LET ME BEGIN WITH A CONFESSION: I haven’t seen too many new episodes of The Simpsons lately. I watch the show if I happen to be home, if it happens to be on; I watch it far from religiously. I saw the landmark 400th episode on the sanctified Sunday night of its premiere, but often as not I’ve caught episodes from the last few years only in reruns or in syndication. And if I don’t catch them at all, I don’t feel the slightest twinge of remorse. I am, in a sense, a lapsed Simpsonian.
Many of my reasons for skipping church are the standard ones—my work has moved to other subjects and grown busier, I have a wife, a young daughter, professional and social obligations—but the main reason is very specific to the Simpsonian faith: the show no longer feels essential. Those episodes I’ve seen in recent years have often had their funny moments and inspired sequences, but they haven’t broken any new ground. The Simpsons remains a very good TV show, but it is no longer a transcendent one. I wonder, sometimes, why it’s still on.
I began my study of the series five years ago by comparing the Golden Age of The Simpsons to the first explosive era of rock & roll, and the analogy remains a revealing one. The Simpsons, at twenty, is the band that keeps on touring for an apparent lack of anything better to do; the band still putting out albums that, even when they’re pretty damn good, appear sort of pointless next to its canonical work. The Simpsons can’t surprise us anymore, in large part because it once startled us so fully with its irreverant brilliance and era-defining immediacy. My original choice for the title of this book was The Simpsonian Institution, because I understood the show to be a body of work whose finest moments were behind it and whose pop-cultural legacy was long ago secured. The Simpsons, at twenty, is a museum piece, a predominantly past-tense thing.
The annals of rock & roll overflow with boastful references to the music’s own glorious, swaggering transience. Hope I die before I get old. It’s better to burn out than to fade away. There was no pre-existing model for post-adolescent rock, no known path to those putatively useless years beyond forty (or even thirty), and so many of those old rockers just kept on rockin’ as best they could even as their rebel poses grew daily more ironic. There is likewise no road map whatsoever for a satirical cartoon after its twentieth birthday, no well-honed graceful method for pulling one’s own primary-coloured plug. The Simpsons is the first twenty-year-old sitcom in TV history, contemplating retirement from a comfortable rut of late middle age—as ever, it blazes a trail all its own.
But even if it’s a trail I find myself less frequently following, I remain in some core sense a Simpsonian. I’ve mostly left the church, but I do keep the faith in my own way. I watch the show most often through its vivid reflections elsewhere. And I’m most surprised, delighted—enlightened—when I view The Simpsons refracted through the cracked glass of the pop culture it so fundamentally altered. I mean, what a gas to discover its jump-cut asides and whiplash flashbacks transported to the live-action southern California of the magnificent, prematurely deceased Arrested Development. How refreshing to watch the South Park gang uncover a topicality and satirical directness that The Simpsons, with its year-long lead times, could never dream of, this as the unintended consequence of animation so lo-fi it can respond within a week or so to the news of the day. (To cite one example, a South Park episode in the spring of 2005 spoofed the Terri Schiavo fiasco while it was still unfolding on the nightly news.) What a delight to see Family Guy develop the sidelight Simpsonian art of the non sequitur and obscure pop reference into its own kind of propulsive narrative form. And, more than any of this, how amazing—how inspired—to find the show’s satirical mirror borrowed by the real, live, unscripted 3-D world, driving the bumpkin-as-instigator schtick of Sacha Baron Cohen and animating the countless instant satires of political ads and official pronouncements stitched together from archival footage and uploaded to YouTube. And taken all the way through the looking glass in the nightly newscasts of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
I don’t need to visit the Simpsonian church on Sunday evenings, in other words, because its dogma so thoroughly—not to mention skilfully—informs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report four nights a week. To watch Stephen Colbert utterly disarm a congressman in a face-to-face interview or to giggle along with a Daily Show correspondent as he reveals George W. Bush’s lies in that very day’s press conference using a dated clip of Bush himself—to do so is to marvel at the evolution of the Simpsonian style. The show no longer needs to bring us Kent Brockman sending up the nightly news, because it has become the nightly news.
