TACtics: Gravel Truck (I Can Feel My Lunch Bouncing About)

"Gravel Truck" is something of an oddity - it boasts one of the most gruesome-looking accidents in all the TAC canon, and yet the ad as a whole is not, by their standards, fantastically memorable. In fact, in my head it's always lived in the shadow of "Mates", a similar (although somewhat less graphic) ad from New South Wales' Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA). The execution of "Mates" is frankly a lot naffer, but that works in its favour. As a cautionary piece, it's got no shortage of character. "Gravel Truck" has the smash factor, but doesn't have the...let's call it the smarts factor. The lingering discomfort that a particularly striking safety ad leaves on your psyche when it's done. Can we dig in and figure out why? 

Before we get started, there is some discrepancy concerning the title and debut year of this entry. Multiple YouTube uploads and at least two different PSA wikis have it down as simply "Gravel", with both wikis stating that it's from 1993. The Monash University Accident Research Centre's 1999 study, however, lists the title as "Gravel Truck" and the year as 1996, and that's the source I'm going with. 1996 seems about right to me, since it strikes me as characteristic of TAC's output from specifically the mid-1990s, when they were at their absolute peak with their televisual trauma farming. Nothing was withheld in making those shocks as bold and salacious as possible. We had the combusting vehicle in "Fireball", the all-out crunching of the combi in "Nightshift", the kid going under the wheels onscreen in "Mum In A Hurry" (most other ads would have been tasteful enough to cut away and leave that to your imagination, but taking prisoners was hardly TAC's thing), and the almost Final Destination-esque twist of that giant tanker lunging out of nowhere in "Bush Telegraph". All of which, needless to say, made for hard-hitting imagery. Still, I wonder if in "Gravel Truck" we are starting to see the limitations of this technique. The problem with relying too much on shock value is that viewers will potentially grow numb to it after a while, enticing you to chase after bigger and ever-more outrageous spectacles, to the point that they risk becoming so over the top that they lose their ring of credibility (there is a certain infamous Northern Irish speeding PIF that I think absolutely falls into this trap - you surely know which one I'm talking about). I'm not saying that "Gravel Truck" is anywhere near that level of extremeness, but it is in rather an odd in-between space, like TAC were experimenting with shocking viewers with a more nauseating Red Asphalt-style approach that was centred on gaping at bodily injury, but then good taste (mostly) prevailed and they decided to be as moderate as possible about it. It goes simultaneously too far and not far enough, and as a result it cancels out what identity it might have had.

It is another scenario in which multiple factors have a hand in the accident, with the particularly deadly ingredient this time around being the speeding. There are shades of "Tracy", in the visible P symbol on the vehicle (indicating that the driver is new and inexperienced, despite his protests to the contrary), and "Fireball", with its emphasis on the hazardous nature of the country roads, even to people who think they can handle them. At least the young occupants of this specific doomed vehicle are a less rowdy bunch than the kids in "Darren" and have their seatbelts buckled, although it doesn't do much to spare them from the carnage in question. We learn that they're on their way to pick up Sophie, who will apparently be "dark as" if they keep her waiting. Jess, the front seat passenger, is the sensible party in this equation, repeatedly berating the driver Gary for going too fast, while back seat passenger Nick encourages him to hammer it. Gary suggests that it's the bumpiness of the terrain that's getting to Jess, and insists that they're in safe hands because he's driven this route numerous times. Having haphazardly overtaken one truck without incident, they encounter another truck coming in the opposite direction, prompting both vehicles to swerve to the side to pass each other on the narrow road. Unfortunately, since Gary is driving too quickly and impulsively, he doesn't see the obscured danger until it's too late - there is a school minibus travelling close behind the truck and, thrown slightly off course by the gravelly surface at the side of the road, he nearly blunders right into it. He manages to swerve, just clipping the minibus, but loses control of the car and sends it hurtling into the bush, where it makes a truly brutal side-on collision with a tree. The dust settles, and we catch sight of not only the lifeless bodies slumped inside the wreckage, but Gary's mutilated remains lying beside it (we recognise that distinctive chequered flannel he was wearing). The impact really seems to have ripped him up; the camera doesn't exactly hone in on it, but it lingers long enough for you to notice that he might be missing his head (I'm not totally clear, but he's certainly missing something). We've seen glimpses of bloodied corpses before in TAC ads, like the girlfriend in "Fireball", but this is on a whole new level of gory detail. Or at least it would be if it weren't so curiously soft-pedalled (if you're going to be that graphic, then you might as well go whole hog with it). The image of decapitated Gary falls a little flat as the ad's final zinger, but at least the impact of the car against the tree is astoundingly savage - to the extent that we're not doubting the seriousness of the accident and the gorier touches don't really add much. It comes off as a half-hearted attempt to tack on a gratuitous shock for viewers growing wise to the formula.

Something that is notably absent from "Gravel Truck" is any kind of emotional follow-up with the grieving parties, which isn't necessarily what denies it the smarts factor. I have gone on record as saying that this particular aspect of the TAC formula is the one that can be hit or miss for me, since my preference tends to be for more understated displays of emotion. Sure, there are times when a more overblown reaction is entirely appropriate - I think "Beach Road" and "Mum In A Hurry" are examples of ads that manage to justify it, in lending an inescapable realism to their appallingly tragic scenarios. On the other hand, some of the most unsettling TAC endings have been the ones that handle the reactions of surviving characters in a low-key fashion, such as the trucker's drooping shoulders at the end of "Nightshift" and the final words of "Bush Telegraph". They close their ads on a more muted note, but it stays with you. "Gravel Truck" looks to be going for a similarly understated approach in having the camera pan briefly to the minibus, where the audience of murmuring children within function as a Greek chorus on the unspeakable horror, only it's still such a melodramatic detail that I think comes off as a touch comedic (albeit not to the charmingly awkward extent as the comparable ending in "Mates", where a busload of schoolkids gawks at the wreck with a seemingly gleeful fascination like the proper little monsters they are).

