Nightmare At 20,000 Feet (Pop Will Eat Itself)

If you prefer your aerophobic anthems to be up to their ears in ghoulish humor (assuming that mordant religious chant at the end of "The Wreck of The Fairchild" didn't go far enough for you), then "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" a track from Cure for Sanity, the third album by Stourbridge-based alternative band Pop Will Eat Itself (aka PWEI), might be the route to go. PWEI were pioneers of a subgenre of music known as "grebo", which incorporated punk rock with elements of hip-hop and the sampledelic electronic dance records enjoying their heyday at the time (eg: "Beat Dis" by Bomb The Bass). The movement at one point seemed set to lead the way for British alternative rock acts as we entered the 1990s, but was supplanted by that evil little thing known as Britpop. This track was so named for the Twilight Zone episode depicting William Shatner's one-man battle with the aerophobic's most iconic nemesis, the gremlin on the wing that only they can see (PWEI's fixation with the classic Rod Serling series was one of their familiar running gags - a previous release, "Def. Con. One", had sampled the theme tune, and parts of Serling's narration). Set to an extract from Beastie Boys' "Shake Your Rump", it offers a deep, darkly comic dive through the paranoia of an aerophobic having to confront his worst terrors, while being met with the hollow assurances that "you're safer in the air than on the ground." He doesn't encounter anything resembling the supernatural entity that Shatner (and John Lithgow, in the story's big screen equivalent) were forced to do combat with, but his experience up in the air is still pretty stomach-churning.

"Nightmare", on Cure for Sanity, is preceded by a short track entitled "Medicine Man Speak With Forked Tongue", containing what I assume to be a sample from a self-help cassette about overcoming aerophobia. An assuasive voice, atop a ticking metronome, offers repeated insistence that, "You can fly without fear, you will fly without fear, you are determined to fly without fear!" However, the track title (an inversion on the Native American proverb, "white man speak with forked tongue") casts doubt on the benevolence of the words in question. The voice of authority, it is intimated, is not to be trusted, the mantra less a call to self-empowerment than a despotic command, haranguing us into a dangerous situation against our will. So when we segue into the succeeding track and are greeted by another, more openly malevolent authoritative voice, assuring us that, "What you're looking at could be the end of a particularly terrifying nightmare...it isn't - it's the beginning!" (yet another direct reference to the titular Twilight Zone adventure), the effect is hair-raising, but we were kind of expecting the ambush.

A general distrust of authority, and the voices assuring us that all is well while everything spirals out of control, runs all throughout the track. Here, those voices are comically represented by soundbites from various Hollywood action blockbusters, which by their very nature suggest giddy adrenaline rushes and spectacular calamities. The suspiciously buoyant voice that instructs us to "Fasten your seat-belt" and "enjoy the ride", recalls Arnold Schwarzenegger's encounter with automated cabbie "Johnny Cab" from Total Recall (1990), whose mindless hospitality drove us deep into the uncanny valley, and resulted, inevitably, in a fiery explosion in which Johnny's plastic smile was eerily obliterated. Elsewhere, we hear the incongruously calming voice of the computer from Aliens (1986), issuing a dire warning. The lyrics, meanwhile, wittily construct the in-flight experience as a surreal nightmare, in which - if you pay attention - nothing out of the ordinary actually happens. The horrors of the protagonist's imagination ("This is no joke, we could go up in smoke, or plummet to the ground as the g-force pulls us down") are markedly worse than the reality, in which a bout of turbulence causes him to become nauseous. Nevertheless, his discomfort is emphasised with such lurid ferocity that we can even buy into his paranoid suspicions that his fellow passengers are reveling in his anxiety. It feels as if we are ascending into a kind of Hell up in the skies, which further accentuates the idea of everything being tortuously upside down; the sensation of being in profoundly unnatural circumstances that air travel generates. We also have the double meaning of the statement, "throw a seven in the air and out go your lights". "Throw a seven" can alternatively mean to die or to vomit (an interchangeable meaning I have exploited myself in the past) - either works in this particular scenario, which plays into the phrase's origins, denoting a losing throw in a game of craps, and underlining the protagonist's view that air travel is a dicey business that could alternatively result in either outcome. PWEI also throw in a sly reference to contemporary rave act A Homeboy, A Hippie and A Funki Dredd, best known for their 1990 hit "Total Confusion", with the lyrics "Far out, this dread ain't funky!"

The track reaches its grotesquely hilarious peak as we near the climax, when a particularly absurd (and abrasive) sample - "If I ever get my hands on the fucking son of a bitch who built that fucking plane I'll rip his goddamn fucking face off!" - plucks us from the claustrophobic nightmare and into the territory of a full-fledged cartoon (it is, in fact, from a cartoon, a 1975 French/Belgian adult animation called Tarzoon: Shame of The Jungle; the vocal, from the English-language dub of the film, was supplied by voice-artist Adolph Caesar, who also narrated a number of theatrical trailers). Here, the dreaded outcome of the aerial journey - the possibility of the malfunctioning plane crashing to the ground - is represented in the realm of madcap farce, with the occupant growling his ill intent toward the plane's creator after the calamity has occurred. A ludicrous reprieve from all the tension, or an indication that our in-flight ordeal has reached even more dizzying heights, the cartoon soundbite being the logical progression from those action movie extracts into something all the more eye-poppingly caricatural? One things that's never confirmed is if our protagonist lands safely; as the song closes, he's still trapped in his junk metal nightmare, so for all we know he just keeps on ascending into his asphyxiating daze, discovering that it only gets stranger the higher up he gets. Maybe that's even a good thing. Because apparently it's worse down on the ground, although PWEI leave the reasoning for that to our own irrational ideation.

The Wreck of The Fairchild (aka Some Fruit Are Sweet And Some Are Poison)

As we saw from Marge Simpson's hair-raising encounters with air transportation, the case of the Andes Flight 571 disaster represents the very pinnacle of an aerophobic's worst fears. The one thing more purely nightmarish than the thought of hurtling to your doom in a malfunctioning aircraft would be surviving such an experience and finding yourself stranded atop some god-forsaken mountain, gnawing on a hunk of your companion-cum-sustenance, whilst looking up at the skies from whence you fell in the forlorn hope of spying the rescue mission that isn't coming. One prominent aerophobic with whom the story struck a particular nerve was English synth musician Thomas Morgan Robertson, better known as Thomas Dolby, who used it as the basis for one of the tracks on his 1982 debut album The Golden Age of Wireless, although unless you grabbed the album in its earliest incarnation then odds are that it passed you by. "The Wreck of The Fairchild" had the privilege of kicking off Side B on the original UK release of the album, but was later jettisoned from the US release, among other alterations - an unfortunate loss, as not only was "The Wreck of The Fairchild" designed to segue directly into the following track, "Airwaves", it meant that American audiences missed out on the most profoundly sinister moment of Dolby's initial output. The track was also sadly excised from subsequent UK releases of the album, including its first CD release in 1983, but was finally restored for the special edition in 2009. In the sleeve notes for this edition, Dolby describes the genesis of this much-mistreated track: "I'd been reading Peirs Paul Reid's book Alive about a rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, and they ended up eating each other." Dolby's description is admittedly a trifle misleading - if you didn't know the story, then you might assume that the survivors of the Flight 571 crash were murdering one another for food, which was not the case, as they only ate the bodies of those who had already died. In "The Wreck of The Fairchild", the cannibalism is referenced only indirectly, and the bulk of the track consists of a dramatised communication between the pilot of Flight 571 and a military base, as the plane hits dire straits, and his request for an emergency landing is denied.

"Wreck" serves in some respects as a counterpoint to the album's opening track, "Flying North", in which Dolby ruminates more explicitly on the discomforts of air travel. In the aforementioned sleeve notes of the 2009 edition, Dolby describes how the track was indebted to his personal fear of flying, although he insists that his was not your common or garden aerophobia: "Not the usual one that the plane would fall out of the sky, that didn't worry me. I was concerned that we would fly so high we'd break free of the Earth's atmosphere and zoom off into space. I'd look up into the dark blue and picture us drifting silently off into orbit." Nevertheless, the only hint of genuine terror in "Flying North" is in the lyric, "Up goes the useless prayer"; overall, it's a fairly subdued commentary on the simultaneously overwhelming and underwhelming experience of being jetted from one dreary airport lounge to the next. It captures not only the solitude and alienation of our weary traveller, but also the allure of the dislocation, and the extent to which the protaginist is addicted to it without fully understanding why - they claim that they are "drawn in like a moth". The song suggests that there is a seductive quality to the state of being perpetually unsettled, as if chasing something on an instinctive level.

