside of the mindless compulsion to keep pulling at that lever ad infinitum.
Marge being occupied elsewhere, for whatever reason, leaving the rest of the family to come apart at the seams without the benefit of her emotional adhesive was by now a familiar Simpsons scenario, one that we'd seen play out on at least three prior occasions. "$pringfield" might honestly be the most down to earth variation we'd had since "Life on The Fast Lane" - an observation that frankly seems strange to make about an episode that is, in most other regards, an absolute fever dream. But if we focus strictly on what happens within the Marge story, it is a lot less outlandish than the competition. "Homer Alone" eventually transforms into rather an unlikely little caper, with Maggie slipping from Homer's oversight and going for a wander downtown, while "Marge in Chains" doesn't treat the matter anywhere near as seriously as it should (and has the problem of running out of time before anything truly unique can be done with it). Notably, "$pringfield" was written by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who had previously penned the latter episode, and feels like a second, more sincere attempt at getting the formula right. The impact on the family is fairly low-key, with dishes going unwashed and food supplies depleting. In "Life on The Fast Lane", Homer was at least capable of feeding the family in Marge's absence by ordering take-out, a survival skill that seems to have waned here - he becomes willing to confront his family's problem only after a failed attempt to subsist on a diet of frozen pie crusts, Tom Collins mix and cloves. The stakes here are lower than those of "Life on The Fast Lane" (there's no hint that Marge's gambling addiction might imperil her marriage to Homer) but still feel as real and as startling. Marge had promised to help Lisa make a costume for her school's upcoming geography pageant, at which she's planning to represent the state of Florida, but the clock is ticking, and as Marge gets increasingly lured in by Gamblor's lustre, it becomes all but inevitable that she will let her daughter down. This is an outcome practically unheard of in Simpsons lore, in which the one person on whom Lisa (or anybody) can surely always depend is Marge.
It is, admittedly, a very barebones treatment of the scenario, sharp and punchy enough to work as the emotional nexus to which the episode keeps returning, but not developed into anything more substantial than a synopsis. Marge promises she'll spend less time at the casino, only to swiftly break that promise, prompting Homer to eventually intervene, and that's about it. The Simpsons' story isn't given a whole lot of room to grow because there is so much else going on the episode (and yet so little), which has a unique conundrum in that Oakley and Weinstein's script can't sit still for a minute. In spite of its deceptively familiar set-up, "$pringfield" is a deeply confounding experience, emerging as not only one of the strangest entries of Season 5 (a season that was unafraid to go to some pretty weird places), but the classic era as a whole. For better or for worse, there isn't another Simpsons episode quite like it. Tonally, it feels so out of place within the series, and I've spent a long time puzzling over that, trying to put my finger on exactly what makes it such an oddity. Some years back, I wrote a piece entitled "The World's Strangest and Most Unsettling Simpsons Endings", where I described it as the Simpsons episode to most closely resemble an episode of The Critic. Which was obviously enormously silly of me. The Simpsons episode that most resembles The Critic is very blatantly going to be one overseen by Al Jean and Mike Reiss - y'know, the actual creators of The Critic ("Marge Gets A Job" would, in all seriousness, be a much better contender for that title). What I was getting at is that "$pringfield" has an extremely threadbare story held together by a steady stream of random and disconnected jokes, though in truth I think the jokes in "$pringfield" are even more random and disconnected than you would expect to find in The Critic. As Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood observe in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, it all amounts to "a series of bizarre moments rather than a story". What we get is a rather baffling collection of vignettes that shifts continually across the townspeople, seemingly to showcase how the seedy psyche of the title community is further warped by the coming of the Burns Casino, yet doesn't compare to "22 Short Films About Springfield", which feels considerably more structured. There is a certain flow and rhythm in how that episode flits from one segment to the next, whereas "$pringfield" lurches about all over the place, having its action unfold in bitty little chunks. A morsel happening over here, a tidbit going on over there. It is, I would say, the most staccato episode of The Simpsons. You get the distinct impression that Oakley and Weinstein pitched the idea of Springfield legalising gambling and becoming a miniature Las Vegas (reportedly inspired by an article they'd read about a town in Mississippi that had recently legalised riverboat gambling), and brainstormed a bunch of ideas about where this could potentially go, writing various short pieces involving multiple characters. Then, when it came to narrowing down the strongest ideas and developing those into a fuller narrative, they found that they couldn't bear to cut any of their material, so they strung all of their pieces together and called it a day.