The smarts factor requires more than lurid spectacle (whether it be physical, emotional or both). We need a reason to feel a connection with the characters, and like there are real lives being devastated here. I do wonder if the real reason why "Gravel Truck" makes less of a lasting impression is because it's overall less narrative-driven than some of TAC's other ads - the characters touch briefly on their plans for that evening and on the need to pick up Sophie (whoever she is), but we're not given a huge sense of the wider world and of their place within it. Compare it to, say, "Fireball", where the opening dialogue established the characters' connections to the local community (setting up for the epilogue's twist), but also the broader life plans that were about to be tragically terminated. All of this was in service of the message about these kids being at at home in the country, yet still succumbing to its perilous roads, but it gave you a strong enough taster of the kind of lives they had been leading. One of TAC's greatest strengths was in how they were able to blend the build-up to an accident with the details of the everyday, whereas in "Gravel Truck" much of the dialogue feels a little too openly expository and repetitive. There's a lot of repeated emphasis on Jess's objections to Gary's speeding, and on Gary's insistence that he knows the road. Perhaps ironically for a speeding ad, the build-up feels slow, and not in a deceptively calm way, but in a way that's taken up by a large amount of empty space. Like a lot of TAC ads, "Gravel Truck" exists in two different presentations, the full 90 second version and the shorter 60s second edit, and for the most part, I don't think the former benefits from being so long. Lost from the shorter cut are the comment about Sophie being "dark as" and a moment where Gary casually lists off the layout of the route ahead: "You go up over this rise, there's a sharp turn to the right, another dip then it's a quick left." He is, perhaps inadvertently, listing off the various points where mishaps could easily occur if adequate care is not taken, and shrugging them off as they're no big deal. It's a classic case of familiarity breeding contempt, establishing Gary's overconfidence and indicating that he isn't making any allowances for the possibility of something unexpected entering the mix. It is a useful narrative detail, but it causes the subsequent sequence where Gary hastily overtakes the first truck to feel redundant, since it doesn't tell us anything about Gary (or Jess) that we don't already know. I'm not really seeing why we needed to have both of them. I have considered the possibility that the latter might potentially have been intended as a fake out moment, where we expect the accident to happen and the characters get away unscathed (only to crash further up when they push their luck one time too many), but I'm not sure that it plays that way - it feels as though it's there purely to reinforce the point about Gary being a habitually reckless driver. 

Where "Gravel Truck" does excel is in one of its most subtle yet ominous touches - the cloud of dust rising off the road as they make that turn in the opening, establishing the rougher nature of the road and foreshadowing the part the treacherous terrain will play in the accident. I'd argue that this is the only serious means by which the shorter edit loses out; the dust cloud kicked up in the 90s second version lasts longer and is considerably more impressive. The dust is, without question, the star of the piece. Not only does it pepper the journey with a hint of impending instability, the way it rises and settles at the end makes for a poetic final visual, even more quietly affecting than the mangled corpses it's swirling above. Dust they are, and to dust they have returned.

TACtics: Bones (Bend Your Knee, Katie)

 

The good news is that, despite its ominously macabre title, "Bones" ends up being one of the happier TAC installments. That says little, and indeed it shouldn't, but still, the victim actually survives in this scenario. That has to count for something, right? 

Debuting in 1992, "Bones" adheres closely to the formula set out previously in "Darren", with us once again finding ourselves inside a car with a bunch of kids with a frightfully low sense of self-preservation. Our protagonist, backseat passenger Katie, unbuckles her seatbelt and leans forward to whisper something in the ear of the driver Chris, causing him to giggle. The front seat passenger, who goes unnamed, attempts to get in on the private joke, but is rebuffed. Chris, like Darren before him, makes a perfunctory effort to be the mature one in the equation, by telling Katie to sit back and put her seatbelt on again, but in the process takes his eyes off the road - which is hugely unfortunate, as it's right at that moment that a pedestrian steps out into their path. Chris's reflexes are thankfully still on point enough that he's able to swerve and avoid the pedestrian, but this causes him to rear-end a van parked at the side of the street. They would have been looking at a mercifully minor collision, but for the fact that Katie hadn't had time to re-buckle - and since there's nothing to restrain her, she goes head first through the windshield and smacks into the van on the other side. This being TAC at their most brutally immersive, we get to experience that short but horrifying trip right along with her, via a POV shot that has us sailing over the dashboard and winding up with a load of broken glass in our face. 

It seems fair to say that the pedestrian likely didn't possess a significant sense of self-preservation either, as from the looks of it he'd already stepped out in front of a hulking great lorry, although it's hard to tell exactly what was happening at his end, and that's by design. Our perception of what lies up ahead is as limited as it is for the occupants of Chris's car. What "Bones" gets across particularly deftly is the importance of expecting the unexpected, and being prepared for the fact that what's on the immediate horizon could change in the blink of an eye. The ad opens with a subconscious hint of what could potentially go wrong - the first thing we see, even before our main characters have pulled into view, is that formidable lorry trundling along beside them. Even if no threat is visible, its looming presence has us instantly alert to how vulnerable and out of their depth this snickering lot are (in contrast to "Darren', where the road appeared open and free, and the perfect playground for these puckish young day trippers, until it wasn't). Our instinct proves entirely astute, for the lorry does indeed play a critical role in their downfall, by obscuring what's incoming. It represents that overhanging element of uncertainty, the doings on the road that are intrinsically beyond their control and perception, making it especially lethal when the pedestrian - the element of unforeseeable chaos - leaps into the mix and throws everything into disarray. There were a few different factors at play here. The pedestrian doesn't appear to have made the most sensible choices, and that much was obviously out of Katie's hands. Distracted driving also played a part in the accident (if Chris had seen the pedestrian sooner, he might have been able to brake then and there, as the lorry did), and to a degree that was Katie's fault, since she was the one interfering with Chris's concentration, though the onus was ultimately on Chris to not take his eyes off the road. The fundamental point, however, is that if Katie had been wearing her seatbelt, she would have been safely protected in the event of the unexpected. By figuring she could let her guard down for just a brief moment, she left herself exposed to the fickleness of chance. 

