Three Men and A Comic Book (aka To Everything, Turn Turn Turn)

 

The spring of 1991 saw The Simpsons nearing the end of its second season in style, climaxing with the two-blow gut punch of "Lisa's Substitute" and "The War of The Simpsons", back-to-back episodes that demonstrated what an uncanny flair the ostensibly grotesque cartoon had for devastating drama. The emotional stakes had never felt higher, the consequences of the characters' choices never more pressing and intimate. With the penultimate episode, "Three Men and A Comic Book" (7F21), we can feel the season making a conscious effort to ease itself into palate cleansing mode; I suspect it's not a coincidence that its two most emotionally painful episodes were followed up by one of the series' most purely fun offerings to date, enabling viewers to head into the summer with more of a light-hearted skip in their step (the actual season finale, "Blood Feud", would be held over for an unusually belated July debut). That might seem like an odd proposition. After all, in its third act "Three Man and A Comic Book" becomes dark and physically nasty in ways that those aforementioned episodes didn't, with Bart descending into feverish paranoia, Martin being falsely imprisoned and Milhouse threatened with a drop from the Simpsons' treehouse. We might have been on the edge of our seat during that sequence in "Substitute" where Lisa finally loses her cool with Homer and repeatedly calls him a baboon, but neither character was endangered in quite so blunt and concrete a way as Milhouse is here. The distinction being that "Three Men and A Comic Book" remains, at all times, an intrinsically playful scenario, even as its pivotal conflict grows ever more alarming. The narrative tension is driven by something so small - a particularly elusive edition of a comic book starring Springfield's favourite radioactive superhero - and the calamity it inspires is ultimately so disproportionate (even with its $100 price tag) that there's only so seriously it warrants being taken. I think we've always enough confidence that Bart is neither crazed or depraved enough that he'd sacrifice his best friend in order to preserve said comic, even as he's assuring the hysterical Milhouse that a fall wouldn't be the worst possible outcome, since the atmospheric rainstorm would potentially soften him up on the way down.

"Three Men and A Comic Book" is a significantly lighter installment than its two direct predecessors, yet it still feels every bit as audacious, particularly with the wild gambits taken in its final act. For the first two thirds, it tells a grounded story dealing with an all-too relatable childhood conundrum - the problem of cash and how to accumulate it fast when you're young and craving something well beyond your means - and then for the big finish relocates its action to the confines of the treehouse, signifying our sudden escalation into more dizzying and dangerous heights. From there it becomes largely a three hander between Bart, Martin and Milhouse, with Marge and Homer getting the occasional interjection. We experience the claustrophobia of being perpetually surrounded by those rugged treehouse walls, exacerbating the intense absurdities of the climactic showdown and illustrating the extent to which our titular trio are mired together in their mutual suspicion, cut off from anything resembling reason and good sense, and with a brutally long way to fall on their inevitable crash back down to Earth.

The theme of corrupted childhoods is established in the gladly irreverent first scene, where Bart and Lisa pass their time en route to Springfield's 12th annual comic book convention devising a dark fan theory connecting two of Harvey Comics' flagship characters. Bart's proposal that Casper The Friendly Ghost is really the spirit of the deceased Richie Rich is intriguing, as is Lisa's deepening of the lore with the speculation that Richie possibly took his own life after realising how misspent it was in pursuit of dollars - but alas, not consistent with the canon of the 1995 feature film (which is the canon that primarily matters when it comes to Casper), where Casper was revealed to have died of pneumonia. Actually, based on the anecdotes that director Brad Silberling had to share on the film's DVD commentary, it seems that the powers that be over at Harvey Comics would sooner you didn't think of Casper as the spirit of a deceased child, period (however much his being a ghost automatically invites that line of thought), but rather as a separate entity altogether. According to Silberling, Harvey Comics heavily contested that particular element of the feature film, along with Casper's infatuation with Kat and Dr Harvey's falling to his death, however readily undone by the Lazarus (jeez, they were against everything about this film that was interesting or meaningful). Being a Casper fan, what I most appreciate about this exchange is Lisa's rebuttal when Bart refers to him as Casper The Wimpy Ghost: "I think it's sad that you equate friendliness with wimpiness, and I hope it keeps you from ever achieving true popularity." Well said, Lisa. I won't have anybody dissing my boy Casper except the Ghostly Trio (given it's their thing and all).

The hypothetical sad fate of Richie Rich subtly foreshadows where the story is headed, with Bart's fixation on material acquisition being the thing that invites his own (less macabre) misfortune, although there is something undeniably innocent and wholesome about his desire when it originates. For a long stretch, "Three Men" is about how badly Bart wants a comic book and the lengths he'll go to make it his own, effective because writer Jeff Martin has such a keen empathy for what it's like to be a child and to feel such an intense longing for something that the world almost seems to stop turning until it's safely in your hands. It's a bit like "Marge Be Not Proud" in that regard, except the events don't take anywhere near so distressing a turn. Plus, Bart actually was able to learn and grow from his experiences in that episode, whereas "Three Men and A Comic Book" strikes me as being almost an anti-coming of age story, in which the possibility of growth is suggested but ultimately shot down - making the title, in which the three warring school boys are identified as men more than a little ironic. It is a reference to the 1987 movie Three Men and A Baby (one of those hit comedies of the 1980s that I don't think is all that well-remembered today, although it comes with a fabulously freaky urban legend involving the alleged ghost of yet another deceased child); that the pivotal comic book has taken the place of the baby marks it out as something for which the boys have a shared and crucial responsibility. Having purchased the elusive publication and devoured all the wonders its pages conceal, they now have the mutual challenge of figuring out how to grow beyond that innocent desire and jointly nurture their incredible acquisition. The comic represents an investment in their future, one that we know they're doomed to blow from the instant Martin insists that they need to keep it in optimum condition so that the last one of them alive might have the honor of being buried with it. Not to preserve it for succeeding generations of comic book fans, so that one day another child just like them might have the excitement of getting to read it. Heck, not even so that it may eventually be resold to another collector for an even bigger sum. We watch as their selfishness and jealousy becomes increasingly volatile, at which point the title takes on an additional meaning, evoking not just a Ted Danson comedy about child-rearing, but also the old proverb about how multiple dogs and one bone will seldom agree. 

The comic in question is the first ever issue of Radioactive Man, originally published in November 1952 with the unassuming sale price of 10 cents. Copies in 1991 are hard to come by, and Comic Book Guy, making his debut at the convention, won't part with his for anything less than $100 (he purports that the comic is worth a lot more and that he's offering to it to Bart for lower because he reminds him of himself, though based on his actions elsewhere in the episode that's presumably all part of his sales pitch). Alas, Bart only has 30 dollars to his name, but his reverence for Radioactive Man is through the roof - less for his heroism than for the fact that he never beats up a villain without delivering some cheesy quip (a point Bart emphasises by showing Lisa a comic where Radioactive Man punches a guy into the sun while asking, "Hot enough for ya?", although if you ask me that's just sick). Bart's itch to get his paws on that first issue is intense, but at this stage it's also pure, fuelled by the thrill of owning such a vital component of Radioactive Man history and by the curiosity of getting to experience how his hero's journey began. We can practically taste his frantic sincerity, and he has our sympathies. His first and most obvious recourse is make an appeal the bank of Mom and Dad, but Homer refuses to believe that any comic book could be worth that kind of money. Marge suggests that Bart might look into getting a part-time job, and refers him to an acquaintance named Mrs Glick, an elderly widow (how elderly is never specified, but she had a brother who served in World War I, which potentially puts her in her 90s, possibly older) with no shortage of gruelling chores she needs a hand with. Unfortunately, Glick transpires to be incredibly stingy, awarding Bart with only two quarters for days of work. Following that, and various other ill-fated attempts at raising funds (the most lucrative of which was selling cans of beer from the front lawn, for which he narrowly escaped a reprimanding from Lou and Eddie by offering them his unsold wares) he ends up only five dollars richer than he was before. 

What's particularly canny about the middle act of "Three Men" is the way it touches on two sore spots at once. It's a harrowing reminder of how unfair life felt when, as a child, you fervently wanted something that stayed well outside of your reach. But there's also the insinuation that Bart's money-making endeavours, most notably his manual work for Mrs Glick, represent an induction into the world of adult responsibility, with all of its own hardships and lack of gratifications. When Bart returns home from his ordeal with Glick and churlishly declares that employment is for chumps, Homer is full of admiration for him for having twigged that basic truth so early in life. This overlapping of childhood and adult anxieties is playfully foregrounded in what might be one of the most strangely implemented cultural references of the early seasons, a parody of The Wonder Years that facilitates a guest appearance from Daniel Stern (aka Marv, the drippier half of the Wet Bandits) as Bart's inner monologue. Ostensibly, Stern's voice represents that of an adult Bart, looking back fondly upon his youth and identifying the moment he was tasked with finding a job as a crucial turning point in his coming of age, only for Homer to keep cutting him off in the present by demanding to know what Bart (his gaze turned contemplatively toward the camera) is staring at. It's hilarious, but it's also a little baffling in terms of what we're meant to assume is going on within context. Is Bart actually having a fourth wall-breaking moment that his father isn't privy to, enabling him to share some kind of mental connection with his future self (circa 2011) and communicate with the viewer? Or is the implication that Bart is actively playing at being in The Wonder Years, imagining a narration on behalf of his older self in the style of Kevin Arnold? Alternatively, is he just staring vacantly into space, with Stern's narration teasing us into supposing that something meaningful is transpiring, and Homer repeatedly exposing it for the nonsense that is? Who can say? Even if you're unfamiliar with The Wonder Years, the gag itself remains basically accessible - Stern's narration purports to recontextualise Bart's predicament as the stuff of cozy nostalgia, but this is adamantly shot down by Homer, who represents the voice of a bitter reality. Bart is denied that transcendence, the assurance that his challenges in the present are in fact building toward something much greater, while the supposed future Bart is denied his rose-tinted comforts. The presence of "Turn! Turn! Turn!" by The Byrds, which was featured in the premier episode of The Wonder Years and doesn't exactly scream nostalgia for the early 90s, leaves Bart all the more dislocated from any sense of coherent time and progression. 

