Bedazzled 2000: The Devil and Koyaanisqatsi

The 2000 remake of Bedazzled is one of those movies that I would probably enjoy a whole lot more if not for the movie itself, if that makes sense.

A reworking of  Stanley Donen's classic 1967 Faustian comedy starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, our protagonist is Elliot (Brendan Fraser), a lonely office worker who's picked up at a bar by the Devil and presented with the offer of a lifetime - seven wishes in exchange for ownership rights to his soul. The unique hook here being that the big D appears in the form of the tantalising Elizabeth Hurley. She's zeroed in on Elliot in part due to his low ranking in the social food chain, but what makes him particularly vulnerable to the she-Devil's machinations is his love-sickness for his work colleague Alison (Frances O'Connor), and it's Lucy-fer's supposed ability to make their union possible that seals the deal. The Devil is nice enough to give Elliot an escape clause, whereby once he's had enough of a particular wish, he has the option of cancelling it and returning to his default reality (she could have gotten him to burn through his seven wishes a heck of a lot faster if she wasn't so generous).

The establishing act is, honestly, fine. The sequences where Elliot meets the Devil and is seduced to the dark side are where the film is at its most breezy and likeable. It's once we get into the "meat" of the story, where Elliot starts making his wishes and the Devil delights in corrupting them (and the obtuse Elliot does make it supremely easy for her), that the experience becomes a drag. We know that none of Elliot's wishes are going to work out as he wants, and the presence of a reset button means that we also know that whatever happens in each individual reality ultimately won't have any lasting consequences for the overarching narrative. With that in mind, it all comes down to how entertaining the wish fulfilment sequences are as their own self-contained set-pieces. The original 1967 film pulls it off. The remake not so much, part of the problem being that the sketches have a tendency to advertise their solution upfront. It's usually too transparent from the outset what went wrong with Elliot's wish for the playing out to be very much fun. Likewise, God shows up and intervenes in Elliot's journey, and it's supposed to be a twist which character he is, but you'll have figured it out the instant you lay eyes on them. There is seriously only one character that he could be (clue: it was 2000, and Hollywood was caught up in a passionate love affair with the Magical Negro). For a film about playing with fire, Bedazzled 2000 ultimately suffers from playing things just a little too safe; in the end, even the Devil's sultry temptress act seems more cute than artfully charismatic.

In spite of my complaints, I come away still somewhat liking Bedazzled 2000, but it's definitely a film that benefits from the presence of a fast forward button (in fact, I think there is a potentially promising edit to be had in implementing a visible fast forward through all of Elliot's wish sequences). The most intriguing aspect of Bedazzled is the sequence that accompanies the opening credits. Here, we supposedly see the Earth from the Devil's perspective, as she scans the population for susceptible clientele, momentarily freezing on a prospective target while a caption appears on screen, each giving us a little window in that individual's coveted soul. Subjects are defined as "honest", "optimist" and "talks during movies". Her unwitting quarry are overwhelmingly human, although she momentarily considers going after a dog bearing the "neurotic" label (I'd be curious to see how that scenario would play out, actually). What's intriguing about this opening is that the Devil's eye-perspective of Earth and its denizens seems deliberately reminiscent of Godfrey Reggio's seminal arthouse flick Koyaanisqatsi (1982). In particular, the credits are reminiscent of the film's most infamous sequence, "The Grid", in which we get to observe the denizens of modern urbanisation from a bombardment of different vantage points. Many of the same techniques are deployed - time-lapse photography featuring crowds of people rushing about their daily grind, perspective shots enabling us to hurtle along overpasses at gut-wrenching speed, sped-up clouds that offer an intermittent glimpse of the natural world existing on the sidelines.

The title of Reggio's film comes from the Hopi language, and translates to "life out of balance". The title being the biggest giveaway that the film is intended as an indictment of this way of life; the film itself eschews commentary in favour of a soundtrack from Philip Glass, leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusions from the imagery. Early sequences focus primarily on natural phenomenon - canyons, waterfalls and deserts in all their awe-inspiring splendour - but as the film progresses we see increasing evidence of human modification, as a new phenomenon lays claim to the landscape, the phenomenon being that of technology. The opening portions of the film are devoid of any actual first-hand signs of human life, the power lines that span the desert and the great imposing smokestacks that penetrate the skies initially doing all the talking for us. As we wade deeper into urbanisation, however, we discover where all the humans are at - playing Q*bert and getting daily slices of nutrition in shopping mall food courts. The sequence is masterfully shot and edited so as to inspire a tangle of contradictory responses; at once beautiful and nightmarish, the imagery speaking of both the potency and vulnerabilities of humankind, the might of species matched with the powerlessness of the individual. The rows and rows of supermarket shelves stocked with goods and the numerous venues competing for patrons' attentions in a shopping mall give off the appearance of choice in an overall arena of entrapment. Reggio himself has commented that the purpose of the film was to illustrate how: "The main event today is not seen by those of us who live in it...the transiting from old nature, or the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation, into a technological milieu, into mass technology as the environment of life...it's not that we use technology, it's that we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we're no longer conscious of its presence."

The journey we undertake in Koyaanisqatsi is effectively that out of Eden and into the Tower of Babel (an image evoked more explicitly in the second of its spiritual sequels, Naqoyqatsi), a Babel that seems to be simultaneously ascending into ever more dizzying heights while erupting into a borderline apocalyptic chaos. There is a universal language being spoken around this tower - one that urges its denizens onto a course of constant consumption - yet it comes from such a multitude of ceaselessly jabbering voices as to amount to an all-out sensory overload, an idea most effectively communicated in one shot where we see a woman and her two children in an electronics store, surrounded by walls of television screens all transmitting the exact same image. This is followed by a channel-surfing sequence in which we surge through multiple television images with the same kind of feverish frenzy as those aforementioned overpass shot, digesting brief extracts from news broadcasts and commercials; too brief to have much individual meaning, but which all ad up to convey a single, entirely comprehensible message that seems to arise from a state of total delirium. Possibly my favourite shot in The Grid is that in which we pan down through the various levels of a shopping mall, a massive complex of criss-crossing escalators, artificial lighting and the occasional desperately out of place greenery; throughout this shot I find myself caught between marvelling at the architecture and the claustrophobic sensation that I'm navigating my way through some kind of maze that's leading me further and further away from the prospect of ever seeing daylight again. In fact, that's my overall impression of life in The Grid - the denizens all appear to be navigating through a giant maze comprised of endless, snake-like passages, all racing toward some kind of objective that none of them seem to be achieving. It is a maze in which all the inhabitants seem to be perpetually lost. Throughout much the footage, the humans are too numerous and too indistinct for any particular one to stand out, but every now and then you get some sense of the individual lives adrift in the system, and micro-narratives start to suggest themselves - I'm quite fond of one shot that seems to function as a split-screen, showing a lone office worker through the window of a skyscraper while crowds and traffic whizz by on the streets below. Likewise, a moment in which we follow an individual woman through an unusually deserted subway seems almost startling when juxtaposed with so much congestion.

The opening of Bedazzled thrives on similar shots depicting masses of humans racing through a plethora of streets and subways. In lieu of Glass's haunting score these shots are unaccompanied by Johnnie Taylor's "Just The One (I've Been Looking For)", cluing us in that we're in for a more comical look at the notion of urban indifference. Here, the Devil has the ability to freeze and identify individuals among the non-stop sprawl by a range of defining characteristics - she can pick out a "sinner" from a "saint", and a "peeping tom", "fake" and "optimist" who all happen to cross paths on their daily commute. There are a few obvious jokes, such as the so-called environmentalist who negligently disposes of a paper cup, the bridge and groom who are tying the knot "for money" and "for green card" respectively, and the "ex-yuppie" who seems to regard a passing "ex-hippie" with an instinctual antipathy. For many of the subjects, however, the labels seem merely absurd in their arbitrariness. The "virgin" seems indistinguishable from the "horny", while our aforementioned fake, peeping tom and optimist barely register as distinct figures. Ostensibly, these are labels which evoke the kind of micro-narratives intermittently suggested in The Grid sequence of Koyaanisqatsi, and the contradictions and general human messiness underpinning this seemingly formidable surge of global conquest. They take on a more sinister edge, however, when we consider that the particular perspective from which we are seeing the world is that of the Devil's own personal shopping channel. The labels which supposedly define each individual therein basically amount to advertising hooks designed to talk up each unwitting soul to a consumer hell-bent on bending them to her own ends.

On one level, the Koyaanisqatsi nods in Bedazzled function as an elaborate set-up to a visual punchline that occurs at the very end of the opening sequence, when Elliot gets stuck holding the door at the Synedyne building (or Syn for short - get it?) for a seemingly endless succession of visitors. The image is indicative of the disconnect between Elliot and his environs, the idea that he's a lost soul struggling to navigate the particular grid he inhabits - he is left standing out in the cold (literally and figuratively) while the rest of the world rushes him by, apparently knowing exactly where it needs to be (unbeknownst to Elliot, this disconnect is universal across Babel, where nobody speaks exactly the same tongue, although everyone is ultimately pushing toward more-or-less the same ends). It also confirms that he has the all-important quality the Devil desires in her next victim - he is a "doormat". Other characteristics that make Elliot an appealing target for Faustian trade include "lovesick", "desperate", "oblivious" and "loser". The one characteristic that is not cited, but is implicit amid the rest is "hungry". The Devil hones in on Elliot because he is especially deficient on the satiation front. Elliot is in a constant state of hungering for the life he feels he's missing out on. He hungers for success, and he hungers for acceptance among his peers. Primarily he hungers for Alison, who represents the peak of Elliot's desires, and what ultimately convinces him to make his pact with the Devil. On another, more visceral level he hungers for something as deceptively basic as a Happy Meal, and even that yearning turns against him.

Elliott's first wish is his most mundane - he wishes for a Big Mac and a Coke, and this the Devil fulfils by taking him on a bus ride to the nearest McDonald's and ordering the requested items, which she forces him to pay for out of his own pocket. This is an underhanded tactic on the part of the Devil, who seeks to create ambiguity as to whether or not she has officially fulfilled a wish for Elliot, thus misleading him into thinking he has more wishes remaining than he does. But there is nevertheless an implicit teaching in this episode that the Devil even goes so far as to spell out for Elliot, when he complains about being expected to pay for his Big Mac: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Only marginally more subtle is the implicit message when Elliot holds up his ill-gotten (or not) meal and declares (albeit sarcastically): "This is really the work of the Devil". Indeed, there is a connection to be made between the culture of mass consumption embodied in that mundane Big Mac and the kind of life tipped way out of balance in which the Devil is clearly most her element. The Devil reminds Elliot that there is a hidden cost to convenience, a message likewise nestled not far below the surface of Koyaanisqatsi. Reggio's film conveys the stark warning that as we immure ourselves in a self-made maze constructed from wall-to-wall television sets, overpasses and shopping malls, we risk losing touch with the bigger picture, and with the world that flounders beneath the weight of our technological addictions. Juxtaposed with all the imagery of consumption within The Grid are odes to the industrial processes that go largely hidden to the average consumer, but which make our diets of confectionery and auto-mobiles possible; these too are marvels in their adroitness, co-ordination and efficiency, and yet there is something unnerving, even unappetising about these mass production sequences. They are reminders of how much of the journey from raw resource to recognisable product happens out of sight, the momentary glimpses we get here barely scratching the surface, to say nothing of the deeper scratches extending far across the landscapes beyond the city as a result of our gargantuan appetites. The fast food ordered by Elliot is the perfect symbol for the kind of on-demand gratification most of us are accustomed to seeing materialise out of nowhere, divorced from the bigger picture, but to which a multitude of visible strings are firmly attached. The cycle of craving and consumption that defines life in The Grid is echoed in the business model by the Devil operates, for both thrive on keeping their subjects mired in a state of constant desperate yearning for on-demand gratification, all while mounting toward increasingly apocalyptic consequences. Elliot risks losing his soul, not merely in the Faustian sense, but to the perpetual feelings of inadequacy and dissatisfaction on which both corporations and the Princess of Darkness depend.