I'm not saying that "$pringfield" particularly suffers for these choices, mind. I actually like how strange and unique the episode is. And, in fairness, some of the best gags are among the most disconnected from the main narrative. The entire stand-alone skit with Krusty's attempt at blue humor could have been easily ditched on the cutting room floor, but it's hilarious. All of that early stuff with Homer finding Henry Kissinger's glasses in the power plant toilet and adopting them as his shiny new plaything goes basically nowhere and is completely forgotten once the casino story gets underway, but it results in Kissinger being hospitalised after walking into a lamppost, and who doesn't enjoy a cathartic giggle at that man's expense? Professional boxer Gerry Cooney makes a guest appearance just so that he can be knocked out in a single blow by Otto, allowing the show to make good on a gag they had previously aspired to do with Joe Frazier in "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?", but were there denied. Flamboyant magicians Gunter and Ernst are inserted primarily for a thinly-veiled jab at Siegfried Fischbacher and Roy Horn, the Vegas-based entertainment duo famed for their acts involving large leucistic cats. On this particular night, their performing tiger Anastasia realises how greatly she resents being abducted from her natural habitat and forced to ride a unicycle under hot stage lights, causing her to savagely turn on her handlers, just shy of a decade before Horn was critically injured by one of his own tigers. (In recent years, there's been a lot of hoopla about the so-called clairvoyance of The Simpsons, but as the production crew themselves point out on the DVD commentary, you get no points for predicting that making dangerous wild animals perform unnatural stunts before a Vegas audience would one day take a spectacularly ugly turn.) Anastasia later has a smidgen more relevance to the overarching story, in a troubling sequence that illustrates how far into Gamblor's clutches Marge has sunken, when she shows only passing concern for a neglected Maggie almost becoming tiger chow. Gunter and Ernst also reappear, none the worse for their brutal lacerating, so that we might have an allusion to the sexuality of their real-life counterparts through their exchanging of covert pick-up chat with a casino patron.
From this grab bag of giddy diversions and offbeat side attractions, two subplots eventually take shape. One revolves around Burns' venturing into the casino business, in an effort to (in his own words) tighten his stranglehold upon the dismal town. He brands the casino in his own monstrous image, having not being sold on the merits of a Woodstock or British-themed establishment (as a Brit, I will make the most predictable nitpick I possibly can and point out that the waitress allegedly fresh from the streets of Sussex doesn't speak with a Sussex accent), and marvels as it proves ostensibly to be the perfect gravy train ("People swarm in, empty their pockets and scuttle off!"). The second sees Bart opening his own casino in his treehouse, at the taunting suggestion of the Squeaky-Voiced Teen, so that Springfield's younger population need not miss out on the joys of blown pocket change or magic acts that result in someone being violently mauled (in this case, Milhouse getting repeatedly clawed by a couple of house cats). The two subplots play off and echo one another more than they do the main conflict, culminating in an inspired development where Bart breezily pilfers the entertainment gig secured by Burns from singer Robert Goulet, the second guest star of the episode, by greeting Goulet at the airport and misdirecting him to his treehouse. Goulet has some misgivings about the situation, but is only too happy to adjust his repertoire for his unlikely young admirers, gaining a more appreciative reaction to his lounge rendition of the subversive schoolyard favourite "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells" than he presumably would have for a straight gig at Burns' casino. Bart is the one character who's able to thrive as the town lies deep within the belly of Gamblor, with its gambling fixation teasing out his latent entrepreneur. Burns, by contrast, is unprepared for where his supposed mastery of the community's wallets will take him, discovering that, having reached the top, he now has nowhere to go but into the dark maelstrom of paranoia.