In addition to offering an affectionate look-back at the qualities that make childhood such a slow and aggravating period (and adulthood likewise), "Three Men" is an elegant exercise in the show's continued world-enriching, managing to pack an impressive amount of development into its 22 minutes. The most obvious thing it has going on in that regard is the aforementioned introduction of Comic Book Guy, a character who'd gain notoriety later down the road when he became an avatar for the obsessive netizens whose pedantic critiquing of The Simpsons did not go unnoticed by the production staff. For now, he's merely a caricature of the kinds of contemptuous, emotionally aloof and self-important nerds who regularly pop up behind the counters of comic book stores. A very inspired and well-observed caricature it is too, holding as true in the UK as it does in the US - there was a time when you could walk into any Forbidden Planet around here and nine times out of ten you'd be served by someone redolent of Comic Book Guy. (If I'm honest, there's a level on which I even sympathise with him, at least in his specific lament, "I do not need this, I've got a Masters degree in Folklore and Mythology". Yeah, I too know the sting of having a Masters that nets you zero prestige in the real world.) This is also our first close-up look at Radioactive Man, who serves as an all-purpose parody of classic comic book superheroes, in the same way that Itchy & Scratchy serve as all-purpose parodies of golden age cartoon stars (he's also an expansion of a gag played more saliently with Krusty, in that if you peer past his outer disguise he bears a spooky resemblance to Homer). In spite of the obvious affection the show's staff have for comic book culture, on the basis of this episode alone, he'd end up being curiously under-utilised as a concept - sure, he would eventually get another spotlight episode in Season 7, this one actually titled "Radioactive Man", and his comics would pop up in every so often in the mise-en-scene, but he didn't exactly become an omnipresent staple of the Simpsons universe a la Itchy & Scratchy. Here we get a glimpse into his superheroic origins, when the atomic blast that improbably failed to kill him gave him radioactive powers, and learn something of the dark mythology surrounding names attached to the 1950s television adaptation (there's Dirk Richter, whose murky demise alludes to that of Superman actor George Reeves, and Buddy Hodges, who was erroneously rumored to have been killed in Vietnam), but if you wanted to learn more about the Radioactive Man lore then you largely had to settle for the interpretations in the Simpsons Comics. Speaking of things that were a bigger deal in auxiliary Simpsons media, I think this is the only canon appearance of Bartman, Bart's own superheroic alter ego. In his case, it's actually hilarious how much mileage the comics, video games and merchandise were able to mine from the concept, when it barely fits in with the series proper at all. Within context, "Bartman" is a made-up superhero Bart dresses as in a failed attempt to gain discount entry into the convention, and that's as far as his story goes, although he does a get a pretty sweet transformation sequence out of the deal (complete with yet another Superman allusion when Bart jumps into a telephone booth occupied by journalist Dave Shutton). Meanwhile, Lisa's observation, "Too bad we didn't come dressed as popular cartoon characters", is a thing of low-key beauty in itself.

Elsewhere, we get a dark origin story for Patty and Selma, at least as we know them, with the revelation that they once had soft, feminine voices before they took up smoking in their teens and warped their vocal chords beyond all recognition (and having covered "Lisa The Beauty Queen" last month, something that leaps out to me about these early Simpsons episodes is how preoccupied the writers were with the topic of cigarettes and their dubious marketing practices - from what we see of the Dirk Richter Radioactive Man series, it's also little more than a stealth Laramie commercial designed to make smoking appealing to kids). Marge has only a small role in "Three Men", but she gets an illuminating flashback recounting how she once agreed to become Patty and Selma's slave in exchange for a cut of their allowance, so as to fulfil her dream of owning a child-sized electric lightbulb oven. The story isn't a total bummer, given that Patty and Selma kept their side of the bargain and Marge did eventually get what she wanted, although the twins' newfound nicotine dependency may not be the only toxic pattern we see being ingrained in this sequence. Wanting to please and take care of the ones she's close to is something that comes completely naturally to Marge (having acquired her swanky new toy, she delights in using it to prepare lightbulb-warmed cookies for her sisters), much as taking advantage of that instinct comes entirely naturally to the ones she's close to. Arguably, there isn't such a massive gulf between her having to cater to the awkward demands of the teenaged Patty and Selma and her having to cater to the equally awkward demands of her family now, with the latter being all the more thankless for not coming with the promise of a lightbulb oven at the end.

The biggest curiosity of the episode is the character of Mrs Glick, who feels as though she was being set up to become yet another recurring member of Springfield's ever-growing community, but whose appearances since have been few and far between (although plentiful enough for her to have been killed off at least twice). One would assume that the decision for her to be voiced by a guest performer, the legendary Cloris Leachman, limited what the writers felt able to subsequently do with her. Certainly, Leachman brought a unique energy to the eccentric old biddy, which they were never quite able to replicate later on - off the top of my head, I remember Glick having a cameo in "Two Bad Neighbors" of Season 7, where Tress MacNeille had taken over vocal duties, and where her voice and characterisation seemed indistinguishable from that of Agnes Skinner (angry and kind of screwy). Leachman's Glick has a faintly sinister side (according to the commentary, she was loosely inspired by Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, in particular the disturbing detail about her wedding dress becoming her mourning dress). She won't take no for an answer when it comes to her stashes of hard ribbon candy, and she seems a little too eager to tip concentrated iodine onto Bart's gardening/cat scratch wounds, in spite of the agony it audibly causes him. Still, she doesn't come off as a wilfully mean character, more oblivious and out of touch with the modern world (though not to the extent that she isn't turned on by its filthy soap operas). Unless she's royally trolling Bart when she hands him his two quarters (which I'm not completely ruling out), she seems genuinely impervious to both her own tight-fistedness and to Bart's bruised indignation (and it is hilarious how she manages to prise a thank you out of him, quite against his intentions). "Three Men" might be where her role within the Simpsons chronology peaked, but she certainly gives it her all, dominating the second act and coming within a hair's breadth of stealing the entire show.

Ultimately, the big attraction turns out to be the grasping chemistry between Bart, Milhouse and Martin, once Bart has to reckon with the fact that he's not the only desperate young soul out there with his eye on the prize. Martin has also been undertaking a one-man crusade to make the comic his own, and Bart spots him in The Android's Dungeon making a gutsy last ditch effort at haggling with Comic Book Guy. His attempts at accumulating funds (which have included visiting his aunt in the nursing home and fishing coins out of the sewer) have been marginally more successful than Bart's - he has 40 dollars, and he's already at his breaking point. Then Milhouse strolls in with 30 dollars in hand, intending to pick up a completely different artefact of a bygone era - a Carl Yastrzemski Topps from 1973, back when he had those mutton chop sideburns - and it dawns on Bart that if they pooled all of their resources together, they would have enough to buy the comic as a group. Unfortunately, as Comic Book Guy is inexplicably elated to point out, they might have bought more than they bargained for, since they now have to deal with the problem of joint custody (a point he accentuates by immediately closing up his store, illustrating how there's no going back).

It is somewhat surprising to note that "Three Men and A Comic Book" was Milhouse's first major story role, considering that he'd been at Bart's side since before the series proper was even underway, debuting in the earliest of the Simpsons-Butterfinger collaborations ("I don't have the Butterfinger group!"). By contrast, Martin had already had at least three prior turns in the spotlight (in "Bart The Genius" , "Bart Gets an F" and the subplot of "Lisa's Substitute"), with all of those episodes highlighting what made him Bart's polar opposite (or "natural enemy", in his own words) so it's refreshing to see "Three Men" establishing some common ground in their shared love of Radioactive Man. In the beginning, Martin stood out as one of the show's most domineering personalities (in part thanks to Russi Taylor's vigorous vocal performances), and while he would have further major roles to come, such as in "Saturdays of Thunder" of Season 3 and "Bart on The Road" of Season 7, there's no denying that his presence receded as the years went on (a side-effect of the writers becoming less interested in Bart's eye-view of the world than in Homer's) and his characterisation was slightly flattened. The joke shifted to his being an effeminate wimp, as opposed to a feisty, intermittently devious poindexter who could go toe to toe with Bart (a worthy adversary, you might say). It is a shame, since I really enjoy the unique dynamic he brings to Bart's friendship circle in "Three Men"; ostensibly, he's the voice of reason, coming up with practical solutions for how they can agree to share, all while being a manipulative bastard underneath. He cunningly assigns the trio days of the week in which they can each claim ownership of the comic, deliberately ordering things so that he'll get to take it home first (and also on a Saturday, which is surely the most desirable day to have it). Milhouse, meanwhile, assumes the role of a docile gamma who's nonetheless cannier than he lets on (he repeatedly challenges Martin on the holes in his system) and is also the one who seems most inclined to actually enjoy their purchase as a comic - his efforts to read it for a second time are blocked by Bart and Martin, who've decided that any further handling of its pages are a no-no. And for what? So that it can be entombed with whichever one of them lives the longest, according to Martin. Once an object of innocent wonder and excitement, the comic has become a disturbance in their childhood paradise. The mystique that surrounded it for as long as it was out of reach has all-too inevitably faded, giving way to toxicity and leery possessiveness. Sure, isn't that where fandom culture invariably takes us? 

