I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.
—JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, SR.
I’ll keep it short and sweet. Family, religion, friendship: These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.
—C. MONTGOMERY BURNS, speaking to a group of school children, EPISODE 4F17
(“The Old Man and the Lisa”)
IT STARTS LIKE A TYPICAL CURRENT-AFFAIRS PROGRAM. The blow-dried news anchor is at his desk, surrounded by newsroom props. He summarizes a key issue from the day’s headlines: “The power plant strike—argle-bargle or fooforah?” A panel is introduced: an industry titan, a union kingpin, talk-show mainstay Dr. Joyce Brothers (who, as she proudly declares, has brought her own microphone). There’s a hard question for the union kingpin, a characteristic evasion, and then the anchor turns to the industry titan, who has requested an opening tirade. The industry titan fixes the camera with a fierce, withering glare. His eyes are beady and merciless, his teeth bared and carnivorously sharp, his desiccated, contorted figure giving him the bearing of Death Incarnate. He begins to speak, his voice pinched and pitiless, his message nakedly malicious, brutally honest, utterly unspun. “Fifteen minutes from now,” he rages, “I will wreak a terrible vengeance on this city.” He raises a clawlike hand, waves it menacingly, forms it into a fist that shakes with rage. “No one will be spared!” His eyes bulge madly as he lurches towards the camera. “No one!” Cut to the anchorman, who chuckles reassuringly. “A chilling vision of things to come,” he summarizes pleasantly.
And so please allow me to introduce Charles Montgomery Burns, a man of wealth and taste. To friends he’s known as Monty, but to you it’s Mr. Burns, and he is far and away Springfield’s oldest, richest and most powerful citizen, the owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, a briber of federal officials and buyer of local judges, a backroom political kingmaker, a war profiteer, a Yale alumnus. A robber baron, in short, in the nineteenth-century mould. Burns is the sneering face of capitalism on The Simpsons. He is big business made wizened, liver-spotted flesh, the embodiment of the corporate world’s black, rapacious heart. He is capital: ruthless, unfeeling, greedy, invincible.
If the goal of The Simpsons’ satire is to entertain and subvert, then of course it needs big nasty authorities to fuel its subversion. It needs a machine to rage against. There are plenty of contemptible authority figures in Springfield—Mayor Quimby, Police Chief Wiggum, Principal Skinner, “Itchy & Scratchy” media baron Roger Meyers, even (particularly in more recent seasons) a handful of ultra-slick New Age corporate stooges—but none of them wields the vicious power that Monty Burns does. At the push of a button, Mr. Burns can plunge Springfield into darkness or summon a squadron of oily-hided lawyers to annihilate his opponents. With a wave of a withered arm, he can bend the board of directors of Springfield University or the braintrust of the Republican Party to his will. He can buy his way out of a laundry list of environmental violations with the petty cash in his wallet, and then make an impulse purchase of the court’s statue of Justice as an afterthought. In many ways—some figurative and some extremely literal—Mr. Burns owns Springfield.1
Mr. Burns is a throwback to the days when big money made no apologies and big industry, sure of its own omnipotence, never worried a whit about its public image. Which makes Burns anachronistic as hell. The corporate world in the time of The Simpsons has become a place of rampant fake populism and co-opted radicalism and flat-out-bullshit ethicalism. In every other TV commercial, we find mammoth multinational conglomerates testifying to their down-home folksiness (one recent and egregious example is an ad for Halliburton that closes with a soldier in desert camouflage on the phone, celebrating the birth of his daughter). Other corporations spend millions of bucks a pop on ads demonstrating their deeply held countercultural bona fides (viz. Nike, assorted Pepsi-Cola products, any number of car manufacturers, ad infinitum et ad nauseam). Or they pump 0.01 percent of their operating budgets into green technologies and a hundred times that amount into testimonials claiming they love Mother Earth more than the crunchiest of granola munchers (a tactic particularly prized by giant oil companies like Royal Dutch/Shell and BP). Against these fetid piles of testimony in favour of What Should Be, Burns runs roughshod and unrepentant over the unwashed masses of Springfield as a one-man army of What Is. He’s the ogre behind the warm, friendly corporate mask, his vow to club the consumers who made him rich and feast on their bones a stark counterweight to all those corporate giants—no less callous than old Monty, no less calculating—who tell us they love us so very very much in the TV ads that run between Simpsons segments.
In Mr. Burns’s uncloaked cruelty, we’re presented with The Simpsons’ most strident critique of authority. Other authority figures on the show—cops, politicians, entertainers—might be just as unworthy of the public trust as Burns is, but it’s usually because they’re merely stupid or incompetent or hypocritical or greedy. Only Burns—only this figurehead of Big Business—is pure evil.
Over the years, the Simpson family has learned exactly what sort of man C. Montgomery Burns is. “You can’t marry Mr. Burns,” faultlessly moral Marge tells her mother. “He’s an evil man!” On another occasion, a suddenly penniless Burns—whose stock portfolio has remained unchanged since just before the 1929 crash and still includes significant shares in Confederated Slavery Holdings—approaches virtuous Lisa to ask for help in a new recycling venture aimed at rebuilding his business empire. “I’d never help you,” Lisa replies. “You’re the worst person in the world!” So yes: Mr. Burns’s cruel nature is no secret.
Not that old Monty is trying to disguise his wickedness. In fact, often as not, he positively wallows in his own crapulence. He adores the misery of others. He is reduced to fits of uncontrollable hysteria by the memory of beating a poor Irishman when he (Burns, that is) was a child. He lavishes affection on the snarling hounds who guard his grand estate, joyfully reminiscing about the time one of them—old Crippler—bagged his first hippie. (“That young man didn’t think it was too … . groovy,” Burns merrily recalls.) On another occasion, he watches on a security monitor in his office with mounting glee as Homer chows down on donuts. “That’s right,” Mr. Burns purrs. “Keep eating. Little do you know you’re drawing ever closer to the poisoned donut.” He starts in on a devilish laugh, stops abruptly. “There is a poisoned one, isn’t there, Smithers?” he calls to his ever-vigilant assistant. “Uhhh—no, sir,” Smithers replies. “I discussed this with our lawyers. They consider it murder.” “Damn their oily hides!” bellows Monty. And this is a man, too, whose first viewing of “Itchy & Scratchy” brings him to tears of laughter as he revels in the cartoon’s brutality. “That was delightful!” he howls. “Did you see that? That mouse butchered that cat like a hog! Is all TV this wonderful?”
Consider how Mr. Burns’s life looks to the tyrant himself. In Episode 1F16 (“Burns’ Heir”), his lackey Smithers accidentally leaves a sponge sitting atop Mr. Burns’s top hat as he bathes his boss. The weight of it sends the frail billionaire sinking into his deep tub, where his life flashes before his eyes. He recalls his infant self firing his nanny for providing substandard milk; he remembers amusing himself no end as a young man by firing a pistol at the feet of a pauper to make him dance; and he lingers on the memory of disguising himself as Wavy Gravy (all that time he was smoking harmless tobacco) just so he could sink a Greenpeace ship. These are the highlights of his nasty life.
This is Mr. Burns’s essence: he’s a man not just ruthless in business but utterly rotten in all facets of his life. He’s disgusted by the very sight and smell of the Johnny Lunchpails and Sally Housecoats of the world, not just thinking but knowing he’s a superior breed of human being. “Your honour,” his lawyer states at the beginning of Monty’s trial for running over Bart Simpson in his car, “my client has instructed me to remind the court how rich and important he is, that he is not like other men.” Then Mr. Burns rises and barks, “I should be able to run over as many kids as I want!” And not just Simpson kids: Mr. Burns also hates fat children and simply loathes babies. (On one happy occasion when Smithers isn’t around to thwart him, he indeed attempts to take candy from a baby.) He proudly made shells for the Nazis (ones that worked, dammit!) and had a wedding party that consisted, in its entirety, of a single German World War I veteran in a Kaiser-style spike-topped helmet. (The wedding—to Marge’s widowed mother—was aborted, and Burns’s essential isolation, save for the bootlicking companionship of Smithers, was restored.) “Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun” goes one of Monty Burns’s malevolent aphorisms. “From hell’s heart I stab at thee!” he bellows as he launches another assault on the people of Springfield.
Perhaps even the archetype of the robber baron can’t fully explain Burns’s tyrannical nature; an older model—the bloodthirsty demon of medieval Christian myth, say—might be more precise. After all, Mr. Burns himself once listed fear, famine and pestilence as his gifts to the people of Springfield, and his Halloween-episode depiction as a vampire required no altering of his character whatsoever.
But Mr. Burns retains just enough vague traces of humanity to serve as more than a mere cipher for the writers’ attacks on the rich and ruthless. There is, for example, his enduring relationship with his omnipresent executive assistant, Waylon Smithers, a deep-in-the-closet homosexual who’s madly in love with his boss. Truly, romantically so: Smithers even dreams of a naked Burns flying in through his window to finally consummate their pseudo-marriage. In return, Burns heaps little but abuse on his lackey—a typical incident has Burns scalding Smithers with a cup of tea because it’s brought to him too hot. But there’s something about Smithers’s steadfast devotion, which has only ever wavered once—that being the time Burns actually did try to destroy the sun—that humanizes the old bastard just the tiniest little bit.
There’s also something faintly humanizing—not to mention endlessly hilarious—in Monty Burns’s exaggerated agedness. For the varying purposes of the show, Mr. Burns has been a man in his early eighties and a man in his early hundreds. He’s ultimately sort of ageless, impossibly old, a man with first-hand knowledge of 113-round boxing matches between an Eskimo fellow and “Gentleman” Jim Corbett (whose prime fighting years were the 1890s) and of baseball games featuring Connie Mack (another star athlete of the Gilded Age). Mr. Burns goes looking for “petroleum distillate” at the gas station and peppers his speech with references to silent-film stars. Oh, man, is Mr. Burns old. And of course there’s the requisite response: How old is he? It’s in answering that question that The Simpsons writers have taken yet another long-established comedic formula and breathed into it new and vigorous life. In their hands, Burns’s antiqueness has become a baroque masterpiece of one-liners, obscure references and decrepitude-driven sight gags. In one scene we find Burns, in old-timey goggles, driving a quadricycle (Henry Ford’s first horseless carriage, built in 1896). On another occasion, Burns is revealed to be a devotee of phrenology, which as Smithers points out was dismissed as quackery 160 years ago.2 And when a puppy stands on its hind legs, it reminds old Monty of Rory Calhoun, a character actor from 1930s Hollywood. His knees fill with fluid the moment he kneels, every joint in his body creaks mightily with each bend, and he loses a tug-of-war with one-year-old Maggie Simpson.
At their best, the show’s how-old-is-he? jokes transcend their clichéd origins completely, giving rise to incomparable moments such as Mr. Burns’s visit to the post office in Episode 3F06 (“Mother Simpson”). “I’d like to send this letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam,” he tells the bewildered clerk. “Am I too late for the 4:30 autogyro?” (Prussia ceased to exist as an independent political unit in 1934, Thailand stopped calling itself Siam in 1939, and no one’s sent anything anywhere by autogyro since the end of the Second World War.) A big part of the humour here is the sheer surprise at hearing such outdated terminology—autogyro!—but just as essential is the oblivious earnestness with which Mr. Burns makes his antiquated references.
And these old-old-old-man gags are also a critical component of Burns’s humanity. He’s a man waaay out of his time, and this character detail is so often used to evoke sympathy in other narratives—indeed it is very often a tragic thing—that it lends a little compassion even to evil Monty. This is a point made explicit in Episode 7F18 (“Brush with Greatness”), in which Marge is commissioned to paint a flattering portrait of Mr. Burns. She depicts him as a frail figure not long for this world in order to downplay his essential nastiness. “He’s bad, but he’ll die,” a Springfieldianite gallery-goer observes. “So I like it.” Exactly.
