Homer The Vigilante (aka Would You Say It's Time For Everyone To Panic?)

 

It goes without saying that The Simpsons is one of those shows that only gets better as you get older. So much of its wizardry lies within its finer details, and in the subtle humor, cultural references and character nuances that are largely unattainable to a child, but will hit you with a spanking new resonance when adulthood sets in. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for watching the series through the eyes of an unworldly nipper and having no choice but to go along with the flow, to wherever it might lead you. In those days, when you had no real frame of reference for a good percentage of what was going on, the world of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie always seemed so much more random and mysterious. Remember, for instance, what it was like to be 10 years old and experiencing "Homer The Vigilante" (1F09) for the very first time, never having heard of Stanley Kramer's 1963 marathon-lengthed farce It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and having no idea how you were even expected to process the direction in which the narrative eventually heads? In those final two and a half minutes, we witness the populace of Springfield losing its collective mind over an elusive fortune reported to be concealed in the outskirts of town beneath a "Big T", an audaciously dizzying swing with which to see out a story that had already seemed to have reached its quota for over the topness. It was almost as though the episode had tumbled down some wild and wonderful rabbit hole - which, for all intents and purposes, it basically had. 

Being in on the joke is great, but not being in on the joke can be a tremendously thrilling experience too. As a child, I became fascinated with that entire ending sequence, and with what I was potentially missing. It felt like the ultimate Simpsons enigma, a great unknown lingering just outside of my understanding, waiting to be discovered and unpicked. I'd quickly deduced that was most likely an elaborate reference to a movie I hadn't seen, for there were two major giveaways. The soundtrack was doing something interesting and unconventional, a tip-off that it was borrowing from an outside source (in this case, Ernest Gold's Academy Award-nominated score), and a bunch of new and distinct faces who were not part of the recurring Springfield mob had gotten in on the money-hungry frenzy, the most prominent of which was a semi-coherent man in glasses and a fedora who had apparently been tricked by Bart into driving into a river. He is of course a parody of Phil Silvers' character from It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and the scene with him being hoodwinked by a wily child into an ill-advised aquatic diversion is transplanted pretty much wholesale from the film. And then at the Big T itself (an unusually-shaped palm tree, just like the film's own Big W, which can also be glimpsed in the mise en scene) there are figures modelled on Buddy Hackett and Milton Berle. 1997 saw the publication of a couple of Simpsons reference guides, the official A Complete Guide To Our Favorite Family and the unofficial one by Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, both of which pointed me to Kramer's film, and thus began a whole new phase in my cultural education, in which the media I consumed was predominantly dictated by my need to comprehend certain jokes on The Simpsons (I also watched 2001: A Space Odyssey purely to understand the closing sequence of "Deep Space Homer", but it frankly left even more baffled than when I'd come in). Back then, if I wanted to see an older movie it typically meant having to wait for it to show up on television, which could be a slow and frustrating process, but in 1999 my patience paid off. The film left a strong enough impression that, some years later, I unsuccessfully campaigned to get it screened at my university's student cinema (I was thwarted less by a lack of interest than by the impracticalities of getting hold of a 35mm copy), but the most important thing is that I was finally up to speed on the secrets of "Homer The Vigilante". Still the overarching enigma of that closing sequence refused to fade, even with the necessary research now behind me. The individual choices all made perfect sense, but as a whole it remained such a confounding way of signing off a Simpsons story. There is something about that it seems downright hallucinatory, even within context. 

"Homer The Vigilante" debuted on January 6th 1994 as part of the show's fifth season, and I don't think it's acknowledged enough what a uniquely strange time in the series' life that quinary year was. While nowhere near as darkly cynical or openly portentous as Season 8, the overall tone feels weirdly unsettled. There's a sense that the very fabric of the Simpsons universe is perpetually on the verge of unravelling, whether that's a result of the basic rules and underpinnings being challenged within an episode's conflict (see "The Last Temptation of Homer" and "Homer Loves Flanders"), or just a random tangent it goes off on at the end (see "Boy Scoutz 'N The Hood"). It was also an era when the writers seemed to be getting particularly dependent on doing elaborate parodies of popular movies, occasionally to the point that it formed the basis of the entire plot. Some of these parodies were relatively unintrusive, serving more as platforms on which to examine existing character dynamics -  we all know that "Marge on The Lam" is one big homage to Thelma & Louise, but it ties in logically enough with Marge's characterisation that it's a functional story on its own merits, one that fits in comfortably with the internal grounding of the series. With other parodies, you get the impression that the show's entire universe is bending in order to accommodate the demands of what it's spoofing, with the It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World homage in "Vigilante" belonging in that second camp. The story gets so intensely frenetic in those final moments, with so much going on and so many outside elements at play (the soundtrack, the appearance from Phil Silvers), that it has the effect of suggesting a heightened reality, one that's strayed drastically far from the show's regular wheelhouse. By the end, the characters aren't in Kansas (or indeed Springfield) any more, but have gone to some whole other plane of existence in which the worlds of The Simpsons and Stanley Kramer have mysteriously converged (in a way that's not altogether different from the moment in "Selma's Choice" where Marge's memories become fused with images from The Prince of Tides). The entire set-up, and not just Malloy's promise of hidden loot, becomes an extravagant mirage. There's that off-kilter moment where Silvers' grinning mug is inserted among a shot of Springfieldians looking downward, as if he were just one of the regular line-up. The angelic choir music that plays as the assorted treasure hunters pull out their shovels and tunnel deep into the earth beneath the Big T might have been pilfered wholesale from the movie, but the ethereal aura it creates causes the sequence to feel particularly illusory. It is both a false promise of salvation, foreshadowing the eventual reveal that there is no buried fortune, and a tip-off that things in general have gone very deeply haywire for Homer and co.

Or it might just be that the entirety of "Vigilante" is an illusion. It opens in the early hours, with the family all sleeping, and I'm half-tempted to propose a fan theory that the ensuing events are nothing more than a colourful dream that one of the household is having (presumably Homer or Lisa, given that they're most at the forefront). Even before we get to that overblown ending, "Vigilante" is a peculiar little beast. Penned by John Swartzwelder, this might just be the most surreal non-Halloween entry of the season - impressive, when you consider that it arrived hot on the heels of "$pringfield (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)", an episode with a particularly baffling structure and execution that evoked a collection of miniature fever dreams sewn together. As a story, "Vigilante" flows much more fluidly and coherently than "$pringfield" (helped along by the fact that there are no subplots it has to juggle), but it somehow feels even more unreal. It's not that the events of "Vigilante" are especially far-fetched - this was the same season where Homer went into space and Bart was keeping a full-grown African elephant in the backyard, and the premise of an artful burglar who's capable of swiping anything in Springfield that isn't nailed down feels positively modest and down to earth by comparison. It's more that this burglar goes about his swiping to a leitmotif modelled on Henry Mancini's theme for The Pink Panther (a reference that was never lost on me, even as a child), which puts his thieving antics in conspicuous quotation marks. Again, it's the movie allusions that take the story to a whole other realm, where everything is all very knowing and caricatured. The Cat Burglar is a cartoon creation by even The Simpsons' standards, at once too farcical to be taken overly seriously as a threat and a way more formidable foe than anyone in Springfield can conceivably handle. (He certainly isn't challenged by the town's approach to security. One of my favourite gags occurs right at the start, when we see the burglar's infiltration of the Simpsons' household from his perspective. He gets his tools out, ready to break open the lock on their front door, and does a double take when he finds Homer's keys dangling there, ready for him to turn.)