This next-generation Simpsonian comedy has indeed provided several moments of real-life comedy so breathtaking they transcend satire entirely, becoming not just comments on the hypocrisies of their age but direct, actionable rebuttals. If (as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter once pompously proclaimed) the terrorist attacks of 9/11 killed irony, and if (as a great many others have noted) the excesses of the age of Dubya have reached heights beyond satire’s reach, then the most gifted jesters have met this challenge by stepping fully into the milieu of their comedy’s targets. Sacha Baron Cohen provided one such instance at the 2007 Golden Globe Awards, celebrating his Best Actor nod for his work as the blustering Borat by stepping out of character to indulge in a long, heartfelt tribute to his co-star, Ken Davitian. Davitian, so Cohen claimed, had stored a tiny pocket of stale air in his anus—just enough to keep Cohen from suffocating during an infamous scene in Borat in which his obese co-star sits naked on his face. The effect of Cohen’s deadpan delivery of this anecdote was to leave not the tiniest shred of the event’s sincerity intact, to collapse entirely the precarious façade of Hollywood “achievement”—this in full view of his spoof’s target, on its own gilded stage, at one of its especially self-important moments. Stephen Colbert performed much the same feat at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, using his keynote speech to transform a traditionally collegial evening of gentle ribbing into a vicious roast of President Bush, while the Decider himself was seated practically within arm’s reach.
The pinnacle of this style of post-satire, however, was a performance by Stewart himself on an allegedly earnest cable news show—CNN’s Crossfire, a long-running current-affairs program in which one pundit “from the left” and another “from the right” debated the news of the day, with a guest caught in between. Since its debut at the dawn of the cable-news era in 1982, Crossfire had become a widely imitated template for political broadcasting in America, the progenitor and perhaps the apotheosis of the mindless, hyper-divisive mudslinging that has come to characterize American political discourse in general. In October 2004, in the midst of a presidential election campaign of unprecedented brutality and fraudulence, Crossfire hosted Jon Stewart. The show was twenty-two years into its run and smug as ever in its own blustering self-importance. And Stewart, simply by refusing to play the show’s game and instead talking honestly, reduced it to a splintered, irreparable pile of its own conceits inside of twenty-two minutes.
Stewart’s appearance opened in Crossfire’s time-honoured style, the hosts bemusedly trading politically flavoured venom, but Stewart brought the proceedings to a halt barely three minutes in. “Stop hurting America,” he told the show’s hosts, accusing them moments later of being “partisan, what do you call it, hacks.” For the remainder of the segment, Stewart redirected repeated attempts to revert to Crossfire’s usual discourse back to his critique of the show itself, explaining how its bipartisan structure and confrontational format played directly into the obfuscations of America’s political authorities at a critically serious time in the nation’s history. “You have a responsibility to the public discourse,” Stewart concluded, “and you fail miserably.” In response, Crossfire’s designated right-winger, the babyfaced, bowtied Tucker Carlson, could only sputter, “Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.” Stewart: “No. No, I’m not going to be your monkey.” Carlson fumbled his way into a commercial break moments later, and the show limped its way through the final segment in some dim shadow of its normal format, but by that point it was too late. Twenty-two years of presumed journalistic authority lay in ruin on the studio floor. Crossfire was cancelled less than three months later. “I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp,” was how Jonathan Klein, CNN’s chief executive, summed up the decision to euthanize it. For Stewart, it was a satirical tour de force beyond even Simpsonian scale—as barbed as The Simpsons’ satire of the contemporary news media was, it’d never succeeded in getting a show cancelled.
The Simpsons, then, had been bested at its own game, outpaced by its own progeny. Its best tricks had been replicated elsewhere, refined and amped up for a new pop generation in a radically transformed mediascape. The show hadn’t burned out, seemed indeed steadfast in its resolve to fade away. What else was there, after all, for a pop legend to do?
Well, there was one thing: it could try to reinvent itself.
Five months before The Simpsons Movie’s July 2007 premiere, 20th Century Fox unveiled the film’s first full-length trailer, promising “a cast of thousands in a movie event eighteen years in the making.” Even by the most pedantic accounting, it was only a slight exaggeration—of Springfield’s expansive on-screen populace, yes, but also of a chain of rumours, hints, false starts and red herrings that stretched back to Season 4 of The Simpsons, fifteen years before America’s favourite four-fingered, yellow-skinned family finally made the jump to the big screen.