More than the withered body and senility, though, it’s Mr. Burns’s distinctive voice that defines the character, tying together his slithering viciousness and vile sadism and tragicomic frailty into a rounded, semi-realistic whole. It’s the voice that gives Burns life, and it’s this life that takes him beyond archetype, producing a singular and enduring character. And how to describe that voice? It’s a breathy half-whisper of doom, a tyrannical wheeze that reeks of lifelong privilege and hints at unbridled power. It sounds like John D. Rockefeller Sr. looks—palsied, penny-pinched, omnipotent—in photos of the robber baron’s robber baron as an old man. Its author is the versatile voice actor Harry Shearer (who also produces Smithers’s sycophantic squawk), who has said he derived it from the voices of screen legend Lionel Barrymore and senile ex-president Ronald Reagan.3 The Reagan influence is the most overt, the Old Gipper’s soft tone and mild drawl—Wehhh!—mimicked in the pitch and cadence of Burns’s signature line: Ehhhk-cellent. In Burns’s voice, though, the brutality of Reagan’s neoconservative Cold Warrior agenda is made manifest, the honeyed smoothness betrayed by the vague trace of menacing growl. Reagan almost never showed anger in his public pronouncements—even when he was threatening violence against godless communist regimes or throwing unionized labourers out of work—but Mr. Burns does so frequently, and usually with real delight. In a representative outburst, Burns learns from his company’s own market research that the public sees him as something of an ogre. “I ought to club them and eat their bones!” he rages in response. Just as often, though, he delivers the nastiest of orders with the offhandedness of someone fully at ease with controlling the fate of others. “Smithers, dismember the corpse and send the widow a corsage,” he quips after attacking an insubordinate university administrator with a baseball bat. The line is delivered with neither malice nor regret. Destroying adversaries is, for Burns, a routine event. Just another day in the life of an archaic robber baron.
If Mr. Burns were solely a beyond-the-grave revisitation of the nineteenth-century capitalist, he’d be a dwarf star in the Simpsons firmament, a one-note character in the same vein as, say, Disco Stu, who pops up from time to time as an excuse to parody the pop culture of the 1970s. But Burns is much more than this: he is capital, the decrepit embodiment of the whole economic order of the industrialized West and the primary representative of Big Business in Springfield. And so The Simpsons’ writers have tied Burns not just to the Rockefellers and Carnegies of bygone days but to a range of business icons, transforming him into Industrialism Incarnate.
Thus, for example, we find Burns ensconced in the luxurious confines of the Springfield Heights Millionaire’s Club, having lunch with Aristotle Amadopolis, the owner of the nearby Shelbyville Nuclear Power Plant and an obvious stand-in for Jackie Kennedy’s second husband, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. On another occasion, Mr. Burns sells off his plant to two German efficiency experts, which ties him to the eclipse of American manufacturing by foreign (particularly German and Japanese) firms and foreshadows the 1998 sale of Chrysler (whose head until 1992, Lee Iacocca, was one of the biggest celebrity CEOs of the 1980s) to Daimler-Benz.
There has even been a veiled suggestion that Burns’s business experience might have included some time as the regime-toppling titan of some Latin American banana republic, which would place him in a fine American industrial tradition best exemplified by the ultimate banana-republican conglomerate, the United Fruit Company (which, with its partners in the CIA, more or less hand-selected the governments of many Central American countries for much of the twentieth century). Burns’s banana-republican moment comes as he addresses the assembled workers of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant from his Perón-esque balcony, which apparently sends him into a reverie. “Compadres,” he orates, “it is imperative that we crush the freedom fighters before the start of the rainy season. And remember: a shiny new donkey for whoever brings me the head of Colonel Montoya.” He comes to at this point and switches into American rhetorical mode, but the message is clear: Burns has some Latin American blood on his hands.
Burns has also been depicted, at a full episode’s length, as Springfield’s very own Howard Hughes. This comes in Episode 1F08 (“$pringfield [or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling]”), in which Burns opens a casino and soon becomes a reclusive, delusional hermit, wearing tissue boxes on his feet and collecting his urine in jars as he obsesses over the germs that cover Smithers’s face. (Which germs, incidentally, band together at one point to chant, “Freemasons run the country!”) Burns—who in this and the rest of his dementia is very much à la Hughes—builds a model of a giant wooden airplane called the Spruce Moose, which he claims will take passengers from New York’s Idyllwild Airport to the Belgian Congo in seventeen minutes. This lapse into obsolete terminology is of course Burns’s alone, but by equating him with twentieth-century industrialists like Hughes, the show’s writers build themselves a satirical vehicle as big and sturdy as the Spruce Moose itself.
The most frequent and elaborate of the show’s allusions has been to the greatest icon of doomed business ambition in the history of American cinema: Charles Foster Kane, the protagonist of Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. If Burns is anyone’s doppelgänger, he’s Kane’s, a connection that the show’s writers use for two purposes: to further humanize Burns (lest his cartoonish malevolence sink the show’s realism), and to make a sharply satirical point about the amplified ruthlessness of big business in our time. The humanization stems from the fact that Kane, for all his hubris, is a profoundly tragic figure, a compassionate champion of the Eddie Punchclocks of the world whose ego and ambition eventually destroys his humanity. By the end of the film, Kane has been reduced to a pitiful creature, longing on his deathbed for a beloved toy from his innocent youth (Rosebud, the most famous sled in pop-cultural history). In Episode 1F01 (allusively titled “Rosebud”), The Simpsons draws an episode-long parallel between Kane and Burns, providing possibly the first illustration in the whole series (and certainly the most graphic one) of a tragic, emotionally scarred side to Burns’s character. The episode opens with an homage to Kane’s opening sequence: Burns, in fitful sleep, recalls a blissfully innocent but materially impoverished scene of his youth, into which comes a twisted, joyless billionaire who whisks young Monty away to a life of empty luxury. Burns’s beloved teddy bear, Bobo, lies abandoned in the winter snow, subbing in for Kane’s sled. “Wait!” Burns’s father calls after the departing limousine, waving the bear in the air. “You forgot your bear—a symbol of your lost youth and innocence!” Here we have the first and pretty much only time that it’s been suggested that Mr. Burns is now or has ever been innocent in any way. Cut to present day, in the master bedroom of Burns Manor (which in this and other episodes features a wrought-iron gate crowned with an encircled “B,” a direct reference to the circle-K’d gate of Kane’s Xanadu),4 where a despondent Burns lies next to a box of NEV-R-BREAK snow globes. He hurls one and it smashes, still à la Kane and the snow globe that drops from his hand in the throes of death. (Kane, though, didn’t have a whole crate of them.) The rest of the episode follows Burns’s efforts to find and reclaim his beloved Bobo.
Numerous other episodes have used this Burns-as-Kane motif. In one, Burns runs for governor (as did Kane) and gives a speech in front of an enormous banner emblazoned with his face and surname (ditto). Burns, though, is undone not by revelations of sexual impropriety (Kane’s downfall), but by the three-eyed fish his power plant’s waste has created in Springfield’s waterways. In another episode, Smithers organizes an elaborate song-and-dance number for his boss that uses the tune and parodies the lyrics of the number that greets Kane in his office upon his newspaper’s victory over its chief rival. “There is a man / A certain man …” Kane’s Daily Inquirer cronies then sing, “What is his name?” “It’s Charlie Kane!” the dancing girls reply. “It’s Mr. Kane!” a crony pipes up, mock-indignant. Then all sing: “He doesn’t like that ‘Mister’ / He likes good old Charlie Kane!” In The Simpsons version, the second line starts with Smithers: “He’s Mr. Burns!” Burns himself replies, “I’m Mr. Burns!” Smithers: “He’s Monty Burns!” Burns, scowling, genuinely indignant: “It’s Mr. Burns!” Then Smithers and the dancing girls sing, “To friends he’s known as Monty / But to you it’s Mr. Burns!” Mr. Burns demands that his status be underscored—kind of like those modern captains of industry who have no time for Charlie Kane’s populism, who instead spend the bulk of their lives in high-security office towers, gated mansions, private island retreats, and curtained-off business class (or on private jets).
The idea that the Simpsons-era. business elite has become irredeemably greedy and amoral, that it can’t sustain the tragedy of a Kane because it is so bereft of human decency that there’s no way to find a state of grace within it from which to fall—this point is hammered home in the ending to the “Rosebud” episode. Citizen Kane itself ends in pure fallen-from-grace tragedy: Kane, who has betrayed his most deeply held principles, ruined his media empire and been abandoned by his wife and friends, dies utterly alone in his cavernous tomb of a palace, longing for his long-lost Rosebud. But Burns eventually gets his Rosebud back. Bobo turns up in a bag of ice at the Kwik-E-Mart and passes into the hands of Maggie Simpson, becoming her favourite toy.5 After attempting to buy, steal and coerce the bear from little Maggie, Mr. Burns finally wins it back by imploring her not to make the mistakes he made—to keep the bear, hang onto her innocence, stay pure. This rare outpouring of emotion from the old tycoon moves Maggie to give Mr. Burns his Bobo back. Burns is ecstatic, momentarily overcome with renewed love for the world. But of course it doesn’t last, and Bobo is quickly lost once again. There’s ultimately no room in Burns’s cruel life for something as sentimental as a tattered teddy bear—he has a power plant to run.
Above all else, Mr. Burns is a boss. And vast as his fortune may be, its cornerstone remains his beloved Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. It’s at the plant that we find Burns at his most casually evil, and it’s there that we get the clearest picture of his relationship to the workers of the world—and of the nature of working life in Springfield.
There’s no ambiguity to this relationship: Burns is a pure tyrant, abusive, penny-pinching, grossly exploitive, and his workers are a horde of faceless drones. Often as not, Burns embraces the plant’s employees only through a TV monitor, watching contentedly from his office as they march to work in a lifeless line. On those rare occasions when there’s a break in the monotony—when, for example, Homer Simpson shows up one morning in a shirt accidentally dyed pink—Mr. Burns is outraged. Believing that Homer must be “some sort of free-thinking anarchist,” Burns has him tossed into the New Bedlam Rest Home for the Emotionally Interesting. Mr. Burns does occasionally meet his employees in person—he greets them, for example, at company picnics and the like, reading their names off cue cards supplied by Smithers—but even at these times they’re nothing more than a stream of interchangeable faces to him.
Indeed, Mr. Burns’s utter contempt for his employees is the inspiration for a long-running series of gags. These start with the conceit that Burns does not, under any circumstances, remember who Homer Simpson is. Now, the lives of Monty Burns and Homer Simpson have of course become deeply intertwined over the years, and the increasing strain on the conceit of Burns’s ignorance is itself mined for laughs. Here’s one of the more elaborate examples of this phenomenon from Season 4:
Burns and Smithers watch on the office monitor as Homer is elected union president.
BURNS: Who is that firebrand, Smithers?
SMITHERS: Uh, that’s Homer Simpson, sir.
BURNS: Simpson, eh? New man?
SMITHERS: [chuckles] Actually, sir, he thwarted your campaign for governor, you ran over his son, he saved the plant from meltdown, his wife painted you in the nude …
BURNS: Enh. Doesn’t ring a bell.
Missing from this exchange—but present in most other “Simpson, eh?” incidents—is a central component in the running gag: a dismissive phrase used by Smithers to identify Homer. A typical dialogue begins with Burns noticing Homer on the monitor and asking who he is. “He’s Homer Simpson, sir,” Smithers replies. “One of your drones from Sector 7G.” With each recurrence, though, Smithers’s dismissal has grown more spiteful. In early episodes, Homer is simply one of Burns’s drones or boobs or schmos from Sector 7G. But later in the series, Homer becomes one of his carbon blobs or organ banks or fork-and-spoon operators. It’s hard to imagine anything more categorically dismissive than these last phrases, which reduce Homer to the absolute basics of his existence: he’s carbon-based, his body’s functional, he eats. Combine their callousness with the mechanistic precision of “Sector 7G,” and you’ve reached some kind of absolute zero in the employer-worker relationship, a coldness in which all the joy of a life’s labour ceases, leaving nothing but physics, science, the hard facts of force applied, energy produced, profit accrued.