The outlandish streak continues during a later scene where Homer looks to up his game against the burglar by shopping for weapons at Herman's military antiques store, and is taken out back for a glimpse at the hottest, most clandestine merchandise on offer - a miniature version of the A-bomb, which Homer fantasies about dropping on a gathering of unsuspecting beat poets. This sequence is clearly framed as an idle daydream in context (so a dream within a dream?), but it's still such a weird digression, in that it's basically an excuse to recreate that iconic shot from Dr Strangelove (or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb) where Slim Pickens goes out on the ultimate adrenalin rush, by riding the titular bomb to the doomed Earth below. But then the real punchline occurs when Homer is forced to return to reality, where we see that he's gotten as far as actually mounting the bomb. Herman indignantly gestures to a sign right next to it explicitly forbidding such behaviour. Apparently it's the standard reaction of everybody who sees the bomb to get high on a Pickens-inspired power trip, to the point that would necessitate the installation of a sign. Which really sums up the spirit of the entire episode. It's a cautionary tale about the dumb stuff that happens when people inevitably get drunk on their own bravado.

It's fair to say that "Vigilante" is not a particularly character-driven episode. Or rather, it's not particularly driven by the characters as individuals. The participant who gets the most heartfelt treatment is naturally Lisa, whose beloved saxophone is stolen by the Cat Burglar, depriving her of her principal means of self-expression and grounding this otherwise entirely silly story with a firm enough undercurrent of pathos. Despite the amount of screentime he's given, and the personal stakes afforded through the theft of Lisa's saxophone, it is only nominally about Homer. "Vigilante" is best understood as a study of the psychology of Springfield as a collective, and just how badly it can react when faced with a crisis, and in that regard Homer becomes more of a representative of the wrong-headedness of the town. This is the recurring theme we've seen since pretty much the beginning, with community spirit forever giving way mob mentality, and the masses being swayed in whatever arbitrary direction is suggested to them. Neither the media or the law enforcement prove in any way reassuring in their responses to the Cat Burglar - Kent Brockman insists on reporting through the most disastrous lens possible ("When cat burglaries start, can mass murders be far behind?"), and while the police get as far as uncovering a clue in the form of a handkerchief dropped at one of the crime scenes, compromising the evidence comes only too naturally and too moronically to Wiggum. When it falls upon the townspeople to pull together and come up with a solution of their own, Ned has a sensible idea in proposing that they start a Neighbourhood Watch, in which everybody looks out for everybody else. The town seems eager to embrace this initiative, until Ned turns the tide against himself with an ill-judged display of modesty, enabling Homer to rise to the top in his stead - not because he consciously understands how to work the crowd, but because he so perfectly embodies the mindlessness of its ethos ("We don't need a thinker, we need a doer - someone who'll act without considering the consequences!"). Homer, whose personality and antics had already seen a marked broadening throughout the course of Season 5, is as loud and obnoxious as he'd ever been in "Vigilante", although in this context it is justified with the perspective that he's representing something much bigger than himself. It also accounts for how he can be so brazenly dismissive of not only his father, but of the entire older generation, when Abe offers to help with the crusade against the Cat Burglar, but is refused on the grounds that he's an old man, and "old people are useless". Despite the significance of this particular plot point to the eventual resolution, Homer's curt position comes from basically nowhere; there are no establishing moments where he's shown having any kind of personal difficulty with Abe, and "Vigilante" certainly isn't about his relationship with his father. Rather, he's best understood as speaking for a broader societal attitude - the idea that senior citizens are to be cast aside and ignored. He also makes himself ripe for a humbling, for it is this very assumption that fatally wrongfoots his mission, causing him to underestimate not only what Abe could potentially bring to the table, but who he might be up against.

Homer goes about assembling a ragtag team of non-seniors to patrol the streets of Springfield, looking for any opportunity to hurl their weight around. Again, the particulars of the group's dynamic don't really matter. Moe and Barney are a given, Apu was slowly being cemented as part of Homer's social circle, and we were slap dab in the middle of the era where there was a concerted effort to make Skinner one of the guys (something more or less abandoned with Season 6; the contrast was often hilarious, but it was too insurmountable a stretch that he and Homer would actually choose to hang out together), but none of them get much of a chance to act as individuals. Under Homer's guidance they swiftly devolve into faceless followers with less interest in protecting their community than in fuelling their own thuggish sensation of being at the top of the pile. It's not just the perspective of the elderly that gets discarded amid this alpha-driven arrangement, but that of the younger generation too. The thread with Lisa's saxophone provides a valuable counterpoint to the vulgar tendencies of the group, in that it gives Homer something genuinely righteous to be fighting for, if he could just keep his sights on it. The saxophone is the only stolen item that actually matters (aside from the cubic zirconia that proves crucial in the latter half), because it is the one area in which the Cat Burglar's practices are shown to have caused genuine harm. None of the other thefts merit anywhere near as much gravity - Marge's pearl necklace was also stolen, but she has an entire drawer full of them, and while Bart wakes up to find his stamp collection gone, in his case it's all a great joke that he would out himself as partaking in a hobby that nerdy (Lisa's observation that "Bart's pain is funny, but mine isn't" might seem a little mean by her standards, but she is only vocalising the stance being taken by the plot). Lisa has been robbed of her emotional mobility, which Homer promises to restore, only for her voice to become all the more buried beneath his chaotic agenda of harassing buskers, flipping vehicles with people's mouthy grandmas inside upside down, and world domination. Lisa represents the vulnerable youngsters on whose behalf this war is supposedly being waged, so that they might grow up in a safer, more nurturing environment, but who inevitably get pushed aside, or worse still, corrupted by its hopelessly subverted values. There are multiple instances where we see Homer's toxic influence being spread among Springfield's impressionable young minds. Bart is apparently permitted to participate in a chaotic session involving shotguns. The mob happens upon Jimbo (who's possibly been watching too much Dead Poets Society of late) spraying "Carpe Diem" onto the side of a building, and not only lets him off the hook when his rationale accords with their own ("It makes me feel like a big man!"), they agree to recruit him into their ranks (on the condition that he supplies his own weapon, in the form of a sack filled with doorknobs^[1]). Later, Homer is lured away from his post by the sight of underage kids drinking beer without a permit, only to get in on the beer binge himself and become the very model for belching frat boy behaviour.