On the upside, Katie has survived her little misadventure, although the price she now has to pay is a heavy one for such an easily preventable mistake. The epilogue of "Bones" closely recalls the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" entry "Recovery", in which we witnessed a man undergoing physiotherapy after losing his ability to walk in an accident. The emphasis in "Bones" is likewise on the harrowing fragility of the human form (hence the title) and what a long and arduous road it can be to get back to normally when physical trauma has stripped you of your everyday functioning. The processes both of standing up and sitting back down in her wheelchair have her in a wad of acutely discernible discomfort, and there is an additional shock, when we get sight of Katie's face (obscured at the start of the epilogue, as she's being wheeled into the rehabilitation centre), and see how heavily scarred it is. The physiotherapist offers her words of support, assuring her that tomorrow will be better and that moving about will get easier every day, but her optimism is undercut by Katie's tearful response: "I'm just so sick of this." She echoes the protagonist of "Recovery", who similarly asserted that he couldn't keep going, no matter how much encouragement was thrown his way, although the implications of "Bones' are potentially even grimmer, suggesting that Katie has been in rehabilitation for long enough already, that she's heard it all before, and all that tomorrow really has to offer is the prospect of having to come back and repeat the agonising ritual all over again. The short ends hauntingly, with a sobbing Katie holding her arm across her wounded face in a diagonal position that evokes the protective embrace of a seatbelt.

"Bones" received a new lease of life in 2019, when it returned to the airwaves, this time in an edited version that was cut down from a minute to 30 seconds, and accompanied by a revised tagline: "This ad made people buckle up 30 years ago. Shame we have to play it again." The maths was a little off, but the point was sill effectively made.

TACtics: Haunted (You Were Aware Of That, Were You Chris?)

 

When the Transport Accident Commission got started with its television advertising in 1989, its approach was one of unrelenting realism. The pseudo-documentary format of earlier entries like "Girlfriend" and "Beach Road" swiftly evolved into the more salacious shocks of "Darren" and "Fireball", which sought to recreate the sensation of being inside a doomed vehicle moments before a crash, causing the viewer to feel less flies on the wall than active participants in scenarios destined to end in tragedy. The emphasis was squarely on the raw immediacy of those life-changing accidents, and on pinpointing the moment at which we'd slipped past the point of no return and were left to soak in the harrowing realisation that, for the persons involved, things were never going to be the same again. But even the most audacious of formulas can only retain their teeth for so long. Numerous variations and countless psychologically scarred Victorians later, and TAC felt that a fresh angle was in order to complement the emerging millennium. "Haunted" from 2005 shows a dramatic shift from the shock-driven tactics of those earlier campaigns, with an approach that leaned more toward the spirit of the UK's "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Live" series, where emphasis tended to rest less on the accident itself than on the longer term fall-out - in this case, the very longer term. "Haunted" is impressively ambitious in its narrative scope, telling a story that spans multiple decades and demonstrates the bitter extent to which a single failure in adhering to your responsibilities as a driver can leave you mangled as a person, if not always as conspicuously as you might imagine. It seeks to address the very question that was explicitly raised by Ken Stott's character at the end of "Fireman's Story", but was there treated as defying any kind of comprehensible answer - how does a drink driver get on with life whilst having to accommodate the knowledge that their foolish actions brought fatal consequences? Even if you are able to maintain the guise of normalcy going forward, is it not the kind of thing that would be perpetually tearing you up inside?

"Haunted" makes for a fascinating comparison with "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives", since it does the one thing that campaign seemed determined to avoid, and does it very effectively - it has you sympathising fundamentally with the perpetrator. This was a perspective largely downplayed in D&DWL, where PIFs centring on the consequences for the drink driver were either about the immediate horrors of being booked for an offence and becoming the most hated person in the vicinity ("Arrest") or filtered through snapshots of the broken innocence for which they were directly accountable ("Kathy" and "Eyes"). The drink driver was usually the incorporeal boogeyman, and rarely humanised ("Mates", one of the few specimens in which we actually got to meet them in the flesh, had them depicted as a snivelling wimp, not unlike the bloody idiot seen staggering about the hospital corridors in "Girlfriend"). They are, naturally, the antagonists of the equations, with the traditional route being to regard them as objects of scorn and contempt (something still manifest in the uncompromising campaign tagline), but the stance taken by "Haunted' is a valid one nevertheless - we do need to be able to put ourselves in their shoes, and appreciate how their lives could so easily become our own if we were to make the same mistakes. In "Haunted" we find ourselves immersed in the world of the perpetrator to the point of entrapment. The claustrophobic cruelties of being wedged inside a steel box hurtling along on a terminal collision course are supplanted with the equally horrifying experience of being stranded inside the head of a man whose outlook has been irrecoverably altered by an ill-advised decision he made at an earlier junction in life, when he hadn't grasped how easy it was to go over the alcohol limit. We get something resembling DETR's "What's It Like?" campaign, with its nightmarish impressions of the offender's inner turmoil, but explored from a more narrative-driven angle.