The other facets of Burns’s corporate governance are no more admirable than his approach to labour relations. He bends and twists safety regulation and environmental standards, and bribes every public official he’s ever met. He’s even been known to offer his bribes in the showy style of a TV game show. “Now,” he tells an inspector from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, post-meltdown, “you can either have the washer and dryer where the lovely Smithers is standing. Or you can trade it all for what’s inside this box.” On another occasion, Burns joins Smithers to dispose of the plant’s radioactive waste, skipping the playground—“All those bald children are arousing suspicion,” he notes—and instead loading it into a tree trunk in a nearby park. Another time, he and Smithers sit watching a news story on TV about the tragic decline in the duck population at a local pond. “Smithers,” Burns asks softly, wiping away a tear, “do you think maybe my power plant killed those ducks?” Smithers: “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it, sir.” Burns, sniffling: “Excellent.”
Burns, in other words, doesn’t give a good goddamn. If his carbon blobs get hurt on the job at his profoundly unsafe plant, he can replace them with illegal immigrants, and if his regulatory violations produce bald children or kill wildlife, well, what of it? Burns’s sense of privilege is unconditional, his contempt for everyone but himself (even Smithers, who during one meltdown is denied the second seat in the escape pod because Burns likes to put his feet up)6 is nothing short of absolute. And in the age of Enron—a time when the heads of corporations that lose billions give themselves millions in bonuses, a time when abject failures are given multimillion-dollar golden parachutes, a time when even outright thieving corporate executives slither through the wreckage they’ve caused with impunity—in the face of all of this, Burns emerges as a somewhat typical example of the contemporary CEO.
And what sort of workplace does this create? Frankly, it creates the kind of workplace that employs lazy, incompetent Homer Simpson for his entire adult life, and indeed actively encourages his indifference towards his work and his lifelong devotion to slacking off. And Homer’s just the most prominent of the plant’s uninspired workers: in Episode 9F05 (“Marge Gets a Job”), Monty’s routine scan of the security monitors reveals a group of employees playing limbo with a pipe suspended between two drums of toxic waste. “Jackanapes!” Burns growls. In the next monitor, he sees two workers in radiation suits playing chess. “Lollygaggers!” he spits. Then the worst offender: a small crowd of his employees has gathered to watch a cock fight. “Noodleheads!” fumes Burns. But at least there are signs of life in this inspection; a far bleaker picture of working life at the power plant emerges later in the same episode, when Burns pays a visit to his newest employee, Marge Simpson, with whom he’s fallen in love. He presents her with a bouquet of orchids and fragrant bath oils, which he insists he lavishes on all his employees, causing Marge to wonder why morale is so low. She points to a line of employees nearby: a man slumped over on his workstation, weeping openly; a woman, her mouth agape, her face fixed in a wide-eyed stare of total despondence, slugging back shots from a whiskey bottle; and a man with a twitchy right eye who is studiously polishing a rifle (“I am the Angel of Death. The time of purification is at hand,” he announces). Marge suggests having a theme day—“Funny Hat Day”—and piping in some upbeat music. Cut to the very same employees: the first man, in a gaudy sombrero, still in tears; the woman, wearing a jaunty baseball cap adorned with large moose antlers, knocking back yet another shot from her bottle; and the man with the rifle, his head crowned with a propeller-topped beanie, hunched over his weapon and chuckling. And this triptych of despair is set to the grotesquely jaunty rhythm of Tom Jones’s “What’s New, Pussycat?” giving the scene a deranged aspect that’s like a hyperbolic version of the professional smiles required of corporate spokespeople and service-industry drones.
This is the image of work most often projected by The Simpsons, and it stands in stark contrast to many prominent myths of the digital age: that work had grown more exciting, more fulfilling, more egalitarian, that corporations had come to hate hierarchy, that grey-suited conformity was as out of date as the ducktail haircut. Some of these doubtless rang true—if, that is, you happened to be in the tiny minority working on the creative side in certain media industries and content-producing high-tech firms. The same years, though, saw the greatest redistribution of wealth in the history of capitalism throughout the corporate West—particularly in the United States, where by the late 1990s the richest 1 percent controlled more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth (up from 20 percent in 1979). At the same time, job security for those on the social ladder’s lower rungs all but vanished, and working-class workplaces moved by the thousands to the Third World, where wages were counted in pennies per hour and labour and environmental regulations were so lax that even the Springfield power plant probably couldn’t violate them.
This was the fate of labour in the 1990s, and it surely played a part in making Homer a working-class hero and Monty Burns a resonant villain. It also gave rise to the massive mainstream success of the Dilbert comic strip, the cult sensation of the film Office Space7 and the canonization of Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, in which characters worked “McJobs”8 in offices made up of “veal fattening pens”—not to mention the widespread use of non-Coupland neologisms like “cubicle farm” and “wage slave” to describe the post-industrial workplace. In all of these, as on The Simpsons, work is portrayed as mind-numbing, soul-sucking, maddeningly bureaucratic and utterly devoid of job security.
“If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike,” Homer Simpson tells his daughter. “You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.” You pin a Dilbert strip to the wall of your veal fattening pen or you trade lines from Office Space or you surf half-heartedly from McJob to McJob. You post details about your doomed high-tech employer and its worthless stock options on Fuckedcompany.com. You work temp jobs (for a time in the 1990s, Manpower—a temporary-employment broker—was America’s largest employer, until it was eclipsed by Wal-Mart). Your work might not look like the manual labour at the Springfield power plant, but you might well have felt as eager to slack off as Homer or even as despondent as that poor bastard in the gaudy sombrero. Whatever this New Economy was—wherever it was—it didn’t touch everyone in the bountiful West, not even most of us. And the half-assed work carried out in Springfield served as an exaggerated allegory for life on the cubicle farm.
Work sucks just as often for Springfieldianites who toil outside the power plant. It sucks so hard, in fact, that it’s given rise to two recurring characters, each embodying a modern work archetype. The first of these is the ubiquitous Pimple-Faced Kid (a.k.a. “Puberty Boy,” a.k.a. “The Geeky Teenager”), the boy with the octave-skipping voice and enduring acne problem who fills many of Springfield’s most menial jobs. He’s the kid behind the counter (or over the drive-thru speaker) at the Krusty Burger, the usher at the movie theatre, the attendant at the roller coaster at Duff Gardens, the clueless counter clerk at seemingly every store and fast-food joint in Springfield. The Pimple-Faced Kid is Springfield’s service industry, the generic representative of the millions whose place in the New Economy included a stint as a greeter at Wal-Mart or a shirt-folding expert at the Gap or a barista at Starbucks or a “sandwich artist” at Subway or any of the other high-growth professions of the 1990s.9
When the Pimple-Faced Kid is employed elsewhere, you’re likely to find the counter manned by a guy the show’s online fans have dubbed “Sarcastic Middle-Aged Man,” a slouchy fellow with a whisk-broom moustache who soldiers on through a wide range of occupations—limousine driver, caricature artist, motel clerk, assistant to 1980s video game star Donkey Kong—with a biting sarcasm that never wavers. He’s the clerk at the Copy Jalopy when Lisa arrives to have her political pamphlets printed: “Twenty-five copies in canary, twenty-five in goldenrod, twenty-five in saffron, and twenty-five in paella.” “Okay,” he replies, oozing disinterest. “One hundred yellow.” He’s behind the counter again at All Creatures Great and Cheap when Lisa shows up looking for a hamster for her science project. “I want the most intelligent hamster you’ve got,” she says. “Okay,” Sarcastic Middle-Aged Man replies, randomly plucking a hamster from a cage. “Uh, this little guy writes mysteries under the name of J.D. MacGregor.”
The interchangeability of Springfield’s service-industry clerks is part of the satire: these jobs, in Springfield as in our world, can be filled by virtually anyone. The employer just needs a body, and the worker just needs the money. Their jobs don’t even have the personal touch, poison-tipped as it may be, of a Monty Burns. They are simply the front-line facade of a corporate order.
There’s a scene in Episode 8F04 (“Homer Defined”) in which Mr. Burns is being interviewed by Kent Brockman about an unfolding disaster at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. “Mr. Burns,” Brockman says, “people are calling this a meltdown.” Burns chuckles with feigned warmth. “Oh, ‘meltdown,’” he replies. “It’s one of those annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus.” Though a fine piece of spin-doctoring, this is entirely out of character for unapologetic Monty, whose usual attitude in such situations is enraged irritation that anyone—reporter, government official, judge, anyone—would dare to question his right to do whatever the hell he wants. There are few, if any, further examples of Monty playing the public-relations game;10 it’s just not him. Maybe for this reason, The Simpsons has long featured a rotating cast of grotesquely slick corporate mannequins who pop up when the show’s satirical target is the communications apparatus of the contemporary corporation (as opposed to Burns, who usually serves as the embodiment of the truth behind the message).
In early episodes, the most prominent PR shill in Springfield is Jack Larson, president of Laramie Cigarettes. We encounter Larson, for example, in a TV commercial for the Little Miss Springfield Pageant in Episode 9F02 (“Lisa the Beauty Queen”). In the ad, a friendly family man and his daughter have just shared a heartwarming moment. Larson enters, in power suit and corporate haircut, all but leaving a trail of slime. “This year, Laramie is sponsoring the Little Miss Springfield Pageant,” he says, with that slightly-too-polished broadcast-ready smoothness that instantly reads as phony. “You see, government regulations prohibit us from advertising on TV.” He inhales deeply on a cigarette, holding up a pack of Laramies for the camera. “Ah, that sweet Carolina smoke!” He returns to the task at hand: “But they can’t prohibit us from holding a beauty pageant for little girls aged seven to nine.” On one level, this little scene brings the subtext of tobacco company sponsorship to the foreground. On another, it’s pretty ham-fisted satire, all but announcing its criticism in blinding, blinking neon. It’s always this way with Jack Larson: in another episode, he responds to the theft of a truckload of Laramies by telling a reporter that another truck is on its way, and its driver has been advised to ignore all stop signs and crosswalks. Larson is entirely too obvious, too outwardly evil.11 He’s got none of the velvet-gloved smoothness and presumed innocence that characterize sophisticated modern PR.
The true face of corporate gloss appears later in The Simpsons’ run, in the sensible-suited, eternally perky person of one Lindsey Naegle. We first meet Naegle (though she hasn’t yet been named) at an animation company’s boardroom table in Episode 4F12 (“The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show”). Naegle’s a slick corporate mouthpiece right out of the gate, explaining the new character for “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” to the show’s writers in a poised, persuasive torrent of marketing buzzwords and vacuous corporate newspeak. “We at the network want a dog with attitude,” she tells the show’s assembled production staff. “He’s edgy, he’s ‘in your face.’ You’ve heard the expression ‘Let’s get busy’? Well, this is a dog who gets ‘biz-zay’! Consistently and thoroughly.” Elsewhere in the episode, Naegle prattles on about outrageous paradigms and fundamental shifts in the key demographic. She’s pure corporate, radiating a kind of cancerous professional sheen that envelops all it encounters, using what it needs and destroying the rest.