As society disintegrates ever further under Homer's oversight, the mystery of the Cat Burglar ends up not being much of a mystery at all, although the episode deftly avoids overselling that point. You get no prizes if you figured out long before any of the characters did that the burglar is his fellow retiree Malloy, for who else could it have been? The answer is right under the community's noses the entire time, but nor is it made entirely explicit up until Abe's epiphany. If you were particularly attentive, you might have been able to match the burglar's silhouette in the opening sequence to Malloy's outline when he appears at Abe's bedroom to borrow his ointment. Perhaps you recognised his voice when he calls in during Homer's televised interview with Brockman to publicly announce his plans for pilfering the cubic zirconia from the Springfield Museum (prompting Homer to take his rage out on an innocent stagehand). Odds are that you picked up on how he sticks out like a sore thumb among everyone else in the story - a one-off character who's a blatant outsider to the ethos of community, and clearly being set up for plot significance. By the time he shows up at the threatened museum dressed in black the jig is pretty well up. Malloy is voiced by the late actor Sam Neill, who gives one of the most sublimely underrated guest performances of the series. His cool, collected and impeccably well-mannered affability makes him the very antithesis of a town that spends the entirety of the episode (and most of the series) racing around like headless chickens, and that, more so than his Henry Mancini-inspired leitmotif, is what makes him such a formidable nemesis. Not even the viewer is immune to his offences, for we too end up liking him and wanting him to get away with his crimes. The man is a gentleman through and through (his prior failure to clean off the applicator on Abe's ointment notwithstanding), but there is still a discernable element of amused disdain in how he handles the Springfieldians. At the start, when he prizes a portable television from the sleeping Bart's arms and leaves him with a book entitled Coping With Loss, I can't decide if that's his politeness showing or just his penchant for taunting his victims. It's evident that Malloy is in the burglary game because he enjoys the thrill of infiltration, and of toying with all of these foolish souls, and in a way, good for him - he represents an undervalued class fighting back against a system that's written him off as worthless and expects him to spend his remaining years withering away in a rundown retirement home. He was always above suspicion because nobody imagined that somebody so low down in the social food chain could be such a worthy adversary. In the end he's done in by Abe, who notices that Malloy has the stolen zirconia on his coffee table and finally puts two and two together. Maybe Malloy got a little too cocky, or maybe he expected a little more solidarity from Abe, who is part of that same undervalued class. But then how could Abe resist the opportunity to get back at Homer's earlier slighting by turning up at his door and announcing that he's cracked the mystery? Actually, this is a pretty generous move on Abe's part, demonstrating how much he fundamentally loves his son. If he'd really wanted to show Homer up, he could have gone to the police directly and wallowed in all of the credit, but instead he allows Homer to take the lead and obtain redemption at a time when the entire town was baying for his blood for failing to keep tabs on the zirconia.

Unlike Homer, Malloy clearly does understand how to work the masses. When cornered, he comes very close to wheedling his way out of trouble on the basis of his charisma alone, agreeing to return all of the stolen items (including Lisa's saxophone) and stroking at the townspeople's egos by telling them how much he likes them. Again, just beneath Neill's charming performance you can practically hear him snickering internally at just how easy they are to hoodwink. It is, surprisingly, Wiggum who puts his foot down and reminds everyone that they can't just ignore the fact that Malloy is a highly prolific criminal. But Malloy isn't beaten yet. He still has one further ace up his sleeve, which is what gets us into our It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World pastiche. Malloy makes his ultimate play, laying out a scenario that this malleable town couldn't possibly resist. He claims to have amassed millions of stolen dollars over the years, which he's concealed somewhere in Springfield at a site marked by a Big T. He's so obliging that, rather than send them out on a totally haphazard treasure hunt, he's even willing to supply the precise location - the money is buried at 4723 Maple Valley Road ("You take Highway 201 south for 15 minutes. You take a left - a left!..."). It is of course a grand diversion, designed to take eyes off himself for long enough for him to sneak away. The town feasts on the bait and races off with their shovels in hand, while Malloy escapes and presumably legs it to a new life somewhere in South America.

The It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World parody works as brilliantly as it does because, far from being an arbitrary movie homage, it is but the logical culmination of the episode-long obsession with the townspeople's collective mindlessness. This whole thing started with Malloy, an apparent interloper from another reality, waltzing in and turning Springfield upside down, and it ends with the town disappearing up its own delirium into territory that is hitherto unknown, leaving them ultimately stranded and with no clue how they're going to get back to their normal state of affairs (to the extent that, according to a nondescript professor consulted by Brockman, society is on the brink of collapsing into a state where bludgeoning and cannibalism will become the new order). Its surrealness is by design, to illustrate how the characters are touching such drastic new heights in their susceptibility as to have become completely detached from reality. The frenetic pacing and epic scale of Kramer's picture has been lovingly recreated, somehow managing to condense the plot of the movie (160 minutes long in its standard release) into less than 3 minutes and run through many of the highlights (like Phil Silvers cursing a child for convincing him to drive his car into a river). It helps that the two properties are such a great match tonally, not simply in being ambitiously larger than life comedies, but in sharing the same unrelenting cynicism about human nature, and reaching toward much the same conclusion. People on the whole are a greedy, grubby and pathetic little bunch, but you've got to laugh, haven't you?

It's an ending that lays bare the fundamental lack of community spirit that's been fuelling the mob's actions throughout. We all know that it was never about any desire to protect their neighbourhoods and uphold values, or (despite Marge's musings to the contrary) any shared love for the glittering novelties housed at their local museum. For Springfield, moving with the mob is a simple matter of self-preservation, in that it's always preferable to be a faceless shadow in a crowd than to be singled out as outside of it (as Homer learns the hard way when the zirconia is stolen on his watch and he becomes a highly acceptable target on which to vent their malaise). With that final suggestion of hidden riches, things degenerate into a matter of everyone for themselves, with the single interest in filling up their pockets with ill-gotten loot - that the alleged fortune was explicitly made up of stolen money is of no odds to any of them, not even to Wiggum and his underlings. Lisa, who's been the episode's moral centre and is satisfied just having her saxophone back, gets to maintain her dignity and sit the sequence out, but the rest of the town is swept up in the frenzied scramble to be the first at the Big T. Even when they've seemingly united in a team effort to dig up the money, Homer is all poised to snatch whatever they unearth for himself - which unfortunately turns out to be a briefcase containing only a missive from Malloy. He apologises for sending them on such a wild goose chase, admitting that there is no hidden money and that he was merely buying himself time in which to escape. It is hilarious when you contemplate that Malloy would have to have gone to the lengths of planting that briefcase with the note inside in advance, as his contingency plan in the event that he was caught, which speaks volumes to the meticulousness of his scheming, and his dual need to be extremely polite to his prey and to taunt them in the same breath. 

Malloy's success represents the triumph of the rational individual over the mindless herd, and I think we the audience are entirely satisfied with that outcome. The Cat Burglar played his hand astutely and earned his getaway. It's a meaning that is, unsurprisingly, lost on the Springfieldians, who persist in digging ever deeper, believing that if they keep going, they'll eventually uncover something. Having tasted such an exhilarating high, they still refuse to be brought back to Earth, and insist instead on going in the opposite direction, by burrowing down ludicrously deep into a tunnel of denial and self-delusion. When, some hours later, it dawns on them that they probably won't be locating any millions and, what's more, they've gone so far down that getting back up to the surface could be a problem (an ironic contrast to Malloy's situation), the solution is once again to keep on digging and see what comes of it. It's not just the moral to which they're left oblivious, but the metaphor too.

BBC2 edit alert!: I don't remember Sky 1 touching anything about this episode when it was part of their rotation, but later when the Beeb got a hold of it, I recall that they nixed the precise moment where Bart was revealed to be in on the vigilante group's shotgun party. 

[1] This was a line I misunderstood as a child. Back then I'd assumed that "swing a sack of doorknobs" was some idiom I hadn't previously come across, but I would figure out as I got older, with, with the joke being that the vigilante group were taking it all-too literally. Nowadays I'm pretty confident that no such idiom exists and this is all just a morsel of self-contained nonsense. Oh, and when a disillusioned Jimbo later tells Homer that he's going to law school, I originally misheard that as "Laura's school", thinking it was a continuity nod to "New Kid on The Block".