As I say, the wishes themselves are the least interesting aspect of the film. Only the first wish (for a Big Mac) and the seventh wish have any real impact on the overarching narrative, and in between we get to see him expend his five wishes on living out cliched and easily corruptible scenarios that represent conventional models of success - Elliot wishes for various incarnations of wealth, power and fame, only to discover that each comes with an unpleasant sting in the tail. So, let's skip directly to the ending, and it's somewhat of an odd one. It's an ending that effectively looks to have it both ways, in that Elliot both does and doesn't get what he wants. During his final encounter with the Devil, she advises him that Heaven is a place on Earth, as is Hell, and whichever one he inhabits ultimately comes down to his own perspective on life. Elliot discovers that what anchors him to the latter is personal desire; when he uses his final wish exclusively for Alison's benefit and not his own, he finds that his Faustian contract is voided, an outcome that makes the Devil curiously happy, as if she has been privately rooting for Elliot all along. Elliot accepts that Alison is unattainable - once he actually gets close enough to strike up a conversation with the woman, he discovers that she's already in a relationship. He does, however, end up with a mirror version of Alison, one who seems custom-designed to be his perfect partner; after his adventure, Elliot returns to his house to discover a new neighbour moving in the form of Nicole (also O'Connor), and the two of them hit it off. The best sense I can make of this ending is that Nicole's uncanny appearance is intended to clue us in that Elliot has finally made it to Heaven, having transcended his previously hellish existence, with Nicole representing the angelic counterpart to the corruptive Alison. Not that there was anything particularly sordid about Alison in herself. We spend nearly all of the picture viewing her through Elliot's distorted lens and barely get to know her as a character. And that's because she barely is a character. Rather, she represents the worst of Elliot's desires, the personification of the life that was forever out of his reach, and without which he'd convinced himself his existence was inherently debased. Nicole, on the other hand, is the embodiment of self-acceptance - she looks like Alison, but her personality more closely echoes Elliot's own, thus affirming that there was validity in the person he has been all along.

In the film's closing sequence, we slip back into Koyaanisqatsi mode, in a manner that deliberately echoes the opening moment in which Elliot was stuck holding the door for a stream of passers-by. Once again, time-lapse photography shows a succession of figures zipping across the local terrain while Elliot, along with Nicole, stays comparatively still. This time, though, there's not so much a sense of Elliot being lost and passed over in the daily grind as him having figured out exactly where he wants to be - which is to say, right there in the present moment - while the rest of the world races ever onward in the expectation of some vaguely defined better. Elliot and Nicole are not the only figures left out of the general scramble - we also see a Buddhist monk sitting upon a park bench, two more couples and a family - a minority of figures who appear to have stepped out of Babel and achieved something resembling clarity. We see that Elliot is still being observed by both God and the Devil, who are playing a game of chess together in the park; the ancient battle between virtue and vice continues, but in a much more amicable fashion than traditionally assumed. For the final frame, we close in on our two heavenly souls and get a glimpse of what life is like on the side of the angels - Nicole "hogs the covers" while Elliot "drinks from the carton." Heaven, much like Hell/Babel, is signified by the uncouth habits and all-round messiness that make up each individual therein, and here that's embraced as as good as it gets.

Bungle Boy Jeans (And That Has Made All The Difference!)

I admit that I haven't revisited enough of the series in my adult years to test this supposition, but is it fair to say that Tiny Toon Adventures was a freakier series than Animaniacs? It's certainly my recollection that Tiny Toon Adventures had a penchant for darker, more grotesque humor than its successor. Then again, I was a slightly younger child during Tiny Toon's run, so it could just be that it hit me at a more suggestible time. Not to mention that, the younger I was, the higher the likelihood that the numerous pop culture references would go right over my head. There were many, many episodes that confounded me, but none more confounding than "Acme Cable TV" (original air date November 11 1991), an episode built around the premise that Babs and Buster Bunny are unable to perform their usual schtick after coming down with the Taiwan flu (so called because it makes you sneeze with a Taiwanese accent), so instead we get to spend twenty-odd minutes hanging out on their couch as they flick through the delights of cable television, or in the words of Babs, "685 channels of viewer-pleasing mind-rot". Mind-rot starring themselves and their classmates, no less. Can we say VANITY?

Conceptually, "Acme Cable TV" bears a resemblance to the 1987 movie Amazon Women on The Moon, which follows a similar channel-hopping format - and, in both cases, the format is largely an excuse for unleashing a slew of micro parodies and skits that require little to no context or development (although Amazon Women has an ongoing narrative thread that it intermittently returns to, in the form of the titular film-within-a-film). Catching this episode back in the early 90s, I was not yet culturally savvy enough to appreciate the bulk of what was being referenced, and with no solid narrative grounding to focus my engagement, watching it swiftly became an exercise in all-out discombobulation, wherein I found myself at the mercy of Babs and Buster Bunny's (mercifully?) fickle attention spans. I remember being particularly frustrated when they cut away from one story just as it appeared to be getting started - I won't say which one for now, although the fact that I became invested in the scenario in question as a narrative probably speaks volumes of my naivety as a child.

One of the early skits was a faux commercial for the fictitious breakfast product "Foot Loops" - a blatant play on the cereal Fruit Loops, although that brand and its avian mascot meant nothing to me at the time. Nevertheless, even back then I was already well-versed enough in the language of television commercials to appreciate what was being lampooned - that is, the efforts of advertisers to make the banal, and sometimes just plain atrocious, look desirable, even the most ghastly kind of sugar-laden cereals (in fairness, I've never eaten Fruit Loops, but it looks absolutely revolting to me, and I can only assume the writer of this particular skit shared my sentiments). It gave me something I could latch onto, amid the chaos. I was hoping to see further spoof commercials littered throughout, but alas, there was only one other (I don't remember there being too many spoof commercials in Amazon Women on The Moon either, and one of the scant few was for a way more vile product than Foot Loops). But that second ad was so bizarre that it wound up being the episode highlight for me. Here, a dressed up Babs catches a taxi, but not without giving a sideways glance to the nonchalant Buster lingering beside the curb, who gets a mouthful of exhaust fumes when her taxi departs. Babs makes it all the way to the airport and up into the skies before a thought suddenly occurs to her, whereupon she backtracks all the way to Buster, to ask him the question that her mind cannot let be: "Are those Bungle Boy jeans you're wearing?" An impassive Buster confirms that he's not wearing anything beneath the waist at all, to which Babs responds, "That's what I thought," and her cab drives away, forcing Buster to once again chow on its exhaust.

It was another reference that was completely lost on me at the time, but the ad was spoofing a popular spot for the now-defunct brand Bugle Boy jeans (in the Tiny Toons skit, the brand has been modified to "Bungle", which means to screw something up, but is also a play on "bunny", referring to the leporine nature of the characters). Airing in the cusp between the 1980s and the 1990s (around the time that Levi's countered with the image of a young Brad Pitt being turned loose from prison in just his boxers), the scenario is actually pretty similar to that of the Tiny Toons skit, but that it takes place in an arid desert where our two participants may well be the only figments of human life within miles. A male hitch-hiker, clad in the denim of the hour, is passed by a female motorist, but she hastily backs up her vehicle to ask him the burning question: "Excuse me, are those Bugle Boy jeans that you're wearing?" He confirms that they are, whereupon she thanks him and drives away, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere. In a more sinister variant from the same campaign, a man received a telephone from his ultramodern apartment in what looked to be a dystopian near-future, to be greeted by the voice of a female voyeur wanting to know if those were Bugle Boy jeans he had on, whereupon she promptly hung up on him. In his case he possibly dodged a bullet.

The former ad is iconic enough to have been spoofed in a variety of venues, including an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head (no prizes for guessing what variant on the pivotal line they had to offer) and the music video to the 1991 Genesis single "I Can't Dance", which was a broad piss-take on the superficial quirkiness of contemporary jeans advertising in general (more on that later). Oddly enough, though, I feel that the Tiny Toons variation actually makes better use of its strange scenario than the original. Watching those Bugle Boy jeans ads, I really am scratching my head trying to crack the underlying narrative - obviously, the implication is that his choice of pants is the only fascinating thing about him, and the sole reason he's given a second look, but she just drives off and leaves him in the dust anyway. His jeans momentarily get him attention, but he doesn't get the ride. Compare it to Brad Pitt's triumphant turnabout at the end of the aforementioned Levi's ad, and this campaign seems curiously punishing of its product's in-universe patron.

With Babs and Buster Bunny, however...well, there is slightly more of a story going on there. I've no doubt that many of the added touches are there simply to play into the cartoon absurdity of their universe, such as Babs getting her plane to turn around in-flight on her own personal whim. Nevertheless, their looser reality cuts a little deeper into the underlying humanity (as it were) of the situation. The feeling I get is that Babs' ability to reverse her trajectory so readily is not a matter of idle curiosity, but a desperate, potent defiance in wanting to move backwards to a critical moment in time when things could potentially have gone differently. Babs is already far down what should logically be passed the point of no return when she manages, by sheer force of will, to turn around and take her story back to square one, driven by an overpowering sense of regret as to what she left behind. 

Unlike the aforementioned Foot Loops skit, this one doesn't advertise upfront its nature as a faux commercial, so a reasonable assumption would be that Babs is going backwards because she regrets not seizing the opportunity to strike up a conversation with the attractive young bunny who momentarily caught her eye before heading down a different direction and discarding the possibilities he potentially opened in a cloud of exhaust fumes. In actuality, she goes back to confirm that Buster isn't wearing the brand supposedly being advertised - when Buster points out that he isn't wearing pants at all, Babs states that she suspected as such and drives off, reinforcing her disregard for Buster with a second blast of exhaust. Again, an absurd outcome, but one that makes sense if viewed from the perspective of Babs' need to explore The Road Not Taken. Babs goes back, basically, to affirm that the path she had chosen was indeed the correct one, in eliminating the possibility that Buster was wearing the coveted jeans that would have marked him out as desirable company. The alternate path was indeed not worth pursuing, and Babs goes on her merry way. And that's what makes this unassuming skit so compelling to me. It plays like the perfect metaphor for very our human desire to know how things might otherwise have gone had we done things just a little differently, weighed against our intuition that we'd likely be no better off either way. That's the case for Babs, at least. Perhaps if Buster had possessed slightly better fashion prowess then he'd have avoided that mouthful of pollution the second time around.

The Lover (aka Ernie, I'll Be Happy If It Comes Up To My Chest)

Last time, I made some nebulous comparisons between a TV ad for a brand of soap that spooked me as a child and Harold Pinter's 1963 creation The Lover, which debuted as a television film, directed by Joan Kemp-Welch and starring Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant (who at the time was married to Pinter), before being transferred to the stage. This seems like a good enough opportunity to segue into talking about The Lover itself. Not only does it happen to be my favourite work of Pinter's, but the original 1963 film ranks as one of my all-time favourite pieces of television, period. The dialogue is tremendously witty, and the script boasts no shortage of beautifully constructed jokes, yet the film as a whole makes for such an incredibly intense and uncomfortable watch - a dry domestic drama charged by interludes of eroticism and a surprisingly sinister undercurrent. And it's poignant. There's an extent to which I find its ending scene almost unspeakably sad.

The Lover starts out with a perfectly nondescript scenario. Richard (Badel), the husband, is preparing to leave the house for a day at the office, and goes to bid Sarah (Merchant), the wife, farewell. But with the first words out of his mouth, the mundaneness is completely shattered, as he wastes no time in dropping their relationship's big bombshell: "Is your lover coming today?" "Mmm" replies an appreciative Sarah. After establishing that Sarah and her lover intend to occupy the house until about 6pm, Richard wishes her a pleasant afternoon, and departs.

