Last month, our coverage of "The Homer They Fall" prompted an interesting question. How can we tell when a particularly happy or sentimental Simpsons ending is being sincere, and when its tongue is firmly inside its cheek? From the start, The Simpsons had always prided itself on eschewing the sappiness and false cheer that characterised so much contemporary American television. In its earliest seasons in particular, it was grounded by a sense of emotional honesty - the messiness and imperfections of modern living were to be embraced and acknowledged, its characters were, for better or for worse, recognisably human, and its warmer moments ideally needed to be rooted in heartfelt observation and not merely trotted out to paper over the rough corners. This delicate balancing act between sensitivity and subversion might have best exemplified in the very first episode, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", when Bart's awe at his father's seasonal altruism was deftly tempered by the backhanded observation, "You must really love us to sink so low." The nobleness of Homer's deed isn't taken away from him, and he gets his son behind him, but the script refuses to sugar-coat the desperateness of their situation, or the undisciplined dynamic between Homer and Bart. Sometimes the series will bring out the emotive guns purely to set us up for a rude awakening (see the ending of "Bart The Genius", where we see the Homer-Bart dynamic at its most wildly undisciplined). On the flip side, there are occasions when it feels as though the subversiveness is there so that the more heartfelt stuff might be allowed to sneak through with the show's edge still intact. In "The Homer They Fall", we could tell that the ending was being facetious because it went so far with the premise of Moe as a born-again humanitarian, pushing his redemption into the realm of absurdity by having him float around the world in a powered paraglider (a stolen one at that) and airlift people away from various natural disasters. But all fundamentally to compensate for the fact that the story had Moe do the right thing by putting his friend's welfare above his personal ambition. "The Homer They Fall" has one of the strangest endings of Season 8, yet the thinking behind it is simple enough to decipher. In my review, I likened the episode to Moe himself, concealing a heart of gold deep down but needing to offset any suggestion of genuine tenderness with an aggressively churlish exterior. The silliness was in servitude of the sentiment and not the other way around - Moe flew to such dizzying heights purely so that his compassionate side could stretch its legs in the first place.
A sentimental ending that's somewhat trickier to parse is that of "When Flanders Failed" of Season 3 (episode 7F23), which aired on October 3rd 1991. It is an unusually exuberant happy ending, with its final frames consisting of Todd Flanders leading the Springfieldians in a communal chanting of "Put On A Happy Face" from the musical Bye Bye Birdie. What might tip us off that this too should be seen as being in quotation marks is that it borrows so extravagantly from Frank Capra's 1946 classic, It's A Wonderful Life, right down to having Maude wear the same attire as Donna Reed's character and make the same overjoyed gesture with her face and hands. (The It's A Wonderful Life pastiche is, incidentally, the sole reason why I'm classifying this as an unofficial Christmas installment and reviewing it in December - if you wanted a holiday Simpsons marathon in the old days, you had slim pickings and often had to bend your definition of a Christmas episode. As a bonus, there is something vaguely festive about the Bowlarama jingle we overhear at one point.) It hammers so forcefully on the allusion that it doesn't quite seem genuine, but rather coding for the kind of triumphant ending of mythos, in which an entire community comes together to be the light at the end of a particularly arduous tunnel. The ending knows that it's hokey, and a pat solution to a problem that has rationally gone too far to be turned around this easily, but it sells us on it by filtering it through the iconography of something warm and familiar. It also incorporates a moment that does feel entirely authentic, when Ned tells Homer that, "Affordable tract housing made us neighbours, but you made us friends." The subversion was already planted in Ned's musing about the formal banalities that caused their lives to cross, paving way for his second observation to really hit home. That line is so affecting that it seems a shame their truce has to end as soon as the episode fades out, with Homer going back to hating Ned's guts before long - and no, I don't think you can make the argument that that is intended to be the joke here. It might hold true for the ending of "Homer Loves Flanders" of Season 5, but in the early stages of Season 3 The Simpsons hadn't been around for long enough for the tyranny of the status quo to have been quite so embedded. Back then, for all we knew this was the start of a whole new coming together between the Simpsons and the Flanders. That it wasn't is arguably the factor that exposes the ending as a total sham, but maybe that is a mite unfair. After all, there is one aspect of the episode that does stick, and that's that the Leftorium, the shop business founded by Ned to cater to left-handed clientele, ultimately succeeds, off the back of Homer's eleventh-hour goodwill, and remains Ned's occupation in subsequent continuity. The Leftorium's survival is a monument to Homer's latent humanity toward his miraculously patient neighbour, definitive proof that there is some intrinsic level on which Homer does indeed love Ned Flanders, just like everybody else.