I've identified "Three Men" as an anti-coming of age story, in which the lead characters fail to become responsible men who make good on their duty of care for their surrogate baby. At the same time, their  third-act clash evolves well beyond the realm of childish squabbling, being more suggestive of some latent savagery from deep within the human psyche, evoking The Treasure of The Sierra Madre (1948) and also Lord of The Flies (Bart addresses a subdued Martin as "Piggy"). When the boys elect to sleep over and keep mutual watch over their trophy, civilisation good as breaks down within their high-up wooden box (comically so, given that they're never far-removed from Marge's microwaved s'mores and whatever mysterious television room Homer is keeping a half-assed eye on the treehouse from). Bart and Milhouse catch Martin attempting to leave the treehouse to go to the bathroom and insist on binding him to a chair, shortly before coming to physical blows with one another. Milhouse is knocked out of the treehouse, but Bart grabs a hold of his sleeve, just as a gust of wind makes the comic airborne and threatens to blow it into the stormy night. Bart is faced with the final moral choice of whether to prioritise his friend or the comic, prompting Milhouse's stand-out moment, when he ruefully admits that deep down, he never wanted the comic, preferring the mutton chop Yastrzemski card he originally came in for. In the end, Bart decides that their friendship is more valuable than a comic (even a $100 one) and pulls Milhouse to safety, but the universe nevertheless insists on punishing him harshly for his prior twitchiness. It isn't enough for the stray comic to be swept into a muddy puddle and mauled by Santa's Little Helper, it also has to be blasted to pieces by a bolt of lightning, making its destruction feel less like bad luck than some overkill act of divine judgement. Alternatively, you could argue that the bolt of lightning did those kids a favour, since the dratted comic was ultimately nothing but a curse. It didn't have to be, however. Whichever way you slice it, its messy demise is a testament to their squandered potential as care-givers.

"Three Men" risks being a little too on the nose with its moralising, something it slickly circumvents by having the characters reflect on the outcome in a characteristically snide Simpsons fashion, in a way that feels like a direct reversal of the joke at the end of "Bart's Girlfriend". In that episode Bart claims to have learned something but isn't able to articulate what. Here, he's able to articulate the obvious moral takeaway ("We ended up with nothing because the three of us can't share"), but fails to register it as an insight that might inform his decision-making going forward; rather, it's something that just kind of ticks him off. In the peaceful light of dawn we find Bart, Martin and Milhouse attempting the arduous task of recovering and piecing together the comic's remains, but ultimately having to admit defeat and walk away, apparently none the wiser for their experience. Yet there is, as Martin suggests, a kind of natural order to this final arrangement ("Another comic book has returned to the earth from whence it came"), even if the kids themselves remain largely oblivious. Their precious comic isn't actually dead - rather than being zapped into oblivion, it exists in an abundance of scattered fragments that are being reclaimed by nature as an essentiak part of the healing process, with Mother Earth succeeding where her human offshoots have failed. At the end, we see that shreds of its pages have been collected by a bird (more specifically a dove, in a transparent bit of symbolism) and woven into its nest; the comic thus becomes an investment in the future after all, in providing the basic materials for the nurturing of further life. The final word goes to Radioactive Man himself, who closes the episode on a poetic note, by musing that the world is safe again - "but...for how long?". He anticipates both the fragility of this equilibrium, and the lessons that will inevitably need dispensing countless times over.

Skinamarink (aka Can We Sleep Downstairs Tonight?)

The thing that hurt me the most about Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink (2022) was how young its central characters were. Going in, this was something I was totally unprepared for. I'd known that the experimental Canadian horror was about two children who wake up in the dark of the night to find that their father has mysteriously absconded, as have all the windows and doors of their increasingly disorientating abode, but I'd had it it in mind that the nippers in question would be at least 10 or 11. Young enough that the sudden parental abandonment would horrify, but old enough that they wouldn't feel completely defenceless. But no, they're 4 and 6. Painfully callow beings to be caught up in so freakishly nightmarish a scenario. The imperilled pair, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and her smaller brother Kevin (Lucas Paul), have relatively little to say about their predicament, with most of their dialogue coming in hushed whispers so scarcely intelligible that subtitles are deployed throughout - but whenever they do open their mouths, the emotive impact is considerable. Every last peep out of them, every plaintive, half-hopeful plea of "Dad?" had me squirming, heightening my awareness of what tiny, terrified little tots these were. If children in jeopardy are a major sticking point for you, in particular children who've neither the vocabulary or the mental capacity to articulate the level of jeopardy they're in, then Skinamarink might not be your picture. 

Actually, the very first thing that had come to mind upon reading the synopsis for Skinamarink was the 1991 track "No Idea" by Earth Leakage Trip, an evocation that continued to niggle all throughout my viewing. Prominently sampled in "No Idea" is the 1975 children's record Happy Monsters, which tells the story of another pair of alliteratively-named children, Bobby and Betty, who seem to have crossed over into a parallel universe where the most mundane of architectural details become indicators of something profoundly askew. In their case, the doors and windows have not disappeared altogether, but are rearranged and out of place; on "No Idea", Bobby's observation that, "The doors are where the windows should be...and the windows are where the doors should be..." is looped and slowed to make him sound high as a kite (the track belonged to the "toytown techno" movement of the early 1990s, which proposed that childhood fantasy and rave drug culture were gateways to a common euphoria). Punctuating Bobby's stupefaction are the startled cries of Heather O'Rourke, as lifted from the 1982 film Poltergeist, interjecting that she cannot see where her mother has gone. The children are alone in a world in which the order has mysteriously shifted, and there is at once something tremendously terrifying and exhilarating in that prospect of slipping past the boundaries of parental control and into the dark unknown (the young ravers of 1991 certainly knew it). Ball's picture is grounded by a similar fascination, with the parents gone, the darkness looming and the familiar gradually giving way to the uncanny. Like "No Idea", it offers a beguiling journey into childhood nostalgia, but one that feels troubled and distorted, so as to emphasise the more sinister implications that were potentially omnipresent all along. The film's title is derived from a popular pre-school nonsense song, and the material comforts of juvenility are all around - the television glow and the cartoon entertainments therein are our guiding light, and the carpet is adorned with a variety of Fisher-Price toys - but these too become a part of the disturbance as the experience goes on, and the world is turned (literally, by the film's end) upside down. Ball also offers a fiendish inversion upon the expected conclusion of any nostalgic voyage, that you can never go home again, by stranding us in a predicament that is its exact opposite - apparently we could go home again, only for the home itself to turn against us and threaten to keep us from finding our way back to the present.

Skinamarink is not for everyone. It requires a lot of patience and, honestly, a love of the mundane. You have to love staring at the shadows on the walls and into the ill-lit spaces in which something might be stirring but relatively little ever reveals itself. You have to be willing to settle for atmospheric clout over narrative clarity. You must have a fascination for low-fidelity, and for the various specks and glitches that characterise "analog horror", the predominantly online media movement from which Skinamarink originates (Ball cut his film-making teeth with the YouTube channel "Bitesized Nightmares", creating shorts based on real dreams as recounted by internet commenters). If you have a particular weakness for hauntology, logophobia or VHS distortion (all those things that I lap up), then odds are that you'll be in your element. 

Despite its aggressively niche form, Skinamarink evokes what must be a near-universal childhood experience - waking up in the early hours to find that your house in the darkness becomes a very different place. It might not have literally turned upside down, but its entire character has been reversed, so that it's no longer a venue of safety, but a harbourer the unknown. Myself, I can recall a stretch from my childhood when my parents had a radio alarm clock with the most ungodly tone, which never seemed to rouse them but would never fail to get to me from the other end of the hallway. It got to the point where I had started to wake up well in advance of the alarm, and would lie awake in petrified anticipation of its imminent eruption. Everything about the scenario - the darkness, the stillness, the deceptive silence - was unbearable. I could not make out the clock on my own wall, nor did I particularly want to stare out into the void that engulfed my bedroom in the nocturnal hours, so I couldn't tell exactly how close we were to the tone's cacophonic assault. I simply knew that it was coming. And when it came, it was a choice between huddling under the duvet for however long it took for my parents to wake up and hit the snooze button (in which case it would strike again in 10 minutes) or braving a trip down that pitch black hallway to turn it off myself. Nine times out of ten, I was more afraid of the pitch blackness and whatever it might be concealing than I was the tone itself, so I lay there and endured it. Eventually, my parents changed the setting, so that the radio went off instead of the tone, and my sleep pattern improved dramatically.