So yes. While Richard is out at the office all day (or so he claims...), Sarah's favoured method of passing the hours is to entertain an extramarital lover, an arrangement that Richard not only tolerates but openly discusses with Sarah on return. Sarah's shamelessness initially seems to stem from the understanding that Richard takes no more than he dishes out - early in the film, Sarah coaxes Richard into admitting that he is not, in fact, at the office during the afternoon but out having an affair of his own, a revelation that bothers her only because Richard does not speak of his extramarital partner with the same degree of warmth and affection that she does her own:

 

Richard: You can't sensibly enquire whether a whore is witty. It's of no significance whether she is or she isn't. She's simply a whore, a functionary who either pleases or displeases.

Sarah: And she pleases you?

Richard: Today she's pleasing, tomorrow one can't say.

Sarah: I must say I find your attitude to women rather alarming.

Richard: Why? I wasn't looking for your double, was I? I wasn't looking for a woman whom I could respect as you, whom I could admire and love as I do you, was I? All I wanted was, how should I put it, someone who could express and engender lust with all lust's cunning. Nothing more.

This is not your traditional love triangle, however. There is a dramatic twist, midway through the proceedings, which massively alters our understanding of the situation, and it's here that I give notice to anyone unfamiliar with either the television film or the play to turn back now, lest you miss out on the opportunity to experience this wonderful story fresh.

On the second day, we finally get a decent look at Sarah's lover, and he turns out to be...none other than Richard himself, under the assumed moniker of "Max". That's right, all this talk of their respective affairs transpires to have been nothing more than a bit of kinky role-playing on the part of a bored couple desperately seeking refuge from the stagnant state of their relations. All innocent fun and games then? Not exactly. Once we have this vital knowledge, we can see that the interactions between Richard and Sarah during the first half of the film are loaded with uncomfortable double meanings. Both players, in their commitment to maintaining the fantasy, are never permitted to break character, from either side of the equation (Sarah, to Richard's chagrin, commits a taboo early on, in neglecting to change her shoes between Max's departure and Richard's return). As such, whatever commentary each has to offer on the content of their role-playing can be made only indirectly (the absence of direct communication was a favourite recurring theme of Pinter's). Having returned on the first evening, Richard takes the opportunity to complain about the intense sunlight he experienced earlier in the sitting room as Max: "Very sunny on the road. Of course by the time I got onto it the sun was beginning to sink, but I imagine it was quite warm here this afternoon." This also gives added significance to the portions of dialogue where they speak of their respective lovers, for they are, in practice, giving critiques of one another's performances and their overall impressions of what this reveals of the person underneath. Hence, Sarah's indignation at being described as a "common or garden slut", when the worst observation she has to offer about Richard/Max in return is that he "has his moods, of course." The interplay between Sarah and Richard, and the clear disparity between what the fictitious affair means to each of them, is indicative of the tensions brewing beneath their (admittedly unconventional) display of domestic harmony. Sarah, who asserts that "Things are beautifully balanced", is ostensibly happy with the arrangement, but we can trace Richard's expression of dissatisfaction right back to his initial description of his (equally fictitious) day at work: "Long meeting. Rather inconclusive." Compare this to his summary of the subsequent day's work, which follows on from his motion, as Max, to bring about an end to the role-playing - "What a dreary conference, went on all day. Still good work done, I think. Something achieved" - and it becomes apparent that Richard's daily synopses of life in the office are actually pithy summaries of his latest tenure as Max - in essence, his job - expressed in the driest and least emotional terms possible.

We learn that Sarah and Richard have been married for ten years, and it is implied that things between them were (perhaps not unexpectedly) a lot more fervid in the beginning - Sarah states that "I didn't take my lover ten years ago. Not quite. Not on the honeymoon," in response to Richard's charge that she has forced him to endure a "humiliating ignominy" for the past decade. Their relationship now is almost comically sterile - Pinter makes a point of illustrating their non-existent sexual relations by showing that they sleep in separate beds. Sarah's lack of passion for Richard is signified in her repeated offer of a cold supper every evening - she reserves all of her fire and intensity for Max, a fact that makes Richard absurdly jealous. The "ignominy" of which he speaks is rooted in the frustration of being unable to experience sexual relations with Sarah without pretending to be someone else - previously, he conveyed disbelief at Sarah's profession that it is Richard, and not Max, whom she really loves. Sarah's reference to their honeymoon, meanwhile, alludes to a time when she and Richard were able to enjoy more conventional intimacy, with her "not quite" in particular suggesting that Max is a lot closer to the suitor Richard was back in the day. During one of their earlier sparring matches, Sarah challenged Richard's assertation that she was the first to "look elsewhere", suggesting that it was changes to Richard's interests and disposition that proved the snake in their marital Eden - which in itself prompts the question as to which identity is assumed and which represents the "true" character. Sarah, meanwhile, might claim that the status quo is beautifully balanced, but we sense that this merely a compromise on her part and that, given the choice, she would sooner have Max full time. When Richard comments that Max has never seen the night from the house, Sarah gives the pointed response, "He's obliged to leave before the sunset, unfortunately." We can only speculate as to whether her faux pas involving the shoes was genuinely a mistake, as she claims, or an act of rebellion (conscious or unconscious) designed to coax Max out of Richard out of hours. This also accounts for why Sarah takes Richard's "common or garden slut" remarks as sorely as she does; more than simply a light-hearted jab at her contributions to the role-playing, Richard is deliberately downplaying the possibility that these games constitute anything more to him than, as he so delicately puts it, "a quick cup of cocoa while they're checking the oil and water".

The notion that these afternoon visits from Max represent a return to a kind of marital purity for the couple is tempered by the nature of their erotic exchange, which thrives on a heavy air of threat and danger. While Max and Sarah are together, they delve into deeper role-playing games still, in which both characters flit between a range of identities. Sarah, who is alternately addressed by Max as "Dolores" and "Mary" throughout this sequence, assumes the role of a vulnerable woman pursued by a potential rapist while awaiting her husband in a park, and rescued by a man claiming to be the park keeper; both assailant and benefactor are fulfilled by Max. The precariousness continues as the self-proclaimed park keeper lures Sarah/Dolores/Mary into the park keeper's hut and apparently traps her there, intermittently shrinking away to acknowledge the wife he insists is still waiting for him. We see extracts from another game in which the two dance their fingers across a bongo drum (an image that appears in both the opening and closing titles) as part of a ritualised interaction; the tentative manner with which Sarah's fingers approach and stroke Max's, followed by the predatory manner with which he grabs and pins down her hand, also conveys an element of threat. As is aptly observed in the BFI's entry on the film, their hands look like a pair of mating spiders, giving a precarious, potentially deadly air to the proceedings.

The Lover is predominantly a two-hander, with Badel and Merchant being the only on-screen figures to feature for most of the film, although a third character does appear, briefly, at around the midway mark. While waiting for her lover to arrive, Sarah is startled by an unexpected (and undesired) call from the local milkman, played by Welsh actor Michael Forrest. As per the play's Wikipedia entry, the appearance of the milkman is a simple diversionary tactic on Pinter's part: "Pinter leads the audience to believe that there are three characters in the play: the wife, the husband and the lover." This may well be true for the stage productions, and the impression you might indeed be inclined to form if you noticed three names on the playbill. It is noteworthy, however, that the original television film does not attempt to practice this deception on the viewer, with Forrest receiving no credit until the end. To the contrary, I would suggest that Forrest's very presence, however fleeting, is a disturbance; when Sarah opens the door to reveal him standing there in the place of her lover, he registers immediately as a stranger to this scenario. The viewer knows, from the outset, that he is not Sarah's lover (although his being a milkman constitutes an entire gag in itself) - earlier in the film, we get a small glimpse of her lover from behind, and the two visibly do not match. More critically, the first half of the film has been so tightly restricted to Sarah and Richard, and to what goes on within the confines of their property, that the appearance of a third person catches us off of guard, to an extent that exposes how much we have subconsciously anticipated the story's twist all along. One of the key themes of the film is isolation, with the milkman's minor but by no means superfluous role conveying something of the couple's ambivalent relationship with the outside world. Part of what makes his appearance so impinging is that he catches sight of the unwary Sarah in the seductive gear she dons exclusively for Max's visits; he represents the prying eyes and judgement that Sarah, who had previously remarked how lucky she and Richard were to live in such seclusion, spends the entirety of the film shielding herself from. He also embodies both the temptations and the perils of the world beyond, as signified in his repeated effort to peddle "cream" to the unwilling Sarah; what makes this staggeringly unsubtle bit of innuendo so hilarious is his attempt to add incentive by inferring a rivalry with a neighbouring housewife Mrs Owens (she just had three jars...clotted). Being such a cliched vessel of illicit sexual gratification, he does, in his own perverse way, represent the threat of conventionality, an offer that Sarah is particularly adverse to. His thinly-veiled crudeness make him a refreshing interlude to the deliberately stilted and reserved exchanges that have occurred between Sarah and Richard, but his predatory intentions also make him a sinister figure, in a manner that seems to prefigure Sarah's mock-vulnerability at the hands of the various pursuers played by Max. It's a dangerous, dangerous world out there, and it parks itself right on Sarah's doorstep.

The milkman and his mention of bored housewife Mrs Owens are our only objective insights into the wider community that exists beyond Richard and Sarah's self-contained soap opera. The strongly claustrophobic atmosphere of the film is sustained not only by the fact that we never see anything more of it, but also that we can never be certain just how many of Richard and Sarah's alleged activities therein are genuine or products of fantasy. Does Richard even go to an office at all, or is this simply part of the act? If so, then how is he whiling the hours until Max's visits at three o'clock? We get some indication that he does not travel far - Sarah objects to his description of his mistress as "handy between trains" on the grounds that he does not travel by train, but by car, suggesting that he has inadvertently strayed from the rules of their established narrative in mixing up his designated transport method. And what of Sarah's mention of her having had lunch in the village? Did she actually go, or are she and Richard simply going through the motions in churning out meaningless detail before they can get to the juicy part in digesting their latest bout of role-playing? If Sarah did go to the village, then she got little from it - as per her account, she saw no one and her lunch was merely fair. Sarah later professes to be thankful for their seclusion, and to live so far away from the main road, a statement that somewhat undermines Richard's preceding caution against laughing too loud at Max's jokes, lest it encourages the neighbours to gossip. We have no idea if there actually are any neighbours within hearing distance, although the threat of gossip from external forces is certainly present in the milkman's indiscretion about his own success in peddling cream to Mrs Owen.

The couple do not seem to have much affinity with the outside world, although their reclusive lifestyle does not, conversely, offer much of a refuge. To the contrary, they thrive on the danger in their seclusion, in the knowledge that they are alone and that no one can hear them. "Richard" and "Sarah" are merely the front they put on, possibly to the external eyes but mainly to themselves - it is the time when things are at their most formal and clearly defined, and when there are strict parameters that cannot be crossed. Richard's departure and return under the guise of Max, and Sarah's similar shedding of her austere garments into more alluring apparel, signify a loosening of these social/personal restrictions, until finally both characters are ready to delve into a tortuous wilderness in which they each possess no fixed identity at all. The prosaic sitting room becomes a menacing no-man's-land, in which offender and defender, husband and lover, wife and mistress are all merely different sides of the same coin. Here, the roles of husband and wife are specifically cited as roles to which they are intermittently obliged to return, but for the moment find great exhilaration in wandering from.