Like the Pimple-Faced Kid, Naegle moves freely from job to job; she’s the public face not of a corporation but of The Corporation. (In one episode, her name even changes to Mindy, but the smart suit and MBA voice make it clear we’re dealing with the same shill.) And her weightless, persuasive banter and hard-headed business sense fit any old conglomerate: a pharmaceutical giant, a toymaker, a telecommunications company. She’s right at home as the PR rep for OmniTouch, a cellular phone company, stepping in to implement a win-win solution after Homer accidentally destroys priceless artifacts at the OmniTouch Traveling Exhibit (formerly the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibit). The massive humming monstrosity OmniTouch installs in Lisa’s bedroom to compensate for Homer’s damages, Naegle calmly explains, is not a cellular transmitter but a “keep-in-touch tower.” By the next scene, she’s got Homer referring to the antenna as a “progress tree” and beseeching Lisa to examine her predicament from OmniTouch’s point of view. In another episode, she represents Springfield’s telephone company, her hands folded in a pyramid on her desk in a hollow pantomime of concerned concentration as she greets Homer and Marge. “Now,” she tells them, “how may I best dispense with you today?” This is how corporations talk to us: warm and friendly, vapid and shallow. Quietly duplicitous. Spun.
What truly differentiates Lindsey Naegle from an obvious hypocrite like Jack Larson or an unrepentant tyrant like Mr. Burns, however, is the depth of her commitment to the corporate ethos. There are no fangs behind her superficial smile, no anger or malice or even joy underneath her polished surface. She’s all business, a pure careerist, a perfect product of her workaholic time. Even at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Naegle doesn’t lose her executive poise. “We all know why we’re here, don’t we?” she announces to her fellow addicts. “To keep ourselves sober … and to network.” And when Marge asks Naegle—a phone-company rep just then—why she keeps changing jobs, she answers, “I’m a sexual predator,” her voice wavering not at all from the one she uses to explain the need for keep-in-touch towers. This is what makes Naegle such an excellent allegory for the modern corporate age: you don’t see through her, because there’s nothing else to see.
Even when Naegle is ostensibly not a PR flack, she can’t help but shill. Case in point: Episode AABF22 (“Brother’s Little Helper”), in which Naegle appears as an unnamed research scientist for the Pharm Team, a drug company that manufactures Focusyn, a cure for attention deficit disorder (ADD). Marge and Homer pay the drug company a visit after Principal Skinner threatens to expel Bart if he doesn’t submit to a “radical, untested, potentially dangerous” Focusyn program. Naegle and a fellow scientist demonstrate the experimental drug on a cage full of rambunctious guinea pigs, which seat themselves in orderly rows in a guinea pig classroom after being sprayed with Focusyn. “They’ve become your slaves,” Homer observes. “Yes,” Naegle enthuses with her usual PR polish, “but it’s not about slavery. It’s about helping kids concentrate. This pill reduces class-clownism forty-four percent!” In a business world where marketing has become the most important component of any enterprise, bringing talk of profit and customer service even to schools and hospitals and pre-emptive wars (viz. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in 2002 on the timing of the march to war in Iraq: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August”)—in this world, Lindsey Naegle is the end result: a force of pure corporate-communications gloss, a woman so immersed in the professional obfuscations of big business that she herself believes the hype.
AABF22 extends its satire of corporate gloss far beyond automatonic Naegle, however, saving its sharpest blade to hack away at a far bigger and nastier beast: the symbiotic relationship between pill-pushing pharmaceutical giants, medical and educational professionals, and a corporate working world that needs hyper-obedient workaholics like Homer needs beer. Which is to say that the episode’s satirical target is pretty much the entire corporate-capitalist system. So it goes that in AABF22 free-willed, rebellious Bart is diagnosed at school with a trendy disease (ADD), prescribed an experimental drug, and thereby transformed into a slick, overachieving executive embryo. His first day on Focusyn finds Bart suddenly absorbed in a poetry assignment and reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pre-Teens instead of watching Krusty the Clown after school. That night at dinner, Marge finds a note from her son: “Thank you in advance for a world-class meal. You’re an inspiration to our entire organization.” Seeing his mother’s pleasure, Bart expresses his satisfaction in the style of a famous credit card commercial. “Cost of paper: five cents,” Bart narrates to himself. “A mother’s love: priceless.” In the coming days, he organizes all the lawsuits against his father into a single class action and takes on the extracurricular chore of tutoring an underprivileged Navajo boy, during which Bart adds a decidedly corporate spin to classic nursery rhymes—teaching the kid, for example, that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall “because he took his eyes off the prize.”
Eventually, Bart’s experiment with Focusyn drives him to paranoia, and he’s taken off the drug, but not before the episode has accomplished its task. To wit: it graphically suggests that the most significant problems facing the millions of North American kids being prescribed Ritalin and antidepressants and the rest might not be their diagnosed disorders, but rather any one or more of: 1) the increasing laxness of testing regimes for new drugs, particularly for children; 2) the over-prescription of such drugs, especially to children; 3) an education system that too quickly inflates the misbehaviour endemic to childhood into mental illness; 4) the pharmaceutical industry’s relentless drive to expand its customer base; and 5) an entire hyper-corporate society that forces kids to live and learn and toe the line in a ruthless, zero-sum system designed to churn out middle-management drones. Or, to put it more bluntly, Episode AABF22 posits the notion that the point of a drug like Focusyn might not be to help children learn but to numb them into submission, to turn them into good little corporate citizens. After all, the corporate world order that feeds their hyperactivity with frenetic entertainment spectacles and sugary junk food is the same one that makes big money treating the “disorders” this stuff then induces in them. It is cause, analyst and solution.
The Simpsons expands on this theme in Episode BABF07 (“Grift of the Magi”), in which Springfield Elementary School goes bankrupt and a private company, Kid First Industries, steps in to run the school. Suddenly, behaviour problems like Bart’s are no longer in need of correction—“humour is a sign of intelligence,” notes a Kid First “teacher”—and class-work increasingly consists of talking about favourite toys. It turns out that Kid First has turned the entire school into a market-research division for its new Christmas toy, mining the kids for information on how to give it the broadest possible appeal. (In one of Lisa’s classes, the guest speaker is “Phil from marketing.”) The result is “Funzo,” a soft and cuddly robotic doll with lots of firepower that walks and talks and is hardwired to destroy its competition. (“You mean like Microsoft?” Bart wonders. “Exactly,” Lisa replies.) Kid First’s marketing machine cranks into overdrive to make Funzo the must-have toy of the season—“If you don’t have Funzo, you’re nothin’!” goes the tagline—and soon there’s a stampede at the doors of the Try-N-Save as Springfield’s gullible consumers scramble to get their hands on one of the dolls. Cut to an executive hot tub, where Kid First’s top executives—one Jim Hope and (but of course) the job-hopping sexual predator Lindsey Naegle—watch the debacle on a monitor, calculating that the speed with which the crowd went from muttering to stampeding equates to $370 million in sales. Jim’s still a little worried about the toy’s success, though, until he sees some trampling. All of which is barely parody: Cabbage Patch Kids created this kind of carnage in the early 1980s, as did the Tickle Me Elmo doll a decade later. And all of them pale in comparison to the (on occasion literally) homicidal frenzy created by the consumer demand for a certain kind of running shoe, the product of one of the greatest marketing machines of our time. I’m talking of course about Nike, leader of the brand revolution.
There’s not much hyperbole here: Nike did indeed launch a revolution. It even declared it in just such terms, in a 1987 TV commercial that used the Beatles song “Revolution” as its soundtrack. That ad—big-budgeted, gorgeously shot and wicked cool—was the first major action in Nike’s ultimately successful campaign to convince the world of the innate value of corporate brands. In the years that followed, Nike transformed itself from specialty-shoe company to pure marketing machine—a New-Age business with few fixed assets and no manufacturing facilities (Nike has subcontracted the entirety of its shoe manufacturing to other companies) whose value resides primarily in a swoosh, a slogan and an attitude.
Few of us ever found ourselves enclosed entirely within the apparatus of modern marketing like the kids at Springfield Elementary, but anyone who’s seen a few thousand ads, which is to say all of us, has experienced the brand revolution. The extraordinary power of advertising is nothing new—it was Coca-Cola’s print advertising, after all, that gave the world the fat, jolly, red-and-white-suited version of Santa Claus—but the years since Nike’s 1987 declaration have played host to a staggering growth in the ubiquity of marketing messages. In addition to the ads that fill our TV screens and thicken our magazines and blanket our roadsides, advertising has in recent years colonized countless new territories (the space above urinals, the labels on bananas, the ten minutes before a feature film begins). Strategically placed products and logos fill the sets of TV shows and movies (from E.T.’s Reese’s Pieces to Seinfeld’s Snapple), stadiums and sporting events have become extended branding exercises (the Florida Panthers of the NHL, for example, play hockey in an arena that in only its first decade of existence has variously been known as the National Car Rental Center, Office Depot Center and BankAtlantic Center), and the line between certain star athletes and the Nike brand (viz. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods) has been pretty much obliterated. I had occasion a few years back to interview a man whose sole job was to sell ad space inside video games—to line the boards of a hockey video game, for example, with corporate logos. And once I thought about it, I had to admit that the logos on the boards actually did enhance the gaming experience, as this guy was claiming. They were a key component in the game’s verisimilitude. A video game arena without logo-plastered boards would seem not just fake but faked, white-washed, intentionally inaccurate. This is how pervasive corporate marketing has become in the age of The Simpsons: it’s an essential part of the scenery.
There’s another revolution of a sort at work in Nike’s 1987 branding exercise: its “Revolution” ad marked to many observers a bold new low in corporate crassness. Here, after all, was a sacred anthem of the 1960s counterculture being used to sell overpriced sneakers. And lo, the keepers of that counterculture’s sacred artifacts—the baby boomers—were verily and mightily pissed. Boomer-aged pundits sounded off in every other newspaper in the English-speaking world about the “Revolution” heresy, and the Beatles themselves sued Nike, its ad agency and the record companies that were involved. (The band had lost control of the publishing rights to most of its songs a few years earlier, in a bidding war with Michael Jackson.) Eventually, Nike agreed to stop airing the ad, but that didn’t stop the force the shoe company had unleashed. In the years that followed, the very idea of nonconformity became little more than a marketing strategy (see, for example, Apple Computer’s “Think Different” ads), and the recasting of 1960s rebellion as 1990s consumption eventually ceased to ruffle many feathers. By the mid-1990s, when both Canada’s Bank of Montreal and the multi national accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand set their financial-services commercials to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” it caused only feeble and ultimately impotent criticism. (The Bank of Montreal ad, in particular, was a gut-wrenchingly foul example of the new crassness: it depicted a choir of angelic children mounting a hilltop to extol the revolutionary virtues of a range of personal-banking services.) It’s as if the corporate order somehow seems far too powerful—too inevitable—to be deterred.
Lisa Simpson runs into this problem in Episode 5F05 (“Lisa the Skeptic”), after she and her classmates discover a winged skeleton—an angel, apparently—at an archaeological dig on the site of the parking lot for a new megamall. The people of Springfield quickly embrace the angel as a sacred idol, though Lisa remains skeptical of its holiness. Then the skeleton disappears, only to magically reappear to lead the faithful to a hill next to the new mall, where it comes to rest with an etching on its stone base that reads, “The End Will Come at Sundown.” The amassed Springfield populace waits there anxiously for the Rapture. As the sun sets, it’s revealed to be an elaborate marketing stunt: “the end of high prices” at Heavenly Hills Mall. Lisa berates the mall’s developer: “You exploited people’s deepest beliefs just to anoint your cheesy wares. Well, we are outraged, aren’t we?” A distracted Police Chief Wiggum responds, “Oh. Oh, yeah, yeah … we’re outraged, very much so. But look at all the stores! A—a Pottery Barn!” The townsfolk rush off eagerly into the mall, leaving Lisa alone and impotent in her disgust.