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #57: Canada's House Hippo Problem

In 1999 Canadians received notice of a peculiar home invader who was taking over their kitchens whenever they'd switched off their lights and retired for the evening. Meet the North American House Hippo, a small hippopotamid (roughly the size of a rat) that is indigenous to Canada and to regions of the eastern United States, where it's carved out quite the ecological niche, feeding off discarded crumbs by night and nesting in shoe cupboards by day. Wherever there are opened bags of potato chips and unattended slices of toast with peanut butter, these resourceful hippos thrive, yet they are highly elusive creatures, and little was known about their habits until a short documentary was cobbled together and extensively televised at the end of the millennium. The minute-long piece showed us the nightly routine of one such hippo, as it emerged to forage for its preferred foods, and to annoy Jake the cat by flashing its (tiny, but still intimidating) tusks his way before going for a dip in his water bowl, all while voice actor Len Carlson (known for his work on The Raccoons and Care Bears) provided genial commentary. With that, a magical new world was revealed, sparking the imaginations of young Canucks all over as to what weird and wonderful delights could be lurking within the nooks and crannies of their humble households. 

It all sounds just a tad fanciful, right? Anybody with their thinking cap on would have hopefully deduced that no such creature really existed, and that was precisely the point of the short. The fictitious hippo was created by visual effects team Spin Productions on behalf of Concerned Children's Advertisers, a Toronto-based organisation who specialised in producing public service announcements for young audiences on a variety of topics, including substance abuse, physical fitness, self-esteem and personal safety. "House Hippo" was conceived as a way of introducing children to the issue of media literacy, and why they couldn't automatically trust everything they see on television, no matter how accustomed they might be to regarding it as a form of authority. A hippo was chosen as the unlikely house pest because as a concept it seemed so irresistibly hilarious, but also so oddly convincing in its miniaturised form. A moose and a giraffe were considered, but in their case the artifice was just too apparent. This was a unique kind of movie magic that only the hippo could provide. Meanwhile, the format of the PSA was designed to recall a familiar staple of Canadian culture, the Hinterland Who's Who vignettes of the 1960s and 70s, a series of charming micro-documentaries commissioned by the Canadian Wildlife Service to provide introductory portraits of the country's fauna. Here's an example, focussing on one of my favourite animals:

The music of "House Hippo" differs substantially to the John Cacavas-composed flute leitmotif that accompanied Hinterland Who's Who, hinting at its more whimsical intentions, although Carlson's voiceover was intended to evoke John Livington's, giving the PSA an air of pseudo-authority that's ultimately counteracted by its epilogue. A second narrator speaks up, openly acknowledging the pretence and prompting the viewer to consider how they processed the bogus information they'd just received: "That looked really...real?! But you knew it couldn't be true, didn't you? That's why it's good to think about what you're watching on TV and ask questions, kind of like you just did." The hippo reappears on a television screen, now full-sized and restored to its natural habitat in sub-Saharan Africa, and we can see that it never actually left. The final image hints at the trickery behind the fake documentary - the hippos we were shown were indeed real, but they were extracted from stock footage, with painstaking technical wizardry employed to create the illusion that they were wandering through a nondescript kitchen and interacting with the objects therein. The intentions of the film were clearly expressed, and yet anecdotal reports abound that a lot of kids tuned out during that all-important denouement, either because they weren't fully receptive to the concept of media literacy in the first place, or because they were too enchanted by the notion of there being tiny hippos in their closets and wanted to preserve that fantasy. Concerned Children's Advertisers had already sold them on the premise, and they weren't going to negate that by suggesting that they be boring and sensible about it at the end. As such, "House Hippo" is often cited as an example of an advertising campaign that humorously backfired, spreading misinformation when it was intended to do the exact opposite. Harmless misinformation, I suppose (well, maybe not to those kids who were inspired to leave plates peanut buttered toast on their kitchen floors and ended up attracting flies and roaches), and the PSA certainly won a lot of hearts amid all the confusion it created. It is remembered today with tremendous affection, immortalising the misplaced hippo as a Canadian icon, a monument to an alternate reality that seemed so much more enticing than the one we were stuck with. You could argue that it did in fact make its point with more potency than its creators had originally anticipated, by boring its way into the hearts and souls of its viewers in order to demonstrate what a frightfully appealing beast misinformation can be. In the end it became more of a slow-burn message - one that, rather than giving its young audience a life-changing education in 60 seconds, required them to grow up and gain a little extra wisdom and perspective on the case of the house hippo and its impact on their perception.

"House Hippo" strikes me as being a more benign cousin to those Hula Hoops Shoks ads about the electric eels purportedly loose in Britain's water supply that had enough kids convinced that their bathrooms had become a no-go area in the Y2K. There was something eerily authoritative about that campaign to the youngsters who hadn't yet developed the ability to discern absurdist irony, and certainly nothing joyous about the thought of being zapped by a confused and disorientated knifefish the instant you turned on your taps. Whereas "House Hippo" warmly evokes the hidden magic and wonder that might be stirring in the most ostensibly banal of environments, "Shoks" gives off a distinctly grimy despair that has the world you inhabit seeming a whole lot more malevolent (as noted in my coverage of the campaign, it ultimately speaks more to the nightmarish prospect of dying alone in a 1970s high-rise apartment than being fried by an eel). But you know kids, maybe it's a good thing that those shrunken hippos weren't actually in your kitchens; in a way, they had the potential to be just as big a menace as those electric eels. If you stop to think about it, would you really want one of those things nesting around your footwear? It all ties in with the bigger picture of how we tend to perceive hippos, which constitutes a serious bit of misrepresentation in itself. In media, hippos are typically depicted as loveable softies (think George from Rainbow and Peter Potamus), and small wonder, when they look like big squishy bath toys. In actuality, they're noted for being violent and territorial creatures, of the sort you don't mess with if you're interested in keeping all your body parts in place. These hippos might be small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, but it's evident that their aggressive nature is still intact, with Jake the cat making what is plainly the right call in backing down from a confrontation. Now imagine if one of these little chonks had made a nest inside your shoe, and you put your foot in without checking it first. I think there's a very good prospect of you losing some of your toes in that scenario. If they were inside your house, then your parents would have been laying traps for them like nobody's business, and that wouldn't have been very fun.

The house hippo didn't just stick to his allotted range of Canada and the eastern United States. We were also alerted to his (non) existence in the UK, when local company Media Smart got their hands on the ad in the mid-00s. In addition to using their own logo at the end, their version also ran about 20 seconds shorter, removing the references to the hippo being a native of North America (in accordance with his expanded territory) and shaving off a few of the specifics, such as his weaknesses for peanut butter and pieces of string. I have memories of an even shorter version still, which dispensed with the faux documentary aspect altogether and just had the hippo roaring at Jake, with the commentary that if you see something on TV that looks real but you know it can't be, then you can consider yourself media smart.

