"Bart's Girlfriend" (2F04) is another Simpsons episode where it might be pertinent to begin our coverage by keeping in mind where everything therein is eventually headed. Bart closes the narrative by claiming to have learned something, but is unable to define what exactly, simply that he's "a little wiser and a little less naive". Based on what happens in the final scene, it's safe to say that he hasn't learned a damned thing, and this shouldn't surprise us. He did, after all, initiate his ill-fated relationship with character of the day Jessica Lovejoy by demonstrating what a painfully short memory he has, finding himself entranced by her beguiling aura and proclaiming, "I've never felt this way about a girl before". Obviously, this isn't true; when "Bart's Girlfriend" debuted, on November 6 1994, we weren't even a full two years away from his previous crush on hip teen next door Laura Powers in the Season 4 installment "New Kid on The Block". What's more, we had only recently been reminded of the events of said episode in the love-themed collage job "Another Simpsons Clip Show", where the family reflected on their failed romances from the past five years (and noteworthy is that Bart had there forgotten how his crush on Laura had actually played out until Marge prompted that awareness back into his brain). The lesson Bart explicitly took from the reminiscing in "Another Simpsons Clip Show" is that being on the pointy end of Cupid's arrow invariably screws you up, and while he would have done well to have heeded his own words, upon laying eyes on Jessica he just couldn't help himself. Well, that's amore. Suddenly the entire interlude with Laura fades into irrelevancy and he's ready to get his heart ripped out all over again.
Despite the familiar subject matter, "Bart's Girlfriend" certainly never feels like a retread of "New Kid on The Block". "New Kid" had a fundamental earnestness in its depiction of young infatuation, even in its somewhat sour resolution, which had Bart sabotaging Jimbo's relationship with Laura for entirely petty reasons, and under entirely petty circumstances. It dealt with Bart's nascent attractions in a way that was ultimately about looking backwards to the innocence of youth. Bart's victory over Jimbo was in not losing Laura to her adolescent yearnings, convincing her to keep goofing around with him making prank phone calls to Moe's when she was at risk of transmuting into a babysitter who ignored her charges while she made out with her boyfriend. "New Kid" ends with Bart and Laura laughing in unison; a two-way romance might be off the table on account of their age gap, but they share a kinship that's affirmed as far more enduring and sincere than Laura's ephemeral pull to Jimbo. Bart is also heard laughing during the fade-out from "Bart's Girlfriend", but here his laughter is deceptive and crucially, he laughs alone. He closes the episode in a conspicuously more inauspicious position than in he did in "New Kid", but seems determined to convince himself otherwise. "Girlfriend" is a greatly more bitter, more toxic tale than "New Kid". The frustrations that "New Kid" touched upon were primarily those associated with childhood and with not being treated like an adult, whereas the injustices "Girlfriend" is concerned with are implied to be of the kind that will translate into the injustices that will follow you all throughout life. Bart's insistence that he's come out of his ordeal less naive doesn't disguise the fact that he hasn't escaped the cycle by the end.
Jessica Lovejoy is at least of the same age as Bart, and in that regard is more attainable than Laura before her. The initial roadblock is that she also happens to be the daughter of the town's most prominent religious authority, and there's an assumption that she would gravitate toward someone who is as upstanding a citizen as she appears to be. Bart's infatuation is so commanding that he's willing to rein in his natural tendencies toward roguery in an effort to impress her, but she still won't give him the time of day. He then discovers the scandalous truth about Jessica, which at first seems better than he'd ever dared to imagine. She's actually a thoroughgoing gremlin who hides behind the facade of sweet-spoken innocence, and Bart thinks he's found in her a kindred spirit - that is, until Jessica's lawlessness transpires to be far more treacherous than even Bart can handle.