The earliest ruminations on the idea of a Simpsons movie began with Episode 8F24 (“Kamp Krusty”), that inspired Simpsonian riff on Lord of the Flies, which originally aired in the fall of 1992 and which several of the show’s producers soon noted in the press appeared easily capable of carrying a full-length film. But the Simpsons braintrust wisely decided against the kind of quick, opportunistic jump to the multiplex that gave rise to the half-baked schlock the show itself revelled in mocking. (One of Homer’s favourites, for instance, was a silver-screen gem by the title of Look Who’s Oinking.) The notion was summarily shelved for the balance of the 1990s, revisited during those halcyon small-screen years that marked the show’s Golden Age only in occasional musings to reporters by its creators and in idle speculation by its obsessive online fans.
The Simpsons staff has always been tight-lipped to a fault about its behind-the-scenes machinations, so the official version never strayed from several variations on the argument that the time wasn’t right, that the TV production schedule was too arduous to allow room for a top-quality movie’s production. The real issue, however, may have been control. In 2001, the show’s creative team negotiated a new contract that included a movie option, with the expressed permission to abandon the film if it was deemed unworthy of the franchise. The final word would remain with The Simpsons crew, not the Fox suits. In 2003, a team of long-serving Simpsons writers started developing a script that would eventually bear a list of authors nearly identical to the writing credits found on a great many of those Golden Age classics—names like George Meyer, John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, Mike Reiss, David Mirkin. Pre-production commenced in 2005 and the first teaser trailers appeared in the fall of 2006.
As the The Simpsons Movie neared completion in the spring of 2007, the summer blockbuster season’s annual frenzy of overwrought prerelease hype soon enveloped the film. Advance word on The Simpsons Movie was fevered, contradictory and voluminous, freely mixing anticipation and apprehension, excitement and dread, rumour and red herring and half-truth and leaked fact. The hype spoke to longstanding hopes of a cinematic triumph and lingering fears of a failure. What if, against all odds, The Simpsons was reborn on the big screen? What kind of miraculous Second Golden Age might be revealed this summer at the multiplex? What if—somehow more likely after all these years—it flopped? What would become of the show’s formidable legacy then?
There were surely bigger-budgeted movies coming to theatres in the summer of 2007, and it was highly likely that several of them would draw bigger audiences, but none arrived on screen as heavily weighted with expectation. Its creators faced a virtually impossible task: to pack all those bags into ninety minutes of Simpsonalia sufficiently original and entertaining that the movie somehow transcended eighteen years as TV’s most influential comedy institution, overshadowed the prejudices of its broad, multigenerational fanbase, and was ultimately judged by the quality of the pictures on the screen.
No wonder, then, it attracted such hype. And the first tantalizing sign of a possible return to form was how deftly that hype was navigated and manipulated by the Simpsons crew. The cornerstone of the film’s marketing strategy was to say almost nothing at all about the movie itself. Trailers were intentionally packed with false leads and deleted scenes. Several of the most tantalizing snippets—a lunar module touching down, a thousand missiles rocketing skyward—would eventually turn out to be lifted from the Itchy & Scratchy feature the Simpson family is attending during the first minutes of the movie. Cast and crew alike deflected nearly all inquiries during the pre-season media blitz, and even those discussions that did occur were studies in witty, weightless mumbo-jumbo. In a May 2007 interview with Matt Groening and James L. Brooks, Entertainment Weekly’s interrogator was reduced to naked begging—“Can you pretty please give us a plot tease?”—to no avail. And the script itself was guarded like a state secret, the full plot kept carefully hidden even from the movie’s own actors.