By contrast, "Wreck" relates a catastrophic vision of air travel gone fatally wrong, although it does not make its own meaning quite so explicit. The greatest clue is in the track title, which refers to the model of plane carrying those ill-fated passengers across the Andes (it is also, Dolby tells us in the sleeve notes, a "rare and famous valve limiter which, while warming up, generates a terrific distorted radio sound"). To get the full benefit of this track it helps if you a) know the basic background details to the Flight 571 crash and b) understand Spanish, or at least have a translation to hand. Fortunately, Dolby has provided a translation of the dialogue heard throughout "Wreck" (the vocals for which were supplied by a retired Argentinean pilot from whom Dolby had purchased a used car) on his official website. As per Dolby's translation, this is what we're hearing throughout the track:

WZ: "Whiskey Zulu to Tower, aircraft in difficulty, request immediate permission to land, over!"
WZ: "Whiskey Zulu to Tower, trying to level up, zero visibility, engine not responding, over!"
WZ: "Calling Base, repeat, 15 minutes of fuel remaining, emergency, emergency!"
Tower: "Base Control to Whiskey Zulu, permission denied, permission denied, over and out."
WZ: "Engine failure, Engine failure, engine one down, please..."
Tower: "Base Control to Whiskey Zulu, the military airport... permission denied"
WZ: "Undercarriage (not altitude?!) too low, I don't think we can make it, I don't think we can make it!!"
Tower: "Control to Whiskey Zulu, slow down, slow down"
WZ: "Whiskey Zulu to Tower...$&%/...gk&$/&ls... radar not working"
Tower: "I repeat., one, two, three... meg.. 123 FM MegaHertz, MegaHertz"

"Wreck" is a tale of technological disaster, but like many tracks on The Golden Age of Wireless it is also about communication. The dialogue we hear represents the final moments of contact between the occupants of Flight 571 and the wider world before the plane went down and the world became inaccessible to the crash survivors. If we are not well-versed enough in Spanish to comprehend the exact words being exchanged (although the appearance of the NATO phonetic alphabet provides a momentary connection) then the language barrier only adds to our sense of discombobulation. There are enough clues that this is not a routine exchange between pilot and air traffic control - the ominous seven second silence (an eternity in pop song time) following the initial transmission and the frantic ska-influenced instrumentals convey a definite air of danger. We feel the perturbation of being caught up in the middle of a situation in which something is blatantly not right, but being unable to comprehend the precise nature of the problem.

There can, nevertheless, be little confusion as to what is being uttered at the end of the track, when the radio exchange has long ceased and multiple voices are heard chanting: "En el nombre del padre, y del hijo y del espíritu santo, Amén", or "In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit, Amen." Coming out of the implied disaster, this might bring us back to the "useless prayer" cited in "Flying North", although in this case the prayer is anything but useless. To those familiar with the details of the Andes crash, it carries a disturbing significance, for it indicates that the most notorious aspect of this story - the cannibalism - is currently unfolding on that desolate mountain top. The survivors, who were Roman Catholic, were so (understandably) repulsed by the prospect of having to eat the flesh of their former companions that the only way they could overcome their revulsion was to rationalise the process as a kind of Eucharist. (Meanwhile, Dolby's vocals appear only briefly, providing us with the track's only English-language lyrics: "Some fruit are sweet and some are poision". I initially assumed that this, too, was a coded reference to cannibalism - perhaps even a morbid play on the proverb "one man's meat is another man's poison" - but it transpires that this line was all that remains, lyric-wise, of the track's former incarnation as a more conventional pop song, "Sale of The Centry", which is included as a bonus on the 2009 special edition).

Both "Wreck" and "Flying North" are indicative of the album's overall mixed perspective on technology. Dolby seems at once optimistic but also alienated with so many whirring airplane propellers and buzzing radio transmitters never more than a stone's throw away, and "The Golden Age of Wireless" plays like a concept album about the paradoxes of living in a world that is more connected than it has ever been but also curiously at odds. Some commentators identify a wartime theme across the album, even if it's not always as prominently felt as in the track "One of Our Submarines" (featured on the 2009 release as a bonus track, although it was included in previous US releases of the album). Joseph Stannard, in his Drowned In Sound review, observes that: "the songs are sort of about relationships in the face of something happening on a world level...a lot of them are very much about the extra weight that's added to emotional feeling in the context of wartime." A general sense of displacement runs throughout the album, making it unclear if Dolby is looking back to the world wars of yesteryear or to a fictitious one from a parallel universe. Ted Mills, on We Are The Mutants, responds to Dolby's own suggestion that the album represents a glimpse into an alternate Britain under Nazi control with the observation that: " I’ve never considered The Golden Age of Wireless...to be post-apocalyptic...The “copper cables all rust in the acid rains” from “Airwaves” didn’t make me think of a dystopian wasteland—it reminded me of pulling into Liverpool Street Station." Emily Bick of The Quietus argues that the appeal of Dolby is in the beguiling fashion in which he juxtaposes the cataclysmic with the wistful and the banal, noting that, "something goes wrong in almost every song. Plane crashes, traffic jams, lost signals, missed connections, acid rain…these themes sit with lyrics about everyday stuff like Coldrex and pylons, film posters, junk food and vague - but powerful - feelings of romantic loss." The final track on the album, "Cloudburst at Shingle Street", strikes me as having the most obviously post-apocalyptic vibe, although it is conversely the most purely euphoric of the lot; to my mind, it describes the experience of a man reconnecting with the world (this time not via technology, but through a direct encounter with the natural world) having concealed himself away in a bomb shelter (either literal or metaphorical) for an extensive period of time. The location Shingle Street, a coastal hamlet in the English county of Suffolk, carries its own connotations, being the site of a reputed (and disputed) attempted German invasion in World War II, and also personal significance for Dolby, who would regularly visit the beach at Shingle Street, and in the 2009 sleeve notes describes his fascination with the assorted "strange concrete shapes left over from the world wars" that littered the sands. Above all, "Cloudburst" speaks of the indifference of nature toward human exertion; the world keeps on turning long after the devastation has occurred, and this is something the protagonist, the survivor of an unspecified conflict, learns to embrace as he traverses his own war-scarred landscape (literal or metaphorical).

"Wreck of The Fairchild" is likewise a powerful track, in part because it is suggestive of its own miniature apocalypse. We catch the world just as everything is falling to pieces, and while we miss out on the critical moment of destruction, we are party to the aftermath, in which the survivors, deprived of domestic and technological luxuries, are forced to make use of the extremely meagre resources at their disposal. There is, nevertheless, a twisted optimism to its macabre conclusion; it presents a scenario in which technology is failing but the basic human drive for survival endures. The mixture of religiosity and cannibalism is unsettling, for it has associations with ritual sacrifice, but it represents a connection, a means by which the participants are able to hold together as a community, acknowledging their indebtment to and physical intimacy with the dead comrades they are currently consuming, and asserting their place within the wider world from which they are seemingly disconnected. It is perhaps a glimpse into a future world in which civilisation has crumbled and humankind exists in tiny, self-contained pockets, banding together for the common cause of survival. As the opening track to Side B, "Wreck" is effectively bookended with "Cloudburst" in exploring the tension and subsequently the catharsis in the notion of the world coming apart at the seams. Both are essentially redemptive stories of man co-existing with the elements following some prior, dislocating trauma; one achieves its redemption by plunging us, somewhat paradoxically, into full-blown nightmare territory, while the other revels in the anticipation of physical and emotional cleansing. In both cases, though, the tracks convey a common aspiration, which is to navigate our way out from the smoking wreckage and continue forward, long after the damage has been dealt.

Hero (aka Where Have All The Good Men Gone And Where Are All The Gods?)

Note: This entry was written for the Disaster Blogathon being hosted by The Midnite Drive-In and Dubsism from 10th - 12th June.

Also, spoilers.

So, last time we touched on that sequence in the Simpsons episode "Fear of Flying" where Homer attempts to assist Marge in overcoming her titular phobia by renting a series of VHS titles on the subject of air travel. The titles in question are Hero, Fearless and Alive, and they all have tell-tale plane wrecks on their box art. If you follow Homer's suit then you've got yourself quite the weekend marathon of early 90s flight paranoia, although be warned that the quality of those pictures varies drastically. As I acknowledged in my previous piece, he picked out a real winner with Fearless and an absolute dud with Alive. But what of the third film that falls straight down the middle? Stephen Frears' Hero, or Accidental Hero as it was known in some territories, is a much trickier one for me to categorise because I have something of a love/hate relationship with it. In theory, I should be every bit as scathing toward it as I am Alive, since in the end I have to consider it a failure. It's a film that bites off way more than it can chew, simply because its teeth are not sharp enough, and spews out its various intriguing ideas and narrative developments in an unsightly, salivary mess. Hero frustrates the hell out of me, but there's something about its obnoxious little world that I find inexplicably captivating. It's an enjoyable film, for the most part, with a number of good key ingredients, and an engrossing set-up, even if it doesn't yield adequate solutions to any of the issues it raises.