Skinamarink could hardly be described as a found footage film, though it presents itself through the grain and crackle of a degraded tape, giving the impression that we are looking into some long-forgotten memory that could well be our own, and in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between what might be genuine movements in the shadows and what are mere blemishes on the image. The distortion is, we suppose, intended to represent the fuzziness and spottiness of memory, suggesting that Skinamarink might be interpreted as a document of irrational childhood fear and of a young mind's attempts to grapple with the incomprehensible. All the same, that the camera's perspective switches between that of Kevin and Kaylee and, more often still, does not show the perspective of either, makes it challenging to align the film's content with the subjective experience of any one character. For the most part, the camera takes a detached view, showing the corners of the house from various angles but rarely focussing on its subjects. Notably, we almost never get a clear view of any of the participants' faces (the single exception to this rule provides the film with one of its most unsettling images). What's seen of the children is mostly their feet, from the perspective of something that might be scrutinising them the carpet level, while chunks of their hushed dialogue feel overheard, by something that is not quite among them. At the same time, it was seldom my impression that we were seeing the action from the eye-view of the entity skulking around them, a la Steven Soderbergh's Presence (2024) - rather, it felt like a stylistic choice, to emphasise the vastness and the emptiness of the house, and the relative smallness and isolation of the children.

There is a certain timelessness to Skinamarink, in that it seems to exist out of time. An opening title card informs us that the events in question take place in 1995, and the protagonists accordingly use a VHS tape for their early-hours diversion, but the cartoons they watch are all from the 1930s, themselves artefacts of a bygone age that would have seemed alien in the film's own purported setting. Specifically, the cartoons are all from the public domain, which from a practical standpoint spared Ball from having to deal with copyright, but it also serves as another important aesthetic choice, imbuing the film's ambience with a surreal, otherworldly quality that feels evocative of a dream or an alternate reality. The television becomes a further space in which the familiar intersects with the unfamiliar - one cartoon, Chuck Jones' Prest-O Chang-O (1939), features an uncanny leporine character who is in actuality a primitive Bugs Bunny. The cartoons themselves do not feel arbitrary; a popular interpretation has it that they are windows into the nature of the children's predicament, and the unknown they are up against. It has been noted, for example, that one cartoon, The Cobweb Hotel (1936), is about a predatory being (a ghoulish spider) trapping unsuspecting prey (flies) under the thinly-veiled guise of hospitality. Another, Somewhere In Dreamland (1936), includes the sung refrain, "Somewhere in Dreamland tonight",  which could be taken as either an ironic dig at the film's insomnious aura, and at the inability to find escapism in dreaming, or an indication that the children have entered into a state of unreality - perhaps the sleeping and waking worlds have become blurred (there is a reference to Kevin sleepwalking at the start of the film). Then there's Bimbo's Initiation (1931), which shows the title character futilely attempting to escape a surreal house through an endless succession of doors. Of greatest interest to myself, however, was the Fleischer Studios short The Song of The Birds (1935), which is featured in two chunks, the first of which comes shortly after Kaylee asks a question that drastically challenges our understanding of the family's domestic situation: "Why is Mom crying?" So far as we can tell, the children's mother had already vacated the house before the father's mysterious disappearance; the children do not call out for her when discovering that they have been left alone. A little later, Kevin asks if their dad might have gone to the same place as their mom, and Kaylee insists that she no longer wants to talk about her mother. The initial mention of Mom takes us into The Song of The Birds, in which darkness is equated with mourning, as the animated birds prepare to bury one of their fallen, a juvenile bird shot by a boy's pellet gun. It is hard to shake the impression that the mother may be deceased, even with Kaylee's question appearing to place her within the present, and in the immediate vicinity. It could be that they are haunted by her memory, with the endless night representing their unprocessed trauma and grief. Still, what makes the inclusion of The Song of The Birds particularly intriguing is that we do actually see the short's redemptive ending (this is in contrast to say, The Cobweb Hotel, in which we are not shown the scenes in which the flies rise up against the spider). For the grieving birds, dawn eventually comes. The wounded bird is revived, and they make peace with their remorseful tormentor, who discards his gun and dispenses birdseed. Of course, this is glimpsed through distorted VHS flicker, in which the triumph of the birds is unmistakable, but the radiance of the new morn comes in a washed-out reddish hue, and the final image where the boy winks reassuringly at the camera is rendered too bright to see. 

The mother is clearly a touchy subject for the children, and Kaylee's discomfort at discussing her whereabouts is indicative of some lingering family discomfort. There are multiple sections of Skinamarink that seem highly suggestive of a subtext of domestic abuse, although how the mother fits in with this is not obvious - was she a victim, a perpetrator or both? The various theories put forth by viewers range from the mother walking out on the family, having a history of self-harm and potentially taking her own life, or being abused and ultimately murdered by the father. We are perhaps primed to distrust the father from the start of the film, when he is heard discussing an injury sustained by Kevin which he attributes to his falling down the stairs while sleepwalking (it is, though, unclear to whom the father would be speaking at this time of night, if not the mother). During the initial clip from The Song of The Birds, the children are disturbed by a loud banging sound, redolent of some violent altercation occurring elsewhere in the house, and turn to find that a chair has uprooted and positioned on the ceiling; the process of domestic upheaval is truly underway. The mother should not be there, and yet she continues to haunt the household, whether as a literal apparition or as a symbol of that unexpressed trauma. In one of the film's most infamous scenes Kaylee is summoned to the upstairs bedroom to find that her father has apparently returned, and sitting at the opposite end of the bed is her mother, with her back to Kaylee. In another scene we see a more intimate shot of a long-haired woman from behind, presumably the mother. Toward the end of the film a similar female figure is seen from the distance, appearing to dissolve away into the grainy backdrop. If we see the clips from The Song of The Birds as being somehow representative of the children's relationship with their ghostly mother, then we might consider the possibility that the mother is the one in mourning - that she is crying, as Kaylee puts it, for the plight of her children, much as the parent birds in the cartoon are weeping for their unresponsive young offspring, who is seemingly fated to be buried in darkness.

It is, we suspect, a darkness of the parents' own making. Some viewers have interpreted the scene where Kaylee encounters her mother and father in the bedroom, positioned with their backs to one another (although never visible at the same time), as an indicator of divorce - the mother's assurance that she and the father love Kaylee very much seems evocative of something a parent might be expected say in such a position - and the broader picture as an allegory for the emotional turmoil faced by children having to deal with such a significant reordering of their domestic arrangement. Divorce, however, seems too tame and ordinary a predicament to account for the genuine peril these children have to contend with. The mother's subsequent instruction to Kaylee to close her eyes suggest that something more sinister is unfolding. Kaylee complies (for this scene, the camera reflects her point of view, so the audience too is plunged into momentary darkness) and opens her eyes to find her mother gone, although she continues to talk to Kaylee, warning her that "there's someone here", before the sounds of crunching are heard. Is the mother undergoing some sort of terrifying transformation (suggesting that she is becoming the abuser), or is something else crunching her (suggesting that she is a victim of domestic abuse)? Soon after the bedroom encounter, Kaylee is removed from the equation; Kevin locates her in the basement with her eyes and mouth blanked out on her face, and is thereafter left on his own (until now, the children have drawn comfort and solidarity from one another, so their separation comes as a particularly grim turn of events). A strange disembodied voice starts to talk to Kevin from the darkness and admits to taking away Kaylee's mouth as a punishment. Curiously, it says nothing about her eyes, but we might implicitly link their removal to the mother's prior instruction that she keep them closed. We might see a similar connection when, in the film's most distressing development, the voice challenges Kevin to play a "game" that involves inserting a knife into his eye (he complies, and his inevitable reaction recalls that at the start of the film when he suffers his head injury). The entity prefers the children not to see, much as the mother prefers them not to see. There is a running theme of the children being required to look away, and to shut out whatever traumas are going on around them. In another scene, the voice commands Kevin to "sleep", followed by a thud in which he seemingly passes out on the floor.

The entity, a manifestation of what is unspeakable, has seemingly arrived to fill the void left by the parents. It is the new authority to which they must answer, claiming to have punished Kaylee because she persisted in asking for her mother and father. Yet there is a definite paradox in the character of the entity; it dispenses discipline when the children won't do as they are told, and its malevolent insistence on eliminating their vision echoes the more covertly sinister actions of the parents. But in various other respects it has the personality of a child. As Kevin sits on the floor fiddling with his Lego blocks, it repeatedly tells him that it wants to play (said with all the benignity of John Kramer), raising the possibility that its rearranging of the house amounts to some form of erratic play-pretence with what, from its perspective, are all just pieces of Lego at its disposal. The entity is a creative being that delights in subverting the established order, affixing chairs to the ceiling and toys to the wall. With its love of cartoons, and of taking disobedient children's mouths away, it also feels uncannily reminiscent of the omnipotent Anthony in the "It's A Good Life" segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (a remake of the classic episode from 1961), who punished one of his sisters for insubordination by removing her mouth and another by banishing her into the cartoon world (notably, Bimbo's Initiation is featured in both films). On that note, it also seems significant that both the victim and aggressor of The Song of The Birds are children; unlike the spider from The Cobweb Hotel, the pellet-firing boy seems less malevolent than he does misguided. He shoots at the birds because he sees it as a game; only the prospect of having mortally wounded the young bird manages to convince him otherwise. Alas, Kevin's injury does not bring out the same compassion in the entity, despite its assurances that it will protect him. Is it offer of protection another of its tricks, or does it reflect the parents' childish delusion that what the children cannot see and are prevented from acknowledging cannot hurt them