"Haunted" follows a man named Chris from his early 30s into the later stages of middle age, all throughout which he is persistently troubled by visions of a mysterious boy in an ominous black shirt. Chris gets older, while the boy stays the same age. A subtext of child neglect seems to intermittently suggest itself (Chris's initial reluctance to acknowledge the boy, the lack of a shoe on the boy's left foot), raising the possibility that the boy might be the childhood Chris, or an abandoned son from a prior relationship. It is evident that the boy's appearances represent intrusions on Chris's life within the present, reminders of a past that he would sooner leave behind, but remains beleaguered by. A flashback eventually reveals the identity of the boy - he was the victim of a road accident that Chris caused in his early 20s, when he got behind the wheel after drinking a couple of beers, something that he hadn't considered a huge deal until was faced with the worst possible outcome and blood on his hands. The boy's metaphorical ghost has attached himself to Chris ever since, ready to make himself known whenever Chris gets a little too comfortable in the here and now.

The effectiveness of the short rests a lot upon the lack of any really overt drama outside of the flashback sequence, and even that is handled with a healthy degree of moderation - the featured scenario is similar to that of "Beach Road", with the paramedics trying unsuccessfully to revive the boy while Chris is questioned, only minus the presence of any distraught relatives, a move that allows the emphasis to fall purely on Chris's horror. On the surface, the Chris of the present appears to be leading a very normal and positive life. Whatever the consequences of his drinking driving were for him from a strictly legal standpoint, they are seemingly behind him. He has a job and a couple of kids with whom he shares a patently loving bond. He hasn't completely gone to pieces in the aftermath, but holding it together underneath remains an unending struggle for him. In one sequence we see Chris riding the bus, looking as if he's about to crack a casual smile about something, only to see the kid gazing back at him from an adjacent street and for his momentary mirth to be shut right down. I did wonder if there was any significance to his using public transport in the present day instead of driving, although I suspect that the main purpose of this scene is to show Chris as an active member of a community while illustrating the extent of his isolation (there is an obvious metaphor in none of the other passengers being seated particularly close to him). Awareness of the boy's omnipresence is a burden that he alone has to carry. We see intermittent hints of how this burden might be placing a strain on his relationships, most notably in a shot that shows the boy lying on a bed between Chris and his wife, who are facing in opposite directions - although a wedding ring is still visible on Chris's finger in the final sequence, so I don't think the implication is that it is literally driving them apart. Rather, their physical separation becomes a shorthand for how intrinsically alone Chris is in his suffering, so that even when he's in the company of others, he cannot keep that kid at bay. Those close to him might well be aware of that spectre from his past, but that grief and culpability is not something in which they can personally share.

For Chris, life must go on, but a part of himself has certainly died at the scene of the accident, while the anonymous kid has acquired a kind of ghoulish immortality, as the unabating shadow to Chris's emotional state. Chris is locked into the horror of that terrible moment when the boy was declared dead; in a powerful stylistic touch, the present day is depicted in predominantly gloomy, storm cloud-ridden tones, in contrast to the overwhelming brightness of the flashback, which is firmly established as the incident that overshadows and defines all else. In a way, the boy does represent the younger Chris, in becoming a symbol for their mutually extinguished vitality. The kid is unable to progress any further, while the ageing Chris is unable to fully embrace the life right in front of him, so that even an occasion as ostensibly joyous as his daughter's wedding is undercut by his relentless pangs of conscience. In the full version (see below) we hear a reference to the speech that Chris is due to deliver as the father of the bride, and sense that he perhaps views himself as a fraud, in being called upon to toast the future that he feels he has already cancelled. The film has a cyclic narrative, closing as it began with Chris, now in his early 60s, standing alone out of doors with only his memories, the pain of which has clearly not dulled over time. The final shots within the present are set against a murky evening sky, indicating little prospect of alleviation from his demons - the horizon offers only further darkness.

I'd rate "Haunted" as one of TAC's most affecting pieces. The balance of realism with more abstract storytelling is infinitely more successful than in "Glasses", and it builds up a convincingly intimate portrait of Chris as a genial guy paying for a single (yet severe) mistake from which there is unfortunately no going back. Of note is that there are two different cuts of the film, the full version clocking in at a couple of minutes in length, and a truncated version that's only half as long. The version uploaded to TAC's official YouTube channel is the shorter of the two, which omits a sequence where Chris is seen in his kitchen preparing lunch for his children, as well as various other smaller touches such as the paramedics laying the deceased boy's shirt back over his chest.

Interestingly, toward the tail-end of the decade the UK had "Live With It", an anti-speeding PIF from THINK! with a near-identical premise, although the execution was markedly dissimilar. I wouldn't say that it in any way eclipsed the sombre potency of "Haunted", but for what it's worth it stands out as one of the better THINK! entries, proof that a compelling premise can come in multiple flavours (although in this case always in some variation of grim).