Lisa’s frustration is understandable: the consumer juggernaut in the Simpsons era has indeed seemed unstoppable and all-encompassing, a multi-headed mutating giant impossible to escape—and almost as hard to satirize. Still, The Simpsons has tried gamely to chart the sleazy scope of modern marketing. In one episode, Lindsey Naegle sits at a boardroom table helping her colleagues invent a new holiday so they can have an excuse to sell yet more “assorted gouge-ables.” Naegle suggests they do “something religious”—they’ve had previous success with “Christmas II”—but they pass on a colleague’s suggestion (“Spendover”) and go instead with the secular “Love Day.” Another time, the Simpson family gathers at the kitchen table so Homer and Marge can teach the kids about romance. “Romance is dead,” Lisa replies flatly. “It was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece by piece.” And there’s even a recurring character on the show who embodies all the self-importance and overstatement of contemporary marketing: Duffman, a hip-thrusting, slogan-spouting, muscle-bound beer company shill in a superhero costume. “Hey, look!” Lenny enthuses as Duffman invades Moe’s Tavern one evening. “It’s Duffman—the guy in a costume that creates awareness of Duff!”
All of these digs certainly ring true, but they’re also quite likely to be eclipsed by crass reality. Back in the 1980s, for example, Budweiser ads created a poster and T-shirt craze not for anything as spectacular as a superhero but for a dog—a good-timing babe magnet of a bull terrier who went by the moniker “Spuds McKenzie.”
What’s more, ads are only the visible tip of a mammoth corporate iceberg, a huge force that in recent decades has usurped much of the power of traditional authorities like church and state, becoming in many ways the most important locus of power on the planet. This transformation, too, has precipitated the odd satirical swipe from The Simpsons. For example, there’s the time Bart heads down to the local mall to get his ear pierced. He scoots past several Starbucks outlets into In ’n’ Out Ear Piercing. “I’d like to get my ear pierced,” he quite reasonably requests. “Well, better make it quick, kiddo,” the clerk (Sarcastic Middle-Aged Man, incidentally) replies. “In five minutes this place is becoming a Starbucks.” As Bart leaves the store, it transforms into a Starbucks, as if touched by a magic latte wand, to match every other store in the mall.
There’s certainly a hint of the speed and power of corporate conquest in this quick-wash changeover, in the image of row upon row of Starbucks. But only a hint. Indeed, the best illustration of the scope of the corporate world and the difficulties and contradictions built into trying to attack it from within might be the show itself: as a corporate entity, as a merchandising machine, as a collection of more or less anti-establishment individuals who nonetheless have high-paying jobs and collect corporate paycheques.
The Simpsons, unlike many a cultural enterprise, has never had to contend with the tricky notion of “selling out.” Beloved indie bands, the directors of edgy low-budget films, writers and artists of nearly every stripe—in short, pretty much everyone who creates the rest of the pop culture near and dear to the hearts of Simpsons fans—all of them have at least potentially had to wrestle with the contradictions between art and commerce, and with the potential loss of authenticity that can accompany a contract or distribution deal with a multinational media corporation. Not The Simpsons, though, perhaps because it’s never been anything but the product of just such a media giant. From its first appearance on The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons has been a product of the bottom-feeding Fox Network, itself a subsidiary of News Corporation, one of the planet’s largest media conglomerates. (News Corp.’s CEO, Rupert Murdoch, is indeed one of Big Media’s most prominent—and most loathed—figureheads.) What’s more, the enormous popularity of The Simpsons was essential to the survival not just of Fox in the United States but also of News Corp.’s British satellite-TV station, Sky One, and its pan-Asian cable service. The Simpsons is not just the product but the cornerstone of a global corporate enterprise.
In addition, the show has always been a willing corporate shill. Matt Groening has speculated that it was the first Butterfinger ads that sold Fox on the cartoon’s viability as a series, and its massively successful first season spawned a marketing and merchandising juggernaut that continues to this day. In addition to Bart pushing Butterfingers, Simpsons characters have been used to advertise Japan Airlines and hawk Australian pasta. They’ve been stuffed into kids’ meals at Burger King, and their faces have been plastered on almost as much junk as Krusty the Clown’s. By one estimate, licensed Simpsons merchandise rang up $2 billion in sales in the first fifteen months of the show’s run. At the height of the show’s first wave of popularity, the American department-store chain J.C. Penney had Simpsons boutiques in more than a thousand of its stores, and the Sharper Image catalogue featured a Bart Simpson phone. There were Simpsons watches, Simpsons backpacks and bubble gum, Simpsons boxer shorts and key chains.12 In the mass-marketplace, the show is just another brand, one in a long line of Officially-Licensed-Product franchises to be milked for millions. And then, of course, there have been the millions more in broadcast and syndication rights (an ongoing windfall for News Corp. that cleared $1 billion in 2000 and grows by millions more every year), plus yet more millions for the ads that air—at premium rates—between the segments of each new episode.
Even as it mercilessly mocks consumer culture and the corporate world, The Simpsons is an avid participant in both of them. So how does this resolve itself with Groening’s self-professed countercultural values? Is the show a Trojan horse, invited inside the corporate gates and proudly displayed in the middle of the prime-time courtyard, only to unleash a punishing barrage of satirical arrows on the authorities that brought it in? Or is it rather a court jester, brought inside the castle at the monarch’s leisure and permitted to poke a little fun at his opulent wardrobe and expansive girth so long as it keeps the people happily paying tithes? Could it be both?
There’s certainly a case to be made for The Simpsons as Trojan horse—or, to skip to another metaphor, as a rabid dog let loose in the house of its corporate owners. It has, after all, gnawed relentlessly on every hand that ever fed it, seeming often to dare its masters to cast it out or put it down. Its attacks on the Fox Network number in the dozens: everything from digs at the overall quality of the network’s programming to suggestions that the network’s executives are vicious criminals. The Fox-sucks gags are often quick and easy—as when the Simpson family is shown watching parodic Fox fare like World’s Funniest Tornadoes and When Buildings Collapse.13 On other occasions, though, there have been more elaborate and audacious assaults. In Episode 3G01 (“The Springfield Files”), for example, Homer encounters an alien in the Springfield woods and drags Bart along to try to document it. “This Friday,” he tells his son, “we’re going back to the woods, and we’re going to find that alien!” “What if we don’t?” asks Bart. His dad responds, “We’ll fake it and sell it to the Fox Network.” Bart starts to giggle. “They’ll buy anything,” he says. “Now, son,” says Homer with exaggerated piety, “they do a lot of quality programming, too.” A one-beat pause, and then both of them collapse into hysterical laughter.
But beyond the relatively simple task of poking fun at Fox’s poorest and cheesiest programs, The Simpsons has occasionally taken shots at the corporation behind this trash. When a shady character named Mr. Blackheart shows up at the house to buy the elephant Bart has won in a radio contest, for instance, Lisa is immediately skeptical about the nobility of his intentions—after all, his boots and hat and even his cheques are made of ivory. “Are you an ivory dealer?” Lisa asks him. Mr. Blackheart chuckles. “Well, little girl,” he replies, “I’ve had a lot of jobs in my day: whale-hunter, seal-clubber, president of the Fox Network. And like most people, yeah, I’ve dealt a little ivory.” In another episode, as the Simpsons enumerate Lisa’s many activist campaigns, Homer notes that she won’t let them watch Fox because the company owns chemical-weapons plants in Syria. These are random and baseless jabs at the show’s corporate parent, and they blip quickly past. Still, they not only associate Fox’s executives with some of the most reprehensible business activities on the planet, they also subtly suggest that building a corporate empire—any corporate empire—necessitates becoming involved in deeply immoral activities.
The Simpsons has also made frequent sport of self-flagellation, particularly in the lampooning of its own merchandising machine. Bart confronts Krusty the Clown about the abysmal quality of his officially licensed summer camp, for example, with this knowing line: “How could you, Krusty? I’d never lend my name to an inferior product.” And a segment of the Season 3 Halloween episode—8F02 (“Treehouse of Horror II”)—parodied the show’s commercial overexposure at length. In the segment, the Simpson family obtains a cursed monkey’s paw and receives Bart’s wish of fame and fortune. Instantly, Springfield overflows with the kind of officially licensed junk that filled real-world stores during the show’s own merchandising boom: overpriced T-shirts, a Simpsons Sing Calypso album, even Bart’s image on a giant billboard, with a word balloon coming from his mouth that reads GET A MAMMOGRAM, MAN! As well, the show has attacked its most famous product endorsement—Butterfinger—by name. In a Season 13 episode, the Springfield court imposes a total ban on sugar. A giant bonfire is built to burn all the sugary treats in Springfield, and some police officers attempt to throw a pile of Butterfingers onto the blaze. As they hit the fire, though, a sort of force field surrounds them, and they’re thrown back, unburned. “Not even the fire wants them,” Chief Wiggum notes ruefully.
There’s an almost apologetic gesture in all of this that’s somehow both subversive and resigned. The writers know the show’s on a network that even by mass-market-TV standards is a shameless panderer to the lowest common denominator. They know the show was overexposed, that it made buckets of cash on cheap crap, that it shilled for a mediocre candy bar. And so they pepper their scripts with winking references to shoddy merchandise and corporate nastiness, as if to say, Hey, what can you do? This is how popular entertainment works. It’s ridiculous. We know it. You know it. Maybe we’re subverting it, maybe we’re not, but at least we all know the score.
This could be the foundation for the argument that the show is more court jester than Trojan horse. Consider, for example, the case of Rupert Murdoch’s own appearance on The Simpsons. Murdoch, like any other celebrity guest, was not allowed to tinker with the script. And so it came to pass that the Fox Network’s owner made his debut as a scowling egomaniac on a TV show that had made him billions of dollars and all but created his TV empire. His appearance comes in Episode AABF08 (“Sunday, Cruddy Sunday”), in which Homer and a gang of his pals go to the Super Bowl. After a series of mishaps, they find themselves in a lush private skybox, where they feast at the trough of plenty until a helicopter lands on the skybox roof and Murdoch himself comes bursting through the door. “I’m Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant!” he announces. “And this is my skybox!” Chief Wiggum challenges him to prove his identity. Murdoch mumbles a few words into a cellphone, and the Super Bowl game screeches to a halt as the players on both teams line up to spell out the words “Hi Rupert.” Humbled, the Springfieldianites begin to plead their case. “Silence!” Murdoch bellows. He magically summons three armed guards, who chase Homer and the gang out of his skybox. And so concludes Murdoch’s appearance.
So what to make of his willing self-satire? Is he having a little good-natured self-deprecating fun with his own image, or has he been trapped into confessing to his corporate crimes? Is there subversion in all of this, or is it just a cartoony Friar’s Roast of the unassailable elite? The answers to these questions might depend wholly on you as a viewer—your preconceptions, your politics—and that might, in the end, be the point. This is a show, after all, that counts among its fans both anticorporate crusader Ralph Nader and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan.
Maybe the point is that The Simpsons is most definitely subversive—more antiauthoritarian by far than almost anything else that’s ever aired in prime time, rivalled on the sedition scale only by M*A*S*H and the first couple of seasons of Saturday Night Live. But it also has to play by the rules of the prime-time game. It has to remain likeable enough that it can appeal to a mass audience and thus stay on the air. It can tweak its boss’s nose, but it can’t tear him to shreds. The Simpsons may not like Murdoch’s authority, or Mr. Burns’s or Lindsey Naegle’s or anyone else’s. It may indeed attempt to dismantle these authorities tweak by tweak. But the balance of power is, in the end, tipped steeply against it.
George Meyer: “It’s a guerrilla battle. I mean, the authorities have the high ground. They have all the money. They have the tradition. They have the history in their favour. So we have to just kind of take potshots and then run back up into the hills.”