The script even crams in a loose sort of D-story, with Homer landing a job as a blackjack dealer, a thread that's mainly there to set up for Marge's fateful entry into the casino, but also enables him to deal hands to a few familiar faces from popular culture. An encounter with Bond and Blofeld in which Homer might have doomed the entire free world was excised from the final edit, but later surfaced as part of "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular". Rain Man, though, was still fresh enough on people's minds to make a shout-out obligatory (another reason why I might subconsciously have associated this episode with The Critic, which treated Tom Cruise as though he were attached at the hip to Dustin Hoffman). Nowadays, this whole sequence feels maybe a little iffy, given that it involves Homer triggering an autistic meltdown in Hoffman's character, who in turn triggers a similar reaction in Homer. Obviously a parallel is being drawn between Homer and the Rain Man, but the script's intentions are not 100% clear. Is the insinuation that Homer might also be autistic...because he's a socially inept simpleton and, thanks to Rain Man, this is what the public thought autism looked like in 1993? Or are we to assume that Homer is merely mimicking Raymond, because he's taking Raymond's meltdown as a cue for how to respond in this situation? Either way, I can see why this moment might leave a slightly sour taste in some viewers' mouths, since it is difficult to interpret it in a way that doesn't leave the meltdown the butt of the joke. Elsewhere we get a similarly cartoonish depiction of obsessive-compulsive disorder via Burns' intense phobia of microscopic germs (and free masons), although this much is coded to specifically be an allusion to Howard Hughes, the aerospace engineer and Hollywood producer who devoted his later career to the development of Las Vegas and became notoriously reclusive in the process (his life was depicted in Martin Scorsese's 2004 film The Aviator). Hughes' case history, via Burns, is presented as the twisted but logical outcome of an overabundance of success, his wealth and influence having elevated him to such dizzying heights above his fellow man that he has nothing to fill the void but his own febrile delusions.
A key reason why "$pringfield" succeeds, in spite of its feverishly meandering format, is in how gleefully it commits to the path of total disconcertment. It is nothing if not an unsettling episode, in which you almost feel as dazed as the characters by the brightness of the casino lights, and as overwhelmed by how this garish building comes, for this one installment, to dominate the lives of everyone around it. A number of the jokes have a deliberately unnerving flavour that leaves the viewer slightly confounded over what to make of them. Take the gag where Burns relives a cherished childhood memory of maiming an Irish-accented handyman by ramming him repeatedly with a bumper car, then laughs uproariously about his evil deed across a prolonged montage. The entire sequence drags on long enough to make you feel really uneasy, but also long enough that you practically surrender to the delirium and start snickering yourself, right before Burns rounds it off with a bitter reminder of the source of all this mirth: "What was I laughing at? Oh yes, that crippled Irishman." (They basically replicated this same joke six years down the line in "Take My Wife, Sleaze" of Season 11, with Bart laughing at Homer's professed inability to ride a bicycle, only minus that same discomforting element, so it comes off as a very neutered remake.) Then there's Homer's reaction when Lisa tries to share with him a nightmare she's just had where the bogeyman was on her trail; rather than offering the sensible parental reassurance she craves, he runs around getting the entire household worked up at the possibility that multiple bogeymen might have infiltrated their walls. As Lisa points out, that notion is absurd. Homer immediately understands how silly he's been when Marge returns to the property after a night of protracted gambling, insisting that it wouldn't have happened had she been there to keep him in check. It goes without saying that there were never any bogeymen inside the house. And yet, the frenzy with which Homer awakens Bart and has him shrieking at the prospect is contagious. For a moment, you really do have chills going down your spine. Chills that aren't entirely unwarranted, for while there might not be a bogeyman at Evergreen Terrace, there is clearly something very wrong with what we see within - a shot of Marge's vacated pillow, juxtaposed with Lisa crying out for the mother who isn't there.
The main conflict is able to keep itself fresh by using a tone that none of those prior absent Marge episodes had ever attempted, which it to say full-on eeriness. There is some pathos in the mix, thanks to the plight of Lisa and her Florida costume, but the scenes detailing how Marge succumbs to her gambling addiction, appearing to cast off all free will and awareness, feel more spooky than anything else. The psychology of addiction is not explored; it's just something that happens because Marge gives in to temptation just once, instead of following her higher judgement to turn that dropped quarter into the casino's lost and found, the pseudo-cheerful carnival music that accompanies her early win being the malevolent fanfare that welcomes her to Hell. This emphasis on Twilight Zone uncanniness has the brevity of the story, which might have been a problem in other scripts, actually playing to its advantage. The way in which Marge finally lets Lisa down doesn't come with any visible struggle or moral dilemma. We don't see her grappling with the knowledge that she's made a commitment to her daughter while her compulsion to gamble gradually chips away at her better intentions. She simply promises Lisa that she'll help with the costume, and then when we next see her she's right back at the slot machine as though nothing happened. It feels like a narrative shortcut, but it deftly gets across the corruptive, all-consuming nature of Marge's addiction. Whatever good things she might set out to do, whenever she's stepped away from the slot machine for long enough to regain her clarity, are rendered null and void the instant the casino beckons.