I hadn't thought about the house hippo for years, but was recently reminded of it while watching Sophy Romvari's remarkable feature Blue Heron, which prominently incorporates the original PSA (partly to evoke the time period in which the film takes place, but also to foreshadow its own uses of non-literal storytelling). It got me pondering the unique appeal of the hippo, and that beguiling middle ground he occupies between cozy familiarity and all-out insanity. It's no surprise that he made the cultural splash that he did, for it is an immensely charming PSA, and so lovingly made. We can suspend our disbelief and buy into the internal narrative that there are tiny hippos in our households, such a joy is it to see this most preposterous of creatures blend in so convincingly with this most mundane of environs. The fusion of humdrum nocturnal setting and improbable imagery evokes a lovely intersection of a dreamed state and waking reality. At the same time, we shouldn't overlook that the house hippo is a metaphor for something deeply insidious, and a problem that has merely intensified with the rise of digital media, deepfakes and AI. We live in a world where the house hippos have taken over. They seemed like a cute thing to have around at the dawn of the millennium, but now you can't put your foot in any direction without having your toes messily savaged. One way or another, Canada and everywhere else has a troubling house hippo problem, and the string-stealing kitchen invader has accordingly received a brand new lease of life in the fake news era. Concerned Children's Advertisers are sadly no longer with us, having become Companies Committed To Kids in 2014 before closing down in 2017. But the legacy of the house hippo lives on, with the premise being resurrected in more recent PSAs by the Ottawa-based MediaSmarts (not to be confused with the aforementioned UK-based Media Smart), encouraging children to "Break The Fake" by developing their critical thinking skills and taking the time to research what's real and what isn't. It's us against the hippos, so be careful to give your metaphorical shoe a good shake before you put your foot in it.

On the subject of hippo misconceptions, I once saw a movie where it was claimed that they fart out of their mouths, but I don't think that's actually true, is it? Mind you, the same movie gave Michael Douglas kind of a silly haircut, and that can do a lot to undermine your credibility.

Maxwell House (We Don't Like Change, Do We Deirdre?)

The Maxwell House "Deirdre" ad from 1994 is one of those campaigns that didn't really catch on with zeitgeist in any significant way, but that I've found definitely made a quieter impression on the people who saw it - particularly if, like myself, they were young and ultra-susceptible to a gloriously uncanny sign-off. For many years, my quest to locate the Imperial Leather spot about the dishonest minimalists that had so unsettled me in 1996 was impeded by the problem that no one besides myself seemed to so much as remember the premise (much less the brand it was promoting). If I mentioned this freaky black and white ad from the mid-1990s about a couple who lived in a surreal abode and were concealing bars of luxury soap from one another beneath the plant pots beside their bathtub, I was met with blank stares all around. But if I brought up the mid-90s ad about another couple who lived in an eerily drab living room and were complaining about their next door neighbours and how they'd stopped liking them ever since they'd switched coffee brands, then it was a different story entirely: "Oh bloody hell! Yes, I remember, that advert scared the crap out me. That freeze frame at the end was diabolical!" I wouldn't go so far as to claim that the eponymous "Deirdre" ever gave me nightmares as a child, but I do have distinct memories of waking up in the early hours, Skinamarink-style, and being haunted by the mental image of her monstrously contorted face in the darkness. I was certainly old enough to know that there was no way that that woman was going to emerge from the television and devour me, but in practice that mattered little. She had already gotten to me where I felt most powerless. She was, without doubt, one of the most terrifying presences to stalk the advertising airwaves in the 1990s, and I say it's high time we gave her her flowers.

There is actually quite a bit of thematic overlap between the "Dierdre" ad and the aforementioned Imperial Leather "minimalist" ad, in that we glimpse their respective products from primarily the perspective of people who would, on the surface, be inclined to shun such things. We could even combine them with the Toyota Roadster "ascetic" ad from 2000 to form a lose sort of trilogy of advertising scenarios regarding people leading deliberately spartan existences, in which said product acquired a haunting and/or intrusive presence as a sinfully destructive item to be resisted at all costs. They were all profoundly odd and disconcerting pieces that hinged on a tension between abstinence and clandestine desire in a way that clearly rattled me at various stages of my childhood development. In the ascetic's case, he lived alone out in the wilderness and had only himself to answer to for his lurid Roadster-inspired fantasies (and, in the extended cut, the suit and tie he had stashed away), but the other two involved deception amongst couples who'd made a conscious decision to forgo certain creature comforts, whether as a bold lifestyle statement or out of a sense of social superiority. For the Imperial Leather minimalists, the deception was mutual (and potentially something that both parties were fully aware of), but in "Deirdre" it was a joke that only one partner was tauntingly in on. Of the three, "Deirdre" is the most overtly comedic, but it's also by and far the most hair-raising, both on account of the fiendish sting in its tail and the repeated atmospheric dissonance to which it subjects viewers on the route to its psyche-scarring payoff.

The genius of "Deirdre" is that it effectively gives you two ads in one. One is breezy and conventional, the other is arch and sardonic. They represent the opposing characters of two different households, which are intercut with an incongruity so jarring as to evoke the sensation of flicking back and forth between two channels. The couples in question frankly don't feel as though they could inhabit the same universe, let alone live side by side on the same street. The Maxwell-drinking couple (never named, but we'll deem them our "protagonist couple", on account of them being the ones we're supposed to want to emulate) are presented in a succession of exuberant cuts that call to the mind the types of ad campaigns that would have populated breaks a few years back, when the 80s were transitioning into the 90s and there was an extensive reliance on upbeat jingles and sun-kissed images (for an example from Maxwell House's own arsenal, check out "Get The Max" from 1988). The time we spend with the protagonist couple is agreeable, if utterly banal. Taken on their own, it's a straightforward demonstration of how an activity as mundane as downing a morning cup of Joe might become an invaluable ritual in reaffirming familial connections and greeting the possibilities that each new day has to offer, with only the excessive jauntiness of the accompanying music track suggesting any kind of parodic intention. The cliched nature of the images is given a more thorough recontextualisation through the input of our antagonist couple, who comment on the action from their own lustreless confines. The bespectacled husband (also unnamed) is the only one who speaks, while the wife (she's Deirdre) stands expressionless in the backdrop. In their pre-Maxwell days, the protagonist couple were apparently just like them ("our sort of people"). The tale of how they changed their coffee and in the process ceased to be the kind of neighbours the antagonist couple could jibe with is revealed to us as though the husband were divulging some form of community-rocking scandal, with the final assurance that, "We try to avoid them nowadays".

Already there is an atmospheric unease, generated by the rapid intercutting of the motion and blaring party music characterising the coffee-induced euphoria next door and the silent inertia conveying the coldly puritanical flavour of the antagonist couple's lifestyle. It will likely not escape us that the protagonist couple are always seen surrounded by greenery, embracing the open world, while the antagonist couple never venture from their living room, making them prisoners of their own close-mindedness. But it also rests on a tension between what plays like a feverishly heightened fantasy and a cartoonishly tedious reality. Neither side feels particularly real. For all of their vapidity, the scenes with the protagonist couple have a surreal, dream-like quality, suggesting an exaggerated proposal for how a consumer product could transform your life, and with the framing commentary from the antagonist couple implying a self-awareness on the ad's part of its own falseness. The antagonists' world has, on the one hand, a stronger grounding in reality, with its lack of music and frenetic energy, but that's negated by the humorously caricatured nature of their conservatism. Although the two worlds appear to be at total odds, they represent the perfect balancing act - the make-believe paradise of the protagonist couple is both a knowing joke and a sympathetic refuge from the overbearing austerity next door. The antagonists' angle might give us an outlet for sneering at the more banal advertising conventions in which the protagonists are revel, but they themselves are ultimately too grotesque to elicit much affinity.