Groening apparently learned this lesson the hard way when he set out in the late 1990s to create a new series for the Fox Network, a satirical sci-fi cartoon called Futurama. Fox executives were initially ecstatic about the prospect of a new series, but soon worried that it was too edgy and eventually bumped the show from its plum post-Simpsons time slot in favour of Family Guy. Futurama then bounced around Fox’s schedule, which may be part of the reason it took some time to find its audience and its stride as a series. Groening was palpably wounded by the process. “It has been by far the worst experience of my adult life,” he told Mother Jones magazine. Groening concluded from Futurama’s woes that The Simpsons, barely ten years old, was a relic from a bygone age, far too subversive to survive the contemporary corporate grind intact. “I don’t think The Simpsons would be allowed on air now in its undiluted form,” he explained. “The show would be run through the deflavorizer.”
So then: much as The Simpsons may from certain angles look like any other mass-entertainment franchise, it was a Trojan horse of sorts. It snuck into prime time when the guardians of bland, safe corporate conformity had their backs turned, tucked inside the junk-TV underbelly of the desperate upstart Fox Network. Ten years later, the network—now well established—wanted only safe clowns and edgeless spoofs. Court jesters.
Imagine trying to pitch The Simpsons to Fox nowadays. Think of it as a scene you’d only see on the show as it is: Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant, calls a meeting of his marketing VP, Lindsey Naegle, and his most deep-pocketed sponsor, Monty Burns, to plot out a safe corporate version of The Simpsons. They review the pitch for the new cartoon, an unbridled social satire starring a buffoon who works at a nuclear power plant. Burns is keen to be seen as hip in the eyes of young consumers, but doesn’t like the nuke bashing. No problem, says Naegle. We’ll just white-collarize the guy by 20 percent or so. Murdoch doesn’t want any of his advertisers to get so nervous they won’t cut cheques, so why not a neutral workplace: maybe a bank? Sure, says Naegle. And shows starring stand-up comics are hot right now, so we’ll find one of them to play Homer. Keep the middle-American setting, toss in a few “wacky” friends and neighbours, lose the egghead references (we don’t want to confuse anyone, after all) and, oh yeah, we’ve gotta add a laugh track so there’s no missing the fact that this is all light-hearted fun.
Result? Your typical forgettable 1990s sitcom. The Drew Carey Show, most likely. And at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, I’ll point out that it’s unlikely you’d make it this far into a book-length examination of The Drew Carey Show.
Burns, Naegle, Murdoch. There’s a notable absence of traditional figureheads thus far in my analysis of power and authority on The Simpsons. This is no accident. Still, you’re probably starting to wonder what happened to the cops and teachers, the politicians and preachers? Oh, they’re around. Springfield has its mayor (“Diamond Joe” Quimby), its chief of police (Clancy Wiggum), its elementary-school principal (Seymour Skinner), its Christian minister (Reverend Timothy Lovejoy). It’s just that in Springfield—as in our world—these are second-tier authorities compared to captains of industry. In Springfield, there is no authority left uncorrupted by the relentless forces of corporate commerce, and none who are their equals in power. There is a leadership vacuum, and business has filled it.
The discounting of public institutions in Springfield results in part from the gross incompetence and/or deep corruption and/or simple indifference of the officers of those institutions. Take Mayor Quimby, Springfield’s very own John F. Kennedy, complete with JFK’s er-uh stammer and Boston drawl. In his time, Kennedy was the King of Camelot, a magnet for the best and brightest, but Quimby embodies all the unseemly shit that has tarnished the Kennedy myth (and big-time politics in general) in the decades after his death. Quimby comes from a big family prone to partying too hard and falling afoul of the law; he’s a dedicated womanizer; and he’s a man far more interested in his own status and power than in serving the people of Springfield.
Quimby is an extended study in lousy, hypocritical, self-serving politics. He plays to the lowest common denominator (blaming high taxes, for example, on a non-existent illegal-immigrant crisis). He uses his office for personal gain (spending two months in Aruba, for example, to determine that it’s unfeasible to build a super-train link between it and Springfield). And he conspires with Springfield’s other public officials to rake in the cash and cover his ass. Quimby is so crooked he’d need servants to screw on his pants (to borrow a marvellous phrase from Hunter S. Thompson’s eulogy of Richard M. Nixon). His mayoral seal reads “Corruptus in Extremis”—he can’t hide his treachery even from himself.
Fresh evidence of Quimby’s corrupt reign emerges every time he appears on the show, but perhaps the most telling is the reaction he gets on those extremely rare occasions when he’s not nakedly self-serving. One of the most pointed examples occurs in an episode in which Homer becomes Quimby’s bodyguard and uncovers a ludicrously shady deal: the mayor’s on the take from Fat Tony’s Springfield Mafia to look the other way as they sell rat’s milk to the town’s schoolchildren. A short time later, Homer saves Quimby’s life—but only after extracting a promise that Quimby will crack down on the rat’s milk fiasco. Cut to Fat Tony’s social club, where the Springfield police burst in to bust up the phony-milk ring. “Gentlemen,” Fat Tony replies calmly, “if you would simply consult my dear friend Mayor Quimby, I am confident that this can be—” Quimby interrupts him: “Not this time, Fat Tony. The mayor’s office is not for sale!” Everyone in the room roars with laughter. And in the knowing mirth of all involved, there are echoes of the cynical chuckling of the modern democratic electorate and their alleged watchdogs in the media. When a political campaign is covered like a horse race, when commentators and even random citizens talk of a politician’s “performance,” when indeed a near-majority of eligible voters don’t cast ballots (as happened in both the United States and Canada in the 2000 elections)—the subtext of all of this is this braying laughter. As if the candidates care about anything other than getting themselves elected. As if their campaigns aren’t bought and paid for by corporate donors and private-sector lobbyists, and as if they don’t govern on behalf of the corporations who fill their coffers. As if it’s even in the realm of possibility that a true man of the people is in the running, and as if anything’s going to change. Har-de-fucking-har.
The Simpsons itself plays out this deeply ironic gag at a full episode’s length when Lisa becomes a finalist in a patriotic-essay contest sponsored by Reading Digest. Early in the episode, there’s a montage of kids’ essays being read nationwide that serves as a catalogue of the most beloved symbols of American democracy: the Statue of Liberty and the melting pot, freedom and opportunity, an informed electorate and checks and balances. (The contestants are graded in four categories: originality, clarity, organization, and jingoism.) Lisa wins the regional contest with her essay “The Roots of Democracy,” but when she and her family travel to Washington for the finals, Lisa stumbles on a scandal in the office of Springfield’s congressman: he’s taking a bribe from a developer to open up the Springfield National Forest to logging. So she quickly drafts a new essay: “Cesspool on the Potomac.” (“This will be one nation under the dollar,” it concludes, “with liberty and justice for none.”) Word of this unfolding tragedy—“A little girl is losing faith in democracy!”—soon reaches the office of a powerful senator. Official Washington springs into action in an instant, and within two hours Springfield’s crooked congressman is nailed in a sting, Congress passes a bill to expel him from the House, and President George H.W. Bush signs it into law. After the contest, Lisa sees a headline—“Imprisoned Congressman Becomes Born-Again Christian”—and marvels that the system appears to work after all. This sequence is of course pure irony, a broad satire of the notion that revelations of corruption would outrage a contemporary politician and especially that several branches of government would react to such news not with obfuscation and damage control but with a quick, concerted effort to eradicate the problem entirely. As if.
There’s a far more realistic picture of contemporary politics in Episode 2F02 (“Sideshow Bob Roberts”), in which pardoned felon Sideshow Bob becomes Mayor Quimby’s rival in a mayoral campaign that exposes the cynical apparatus of modern politics in all its fetid glory. The episode opens with Sideshow Bob in jail for his attempted murder of Bart in a previous episode. Birch Barlow, Springfield’s very own Rush Limbaugh, turns Bob’s imprisonment into a cause célèbre, and Barlow’s loyal listeners soon rally to demand Bob’s release. Mayor Quimby quickly capitulates to this mob and pardons Bob, who immediately launches a campaign to unseat Springfield’s spineless mayor.
It’s in the ensuing election race that the full range of dirty tricks, media schemes and old-fashioned shallow posturing endemic to contemporary politics are laid bare. Both candidates engage in the timeless political arts of mugging for photos with cute kids and shamelessly sucking up to senior citizens, but they save their vilest stuff for their campaign commercials. Quimby’s ad employs a jingle to celebrate his meagre accomplishments (a tire yard and mid-sized roller rink, a gallows and shiny Bigfoot trap), while Bob’s commercial attacks Quimby for supporting the very “revolving-door prisons” that led Bob himself to be released in the first place. Then comes the televised debate on the nakedly partisan Fox Network, which superimposes flames around Quimby’s head to vilify him and permits Birch Barlow to ask ludicrously leading questions, thus producing this stellar example of the debased quality of contemporary public discourse:
BARLOW: Mayor Quimby, you’re well known, sir, for your lenient stance on crime. But suppose for a second that your house was ransacked by thugs, your family tied up in the basement with socks in their mouths. You try to open the door but there’s too much blood on the knob …
QUIMBY: What is your question?
BARLOW: My question is about the budget, sir.
On Election Day, we see the result of this inane campaign, as Springfield’s misinformed and self-absorbed voters glibly elect Bob in a landslide. Bob’s election is soon exposed as a case of massive electoral fraud, and Mayor Quimby—for once the lesser of two evils—is returned to power. The idea that the town might actually find an honest, capable mayor, however, is never entertained.
The thing about Episode 2F02, though, is that it’s barely even parody—especially not when it’s compared to the vacuous carnival of mudslinging and spin-doctoring that is big-time American politics. Bob’s attacks on Quimby for being soft on crime, for example, are actually less underhanded and misleading than the ads from George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign that they’re lampooning. And Sideshow Bob’s electoral fraud has nothing on the removal of thousands of African Americans from the voter lists in Florida—under the gubernatorial watch of the Republican candidate’s brother, no less—that helped elect George W. Bush in 2000. A handful of Hollywood movies released in the 1990s (among them Bulworth, Wag the Dog, and of course the Tim Robbins mockumentary Bob Roberts, which 2F02 refers to in its title) ran into the same problem. As pointed as the satire sometimes was, it somehow fell short of the real thing. Maybe that’s why the darkest satire of the modern American political process in recent years was a genuine documentary: The War Room, a 1993 film about Bill Clinton’s first presidential run that so fully revealed the behind-the-scenes brutality of American presidential politics that it seemed impossible to exaggerate it for satirical purposes thereafter. Sideshow Bob calls his electoral fraud “a work of Machiavellian art,” but I bet Clinton’s ferocious campaign manager, James Carville, could beat the green goo out of Sideshow Bob’s backroom ghoul. And not even Monty Burns at his most hissingly villainous could top George W. Bush’s top political operative, Karl Rove, an attack dog so rabid he terrifies former Nixon aides. Politics, we all understand, is a silly, sleazy business, so the satire’s sharper—and more surprising—when The Simpsons depicts Washington functioning selflessly than when it shows Springfield’s politicians behaving abominably. Springfield’s politicians are hypocritical, calculating, flat-out larcenous? Well, join the club.
The people of Springfield are no better served by their other local authorities. Police Chief Wiggum, for example, may occasionally enforce the law—as in the aforementioned case of the rat’s milk—and his chief crime is actually massive incompetence, but he’s certainly no stranger to corruption. There’s a single scene in Episode 1F09 (“Homer the Vigilante”) that tells you pretty much all you need to know about the interconnected crookedness of Springfield’s public officials. In the episode, Homer has formed a vigilante mob to track down a cat burglar, as the local police are too bumblingly incompetent to catch him. Homer’s mob succeeds, but the townsfolk are so charmed by the burglar—a suave senior citizen named Mr. Molloy—that they want to let him go. It’s at this point that Wiggum and his force step in. “Gee, I really hate to spoil this little love-in,” Wiggum tells the crowd, “but Mr. Molloy broke the law. And when you break the law, you gotta go to jail.” Mayor Quimby steps out from the crowd. “Uh, that reminds me,” he tells Wiggum, “er, here’s your monthly kickback.” Wiggum, exasperated but far from outraged: “You just—you couldn’t have picked a worse time.” This blatant display of hypocrisy and corruption ruffles not a feather among the crowd, of course.