Duffless (aka Kiss My Red Asphalt)

 

It's fair to say that Season 4 was a relatively bright and breezy time in The Simpsons' life. Compared to Season 3, which had an entire trilogy based around scenarios where certain Springfieldians were either at risk or at perceived risk of being done away with by their compatriots, whatever anxieties had been plaguing showrunners Al Jeans and Mike Reiss seemed to be mostly out of their system by their tenure's second half. Season 4 is where they allowed their cartoonier tendencies to rule the roost, and (for better or for worse), the show's world got a whole lot more dynamic and larger than life. Serious and grounded stories were a little less high on the agenda, but that's not to say that the odd dose of genuine discomfort couldn't still work its way into the mix. So which episodes stand out as the darker entries of Season 4 (besides the Halloween show, which is always a given)? Obviously there's "Kamp Krusty" - any installment in which the children of Springfield find themselves far from home and at a summer camp that's actually a sweatshop dedicated to the manufacturing of cheap wallets for sale in Hong Kong was bound to be a harrowing experience. That was a Season 3 holdover, however, so it only half-counts. The implications of "Marge vs The Monorail" are frankly horrendous (how many people in North Haverbrook died?), but played at such an overblown level that they don't necessarily register. The situation in "Marge In Chains" has some distressing overtones, but the script isn't focussed enough to fully realise them. Where Season 4 gets most convincingly uncomfortable, I'd say, is with a pair of episodes where the consequences of Homer's lifestyle choices are at the forefront, namely "Homer's Triple Bypass" and "Duffless". "Bypass", in which Homer comes down with heart disease and requires a major operation, has him once again reckoning with the possibility that his time on Earth might be coming to an imminent halt (as he did in "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish" of Season 2), while serving as a commentary on the American healthcare system, with his quest for surgery that won't break bank. "Duffless' (9F13) is less overtly dramatic - here, Homer is never in a situation where his life is immediately endangered (well, except where an eight-legged freak is involved) - but is in some respects the more emotionally haunting of the two. It works as a quieter, more nuanced character study, in a fairly similar vein to "Selma's Choice" (by astonishing coincidence, both episodes feature trips to dubious Duff-themed attractions), where the lead character is put under pressure and must come to a decision about what it is that will ultimately bring them fulfilment in life.

Debuting on February 18th 1993, this one sees Homer being arrested and convicted of a drink driving offence, resulting in the loss of his licence and prompting Marge to challenge him to give up beer cold turkey for a month. The resulting conflict is a fairly barebones one - once Homer has agreed to Marge's request, there's not a lot for him to do other than to stick it out as his entire world closes in on him and the allurement of the bottle mounts - but there is an honesty in its observations that keeps it at all times compelling. We see Homer being pushed to a really low point, with a good deal of emphasis on the intense loneliness that accompanies his addiction (even while attending an Alch-Anon meeting, he finds no solidarity) and the claustrophobia (a nightmarish sequence where the Duff brand is omnipresent). It's not the easiest going of episodes, but it finds the light at the end of the tunnel, offering up one of the most sweetly redemptive closing sequences of all the series. So sweetly redemptive, in fact, that there's the temptation to accuse it of being disingenuous, since we know that the status quo won't actually be yielding no matter how feel-good the sentiments, but that's a discussion we'll get to in due course.

One of the smartest things about David M. Stern's script is in how it implicitly challenges the underlying assumptions reinforced by what was then one of the series' longest-standings dynamics - namely, how hard it was to feel overly stressed about Homer's drinking habits when Barney Gumble is right there and so perpetually intoxicated that he's barely able to keep himself upright. If you want disingenuous, then maybe take a look at what that's all about. Since as far back as Season 1 (most notably, in "Homer's Night Out"), Barney has been on hand to make Homer look better by providing a sobering example of how Homer's life might have been if he'd really ballsed things up. Compared to Barney, Homer leads a relatively normal existence, with a steady job and a loving family, and for as frequently as he's seen occupying his bar stool at Moe's, he isn't shown to habitually drink to the same excess as Barney. But there is a certain fallacy in all of this, given that that Barney is merely a caricature of an alcoholic, played to such a grotesque extreme that he ceases to be an accurate representation of what addiction necessarily looks like. The implication (particularly prominent in "Homer's Night Out") is that drinking has been allowed to dominate his life because he doesn't have the responsibilities that Homer does to give him the incentive to do better, but then we know that it would be awfully naive to suppose that people with responsibilities like jobs and parenthood can't also be addicts, or that they wouldn't do a better job of disguising it than Barney. Alcohol dependency often exists within the cracks of normalcy, not outside of it. In that regard the opening act of "Duffless" does something fairly deceptive. Homer sneaks out of work early to accompany Barney on a tour of the Duff brewery, where they enjoy a selection of free samples (Barney with far more reckless abandon than Homer). As they're leaving the tour, Homer ostensibly does the responsible thing by confiscating Barney's keys and preventing him from driving them home, only to get pulled over by the cops when he then gets behind the wheel. Homer appears perfectly lucid, but when he's made to take a breathalyser test it's revealed that he is in fact over the limit, resulting in his arrest. Some viewers consider this turn of events to be most unfair, given that Homer had made the effort to be sensible with Barney and was blatantly nowhere near as intoxicated as his companion, but I would argue that that is precisely the point. Homer might have been right to have interfered with Barney, but he ultimately wasn't in a fit state to drive either. (Only a little bit over? You bloody idiot.) It is a common misconception that you need to be drunk to qualify as a drink driver, and while I'm not expecting or desiring for The Simpsons to function as a PSA on that point, it's also a valid observation in terms of what it says about Homer's characterisation. He might be doing okay compared to Barney, but does that actually mean that he's doing okay? I agree that there is an egregious injustice in Barney spitefully giving Homer away and then being encouraged to drive home by Wiggum, but that's Springfield's police department for you. Besides, by the nature of the episode's ending, it wouldn't be accurate to say that Barney gets off scot-free. For what he has to go through, Homer is given fleeting insight into how self-improvement is at least possible, whereas Barney stays deep in the pit of stagnation. 