Which takes us to our infamous ending. A third-person voice-over imparts the slogan, "The full of beans coffee for full beans people", suggesting that this is the fundamental distinction being drawn between the two sides. Some people are "full of beans", possessing all of the enthusiasm for life that Maxwell House typifies, and those who aren't a part of that privileged group will simply not comprehend. The closing twist, however, implies that it is a potential that just about anybody can unlock. The antagonist husband acknowledges his wife for the first time: "We don't like change, do we, Deirdre?" Deirdre has spent the entire ad in silence, which ostensibly signals accordance with her husband's sneery sentiments. In the final seconds, she maintains her silence, but gets in the last word regardless. Her face alters dramatically as she holds up a jar of the forbidden product and demonstrates where her own allegiances really lie. She is willing to embrace the Maxwell House revolution, if literally behind her husband's back, and change is coming, whether he's ready for it or not. While her husband embodies the smug front of people set in her ways, Deirdre expresses the latent potential yearning to break free.

As a twist, it seems cute and logical, but the execution is disproportionately disturbing. Deirdre doesn't merely hold up the jar of freeze-dried beans with an air of surreptitious triumph. Her face contorts horrifically, in a manner that is presumably intended to indicate an intense and uninhibited elation bursting belatedly to the surface. In practice, she looks like she's possessed, a testament to the insidious power of the Maxwell House brand and its ability to warp everything it touches beyond recognition. It was an expression that sent shivers down the spines of innumerable young viewers, its horrors amplified by its insistence on lingering for good measure as a torturously drawn out freeze frame. I swear that the folks responsible for cutting together advertising blocks knew exactly what they were doing and had a penchant for inserting it right at the end so that the cursed image would be prolonged even further. It seemed to persist for an eternity regardless, a perfect vision of unfiltered monstrosity forever etched onto my brain, ready to strike whenever I was feeling in any way vulnerable. I don't think the closing sense of dread was entirely accidental either. The way Deirdre holds up the jar at the end, it frankly looks as though she could use it to bonk her oblivious husband on the head. Maxwell House takes the form of a deadly invading presence, already much closer than the husband assumes, being right behind him and inside his seeming place of safety. The barriers have been eradicated and we're left with an uncanny intersection between the exaggerated caricatures of one world and the excessive animation of the other. A distressing transformation indeed. 

The original Deidre ad is the only one I remember seeing at the time, but there was indeed an entire series spun around the premise, in which the husband got to exercise his equal disdain for Noel Edmonds (who'd also infiltrated their house unbeknownst to him and was unambiguously looking to strike his head with the jar of Maxwell House) and for Penguins (the brand of chocolate-coated tea biscuit and not the bird, although odds are that he didn't care for them much either). I'm not 100% sure, but I could swear the actress who played Deirdre kept changing with new installment - a subtle commentary on the inevitably of change and the husband's ongoing obliviousness? And then there was at least one ad that swapped out the cast entirely, centring on a different set of couples divided by Maxwell House, and with a holiday-making theme. The protagonist couple were there identified as "Ron" and "Fran", with Deirdre having been supplanted by "Laura". The antagonist husband still went unnamed, but here had acquired a wetter sense of humor to go with his new rain-soaked environs. I'm not sure, but I think this might have been the only installment in which the husband actually cottoned on to his wife's being a closet Maxwell drinker. "This isn't our usual coffee, Laura? LAURA!!!" 

 

 

Two versions of the original ad existed, one 46 seconds in length, the other a shorter 30 second edit, which saved time by trimming down the sequences with the protagonist couple, incorporating only one iteration of the "full of beans" slogan and, most curiously, using alternate takes of the antagonist couple, in which their dialogue was more concise ("Could changing their coffee be responsible for this distressing transformation?" becomes "Could changing their coffee have changed them?", and "We try to avoid them nowadays," becomes a more definite "We avoid them nowadays"). The husband's closing expression also differs slightly between the versions, with him gazing more intently at the camera in the longer cut and in the shorter cut wearing more a look of self-satisfied complacency. No massive differences to report between Deirdre's final poses, but for what it's worth I'd rate her as being marginally more terrifying in the shorter edition.

Safeway: Little Harry Goes To Wolverhampton

Little Harry's Safeway adventures continued in an ad (circa 1995) which saw the drolly articulate tyke and his mother enjoying a grand day out in one of the chain's newly-opened superstores, the location of which varied according to which part of the UK you were watching it from. The narration in the embedded YouTube upload gives the shout-out to a Wolverhampton store set to open its doors that August, although the all-purpose footage was adapted to reference a variety of stores in different regions. TV Ark has an upload of a variant promoting a couple of stores in Dumbarton and Glenrothes. Wow, Harry and his mother certainly got around.

The Harry campaign was designed to cement Safeway's reputation as a particularly appealing option for parents accustomed to shopping with small children, by emphasising the various perks they had implemented to make the experience more straightforward (including the "VIP" parent and child parking right beside the entrance). But by aligning the viewer's perspective with that of a toddler coming to grips with the vast world and all of its possibilities, at a time when even something as mundane as pushing a trolley around a stack of groceries seemed novel and exhilarating, it had the additional effect of making setting foot in one of their stores seem like a great and wholesome adventure. Safeway were pushing themselves as the supermarket chain that met all of your needs under one roof, to the point that you, like Harry, were dwarfed by its scope (albeit not to the same inhibiting extent where the wide aisles impeded his ability to interact with the items on the shelves). Harry's remark on assessing the magnitude of the venue - "I hope you cancelled the milk" - has a cunning double meaning, alluding hyperbolically to the possibility that they could be navigating its wares for days, while implicitly suggesting that having milk delivered to your door was a redundant service when you might as well pick it up at Safeway.

Harry's charm as an advertising character lay in his being both a child and an adult at once, the delightfully incongruous combination of Hanford's pint-sized form with Clunes' ultra-dry delivery. Innocence by way of sardonicism, he became the avatar for the inner child of every Safeway consumer whose gut reaction, on seeing balloons handed out, was to anticipate that some kind of party should follow. As it turns out, Safeway had two different parties (of sorts) to offer inside of its stores. One was the more subdued party targetted at adult patrons, a celebration of service and expansive convenience comprised of petrol stations, coffee shops, dry cleaning and all the things that you're expected to embrace as a grown-up. The second was located in the soft play area that serves as the ad's punchline, with the revelation that these Safeway superstores came with a crèche where you could dump the kids, the ultimate dream of any parent who didn't want to have to deal with a fussing toddler and a trolley full of dried penne and tinned peaches at the same time. Harry speaks so deftly to the adults who are still kids at heart that it's actually a little heart-rending, seeing him gazing longingly at the tots on the other side of the glass, unable to access this particular Safeway perk on account of his mum yanking him in another direction. He asks her not to take it the wrong way, but he'd rather stay in the crèche next time, with his repeated unanswered imploring leaving doubts as to whether it's going to happen. He articulates the desires of the wistful adult viewership more than their hyperactive children. Because admit it, no matter what your age, there is a very visceral part of you that likewise envies those kids, as you find yourself yearning for a simpler time when you could bounce relentlessly off of soft surfaces while someone else took care of your material needs. Alas, dry cleaning is where you're at now. You've got to be satisfied with the excitement in that.