In The Song of The Birds, it is seemingly an act of divine intervention that saves the injured bird, when rain falls out of the sky and revives it. It is, nonetheless, the compassion of the boy that facilitates this - unable to shut out the birds' suffering any longer, he gets down on his knees and prays, calling on the assistance of a higher power. The happy outcome at the end of the cartoon was thus dependent on the mercy of the omnipotent, but also the final refusal of the boy to turn a blind eye to the trauma happening outside of his window and his resolve to address it. His willingness to throw the gun he had wielded so childishly aside and to become a caregiver to the birds, nourishing them with birdseed, suggests that he has undergone a growth and maturation that is ultimately redemptive. Such an outcome is unattainable in Skinamarink, where the omnipotent have no mercy, those who refuse to turn a blind eye are literally blinded, and growth and maturation is cruelly denied the children within. Shortly after his eye injury, Kevin discovers the will to try phoning the emergency services, and his resolve does appear to momentarily conquer the obstacles - despite the phone lines being down earlier, he is able to get through to an operator this time. The operator praises him for being a brave boy, suggesting that he is undergoing a redemptive growth of his own, only for the entity to ultimately thwart him by transforming the telephone into a toy one, specifically a Chatter Telephone, an anthropomorphised rotary phone manufactured by Fisher-Price. The message is clear - Kevin cannot be allowed to grow up and will stay imprisoned in helplessness of youth. The Chatter Telephone is another detail that seems to defy any clear sense of time, for it has remained a popular childhood icon since its creation in 1961. Even if you never had one growing up, odds are that you are familiar with the toy from its appearance in Toy Story 3 (2010).

What amuses me about the Chatter Telephone's appearance in Skinamarink is how deftly it plays into what was everyone's first instinct on seeing the trailer for Toy Story 3 - that something with a face that uncanny was not to be trusted. I distinctly remember the build-up to the Pixar sequel and what a common assumption it was that Chatter Telephone would be one of the villains. In part because his line, "You and your friends ain't ever getting out of here", was taken out of context in the marketing and sounded like an unambiguous threat, but moreover because his appearance just didn't seem that friendly. What a surprise it was when the film arrived and it turned out we'd all misjudged the little ringer on wheels. His method of communicating (exclusively through his receiver without moving his lips) while inspired, gave off a somewhat sinister vibe, but he was 100% on the level and gave Woody some helpful pointers on evading Lotso's clutches. In Skinamarink the toy (another manifestation of the entity) serves a very different purpose - not only does it signify Kevin's entrapment in this permanent childhood nightmare, it later plays a fiendish trick on him, when Kevin sees the eyes of the phone in the darkness, accompanied by the sounds of snarling, and shines his flash light on it. The monster he'd imagined skulking in the shadows is revealed to be a run of the mill toy...which subsequently reveals itself to be more terrifying in the light than in the darkness. Its eyes shift, its mouth contorts, and it emits a piercing noise about as comforting as that alarm clock tone I described earlier. Kevin apparently decides it was more palatable as a pair of predatory eyes in the shadows, and takes the flash light off of it.

(Spoilers follow) 

The Toy Story connection feels more pertinent than perhaps first meets the eye, for the fate that awaits Kevin seems hauntingly reminiscent of the problem facing Woody and co, destined never to grow old and to stay mired within the realm of childhood as their owners inevitably move on and abandon them. Kevin is reduced to the status of a toy. In the film's third act, he is summoned upstairs by the voice and, in a manoeuvre that would certainly appeal to the denizens of the strange parallel world from Happy Monsters, the floor is now where the ceiling should be and the ceiling is where the floor should be. Kevin is prompted to keep moving through his inverted environs, until we come across a mountain of toys, mostly the Lego blocks he was playing with earlier, suspended on the ceiling. Onscreen text would appear to indicate that 572 days have now passed, a punchline recycled from Ball's 2020 short Heck (the evolutionary ancestor of Skinamarink), which reveals that its protagonist has been stranded in a similar inertia for "18694 sleeps" (in his case, that's more than 51 years, dependent on what length of time a "sleep" is meant to imply). Does this mean that it has been 572 days since the darkness first descended on the children, or is that specifically how long Kevin has been stuck there on the ceiling with the other pieces of misplaced Lego? Either way, how many days' worth of time had already elapsed before Kaylee was taken out of the picture? Have the children aged at all within that time? Is it safe assume that we've arrived in 1997 by now, or has it been that same night in 1995 for all eternity? Kevin's entrapment in that endless corridor, which seems to stretch out into infinity (and beyond) implies that he is suspended in some kind of limbo; he has been tidied away with the other toys, with the entity having seemingly grown bored with him as a plaything. Stifled and helpless, he has no means of progressing, no way of conquering the childhood demons that have become the be-all and end-all of his entire universe. This is the epitome of his abandonment, with the upturned dollhouse in the toy collection echoing the house's disruption and suggesting that the process of domestic upheaval that was triggered by the family's unspoken turmoil is now complete.

Soon after, we are presented with a sequence that is (for my money) all the more disturbing, centring on the framed still photographs that adorn the walls of the house, all of which are of children. They might pass for perfectly ordinary family photos, but for the fact that the children's facial features have been obscured, recalling the subjugation of Kaylee, and in some cases their heads are missing altogether. A natural assumption would be that the images depict Kaylee and Kevin at even earlier points in their short lives; their modification could be indicative of a temporal disconnection, as Kevin's memory of his former life erodes and he is fractured off into an inertia that exists without past or future. Alternatively, it might be suggestive of the historic traumas that have assured the destruction of Kaylee and Kevin across a longer period of time. A more terrifying possibility still is that the pictured children are not Kaylee and Kevin at all, but other victims of this same process, indicating that the story we've seen is in no way unique. Another way of putting it is that this house is, in an allegorical sense, made out of gingerbread, and these children were already eaten by the witch that lurks within - for, in Ball's own words, "If people pay attention, they see it's basically a Hansel and Gretel story."

 

In the most familiar version of the classic German tale, Hansel and Gretel fall into the clutches of a witch after being abandoned in the wilderness by their father, though he does so reluctantly, at the insistence of the children's vicious stepmother. The children ultimately defeat the witch and return to their father to find that the stepmother has been conveniently disposed of in their absence; the vanquishing of the witch implicitly precipitates that of the stepmother, suggesting that, for all intents and purposes, the two are one and the same. If we are to read Skinamarink as a retelling of this story, we might take that as a clue that the children's mother is dead before the picture begins and, furthermore, that the "mother" Kaylee encounters in the bedroom is not really her lingering spectre, but an imposter, in likelihood another of the entity's deceptions. We would, however, do well to keep in mind that in the earliest editions of the story presented by the Brothers Grimm, it was the children's biological mother who expelled them from the home. This was later superseded by the narrative of the wicked stepmother, which proved more enduring - for it is easier to attribute corruption and abandonment to an interloping evil than to reckon with the possibility of it arising from within, among those we'd trust to love and protect us. The narrative is a smokescreen, much like the mother's insistence that Kaylee keep her eyes closed, designed to shield us from some unpalatable reality. And how easily does it really sit with us that, even in the most oft-told version of the story, the biological father bends to the will of the stepmother and abandons the children, even if they are reconciled at the end? Is there such a world of difference between a parent who promises protection and leaves his children to die in the woods and a witch who promises gingerbread and lights up a cooking pot?

The prospect of the witch and parents being parallels of one another, if not outright the same, makes the film's closing implication particularly unsettling. In the final sequence, we return to what is presumably Kevin's perspective once more, scanning the grainy blackness until our gaze falls upon the outline of a figure standing above us. The figure looks vaguely human, and like an adult, but it is hard to tell, not least because its facial features are (of course) obscured. We can just about discern its lips moving, and the words that come out are the predictable ones - we are told to go to sleep. The film thus leaves us at a point of delicious ambiguity; it is unclear if it signals the end of the nightmare, with Kevin (and by extension, ourselves) awakening from a bad dream to the parental reassurance that nothing wrong is really happening (as hollow as such reassurances might sound), or our continued entrapment, as our captor subdues us to a bad reality that is basically inescapable. Exacerbating our unease is that we cannot be certain if we are in the presence of one of Kevin's parents, be it his mother or his father, or the entity. Kevin, for his part, does not seem sure either. He asks the figure to identify itself, and receives no answer. In practice it might make little difference. If we've escaped the witch but have only dubious guardians to run to, aren't we merely headed back to square one?

The Three Children (aka Beware The Friendly Stranger - But He's Not What You Think)

When it comes to public information films combining haunted landscapes, imperilled children and uncanny foes, it's hard to imagine a concoction more impactful than Lonely Water (1973), but The Three Children, a little-seen gem from 1946, could give it a decent run for its money. Some twenty-seven years before Donald Pleasence's aquatic spectre took to haunting the airwaves of tea-time television, post-war cinemagoers might have been threatened by another dark shape with a penchant for unwary youngsters. The film's title sounds beguilingly reminiscent of a fairy tale, and indeed, its basic trajectory recalls that of Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel, where children who've ventured from the safety of home are tasked with navigating some forbidding wilderness and resisting the advances of affable strangers representing the most unspeakable kinds of dangers. It offers, though, an especially grisly sting in its tail, regarding both the nature of that wilderness and those most unspeakable of dangers. Although presented in an authoritative newsreel style, the narrative of The Three Children has the distinct vibe of a campfire story being shared by a puckish scout eager to unsettle a few of his fellow young campers before the witching hour sets in.