With Homer having returned home from his legal ordeal, stripped of his licence and faced with the gruelling prospect of attending traffic school and two months' worth of Alch-Anon meetings, Marge quizzes him on his drinking practices using a checklist from a pamphlet, and it becomes sadly evident just how heavily Homer uses alcohol as a crutch for getting through the day. There's a delectable humor in Homer's responses ("Do you ever drink alone?" "Does the Lord count as a person?" "No." "Then yes."), but a genuine undercurrent of pathos too - not least in a moment where Marge asks him if he drinks to escape reality, and we see him take a swig of beer before checking himself out in the bathroom mirror and indulging in the fantasy that he has an ultra-buff body. It's hilarious, but it also illustrates what kind of existential despair is plaguing Homer underneath. For him, drinking offers relief from the weariness of existence, and from the eternal dissatisfaction of being who he is. Agreeing to give it up for a month means having to live with himself, and with the rest of Springfield, in a way that he's really not keen on doing.

With the major theme being how Homer navigates the grim vapidity of his day to day life without falling back on alcohol to ease the monotony, it shouldn't surprise us that "Duffless" emerges as one of the more grounded episodes in a season with a tendency to go off the rails. Conversely, it also offers up a formidable contender for its single biggest "WHAT THE FUCK?!" moment, when Homer attempts to exit the plant through a disused corridor and comes face to face with a spider the size of a Clydesdale horse. People don't talk enough about how reality-breaking that spider is - it is one heck of a fanciful thing to be implementing outside of a Halloween show, even with the unspoken assumption that the spider got really big through exposure to nuclear radiation (a fish with three eyes is one thing, but a spider that's like something out of a 1950s B-movie might be pushing it somewhat). The spider can supposedly be subdued with the recitation of Biblical verses, but if you're like Homer and don't know any of those, chucking a rock at its head will work just as effectively. That spider's not so tough. (It's also purple, which makes it marginally less horrifying than it would be if it were a more conventional spider colour.)

As much as it is, I'll admit that I'm cool with the spider. I rather enjoy the random nonsense of it all. Intellectually, its presence should be treated as a far bigger deal, but it's also the kind of detail you can only get away with if you push past it as quickly and as cheekily as the narrative does. The spider is, in the scheme of things, quite harmless. For me, the thing that prevents "Duffless" from attaining true greatness is the B-story, which sees Bart destroying Lisa's project for an upcoming science fair and Lisa seeking vengeance through a back-up experiment involving a hamster, a supply of cupcakes and an electrical current. It's nothing really terrible, but it's far from my favourite Simpsons subplot, and I promise you it's not because of the scene where the hamster receives a mild electrical shock. I know I've a tendency to grumble whenever the show does jokes about abused hamsters, but on this occasion that's honestly the least of my problems. I'm of the opinion that the two older Simpsons siblings work best when they're a team, and any episode that pits them against each other is automatically on shaky ground. It's not that it can't be pulled off, but I don't think that Stern ever lands the right balance. Here, their rivalry is nowhere near as mean-spirited and one-sided as in "My Sister, My Sitter" of Season 8, but it still leaves rather a sour note, which is ironic for a subplot that was presumably implemented to give balancing levity to an A-story that touches on heavy topics. Bart destroys a futuristic tomato that Lisa had been growing using steroids - not out of malice toward Lisa, but because Skinner presented him with an opportunity for mayhem that he couldn't pass up - leaving her naturally distraught (she'd also had aspirations of the tomato being used to combat world hunger, so...nice going there, Bart). With the science fair looming, she devises an alternative project that involves running a series of tests to determine if her brother is a slower learner than a hamster, with the intention of humiliating him in front of the school.

Quick question to Mr Stern - are we supposed to sympathise with Bart in this situation, or Lisa? Because neither party is coming off particularly well. There is, in theory, nothing wrong with attempting to explore Lisa's pettier, more childish side - in fact, it's what fuels some of the subplot's best laughs ("That'll learn 'im to bust my tomater!" is an absolute banger of a one-liner, and I love how Lisa's degraded grammar all but affirms her personal debasement). There's amusement to be had from her ruthless antics, but it's hard to get past the fact that she is being extremely vindictive. At the same time, I've no real sympathy for Bart. It's not as though he even attempts to atone or take responsibility for wrecking her tomato, nor are we given any evidence of Homer, Marge or even Skinner reading him the riot act for it. So I don't like the fact that he wins at the end (with victory handed to him by Skinner, no less, although it does allow him to give a shout-out to the very scientist who inspired his name). There is something about this whole outcome that feels terribly unsatisfying. Honestly, I'd have much preferred it if Bart and Lisa had both lost and the ribbon had gone to that overzealous father who'd commandeered his son's volcano project and worked too long and hard on it to let the poor confused kid share any of the glory. Also, this might be a tad nitpicky, but another reason I don't much care for the subplot lies in how it fudges the timeline of the A-story. Lisa explicitly states that the science fair is happening in three days, meaning that the actual length of time spanned by the bulk of the onscreen action is very short, and Homer's prolonged period of abstinence is left to be largely rushed through within the last few minutes. This might have felt a tad less hurried if there'd been a little more ambiguity as to how much time had already elapsed when we get to the science fair, and an aching Homer is seen drooling over Ralph's alcohol-fuelled car.