The Mourning After (Brought To You By Seagram)

At first glance "The Mourning After" seems entirely self-explanatory. The onscreen title makes it obvious that this is a piece on the subject of bereavement; that it did the rounds in UK ad breaks and cinema reels during the Christmas and New Year period (initially in 1982-83, although it was rerun elsewhere in the decade) means that we can already connect the dots as to the probable cause of the loss in question. Still, our assumption that we're watching a public information film on the perils of drink driving transpires to be only half-correct. The first drop of discrepancy comes when the text informs us that "Seagram sell more wines and spirits than anyone else in the world", followed by "Naturally, we like you to take a drink". This is immediately tempered by the disclaimer, "But always in moderation. And never when driving", but it is hard not to be thrown by that slight air of incongruity - an ad selling us on the virtues of a product whilst confronting us with a grim reminder of the potential consequences if we are not judicious consumers. It's an oddity, to say the least.

"The Mourning After" is what could be termed a pseudo-PIF. It does the work of a public information film, but it's really a bog standard advert and as such is looking to double as promotion for a brand. There is certainly an element of the (now defunct) Canadian drinks company looking to have their cake and eat it - amid the sombre display, they cannot help but brag about their stature in the world of alcoholic beverages, and to work in the implicit suggestion that Seagram's wines and spirits are very good when partaken under the appropriate circumstances. But in spite of these ostensibly contradictory intentions, "The Mourning After" still packs quite a heavy punch as a drink driving film, no less so than many actual PIFs on the matter. There is something hauntingly lyrical in its approach, which feels markedly different to that of the more infamous "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" PIFs that would begin their run toward the end of the decade. Whereas D&DWL focussed on the voices of those impacted by drive drinking incidents, "Mourning" contains no spoken dialogue, allowing an instrumental piano piece (a track from the KPM library, "Recollections" by Dennis Farnon) to convey the mood, while lingering on a series of static black and white images with deliberately minimal human presence. It is effectively a statement on drink driving delivered via a tone poem. Pun-tastic title aside, there is very little onscreen grieving - an early shot of the bereaved gazing longingly at the unoccupied pillow beside her (with a worn-out tissue at hand) and a subsequent still giving a face to the deceased, via a framed photograph, supply us with enough information to fill in all of the crucial narrative blanks, but what we're shown is largely a series of empty spaces, the remnants of a life vacated and abandoned. Clothes hung within a closet, no longer worn, a vacant spot in a garage that presumably once housed two vehicles, an unfilled chair beside a pair of unfilled slippers. The personality of the deceased is communicated through the array of personal items he leaves behind - we can deduce that he was a keen outdoorsman, as implied by the stack of books on fly fishing and the pair of binoculars glimpsed on the bedroom shelf. Meanwhile, the assortment of artefacts scattered around his photograph (car keys, rings, wristwatch, pocket journal) appear to have been arranged as a monument to the life he led, being the items he kept closest to him at all times, while forebodingly indicating the accidental nature of his death (since these were in likelihood the items found about his person in the aftermath).

Compared to D&DWL, the emphasis is not explicitly on the life attempting to function in the aftermath of the tragedy, although the loneliness of the grieving spouse is omnipresent within the subtext of the images - the two chairs at the breakfast table, only one of which has crockery set before it, and the solitary car in the garage. We are all throughout seeing snapshots of her corrupted world, of the rawness of waking up into a home where her husband should be, but isn't, and yet still feels so tauntingly near through these innumerable tokens of his existence. The colourlessness of the images suggest an emotional austerity, while their stillness suggests inertia. We might be put in mind of the D&DWL film "Jenny", which illustrated how both the comatose Jenny and her quietly devastated mother were prisoners of a mutual entrapment, for "Mourning" conveys a similar sense of two intertwined lives that have been brought to a standstill - the husband whose life has literally been reduced to an assortment of inanimate artefacts and the spouse who has become a part of this deserted landscape, its crushing emptiness now her lived reality. The tragedy only deepens as we venture beyond the house and encounter a pair of wellington boots that presumably belonged to the deceased, and beside them a much smaller pair, the advert's sole indication that there may be a bereaved child in this equation. Given that the smaller boots are also shown unoccupied, there are multiple ways of interpreting this particular image - as a glimpse the spouse's interior world, it could be a symbol for the child they will never have. Alternatively, it could point to a child in the present who can no longer follow in their father's footsteps (both literally and figuratively) now that his role as a mentor and protective figure has been voided. In either case, the invisible child stands for the cancelled future. I note with some curiosity that this is also the still with which the text "Naturally, we like you take a drink" is juxtaposed, perhaps implanting the subliminal message that Seagram can be seen as a nurturing entity to the consumer, offering them pleasurable watering but also protective guidance on where to draw the line.

As we journey deeper into the grounds surrounding the house, we happen across a lawnmower left out upon the grass, possibly indicating some unfinished business on the part of the deceased, although it may have a more disquieting significance still. Our final image is of a tennis court, with leaves scattered across one half, as a ladder seen to the left of the court points to a trimming job that our deceased protagonist was unable to complete before his accident. It is here that the fateful text "And never when driving" appears onscreen. Something that "Mourning" obviously lacks is imagery overtly tying the featured grief to a drink driving accident - in lieu of this, the debris upon the tennis court appears to substitute for the wreckage of the crash, with the unsecured gate in the foreground suggesting an inattentiveness to safety. It is a poignantly understated means of illustrating what went wrong. That only one side of the court should be covered in leaves is yet another emblem of that broken union between the deceased and bereaved, this site of vibrant play now off-limits to them both. There is a solemn irony in the insinuation that the garden, traditionally a place of regrowth and rebirth, should serve as our final symbol of stifling devastation. The deserted lawnmower and scattered leaves are indicators of a battle against a metaphorical wilderness that has already been lost, the disordered garden signifying the dangers that lay outside the safety of home in the allure of those alcoholic beverages (whether Seagram brand or otherwise) and their potential for calamity when combined with driving. At the same time, we sense that this is only the beginning, and that the garden is about to fall into a even deeper state of disrepair. The lawn will get evermore overgrown and the volume of leaves on the tennis court will merely increase, as this erstwhile paradise becomes all the more lost and buried in the passage of time.

"The Mourning After" is an oddity, sure, but a supremely affecting and intriguing one. It was acclaimed at the time of its debut, picking up a British Arrow Award in 1983, and while it since seems to have fallen into obscurity, I reckon it deserves to be remembered and celebrated. As its legacy, Farnon's "Recollections" will forever be a track that tears hard on my heartstrings.

Note: At least two versions of the ad exist, the only difference being Seagram's parting words at the end. In one they wish us a safe Christmas. In the other, a safe New Year. Presumably they were swapped out according to whichever occasion for intoxicated revelry was next on the horizon.