The Springfield PD’s daily routine is rife with casual corruption and gross incompetence. Springfield’s cops accept free beer from Moe, watch boxing matches on Homer’s stolen cable and throw parties at the site of marijuana busts. And the people of Springfield are little better served and protected when the cops are actually on the case. Consider, for example, Chief Wiggum’s expert police-radio description of a suspect who’s fleeing the scene of a burglary: “Put out an APB for a male suspect driving a … car of some sort, heading in the direction of … you know, that place that sells chili. Suspect is hatless. Repeat: hatless.”
You can find the same mix of indifference, incompetence and immorality at any institution in town. Springfield Elementary struggles along with outdated textbooks,14 an incompetent principal who commands no respect whatsoever, and teachers who uniformly radiate total apathy towards the task of shaping young minds. “Whose calculator can tell me what seven times eight is?” instructs Mrs. Krabappel in a characteristically bland lesson. And on a rare occasion in which Mrs. Krabappel actually seems interested in her job—strictly to bolster the teachers’ union’s demand for higher salaries—it precipitates a profoundly disheartening exchange between Mrs. Krabappel (Edna to her colleagues) and Principal Skinner, in the middle of a cafeteria packed with kids. “Our demands are very reasonable,” she says. “By ignoring them, you’re selling out these children’s future!” Principal Skinner: “Oh, come on, Edna. We both know these children have no future!” Skinner suddenly remembers where he is. He titters nervously and turns to face his students. “Prove me wrong, kids,” he intones half-heartedly. “Prove me wrong.”
Skinner, though, is downright buoyant compared to Springfield’s most prominent religious leader, Reverend Lovejoy. Lovejoy’s just fine from the pulpit—he can chastise the sinners and rattle off biblical lists of who begat whom and take ill-informed cheap shots at the evils of pop culture with the best of ’em—but he’s of little other comfort to his flock. When Principal Skinner calls him seeking advice on how to deal with yet another conflict with his mother, for example, Lovejoy answers mechanically, “Well, maybe you should read your Bible.” Skinner: “Um, any particular passage?” Lovejoy: “Oh, it’s all good.” And the good reverend is openly contemptuous of his most devoted parishioner, the obsessively Christian Ned Flanders. When Ned learns that the Simpson children haven’t been baptized, for instance, it sends him into a panic. He calls Reverend Lovejoy, babbling incoherently. “Ned,” Lovejoy replies, “have you thought about one of the other major religions? They’re all pretty much the same.” And then he hangs up.
Almost without exception, Springfield’s civic authorities are either powerless or undeserving of what power they have. Lovejoy and Wiggum and Quimby might be permitted their petty fiefdoms, but the real higher authority is the almighty dollar, and its high priests are not public servants or men of the cloth but captains of industry. Indeed, Springfield’s corporate titans are occasionally presented with the opportunity to simply buy Springfield’s public institutions outright. In one episode, the local church is destroyed in an accident, and Mr. Burns quickly steps in with the cash to rebuild it. The only catch is that it be built to Burns’s profit-making specifications, so the new church is plastered with ads inside and out. And as I’ve mentioned, when Springfield Elementary School runs into revenue woes, Kid First Enterprises is soon on the scene to privatize the school, converting it into an elaborate market-research laboratory while shrouding its diabolical plans in the can-do language of corporate efficiency. “You know,” Kid First executive Jim Hope15 explains to intrepid reporter Kent Brockman, “when public schools drop the ball, it’s up to the private sector to fall on that fumble and run for the end zone.”
With this sentiment, Jim Hope comes closer than any other Springfield business leader to joining the swelling chorus of corporate voices that articulated the dominant ideology of the corporate world in the 1990s. And in many cases the ideology was just as simple and binary as Hope’s comment suggests, built as it was on this crude cornerstone: public sector = bad (antiquated, wasteful, socialistic, bureaucratic, unprofitable), private sector = good (modern, efficient, rational, democratic, market-driven, profitable). This ideology and the corporate elite it served never did find a definitive name—though the related phenomena of consumerism and globalization and neo-conservatism and the New Economy all certainly contributed to it. It was instead one of its most insightful detractors, the American cultural critic Thomas Frank, who ascribed to it the most evocative catch-all term: market populism.
How did the “democracy of the supermarket” triumph over electoral democracy throughout the West? What ushered in the “Washington consensus” of the 1990s—that unprecedented agreement among business and media elites and political parties of almost every stripe throughout the developed world that free markets were the backbone of democratic society? How did the American business elite and its allies in the government and the media justify the unprecedented economic polarization of the 1990s (the greatest such redistribution of wealth in American history)? These are the questions Thomas Frank wrestles with in his 2000 book One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. Frank’s book is a thorough examination of the varied means by which corporate masters have transformed themselves from demonic Burns-like figures into warm, fuzzy men-of-the-people like Jim Hope. How did that makeover happen? The answer, Frank writes, is market populism:
At the center of the “New Economy” consensus was a vision of economic democracy as extreme and as militant-sounding as anything to emanate from the CIO [a radical American labour union] in the thirties. From Deadheads to Nobel-laureate economists, from pale-o conservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than (democratically elected) governments. This is the central premise of what I call “market populism”: that in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets are mediums of consent. With their mechanisms of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and internet, markets manage to express the popular will more articulately and meaningfully than do mere elections. By their very nature markets confer democratic legitimacy, markets bring down the pompous and the snooty, markets look out for the interests of the little guy, markets give us what we want.
At the time of its pre-industrial birth, the corporation was understood to be an institution that existed only by the benevolent grace of the state. Even through the industrial revolution and on into the second half of the twentieth century, capital’s enormous and growing power was balanced by that of the government, the media and most ordinary citizens—all of whom understood to greater or lesser degrees that the interests of big business were at best indifferent and quite possibly diametrically opposed to their own. In the 1980s and especially the post–Cold War 1990s, however, this balance of power shifted dramatically, and the inversion of the relation ship between state and corporation was complete. Not only did corporations now hold supreme power in affairs both public and private, it was believed to be right that they possessed that power. Corporations, not public institutions, were the guardians of the public good.
What’s more—and here we move from Frank’s market populism to the alleged global triumph of “Western liberalism” that set the stage for it—there might not have been any real need for governments anymore, and politics, at the very least, was increasingly irrelevant. This argument lay at the core of Francis Fukuyama’s hugely influential essay “The End of History?” which appeared in a 1989 issue of the journal The National Interest and soon became required reading in the corridors of Western power. Fukuyama’s argument was simple enough: the collapse of communism represented the death of the last remaining alternative to “Western liberalism.” The war was over. The good guys won. All that was left was to get fat and tidy the lawn.
And what happened in the 1990s to prove him wrong? The great stories of the decade were the ones about consolidating Western liberalism’s victory and expanding its scope, and the engine of all of this was the free market. There’s a McDonald’s where now? Beijing? Not only can you watch CNN in Timbuktu, dude, you can send an email from there to the South Pole. Then maybe use E*TRADE to buy some stock in a Bermuda-based dotcom run by an expat Australian Buddhist, a Taiwanese math whiz and a game-theory expert from Kazakhstan. “For our purposes,” wrote Fukuyama, “it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind.”
In Episode 4F17 (“The Old Man and the Lisa”), Mr. Burns learns that he’s bankrupt. Surrounded by mendacious yes-men and firm in his belief that his position of omnipotent privilege was unassailable, Burns hadn’t noticed that his stock ticker had been on the fritz since September 1929. Likewise, Fukuyama surveyed the world’s ideological landscape and saw only the placid sea of Western liberalism. The glorious view was spoiled by the rubble of Marxism and a few ancient theocratic relics on distant shores, but since these were easily tossed in history’s dustbin, he decided this sunny vista was as eternal as god’s ample grace.
As long as you were lucky enough not to be born in the southern hemisphere or the rougher parts of Detroit, the decade that followed Fukuyama’s essay could indeed seem like a time without history. Tremendous changes were underway—corporations expanding into and branding every corner of the planet, a communications revolution shrinking that same planet even as it churned out millionaires by the bushel, new scientific breakthroughs announced every other day—but still the days seemed inconsequential. There were few signposts, and the ones that were planted seemed weirdly skewed towards weightlessness and decadence. O.J. Simpson’s murder trial in Los Angeles and Princess Diana’s death in Paris made for bigger landmarks than the brutal genocide in Rwanda. The tragic downfall of famous individuals from the lands of Western liberalism was far more relevant to history than the mass brutality of obscure tribes. Spectacle, not substance, ruled the public agenda. And so we in the wealthy and booming West who were living after the end of history sat back and watched the parade.
So maybe Fukuyama was right, but not in the way he thought he was. It’s true that it no longer matters what’s being said in Burkina Faso or Albania; what matters (and what Fukuyama and the free-market triumphalists failed to recognize) is that Burkina Faso and Albania—and Tuvalu and Timbuktu and Afghanistan—are part of a single multifaceted entity created by the global reach of Western liberalism and corporate power. They are part of the conversation, whether we (or they) like it or not, and if we’re too busy shouting congratulations at each other to listen to what they’re saying, they may just force their way in.
Put another way, history was storing its energy. It was building for something massive. It abhors vacuums. And then it came, flew in out of a sky so clear and blue that it was a key part of the story, a detail everyone felt compelled to note.
It was such a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky.
In Episode 2F11 (“Bart’s Comet”), Springfield is under imminent threat of total destruction by a comet hurtling towards the earth. The town’s best minds get together and decide to launch a rocket at the comet, but their rocket misses its target and plummets back to earth, destroying the only bridge out of town. Cut to the floor of the U.S. Congress, where a bill is tabled to provide funding for the evacuation of Springfield. Just before the vote, a congressman adds a rider to the bill providing $30 million “for the perverted arts.” The bill is defeated. Cut to news anchor Kent Brockman, who turns to his viewing audience with this summary: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: democracy simply does not work.”
This was a sentiment that occurred to me often in the days after September 11, 2001, as I tried somehow to reconcile the horror of watching the two tallest buildings in New York collapse live on television with the extraordinarily banal responses put forward by the elected leaders of the world’s democracies—especially that self-proclaimed last best hope for humanity, the United States of America.
Even before the fires had gone out in the pile of rubble that was once the World Trade Center, America’s leaders had carefully surveyed the damage. Had considered its enormous impact on everyday life. And then had risen as one in a brave chorus, imparting their sage advice to a shaken nation. The advice? Go shopping. By the tragedy’s two-week anniversary, President Bush had called for “continued participation and confidence in the American economy.” New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani advised, “Just spend a little money.” Vice-President Dick Cheney was urging “a normal level of economic activity.” Senator Bob Graham explained that buying a new car was “an act of patriotism.” The president’s brother, Jeb, added going to a restaurant and taking a cruise to the list of patriotic acts. Senator John McCain, beloved for his straight-talking ways, cut succinctly through the politicking. “We need,” he explained, “to spend money.”
No longer living after history, we in the West, and in many other places, were instantly awake to a new and grave reality. We were horrified but resolute, finally ready to move beyond the trivialities of reality TV and day trading and a new pair of Nikes. But in the weeks and then months after September 11, not a single one of the great leaders of our peerless West—these lands of the free, cradles of civilization, beacons of liberty and justice, wellsprings of unparalleled opportunity and prosperity—not a single one could articulate even a vague notion of what it was we were defending. All agreed it had to be defended, but none had a clue what would help on the home front. Except this: we were being told, in emphatic terms, that the thing we were defending and the way to defend it were one and the same; we were the great globalized Republic of Buying Stuff, and we should bravely go on buying stuff to protect our right—our most basic, most cherished right—to buy more stuff.