Truth be told, "When Flanders Failed" is a rather heavy-going slice of Simpsons life. Before we get to that impossibly wonderful ending, there is an awful lot of suffering and hardship to be endured - as might be anticipated from any installment where the title evokes "In Flanders Fields", the 1915 war poem by Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. On the DVD commentary, they joke about how the episode follows a foolproof formula of being "sad, sour and bitter for everything but the last ten seconds, then it's really sweet." True, but in all fairness that's kind of what It's A Wonderful Life is like too. The bulk of that movie consists of George Bailey being handed lemon after lemon, and then being subjected to that nightmarish vision of how Bedford Falls would have fared in his absence, before the redemptive finale where his kindness to the community is ultimately repaid. That's a movie we all sit down to watch every year, at a time when we're encouraged to keep our spirits high - sometimes the darkness is necessary to make that final light shine as beautifully bright as it can. Ned is the George Bailey of this particular tale, a rare and precious flower who wants nothing more than help those around him and gets terribly mistreated in return, until the value he brings to the world is finally recognised and lauded. The ending doesn't hold back with the glad tidings because after watching someone as benevolent as Ned get beaten down for an entire episode we're frankly in need of the uplift. The Simpsonian twist in this instance is that we haven't been following events from Ned's perspective, but through the eyes of someone with a vested interest in watching him fail. Ned retains his innocence throughout and doesn't realise the full extent to which he's been mistreated - it has in fact been a much more bitter story than he'd ever imagined. If Ned is our George Bailey, then Homer is...not exactly our Potter, but he is effectively Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life are very similar stories, when you strip them right down), receiving a sobering vision of how much more terrible life could potentially get as a result of his own callous inaction.
"When Flanders Failed" plays like a direct sequel to the previous season's "Dead Putting Society", giving us another ringside view of the ongoing one-sided rivalry between Homer and Ned, and some further insight into the psychology of both characters. Their mutual humbling at the end of "Dead Putting Society" has done little to change the situation - these episodes open in an uncannily similar fashion, with Ned once again intruding on Homer's futile attempts to keep his garden in order to extend him his hospitality. Ned still wants to be the best possible neighbour to Homer and Homer's knee-jerk response is to rebuff Ned at every turn. He still can't articulate exactly what it is about Ned that gets his back up so, other than that he's jerk, which Marge knows is code for awakening Homer's green-eyed monster. Ned's life puts Homer's in the shade, and not simply because he lives with more material comforts than Homer. Ned's family respects him, and people in general respect him. And why shouldn't they? He's a helluva nice guy who can maintain composure in the face of adversity, and that's something Homer knows is well beyond him. He doesn't like Ned because he's a symbol of everything he'll never be. Paradoxically, he still depends on the generosity of his neighbour, as is established in the opening frames, where Homer is shown using a weed strimmer marked as property of Ned Flanders (paving way for a running gag whereby Homer would effectively steal household items from Ned under the guise of borrowing). And although Homer initially chooses to sit out the BBQ Ned is throwing (preferring to stay home and watch Canadian football whilst fantasising about his family returning to find him dead from emaciation, epitomising his cut-off-my-nose-to-spite-my-face approach to the rivalry), he ultimately lacks the restraint to resist the promise of free food next door. Even then, he insists on taking a plate of food and planting himself beneath a tree at the end of the garden, away from the adult conversation. He is being futilely childish, a point made extra salient in his appreciation for the school-yard taunting going on between Bart and an unnamed girl ("The "fly" was funny and the "booger" was the icing on the cake!").
Ned can afford a plethora of luxuries that Homer can't, but up until now it's all been on a pharmacist's salary, and Ned is about to jeopardise that with his upcoming career change. He states that he had a sinister motive for bringing everyone to his garden today ("sinister" being Latin for left-handed), that being to formally announce the opening of his new business, a store at the Springfield Mall dedicated to selling left-handed paraphernalia. Homer is predictably negative about the venture, which is of course because the gumption or opportunity to start his own business is yet another luxury lacking in his own life. Then when Ned, ever the magnanimous soul, invites him to pull a wishbone with him, Homer's envy takes him down a very dark train of thought. He considers wishing for Ned to die, but decides that's going a bit far and settles for wishing for his new business to fail. Then when Homer pulls the larger half of the bone he provides the perfect metaphor for his position, by laughing so uproariously at the prospect of Ned's misfortune that he ends up choking on a mouthful of hamburger meat and requires Ned to perform a Heimlich manoeuvrer. He is effectively choking on his own hatred. You can bet that this is going to hurt Homer as much as it hurts Ned.