There is a liberation in their games, but it also entails entrapment, something that becomes apparent when Richard, ever jealous of his alter ego and his wife's blatant preferences for whom, elects to disrupt the entire routine. His resentment culminates in a tirade on both sides, as he attempts to end the fictitious affair, first as Max and then as Richard. Here's where Richard decides to rewrite the rules of the game completely, leading Sarah down a cruel and confusing path. Some of his statements, such as his comments about Sarah being too bony, are deliberately contradictory and designed to discombobulate her. Other times, he violates the established narrative by supplementing it with earth-shattering creations of his own - most explosively, he gives the couple imaginary children (the only such reference in the entire script) whom he claims are away at boarding school - leading the game into hitherto unknown, and therefore dangerous territory. Sarah is eventually provoked into playing Richard at his own game, and starts fashioning fantasies of her own out of thin air, whereupon we get a callback to the episode with the milkman: "I have other afternoons, all the time, and neither of you know...I give them strawberries in season, with cream. Strangers, total strangers! But not to me, not while they're here."  For as intense as their climactic stand-off becomes, both characters remain committed to the most cardinal rule of their fantasy - that is, neither will explicitly acknowledge that Richard and Max are one and the same - for its duration, almost to an unsettling degree. In particular, it is unclear whether Richard's ludicrous declaration that, should he ever happen across Max on the premises, "I'll kick his teeth out", constitutes a further indulgence of the fantasy, a deliberate expression of self-loathing, or the very peak of absurdity with regards to his jealousy toward Max. He pushes Sarah within a whisker of crossing this forbidden line when he suggest that, should she continue the affair, then she do so outside of the house: "Take him into the field...find a ditch, a slag heap, find a rubbish dump...buy a canoe and find a stagnant pond. Anything anywhere, but not in my living room!" Sarah protests that this is not possible, but is unable to elaborate further when challenged by Richard. Naturally, Sarah is unable to continue without Richard's mutual participation, but we also see shades here of her antipathy to the outside world, and a means of interpreting the symbolism behind her house-bound existence. Earlier, during their sexual role-playing, Max had taunted Sarah by insisting that she was trapped, something that Richard later repeats while fingering the bongo drum previously reserved only for Max and Sarah (much to Sarah's alarm). What, exactly, is the nature of Sarah's entrapment?

The entrapment Sarah faces is the same as that faced by Richard, which is to say that they are trapped with one another. Ultimately, The Lover plays like a commentary on the depths of the codependency between these characters. For Richard and Sarah are a couple well-accustomed to one another, and who effectively have nothing but each other. From that perspective, we might question which need the role-playing better fulfils - is an attempt to rekindle the sex life that has inevitably waned now that their honeymoon days are long behind them, or a means of coping with the reality of their mutual dependence? They are bored with one another, but emotionally reliant on one another for normality, to the extent that, rather than look to the outside world as a means of escaping the monotony of their marriage, they are obliged to create that escapism among themselves. The paradox being that the game ceases to function as escapism, once it has become part of the established normality. While the visits from Max - a throwback to Richard's younger days, when he was a passionate and spontaneous suitor - still mean the world to Sarah, for Richard the constant alternation from one alter ego to the next has become a burden. His resentment appears to stem, in part, from the awareness that he is, by now, assuming the role of Max more for Sarah's gratification than his own (it is probably not a coincidence that Richard launches his aggressive rebellion on the day that Sarah actively requests an afternoon with Max). His main grievance, though, is hinted in his early complaints about the sitting room, his references to "these damn afternoons, this eternal tea time", and his observation that "to have as the constant image of your lust, a milk jug and a tea pot must be terribly dampening." As jealous as Richard is of Max, and the affections and privileges Sarah keeps exclusively for Max, he's also aware that Max has grown weary of his own lot.

The film ends on an ambivalent note, with Richard and Sarah once again lapsing into their sexual role-playing, and the lover and the whore resurfacing. Richard's rebellion has not, in practice, brought an end to their fantasy, but merely shifted the rules of the narrative, so that Max now lays claim to the house in the evening and can finally remain after the sunset with Sarah. Max has assumed the territory previously designated to Richard, and as such it might be tempting to read the ending as a sign that the barriers have been broken and that Max (aka the younger, more passionate Richard) has returned full-time. Of note is that Sarah does not address Richard as "Max" at the end, but purports instead to recognise her lover underneath Richard's guise - "I've never seen you like this before...why are you wearing this strange suit, and this shirt? Usually you wear something else". Their sensual interactions do, nevertheless, continue to be framed within the realm of fiction, with Sarah indicating that the man standing before her is not her husband, and accounting for his absence by stating that he is at a late-night conference. There is also a slight disturbance in the film's closing line, when her lover addresses her as "You lovely whore" - "whore" being a term that Richard, and not Max, had ascribed to Sarah. This follows on from Sarah's offer to change her clothes (presumably into the alluring gear restricted only to Max's visits), to which Richard agrees: "Yes...change...change...change your clothes." The repeated emphasis on "change" calls to mind the extent to which this alternation between identities is mutual; Richard sheds his aloof shell and becomes Sarah's sensitive lover, via the very same process through which she strips away her own outer layer of decorum and becomes Richard's lovely whore. The play thus ends with both a truce and a compromise. The couple's bond will continue to endure, but they remain reliant on the crutch of fiction to keep them afloat. Is this simply the price of having lived with a significant other for over a decade, and knowing them inside out, to the extent that fantasy is needed in order to inject some degree of improvisation? Or perhaps this lover and whore would quite happily be so 24/7, only the husband and wife play too indispensable a role in providing the pillars from which they delight in deviating as part of their danger-fuelled erotism.

I first experienced The Lover as the television film, when the BBC aired it as part of a Pinter retrospective in 2002 (unfortunately the film was initially produced for ITV, so it was not featured on the Pinter At The BBC DVD collection released by BFI in 2019). I did, however, see a stage production of it some years later, paired in a double bill with another Pinter two hander, The Dumb Waiter. The two key points that stood out were:

a) The appearance of the milkman immediately got a huge laugh from the audience. The milkman in the production I saw was also a lot less threatening than that portrayed by Forrest in the film.

b) On that note, the production in general tended to put greater emphasis on the campness of the scenario. Elements of threat and claustrophobia were still retained, but this production went for a somewhat more overtly comic vibe than the film; let's just say that this Max made for a slightly more awkward suitor than Badel's. Of course, I'd say that much of the threat in the film version comes from the intense close-ups, particularly wherever Badel's steely gaze is involved, which the stage version naturally has to make do without.

Interestingly, I saw the play with a friend who went in totally ignorant to the plot, and his initial reaction to the big reveal had been to assume that Richard and Max were indeed different characters in context, just played by the same actor (a technique that admittedly works more convincingly on stage than on film), but he got wise when Richard professed to having dumped his mistress for being "too bony". Obviously, if you study their language throughout the first act it becomes apparent that Richard and Max are one and the same, but only with the benefit of hindsight, so I wonder how common my friend's misconception is among audiences who first experience the story through the stage version. It's my theory that we do subconsciously anticipate the twist, but perhaps that only strictly applies to the television film - there at least, we're so tightly immersed in Badel and Merchant's tense and secluded world that any permeation from outside forces seems borderline impossible.

Minimalists vs Soap (Cussons Imperial Leather)

If you know me by now, you'll know that I had a long history, growing up, of finding something to spook me in just about every ad break I witnessed, to the point that I remain haunted by certain ludicrous images long after they've slipped the net of popular consciousness. Nestled firmly within my brain, for the past quarter-century, was the memory of this advert about a couple living this eerily barren existence, in which the single greatest pleasure, for both of them, came from getting freaky with a bar of soap, but only while the other was safely out of the picture. For all of this time I'd remembered exactly how the scenario played out - the ad opens with the husband/boyfriend complaining out the state of the abode because a couple of their meagre possessions are marginally out of place, after which we cut to the pair eating a meal. The man then leaves the building, and his wife/girlfriend seizes the opportunity to get lathered up in the bathtub with a bar of soap while he's gone. Significantly, the portions of the ad depicting the couple's typically sterile lifestyle were shot in black and white, but the instant the soap appears we switch abruptly to electrifying colour. Then at the end there is an epilogue establishing that this clandestine weakness for bathtub indulgence is entirely mutual - the man returns to find the woman sleeping, whereupon he sneaks into the bathroom to have his own turn with another bar of the soap in question. I remembered the events of the ad so vividly, and yet the one thing I had failed to commit to memory was the brand of soap being flaunted, which somewhat impaired my ability to dig out the ad on YouTube and face down those lingering childhood demons. And naturally, the memory wouldn't let up. So potent was the ad's lasting impression that it's this couple I automatically have in mind whenever I listen to the Pet Shop Boys' track "So Hard" (a track which seems strangely in sync with the ad's unsettling tone, if only for that unearthly moaning voice that chimes in about three minutes into the song).

I did recall that the ad would have been from 1996, possibly 1995, and so for a while my only recourse was to search uploads of ad breaks from both those years in the hope that it would come up. All the same, without anything more precise it's still like find a needle in a haystack. So I tried adding assorted combinations with different soap brand names into the search bar, to see if that took me any closer, but my search came up equally fruitless. I shudder to think how many hours I expended on this wild goose chase, but about a week or so ago it finally all paid off. I stumbled upon the ad - it was for Cussons Imperial Leather, actually - and it was every bit as deliciously unnerving as my pre-adolescent mind had processed it as being. It was worth all that shooting in the dark.

What we do have to acknowledge is that the ostensibly juicy fragment of the ad, where the woman whips out the game-changing soap and soaks to the sounds of "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)", a 1978 hit for disco artist Sylvester, is in practice its least interesting element. Don't get me wrong, I always love me some Sylvester, but it's here that the ad slips into the language of banality typical of advertisements for run-of-the-mill household products, with its emphasis on familiar pop tunes and radiant colours. The real fascination of the ad lies not in how dramatically a forbidden bar of soap enriches the lives of two ostensibly impassive humans, but in the surrounding material depicting the deadpan stoniness that otherwise dominates their day-to-day living. There is something genuinely, beautifully sinister about this portion of the advert, what with the gaping emptiness of their exotic living quarters, resembling less a practical home than an art exhibit, and the long, eerie silences in which any minor sound, be it the ticking clock, squeak of decor being pushed into line, or the sounds of mastication, seems startling. There is a claustrophobia to these scenes that possibly seems at odds with the spaciousness of their barren abode; like the wife, we spend the entirety of the ad concealed within the walls, and while we are led to believe that an outside world does exist (the husband needs somewhere to disappear into), the internal world seems so strange and cut off from any form of reality beyond that it is hard to envision the two interconnecting.

So great was my perplexity toward this ad, back in 1996, that I felt compelled to ask my mother for an explanation. She told me that they were basically a very boring couple and that the bars of soap they had stashed away beneath their potted plants were their only euphoric outlet in life. Actually, I suspect I'd already grasped that much and was hoping for more of an explanation with regard to their unsettlingly stilted language and the fact that they seemed to purposely avoid making eye contact with one another - somehow, the term "boring" didn't quite seem to cover it. Nor did it count for arguably the single most confounding aspect of the advert - the subtitles. Those subtitles, for me, were what really elevated this ad into the realm of the uncanny. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why they were there, as the dialogue was already in English, and perfectly audible. They were another lightly surreal touch that played into the overall discombobulating aura of the ad. They were, I think, the big reason why I was so driven to find this ad, so many years later, as I wanted to see if I could make any better sense of their presence as an adult. Nowadays, I'm still slightly puzzled as to what purpose they serve (other than to play into the general trend for artiness that characterised TV ads at the time, in an effort to make the ordinary look extraordinary), but I have noticed that there is one instance where the subtitle does not match with what is actually spoken - the woman's second "Yes" is instead represented as "Don't rush back" in parentheses, hinting at the unspoken tensions that are really at play here. The subtitles reinforce the stiffness of the couple's cold domestic landscape, by giving their words a toneless physicality, but also indicate the extent to which they are merely symbols.

The message of the ad is straightforward enough...almost to the point where the voice-over narration assuring us that "Some indulgences you can never give up" seems intrusively redundant. Where I would disagree with my mother's interpretation is in the suggestion that these characters are "boring". To the contrary, I think they live a pretty fascinating existence. Their house is a borderline nightmarish work of art. The gag here is not that they're dull, but that they're ultra-modern minimalists, and that the lifestyle they lead is the very antithesis of the luxury that Imperial Leather embodies. Everything here is hard and stony, from their verbal exchanges to the spartan bed they sleep on. I'm not saying I would replicate it, but it makes for an arresting atmospheric flavour.