What Alive, Fearless and Hero all have in common is that their respective in-flight catastrophe occurs early in the running and the bulk of the picture is taken up by examining some aspect of the longer-term consequences. Whereas Alive is a raw tale of survival at all costs, Hero is superficially closer to Fearless, in that it's more interested in the emotional fall-out of this kind of deeply traumatic experience among people attempting to resume their day-to-day lives and discovering, for one reason or another, that things can never go back to the way they were. Hero, though, does so from a more jocose angle than Fearless, its pet interest being in the nature of heroism, and the stark discrepancy that exists between the real individual who just so happened to pull off an extraordinary act, and the idealised hero who exists only in the public mind and in media sensationalism. Hero takes its inspiration from the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges, most notably Hail The Conquering Hero (1944), in which an army reject is mistaken for a war hero on returning to his hometown, to tell a more modern story of misguided lionisation. In the process, it raises a plethora of fascinating questions. Do terrible events bring out both the best and worst in our human nature? If so, then could we be either the hero or the villain of the story if you happened to catch us at the right time on any given day? Or is it the case that humans are fundamentally bastards, and that whatever good deeds we might be capable of are inevitably balanced out by our innumerable moments of weakness? For as long as it entertains the latter position, Hero is a delectable ride. It's at its strongest where it's at its most sour, and for the first fifty minutes or so shows plenty of promise, until it develops a lethal appetite for sugar and all goodwill goes out the window. In the end, I'm not sure what point Hero is trying to make and I'm not convinced that Hero knows either.

The hero of Hero is one Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman), who at first glance appears to possess very few traits of the archetypal chevalier. Bernie is deeply cynical and embittered about the human condition and prefers to spend most of his time hiding under a proverbial rock, although his penchant for pick-pocketing credit cards occasionally brings him under legal scrutiny. As we open the film, we find Bernie in court, having just received a conviction for receiving stolen goods, and the likelihood of a prison term when he returns next week for sentencing. This couldn't have come at a worse time for Bernie, who is in the process of attempting to reconnect with his ten-year-old son Joey (James Madio), whom Bernie walked out on some years ago. Bernie is a scavenger, an opportunist who preys off of other people's moments of weakness, although he is self-aware enough to recognise his own - early on in the film, he gives a remorseful speech to one of the few individuals willing to lend him a sympathetic ear, Chick the bartender (Tom Arnold), about how he didn't grow into the great individual he assumed he would he would do as a child. At the top of Bernie's regrets is his failure to provide for his son, either financially or as a role model.

As it turns out, Bernie's shrinking, disheveled exterior conceals an abundance of physical courage, something he demonstrates when he witnesses a plane crash while driving along an empty road outside Chicago, and valiantly (if gracelessly) approaches the scene of the accident and opens the emergency door, allowing most of the passengers to escape the burning aircraft. A boy pleads with him to go inside for his father, who was knocked unconscious and left behind; Bernie reluctantly does so, and ends up saving several more passengers who were trapped within the wreckage - among them, Gayle Gayley (Geena Davis), an ambitious young TV reporter hot off receiving her award for Excellence In The Pursuit of Truth. Although Bernie is clearly a tremendous man, he is far from your ideal hero - in part because he is a felon, and his heroism does not exactly signify redemption for his history of misdeeds, as demonstrated when he swipes Gayley's purse while in the process of hoisting her to safety. There's also the generally uncouth manner in which he conducts himself while roaming the wreckage for additional casualties, hurling various curse words at his rescuees, and at one point contemplating leaving one man to his death because he isn't the man he came in for. This sequence is one of the film's most successful, for it's in that moment of gut-wrenching crisis that Hero seems quite happy to be as thoroughly mordant and unromantic about its subject matter as possible. Saving people, it posits, can really be a pain in the neck, but on the flip side, a tragedy can be an opportunity for personal gain, signified not only in Bernie's sticky fingers, but in Gayley's howls of territorial rage as she is loaded into an ambulance: "This is my story! I did the research!" Despite saving numerous lives, Bernie considers himself a failure, because he was unable to locate and rescue the father of the child who originally implored him for aid (unbeknownst to him, the man in question had regained consciousness and left under his own steam). Rather than face the child he assumes he has let down, Bernie chooses to slink off discreetly into the night, as befits his general style, with a pocket of ill-gotten plastic and only one of his $100 shoes. The public is left in awe at the bravery of this mysterious man, and Gayley spearheads a media campaign to identity him, their only lead being a blurred video image and the shoe he left behind.

Bernie is not an amazingly endearing character, but his assorted contradictions make him engagingly enigmatic. Is he a bastard with a hidden heart of gold? Is he simply doing what anybody would have done under the circumstances, confronted by the plight of his fellow humans? Or is there something special about Bernie that makes him cut out for heroism, however ill-mannered? Could it even be Bernie's more inhuman qualities - his more feral, animalistic side, and his tendencies toward reckless plundering - that makes him better suited to handling wild situations that most people, in their prosaic, everyday existences, would be utterly thrown by? Is, as one character suggests, there a fine, fine line between the kind of heroism Bernie exhibits and unbridled stupidity? These are all juicy enough questions, but the film ducks out of exploring them in any particularly substantial depth. For the plot thickens, but ultimately falters when Bernie crosses paths with drifter John Bubber (Andy Garcia), a fellow societal outcast who figures out how to exploit the situation to his advantage. Hearing Bernie's story, and acquiring his remaining shoe, he manages to pass himself off as the so-called "Angel of Flight 104", securing the $1 million reward and the adoration of the public. Bubber's arc is, unfortunately, the film's major weak link. Whereas Bernie is a miserable sleazebag, Bubber is truly detestable. He has a comprehensible enough motive for wanting to claim the glory as his own (he wants to be noticed and be treated as a valid human being, for a change), yet the film seems curiously oblivious to just how mawkishly, odiously manipulative his character is. It aspires to have it both ways, using Bubber to satirise hero worship and the creation of celebrity while equally imparting that he is somehow worthy of his lionised status, because he is a terrific and wonderful person in spite of his gargantuan exploitation of Bernie's confidence and the public's trust. And the film certainly has no interest in exposing the hypocrisies of the public's reaction to Bubber (eg: the general disdain with which they treat the homeless, despite reveling in the fuzzies of his rags to riches story), instead suggesting that he genuinely is inspiring them to be better people, while showing little in the way of evidence. It's at this point that Hero suddenly seems terribly confused about its own agenda, and we catch it swallowing its own tail-end in sheer disorientation.

Hero has fun sending up the media's manufacturing and exploitation of celebrity, notably in a sequence promoting an upcoming TV dramatisation of events in which all of the people involved are slated to be playing themselves, an idea that feels as if it should have been taken a whole lot further than it actually is. In practice, the dramatisation amounts to disappointingly little, other than providing the first point in which Gayley becomes even vaguely aware of the discrepancy between the uncouth gentleman who hustled her out of the plane and the heavily romanticised Bubber. There are times when Hero fully embraces the goofiness of the culture it's lampooning, such as when a small girl approaches Bubber asking him to sign her Bubber doll, and other times when details of Bubber's personal history (eg: his war record in Vietnam) seem so perfectly aligned with the kind of person the public wants to have rescued them from a burning plane that the man's existence plays like one great cosmic joke at Bernie's expense. And then there are times when the film leans dangerously toward mistaking the kinds of highly public displays of virtue it ought to be skewering for assurances of genuine virtue. The film's most misjudged plot point involves Bubber making a televised trip to a children's ward (jeez, that's probably the oldest ploy in the book), where he has a nauseating moment delivering a pep talk to a kid in a coma (think about this for a second - he hones in on the one individual in no fit state to object to his using him as a prop in his ongoing publicity campaign). In a more focused film, this could have been tremendously funny (it puts me strongly in mind of that Smashie and Nicey skit where they visit a children's hospital and attempt to bring a child out of his coma by singing the most flagrantly self-congratulatory song about the good work they do for charity). Unfortunately, Hero sees fit to bestow Bubber with genuine powers; the child comes out his coma soon after and the media brands Bubber a miracle worker. Actually, the kid's humdrum non-sequitur upon emerging would appear, beguilingly, to suggest that the whole thing was nothing more than a dumb coincidence, and yet in the climactic sequence Bernie himself (who's been observing Bubber's deception from afar with furious eyes) has decided otherwise, insisting to a despondent Bubber that he actually helped the child, supposedly confirmed by the fact that he actually remembered the kid's name (Alan). Oh yes, that's the other misjudged thing about Bubber. The film's climax requires him to have a crisis of confidence that compels him to step out onto a window ledge and consider hurling himself off, an act of desperation that feels wholly unmotivated based on everything we've seen. We do get hints that Bubber, for as much as he accepts the media attention, feels guilty and unworthy for his fakery, but I don't buy that he feels so entrapped by his ill-gotten celebrity that he wants out via his own destruction. That too would be an interesting narrative development, but the film simply doesn't do the work to get us there.