When Harry Shearer turned up in Toronto for a press junket a couple of months before the film’s release, he provided a succinct anecdotal summary of the lunatic secrecy around the movie. Shearer’s junket was ostensibly promoting a new DVD highlights package of his brief stint as a Saturday Night Live cast member in the mid-1980s, but the most penetrating questions addressed the latest exploits of his most famous alter egos—Burns and Smithers, Ned Flanders and Reverend Lovejoy. Shearer insisted he knew little more than anyone else about the nature of their big-screen debut. He illustrated his point with a story about a recent recording session in New York. Principal voice recording was long finished, but Shearer had been called in to deliver a few snippets of new dialogue. At the end of his reading, he handed the text to the studio engineer. He noticed that the engineer didn’t move immediately to shred the document, which had been standard operating procedure at the movie studio in Los Angeles. Whither the shredder? he wondered. The engineer explained that he was obliged to ship the used scripts to Fox headquarters in L.A. post-haste, where they could be destroyed under the watchful gaze of more trusted eyes.
The story verged on self-parody—it was the kind of thing Monty Burns himself would’ve demanded of Smithers in his casino-owning Howard Hughes phase. Brezhnev’s Politburo was not this officious in the handling of its files. But it was also all kinds of effective. Most obviously, it dodged the increasingly common internet-age trap of a film arriving in theatres with its plot and themes already picked apart so fully it seems dead on arrival (a phenomenon that had cursed the intentionally silly Snakes on a Plane to a stillbirth the previous summer). What’s more, this Kremlin-style promotional campaign also shrouded the movie in an enticing air of mystery and turned what tiny details had emerged into instant word-of-mouth legends. A key character would die! Flanders would adopt Bart and Homer would adopt a pig! There was a President Schwarzenegger subplot! A glimpse of Bart’s penis! And a dogsled for some reason!
In early July, just weeks before The Simpsons Movie’s debut, the campaign’s masterstroke was unveiled, a flawless semi-viral marketing gimmick that again created a word-of-mouth riot of buzz without disclosing a single frame of the film’s actual content. It was just a cross-branding campaign, really, but a wickedly ingenious one: on July 1, 2007, a dozen 7-Eleven stores across North America were given top-to-bottom makeovers and rechristened Kwik-E-Marts. Shelves overflowed with Buzz Cola and Krusty-O’s cereal, vending machines dispensed Squishees, pastry racks were filled with Homer’s beloved pink-frosted donuts. Outside walls were decorated with the graffiti of the infamous El Barto, and banners enticed with Apu-approved promises of “Today’s Pastries At Tomorrow’s Prices!”1 Visitors soon lined up around the block to get a glimpse of the stores and scoop up six-packs of Buzz Cola for lucrative resale on eBay, and Flickr and Myspace accounts quickly overflowed with documentary evidence of the Kwik-E-Mart phenomenon. The whole campaign was so secretively executed that even major news sites could do little but post links to those intrepid amateur photo galleries. The fans’ sense of proprietary ownership and almost conspiratorial disclosure was palpable.
The campaign had done the near-impossible: it had excited people about an eighteen-year-old, taken-for-granted cultural institution in a wholly original way. It’d made the old museum piece seem new again. And that, even more than the teaser trailers and seasoned-vet names on the script, gave even the most lapsed Simpsonian pause. Maybe—just maybe—they’d pulled it off. If the merchandising tie-ins were this clever and this meticulously executed, then maybe we had a work of real cinematic genius in store for us.
It might’ve seemed too much to expect, if not for Spider-Pig. Ah, Spider-Pig—now, that little rascal had made his debut just the week before the Kwik-E-Mart sensation, right at the end of The Simpsons Movie’s flat-out brilliant second theatrical trailer. The trailer was pointedly structured in the standard style of a thousand overblown action movies. It opens with a handful of brief establishing shots (including Ralph Wiggum bleating nasally along with the 20th Century Fox opening fanfare) before moving to a quiet, pastoral scene in which Bart and Homer are fishing together (albeit using a bug zapper). “When disaster threatens our world,” the rote voice-over intones, “one family will show everyone what they’re made of.” The editing accelerates through quick-cut glimpses of chaos and missile launches and stunt-driven heroism (and an M.C. Escher reference out of nowhere) to that moment in all action-movie trailers where the blowed-up-real-good money shot is always placed like an exclamation point. Instead, Marge Simpson stands in her living room, gazing silently up at a maze of black hoofprints on her ceiling. “How did the pig tracks get on the ceiling?” she asks. Cut to Homer walking his pet pig upside down along another stretch of ceiling, singing “Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig, does whatever a Spider-Pig does,” to the tune of the Spider-Man theme.