The underlying gag is effectively the same as one later used in a 2000 ad for the Toyota Roadster (which also spooked the heck out of me in its day), involving a hermit who'd ditched material luxury for the solitude of the woods, but whose spiritual tranquility is intermittently disrupted by nightmare visions of temptation in the form of said sinful vehicle. As with this ad, the most impactful fragments lie in the surrounding material, with the appearance of the product itself feeling more like the intrusion of banality than materialism. Here, though, there is an additional troubling element in the small window we get into the relationship dynamics of this couple. In some respects, the basic set-up feels vaguely reminiscent of Harold Pinter's 1963 play The Lover (which started life as a profoundly unsettling television film staring Alan Badel and Vivien Merchant), the first half of which also centres upon the stilted morning and evening interactions between a husband and wife. As per their routine, the husband sets out for the office every day and the wife is well-accustomed to letting her hair down in his absence (although there is a deliciously good twist in Pinter's play that I'm certainly not going to spoil here); on either side, their relationship is characterised by affected verbal sparring and emotional sterility (in the original television film the couple don't even sleep in the same bed). Here, there is a similar air of artificiality to the character's interactions, with the one subtitle that does not correspond to the dialogue being spoken confirming that it is all an act designed to keep their true emotions/desires in check. The lingering question, not resolved in the ad, concerns whether or not, like the couple from The Lover, this is a mutually knowing arrangement, or if both parties are genuinely trying (unsuccessfully or not) to pull the wool over their partner's eyes. What are we to take from that rogue subtitle? Does it represent what is actually communicated in that second "Yes", or merely what our female participant is privately thinking, the emotional reality lurking beneath the apathetic surface?

The implication, certainly, is that the couple's respective clandestine interludes with their bars of soap constitutes the only point in their routine where they drop the mask - or shed their skins, as symbolised in the momentary discarding of their homely black suits - and are fully in touch with their "mighty real" selves. The soap equals reality, hence the sudden appearance of colour, and it brings out the earthy animal passions (represented by having our heroine produce an actual tiger roar) that are otherwise tethered by the constraints of social convention. Indeed, we might interpret these chic minimalists as being not so different to ourselves, in practice - they go through the motions of everyday living (however unconventional that everyday living may be in their case), so that they may enjoy a momentary lapse of inhibitions behind closed doors. What is unsettling, however, is that here the ruse seems designed purely as a means of maintaining the facade for one another (since we have no way of knowing how the husband behaves when out in the open). The two seem to have constructed their routine so that their respective realities do not overlap, and their partner sees only the performance. One gets the impression that this is all part of an established diurnal cycle for them, and that they will go through the exact same process the following day. The ambiguity of the ad lies in just how complicit each participant is in their partner's soapy infidelity. Comparing the ad to Pinter's The Lover, it had crossed my mind that the husband possibly makes himself scarce for no other reason than to allow the wife time to play around in the bathtub, in exchange for her obligingly going to sleep (or feigning that she's sleeping) by the time he returns, so that he may be permitted to have his own allotted slot with his personal bar of soap. This somehow strikes me as being more plausible (and infinitely more interesting) than the alternative reading, with both partners living in mutual ignorance. Either way, what we have is a scenario with a couple who are incapable of communication but, whether consciously or subconsciously, have settled upon an arrangement that enables them to function and to tolerate each other. Imperial Leather saved their marriage.

What does strike me as seriously unsubtle about the ad now are the individual hiding places chosen by each partner for squireling away their forbidden bar of soap. She uses a bonsai bush, while he favours a very phallic-looking cactus (and you've got to love the fleeting glimpse we get of the two plants on opposite sides of the bathtub during the bathroom montage, subliminally cluing us in on the final plot twist). On that note, it occurs to me that, given the frosty nature of their interactions and the bed they sleep on, these two possibly don't have much of a sex life, and with that it mind, I'm inclined to interpret that soap as a metaphor for masturbation. I mean, it's kind of obvious. I don't think you have to be Wilson Bryan Key to see that one.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #34: Randy Won't Bite (Harp Lager)

Picture the scene: a fashionable high-rise apartment in the twilight hours, where the owner, a woman with an eye for extravagant decor, receives an unexpected caller in the form of a beguiling gentlemen who just moved in next door and is short of a particular hot beverage. So irrepressible is the spark of mutual attraction between the two that she invites him in to join her for a cup then and there. The early beginnings of a passionate, slow-brewing romance between the chicest souls on the block? Nope, the scenario ends with a defenestrated Yorkshire terrier and the man making a sharp exit to the nearest boozer to drown his frustrations in the featured lager. Don't worry, though, the Yorkie survives...somehow or other. Guess he embraced his inner cat on the way down.

To get the full benefit of this bizarre spot from 1989, it helps if you're acquainted with the Gold Blend couple, or "Love Over Gold", a contemporary campaign from Nescafe depicting the numerous titillating encounters between Tony and Sharon (Anthony Head and Sharon Maughan), also inhabitants of neighbouring apartments, over their shared weakness for Gold Blend instant coffee (or Taster's Choice as it is branded in the US). Beginning in November 1987, the campaign caught the public's attention for its unusually narrative-driven format - it was effectively a soap opera told in bite-sized chunks, chock full of assorted misunderstandings and near-admissions (the campaign was heavily inspired by the Will They/Won't They arc from the US series Moonlighting). Nescafe managed to eke more than five years from this protracted caffeine-fuelled courtship ritual before finally allowing Tony to profess his love for Sharon and calling it a night in 1993 (although a spiritual sequel focussed on a different prospective couple appeared shortly after). A VHS tape comprising the complete collection of ads was made available through a special mail order promotion, although copies of the tape are tricky to come by now - I've been waiting for the damned thing to show up on eBay for years and still no luck. It also received a novelisation by Susan Moody - by contrast, copies of that can be sourced from just about any second-hand book shop. The 1980s being a time when soap operas centred on the cultural elite, such Dallas and Dynasty, were very much in vogue, there was great emphasis on having the awkward mating dance between our two caffeine-craving love birds take place amid an air of sophistication. The urbane banter exchanged by Sharon and Tony as they flirted over the prospect of downing another cup of freeze dried beans was enough to mask the somewhat incongruous fact that their hormones were bubbling over something as hopelessly prosaic as instant coffee...so how good could it be?

This ad for Harp Lager was a cheeky parody of the initial ad in the Love Over Gold campaign, which saw Sharon calling at Tony's door in the hopes of borrowing some instant coffee for the party she was hosting across the hall. Here, the scenario has been reversed, with our dapper gent being the one doing the calling, although our first real disturbance occurs when our caller makes a request for tea instead of coffee. Straight off the bat, this wrong-foots the situation and takes us into some freaky mirror universe, in which we sense that things are not destined to end quite so genteelly for our leaf-loving pair. Our suspicions are confirmed when a third wheel enters the picture in the form of Randy the Yorkshire terrier (he, naturally, had no counterpart in the original campaign, where neither of the couple owned a dog). The appearance of that dog instantly gets our hackles up. There's a level on which Randy seems to act as a furry manifestation of the raging animal magnetism surging beneath not-Tony and not-Sharon's display of cultivation (there has to be some kind of in-joke buried in that name of his), and his defensive reaction toward the former marks him out as a rival to the latter's affections. What's really off-putting about Randy, though, is that the assortment of yips ostensibly emitting from his canine vocal chords were very blatantly provided by a human tongue, which naturally throws a cold wet blanket over our sensuous atmosphere. Make no mistake, we're headed for a truly twisted outcome here. Sure enough, Randy's ultimate purpose is to be the butt of a sick little gag involving a wad of misfortune befalling a particularly small and fragile animal; the prospective Love Over Typhoo is stopped dead in its tracks when our would-be suitor inadvertently sends Randy plummeting out of an open window (here's where the establishing shot indicating that the action takes place in a high-rise apartment finally pays off). Realising that a slow-brewing romance with not-Sharon just isn't in the cards in this reality, not-Tony hits the proverbial exit button and retreats to the earthier atmosphere of his local pub to indulge in a very different beverage. He does not do so alone, however, for Randy continues to drag out their rivalry from atop the bar counter. The ad is mean, but not so mean as to sign off with the implication that the pugnacious dog ended up a stain on the pavement below.

The purpose of this spot, other than to have some fun at the expense of Love Over Gold, is to posit Harp as the kind of unromantic, down-to-earth antithesis to the lush soap opera fantasies of the aforementioned coffee campaign. With that in mind we might as well view Randy's defenestration as symbolic for not-Tony's realisation that he has to come down from Love Over Gold's airy nonsense eventually. There is a lingering aftertaste, however, in the form of Randy, who insists on showing up to bug this man wherever he goes. At the height of our protagonist's dizzy euphoria, he provided a voice to his raging hormones, while here he acts as a mirror to his self-loathing and defeat. In both cases, the message is clearly impressed that this guy is his own worst enemy.

Incidentally, I didn't mention this when I covered the campaign two years ago, but the opening installment to Love Over Gold was also sent up in one of the individual adverts featuring the PG Tips T-Birds. There, Tom the Owl received a call from a sultry neighbour who professed to be from upstairs (somewhat confusingly, as it's not totally clear to me whether the birds rent a flat or a house proper), only to shut the door on her when she confessed to wanting to get her hands on his tea bags. Sorry tea drinkers, but I guess your preferred beverage just doesn't beckon Cupid's arrow like that seductive bean.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #33: Rooster From The Other Side (GMTV)

Flashback to 1st January 1993. As the UK entered this brave new year, viewers accustomed to getting their wake-up entertainment fix from ITV (or Channel 3, as it is legally known) were having to endure the seismic shake-up that was taking place with the channel's programming. TV-am, the production company responsible for the past decade's worth of breakfast television (their greatest contribution to popular culture was the puppet creation Roland Rat), was being ditched in favour of a newly-appointed licensee, GMTV (Good Morning Television), and there was little rejoicing about this fact. My understanding is that the circumstances under which the power had shifted - new legislation in the early 1990s meant that commercial television licences were allocated not on the basis of quality, but on whoever placed the highest bid - left a bad taste in people's mouths, while GMTV's desire to adopt a more family-friendly, less news-driven approach was widely criticised as the dumbing down of the channel's morning programming. Personally, I was seven years old at the time, and while I was aware of the air of negativity surrounding this upcoming change, so long as there were a few decent cartoons in the mix I was likely to be satisfied. I gave GMTV a shot, though I think my household switched over very quickly to Channel 4 and The Big Breakfast and nowadays I can't remember a danged thing I saw from the program. Well, one solitary memory does remain - I may have forgotten GMTV as a whole, but I've always remembered the promotional spot they used to trumpet themselves around the time of their launch.

The controversial new format was heralded by the image of a decrepit stop motion rooster staggering out to face the world to an extremely distorted version of "Good Morning", a song from the 1939 picture Babes In Arms. This, the ad insinuates, is the rooster who rings in your morning (or, more accurately, doesn't) when you get out of bed on the wrong side. The premise behind this ad is that there are two possible realities awaiting the early riser every morning, with the preferable option, or "bright side" being represented by a second, greatly more animated rooster who pops up in the final ten seconds and takes us into a world of dizzying colour. There's not so much of interest going on here, but for the possibility that the GMTV titles might just have squished the rooster as they closed in on him (we see his feathers flying at the end). The reason the ad stuck with me as it did, I suspect, has more to do with the twenty seconds we spend lingering in that twisted parallel universe, entrenched in the horrors of a morning that flat-out refuses to get going. The footage of the rooster is interspersed with scenes depicting two human denizens of morning on the wrong side, and their torturously barren breakfast routine, which largely involves grappling with obstinate household appliances. Ostensibly the duller of the two realities, there is a certain demented personality to how things operate around here, manifested in the rubbery, flexible nature of said appliances - a toaster expands and contracts while not making that bread any browner, and a pipe bulges as the water flow (a single drop, as it turns out) struggles to make its way up to the shower head (although what's weirder still is why on earth the man standing below would be dressed in his pyjamas; I get that nudity might have been too risqué for GMTV's target audience, but was he really planning on getting his clothes soaked too? Unless the implication is that this skimpy shower is such an ingrained feature of the man's regular morning routine that he barely bothers undressing for it). The prosaic backdrops have a neatly claustrophobic feel, particularly the overhead shot of our would-be showerer, reinforcing their feverish discomfort.