Bernie, meanwhile, abhors attention and has no interest in being lauded a hero. He does, however, have use for the $1 million reward that's rightfully his, which would not only cover his legal expenses, but also finally enable him to ensure a decent college education for the son he's been failing his whole life. By the end of the film, Bernie and Bubber have come to an arrangement - Bubber continues to take the credit for Bernie's heroism, on the condition that a cut of the reward money goes to Bernie and Joey, and that Bubber uses his celebrity to pull a few strings with the Chicago courts and convince the judge to suspend his prison sentence. Although the film has by and large lost me at this point, the one aspect of the conclusion I can genuinely get behind - the implication that Bernie walks away scott-free in all regards while Bubber remains ensnared by the obligations of his public profile, having to perpetuate the deception day by day and live up to an idealised version of himself, knowing that all eyes are trailed upon his every move. As Bernie so shrewdly informs him, "Why should you be comfortable? Uncomfortable is what you should be." Sadly, Hero does kind of blow that too, as it remains charitable enough toward Bubber to give him the opportunity to prove that he is capable of genuine heroism. He saves Bernie's life when he nearly slips off the ledge, thus adding more supposed credibility to his final speech about how, deep down inside, we're all heroes, even if we're also predisposed to do crummy things. It's certainly hinted that a critical factor in why the public accepts Bubber's heroism so unquestionably is because he says all the right things and makes them feel good about themselves. As such, it would be a fatal mistake for the film itself to become suckered in by Bubber's ludicrous Hallmark rhetoric, but apparently it does. Hero remains connected enough to its ironic trappings to know that the cost for a closing speech as pandering and mawkish as Bubber's is to follow it up with a sardonic dismissal ("Have you ever heard so much bullshit from somebody who isn't the president?"), a tactic that plays less like an affirmation of the film's satiric underbelly than an audacious attempt to have its cake and eat it.

Hero finds more authenticity in the more muted, contemplative moments in which it reflects not on the nature of heroism, but on the nature of weakness. The idea that the great unifying factor is not our latent capacity for Herculean greatness but the simple fact that we are, none of us, gods, and therefore bound to screw up, is leagues more compelling than any of the feel-good sentiments articulated by Bubber. And the suggestion that the individual humans behind the news stories are inevitably more nuanced and complicated than their media representation lets on is not an amazingly revelatory one, but always worth exploring. Multiple characters struggle with the notion that somebody noble enough to save a woman's life could sink so low as to rob her at the same time, while Bubber tries to make sense of the desperation that compelled him to assume the life of a charlatan. In one scene, Bernie's ex-wife Evelyn, (Joan Cusack) comments that Bernie is at his best in moments of crisis, when he forgets to be Bernie and remembers to be "sort of like a human being"; on the surface, this plays like another facile attempt at rationalising the contradictory elements in Bernie's character, but it becomes infinitely more curious when we consider the film's implicit suggestion that our moments of weakness might be our most prevalent human characteristic. As Chick so delicately observes, we're all assholes.

The question of Bernie's humanity was raised earlier, when Evelyn lambasts Bernie for attempting to mold Joey in his own misanthropic image. When Bernie insists that, "it's a jungle out there", Evelyn suggests that he "go back to jungle". Bernie, clearly, is out of place in the domestic world, despite his efforts to make good with Joey, yet the reference to the jungle hints at ways in which he, in a more metaphorical sense than Bubber, is homeless. If we think back to a sequence toward the start of the film in which Bernie and Joey are seated on a bench at the zoo, watching a tiger pace up and down a harrowingly spartan cage, we might question just what jungle there is for him to go back to. The initial zoo scene is a small moment that nevertheless encapsulates so much about the film's central concerns. The verbal exchange between the father and son - Joey speculates that if Bernie were to step into the tiger cage, it would kill him, with which Bernie does not disagree - speaks of Joey's dented faith in his father's abilities and Bernie's awareness of such. The caged tiger signifies the characters' general fear of entrapment (both Bernie's fear of his pending incarceration and Bubber's later predicament). It also conveys the apparent order of modern living, in which the jungle has been eliminated and the big cats confined to tiny cages, in a manner that is evocative of the meagre barrier that exists between safety and danger. There is also an extent to which we sense that Bernie identifies with the agitated tiger - the magnificence of the beast might signify his unlocked potential, and its languishing outside of its natural habitat his alienation from the world. Joey remains Bernie's sole link to the world of domesticity - at one point, Bernie uses Joey very explicitly to assert his humanity, yelling "I got a kid, you know! I'm a person for Christ's sake!" For much of the film, Bernie's concern for Joey serves as an easy means of bestowing him with humanity - we do have the obvious interpretation that Bernie chooses to enter the wrecked plane because in the pleas of the desperate child he finds himself haunted by the vulnerabilities of his own son. But I think a far more gratifying explanation (and far more so than any of Bubber's insufferable bullshit) would be that Bernie's heroism is motivated, to a large degree, by his misanthropy. Bernie chooses to help his fellow human because he has such great contempt for them, and he knows that they cannot be relied upon to help themselves in a terrible situation. It's this same embittered understanding of how much people suck that also causes him to think nothing of helping himself to their property while he's at it. In the film's closing punchline we find Bernie once again at the zoo with Joey, and confiding in him the truth of the preceding events, before he finds his heroic services in demand once again. A child has (somehow) ended up inside the lions' cage, and with no authorities coming to help Bernie ends up passing his shoes to Joey and making his own down toward the action. We don't get to see it, but he is implied to actually enter the territory of one of those caged big cats - a sign that he has finally become the man his son desires him to be, that he has finally embraced his own magnificent nature or, most likely, that the rest of the world remains so inept and so bound for calamity that Bernie has no means of escaping his begrudging obligation to save them from themselves. Thus, there is an extent to which Bernie remains trapped at the end, but it's an entrapment of the rest of the world's making.

The third major player in all of this is Gayley. She, like Bubber, is a fake, a point illustrated perhaps a little too obviously in an early sequence where she delivers a speech on journalistic integrity to a showroom of colleagues and uses an onion as a prop, causing herself to shed distinctly unemotional tears. Her infatuation with Bubber certainly never seems convincing, and it's hard to say to what extent this is intentional. The film seems only vaguely interested in exploring the extent to which her phoniness blurs into her self-delusion, although Davis imbues her with a vulnerability late in the film as she struggles to deal with the increasingly transparent likelihood that the man for whom she has fallen may not be as wonderful as she first assumed - the realisation that her savoir (whom, until the very end, she still believes to be Bubber) pocketed her purse in the process sends her spiraling off into a ludicrous harangue about how "John Bubber is more of a hero than we ever imagined." Hero also benefits from a handful of entertaining supporting figures. In particular, Chevy Chase and Stephen Toboloswky both give fine comic performances as a couple of media executives who gradually come to realise that Bubber is a phony, but also that their station has backed his supposed heroism for too long to walk away unscathed, and that they, too, are now prisoners of the ongoing deception. Whenever they're on screen, the film pops with all the right levels of screwball energy.

Finally, here's a fun fact. The song "Hero" by Mariah Carey was originally written for this film. The plan was to have Gloria Estefan sing it, only Carey was convinced that the song was too good for this picture and that she should keep it for herself. It's no big loss. No knocks to Carey's song, but that kind of inspirational power ballad most assuredly did not belong in this film and probably would have been the final nail in the coffin from a tonal standpoint. Instead, we get an airy gospel number from Luther Vandross and a choir of children, which at least has the virtue of sounding appropriately goofy.

Marge Rating: Dog and cat wedding. This is arguably the "nicest" of Homer's VHS marathon from an aerophobic perspective, given that, in this particular aerial accident, nobody dies, and the impact itself happens off of screen (we see only Bernie's reaction, which suffices, but possibly betrays that they didn't have the budget to pull off the crash). I suspect those claustrophobic shots of the trapped passengers will still prove highly gut-wrenching to anybody with a pervasive terror of sky-borne disaster, however. And eventually we do get the alluring sight of the aircraft completely erupting into flames.

Fear of Flying (aka The Wreck of The Fairchild)

Let's talk about a Simpsons sight gag that I believe merits more appreciation. In Season 6's "Fear of Flying" (2F08), Homer and Marge visit the VHS Village, a video rental store, which advertises itself in its signage as "formerly the Beta Barn". It's a small moment, but one that the format nerd in me absolutely revels in. Oh yes, trust me, this is a far greater deal than Guy Incognito. On the surface, it might register as nothing more than a fleeting reference to the videotape format war that waged across the late 1970s/early-to-mid 1980s, with Sony's Betamax and JVC's VHS each competing to determine the future of home media consumption. Springfield's local video library, it seems, backed the losing pony and were forced to concede come the back-end of the 80s, when VHS emerged as the clear victor and most Betamax tapes were earmarked for landfill. Change happened. Yet that vanquished identity represents more than just a basic nod to a cultural curiosity that was fast fading into memory. It signifies as what could have been as much as what was - a cancelled timeline and a possible future that never materialised. By the time "Fear of Flying" debuted, on December 18th 1994, the succeeding decade was almost half-over and enough distance had been created between Betamax's point of relevance and the present day that the VHS Village really should be able to stand on its own. Surely nobody would be asking for the Beta Barn at the dawn of '95? Instead, acknowledgement of the store's former identity continues to linger, an unassuming ode to every potentially revolutionary idea or development that got lost and discarded in the merciless march of time. (Adding to the poignancy, from a modern-day perspective, is the knowledge that the VHS Village would now be defunct in any format.)