The first of two amazingly cool things about "Bart's Girlfriend" is that the basic plot was inspired by the 1968 film Pretty Poison, starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld. Perkins (typecast from his Psycho association, as is evident from the first minute of the film) plays a young delinquent who falls for the seemingly guileless Weld, only for her to out herself as the more dangerous and predatory of the two. They go over this a little on the DVD commentary, noting that this was the significance of having Jessica twirl a baton in a scene where Bart is confronting her about her behaviour (a nod to Weld's entrance as part of a marching band). The second is that Jessica was voiced by Academy Awards darling Meryl Streep, who achieves something that's honestly very rare among Simpsons guest stars, in that she gives a performance that allows her to disappear completely into the character. As you're watching Jessica, I don't think you're ever consciously aware that it's Streep you're hearing, and if you hadn't looked at the credits, would you even have guessed that it was her? The only other guest voice who leaps out as doing anything halfway comparable would be Streep's Kramer vs. Kramer co-star Dustin Hoffman, as Mr Bergstrom in "Lisa's Substitute" - in his case, he was so set on disappearing into the character that he insisted on being credited under the puntastic moniker of Sam Etic, a move that probably undid his attempts at discretion in the long run (the script also teased him by working in a moment that winkingly evoked his role in The Graduate). With how endemic guest celebrities had already become by this point in the series' lifespan, there was something to be said for any actor who simply wanted to put their all into becoming a denizen of the Simpsons universe, without drawing overt attention to their real-life brand.
I'll admit to having some reservations about how the episode opens. John Collier's script gets things off on a note that's inventive, subversive and a whole lot of fun but then, much like our featured antagonist, insists on taking it to an uncomfortable extreme. I speak of that specific sequence where the children of Springfield are fleeing the clutches of their parents, desperate to get out of having to spend a sizeable chunk of their precious weekend mired to a church pew, and it turns into an allusion to the scene from Planet of The Apes (1968) where the apes pursue Charlton Heston and friends through the cornfields. The build-up to the gag is simply beautiful. The children are hard at play at the local Veteran's Park (named, according to its signage "in honor of some veterans") when their japery is interrupted by the ominous sounds of church bells, and the distant cries of their parents beckoning them to the Sunday service. We first hear Marge call out from off-screen: "Bart! Lisa! Time for church!" Then Luann Van Houten chimes in, with "Milhouse! Time for church!" Finally, an anonymous Jewish voice breaks the pattern: "Shlomo! Time for your violin lesson!" The Apes homage commences, with an inspired shot of Marge stalking Bart through the grasses, where only her hair is visible; the sight of her towering beehive inching closer to the terrified Bart is at once ludicrous and downright menacing. It's when Kirk Van Houten gallops by on horseback and bundles his son up in a net, while Marge has Bart and Lisa shackled by the neck that I'm thinking the allusion is maybe becoming a mite overplayed and the entire sequence has suddenly crossed the line into being way too silly. I mean, are we to conclude that Marge has literally taken to affixing manacles to her children's throats, or is the moment intended to be at least somewhat impressionistic? At this stage it was difficult to say quite where the line should be drawn within the show's internal reality. Then again, it's hard to deny that the overblown nature of the sequence isn't fully in keeping with how adult authority is characterised throughout "Bart's Girlfriend". Take the ridiculous "Scotchtoberfest" sting operation Skinner uses to bust Bart for a cheeky prank involving helium balloons and Groundskeeper Willie's kilt - a prank that Skinner deliberately went out of his way to create the opportunity for, with the sole intention of slapping Bart with three months' detention (Willie, though, is mainly outraged that Skinner would exploit his Scottish heritage in such a manner). Uglier still is the Hannibal Lecter treatment given to Bart when he's falsely accused of the nefarious crime of stealing from the church collection plate. All in all, there's a cartoonish heavy-handedness to how rules and boundaries are enforced upon Springfield's youngest denizens that borders on the grotesque, and seems to nullify any professions on the part of the enforcers to be upholders of righteousness.
Adult hypocrisy is at the heart of "Bart's Girlfriend", even with the prepubescent romance being in the foreground, and the episode takes assorted irreverent jabs at the role of organised religion in sustaining these hypocrisies. Marge's assertion that the entire purpose of having the children attend church is to instil in them morals, decency and love for their fellow men is promptly undermined by the sermon Reverend Lovejoy delivers, which concerns how the Aromites slaughtered their fellow men with flaming swords and cannibalised their pulverised eyeballs (and if you think Jessica comes across as sociopathic, you should check out the bright-eyed glee with which Rod and Todd are receiving his lurid narration). On a more personal level, the incorrigible Jessica is heavily insinuated to be a product of the Lovejoys' reliance on external virtue to cover over more heinous realities. By the show's sixth season we still knew next to nothing about the Lovejoys' private lives (other than that they were repeatedly beleaguered by phone calls from a frantic Ned Flanders), so it wasn't a terribly egregious cheat to reveal that they have this daughter who had been hitherto hidden away at boarding school. Timothy and Helen themselves get only minimal screen time in "Bart's Girlfriend", but the little window Jessica offers into the unseen dynamics of their household is nevertheless illuminating. At first glance, she serves as an extension of the Lovejoys' social superiority, in being a seemingly perfect daughter whom they can endlessly brag about. When Bart is invited by Jessica to have dinner with her family, Helen asks him how school is going - a genial enough question in itself, except that she immediately adds, "Jessica always gets straight As", as if to pre-emptively show Bart up for whatever answer he's about to give. Watching this sequence with the episode's numerous twists in mind, it becomes even easier to read this as a knee-jerk denial on Helen's part; she cannot so much as raise the delicate issue of school without having to reassure herself that the situation with Jessica is as flawless as everything else about her. The truth is that the Lovejoys are sitting on a myriad of bombshells when it comes to their daughter, the biggest and most explosive of them all being that Jessica has come home from boarding school because she was expelled. It's a fact that the Lovejoys cannot bring themselves to look in the face, even as it's living right under the same roof as them, and even as Jessica pushes ever more defiantly for her parents to acknowledge her imperfections.