The intent, naturally, is to convey something of the stifling monotony of routine, but the ad's merits lie in how convincingly it creates a state of being that exists halfway between tedium and delirium. The world here is unable to wake up and progress beyond its half-asleep stupor, an existential despair encapsulated in the image of that lethargic rooster hobbling along his wooden walkway without ever mustering the verve to crow, usher in the new day and embrace the possibilities it brings. That is the nightmarish beauty of this promo - how it captures a sense of time grinding to a moribund crawl. The slowed-down audio seems grotesque in how taunting it is - we hear the (just comprehensible) words "Good morning" babbled over and over, a supposed celebration of renewal and the promise of what lies ahead (or alternatively, an unwelcome reminder that we have to get up and do the same thing all over again). The truly warped thing about this reality, though, is that it has nowhere to go. The rooster reaches the end of his walkway and topples into oblivion, much as the shower never materialises and the toaster conks out, leaving the bread perpetually bread. This is a world with no potential; the diurnal cycle has short circuited and the apocalypse happened before we even got to breakfast.

At the end of the ad, we flip over abruptly to the bright side, where our alternate rooster loudly announces not merely the dawning of a new day, but the arrival of GMTV, who supposedly rule the roost over here (and exercise this by snapping their titles on him). The rooster, though, is all we actually see of this frenetic parallel reality - a possible alternate existence for our human chums is not represented in any capacity. Alas, we can only leave them stranded in their black and white inertia. But then I suspect it wouldn't take terribly long for that hyperactive rooster from the favourable side to start messing with your nerves either.

 

Moaning Lisa (aka It's a Brazzle Dazzle Day)

I take great pleasure in flying the flag for The Simpsons' introductory season, easily the most undervalued of all Simpsons seasons, and I can think of few episodes more undervalued than episode 7G06, "Moaning Lisa" (first aired February 11th 1990), where Lisa's preadolescent anxieties about life, the universe and everything lead to an interest in crazy bebop and a friendship with an enigmatic outsider, although not without upsetting the apple cart both at home and at school. Not everyone was won over by this in-depth exploration of childhood angst, with Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide dismissing it as "the most syrupy of all Simpsons episodes" and attesting that it has the power to send "viewers raised on later seasons scurrying to the bathroom", whatever that's intended to mean. (To throw up? Eh, to quote Abe Simpson, maybe you're just a lousy cook.)

It goes without saying that I take a very different perspective to Martyn and Wood. To me, this is a smart and thoughtful episode about arriving at the realisation that you're slightly out of sync with your peers, potentially for life, and coming to terms with that fact. It's also an important episode, in being the first time the series had taken the trouble to properly map out who Lisa was. Up until now, she'd largely been defined by her status as middle child, and through her dynamic with Bart. Although I think it somewhat hyperbolic to say that she was originally nothing more than a female version of Bart (even in the Ullman shorts, we saw occasional contrasts between the characters), she was seldom ever more than Bart's foil in the Simpsons' infancy. This was something that carried over into the first few episodes of the series proper - "Some Enchanted Evening" and "There's No Disgrace Like Home" depict her as a hell-raiser in a similar vein to Bart, and while "Bart The Genius" started to explore the idea that she was booksmart beyond her years, there she doesn't get a whole lot to do other than periodically undermine Bart's alleged genius. "Moaning Lisa" was effectively Lisa's coming out episode, and in that regard it's another episode that arguably had a smidgen of its thunder stolen by the production fiascos of Season 1 which caused a couple of installments to air drastically out of order. Since "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" (originally intended to be the eighth episode of the series) was bumped to the front of the queue, we'd already gotten a small but momentous glimpse of the new, improved Lisa during the portion of the episode where she stands up to Patty on behalf of Homer. Seeing Lisa in such a downbeat, introspective mood in this episode perhaps isn't that much of a revelation, although it does fill in a few of the gaps to how she got there. But then "Moaning Lisa" also doubles as Marge's coming out episode, and in this regard it probably benefits from the switcheroo. Had "Some Enchanted Evening" kicked off the series as planned, then it would have been established from the go that Marge is a privately unhappy housewife who's well-accustomed to bottling her negativity and putting up a ruse of contentment, but who harbours a considerable amount of unfulfilled fervor underneath. This is also touched on in "Moaning Lisa", but it happens so subtly, in the shadow of Lisa's story, that it is genuinely startling when Marge's inner anguish suddenly snaps to the surface and makes itself known. It also serves as a perfect appetite-wetter for what was to come in the latter half of the season.

Lisa may have been a dark horse when the series began, but Marge was darker still - in forty-eight Ullman shorts, we never even learned her name. In part, this had to do with how heavily focused the Ullman shorts were on the kids' perspective (usually Bart's) - there were no Ullman shorts focussed exclusively on Marge and Homer. The tetchy relationship between Bart and Homer was where a lot of the early fascination lay, and we can certainly see remnants of this in the way that the spotlight was distributed throughout the first season. If we categorise each episode according to which family member was the key driving force behind the story, things do come out looking a little lop-sided. Season 1 is only half the length of all subsequent Simpsons seasons, so obviously there's not a whole lot of screen time to go around, but the results are still very telling:

 

Homer: Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, Homer's Odyssey, There's No Disgrace Like Home, Call of The Simpsons, Homer's Night Out

Marge: Life on The Fast Lane

Bart: Bart The Genius, Bart The General, The Tell Tale Head, The Crepes of Wrath, Krusty Gets Busted

Lisa: Moaning Lisa

Maggie: Nadda

All: Some Enchanted Evening (I consider this one an ensemble episode)

On the surface, it looks as if Bart and Homer at least are evenly matched, but that's not quite true in practice - at least three of those five Homer-centric feature Bart prominently as a deuteragonist (Homer's arcs in Bart-centric episodes, meanwhile, tended to be crucial but competitively smaller). Season 1 was when the series was most heavily slanted toward being The Bart Simpson Show - which stands to reason, given that he was, at the time, the face of the relatively young franchise (the focus of nearly all of the Ullman shorts, and the star of the Butterfinger campaign). The relationship between Bart and Homer still took centre-stage, while Marge and Lisa continued to exist largely on the sidelines (and Maggie, but she's a tough character to build stories around). It's probably not a coincidence that their respective focal episodes are the two most understated and emotionally grounded of the season - being the quieter, less assuming Simpsons in the equation (sans Maggie), they were naturally suited to stories centred on exploring hidden depths, and tensions easily overshadowed amid the crazier antics unfolding around them. Season 1 remained reluctant to put the Simpsons girls at the forefront terribly often, but it did a sweet job in deepening the dynamics of the household all throughout.

It took me a number of years to grow into "Life on The Fast Lane", and for good reason - the central scenario is not exactly one that kids can relate to. "Moaning Lisa", on the other hand, always struck a deep personal chord with me. I wouldn't say that I experienced anything close to Lisa's degree of alienation until after puberty, but growing up I was a shy and reserved child, and there was a time when I was under a lot of pressure to widen my friendship circle and get invited to more birthday parties, which was never a massive priority for me. So it made me so happy at the end of the episode, when Marge does a complete 180 and tells Lisa that being herself is more important than fitting in. For my money, it's the show's first really tear-jerking moment, and it still does a lot for me to this day. It's an intelligent episode, because it understands that the problems kids face can be complex and that often there isn't an easy fix. By the end of the story, the issues haven't exactly been cut and dried, and many of the questions Lisa raises throughout go unanswered. It closes on an optimistic note, with Lisa gaining renewed confidence in her ability to weather the problems ahead, and in the knowledge that her family, while they may not always see eye-to-eye with her, are fundamentally on her side, but it doesn't downplay the fact that things will continue to be hard for Lisa.

"Moaning Lisa" boasts another first - the very first Simpsons B story. While Lisa is struggling with figuring out her place in the world, Homer is plunged into his own personal crisis prompted by his inability to beat his 10-year-old son at a 16-bit boxing game. B stories are a useful means of padding out 22 minutes and giving family members who aren't heavily involved in the main story something to do. They can also add a splash of comedic balance to a more serious, emotion-driven story - and, as Lisa-focused episodes typically occupy that camp, they tend to show up a lot whenever she gets the spotlight. Here, the B story certainly fills the function of providing the episode with its quota of comic levity. Yet Homer's story isn't as disconnected from the central conflict as perhaps appears - there are a couple of intersections, most notably at the end, when Marge and Lisa's newfound understanding comes firmly at the expense of Homer's episode-long goal - but it's also Homer who expounds the central concern that's underpinning both his and Lisa's stories: "Getting old is a terrible thing." Lisa and Homer are both dealing with the pains of getting older, albeit from very different points in life, and with an increasing self-awareness regarding their mutual helplessness in the grand scheme of being. In both cases, the characters are in the process of crossing over into an unwelcome point of no return.

 "Moaning Lisa" deals with waning childhood innocence, a theme the series would revisit toward the end of the season with "Krusty Gets Busted". Bart's disillusionment on discovering that his idol Krusty may not be the model of upstanding anarchy he's spent his lifetime revering comes from a darker, angrier place than Lisa's melancholia, which has more of an air of sad inevitably about it. And whereas "Krusty Gets Busted" ends with Bart securing a kind of reprieve - he gets to retreat back into the warm comfort of childhood, with the grotesque array of cheap Krusty-themed merchandise that adorns it prompting us to question if it has not been something of a hollow victory - there is here no way back for Lisa. At 8 years old, her individual personality is still in the process of refining itself. Her precociousness gives her a sharpness and sensitivity that naturally drives a wedge between herself and her peers, and at the same time she's very much mired in the limitations of childhood. A pivotal character trait we see emerging from Lisa is her tendency to convey the intrinsic helplessness of a child through a distinctly adult voice (although she doesn't lay on the psychotherapist jargon as heavily here as in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" or "Life on The Fast Lane"). What she is largely dealing with throughout "Moaning Lisa" is the burden of her newly-awakened self-awareness, which has clued her in to the general futility of her existence and to what a wretchedly indifferent place the world can be (among other things, Lisa is troubled by how inexplicably unconcerned the adult set seems about the general state of the world). And the worst part is that she's only 8 - Lisa knows that the challenges of her life are only just beginning. How, then, does she find the resolve to face another day?

The same theme is evoked in Homer's story, when he pinpoints the moment his own childhood innocence crumbled - the day he realised that he could beat his father at most things (at this point in the series, Homer and Abe seemed to enjoy a relatively healthy relationship, which is more than can be said for Marge and Jackie, as we'll shortly discover). It was an upsetting revelation, we presume, because it taught the young Homer that nothing stays the same forever and that every human, no matter how revered, is doomed to fall victim to the marches of time. Right now, he's undergoing the loss of an altogether different kind of innocence, in the awareness that, like Abe before him, he's getting past his prime and the younger generation has surpassed him (to hammer that point home, even the two player characters in Slugfest resemble the respective Simpsons who control them, as if they are avatars competing in a much grander game of life). Whereas the episode's major conflict revolves around a discrepancy between Marge and Lisa regarding which survival strategies the latter must adopt as she veers ever closer toward adulthood, Homer's response to his own problem is to go backwards, in an attempt to keep a hold of his dissipating youth, by immersing himself deep in the culture of the younger generation. He does so by visiting the local arcade and seeking pointers from Howie, a kid who is something of a Slugfest guru. First though, he must undergo the humiliation of yet again having to submit to the supremacy of someone significantly younger than himself - Howie agrees to tutor Homer on the condition that he provides momentary amusement by barking like a dog. (If you ask me, Homer got off lightly there - Howie certainly seems nicer and more reasonable than the two boys with whim Lisa converses at the end of the episode.) Rather than step aside gracefully, Homer wants to prove that he's not down for the count and that he still has a few glory days left him, and the best way to demonstrate that is by mercilessly pummelling a 10-year-old in a virtual boxing match. Obviously, it's petty as hell, and it's a pettiness for which he ends up paying the price, but I think his motive is comprehensible. His subplot, and his attempted solution, also feeds into the general theme regarding a disconnect between the younger and older generations. Howie is the alpha kid at the arcade, and very respected among his peers, but he is immediately put in his place with the arrival of his mother, who disapproves of him spending his time and money on something as frivolous as video games.