For as much as I'm inclined to read into this gag, its presence here may be down to good old-fashioned labor-saving more than anything else. Technically, the first time we encountered it was in Season 3's "Saturdays of Thunder" (which aired three years prior, in November 1991), when Homer and Lisa go to the VHS Village to rent a Happy Little Elves tape (another nod to a cultural phenomenon that was then becoming obsolete). Yet for some reason the exact same gag doesn't resonate even half as hard with me in that episode. It seems starker in 1994, when the Betamax's try at longevity was more of a faded memory. Studying the store exterior as it appears in "Saturdays of Thunder", I wonder if the Betamax reference in "Fear of Flying" was something of a leftover detail as opposed to a calculated choice. Compare the two and you'll note that while they didn't go so far as to reuse the same animation cels from "Saturdays of Thunder", they have basically recycled the exact same mise-en-scene, only with a new lick of paint slapped on everything. In "Saturdays of Thunder", the blue and yellow colour scheme was clearly intended to evoke that of Blockbuster Video, only here the VHS Village has swapped that out for a slightly less shameless mixture of red and beige. The posters on the store window are the same but are obscured so that we can no longer see the titles. The Simpsons' car has been removed, but the two nondescript vehicles are identical, just with different paint jobs. And here's a particularly disturbing detail - the fire hydrant outside the store is yellow! Have Homer and Marge gone to the VHS Village in Shelbyville, per chance?

Still, not only did they retain the Beta Barn sub heading, in revamping the scene they the lettering bigger, bolder and more prominent, as if they really wanted you to notice it this time around. Perhaps this gag is more at home in "Fear of Flying", an episode where the central theme deals with uncomfortable truths and barely suppressed memories that continue to reverberate in the present, no matter how seemingly far-removed by the sands of time. We saw all the way back in Season 1's "Moaning Lisa" that smiling and concealing has been Marge's long-term survival strategy, and in the same episode we also got an inkling of how well that strategy has served her. Here, Marge's lifetime of bottled-up emotion finally reaches breaking point when Homer's latest misadventure earns the family free airline tickets to any location in the contiguous United States and she's forced to confront her aerophobia. Whenever this episode is the subject of discussion, some smart aleck is bound to bring up that the family previously flew in the Season 3 episode "Mr Lisa Goes To Washington", and there we didn't hear a peep out of Marge. And true, that is one heck of a glaring continuity issue, although here it is strongly insinuated that her areophobia is really just a manifestation of a far greater problem, and the form it takes ends up feeling largely arbitrary. It has nothing to do with her father making a living as an airline steward and not a pilot, as she'd been led to believe. The revelation is just dumb, and the episode knows it's dumb, although it does give us a rare glimpse of Clancy Bouvier, a character we'd previously only encountered once. The real underlying source of Marge's problems is...well, take a wild guess. It's an episode that spends a lot of time dancing around the obvious, without getting anywhere in particular, and for that reason it sometimes has a hard time endearing itself to viewers. "Fear of Flying" is definitely one of the more undervalued episodes of Season 6; it has a sad, sour quality that doesn't consistently yield belly laughs, but it's an interesting look at just how determined the adult Simpsons are to avoid facing up to what hurts. It only scratches the surface, but even that superficial scratch proves potent enough.

When Marge's pre-take off panic attack causes the family to cancel their vacation plans, her latent anxieties continue to manifest themselves in increasingly strange and neurotic ways. Lisa urges Marge to see a therapist, but Homer is against the idea, for he has enough foresight to see where this is potentially headed. Instead, he seeks alternative outlets of support, including a hack radio psychic and agony aunt Dear Abby (Dear Abby, lest we forget, would later unwittingly respond to one of Marge's dilemmas), and gets the idea that watching films about air travel will help Marge to overcome her fears. Hence their visit to the VHS Village. Homer picks out a selection of pertinent videos, based on their upbeat titles - Hero, Fearless and most alluringly of all, Alive. This, too, is one of my favourite Simpsons gags.

You can see the misguided logic in Homer's thinking. On the one hand, all of those films do have ostensibly positive-sounding titles, although the imagery on each VHS cover should have been a dead giveaway as to the content in each case. Hero (Stephen Frears, 1992), Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993) and Alive (Frank Marshall, 1993) are all real pictures, and they were all relatively recent releases back in 1994. I'm not sure how much individual resonance Hero and Fearless would have had with viewers at the time, beyond what's self-evident, as both of those films nose-dived at the box office, but Alive was rather a different story. It didn't exactly make a blockbuster-sized killing either, but such was the infamy of its subject that mere mention of the title would have struck an uneasy nerve. Not everybody has seen the film, but most everybody knows the true-life story it was based on, or at least has a vague idea of what went on atop that remote Argentinian mountain in 1972. On October 13th, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 went missing while flying over the Andes carrying 45 passengers and crew, including members of the Old Christians Club rugby team. More than 70 days later, two of the missing individuals, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, arrived in Chile, having made a daring trek across the mountains in search of aid, and on their instructions authorities were able to locate the plane wreckage and an additional fourteen survivors. The lucky sixteen later revealed that there had been a disturbing cost to their survival, for in the absence of any viable food sources, they were forced to cannibalise the bodies of their dead friends and family. All of the passengers on board the flight were Roman Catholic, and some had rationalised the extreme measure as a form of Eucharist. Their story quickly became legendary, both as a testament to human tenacity and its ability to withstand the most adverse conditions, and as a troubling reminder of our fragility, and the harrowing decisions that might have to be made simply to sustain ourselves if the comforts of civilisation were stripped away. While Alive, based on Piers Paul Read's 1974 book Alive: The Story of The Andes Survivors, is one of the most famous media takes on the subject, it is but one artifact in a long-standing cultural fascination with the story. It had previously been dramatised as another feature film, Survive!, directed by Rene Cardona Jr in 1976. It likewise didn't take long for the world to begin plundering it for gallows humor -  Ted Kotcheff's 1978 film Who Is Killing The Great Chefs of Europe? contains reference to a fictitious "Andes Plane Crash Cookbook", while in 1979 BBC comedy sketch show Not The Nine O'Clock News featured a skit in which two survivors of a plane crash (played by Mel Smith and Chris Langham) are interviewed about the drastic measures they took to stay alive; we are goaded to think at first that they are alluding to cannibalism, but it is revealed that they are actually describing the experience of having to eat airline food. Then a final punchline confirms that there was cannibalism involved after all ("I mean, we'd already eaten the other passengers..."). Added to that fine tradition, we have the parody in "Fear of Flying", as Marge watches the rented video and we hear one survivor mordantly remark that, "No thanks to the plane, many of us are still...alive!", followed by the tell-tale sounds of ravenous gorging. "Pass me another hunk of co-pilot..."

As a kid, I got this gag because Alive was one of those titles that had serious playground notoriety while I was growing up. "Have you seen the movie about the rugby team who crash into the mountains and have to eat each other to stay alive?" Most of my peers actually hadn't, but I knew one particularly loud-mouthed individual who claimed to have done so, and whose professed admiration for the sixteen survivors barely concealed the strangely perverted relish with which he would talk, in eagerly lurid detail, about the sequences in which they devoured the butt cheeks of their fallen comrades (as per his account, that's where the hunk of co-pilot came from). He was so emphatic on all of this, and the parody on the Simpsons so hair-raisingly macabre, that it was something of a disappointment, many years later, when I finally got hold of Alive and discovered that, not only is it not a good film, but it's actually not as interested in the whole cannibalism dilemma as you might have imagined (given that it's the only part that anybody talks about). Make no mistake - Alive is a Hollywood production with a glossy Hollywood sheen, and it's more interest in stressing the triumph of the story than the trauma. Despite reports of the method acting the cast were supposedly put through in order to simulate starvation (I read at least one book claiming that they were not only barred from eating, but were also tasked with watching the production crew eat), I must agree with what Roger Ebert said in his review: "As subtitles tick off "Day 50" and "Day 70," the actors in the movie continue to look amazingly healthy (and well-fed)." (Gene Siskel was more positive about the film, but felt that it could have used more of that gallows humor). The obvious issue of survivor's guilt - which is the focus of Fearless - is here treated in a very pat manner. And the butt-eating? In one scene you see a character insert their finger into what looks like the vague outline of a frozen human body in the snow - the outline is so vague that it's hard to tell which part of the body he's supposed to be fiddling with, but it could well be the buttocks.

Naturally, being a true story, it merits a certain degree of reverence, and too lurid a focus on the cannibalistic element would have run the risk of being exploitative. Nevertheless, for Alive to have succeeded, it needed to be a far more visceral and physically ugly experience than it is. The tenacity of the human spirit under pressure is all well and good, but I think in a scenario such as this the basic mechanics of survival deserve consideration too - the biological drive to keep ourselves alive, and how this might compel us to do things that under ordinary circumstances we would regard as unfathomable. As remarkable as the survivors' story is, it doesn't exactly strike me as the material of life-affirming cinema. We are, after all, talking about a situation in which the majority of persons involved died, and the minority who survived only did so by eating the dead. There comes a point where the film's spirituality comes to seem less like meaningful commentary than an indulgence by which to kid ourselves that we didn't come to this picture because we were morbidly curious about the cannibalism. I think of my friend, who claimed to be greatly inspired by the courage and endurance of the Andes sixteen, but plainly just wanted to see a movie about people eating keester. It's why I appreciate the gag in "Fear of Flying" - it speaks to a world still haunted by the cultural memory of a harrowing account of death and survival, subverting efforts to repackage that memory as rousing, feel-good entertainment by peeling back the veneer and revealing the crude, unmitigated horrors at the heart of the story; horrors that captivate as much as they repel.