This was an inspired gag, singular and unexpected, character-driven and side-splittingly funny. It seemed to suggest, all by itself, that the one thing a longtime Simpsonian (lapsed or otherwise) dared not ask of the movie had somehow been achieved. It was a return to peak form. It was a Golden Age gag.
I don’t know about the rest of the audience, but I entered that theatre fighting as hard as I could against the urge to expect transcendence just one more time.
Transcendence was, it turned out, too much to ask. In a way, The Simpsons Movie peaked a month before its release, with the Spider-Pig trailer and the Kwik-E-Marted 7-Elevens. The movie lacked the flawless execution of either of its forerunners. It delivered instead a half-hour opening act of densely written, lightning-quick brilliance that verged on Golden Age lustre, followed by nearly an hour of mild, overwrought action-movie spoofing. It was, in short, a very good movie, but definitely not a great one. It was, in any case, a major commercial hit, topping the box-office charts its opening week and eventually grossing more than half a billion dollars in theatres worldwide (good for No. 8 on the global list of 2007’s highest-grossing films).
As for the plot of The Simpsons Movie, hidden for so long under a Soviet-scale web of secrecy, it went like this: Homer, having adopted a porcine cutie named Spider-Pig (later rechristened “Harry Plopper”), dumps a silo stuffed with his beloved hog’s shit into Lake Springfield, pushing the heavily polluted pond beyond its tipping point and precipitating a Springfield-wide environmental crisis. President Schwarzenegger’s diabolical Environmental Protection Agency chief, a corporate villain named Cargill voiced as a sort of second-rate reprise of Hank Scorpio by Simpsons guest-voice stalwart Albert Brooks, encases the entire town in a giant dome (built by a company he just happens to own). A vengeance-hungry Springfieldianite mob then chases down the Simpsons, who discover an escape hatch and flee to Alaska to start a new life. Marge and the kids eventually leave insensitive Homer to save Springfield, which Cargill’s EPA has slated for total demolition (thus to become the “New Grand Canyon”). Homer returns to triumphantly save the day. Along the way, Lisa falls in love with an Irish environmentalist and Bart briefly joins the Flanders clan in response to his father’s neglect.
Credit where it’s due: there are some truly inspired sequences in The Simpsons Movie, and indeed the first half-hour could hold its own against your average Golden Age episode. The unveiling of Bart’s penis, for example, occurs at the end of a magnificent series of escalating visual gags as Bart skateboards naked through Springfield on a dare. “Stop, in the name of American squeamishness!” Chief Wiggum bellows. But Bart skates on, his special little guy blocked from view by Principal Skinner’s mother’s pointing finger, a cigarette passed from Jimbo to Kearney, a thrown ball, a frisbee, the round fineal ball atop a remote-controlled car’s antenna, blown bubbles, a field of dandelions—all this before finally being revealed by a gap in a tall hedge that otherwise blocks our view of the rest of Bart’s body. It’s a classic Simpsonian inversion-of-expectation gag, and it’s a thrill to watch on a giant technicolour screen. Beyond this, there is of course Spider-Pig, but there is also Lisa lecturing her fellow citizens on “An Irritating Truth,” a fantastic one-off joke as apocalypse looms for the town and the respective crowds at Moe’s Tavern and the church next door trade places in parallel waves of panic, and Tom Hanks in a giddy cameo, lending the American government his credibility because it’s lost all of its own (this in a commercial for the New Grand Canyon).
These moments of brilliance, however, never build to the symphonic pitch of a Golden Age classic like “Deep Space Homer” or “Last Exit to Springfield,” in which the gags aren’t merely funny in their own right but propulsive and revelatory and plot-enhancing. And no amount of one-off clowning could entirely hide the film’s glaring weaknesses, which emerge as sort of writ-large versions of The Simpsons TV show’s greatest faults in recent years: a meandering, overwrought storyline; a weakness for contrived plot devices (encasing the town in a dome, yet another trial separation in Homer and Marge’s marriage); the sacrifice of long-established core character traits to cheap one-off gags.