"Moaning Lisa" was our proper introduction to Lisa the sensitive, precocious and misunderstood middle child (as opposed to Lisa the middle child, as she had been in the beginning). It was also our introduction to Lisa the saxophonist, and the two go hand in hand. "Moaning Lisa" is in part a story about how important Lisa's saxophone is to her, for it is her greatest emotional outlet and primary means of expression. Problem is, individual expression isn't exactly encouraged in the world she inhabits. At school, Lisa's musical finesse is tolerated only so long as she plays along with the rest of the band; her attempts to contribute her own impassioned bebop solo to the band's soulless rendition of "America (My Country 'Tis of Thee)" net the ire of her music teacher Mr Largo, who is unmoved by Lisa's compulsion to interject on behalf of America's disenfranchised ("None of those unpleasant people are going to be at the recital next week!") Lisa finds little refuge at home, where her playing irritates Homer and she is instructed to keep it down, though it is ultimately Marge who enforces the most damning oppression on Lisa. Compared to the reception she gets at school, her family isn't aloof or cold-hearted - they struggle to understand Lisa's despondency, but they do all express sympathy and attempt to help in some way. Homer offers to hear out Lisa's anxieties, but they go way beyond his comprehension. Bart attempts to cheer Lisa up with a prank call to Moe, but Lisa isn't biting. Marge is the one who takes Lisa's unhappiness the most personally, and who literally loses sleep over the matter, and while the solution she settles on is troublesome, we do not doubt that her heart is in the right place.

Something that stands out to me about "Moaning Lisa" is that it is by and far the most staccato of all the Season 1 narratives. Lisa and Homer's respective plights provide a strong enough emotional/comedic through line, but the story isn't as tightly structured as the rest of the season; instead, it feels like a string of vignettes that connect more loosely into a story, almost like watching a set of slightly elongated Ullman bumpers. There are a number of sequences that don't so much further the plot as provide a little more insight into how dynamics typically function around the Simpson household - for example, Bart antagonising Homer over his misplaced keys and the moment where Bart and Lisa test Maggie's loyalties, only for her to spurn them both in favour of the head of the Medusa (this one in particular feels like the punchline to a self-contained Ullman short).

For the relative realism of the first act, things take a slight veer to the romantic throughout the middle, when Lisa hears the sounds of another saxophone playing off in the distance and, intrigued, follows it to a downtown bridge, where she encounters Bleeding Gums Murphy (voice of Ron Taylor), a lonely jazz musician who copes with his own persistent dysphoria through nocturnal jam sessions. Impressed by Lisa's own woodwind abilities, he invites her to join him and teaches her something about the value of artistic expression. Lisa is relieved to finally have found a kindred spirit, but her gratification is short-lived - Marge eventually tracks her to the bridge and whisks her back to the stifling monotony of the Simpson household, leaving Bleeding to continue jamming by his lonesome.

Now that I think about it, Bleeding Gums Murphy (so named because of his self-professed dentophobia) might even have been the first prominent African American character to have appeared in the series (I probably shouldn't count Smithers, who underwent something of an ethnicity swap following his first on-screen appearance in "Homer's Odyssey"; we'd also met Bart's friend Lewis, but he's never been more than a glorified - just barely - extra). He's also, for better or for worse, the first of a particular line of characters of the week who were fairly common in the show's early days. The first couple of seasons or so had a number of these vaguely mysterious characters would wander in for seemingly no other reason than to support one of the family through some form of personal crisis, after which they would conveniently disappear, satisfied that their work here was done. They had a wisdom and a benevolence that made them feel distinctly out of place in a crummy little burg like Springfield. In addition to Bleeding Gums Murphy, we also had Karl from "Simpson and Delilah" and Mr Bergstrom from "Lisa's Substitute", with Leon Kompowsky from Season 3's "Stark Raving Dad" being potentially the last character of this ilk. There are certainly enough of them that I think they deserve their own team name, like the Home-Wreckers, so I'm just going to call them "Elliotts", after Elliott the Dragon, and see if it catches on.

In Bleeding's case, there is a very obvious risk of the character wandering into the territory of the "Magical Negro", a term popularized by film-maker Spike Lee in 2001 to describe any black character whose sole function is to dispense pellets of wisdom or moral support to white characters, with little to no hint of any ambition or agenda of their own. When I covered "Simpson and Delilah", I weighed in on the discussion as to what extent Karl might be considered the LGBT equivalent of the Magical Negro, and yeah, it is kind of hard to deny that that's what's going on here. Compared to Karl (who received exactly ONE line of dialogue hinting at any kind of personal life or interests outside of Homer), we actually get a decent flavour of who Bleeding is in his day-to-day being - in addition to having notoriously poor dental hygiene, he was dumped by his significant other and sees loneliness as one of the defining traits of his existence. He also never had an Italian suit, and that vexes him. It's also noteworthy that Bleeding's initial moment of validation toward Lisa takes the form of a backhanded compliment, in which he assures her that her problems are insignificant compared to his own ("You play pretty well for someone with no real problems"). There is, nevertheless, little use in dancing around the fact that he exists, as a character, exclusively for the benefit of Lisa. He may have problems of his own, but they're predominantly cited as a means of putting hers into perspective. There's also the matter of his legacy post-"Moaning Lisa". Unlike most other Elliotts, Bleeding didn't disappear off the face of the Earth after his one episode; he made the occasional cameo here and there (most prominently in "Dancin' Homer" of Season 2), and was also heard on the show's first tie-in album The Simpsons Sing The Blues. His only other major appearance, however, was in the Season 6 episode "Round Springfield", where he earned the more unfortunate distinction of being the first recurring character to be killed off in the series (prior to that, the most significant character death had been Beatrice Simmons in "Old Money"). This, honestly, only reinforces his Magical Negro credentials, as he was effectively sacrificed to provide Lisa with another life lesson, this time in coping with bereavement. Killing off black characters in order to light some kind of fire under their white cohorts is a well-worn cliche, one that the Simpsons crew had previously demonstrated some savviness toward, as they sent it up rather brutally in the Season 3 episode "Saturdays of Thunder" ("MENDOZA!!!") - here, though, it's played more-or-less entirely straight. Furthermore, the episode ends with Bleeding exhibiting actual supernatural powers, by reappearing as a spirit in the sky and performing one last jam with Lisa (granted, I prefer to read this as more of a symbolic sequence, as it doesn't mesh with the overall reality of the series, although that does raise questions on what some of it potentially says about the state of Lisa's mind).

So yes, for their first major African American character The Simpsons leaned back on a rather hackneyed archetype without a hint of self-awareness, proving that they weren't always ahead in the subversiveness game. Which is not to say that Bleeding has no value as a character, or that his friendship with Lisa isn't genuinely affecting. For one, the guy is so splendidly voiced, by guest star Ron Taylor; his performance conveys a fundamental, largely unspoken pathos, but there's a certain wryness to his character too, a spirit to his despairing. And he and Lisa had this wonderfully offbeat rapport, two seemingly mismatched characters who felt a tremendous affinity based on the mutual release they sought in jazz. The sight of them jamming together was positively iconic - it reappeared in the "Do The Bartman" music video, it was immortalised on a collector's plate, they flashed back to it in "Lisa's Sax" of Season 9, etc. There was a rather mean-spirited joke in the Season 7 episode "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" about how he was "never popular", but to that I say, "So what?" We all know what popularity is the hallmark of.

The sequence where Lisa goes out in search of Bleeding and bonds with him atop the bridge ranks, for me, as the most hauntingly beautiful in all of Season 1. I think only Marge's dream sequence from "Life on The Fast Lane" rivals it in terms of its aesthetic and atmospheric mettle. It was nevertheless a sequence that caused some understandable hand-wringing behind the scenes - according to the DVD commentary, there was unease among the production team as to how appropriate it was to have a child as young as Lisa roaming the streets unaccompanied in the dead of night. Arguably, it fits in with the general theme of adult indifference/insensitivity toward the welfare of the young, although probably from a darker angle than was intended (we're not quite into "My Sister My Sitter" territory here). It is not, though, a particularly unsettling sequence to watch in context. The radiant blue moon that dominates the backdrop during the encounter conveys more of a quiet, mournful insomnia than an atmosphere of overt menace. The run-down streets of Springfield - devoid of all life, it seems, except Lisa and Bleeding - have a sad desolation that reflects the solitude of these two jazz enthusiasts. There's an almost Edward Hopper-like quality to how it captures the loneliness of the individual in a world of urban indifference. It's a very poetic sequence, and I think it works best when viewed in precisely that sense - as a representation of Lisa's inner despair, and her yearning to find at least one individual, in the vast impassive dust bowl, who can connect on her same wavelength. I've already compared Bleeding and his ilk to Elliott the Dragon, and while I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that Lisa's interactions with the misfit jazz artist are to be regarded as the onset of childhood schizophrenia, there is something about him that seems ever-so-vaguely unreal. Just as Karl gives off the air of being Homer's self-appointed guardian angel, Bleeding gives the impression of being a kind of corporeal imaginary friend for Lisa. Which may sound like a contradiction in terms, but remember that Elliott the Dragon managed it just fine. He was real - the 1977 film left precious little ambiguity on that point (I cannot speak for the 2016 remake, which I have not seen) - but he still acts as a reflection of something inside Pete, leaving once the troubled orphan is settled with a new family and has outgrown the need for his reptilian coping mechanism. I'm compelled to take a similar view of Bleeding Gums Murphy, who here gives a voice to a certain energy ingrained deep in Lisa's psyche - her latent creativity. It is an itch that will not cease, a part of Lisa that, no matter how much frowning it generates in the adults around her, keeps on stirring, leaving Lisa restless and compelled to heed its call. It is a defiant energy, one that beckons her well away from the dual authorities of home and school and into more unknown, unorthodox ground. Which makes Bleeding a natural adversary to Marge, who fears what lies off of the beaten track and the prospect of losing her daughter to it.

Bleeding is very different to the adults Lisa is used to encountering in her regular diurnal existence. He doesn't condescend her or pretend to have the answers. He tells her straight up that he cannot help her with her problems, but he offers her something equally valuable in being a willing recipient of her art. He tells her that the ability to express oneself through art is an empowering one indeed - not because it brings the artist catharsis, but because it enables them to convey just a little piece of their inner turmoil to the outside world; to give their audience insight into what it's like to inhabit their skin, and to be heard. ("The blues isn't about feeling better, it's about making other people feel worse - and making a few bucks while you're at it.") Conversely, he is also dismissive of the personal worries she expresses in her vocal performance, which have to do with the emotional divide between herself and her family. Certainly, the specific problems cited by Lisa are indicative of the kind of banal, everyday problems you'll encounter in any number of households, despite Lisa's colourful methods of sending up her family ("My dad he acts like, like he belongs in the zoo"), but to someone as young and fundamentally powerless as Lisa, they would seem overwhelming, so Bleeding's comment might be perceived as strangely insensitive for such an otherwise benevolent character. But then I'm inclined to think that this is Bleeding simply assuring Lisa that the disconnect isn't as bad as she believes, and that the problems she cites are the kind that will eventually pass in time.