Avoidance of staring an undesirable truth straight in the face is one of the characteristic themes of "Fear of Flying", an episode that, in my experience, gets little in the way of appreciation, in part due to its overall desultory nature. A common grievance with the episode is that Homer's opening arc - to find a new watering hole after being booted out of Moe's - is abruptly forgotten and never actually resolved, so that in the end we have to rely on our trust in the end-of-episode reset to get us back to where we started. Erik Adams of the AV Club takes takes issue with this, noting that the episode's sudden switch in interests is "a letdown after such a crackerjack cold open—one that gave the world Guy Incognito and the always useful Chinese word for crisis and opportunity, “crisitunity.”" He also criticises the overall lack of stakes with Marge's plight, stating that, "There’s no compelling reason to get Marge back on that plane, and her reason for keeping her feet on the ground isn’t particularly compelling" (actually, I do have a number of issues with Adams' review in general). It's true that the destination is less important than the flight itself (I don't think it's even established where the Simpsons were going - wherever it was, they had intended to take Abe with them, in a rare act of generosity toward him, but that turns out to all be the set-up for a Home Alone gag), and that Marge ultimately boards the plane in an effort to prove to herself that she has overcome her problems, which of course she hasn't. That reality is neatly encapsulated in the closing moments when she ends up with a carp swimming around her ankles. "Fear of Flying" is a frustrating episode, if by design, and I suspect that's why a lot of viewers struggle with it. It also has an unusually grim tone, which comes from trawling through all of Marge's half-repressed traumas. For the obviously ridiculous nature of most of her deepest, darkest memories (she had her innocence shattered on her first day of school, not because of all the unsettling falsehoods that Patty and Selma fed to her beforehand, but because she was forced to contemplate the manufactured nature of The Monkees), you still get a strong sense of just show small and vulnerable young Marge was, and how that continues to nibble away at her in the present.

As painful as our voyage through Marge's subconscious is, it ends up feeling like something of a futile effort, and in that regard the opening act involving Homer's personal, more physical quest makes for the perfect prelude. Lisa attempts to inspire Homer to make the best of a negative situation by informing him that the Chinese use the same word for crisis as they do opportunity (apparently not, Lisa, although I suppose that Homer's own suggestion, "crisitunity", will suffice). The notion that a crisis inherently equals opportunity is maybe a tad questionable (it certainly wasn't for the 29 who perished in the Flight 571 disaster), but the implied motivational lesson is that a quandary has the potential to challenge us and enable to us to develop and change our situation for the better - although Homer, naturally, takes his crisitunity as affirmation that he should be doing more of the same in a different location. He ends up falling down quite the rabbit hole as he tours every alternative bar in Springfield, including a genteel cocktail bar (from which he is ejected on sight), a strangely familiar bar (which proves too terrifying), a trendy lesbian bar (which has no fire exit - enjoy your deathtrap, ladies) and finally a private airport bar for pilots, which is where things finally start to merge into Marge's aerophobia arc. Obviously, order will not be restored in the universe until Homer is back at Moe's (which doesn't happen here, causing things to feel slightly out of whack at the end, among other reasons). We sense that what's driving him on his quest, besides his craving for a beer, is the underlying desire to put off contemplating the alternative, which is to stay home and spend his evenings with the family, as was implied in his response earlier to Marge's suggestion that he pretend the couch is a bar. Homer keeps on moving in order to avoid facing up to the undesirable issue of his familial responsibility, taking him to increasingly far-out and unlikely venues. Later, when Marge's own crisitunity materialises, and she's asked with traversing her subconscious under the guidance of Dr. Zweig (wonderfully voiced by Anne Bancroft), we can see how her journey mirrors Homer's, as she hops from one uneasy dead end to another, before finally reaching an apparent conclusion in which the basic problem goes entirely unresolved.

We are led to believe that the issue Marge has been avoiding all along has to do with her father, which seems a fair enough subject given that we know so little about the man. The big revelation - she was horrified, as a child, to learn that her father worked as an airline steward - is flagrantly ridiculous, and is immediately undermined in being followed up by an all-out avalanche of unhappy childhood memories, all involving aviation imagery in some form, suggesting that Marge's fear of flying could have originated from any number of sources. Zweig, though, has her reasons for wanting to glibly pass over this "rich tapestry", as she's cottoned on that Homer is the real source of Marge's troubles, although more because of Homer's own actions than anything Marge lets slip, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy (Marge only betrays her resentment toward Homer once, when she relates a recurring, copyright-infringing Lost In Space-themed dream in which she casts Homer as Dr Smith). Homer's earlier response to Marge's plight - "The important thing is for your mother to repress what happened. Push it deep down inside her so she'll never annoy us again" - tells you all you need to know on why that is (it's also implicit in the episode title, a nod to the 1973 novel Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, which explores female sexuality from the perspective of a heroine looking to transcend the limitations of her unfulfilling marriage). Homer intervenes at this point, insisting that Zweig does not have to make Marge Superwoman, thus ensuring that the really painful issues stay haphazardly swept under the rug. Besides Homer, the other devil lurking in plain sight throughout "Fear of Flying" may be Jacqueline Bouvier, who appears in a couple of Marge's flashback but is never the focus of the discussions, despite an earlier moment in which we were reminded of some of the detrimental ways in which she conditioned Marge to suppress her emotions throughout childhood. (It's hinted, and not just here, that Marge may have as troubled a relationship with Jackie as Homer does with Abe, although this was never really explored in any substantial depth, possibly because Julie Kavner disliked doing Jackie's voice - in fact, I think this may even be her last speaking appearance for a lengthy stretch).

Marge's association with Zweig bows out with a callback to a moment from the Season 4 episode "Selma's Choice", in which we get another glimpse of Marge's peculiar obsession with reenvisioning details from her life in order to project herself into world of the 1991 film The Prince of Tides. Here, though, Marge doesn't explicitly acknowledge the connection, so unless you're familiar with the film, or the novel by Pat Conroy, you may be slightly confused by this reference. Marge tells Zweig that she will continue to honor the difference she has made by thinking, "Lowenstein, Lowenstein..." whenever she hears the wind whistling through the leaves (which is how Nick Nolte's character paid homage to Barbra Streisand's character at the end of that film, more-or-less) and blissfully ignores Zweig's indignant reassertion of her true identity, choosing to keep uttering "Lowenstein, Lowenstein..." as she goes her separate way. I presume this is Marge's attempt to affix her own glossy Hollywood sheen onto the ostensible end of her story, to convince herself of resolution where none exists. It's probably not a good sign that, rather than face the world with a heightened new awareness, she heads out retreating ever deeper into the comforts of fantasy. And, despite Marge's insistence that her surface-scratching with Dr Zweig has changed her life, we know that her newfound ability to get on that plane is ultimately a seriously hollow victory. As Homer had already reminded her, going on vacation is an opportunity for her to clean up after chaotic family in another state. That unseen carp swimming around her at the end, coupled with Homer's nonchalant commentary, seems especially ominous in that regard.

Still, if Marge got to watch Fearless out of the deal then the entire experience wasn't wholly in vain. Forget Alive, Fearless is the one you want to ride with.

Pepsi '95: Casper vs Aluminum

It goes without saying that there's no such thing as peacetime between the colas. The Cola Wars peaked in the 1980s and while neither side has ever made a move quite as tectonic-splitting as Coca-Cola's New Coke gambit, their brawl continued into the preceding decade and would occasionally throw up a few fascinating developments, such as the clear cola fad of the early 90s, a short-lived phenomenon that Coca-Cola willfully destroyed with their dirty little kamikaze tactics. Coca-Cola learned how to utilise the commercial appeal of cute and cuddly polar bears, while Pepsi hitched themselves to the Spice Girls' bandwagon and offered bribery in the form of Pepsi Stuff. So ubiquitous was the rivalry that not even Casper could escape it. He was forced to pick a side, and he chose Pepsi (perhaps their underdog status made them more appropriate for the downtrodden young wraith). Hence, there was a Pepsi commercial, around the time of the movie, where we saw Casper wrestle with a can of Pepsi, and discovering, to his chagrin, that aluminum obeys a different set of rules to ectoplasm.