We are introduced to the titular children, who have been discharged from their houses on various missions, but who are linked by the same morbid destiny. Tommy has been sent out to collect a paper for his father, Susan is excited to be going to a party, and Bobby has been left to play out on his tricycle while his parents are having a lie down (hmm, is that all that they're doing?). The three encounter one another and enjoy a carefree romp upon a green, but as they enter a wooded area they're greeted by a strange gentleman who indicates their divergence into some dark unknown. The children are initially unnerved by his presence, but his kindly demeanour swiftly wins their trust. He asks if he might accompany them to where they're headed, and they accept; as they proceed, however, it becomes apparent from both the visuals and the narration that these children are most definitely going the stranger's way, never to resume their innocent errands again. The film cunningly evokes one parental nightmare, the fear of child abduction, only to reveal that quite another is taking place below the surface. These three children, the narrator tells us, are THE three children. The three children killed on the roads every day!

No context is given for that grim statistic, so I couldn't tell you if it applied to children in Britain as a whole, in the London area, or just in Wanstead and Woodford, whose road safety committee produced the film and presumably intended it for exhibition in local cinemas. There is some mystery surrounding the film's creation - it is unknown who the BFU cited in the credits were, although Josephine Botting, writing for the BFI media release Short Sharp Shocks Vol. 2, speculates that they were likely the Blackheath Film Unit, who made a variety of safety shorts in the late 1940s. Despite its extensive immersion in a child's eye-view of the world, filled with excitement, time for idle play and no shortage of dark mystery, children were evidently not the intended recipients of The Three Children; the closing tagline "Child safety is YOUR responsibility" makes it clear where the blame for the implicit tragedies should be apportioned. The absence of adult oversight is a common factor in all three scenarios, with the children's parents at most lurking upon the narrative sidelines to wish them well on their adventures. Tommy's father is seen standing at the doorway as Tommy sets out on his ill-fated errand, while Susan's mother lavishes her with affection as she is putting on her party dress, but as soon as the children have set foot outside they are left to find their own way. However well-intentioned these adults might be, they share in their offspring's naivety as to what lies beyond their doors, fatally overestimating their capacity to handle those unforeseen perils and setting them up for disaster. (Meanwhile, Bobby's parents, who come off as the most outright negligent, prioritising their own relaxation above their son's wellbeing, are not seen at all.) The strange gentleman who crosses their paths is that most sinister of figures - the adult who will happily take charge of impressionable children wherever parental supervision has failed them. In this case that figure just so happens to be Death itself. 

Given the symbolic nature of the threat he presents, there are multiple ways of interpreting what is going on in that climactic encounter. It could be that the children are, unbeknownst to themselves, already dead when they meet with one another upon the green, with the gentleman being the reaper who's come to meet their ghosts and to lead them into the great beyond. Lending credence to this reading is that none of the people roaming the background of the green take any notice of the three protagonists. The sequence in question might also be an entirely allegorical one, with the gentleman representing the impending risk of death on the road, and the children's inability to recognise the danger they are in indicating the precise moment at which their fates are each sealed. Whether the murky, desolate wood they venture into is a literal a gateway to the netherworld, or a reflection of how critically far they are from the security of home, it has a dream-like aura that stands in direct contrast to the grounded urban sequences that established the characters. As the gentleman leads them into the distant horizon, they are taken ever further from the safety of civilisation, becoming increasingly smaller and uncannier figures that are seemingly claimed by the uncultivated landscape. While alarming, there is something eerily hypnotic about this set-piece; we feel that we've slipped suddenly from the mundane streets of East London and into a hidden fantasy realm, as enigmatic as it is chilling. It seems so disconnected from where our story began that it perfectly disguises the fiendish twist - that the familiar urban world is where the danger in question always lay. The narrator's final denouement brings us back down to earth with a vigorous thud, as the closing shot of Bobby's mangled tricycle illustrates in the starkest possible terms what has actually transpired. 

The Three Children is a stellar example of how a road safety message can be delivered without any onscreen violence, with that forlornly spinning tricycle wheel being as close as we get to the gruesome reality (the spinning notably stops before the fade-out, further emphasising that time has run out for its callow owner). Perhaps the most distressing implication is in the declaration that the demise of Tommy, Susan and Bobby should be seen as representative of a process that repeats itself every day, suggesting a cyclic nature to their macabre story. Being left to envision the individual fates that would have befallen each child is upsetting enough in itself, but is exacerbated by us also being left to envision the gentleman showing up each day like clockwork to the claim the souls of three children, who might as well be Tommy, Susan and Bobby all over again, headed for some important or exciting business that will never be. Their journey appears to stretch out into infinity, with the narrator stipulating that their only recourse is to keep moving onward through a darkening terrain. No bright future lies before them, only the grimness of inevitability. 

Round Springfield (aka Make My Pain The Same As Yours)

The recent passing of Simpsons composer Alf Clausen got me wanting to cover an episode in which music plays a significant part. The most obvious candidate was already taken - and besides, I did ideally want it to be an episode in which music is celebrated as something expressive and transcendent, not one in which we simply have a good giggle about how camp and silly musical storytelling is. So "Round Springfield" (2F32) of Season 6 seemed like the best possible option, with bonus points for the fact that it is a story about bidding farewell to a musical legend who maybe didn't get the full recognition he deserved within his lifetime. Debuting on April 30th 1995, this was a historic episode, marking the first occasion on which one of the show's established characters was killed off. It was not the first episode to deal with the subject of death and bereavement - "Old Money" of Season 2 can claim that honor, although the theme of grief was far less pivotal in that episode, with the narrative focus being primarily on Abe's estrangement from Homer. Here, the issue is all the more stark and hard-hitting for being presented from the perspective of one of the show's younger and more ingenuous characters. Lisa left contemplating matters of life, death and resilience when a chance reunion with her mentor, the enigmatic blues musician Bleeding Gums Murphy (guest voice of Ron Taylor), is cut tragically short by an unspecified terminal illness she did not see coming. 

I confess that I know very little about how "Round Springfield" was marketed in the run-up to its airing. I personally did not get to see the episode until roughly a year after its Sky 1 premiere, and with the internet still being this weird and slightly alien-sounding rumble on the horizon, I had no means of accessing spoilers online. Later instances in which the show pulled this same macabre move tended to be preceded by promotional blitzs designed to drum up suspense about the identity of the condemned character (Maude Flanders and Rabbi Krustofsky spring to mind, although neither example worked out anywhere near as well as the King of The Hill "Propane Boom" cliffhanger). I would hazard a guess that this did NOT happen here, if only because the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter was right around the corner, and why would they risk stealing that publicity stunt's thunder? I do not know if viewers were made aware in advance that a character was going to die, let alone if there was any mystery regarding who it might be. Perhaps the title offered a clue to those hip to the 1986 picture Round Midnight, which follows the final days of a drug-addicted saxophonist (played by jazz legend Dexter Gordan) and his friendship with the fan he encounters after travelling to Paris. All I can say is that, having entered into the episode blind, I can attest that it really is the best way to first experience it, with your perspective actually aligned with Lisa's. There are clues, certainly, that something more troublesome might be unfolding (not least in that Lisa finds Bleeding laid out in a hospital bed) but we are at first inclined to share in her naivety, being too caught up in the joyfulness of the reunion, and the robustness of the characters' rapport. Alarm bells might start to ring should we pick up on the fact that the one thing the characters are emphatically not discussing is the nature of Bleeding's condition, as if it's something that neither party can bring themselves to acknowledge. But Bleeding certainly never presents as a man who is at death's door (to the point that it requires some suspension of disbelief that he'd still be able to belt out such a vigorous jamming session on his saxophone in what transpires to be his last meeting with Lisa). He seems much too alive, still so full of passion for his craft and with warmth and wisdom for Lisa. So when tragedy strikes, it comes with a devastating abruptness that feels all-too real. The line between this world and the next is such a fragile one, something this episode captures so bitterly. One moment he's giving Lisa some pointers and encouragement before she plays in her school recital, the next she's rushing back to tell him how well her performance went, only to discover that he's no longer there.

What fascinates me about "Round Springfield" is that it's an episode that allows itself time to be sad, in a way that was honestly quite unusual for this point in the series. There's comic levity in the subplot, which involves Bart suffering at the hands of yet another shoddy Krusty product (a jagged metal hoop that's inexplicably included as a freebie in his brand of cereal), and in whatever Homer is up to on the sidelines (of note, there's a running gag where a hot dog vendor seems to seek him out in the most inappropriate of places), but the loss of Bleeding and its impact on Lisa are treated with genuine reverence. There are points where it honestly seems reminiscent of the more melancholic tone endemic to the first three seasons of the show; it has a certain moodiness of atmosphere, and an eye for emphasising the loneliness and finer disappointments of the characters' lives in a way that was so central to early installments like "Life on The Fast Lane", "Colonel Homer" and Bleeding Gums' debut episode "Moaning Lisa". I tend to think of this model of Simpsons storytelling as having bowed out with "A Streetcar Named Marge" at the start of Season 4, but with the reappearance of Mr Murphy it momentarily lives again. And this would be the big twist - I'm forever blaming this shift in tone on then-showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss and their preference for sillier, rapid-fire humor over character-driven storytelling, yet they were the minds behind this episode. The script itself was written by Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia, but the plot was Jean and Reiss's brainchild, and they receive a story credit. Credits for story alone were unusual on The Simpsons, and it's explained on the DVD commentary that Jean and Reiss requested it on this are occasion because they'd envisioned the episode being a big winner on the awards front and wanted their names attached. (It was all in vain; the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year was scooped up by another Lisa-orientated episode, "Lisa's Wedding", which offered something even more novel than the death of a jazz musician - a hair-raising peek into the distant dystopian future of 2010). By Jean and Reiss's standards, "Round Springfield" is a remarkably grounded narrative. Even the lighter touches, such as the hot dog vendor, seem deliberately smaller and more restrained than much of what we'd seen them do throughout Season 4. That is, until we get the ending. With the closing sequence, the episode is suddenly immersed in the signature off-the-wall humor that was all over Jean and Reiss's own series The Critic (a perception bolstered in how it is essentially an extended parody of a popular moment from a contemporary movie). That ending is the key factor that disqualifies it from playing like a total throwback to those earlier seasons. And it is such a deeply bizarre way to conclude this story. I don't even mean that as a criticism. It's weird in ways that are grand, fun and very moving. But if you stop to think about it, what is even going on in that ending? Because surely Bleeding didn't really...well, we'll get to it.