Life and Stuff (aka Not Asleep, Not Awake, Always Tired)

About midway through Kumar Satkunarasa's Life and Stuff, the protagonist meets someone who shares their philosophy about life being harder for people who aim to exist than for those who just want to survive. It's a philosophy that Life and Stuff automatically calls into question, through the images that it juxtaposes with this statement. The people who are supposedly trying to exist are all shown in silhouette, bustling about their nondescript business in an indistinct mass. Its visual representation of a person who just wants to survive, meanwhile, is a picture of an impoverished child, who seems real, and their plight immediate, but is also invisible to these indifferent silhouettes. The aspiration to exist is exposed as an absurdity, being the luxury of those who do not have to worry about day-to-day survival. But it's also in this statement that one of the key tensions of the short is vocalised - the need to feel that our being in the world is having some kind of meaningful impact versus the feeling of drifting passively through. It seems significant that it occurs about midway through the runtime, and is spoken by the only character whose words the protagonist seems (momentarily) inclined to take heed of, and who doesn't immediately fade into the backdrop of their life. It is, in truth, a mere extension of an idea that had already occurred to the protagonist earlier on, when they'd arrived home from school to find their parents arguing over the TV remote, and wondered if anybody really grows up, or just grows old? This is the uneasy concept at the heart of Satkunarasa's four minute piece, which travels through the entirety of an individual's lifetime in a gut-churning pace - it isn't simply that life is short, but that it potentially has no cumulative effect. That, far from progressing our way from bright potential to silver wisdom, we might be stumbling down lonely corridor after lonely corridor, ending up nowhere. The protagonist feels perpetually callow no matter where they are in life, waiting for some epiphany or final meaning that never comes to them. Even as they lie on their deathbed, their life fails to flash before their eyes and put it into any kind of coherent perspective. 

Life and Stuff was completed for Satkunarasa's degree while studying at Bournemouth University, and combines computer animation and various repurposed clips and images to create a collage effect, a representation of a life pulled together from various odds and ends, amounting to a string of memories as ambivalent as the short's title. We are spurred ever onward through these humdrum chronicles by the relentlessly forward motion of the camera, never stopping to linger for long at any of the transient sights as we're whisked along an assortment of drab domestic spaces, sunlit beaches and, in the short's most grotesque sequence, down a toilet u-bend to mingle with life's literal shit. Satkunarasa presents it all with the same doggedly sardonic tone as his 60 second piece One Day, regarding the mundane details of a single day in the life of an office worker, the highlight of which was an idle train of philosophical thought they swiftly berated themselves for daring to momentarily entertain. The title was cheekily deceptive, appearing to suggest that something eventful might occur, but in actuality indicating that this self-contained day was much the same as any other. Life and Stuff is a macroscopic expansion on that same theme, guiding us through a complete lifetime in a way that is implied to representative of the broader human experience. The crucial difference is the shift in perspective. One Day was narrated in the first person, suggesting that Satkunarasa might be speaking directly from his own experience. Life and Stuff is told using second person narration, switching the short's tone to that of an instructional manual and the protagonist to a hypothetical; even details that would appear distinguishing, such as their larger than average head at birth, are presented as expected bumps in the road, thrown in to make their being that much more challenging. We follow them from their days as a disaffected school kid navigating the confusion of adolescence, through their menial career as a warehouse worker and into their twilight years of contemplating that they now have more to look back upon than forward to, an aching realisation related somewhat incongruously in Satkunarasa's distinctly youthful-sounding voice. We'd do well to keep in mind that Life and Stuff is a student film, and it conveys the fear of what lies ahead from a certain vantage point, from which old age is a distant threat on the horizon that still looms frighteningly large in its inevitability. These are the anxieties of a student gearing up to enter the real world, someone who is really only at the beginning of their journey but can already feel the passage of time taking its toll as their youth already seems behind them. Even its earliest stages, there are haunting reminders of how this story must invariably end. The protagonist's conception is heralded by a leaf falling from a near-bare tree. The skeleton in the school classroom is a grisly symbol of the bodily destruction that awaits us all, although its vacant eye sockets and hollow grin are equally suggestive of the emotional disconnect that keeps staring the protagonist in the face.

I saw Life and Stuff while it was making the festival rounds in late 2012, and the thing that stayed with me about it was its depiction of an overwhelming loneliness, that sense of being adrift in a world where everything seems to be functioning around you, not with you. A moment that particularly stood out was the one where Satkunarasa seemed to be evoking the visual language of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), when the protagonist gets their first job cleaning an office skyscraper and is troubled by a timelapse sequence of a busy city that seems to be thriving just fine in their absence. It put me in mind of that specific sequence from Reggio's film that occurs about an hour in, when we glimpse a solitary worker through the windows of an office, their life running parallel to the constant flow of traffic outside. In general, the people in the "Grid" portion of Koyaanisqatsi move in sped-up swarms, making it difficult to pick out and focus on any particular person. The metropolis is depicted as a chaotic Babel in which the voice of individual is all but unintelligible, with this one shot giving us a fleeting impression of an isolated figure subsisting in a world that seems totally unaware of their existence. In Satkunarasa's short, a running feature is the persistent feeling of distance that accompanies the protagonist throughout life. A younger sibling is mentioned precisely once, and purely to be the set-up of a joke involve a Kinder Egg, the parents are forgotten as soon as the protagonist sets foot into the working world, and the schoolmates and colleagues exist only to emphasise the protagonist's alienation. The female companion acquired during the short's middle section is the only secondary character who gets close enough for any semblance of a genuine connection to be formed, and for the protagonist to learn a few of the traits that mark her out as an individual, such as her fondness for Sesame Street and for rouge lipstick. This is presented at first as an almost miraculous intersection between two souls on equally adrift trajectories (the coffeehouse sequence where their bond is solidified shows the rest of the world buzzing by in a very Koyaanisqatsi-esque fashion), although the prospect of it bringing mutual healing is too romantic to weather Satkunarasa's unrelenting sardonicism. The longer they stay together, the more their common understanding deteriorates (something implied to coincide with their waning sexual intimacy), and the distinguishing traits of our Sesame Street-watching significant other are distorted into signifiers of insurmountable differences.

 

Truth be told, and in spite of that persistent feeling of alienation, I don't think the protagonist of Life and Stuff leads such a bad life. The breakdown of that long-term relationship is the most upsetting thing that happens to them, and even then it ends on more of an anti-climactic note than an openly traumatic one. Indeed, they get to finish up in a position that many would envy, with all their years of manual labour paying off and enabling them to retire to a coastal community by the equator to live an idyllic existence of fishing and looking up at the stars (of course, if we read between the lines, then it's possible to conclude that they were left so heartbroken, in spite of Satkunarasa's detached narration, that they were compelled to put physical distance between themselves and their ex). Yet even in their laid back new routine they remain fundamentally adrift, indulging in the childishly creative but explicitly solitary pastime of creating constellations that exist only to them. They find themselves in a culture where they literally speak a different language to their neighbours, at point that makes them a curiosity to the local children. All the same, they do seem to form an understanding with the children that overcomes this communication barrier - as the protagonist enters old age, the children have grown up into adults and assist them in their daily routine of pushing their boat out to sea, having potentially become a found family to them. Still, the short ends poignantly, with the protagonist worrying that their contribution has amounted to nothing, their ultimate thought as they shuffle off this mortal coil being the terrifying hypothetical that nobody left upon it will even notice their absence. Of note is that the animatic uploaded to Satkunarasa's YouTube channel contains an epilogue, not present in the final film, in which we learn a little more about how life goes on after the protagonist's death - that the local community pay to have their body flown back to their town of birth for burial (a gesture that could be taken as either an act of kindness or definitive rejection), leaving nature to deny them their mark by eroding their name from their tombstone. The finished short feels more impactful for ending where it does, with the onset of oblivion, and the haunting dual implications of the closing statement, "Your heart stops". It suggests both that time has abruptly run out and that the protagonist already anticipates the answer. They've tasted enough of life's indifference to know.