These kinds of commercial tie-ins might strike one as heavy-handed, but it was all part of milieu back in the 1990s, and Casper was far from the only cinematic character to vaunt the joys of Pepsi just in the summer of 1995 alone. There was another ad where Amy, the signing gorilla from Frank Marshall's jungle-action thriller Congo, requested a Pepsi. Heck, even The Simpsons were in on it - they had a tie-in promotion with Pepsi as part of their "Who Shot Mr Burns?" contest. The Congo Pepsi ad strikes me as being somewhat out of character with the movie it's connected to (more so than the Casper ad), and yet the most incongruous movie/cola tie-in promotion of them all would have to be an ad from three years earlier promoting...Alien 3, of all things, which frankly makes that Alien 3 parody we'd occasionally see in the opening sequence to The Critic look tame and sensible by comparison. Here, we discovered that Xenomorphs actually prefer the taste of Pepsi to human fluids, and can be dissuaded from chowing on a prospective victim's hide if you can point them in the direction of the nearest Pepsi vending machine. Too bad that Sigourney Weaver and her crew never figured that out. Heck, we can go back even further, to 1988, and to the other side of the battlefield, where we had a Diet Coke commercial with Jessica Rabbit singing "Diet Coke" over and over, and Roger brandishing a can of the eminent liquid, in case you were at risk of missing the point. I technically find this set-up even more questionable than a Pepsi-drinking Xenomorph, given that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is set in 1947, and Diet Coke wasn't introduced until 1982. Compared to the aforementioned Pepsi ads, there's not even an attempt to create much of a narrative around Roger and Jessica's cola lust; it's pretty much just a case of the characters flaunting the product as much as possible within thirty seconds. I'd brand it the very model of commercial crass, but for the fact that I'm a sucker for any footage with Roger, Jessica and Eddie Valiant rubbing shoulders. In the same way, the Casper ad is neat for all the extra time we get to spend stalking the corridors of Whipstaff Manor (including another glimpse into Harvey's office and of the organ that never got to fulfill its purpose in the finished movie).

The Casper ad boasts an eerily similar premise to that Pepsi ad about a man's ongoing battle with a Pepsi vending machine that wouldn't accept his crumpled-up dollar bill, which received a shout-out in the Negativland song "Drink It Up". By comparison, the Casper ad isn't quite as bleak (we don't get the background noise of "Lonesome Town" by Ricky Nelson to emphasise the aura of almost apocalyptic abandonment), but it's more-or-less the exact same scenario - our protagonist is all alone and desperate for a can of Pepsi, only to find that the limitations of their physical environs are preventing them from accessing the sweetness within. As we leave them, both remain locked in their respective Sisyphean struggle, with the onscreen reminder that Nothing Else Is A Pepsi, and the grim implication that there's nothing else out there for them. Actually, in Casper's case there is a very obvious solution to his problem, which is simply to open the refrigerator door. Come to think of it, why isn't he doing that? Is the can of Pepsi just so alluring that Casper just can't overcome the compulsion to keep his hold, lest he never gets it back again? Then again, maybe that kind of graspiness is perfectly in-character for Casper - it was, after all, his refusal to let go of a sled that led to his becoming a ghost in the first place. Once again, life (signified here by a Pepsi can, and the nihilistic intimation, implicit in the tagline, that the world beyond it is little more than an abyss of unfulfilling nothingness) is something that Casper has to learn to relinquish in order to experience.

Naturally, since Casper ain't got no life, ain't got guts, ain't got no liver, if he were to drink that Pepsi then it would literally pass right through him and leave a sticky puddle on the Whipstaff kitchen floor. But maybe that's one of the advantages of being dead. You're beyond the point where sugar can hurt you.

Hilltop Reunion '90: Can't Beat The Feeling

Coca-Cola's iconic "Hilltop" spot might have come in many years before my time, but it's still an ad tremendous nostalgia for me. It's a strange nostalgia - basically, a nostalgia filtered through somebody else's nostalgia, and for something I didn't even remember from the time. You see, my nostalgia is not for the original ad from 1971, but for the sequel that arrived just over eighteen years later, and which debuted during Super Bowl XXIV on 28th January 1990. I have no memory of watching the ad in the year it appeared, but I stumbled across it three or four years later on a home recording. Back then I was experiencing my induction into the slippery world of nostalgia by mining old VHS tapes for old ads and idents, and delighting whenever any of them had the vaguest chimes of familiarity for me, and I unearthed this one particular ad that opened with a blonde-haired woman informing her daughter that "You know it happened right here, twenty years ago." I was intrigued and maybe a little frustrated that the ad never specified what had happened upon that hill twenty years ago, but before I knew it the woman had burst into this hopeful song about doves and apple trees, all of these other people were flocking out of the blue to join her (each and every one of them brandishing a Coca-Cola bottle), and the ad worked a remarkable kind of magic on me. I still lived in blissful ignorance of the original ad to which it was referring (a clip showing a facial close-up of the then-teenage protagonist Linda Higson plays, but only fleetingly), and yet I felt intuitively that I understood exactly what was going on; that whatever had happened twenty years ago was recurring again with these people, and it was as alive as it ever had been. Even at the time I thought it bemusing that the consumption of Coca-Cola was being equated with laudable values like loving the Earth and your fellow human, but there was nevertheless something wondrous about the notion of the hills spontaneously erupting in a great euphoric flare, and everyone convening to sing about the joys of peace, love and Coca-Cola. In 1990, the ad signified a convergence of the old and new - the adult participants singing their old nostalgic jingle, as the younger generation races in singing the current "Can't Beat The Feeling" jingle - and yet by the time I discovered it, the ad, barely a few years old, already struck me as a relic of a bygone time. The fashions and hairstyles seemed mildly out of step with contemporary trends, and "Can't Beat The Feeling" had long been replaced by "Can't Beat The Real Thing", and more recently by "Always Coca-Cola". The ad had the power to transport me back into another time, a not-too-distant past that nevertheless seemed a world removed, and in the process put me in touch with an altogether more remote past, one that I had not experienced first-hand and which was much more fuzzily-defined. I still didn't know what had happened twenty years ago, but I felt the same yearning for it that the characters did. It was a borrowed memory through a borrowed memory, and my misplaced warm feelings were putty in the hands of the Powers That Be. The message of the ad was that the world keeps turning and the population keeps regenerating; change is inevitable, and generations come and go, but Coca-Cola is the one great constant, our cultural and temporal unity. The time may be wildly out of joint, but there's always Coca-Cola.

The 1990 ad is popularly known as "Hilltop Reunion", although "Generations" is given as the onscreen title, and it features around twenty-five members of the original assembly and their families. Tracking down as many of the original cast as possible was no small task - naturally, Linda Higson, who had been working as an au pair in Italy when she was picked to open the 1971 ad, was the most coveted of the lot, but she very nearly slipped the net. As this Associated Press article explains, since that ad, she had moved back to her native Britain, married and assumed the name Neary, and to further complicate matters, Coca-Cola had incorrectly recorded her maiden name as Hipson, meaning that their chances of tracing her were akin to finding a needle in the haystack. In the end, their last ditch option was to run a print ad in several key newspapers, and this was fortuitously seen by one of Neary's friends and brought to her attention. Neary once again opens the ad, this time accompanied by her 10-year-old daughter Kelly.

The above ad is the version that I'm familiar with, although it seems that there was an alternate version, which I'm going to assume was the one that played to US audiences. This one can be found in the video below, which also contains some behind-the-scenes footage.

Watching the above version, there are two key differences that immediately leap out at me - firstly, the voices of Neary and her daughter have been conspicuously dubbed to remove their British accents. Secondly, every repeated utterance of "The feeling you get from a Coca-Cola Classic!" plays like a jar on my personal nostalgia; it's vaguely dislocating, like seeing a version of your own memory misremembered through someone else's. In early 1990, Coca-Cola was still feeling the knock-on effects of the introduction of New Coke in 1985, and I'm not sure at what point they stopped having to specify which of the beverages they were referring to in a given campaign (I don't think this was such an issue outside of the US and Canada, where the original formula was never replaced). Although Coca-Cola is presented as the one constant in an ever-changing world, that specification adds its own layer of meaning. Compared to the non-Classic ad, this one presents a somewhat disturbed timeline, in which the beverage's identity has been confused, and the unbeatable feeling described by the Hilltop gang has faced a threat to its existence. Calling it a "classic" suggests a more vintage model, and still we see the shadow of New Coke, the trendy contender that recently attempted to consign it to a bygone age. The ad becomes less a celebration of generational bridges than a reminder of our deeply chaotic universe, where even the nexus of our very reality - The Real Thing - is subject to the occasional rearrangement.

Burger King '85: Herb's The Word

The New Coke fiasco wasn't the only questionable marketing strategy to be deployed by a major corporate brand back in 1985. Kicking off its short-lived run in November that year was Burger King's "Herb" campaign, which doesn't bear quite the same level of timeless notoriety as Coca-Cola's legendary faux pas, but nevertheless remains a ready and gift-wrapped target for any editorial looking to scoff at a naff nostalgic curio. In the 1980s, it wasn't just the soft drinks that were attempting to obliterate each other's market shares by blitzing consumers with incessant advertising. The fast food chains were also waging their own equally cutthroat war, and Herb was one of the more baffling by-products of the culinary combat.

In the US, the burger wars were being fought principally between three restaurants - McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's (Wendy's, though, does not have as strong an international presence as the other two). McDonald's led the market by such a significant margin that the other two had basically no chance of toppling them, and in their case the battle was more for the privilege of claiming the number two spot. Naturally, a memorable advertising campaign could go a long way, and in 1984 Wendy's had found great success with their "Where's The Beef?" campaign, in which an elderly woman named Clara griped about the small sizes of their competitors' burgers. Burger King hit back the following year with a campaign devised by advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, in which they posed an altogether more imperative question: "Where's The Herb?" They referred not to some kind of secret flavouring in their own burger recipe, but to some guy named Herb. Burger King urgently wanted to know where he was at.