"When Flanders Failed" is nothing if not a risky episode, as it paints Homer in a really unfavourable light for most of its running time. As they point out on the DVD commentary, Homer is supposed to be the guy we root for, and yet here they made him so spiteful that he wishes for his neighbour's ruin (even if he drew the line at wishing for his demise). We'd seen episodes where he was in a perpetually foul mood, like "Dead Putting Society" and "Bart's Dog Gets an F", but this is on a whole other level - writer Jon Vitti delves into a startlingly malicious side of Homer that was hitherto unknown to us. Now I have seem some defenders of the later seasons who will specifically point to this episode in querying how fans of the classic era can be so critical of Homer's portrayal during the Scully years and beyond (the so-called Jerkass Homer), when we had ample evidence of his more horrible traits right here. It is a fair question, and I do have an answer. It goes back to what I said above about the characters in the early season being recognisably human...for better or for worse. The Homer we see in "When Flanders Failed" is not Jerkass Homer. Jerkass Homer was loud, obnoxious, indulged in the most idiotic of antics and was basically celebrated for it (if not by the characters in-universe, then there seemed to be an underlying expectation that the audience would be hollering in approval). In other words, he was a total cartoon character. What the Homer of "When Flanders Failed" is doing certainly feels a mite exaggerated, but it is being used to hold a magnifier to something honest and genuine, and which is explicitly outlined by Lisa. Schadenfreude, while not a pretty emotion, is a very real part of human nature, and fair play to the Germans for coming up with a word for it where the English language failed. Sometimes, we do take satisfaction in seeing other people fall down, if it makes us feel in any way better about our own shortcomings. We might not feel proud of ourselves, but we like the reassurance that our friends, neighbours and compatriots are just as fallible as we. And that's all that Homer really wants out of the situation - the chance to feel better than Ned for once. He isn't thinking about the bigger picture. (He might have remembered from what happened to his brother Herb that financial ruin is not something to be taken lightly, but I digress.) Which leads us into the other means by which classic Homer, while not the nicest of guys, differs from his later incarnation. He was capable of recognising and acting on consequence. When he realises how badly the failure of the Leftorium has impacted Ned and the rest of the Flanders he does everything in his power to put it right. His awfulness isn't being celebrated as something hilarious but is rather used as the set-up for his eventual redemption. This is why why I consider the sentiments of the ending to be entirely sincere. Vitti's script, while acknowledging the prevalence of schadenfreude in the human psyche, goes on to make a very intelligent and thoughtful argument for why there is ultimately more value to be had in upholding the success of others than in watching them fail.
But let's talk about Ned's left-handed store for just a moment. The Leftorium was chosen as his precarious business because Simpsons writer George Meyer had known someone who'd tried to launch such a store but had failed to crack any kind of fervent left-handed market. The other writers agreed that it sounded like a niche business that could very feasibly go down like a lead balloon. But left-handedness is also a subject near and dear to The Simpsons, since creator Matt Groening is a southpaw and so are many of the staff who work on the show - on the commentary they muse that the statistic given by Ned here is one in nine, but in the Simpsons production crew it's more like one in three. Fitting, then, that left-handedness should also be well-represented within Springfield itself. Canonically Bart is left-handed and, as per this episode, so are Moe, Mr Burns, Barney, Akira and a host of other Springfieldians. (So is Scratchy, apparently - in the featured Itchy & Scratchy short, "O Solo Meow", he holds his fork in his right hand and his knife in his left.) And there is something tremendously satisfying about seeing all of these southpaws come together at the end, finding solidarity and celebration over their differences in a world designed for the convenience of the right-handed. Ned certainly picked the right (or rather the left) community in which to start this particular business.