"Round Springfield" is, admittedly, another example of an episode where the optics maybe aren't so great when viewed from a particular angle. I mean, think about this for a moment. They made the bold decision to kill off a (semi) recurring cast member, and they chose one of their few African American characters. In other words, the black guy died first. That had never been done before, right? Adding fuel to the fire is that, when Bleeding Gums Murphy was introduced in "Moaning Lisa", he was a textbook example of the Magical Negro, being a somewhat mysterious black character whose sole function within the story was to make Lisa feel more confident about her place in the world. Now, to an extent, all supporting characters are bound by the law of Simpsons-centrism - the Simpsons ARE the centre of this confounding little universe, and everything the rest of Springfield gets up to must in some way relate back to them and be in service of them. But it's felt particularly strongly with the Elliotts, a group of characters who effectively serve as the family's guardian angels. I went over my reasoning in more detail in my review of "Moaning Lisa", but to recap, "Elliotts" was a term I came up for a foursome of characters from the show's early years (named for the cartoon dragon from Disney's Pete's Dragon), whom I'd clumped into a collective as a sort of counterpoint to the Home-Wreckers - in addition to Bleeding Gums, the others are Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), Bergstrom (from "Lisa's Substitute") and Kompowsky (from "Stark Raving Dad"). What they have in common is an uncannily benevolent, otherworldly aura and that they are all, significantly, outsiders to the Simpsons' White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heteronormative domesticity. Bleeding's a Magical Negro, Karl's a Magical Queer, Bergstrom's a Magical Jew, Kompowsky's a...hmm, is the Magical Psychiatric Patient a thing? It could be. The point is that each of the Elliotts represents a marginalised figure within the Springfield community. Their outsider status might have given them a strength and a perspective on life that would otherwise be unknown to the Simpsons, but all that matters is that they're able to share those pearls of wisdom with one or more of the family and go merrily on their way, satisfied that their work is done. They can help to prop up the central dynamic, but they have no business in sticking around to be a part of it. Of the four, Bergstrom is the only one who could be feasibly described as having anything even resembling an agenda of his own (in that he doesn't lose sight of the fact that his time with Lisa is only a short-term job assignment and he'll soon have bigger fish to fry in the projects of Capital City). For clarity, I like the Elliotts and think they're all great and beautifully realised characters, but there's little downplaying that this dubious convention informs a huge part who they are and how the narrative regards them.

Bleeding Gums retains the honor of being the only Elliott to ever be brought back to any significant capacity, even three decades on from the episode's debut, although this wasn't for a lack of interest on the writers' part. (Returns for Karl and Kompowsky were on the cards but fell through. I am not, though, aware of there being any serious motions for a Bergstrom sequel; I suspect that Dustin Hoffman - sorry, Sam Etic - regarded it as a one-and-done gig.) His reappearance in "Round Springfield" might have been an opportunity to expand on his character and have him grow a little outside of his role as a mentor figure to Lisa - but nope, if anything they only doubled down on his Magical Negro credentials, sacrificing him so that Lisa could undergo character growth of her own, before finally depicting him as a literal spirit in the sky, jamming with his newly-enlightened protege to a Carole King tune (like I say, we'll get to that goofy ending in due course). 

None of this was done maliciously, of course. But what is just as telling is how Bleeding Gums was singled out as the kind of perfectly expendable character who could be jettisoned for the feels (and the awards bait). The Season 7 clip show "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular", would infamously mock him (alongside Dr Marvin Monroe) for never having been a popular character, and therefore not one that viewers were presumably expected to care about, although the truth with Bleeding really lands somewhere closer to the middle. On the DVD commentary, Jean does indeed state that they obviously weren't going to kill off a character like Mr Burns whom they'd be wanting to use again, but he also recounts that Bleeding was chosen because he was a character whom people felt warmly toward, in no small way thanks to Taylor's performance. He offered the best of both worlds, in not being integral enough to the core universe that it would be an especially startling development to retire him to the jazz club in the sky, but being sympathetic enough that it would still hurt viewers to see him go. If Reiss had had his way, then the show would have taken a very different path and killed off Marge's mother (a move that Julie Kavner might actually have been fully on board with, as I understand she hated doing Jackie Bouvier's voice), but he concedes that Bleeding turned out to be a better choice. Perhaps bumping off someone within the family, however seldom seen, was deemed too radical. Or maybe it came down to the fact that Bleeding is a fundamentally gentle soul, which Jackie is not. He expresses no outward bitterness or regret for the life that he's led (other than his $1,500 a day Faberge egg habit, which is the closest we get to a heroin allusion), and his legacy is complicated only in the sense that his inherent goodness went under most people's radars. He's a wholly angelic being we're intended to shed a tear for but also conversely write off as a character of no genuine consequence. Outside of what he meant to Lisa, that is.

The Lisa factor is another big reason, I'm sure, why Bleeding was ultimately the one placed on the chopping block. She is such a compelling character around which to craft emotional stories, possessing a wisdom well beyond her years but still having all the vulnerabilities of a child. The loss of a friend like Bleeding would hit her tremendously, even with life already having dealt her so many blows with its cruel impermanences. As Kompowsky's episode made clear, she was very deeply affected by the death of the original Snowball (and her hamster named Snuffy, though he comes up less often). There are also those losses she'd suffered that didn't entail mortality, with her being all but forced to surrender her beloved pony Princess and the man she'd looked up to as a substitute father figure abandoning her for a job in Capital City. In both instances, Lisa's distinctly child-like naivety regarding the impending heartbreak was such a powerful factor. She was so thrilled to have Princess that it seemingly never occurred to her just how difficult and impractical it was for her family to afford such a high maintenance animal. She was so besotted with Bergstrom that she lost sight of the fact that he was never going to be there on a long-term basis. Here, she's so overjoyed to have Bleeding back in her life that she doesn't question what he might be doing in the Springfield Hospital, and it seems that Bleeding doesn't have the heart to outright tell her. Was he himself aware that he wasn't going to make it? Yes, and I think there is a specific moment in the episode where we can pinpoint him making what seems like a conscious farewell to Lisa. It's a scene that hits so hard on repeat viewings, when we know what's coming. As Lisa prepares to go off to her recital, Bleeding hands her his saxophone and tells her to take it with her for luck. While Lisa is honored, she does not grasp the full significance of this gesture, presumably thinking that he's just lending it to her for the recital. With hindsight, it seems obvious that Bleeding gave it to her because he knew he wouldn't be needing it. In addition, by giving her his saxophone he is in effect passing the torch to her to go out and perform great music in his stead. There's a more macabre foreshadowing in his telling Lisa that she's going to "knock 'em dead" (by which he likely to alludes to Lisa's potential to go far in life, not just at this particular recital), followed by an ominous cough, the only symptom of ill-health he's seen to exhibit. Finally, as she leaves his side, there's a lingering emphasis on him waving to her, as if he knows this will be their last goodbye.

What always made the relationship between Lisa and Bleeding so affecting is in how they were ostensibly so mismatched, yet connected so readily as social misfits with a mutual appreciation for jazz and the importance of creative expression. When Lisa first encountered Bleeding back in Season 1, he gave her the much-needed assurance that she was not alone in the world, at a time when she felt that no one understood her. (Perhaps fearing that newer viewers wouldn't know who Bleeding was, the episode incorporates a small clip from "Moaning Lisa", leading to a jarring clash of art styles; I suppose it's not so strange when we consider that for several years the series still felt the need to keep reminding us who Sideshow Bob was every time he showed up.) In "Round Springfield" we see how Lisa is eventually able to return the favour, in demonstrating to Bleeding that his life and music had value, at a time when he seemed destined to die alone and all forgotten. ("You've had some career...although the moral seems to be that a lifetime of jazz leads you sad and lonely." "Well, before you came to visit I would have agreed with you.") Before Lisa, nobody had come to visit Bleeding at the hospital; when she asks about his family, he tells her he doesn't really have one. (In what can only be a deliberate callback to a joke in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", it's heavily hinted that Bleeding and Dr Hibbert are brothers who lost contact a long time ago, although neither party seems to connect the dots. This also means that Bleeding had a second brother he possibly didn't even know about.) The grim reality doesn't fully set in until after his death, when Lisa attends his funeral and discovers that she's the only mourner there; nobody else in town knew who Bleeding was or cares that he's gone. It's a realisation that transforms Lisa's grief into red-hot grit and takes her on her first step toward healing, with the knowledge that responsibility for keeping her friend's memory alive rests solely on her.