Marge's intrusion on their melancholic jamming is another aspect of this sequence that's honestly kind of odd, when you attempt to reconcile it with the narrative flow of the middle act. Sandwiched in between Lisa's urban journey and impromptu music lesson is a sequence where Homer and Marge are sleeping and each is taunted by a dream vision pertaining to their respective preoccupation - the implication being that both of them retired to bed without realising that their eight-year-old daughter had slipped the coop, which itself raises questions about the quality of their parenting. More startling to my sensibilities than the images of Lisa wandering away per se is the idea that while Homer and Marge are discussing their private anxieties in the comfort of their bedroom, their daughter is apparently off having a wild night on the town at god-knows-what hour. How Marge discovers what Lisa is up to is indicated only minimally - she's kept awake by the sounds of the two saxophones jamming in the distance, somehow puts it together that one of them is Lisa, and shows up at the bridge to reclaim her daughter from Bleeding's wayward influence. Having their encounter fall around our fleeting glimpses into Homer and Marge's dream life only reinforces their own vaguely illusory air, with Marge's appearance being as symbolic as anything else in the sequence - she comes between Lisa and her newfound lease of creative freedom, bearing out the aforementioned gulf between Lisa and her family. Under the circumstances, any reasonable parent would naturally be concerned to find their child conversing with a stranger in the middle of the night, although Marge's hilariously polite, if candid address to Bleeding - "Nothing personal, I just fear the unfamiliar" - is revealing of what's actually driving her. It underlines the implicit opposition between Marge and Bleeding, in terms of what each of them aspires to bring out in Lisa - Marge wants Lisa to learn how to blend in, to have endless social opportunities and not to put herself in a position that may cause her to be singled out and ostracised by her peers, whereas Bleeding encourages her to embrace that underlying alienation as part of her life's path. As Marge whisks Lisa away, Bleeding resumes his solitary jamming long into the night, assuring us that Lisa's own nonconformist itches will not be silenced.

Marge has her own ideas about how to address Lisa's unhappiness, and with them we get our first major glimpse into Marge's background. "Moaning Lisa" marked the first appearance of her mother, Jacqueline Bouvier (named, naturally, in reference to Jackie O), albeit only in a dream sequence, and drawn and characterised completely differently to her subsequent appearances (she wasn't the only one either - see my closing notes). Compared to Homer's more overtly nightmarish fantasy, in which he envisions himself as one of the player-characters in Slugfest being brutally pummelled by his opponent in the form of Bart, Marge's nightmare is far more prosaic, but no less squeamish - she recalls being packed off to school by her mother and being instructed to smile before she walks out the door. Clearly, the school aged Marge isn't in much of a smiling mood, but she manages to churn out a strained plastic smile, one that very visibly conveys suppressed despair over genuine happiness, and Jackie does the same in return. Of course, Jackie betrays her true intentions with the line, "People know how good a mommy you have by the size of your smile", making it plain that what she's actually doing is projecting her own insecurities onto her daughter's public presentation. She also tells Marge to "put on our happy face", reinforcing that there is a complicity to the deception - by pretending that all is well in the Bouvier household, she permits her mother to do the same. The moment where Marge and Jackie exchange their gruesome feigned smiles is harrowing (in the way that the first two seasons frequently were), because of what's really being communicated in their futile gesture - both characters are denying themselves the freedom to express how they feel, on the mutual understanding that this is their only survival mechanism in a world that doesn't care anyhow. Jackie's dubious advice about always smiling was later brought up again in the Season 6 episode "Fear of Flying", if only in passing - the root cause of her own repressed anxieties is never explored, although I guess that's an entire story in itself.

In the climax of the episode, Marge attempts to force Jackie's recipe for ostensible bliss onto Lisa, and while she's never as upfront as Jackie about her intentions, it's nevertheless clear that she's driven by similar anxieties as to what Lisa's visible aberrancy potentially says about her as a parent. She denies Lisa the freedom to be her own person in order to make her a reflection of herself and how she wants to be perceived, a move that ultimately backfires dramatically for Marge. When Lisa objects to being made to smile in spite of her actual feelings, Marge retorts with this disheartening monologue: "It doesn't matter how you feel inside, you know. It's what shows up on the surface that counts. That's what my mother taught me. Take all your bad feelings and push them down, all the way down, past your knees until you're almost walking on them. And then you'll fit in, you'll be invited to parties, and boys will like you. And happiness will follow." Disheartening, in part, because much of it seems crushingly inappropriate advice to be dispensing to an 8-year-old (Boys will like you? Should Lisa really be expected to worry about that at her age?) but also because the advice is nowhere near as empowering as Marge assumes - not least because it puts one's personal happiness firmly at the mercy of the approval of others. Lisa manages a strained plastic smile of her own, with some cajoling, and goes out to face the world. At first, Jackie's methods seem to get the desired results - Lisa strikes up a conversation with two boys at band practice, who seem well-disposed toward this new, "happy" Lisa, and one of them invites her to his house. The odiousness of the matter is made plain, however, when he brazenly reveals that he only wants her there to do his homework for him; what Marge hadn't anticipated is that the other children, sensing that Lisa is eager to please and be accepted, will be quite prepared to take advantage of that. Watching this sordid scenario play out, Marge's mood changes, and she suddenly becomes very, deeply enraged. Although Marge's own problems, much like Jackie's, are not explicitly explored in this episode, the implication is that Marge's rage is twofold - she's angry in seeing just how badly her second-hand advice is working out for Lisa, but she's also angered in finally receiving this chilling reflection of just how poorly it's also worked out for her (there is not, after all, a world of difference between what Lisa faces here and what Marge puts up with every day in the Simpson household). The moment where she completely loses her cool - when Largo appears and rebukes Lisa for her previous outburst of "unbridled creativity" - and physically removes Lisa from the situation, what we're seeing is all of Marge's repressed fury bubbling to the surface for the very first time - 34 years' worth of it, in fact. The implication that Marge herself is sitting on a whole well of untapped energy and ingenuity is borne out in Largo's observation that, "That's where she gets it." (Appropriately, it was established in the Season 2 episode "Brush With Greatness" that the young Marge had her own creative passions - in her case, painting - in which she eventually lost confidence through the goading of adult authority.)

Marge realises that the survival mechanisms Jackie instilled in her were little more than a self-serving sham, and that she was wrong to do the same to Lisa. Instead, she finds the courage to break the cycle, telling Lisa that she should always be true to herself and that she can take solace in the fact that her family will unconditionally have her back: "We'll ride it out with you. And when you get finished feeling sad, we'll still be there." Her revised speech to Lisa is a powerful moment, possibly as nakedly sincere and as righteously vehement as the series had been at this point. It is a case of empathy overcoming barriers, with Marge concluding that the imperative to defend her children overrides the inclination to put up another layer of vapid self-protection. She acknowledges that there is no easy solution to the way Lisa feels, and that she simply has to be allowed to get through her sadness on her own terms. The acknowledgement itself, though, is enough to raise a smile from Lisa - not the horrifying Stepford smile we saw earlier, but a genuine, natural smile. After all, for the first time in the episode someone other than Bleeding Gums Murphy has signalled that they understand her, and that understanding is the first major step in enabling her to feel less at sea. The part of Marge's final speech that I find heart-breaking, however, is her proposal, "From now on, let me do the smiling for both of us." I've thought about that line a lot, and what it's supposed to mean. It's an altruistic offer, but I can't help but think it sad that Marge continues to deny herself the same freedom of expression that she ultimately affords Lisa, particularly as "Moaning Lisa" suggests that there is a lot seething beneath Marge's collected exterior. Possibly she means that she will continue to smile to Lisa, to give her that extra bit of encouragement, so she knows that her mother is always rooting for her. But I also suspect that by "smiling" she means that she will defend Lisa, and that Lisa herself does not have to answer for herself or justify how she feels - Marge will face down the cold and condemnatory world on her behalf.

Although "Moaning Lisa" was as Marge-orientated as a Simpsons episode had been at this point, her personal woes are still regulated largely to the subtext of the narrative. The episode does not, however, seem oblivious to the irony that Marge's lifelong tactic of feigning contentment and not asserting her own needs has not succeeded in making her socially popular. If anything it's made her more cut off and disregarded by the rest of the world. Outside of her bowling/brunch sessions with Jacques in "Life on The Fast Lane", there was very little hint of her having much of a social life from the start of the series. The aerobics class she attended in "Homer's Night Out" is the only other example I can think of in Season 1 (she also got tipsy with some other women at the company picnic in "There's No Disgrace Like Home", but something tells me they weren't her natural social circle). We can, in part, attribute this to the series' early lack of interest in Marge as a focal character, but then as a character she's always thrived with her story existing largely in the cracks of episodes centred on other family members. When we finally got to hang with Marge and see her pursue her own temporary break from the demands of her family in "Life on The Fast Lane", it felt so natural, as if the series had been purposely laying the ground for this scenario the entire time by pretending not to be interested in Marge (even if "Life on The Fast Lane" itself was clearly written to be the culmination of Season 1's Trouble in Paradise trilogy, not the beginning as air date order decreed). For now, we see a small instance of Marge finally speaking up and making herself heard in a milieu that's well-accustomed to ignoring her - she forces Homer and Bart to listen to her make an announcement on Lisa's behalf by physically unplugging the television set, obliterating Homer's chance to finally beat Bart at Slugfest in the process. Homer doesn't exactly take this well, demonstrating that, even though he cannot stop the march of time, emotionally he's never really progressed beyond the school kid level. His story ends up being a cautionary example about the futility of pinning one's self-worth on something as inconsequential as winning at a boxing video game.

"Moaning Lisa" ends with a display of unity among the Simpsons, who attend Bleeding Gums Murphy's favourite haunt, The Jazz Hole (yay for disgusting puns), at the suggestion of Lisa, where Bleeding performs his own rendition of the song Lisa had regaled him with earlier ("Moanin' Lisa Blues" as it was entitled on The Simpsons Sing The Blues), reaffirming that he's heard Lisa, that he both acknowledges and accepts her and that she has his solidarity. Meanwhile, the fact that Lisa's family are all here with her in this dark and unfamiliar venue indicates a reconciliation between Lisa's untamed creativity and the rest of her clan, proving that they do not have to be at odds. Somewhat incongruously, they are presented, for their receptiveness, with a less-than-flattering song describing their own individual foibles, but then this particular reality seems to go over their heads - except possibly for Homer, who is triggered by the mention of a patriarch behaving like a zoo animal. The important thing is that Lisa is finally happy. She's happy because she's found where she belongs, and it happens to be both within the murky walls of the Jazz Hole, and there among her singularly neurotic kin.

A couple of stray observations:

• There is a subtle instance of continuity between this episode and "Life on The Fast Lane". Here, Homer is distressed to learn that the Bowlarama was razed in a fire that seems to have wiped out a large proportion of Springfield's downtown culture. When we finally see the Bowlarama first-hand in "Life on The Fast Lane", there is a sign at the top indicating that the establishment is new, so I presume this is supposed to be the new reborn Bowlarama.
  
• Jacqueline Bouvier wasn't the only character to get a somewhat off-colour introduction in "Moaning Lisa". Apparently, the wire-haired kid who attempts to wheedle Lisa into doing his homework for him is officially recognised as the earliest incarnation of Ralph Wiggum (a proto-Ralph had previously appeared in "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", but I suppose it works if we go by production order). There is a slight resemblance - slight enough that I can buy that Ralph's design evolved from this character - and yet they are distinct enough that I honestly prefer to think of them of separate characters. Both are voiced by Nancy Cartwright, but the voice she uses here is much closer to her Nelson voice, and his characterisation is completely different. Intriguingly, I have noticed that during the moment in the arcade scene where Homer vies for the attention of Howie, there is another kid in the vicinity who looks like a proto-Ralph; he's dressed in similar clothing to the kid at band practice, but has a rounder, more benign face. I think we may have found Ralphie's missing link.