Where the subplot best succeeds is in its darker, more unsettling moments, like Lisa imagining a hamster with Bart's head getting stuck in a maze and crying out "Help me! Help me!" in the manner of the human-fly hybrid from the 1958 version of The Fly (consistently one of the most disturbing pop culture items you can possibly reference - just look at The Emperor's New Groove). Then there's the allusion to A Clockwork Orange (1971), where a highly-conditioned Bart attempts to grab hold of a pair of cupcakes (just like Alex reaching for the topless woman's breasts) before collapsing in a quivering heap. I'm likewise always unnerved by the high-pitched whining Bart makes during his first encounter with the electrified cupcake (which the subtitles on Disney+ helpfully indicate that is a Three Stooges reference - ah well, I've already admitted I'm not massively well-versed in their lore). Incidentally, on the DVD commentary Reiss talks about how difficult it was implementing the moment where the hamster gets shocked (this, coupled with Lisa's white saviour fantasy, admittedly feels like an out of character thing for her to do now, even if the hamster isn't seriously harmed). They were aware that the audience's sympathy would lie with the hamster and looked to make it as quick and easy as possible...which begs the question as to why they were so callously indifferent to that poor expired hammy we saw in "Dog of Death"? Given the frequency with which hamsters seem to end up dead or imperilled on The Simpsons, I had gotten the impression that the show's crew regard them as acceptable punching bags, although Reiss insists that this isn't the case. (Jean does, however, go on to immediately confirm my suspicions about them being a bunch of cat haters, when shares his theory that onscreen kitty carnage is all well and passable in television, but once you've killed a dog, you've automatically lost your audience. I don't know if I buy that as a universal principle. Wouldn't it depend on whether your audience was comprised predominantly of dog lovers or cat lovers?)

 

As brutal as those kids are, the most disturbing portion of the episode, bar none, would be the video Homer is forced to watch in traffic school detailing the potentially grave consequences of drink driving, which is presented by an incongruously buoyant Troy McClure, star of such esteemed driver's ed titles as Alice's Adventures Through The Windshield Glass and The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot. I've never gotten official confirmation on this, but I strongly suspect that this film was modelled on the Red Asphalt series, an infamous collection of films produced by the California Highway Patrol between 1960 and 2006 that urged responsible driving using tactics straight out of the Mondo playbook (shocking images of crumpled vehicles and mangled bodies abound). Specifically, I believe that Troy's film was based on the 1989 entry, Red Asphalt III, which opens with a similar mise-en-scene and has the presenter saying "What a _____ waste!" multiple times. If you're tempted to look up Red Asphalt III, know that it isn't for the faint of heart (among other stomach-churning vignettes, we're shown footage of a driver whose head has taken a massive battering, and I think you see parts of his brain spilling out into the wreckage). Appalling stuff, and yet I'll admit to having a certain sympathy for Homer's reaction as he sits there giggling at the lurid onslaught. He's portrayed as an anomaly among an audience of fellow offenders who are all at serious risk of losing their lunches, but he nails a fundamental aspect of the experience of having to soak in a production of this nature (either because you were forced to do so in traffic school or because you're a masochistic sicko like myself and your morbid curiosity got the best of you). So often, it is insanely difficult not to laugh, particularly with a specimen like Red Asphalt III that insists on being as overbearing as possible with its grisliness. I would argue that it's not even schadenfreude. Sometimes the brain just goes, "You know what would be the most inappropriate reaction right now? Laughter!", and before you know it you've lost control. Truth is, laughter can be a natural response to stimuli so terrible and overwhelming that it defies being processed in any other way. Homer's exact assertion is, "It's funny because I don't know 'em!", suggesting that it's is a privilege of the distance between ourselves and the subject, and that's valid enough - often, the stimuli is so extreme that it doesn't fully register as someone else's lived horror. The issue doesn't just lie with Homer either; the irreverently upbeat music and cheesy puns that accompany the presentation are concessions that, no matter how high-minded the professed intentions, there is something dreadfully exploitative about exhibiting real-life death and suffering in this manner. All I know is that allowing myself the occasional ignoble snicker is what made it possible for me to get through Red Asphalt III. It is a confounding film. Unlike Troy, the presenter in the initial sequence does a decent and respectful job of reminding us of what's really at stake in these situations: "Remember that each [body bag] carried away contains a destroyed human life. Not a dummy or a cleverly made-up actor, but a real body. A lifeless person. Next time it may be a friend, a brother, your child, or you." But then we go into the studio with our main presenter, and he isn't quite so delicate in his approach. He gestures, with a more theatrical anger, to a pile of videotapes that he tells us were created by highway patrol officers depicting real accidents - "This one is simply labelled: 17-year-old DUI, six dead!" It's all a little much to take in. There are times when awkward tittering is the only coping mechanism we're left with.

It's also the only mirth that Homer derives from what's otherwise a soul-crushing experience. As he gets deeper into his dry month, he finds himself a pariah in every social situation, at once the sole sane individual who can see the rampant futility of the world with his metaphorical beer googles off and a man going slowly to pieces as he's pushed to the very limits of his endurance. Being a rare sole sober spectator at a baseball game opens his eyes to what a tedious, chaotic mess the entire affair is, while having to sit through the supperware demonstration that Patty and Selma are hosting in the Simpsons' home (I'm guessing that he's usually down at Moe's when this sort of thing is going on?) has his thoughts turning quietly murderous. Empathy and community are bitterly denied him, even by those who claim to be peddlers in it. He gets exiled from the local Alch-Anon group when he confesses that his cravings for anything remotely close to a beer had him crawling beneath the bleachers of a football stadium ingesting dirt, and the judgemental pricks therein won't even pretend to understand that desolation (not even Hans Moleman, who here reveals himself to be a 31-year-old who ruined his life through excessive drinking). The greatest menace, though, comes from the Duff advertising that's slapped in every direction he looks, and serves as a constant reminder that it's never less than him against the world. Earlier in the season, "Lisa The Beauty Queen" had tackled the topic of cigarette promotions and their odious efforts to create a generation of young smokers, and it was explicitly noted in that episode's commentary that such an outspoken attack was only possible because cigarette companies couldn't advertise on television and the networks didn't have to worry about stepping on their toes. With alcohol it's a much thornier issue, although "Duffless" still gets surprisingly audacious in critiquing how a product so potentially harmful can be pushed on consumers who can't handle it. The promos Homer has to contend with in the present might not be as bare-faced as the 1950s television ad glimpsed at the Duff brewery, where viewers were urged by a cartoon medic to fill up their undernourished Q-zones with "pure beer goodness", but their sheer omnipresence proves just as diabolical. It illustrates how difficult it is for someone fighting addiction when the pressure to drink is so deeply ingrained within every aspect of the cultural scenery. It gets to the point where even a passing train bearing the Duff logo on every carriage appears to taunt him by repeatedly commanding him to "Chug".