"Girlfriend" also works as a nice little character study for Bart, in examining the nature of his own wayward tendencies and where he senses that the line should be drawn. As Lisa puts it, he's already cemented his reputation as the Devil's cabana boy, a sheep so unrepentantly far from the flock that the church's Sunday school have written him off as a hopeless case. This leads to another of those mistreated hamster jokes that the Simpsons writers are so fond of for some reason, with the implication that Bart had a history of making life difficult for the Sunday school hamster - a gag that frankly feels out of step with Bart's characterisation, since animal abuse is not ordinarily something he goes for, a factor that seems important in establishing that his deviancy is fundamentally about mischief and not malice. He's all about punching upwards at the admonishers of the world, not downwards at tiny creatures that couldn't defend themselves. The itch to sock it to authority in all of its forms is so hard-wired into his neurons that it takes all the restraint he has to spare the Sunday school teacher when she opens up a golden opportunity by handing him a replica of the slingshot David used to slay Goliath before turning around to straighten her desk (an appalling waste it is too, since I'll admit to having a really strong dislike for that teacher, although she's probably at her most tolerable in this episode). Ultimately, he can't even fake it; even when he's intent on making a good impression during his dinner with the Lovejoys, he gets himself unceremoniously ejected for repeating a joke he heard on Fox that contained gratuitous use of the word "butt". Bart clearly isn't one for the angels. But it's those very impulses that make him such an amoral menace in the eyes of the parishioners that also make him vulnerable to the calculating Jessica, once she cottons on to what an ideal fall guy he would be for her lower-key depravity. It's a ready-made narrative the town is all too eager to devour; as she words it to Bart, "I'm the sweet, perfect minister's daughter, and you're just yellow trash."
Jessica, it has to be said, is one heck of an unsettling antagonist. The only Simpsons villain who has her bested in that regard (outside of the Halloween shows) is Ms Botz from "Some Enchanted Evening". She works as well as she does, in part, because the episode is willing to take its time in building up a full picture of her character, so that the viewer is never more than a step ahead than Bart in comprehending quite what he's dealing with. Our first impression of Jessica is that she's a reticent, unassuming kid who's put off by Bart's forwardness, but is willing to extend him her sympathies on witnessing him fall victim to Skinner's sting operation. At the same time, we get miniature hints that there might be more going on with her than meets the eye, such as her somewhat sassy response to Bart's overreaching suggestion that they stay after Sunday school and help the teacher clean up ("Do you ever think anything you don't say?"), and if you look closely, you can see that she's clearly enjoying the way Bart is inadvertently ruffling her parents' feathers at the dinner table. When she reveals to Bart that she's drawn to his unruly nature, for deep down inside she's cut from the same miscreant cloth, it's a natural assumption that she likes him because he represents such a breath of fresh air next to the uptight, excessively pious environment she's been raised in. There's a fleeting interlude where the two are depicted as equals, roaming the streets of Springfield after dark and letting their puckishness hang out to the theme from Pulp Fiction. It becomes apparent that Bart is way out his depth, however, when Jessica later coaxes him into skateboarding down a perilously steep hill, informing him (more tauntingly than reassuringly) that "You can't trust your perception at this altitude." The ensuing sequence is every bit as ludicrously cartoony as the opening Planet of The Apes homage, but the sharp direction and array of slick visual gags are able to sell it as an inspired metaphor for the critical power imbalance that's destined to characterise this relationship, and the disaster for which Bart is now irreversibly headed. Jessica savours the adrenalin rush, while Bart endures a royal grazing on his way down to the bottom, before coming to a (literally) sticky end when a truck full of glue unleashes its contents on him.