It's a formidable cycle that refuses to be broken..until Homer finally gets the resolve to confront Marge and tell her upfront of her addiction, spurred on by the tears of a distraught Lisa resigned to attending the pageant in the misshapen strips of foam rubber he'd duct-taped together at the eleventh hour when Marge failed to deliver. It's an outcome that puts Homer in the rather novel position of having made a correct moral choice where Marge has not, and you can bet he's going to make the most of it. The episode ends with them exiting the casino and Homer reminding a remorseful Marge of a selection of the idiotic stuff he's done over the years and how it all pales beside her gambling problem. Although Marge is initially willing to accept the criticism, she eventually tires of it and reminds Homer that once you've forgiven someone's transgressions, you can't keep rubbing their noses in it. This terrible ordeal in their lives is thus reduced to a quirky routine about the dos and don'ts within a relationship. Which leads us in to quite possibly the most fiendish thing about "$pringfield" - it lacks any kind of firmly redemptive resolution, although it certainly does endeavor to give the impression otherwise. The closing image is nice and uplifting, yet a gambling addiction isn't the kind of problem that's going to be remedied with a kiss and a picturesque stroll into the sunset. The episode itself is fully aware of this, judging by the glib solution proposed by Homer - when Marge suggests that she might do well to get professional help, he rebuts, "No, no, that's too expensive. Just don't do it any more!" Having set up such a complex issue, Oakley and Weinstein are faced with the quandary of how to resolve it in the allotted 22 minutes, and they all but admit that it isn't happening. The best they can do is put a pretty little bow on it, in the form of that kiss, and that sunset, and allow the fade-out to signal that the characters will all have moved on by the following week. For now, there is little in the way of a happy ending for Lisa. She gets a consolation prize at the pageant, for showing up in a costume so glaringly homespun it's presumed she received no help whatsoever from her parents. But if this was intended to take the sting off her humiliation, it doesn't succeed - having to share that honor with Ralph Wiggum, representing the state of Idaho by affixing a piece of paper reading "Idaho" to his chest (what are the odds that Chief Wiggum actually did help him with that?), renders it a patently hollow victory.
Burns' arc resolves with the most explicit promise of a restoration of the status quo, with him choosing to abandon the casino for the plant on the realisation that he prefers his old establishment. He also has Homer restored to his former position, after being perturbed by his erratic display while searching for Marge, and agreeing that such an unpredictable lunatic would be better suited to a nuclear setting. Even then, Burns is last seen holding Smithers at gunpoint for his concerns about the practicalities of flying to the plant inside the Spruce Moose (an allusion to Hughes' Spruce Goose), the titchy model aircraft he'd devised to transport passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes. Burns' insanity has not subsided, and we are left feeling a little worried there for Smithers, but with sufficient reassurance that the universe is shifting its way back to normalcy, the casino's reign of terror essentially nothing more than a crazy nightmare from which it will awaken shortly. Just like something from a dream, the Burns Casino seems to evaporate instantly, as though it never were a part of the town, and this comes as no surprise. Burns' sudden lost interest in the venue is a tip-off to the viewer that its narrative purpose has expired and that they too should prepare to leave it behind, a temporary fascination to be discarded as Homer (presumably) has Kissinger's glasses. It would eventually come up again in the Season 10 episode "Viva Ned Flanders", where they went to the trouble of having it demolished onscreen, so as to justify Homer and Ned then having to go to the actual Vegas so the latter could master gambling. There, Marge ruminates on the fate of the casino with the kind of ultra on-the-nose self-awareness that was rampant during Scully's era ("Remember how excited we were when this place opened? Then a week later we just forgot about it..."), but given how "$pringfield" ended I find it more baffling that the casino's ongoing existence should retroactively be treated this seriously (besides, if you want to get hung up on continuity, I'm pretty sure the subplot of "My Sister, My Sitter" took place on that same waterfront, and the casino was already gone by then).
Finally, I couldn't close this review without drawing attention to one of the episode's greatest background gags. Toward the start, as Abe and Jasper are walking past the porno theatre, if you look closely you'll see that the two titles playing are both parodies of James L. Brooks films - Sperms of Endearment (Terms of Endearment) and I'll Do Anyone (I'll Do Anything). Speaking of I'll Do Anything, it has been a long time since I last talked about that film, and since then there have been some really exciting developments. No, we still don't have the uncut version with the musical numbers intact, and I'm not optimistic that it's ever coming. But someone was nice enough to put up a bunch of the excised musical sequences on YouTube, including the one where A. Brooks tap dances. So I technically did find my grail. Huzzah!
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