Actually, the more vexing question, to begin with, was not so much where was Herb as who was Herb? As the campaign got underway, he was shrouded in mystery. All we knew about Herb was that he was "different". How different? He was the only man in the entire world who had never eaten a Whopper (supposedly...). Needless to say, Burger King were deeply unhappy with Herb for his fierce non-conformity, and so, as per their advertising, was the rest of America. Where Herb was specifically was immaterial, for he was defined where he wasn't. All that mattered was that he wasn't anywhere within the vicinity of a Burger King restaurant, and the campaign set about creating an aura of mistrust around anybody who could muster neither the interest or the appetite for popular taste.

The early stages of the campaign were all about how much Burger King hated this phantom Herb's guts for the fact that he wasn't filling them with their product. They resented Herb so much that they came up with a promotion specifically structured around shunning him. When ordering a Whopper, customers were encouraged to say "I'm not Herb" to get it for 99 cents - or, if they were named Herb, "I'm not the Herb you're looking for." In one commercial, it played like an inversion on that scene from Spartacus. Meanwhile, Burger King continued to taunt Herb with a series of print ads and sports banners calling him out on his Whopper aversion. The point, obviously, was to build intrigue and to get the name Herb to the forefront of every consumer's consciousness, but in terms of the campaign's internal narrative, in which Burger King is frequented by everybody except for Herb, their obsession with this one dissenter seems frankly sinister. That, I would say, is the campaign's greatest strength at this point. It's like something out of a dystopian nightmare, in which a corporate giant sets their sights on eviscerating an individual for no other reason than that they represent a challenge to their power. The chilling implication is that Herb is the only thing standing between Burger King and world domination. He is an anomaly they cannot afford to ignore because, for as long as he's out there and not gracing their buildings with his enigmatic presence, he's a reminder that resistance is not futile. It's a far cry from the marketing strategies favoured by McDonald's, which traditionally emphasised warmth, sunniness and family togetherness, and that's potentially not such a bad thing.

It was, however, only the beginning. Two months later, Burger King elected to bring closure to the mystery and, during Super Bowl XX, they unveiled Herb's likeness before a viewing public in a much-touted TV spot. Herb, it transpired, was a wet-looking, wet-sounding milquetoast portrayed by one Jon Menick. Burger King had tracked him down, abducted him and subjected him to all manner of torture before he'd cracked, for he was now singing the praises of the corporation that had devoted the last two months to making a pariah of him. Or so it would seem. Now that the public eye was finally on him, Herb revealed that he had just sampled Burger King's signature sandwich and that it was love at first bite. Ah well, kind of an anti-climax, don't you think? I'm not sure how much of a narrative was concocted around Herb's 180 transition, but I do wonder why, if it was really that easy, Burger King had so much trouble courting him in the first place?

By whatever means, Burger King finally had finally vanquished their lone resister and the path to world domination was clear. All that was left was to have Herb flaunt his contrition by visiting Burger King restaurants all across the country. In early 1986, Burger King ran a contest in which Menick (in character as Herb) would visit restaurants in every state, and the first person to spot him on each occasion would be awarded $5,000. Meanwhile, everybody present in the restaurant at the time would be entered into a prize draw for a chance of winning $1 million. Rather than convincing the public of Burger King's unquestionable supremacy, however, it had consumers questioning their credibility. Turns out, the masses weren't really taking to this Herb character, which was a serious blow Burger King, who had already poured millions of dollars into his being.

I've read conflicting accounts as to how the campaign was initially received, and at what point the air ran out of its tires. Some sources suggest that the original phase of the campaign was very successful and that people were genuinely hooked by the initial hype, but were ultimately disappointed when Herb's identity was revealed, feeling that the "reality" of his character fell somehow short of the mystery. Others suggest that people found the campaign weird and confusing from the start, and that by the time that Herb was revealed, the public was already sick of hearing about him. Wikipedia, in typically questionable Wikipedia fashion, states that it, "confused people who tried to follow the promotion because they did not know what Herb looked like." Now personally, I was way too young, and way too non-American to have any first-hand memories of this campaign, but from the outset it does seem to me like it was split into two distinct halves. There was the initial half, where Burger King was supposedly searching for Herb, and the onus was on the public to come forth, confirm that they were not Herb, and get their 99c Whopper. Only in the second half does it seem like the onus on the viewer to find Herb in the flesh, and that was after his identity had been revealed. I'm also going to assume that those cardboard standees with Herb's likeness were distributed to Burger Kings all across the country?

As to that infamous second phase, I can see why it might have sounded promising on paper. It was like a real-life Where's Waldo, two years before Waldo (or Wally, as he was originally called in his native Blighty) even existed. A live event happening all around you that, in theory, should have made every visit to Burger King seem magical and ripe with possibility. In practice, I suspect that most people probably figured that their chances of being in the right place at the right time were too minuscule to even bother with, particularly for such a paltry cash prize. The contest failed to drum up much enthusiasm, Burger King's stock dropped by 40%, and what's more, they were headed for a major PR nightmare when Herb arrived in Bessemer, Alabama and was spotted by 15-year-old Jason Hallman, who was denied the prize money on account of his age. Burger King were enforcing a 16+ age restriction on the contest, reportedly as a measure to discourage children from playing hooky and spending all day on the Herb hunt, and opted to give the money instead to Hallman's 16-year-old friend, who was with him at the time. Ouch. Hallman's parents raised a complaint with state senator Mac Parsons, the result being that the matter was formally investigated and Burger King were ultimately condemned by the Alabama senate, who concluded that Burger King had not made the restriction clear in its promotion and that their actions consequently amounted to consumer fraud. Now, I do see a clear "16 and older to enter" disclaimer in the above commercial (assuming that it wasn't added after the negative publicity the company garnered from this incident), but again, I think it's another aspect of the contest that probably wasn't well thought-out. It wasn't like a prize draw or a scratch card, where you could be sure to only distribute the items in question among adult customers - if a kid spotted Herb inside a restaurant, then you could bet that they weren't going to hold back on account of there being an age restriction. Giving the money to the kid's older friend also strikes me as rather a callous move on the part of Burger King. I wonder if they were still friends after that? (Likewise, I suspect the contest wasn't much fun for Burger King patrons who may have borne a passing resemblance to Menick - unless they wanted to create a bit of mayhem by trolling those who might have mistaken them for Herb.)

Once the contest had run its course, Burger King were officially done with Herb and eager to put this whole unwieldy business behind them. This was no skin off Menick's nose, for he was already moving up in the world, and went on to enjoy a fairly prolific career playing bit parts in various films and TV shows - among other places, you can spot him in the 80s Twilight Zone episode "The World Next Door" and the 1992 movie Forever Young. Burger King, though, were left with such a sour aftertaste that they never did business with J. Walter Thompson again.

The real problem with the "Herb" campaign, I think, aside from the awkwardly-implemented contest, is that, as noted, it was a campaign of two distinct phases, and those two phases really don't feel as though they belong in the same campaign. The early ads were spooky, grim and ominous, but perhaps that's what made them interesting. When Herb showed his face and immediately reversed his position on the Whopper, we were plucked right out of that dystopian universe where Burger King sought to crush the rights of individuals, and the tone switched to something altogether more upbeat and would-be screwball. As for Herb himself, I think it's fair to say that he had way more character when he was a non-character, and I can't help but wonder how much more mileage this campaign might have had if they had never left Phase I and allowed Herb to stay a phantom for the full duration. This, obviously, would have been contrary to Burger King's objective, which was to create a human mascot for their brand (in a similar vein to Wendy's Clara), but in giving him a face and a persona (albeit not much of a persona), it seems to me that Burger King missed the really obvious subtext implicit in those early ads, which is that "Herb" referred less to an individual character we could expect to meet down the line than to something more abstract and uncomfortable. He was an anti-mascot, rather than a mascot - a blank space, haunting precisely because just about anybody could be projected into it. The implicit narrative was that you, potentially, were Herb. You were the person who was derided, distrusted and shut out of the action because you weren't bowing to the temptations of the King. When you informed that cashier that "I'm not Herb" or "I'm not the Herb you're looking for", it was as much a means of reasserting your own identity and your belonging as a B.K. consumer as it was of claiming a cut-price Whopper. Herb represented the self-willed exile, and you were encouraged to not be Herb. In the end, I don't think it mattered too much who played Herb or how he was characterised. Just to make Herb into an actual, tangible person and to have him develop an instantaneous passion for the Whopper kind of flew in the face of everything he signified. The "Herb" story is fascinating, because it's a case of a corporation not getting the meaning of their own campaign.

So negative were NBC's memories of Herb that in 2007 they voted his heavily-publicised reveal in 1986 as the second worst Super Bowl commercial of all-time. What took the top spot? Well, what do you think?