At this point, it is still possible to give Jessica the benefit of the doubt, even as we can see that she's clearly not the soul mate to bring validation to Bart's playfully deviant urges. Maybe she's having too much fun and expects Bart to keep up with that, but isn't being purposely cruel. Still, when she commits her most egregious misdeed - pocketing the contents of the church collection plate and setting up Bart to take the rap - I don't think we're particularly shocked, for the girl blatantly has no limits. It's here that the line is explicitly drawn between Bart and Jessica's respective values, for this is a low to which Bart would never stoop; in his words, "You're turning me into a criminal when all I want to be is a petty thug." He might have been tempted to undermine the individual authority of the Sunday School teacher, but swiping the income of the town's most sacred institution is on a whole other level. That plate does, after all, represent the goodwill and generosity of the entire parish (including Homer, who slips in a coupon for 20 cents off Shake n Bake), making it an affront to the community at large. For Jessica, it's something else entirely. It's discernible from the outset that her theft isn't motivated by avarice. She doesn't want the money per se. She is instead playing two games at once, getting to live out her resentment toward her parents, whose authority is intertwined with that of the church, whilst having the thrill of seeing how far she can string her human plaything along. Jessica delights in the power she holds over Bart, and in his inclination toward silence even when he recognises that it is not in his interests to protect her. But then, as she points out, it's not as though Springfield are a particularly understanding or non-judgemental bunch (even when associating with a religion that, as Lisa argues, has something to say about not judging, lest ye be judged). If Bart did speak up, his protests would fall on deaf ears. The town has immediately accepted him as their sticky fingered churchgoer, and are only too eager to inflict on him their typically grotesque and heavy-handed wrath.
As noted, the adults are presented in brutally caricatured terms for much of the narrative, although tempering that are a series of scenes in which Homer and Marge are able to weigh in from the sidelines on Bart's situation. Initially, they echo the optimism of his budding puppy love (at least until Homer's train of thought takes him to the more haunting prospect of having no bananas), before Marge picks up that something in Bart's world has gone sour, but is unable to pinpoint what - although this too takes a bizarrely disturbing turn, when Homer misinterprets Marge's concern about potentially smothering her son all-too literally (and prior to that is so inattentive to the basic details that he attributes Bart's malcontent to glasses that he doesn't even wear, unless he's still got the subplot of "The Last Temptation of Homer" in his head). Even when the adults are trying to be compassionate, an underpinning of unsettling inhumanity can't help but work its way into the proceedings. Marge does at least accept Bart's assertions of innocence over the theft of the collection money, but she also stands back and lets the town do its evil the following Sunday, by trussing him up like a Hollywood cannibalistic serial killer, in spite her concerns about what it could do to his self-esteem. It fits in with the broader themes of the episode, which have to do with passiveness being adopted as a response to cruelty. On an individual level, Bart is learning helplessness as a means of navigating Jessica's abuses. He lays out a bleak future for himself when he proposes putting up with it for the time being, in the hope that she'll eventually come around to treating him better once they're married and have children. ("After all, I deserve it".) The way this dovetails into the abuses he endures at the hands of the town points to a wider culture of callousness he's expected to fall in line with, of which Jessica is both a product and the tip of the iceberg.