Which begs the question - why did it have so much trouble in getting off the ground? Did Homer really put a curse on Ned by wishing on some dead bird's furcula? Perhaps. There is certainly precedent for the Simpsons invoking forces beyond their comprehension, with Bart managing to negotiate an act of divine intervention in "Bart Gets an F", but here it's handled with a greater ambiguity. I personally lean toward the view that there is nothing supernatural going on. In a way, Ned has had a curse put on him, but it's the curse of having a neighbour so wretchedly petty that he would gladly see him fail - a curse that's lifted the second Homer's outlook changes. Some would argue that, in the absence of any actual supernatural curse, Homer can't really be blamed for the Leftorium's shaky beginnings, since a lot of its problems rest on matters that aren't down to him. And true, Homer clearly isn't Ned's only bugbear. It does seem that at least part of the Leftorium's teething troubles are rooted in a lack of publicity, given how much of a demand there blatantly is for what Ned is selling around Springfield. The issue is that people just don't know about the store, and maybe there is more that Ned could have done to get the word out. We also have to factor in that Ned is certainly not the most cut throat of businessmen. He refuses to accept payment for a breakage when offered to him, and his generous nature is quickly taken advantage of by mall patrons, who treat him as an easy route to get their parking validated and then don't buy anything from his store. But to get too bogged down in the particulars of how Ned hasn't made it easy for himself would be to miss the point. The point is that Homer sees that Ned is struggling and not only revels in it, he repeatedly passes up opportunities to help him out. He sees Moe in need of a left-handed corkscrew and deliberately doesn't tell him (which, arguably, doesn't make him much of a friend to Moe either). He sees Burns paraphrasing Shakespeare's take on Richard III ("My kingdom for a left-handed can-opener!") in his futile effort to feed the fluffy white cat on his lap (a possible Blofeld reference?), and likewise holds his tongue. His insensitivity peaks when he finds Ned selling a concerning number of household items on his front lawn and exploits Ned's evident desperation to acquire the lot for a piddling $75 - it has, after all, long been his dream to own all the material luxuries that Ned does, and now he gets to enjoy the privilege of being the better-off neighbour. The reality of the situation starts to sink in when a man from a debt collection agency shows up at his door, looking to speak to Ned about unpaid bills. The debt collector is also left-handed, and struggling with right-handed ledgers; Homer begins to tell him about the Leftorium, but gets cut off. His conscience having finally kicked in, Homer attempts to return Ned's items, only to discover that the Flanders have now lost their home and are reduced to sleeping in their car. The following morning they will be leaving Springfield and heading for Capital City to stay with Ned's sister. (Did Ned ever bring up his sister who lives in the city again? Flashbacks in subsequent episodes don't seem to point to him having siblings. I suppose it's possible that it could be another half-sibling situation like Herb, with one of his beatnik parents having another child from a different relationship.)
Seeing this sorry chain of events play out from Homer's perspective rather than Ned's means that up until now we've only ever seen what's been evident from the surface, with Ned striving to maintain a smiling facade and the cracks becoming ever more conspicuous. Just like "Dead Putting Society" before it, "When Flanders Failed" tests the limits of Ned's perpetually sunny exterior, examining just how much of an increasingly trying situation he can bear before he's pushed to his breaking point. Not to the extreme extent suggested by "Hurricane Neddy" of Season 8, which proposed (somewhat unconvincingly) that Ned was totally incapable of expressing anger because he'd been conditioned not to as a child. These are more relatable scenarios, with Ned feeling obliged to keep his more negative emotions bottled up out of consideration for others, but revealing in the end that he is only human. "Dead Putting Society" dealt with his latent irritation with Homer, his attempts to always turn the other cheek, and the extent to which Homer's constant baiting could potentially corrupt his gentle intentions. "When Flanders Failed" looks at how he tries to soldier on in the face of despair. When Homer finds the Flanders locked out of their house, it becomes heartbreakingly apparent that Ned has not only had to remain upbeat when out in public, but also behind the scenes, to disguise the bleakness of the situation for his family's sake. He's managed to sell Rod and Todd on the premise of their homelessness being a grand adventure, with them getting to camp out overnight in their car before experiencing life in the big city. He then goes off to talk to Homer, leaving Maude, Rod and Todd to partake in a preliminary rendition of "Put On A Happy Face". The lyrics of the song epitomise the approach Ned has attempted to apply throughout his ordeal, but they are sentiments that, once he is far enough away from his family, he admits to Homer he doesn't actually share. He bears his despondent soul for the first time, calling his family "poor fools" for not seeing how badly he has let them down by gambling their future and financial security on a silly dream. He recalls Homer's negativity about the Leftorium at the BBQ, which he interprets as Homer being a good friend in trying to discourage him from making such a risky move. Of course, that's so far from the truth that Homer finds himself pushed to his own breaking point (the emotion of the moment is tempered, just slightly, with a sardonic visual gag, wherein Homer is seen wiping his teary eye with a monogrammed handkerchief he clearly bled out of Ned in his emergency sale). Having savoured an abundance of schadenfreude, and the change it's provided from his usual diet of sour grapes, he is finally discovering that all that shameful joy can leave you with an incredibly bitter aftertaste. His resentment of Ned was always rooted in his assumption that Ned's successes on a personal and financial level were a reflection of his own perceived failings. But seeing Ned now at his lowest ebb, he suddenly becomes a reflection of a far more critical failure on Homer's part - his failure as a human being.