There are indeed moments speckled throughout The Simpsons Movie in which you can practically see it jump the tracks and veer away from its best comedic instincts. There’s the moment about twenty minutes in, for example, when Homer breaks character upon learning that Lard Lad Donuts is giving away its pastries for free to dance girlishly and shriek “ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod.” (This has been an occasional and equally jarring phenomenon on the TV show in recent years as well.) A few scenes later, the dome descends on Springfield and an angry mob consisting of nearly every minor character in the show’s history assembles, teasing us with the promise of rapid-fire asides and background gags but opting instead for the plot-driven wackiness of a standard caper flick’s chase scene. Even more clangingly off-key is Homer’s Alaskan vision quest, which is led by a stout, generically “native” woman (putatively Inuit, but clearly bought off the rack at Stereotypes’ R’ Us). The sequence bears striking similarities to Homer’s mystical journey with the Space Coyote in Episode 3F24 (“El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer”), right down to its intended goal of rekindling Homer’s love for his wife. Homer’s inner-space explorations with the Space Coyote, however, boasted some of the most giddily inspired animation in the show’s history and the inimitable voice-of-god-like intonations of Johnny Cash. The Simpsons Movie version, in cringing contrast, has no momentum, mostly unimaginative visual riffage and several ill-advised detours into bland slapstick, culminating in a full-on groaner of a juvenile titty gag. (The generic native has these large, pendulous breasts, see, and she gestures with them to point Homer toward his destination.)
The Simpsons Movie’s most unforgivable characteristic, though, is that it plays it safe. It takes no risks, pulls its punches, makes no real point. It’s funny, sure, but The Simpsons at its best was about putting humour in the service of higher truth. The movie assembles all the tools of cutting satire—official corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, environmental devastation and public indifference and institutionalized brutality—and uses them to make only the odd paper cut. It seems afraid to pull out its sharpest weapons—Mr. Burns, for example, the very personification of Springfieldianite capitalism, features prominently in only a single scene midway through the proceedings, and even that seems tacked on.
As I left the theatre, I found myself thinking of a quote from Al Jean I’d read shortly after he’d taken the reins as the show’s executive producer and show runner. “I spend all of my waking hours thinking about the writing,” Jean told the Hollywood Reporter in February 2003. “It consumes me. From the time I wake up in the morning until the moment my head hits the pillow, I’m worried about screwing things up. There’s this weight you feel when you’re running it that’s really intense—you don’t want to be the first guy who drops the ball.” This was precisely the tone of The Simpsons Movie: it was content merely to hold the fort, even as conditions beyond its walls had grown more dire than ever. At a moment desperate for The Simpsons’ ferocious satirical clarity, it opted for caution.
Here, after all, was a tale ostensibly about ecological apocalypse aided and abetted by a braindead government in the thrall of rapacious corporate interests, a story of monumental crisis torn from the day’s headlines that cut to the core of the smug, gilded age that created it—and it was used as window dressing for an action-romance romp. The single most pointed gag about the climate crisis comes in the opening few minutes, when Nelson bullies Milhouse into enunciating the nonsensical argument that global warming is a myth. The premise is abandoned where it lies next to Milhouse’s prone body, in favour of a mostly outdated environmental issue (the dumping of sewage in lakes) used as nothing more than a springboard for some routine Homeric clowning.
The Simpsons Movie shares the same fatal flaw as the show itself at twenty: it is largely irrelevant. The Simpsons, once the hysterical howl of a generation’s discontent, is mere background noise now, and the movie is a sidebar verging on a distraction. To use the mise en scène of eco-apocalypse as mere pretense would be a mild insult in the hands of a hack stand-up comic; coming from what was once the greatest satrical voice of its age, it verges on travesty.
The Simpsons Movie? Well, I laughed. Really hard in parts. But that’s all, folks.