Naturally, Bart finds his strongest alley in Lisa, who urges him not to stay with Jessica on the assumption that he can tame her amorality over time (wisdom she would later go against in "Lisa's Date With Density", although to be fair that was on the insistence of Marge) and who summons the gumption to confront Jessica, but not without having her own values tested in the process. Lisa's enters into the ring with the intention of not exposing Jessica directly as the culprit, but instead getting her to confess voluntarily by appealing to her guilty conscience. The problem she runs into immediately is that Jessica doesn't have a conscience, so Lisa is forced to switch up her tactics and encourage the town to ransack Jessica's bedroom for the stolen money. One bed check later and the evidence is irrefutable, and yet Reverend Lovejoy still persists in attempting to bend the narrative so that it points away from the obvious conclusion. "Bart Simpson has somehow managed to sneak his bedroom into my house!", he protests, before imploring the townspeople to use their imaginations when not even they prove ridiculous enough to buy it. It's here that Jessica comes clean and admits to her father that she did it, describing it as a classic cry for attention. Some viewers have doubts about the sincerity of this plea - we know by now how manipulative she is, and it is a little suspect how she's able to turn on the waterworks in the moment and then switch them off as abruptly - but I think the mask is well and truly dropped when she attempts to make her father face the facts about why she left boarding school, while he very tellingly refuses to listen, preferring to reflexively cover his ears and flee the vicinity. We're left to conclude that Jessica's antisocial behaviour stems from her distaste at having to live up to the predetermined version of herself that suits her parents' social standing, and which they would evidently sooner convince themselves is there than have to engage with their daughter as a complex and sometimes messy human being. The collection plate theft, the glee club brawl and the pipe bomb incident all amount to disaffected attempts to combat her own fundamental powerlessness by taking control of her own narrative. The problem being that her parents only become more withdrawn into their delusions, prompting Jessica to go for bigger and more shocking transgressions, in an ever-escalating arms race between denial and audacity.
There are, it seems, two competing objectives to Jessica's fun and recreation. On the one level, she wants to get caught, and for the sham that is her family's spiritual and domestic purity to be thoroughly exposed, not least to her family themselves. But she's also getting a tremendous kick out of setting Bart up as the scapegoat for her wrongdoing. If the opportunity to rewrite her narrative is continuously denied her, then she'll settle for the next best thing in taking control of Bart's. In some respects Bart and Jessica really are kindred spirits, as both are rebelling against a system that has boxed them into its preconceptions, and assumes it already knows everything about each of them that it ever needs to know. The key difference being that while Bart punches upward at the figures looking directly down on him (the Sunday School hamster notwithstanding), Jessica punches upward to truly dizzying heights, and also downward at the little creatures that can't defend themselves (ie: Bart).
By the final scene, we see that the Lovejoys have conceded enough to their painful reality to have tasked Jessica with the punitive responsibility of scrubbing clean the church porchway. It's here that Bart shows up to weigh in on his takeaway from their entanglement, with the moral outcome being deliberately muddied. Bart purports to have learned something, but does not articulate what. Jessica, on the other hand, is able to specify exactly what she's learned - that she can make men do whatever she wants. Bart objects that this means she really hasn't learned anything, but that's his small-mindedness on display. Jessica has figured out where her talents lie, she recognises what a screwed up world this is, and you can bet she's going to hone whatever weapons she has to stay afloat in it. She exits the episode as a true survivor, last seen riding off to freedom with a brand new beau while Bart is left doing her dirty work, having instantly complied with her suggestion that he scrub the porchway in her place. Important question - is the guy Jessica rides off with supposed to be the same well-read snarker from the library with whom Lisa was besotted in an earlier scene? Nah, it couldn't be. There's definitely a striking resemblance between the two, but something about that scenario doesn't add up. The kid we see at the end is clearly a child of around the same age as Bart and Jessica, whereas the guy in Lisa's library flashback looks older and surely has to be older, on account of the fact that he's in the library's employment. I deem them to be separate characters, with the joke being that they are both visibly modelled upon James Dean's character from the 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause, and are thus both part of the same "bad boy" archetype that gets the girls' stereotypical hearts a flutter. Having Jessica flee her parents' command with such an archetype reaffirms her as an outlaw for life. For all intents and purposes she has escaped them for good, since it's not like she's going to stick around and become a recurring character anyway.
It is rather a peculiar ending, and one that I've walked back on over the years. Ostensibly, the last laugh goes to Bart, who declares that, unlike that Jim Stark wannabe over there, he wouldn't do anything for a pretty face, and that Jessica might be surprised when she sees the second-rate job he does in cleaning the porchway. As a kid, I took that to mean that Bart's subservience was merely feigned; that he was in total control of the final situation, with the goal of getting back at Jessica through more underhanded means, which I guess was all a reflection of my own naivety. Now, I think the whole point is that this is a pitifully meagre rebellion on Bart's part, the clue being that he says "second-rate", not "third-rate". His scrubbing won't be of top standard, but it won't be abysmally terrible either. His first instinct is indeed to submit, and the expression he allows himself comes from squarely within the limits of that compliance - he knows that Jessica has played him, but reassures himself that it's okay because his cleaning abilities will only be so good anyway. This is a world in which you either eat or be eaten, and Bart's laughter comes from deep within the belly of the beast.
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