I've not yet touched on the episode's subplot, which has Bart signing up for karate lessons and then continually skipping them to play arcade games. It features a welcome return from Akira, the Japanese waiter from "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" (albeit no longer voiced by George Takei, but by series regular Hank Azaria doing his best Takei impression). Otherwise, my favourite thing about it is the slick bit of fourth wall-breaking it works in, with Marge indirectly berating the show's viewership. ("As we speak, millions of children are staring at the TV, instead of getting some much-needed exercise. Those children's parents should be ashamed!") As subplots go, it's a fairly arbitrary one, its main purpose being to get Homer into the mall so that he can regularly keep tabs on Ned and the Leftorium, and to give the kids something to do amid this tale of adult pettiness. Bart is initially thrilled by the prospect of learning karate, if it means getting to do cool stunts like breaking blocks of ice with his head, but is disappointed when he realises that Akira's lessons consist more of philosophical study ("We learn karate so we need never use it."). He figures that his time would be better put to use by playing Touch of Death, but has to keep up the pretence of learning karate, which eventually brings him into conflict with Lisa. Stories that pit Bart and Lisa against each other can sometimes be a tough pill to swallow, since ordinarily the two have such a loving and supportive sibling relationship, and definitely work better as a team than at odds. There is, though, a pleasing realism to their dynamic here, with both parties acting like children. Usually, Lisa can tell when Bart is lying (and when he is telling the truth), but here she seems to freaked out on a visceral level by his claims of having mastered a move called "The Touch of Death" that she doesn't want to call his bluff. Thus, Bart gets to intimidate Lisa into doing everything he asks for a brief while, until a fateful incident occurs on the schoolyard, when Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney steal Lisa's saxophone and she calls on Bart to use his newly-honed karate skills to get it back. Of course, Bart can't actually use karate and the bullies mop the floor with him, although in the process they lose interest in Lisa's saxophone, so she gets it back anyway. She concludes that it is indeed possible for two wrongs to make a right. Ah well, at least we got a fleeting glimpse of that typically immaculate Bart-Lisa bond, when he sees her crying and wanders over to ask her what's wrong. But mainly, the Bart story is where the episode's meaner impulses eventually go to get vented, paving way for the A-story to wrap up more clemently. There does seem to be a thematic parallel between Bart's childish abuse of his (feigned) power and Homer's gross immaturity regarding Ned's predicament, something that becomes more pronounced when Bart is implicated as Homer's accomplice in his sinful acquisition of the Flanders' furniture. We've the sense that Homer is inducting Bart into his exploitative mindset - Lisa chides Bart for doing nothing to stop this and calls him a "scavenger of human misery", a term that would aptly describe Homer for much of this story.
Fortunately, there is still hope where Homer is concerned. He establishes that Ned hasn't yet relinquished the Leftorium and implores him to remain in Springfield and reopen it for one more day. He then goes and calls absolutely everyone he knows to get the word out about Ned's store. When Ned arrives the following morning, expecting another day of hardship, he finds that every southpaw in town has shown up and that suddenly the Leftorium is the toast of the mall. The Flanders' financial troubles are swiftly rectified, enabling them to remain a fixture of the series, along with the Leftorium. Todd leads the store patrons in his second rendition of "Put On A Happy Face", the sentiments of the song now fully upheld, and the Simpsons and Flanders clans close the episode by standing side by side, in a state of ephemeral but nevertheless entirely meaningful harmony. Homer had previously regarded the Leftorium as yet another detail that elevated Ned above him, but that's no longer the case - not because Ned was brought down by the store's near-failure, but because it has become their shared success. Which takes us into the moral of the story. Our friends and neighbours become reflections of who we are, revealing all of our strengths, our weaknesses, and the differences that we've seen fit to make to their lives. Seeing them knocked down, and thus exposed as no better than us, might satisfy some base craving within our psyches, but it isn't half as fulfilling as propping them up and getting to be a part of their accomplishments. The path of solidarity is better than the lure of schadenfreude. It's a message The Simpsons delivers with full-throated, deliberately quaint euphoria - an approach that might be a little startling for a series famed for its sharp and trendy subtlety, but maybe some messages are worth the enthusiasm.
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