Before then, we get a series of short scenes that feel reminiscent of "Moaning Lisa", with the family all showing awareness of Lisa's suffering and doing their bit to try and help, even if they don't necessarily have the kinds of answers she's seeking. Homer looks as though he might have a sensible response, in reminding Lisa of how she coped when Snowball died, but ends up reaching the most inappropriate possible conclusion from that train of thought: "All we have to do is go down to the pound and get a new jazzman." Maggie attempts to soothe Lisa's aching soul the only way she knows how, by offering Lisa her pacifier (it doesn't help Lisa, but the tactic later proves effective on Homer, who is rattled by his own failure to say the right thing). Bart shares with her his belief in reincarnation - specifically, that when you die you can come back in a form of your own choosing. He's intent on being a butterfly in his next life, because as he sees it he'll be able to commit acts of arson and be totally above suspicion. (Something I find particularly disturbing about Bart's butterfly fantasy is the fact that everyone else in it - Skinner, Wiggum, Lou and Eddie - are all the same age they are in the present, so is Bart banking on dying imminently?). Deciding that she needs to consult someone with a little more experience and wisdom, Lisa turns to Abe, who seems to think he's in a Final Destination scenario, with Death conspiring against him at every turning. (Really, the guises in which he sees Death manifesting aren't that far off. Maggie? Well, she'd make an attempt on Burns' life soon enough. Snowball II? As Homer alluded to above, she's a walking reminder of the grisly fate that befell the original Snowball. The bird bath? Odd are that something drowned in there at some time or other.) Marge, who nearly sent Lisa down a terribly destructive path in "Moaning Lisa", here gets to be the voice of reason, assuring her daughter that the sadness she feels is normal and making the practical suggestion that she might honor Bleeding's memory by asking the local jazz station to do a tribute to him. Lisa immediately runs into a roadblock - K-Jazz is happy to fulfil her request, but they don't have Bleeding's sole album, Sax on The Beach, in their library, and copies are hard to come by. As luck would have it, Comic Book Guy has one for sale in his store, but it comes with a hefty $250 price tag, which is increased to $500 when Comic Book Guy learns that the artist in question is dead. Knowing she could never afford it, Lisa sinks back into despair, only for help to arrive from the aspiring lepidopteran arsonist, whose recent traumatic experience with that piece of jagged metal has brought him a cash settlement of precisely $500.

 

Bart's subplot, which involves him falling ill after unwittingly ingesting the cereal prize from Hell and requiring emergency surgery, is (in spite of its gruesome premise) predominantly there to bring comic balance to a more sombre than usual A-story. It is, though, no arbitrary joke-fest, with the resolutions to these respective stories dovetailing in a way that is meaningful and rewarding. As fate would have it, Bart's swallowing of the metal hoop occurs on a morning before a history test that he's ill-prepared for; when he starts to complain of intense pains in his stomach, Marge and Homer, wary that he's pulled this exact shit to get out of a test before, pack him off to school, although Lisa voices the opinion that his illness might be genuine this time. This in itself feels like a nice callback to the events of "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa was the only character who knew that Bart was faking his amoria phlebitis; it speaks volumes to their sibling connection that she's consistently able to tell the difference. When Bart finally receives a settlement from Krusty (lawyer Lionel Hutz has actually scammed him out of a much more substantial sum, but $500 seems like a huge amount to the trusting eyes of impressible youth), he's all prepared to blow it on the most frivolous purchase imaginable - a limited edition pog (remember those?) with Steve Allen's face on - but his conscience prevails and he instead buys Lisa the elusive album (the sequence detailing Bart's dilemma, which repeatedly shifts between three different leitmotifs, is in itself such a wonderful testament to Clausen's composing talents). He explains to Lisa that he felt he owed it to her for being the only person to take his side when he got sick. It's a lovely gesture that upholds my personal view of Bart and Lisa having the strongest bond out of all of the Simpsons, but it has deeper significance still, as a final affirmation to Lisa that, even with her soulmate sadly departed, she does not have to worry about being alone in the world. No matter what, she can always count on her family to come through for her.

At last the time has come to dig into that bizarro finale. Even with that copy of Sax on The Beach safely within her mits, Lisa's tribute seems doomed to fall at the second hurdle, that being K-jazz's ridiculously weak broadcast range; even when standing immediately outside the station with a portable radio, she is unable to pick up their transmission of Bleeding's music. That is until a thunder cloud appears in the sky, and a bolt of lightning strikes the K-Jazz antenna, making it so powerful that the broadcast is heard and enjoyed all over Springfield. The Deus ex Thunder Cloud subsequently assumes the form of none other than Bleeding himself, assuring Lisa that her actions made him happy. This much is a parody of the sequence from Disney's The Lion King in which the deceased Mufasa appears amid the night sky and urges the emotionally lost Simba to remember who he really is - a point made salient in having the ghost of Mufasa appear right next to Bleeding, with a message for Simba...or does he mean Kimba? (On the DVD commentary, Jean and Reiss fret that this is a jab that nobody would have gotten after the 90s, but they'd no need to fear - as long as there are animation buffs in this world, that line will always be hilarious and relevant.) They are then joined by the ghost of Darth Vader, making his shocking declaration of kinship with Luke, and then finally...James Earl Jones, giving an announcement on behalf of CNN? This elaborate and totally nonsensical gag is nothing less than a loving tribute to the vocal talents of Jones, who voiced Mufasa and Darth Vader and recorded announcements for CNN. (Jones was imitated here by Harry Shearer, although he had previously guest starred in the Halloween episodes "Treehouse of Horror" and more recently "Treehouse of Horror V". Somewhere out there there's also a parallel universe in which he got to voice Sideshow Bob.) It's a sequence that would seem perfectly suited to the looser, cinema-fixated reality of The Critic, but if feels just a whisker out of place in The Simpsons, no? Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of Bleeding, Mufasa, Darth Vader and James Earl Jones all being besties in the afterlife (Jones himself was very much alive when "Round Springfield" initially aired, but now in 2025 his placement alongside these deceased characters seems less absurd). But what exactly are we to make of this sequence within the context of this otherwise relatively grounded story about grappling with bereavement? Surely Mufasa, Darth and then-still-with-us Jones didn't literally manifest in the clouds above Lisa? Surely not even Bleeding was really there, jamming with Lisa to a "Jazzman" reprise? I recall that Groening made a big thing about that catfish who winked at the camera in "The War of The Simpsons", but that all seems very sensible and subdued compared to the borderline fever dream unfolding here.

"Round Springfield" leaves us with a head-scratcher - have the skies above Springfield really become host to this odd assortment of spectres (most of them culled from popular culture), or is the entire sequence nothing more than a weird and protracted bit of symbolism? Arguably, there was precedent for it in "Old Money", which included a scene in which the ghost of Bea Simmons appears to Abe on a roller-coaster, though its strangeness was of a somewhat lower-key variety and was easy enough to rationalise as representing some kind of internal monologue on the part of Abe. It should also be noted that the Disney moment it's parodying is up for a similar kind of interpretation - Rafiki makes a remark about the weather, leaving some ambiguity as to whether Mufusa's manifestation really occurred, but I suspect that most adult viewers would be inclined to read it as symbolising the soul-searching Simba undertakes in trying to understand what Rafiki means by "He lives in you." It's possible that this too is taking place inside of Lisa's head, but it goes so far with some of its concepts and gags that I fear this would make Lisa look just a little unhinged.

It is, though, a magnificent ending - triumphant, redemptive, uplifting and poignant. Perhaps it doesn't matter how well it meshes with the series' reality or what sense we make of it, so long as we gather that Lisa has reached the light at the end of the grieving tunnel and realised that she retains her connection to Bleeding Gums and everything that he taught her. I would argue that the intention here is nothing more complicated than to leave us on a spectacular emotional high following such a downbeat experience - it's the episode's markedly eccentric way of letting us know that everything is going to be okay. It helps that Lisa and Bleeding's recurring performance of "Jazzman" is allowed to be a thing of beauty in itself, tussling only with the "Oh Streetcar!" material from "A Streetcar Named Marge" for my favourite musical sequence of all the series (bless the person who compiled the Songs in The Key of Springfield album for putting those tracks right next to each other, so I could listen to them over and over in easy succession). Perhaps it ought to lose the edge for not being an original song, but that seriously doesn't matter. They imbued it with a heart and an aching all of its own. I love Carole King's original 1974 rendition too, but thanks to The Simpsons I will forever interpret it as being about Lisa's yearning to become one with her idol, both before and after his passing.

Cheers to Yeardley Smith, to Ron Taylor and not least to Alf Clausen for making this episode such a transcendent voyage. Jeers to Disney, for a whole multitude of reasons, but on this day for the downright galling manner in which, while watching this episode on Disney+, they always seemed to want to take out midway through the credits and directly into "The Springfield Connection", rather than encouraging me to enjoy the whole dazzling performance of "Jazzman" as the Simpsons gods intended. If Disney had their way, nobody would stick around for the punchline that rounds off the story: "Oh come on, Lisa, I've got a date with Billie Holiday!" Bleeding's parting words, and they couldn't give a mouse's hickey if you hear them. The sacrilege astounds.