I first saw The Simpsons Movie at an afternoon press screening in Toronto, and I stepped out into a lovely, lilting summer evening. I strolled down Yonge Street, thinking I might stop for a pint somewhere to mull the movie over. As I approached a cross street, I saw a slick white Mercedes convertible come screeching to a halt to grudgingly permit a pedestrian her right of way. The driver was right out of Central Casting: eyes hidden behind Ray-Bans, a sneer of impatient entitlement on his lips, a fat stogie—honest to god—clenched between his teeth. He was even wearing a white linen coat to match the car. He was the smarmy epitome of a Fat Cat. I was in no hurry, so I waited at the curb for him to roar off to whatever self-important evening engagement beckoned. And it struck me how, in the wake of a Golden Age Simpsons episode, when I would encounter symbols of entrenched authority—a Budweiser ad on the tube, the façade of a bank tower on my way out for the night—I would feel a sense of its diminished power, a sort of elevated state of righteous consciousness. There was none of that with the Fat Cat in the white Mercedes after The Simpsons Movie; there was just a mild irritation.
On the other hand, the idea of “winning” the confrontation with the Fat Cat seemed absurd. We weren’t in direct conflict, and he was as irrelevant to me as I was to him. I remained a Simpsonian, I guess, in that I knew that the social order that inflated his wallet and his ego was corrupt and fatally flawed; the difference was that I no longer cared whether he knew or not. I knew—The Simpsons had proved it unequivocally many years earlier—and now I was much more interested in recalibrating the scales of social justice to reward more virtuous action, or at least to keep the planet healthy enough for my young daughter to continue to romp through as long as she wanted. I was in any case more interested in creative engagement than in detached opposition.
The idea of “counterculture” has always been predicated on a monolithic mainstream as its opposite pole. I’m not sure if the world was ever so tidily Manichean, but I know it sure isn’t now. There is rather a kind of inertial momentum to the culture at large, and there are forces intersecting with it from a thousand vectors, trying to bump its centre of gravity hard enough to change its direction one way or another. And those forces are most effective, these days, not when they challenge directly but when they build anew, assemble new types of engine to propel their causes. The counterculture, if there is such a thing, is no longer oppositional but transitional, not revolutionary but evolutionary.
As I write this, an improbable presidential candidate has assembled the most powerful new force in American electoral politics from elements found mostly outside his party’s (not to mention his country’s) traditional power structures. He has cobbled together micro-donations and organized a decentralized micro-recruiting system online, won the young and disenfranchised to his cause by ignoring the status-quo attack politics of his age as much as possible. If America elects its first black president later this year, Barack Obama will be the first great statesman of this transitional style of counterculture. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the most effective protest movement in a generation has electrified a formerly paralyzed Tibet. The movement’s overnight conquest of the world’s headlines, which has inspired the strongest diplomatic pressure for change on its oppressors in the Chinese government in decades, owes a great deal of its success to images and video clips captured and blipped around the globe via mobile phone. In a new book called Blessed Unrest, the green entrepreneur Paul Hawken—whose previous books all but invented the corporate sustainability trend—argues that the largest and most powerful progressive movement in world history is well underway, no longer in the form of a monolithic ideological crusade but as a million tiny flashes of insight and incremental action.
I like to think I’m part of that movement. After completing the first edition of this book, my writing soon became exclusively focused on climate change and the sustainability movement. I wrote a book on the subject, and when I was asked how I got from one to the other, I always answered the same way: The Simpsons diagnosed all of our society’s diseases, charted them in bright primaries on every TV screen in the free world. For that, I will be eternally grateful. And now, I am interested in working to find cures.
Chris Turner
Calgary, Alberta
April 2008
1 The Master Knows All (except combination to safe): So reads the sign on display at the world’s first convenience store on a mountaintop in India (see Episode 1F10), and it was about the only slogan that didn’t make it onto a placard inside the transformed 7-Elevens. Here’s a sampling of the ones that did decorate those real-life convenience stores:
- “Buy 3 For The Price Of 3!”
- “Coffee: When Your Other Vices Grow Old”
- “Buy Some Fruit To Feel Less Guilty About The Chili Dog”
- “Krusty’s Nutrition Guarantee: I Guarantee I Was Paid To Say This Stuff Is Nutritious!”
- “Back By Popular Indifference!”