Even with the odds so heavily stacked against him, Homer makes it through the month with his promise to Marge intact, at which point he's eager to head straight to Moe's and get his Q-zone overflowing once more. Marge is disappointed that this would be his first inclination, since the entire purpose of this exercise was to prove to him that he had the willpower to survive without alcohol, not give him an excuse to go on the mother of all binges. Still, when Homer arrives at his sorely-missed watering hole, he finds that he can't go back to the way things were. He looks around himself, takes note of the palpable dolour that hangs over the bar's patrons, and becomes conscious of how much his own perspective has shifted within those 30 days of non-boozing. He tells Moe to put his beer back in the fridge and leaves, having decided that he'd sooner spend the evening sober, and in the company of Marge. It's here that the episode runs into its greatest challenge - we all like happy endings, and after the anguish Homer has endured in this particular go-around, it feels as though he's earned one, but how does it balance itself against our awareness that this newfound harmony is probably not going to last? Homer's weakness for Duff is too prominent a character trait to be going anywhere, and will prove his expressed Achilles' heel just two episodes along, in "So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show", so does the ending become any less sincere with that in mind? There is a flip side to this problem, which is that alcohol addiction isn't an issue likely to be resolved by just one month's worth of abstinence. Realistically it would be something that Homer should expect to struggle with for a while. So perhaps the ending risked looking disingenuous either way. Instead, it exits on a glorious middle ground, with Homer gaining a moment of clarity on what it is that really makes his life worth living, and the sincerity of that realisation certainly not being in doubt (he was willing to give up the beer in the first place for her). Meanwhile, Moe speaks on behalf of the slighted status quo, asserting that Homer will be back in his usual spot before long, and working in an odd bit of pseudo-fourth wall breaking when he gestures toward the viewer and indicates that they, too, will return. It's then revealed that he is in fact pointing his finger at Barney, who's very much wedded to his personal Hell (to the extent that if Moe's bar didn't close, he wouldn't set foot outside its walls), but for a brief second, the viewer is implicated in this culture of sorry dependency. We know that nothing's going to change substantially for Homer, and we wouldn't miss it for the world. It's as if our need to return to our television sets night after night and while away the hours chuckling at the kinds of sad saps who populate sitcoms is indicative of some existential hole within our own lives. We're all creatures of our own dubious habits, after all.

In the meantime, Homer and Marge are allowed ride off into the sunset singing "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", in a homage to Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969). There's a cute visual gag in that Homer still doesn't have his licence back and is having to ride about on Lisa's little pink bicycle to get anywhere. With Marge perched on the handle bars it should be additionally awkward, but they're managing. It also doubles as a touching metaphor, with the bike, once a symbol of Homer's failure and humiliation, becoming his final means of mobility, a chance to glide free from the burdens of his past, now that his recent upheaval has directed him to an alternate path. It's a path that seems to only ever open on a temporary basis in the world of The Simpsons, but it's a reassurance to know that it's there. 

 

BBC2 edit alert!:  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31st August 1997 had an inescapable impact on the zeitgeist in the UK. I remember tuning into Sky 1 to watch The Simpsons that very day and having to sit through numerous links showing footage of Diana and her family set to mournful music, creating such a deluge of misery that they had me feeling dirty for merely desiring a bit of fun and levity with a cartoon family in between. You'd have thought that "Duffless", which contains an explicit shout-out to Diana Spencer, would have been an obvious target for Sky 1's censoring scissors when it next appeared. Yet I remember being surprised when they aired "Duffless" in what was still the close aftermath and the entire Princess Di sequence was left completely intact. It's not that there's anything overtly problematic or offensive about the sequence in itself (the joke is just Barney being a drunken wally, in mistaking something as ridiculous as a pile of rags for the Princess of Wales, and Homer being comically hurt in the process), but given the atmosphere at the time I wouldn't necessarily have faulted Sky if they'd opted to play it safe and not have Diana joked about in any capacity (particularly given the episode's broader subject matter, and its subsequent talk of fatal road accidents). But no, they either overlooked it or decided it was okay. And then when BBC2 got round to airing the episode (some time later, once things had settled down a notch), they did implement all the anticipated edits, so that Barney simply drives forward without explanation, causing Homer to miss the mattress on the roof of the car and hit the ground, and the sequence immediately ends. While I've no doubt that the Beeb made these cuts in the interests of not ruffling anybody's feathers, it's quite possible that they thought it would be confusing to have Diana referenced as though she were still among the living - as I recall, they also cut the moment in "Treehouse of Horror IV" where Richard Nixon, having been summoned to the Jury of the Damned, protests that he's not dead yet, on the grounds that Nixon was dead by the time the BBC aired it and the joke would have made no sense. To which I say, they should have given a bit of credit to the viewer's ability to decipher the original context - not least because the actual punchline of that exchange was Devil Flanders' "Listen, I did a favour for you!", which will never not be hilarious. Also, the man never drank a Duff in his life.

This was not, however, the most bewildering edit to be made to The Simpsons on account of Princess Diana. Believe me, I've a much juicier anecdote to share when I get round to covering "Rosebud". Spoiler: that one was Sky 1's doing.

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".