We will never know just how great an opportunity was lost, how much passionate momentum squandered. Here were the people of virtually the entire world rising as one, ready to sacrifice, wanting to help. Who knows how many oversights could have been corrected, inequalities eliminated, hypocrisies inverted? Who knows what glorious civilization could have emerged from the ashes of those towers? One thing is for certain: our national leaders on that day failed us completely—particularly those of the United States. America’s primacy of place and supremacy of power in world affairs, be they economic, political, military or cultural, has never been more apparent than in the wake of September 11, when, as if in some half-witted Hollywood movie, the whole world looked to its leaders for direction. And was told to go shopping.
But then who among the world’s political leaders on that day of infamy would have been capable of oratory—of leadership, of a sense of purpose—on the level of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (or Lincoln or Churchill or Gandhi, or even Trudeau or Kennedy)? Tony Blair, whose posh accent and classical oratorical skills hide the facts that his political philosophy was cribbed from Bill Clinton and his moral philosophy isn’t really that much more complex than Bush’s? United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose entire job seemed to consist of saying absolutely nothing of consequence in a superficially substantial manner? The answer, of course, is neither of these—and no one else. We’re rudderless, completely adrift. Or, worse, the people with their hands on the rudder have ferocious, tragically misguided convictions, driving us full steam into the abyss prophesied by W.B. Yeats in “The Second Coming”:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The passionate intensity of the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks collides with the passionate intensity of the architects of the “war on terror,” and in the anarchic din of the collision there is no insight, no dawning awareness, no new direction pointing to a place where these collisions are no longer possible. Tragically, the one piece of oratory that truly resonated with the American public after September 11 had no wisdom in it at all. It was merely a captain’s order: full speed ahead. It was a line President Bush borrowed from a regular-guy-turned-hero on one of the incinerated airplanes, a line that’s closer to Nike’s “Just Do It” tagline than to anything Lincoln ever said: “Let’s roll.”
In the age of market populism, an ersatz ad slogan is apparently the most we can hope for. After all, Mr. Burns is the man in charge, and he’s far too busy by now with war profiteering to offer us anything more substantial.
1 Full Disclosure: In the fall of 1993, I co-published a zine with two friends. It was called Stun. It lasted for two issues. It had really, really cool covers. One had this line drawing of Greek philosophers lounging on the steps of this classical lyceum, all of them gathered around this monolith, and we cut-and-pasted a baby’s head onto the top of the monolith. It was awesome. The less said about the content inside—particularly my pretentious record reviews and rants about how the ’60s were like over, dude—the better.
2 So What Does a Tremendous Overbite Indicate? Phrenology—a.k.a. cranioscopy—is the “scientific” study of the size and shape of the head as a measure of a person’s intelligence and the nature and strength of his or her character. Based on the theories of an oddball Viennese physician named Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), phrenology came to America in the 1830s, where it was spread from town to town by itinerant, medicine-show-style lecturers, enjoying more than a decade of widespread popularity before being pretty much completely discredited. (At the peak of its vogue, some employers would demand a character reference from a local phrenologist before hiring a new employee.)
Monty Burns, for his part, expresses his tenacious dedication to this brand of junk science in Episode 3F06 (“Mother Simpson”), when he explains to the police that he recognized his old nemesis Mona Simpson—Homer’s mom, who’d helped destroy his germ-warfare laboratory in the 1960s—by her phrenological traits. “Who could forget such a monstrous visage?” Burns tells the authorities. “She has the sloping brow and cranial bumpage of the career criminal.” When Smithers points out that phrenology is bunk, Monty replies, “Of course you’d say that—you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!”
3 Beyond the Voice: In an interview with America’s National Public Radio, Simpsons producer Al Jean hinted that Mr. Burns’s behaviour, if not his voice, draws on numerous other sources. Among them: Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, powerful entertainment-company executive Barry Diller, the “evil banker character” in It’s a Wonderful Life, and “any boss that any of us has ever had.”
4 Xanadu Redux: In 1F01 and several other episodes, the staggering luxury and abundance of Burns Manor and of Mr. Burns’s vast, vast, vast fortune (vast!) are laid out in some detail, which both echoes the lavishness of Xanadu and ultimately puts it to shame. Both castles feature massive oversized fireplaces, stores of exotic animals, elaborate classical statuary—all the usual trappings of impossible wealth—but Burns Manor boasts some accoutrements that set it on a gilded pedestal of its own. Among them:
- King Arthur’s famed sword “Excalibur”
- the only existing nude photo of Mark Twain
- a rare first draft of the U.S. Constitution with the word “suckers” in it
- the suit Charlie Chaplin was buried in
- a toy train that takes three hours to complete its run and sometimes reappears in the toy room covered with snow
- a “play room” in which an elaborate theatrical play runs non-stop
- a room containing a thousand monkeys banging away at a thousand typewriters (one has thus far come up with “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”)
- a room containing the largest television in the free world
- a room called “The Patriots” lined with portraits of Mr. Burns’s ancestors (including a painting of Mr. Burns himself that contained the only trillion-dollar bill the U.S. ever issued until Mr. Burns gave it to Fidel Castro)
5 Globe-trotting Bobo: After young Monty abandons Bobo, the bear is washed away down a river, where it falls into the hands of Charles Lindbergh, who carries it with him to France on his historic trans-Atlantic flight. Then Bobo passes into the possession of Adolf Hitler, who blames the bear for the fall of the Third Reich moments before committing suicide. It turns up next in the present-day Arctic, encased in a block of ice that’s harvested and bagged for sale at Springfield’s Kwik-E-Mart.
6 Great Moments in Sycophancy: In Episode 3F14 (“Homer the Smithers”), Smithers recruits Homer Simpson to fill in for him as Mr. Burns’s lackey so he can take a long-overdue vacation. He enumerates the duties of his job thusly: “answering Mr. Burns’s phone, preparing his tax return, moistening his eyeballs, assisting with his chewing and swallowing, lying to Congress, and some light typing.” Conspicuously absent from this list is Smithers’s most common and critical task: shameless sycophancy. Herewith, some classic examples of Smithers’s incomparable skill at the fine art of ass-kissing:
- As a meltdown looms in Episode 8F04 (“Homer Defined”), the power plant’s owner and his bootlick share a last moment together. “Oh, Smithers,” Burns laments, “I guess there’s nothing left but to kiss my sorry ass goodbye.” Smithers promptly replies, “May I, sir?”
- As Mr. Burns half-heartedly unwraps his birthday presents in Episode 1F01 (“Rosebud”), Smithers presents his boss with his own elaborate gift. “Sir,” Smithers explains, “I’ve arranged for the people of Australia to join hands tonight and spell out your name with candles.
There’s a satellite hookup on that monitor if you’ll just turn your head slightly.” Lo and behold, the monitor displays just that, but Burns declines to witness the spectacle. “Bah—no time,” he barks.
- In the final scene of Episode 3F14, Mr. Burns lies in traction at the hospital, crippled as a result of Homer’s tenure as his assistant. Smithers, back at his beloved boss’s side, makes it up to the old tyrant by feeding him Spanish peanuts, carefully skinning each one and placing it in Burns’s mouth in an homage to the final scene of A Clockwork Orange.
- In Episode 4F17(“The Old Man and the Lisa”), Burns goes bankrupt. But even as professional wrestler Bret “the Hitman” Hart contemplates buying the old man’s enormous mansion, Smithers keeps on bootlicking. “Eww,” the Hitman declares. “This place has got old-man stink!” Burns is momentarily wounded. “Don’t listen to him, sir,” Smithers retorts. “You’ve got an enchanting musk.”
7 McJob: The Movie: The slow, steady evolution of Mike Judge’s 1999 film Office Space from box-office bust to cult hit—or “stealth blockbuster,” as Entertainment Weekly put it—is a powerful symbol of the resonance of the work-eviscerating tale in the Simpsons era. The movie—a scathing satire of working life in a bureaucratic nightmare of a cubicle farm—barely recouped its modest $10-million budget in its theatrical release. Since then, however, Office Space has slow-burned its way to a place in the satirical-comedy pantheon, with sales of more than 2.5 million copies on DVD and VHS earning it a place in the top twenty titles in Fox Filmed Entertainment’s catalogue.
The film has also accomplished a feat far more essential to the establishment of a pop institution: it has become a fount of everyday references in the culture at large. The phrase “TPS reports”—a nasty bit of bureaucratic arcana that haunts the film’s protagonists—has become shorthand for office-regulation madness, even popping up in a 2003 Super Bowl commercial for Reebok starring “Terrible Terry Tate, Office Linebacker.” Office Space also immortalized the photocopier-jargon term “PC Load Letter” as a catch-all for office-chore frustration.
Its most spectacular achievement, however, was the simultaneous invention and canonization of the fire-engine-red Swingline stapler, the coveted office supply of the film’s neurotic office weirdo, Milton. At the time Office Space was filmed, Swingline didn’t manufacture its iconic stapler in red. But demand for Milton’s prized possession eventually became so great that Swingline added the “Rio Red Stapler” to its product line in April 2002.
8 McJob: The Dictionary Entry: In June 2003, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary added the term “McJob” to its pages, defining it as “low-paying and dead-end work.”
9 Full Disclosure: My own conscripted service-industry tour of duty came in the summer and fall of 1996, when I parlayed my freshly minted honours degree in history into a cushy just-barely-above-minimum-wage gig as a barista at Starbucks. To this day I can readily recall the proper “calling order” for a Starbucks drink—it goes number of shots, size, customizations, drink type, as in “double-tall-decaf-skim-vanilla latte”—and the preferred term for the chain’s slushy drink (“Frappuccino blended beverage,” never just “Frappuccino” or, heaven forfend, “Frapp,” which might encourage the Kleenex-ization of Starbucks’ hard-earned trademark). I’m still waiting to be offered stock options.
10 Another Case of Burnsian Spin: In Episode 1F02 (“Homer Goes to College”), a platoon of Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors arrive at the plant’s entrance and ring a buzzer. Mr. Burns, disturbed from his naptime, tries simply to dismiss them over the intercom, but they persist. “This is a surprise test of worker competence,” one announces. Burns: “There must be some mistake. We … uh … we make cookies here. Mr. Burns’ Old-Fashioned Good-Time Extra-Chewy …” He’s cut off by the invading agents before he can finish.
11 Mmmm … Soylent Green: The Simpsons has frequently dragged to the surface the darker truths hidden beneath the smooth corporate facade. Episode 3F07 (“Marge Be Not Proud”), for example, begins with a snippet of Krusty the Clown’s holiday special. “It’s a Krusty Kinda Christmas,” an announcer intones, “brought to you by ILG: Selling your body’s chemicals after you die. And by Li’l Sweetheart Cupcakes—a subsidiary of ILG.”
12 Can’t Get Enough of That Wonderful Duff: In late 1995, Lion Nathan Australia, an Australian brewery, expanded The Simpsons’ merchandising range to include Homer’s favourite brew, Duff beer. The beer—packaged in a can made to resemble the one Homer wraps his chubby mitts around—filled Australian shelves for several months, selling briskly at $29.95 (Australian) per case. In May 1996, however, an Australian court ordered it removed for exploiting the show’s intellectual property. The court case was by all accounts wildly entertaining, featuring screenings of numerous Simpsons episodes that delighted lawyers and judge alike and at least one for-the-record detailing of the meaning of Homer’s trademark exclamation, D’oh!
In a graphic illustration of the thirst for Simpsons merchandise, sales of the beer then moved underground: an Australian newspaper reported in 1999 that surviving cans of Duff were selling for $200 (Australian) each, with one fully intact case of the beer fetching $13,000 (US).
13 Zing! Probably the most vicious parody of Fox’s programming came in Episode 1F13 (“Deep Space Homer”), at the expense of The Simpsons’ own follow-up on Fox’s Sunday night schedule, the crude sitcom Married … with Children. In the episode, NASA officials, disturbed by the plummeting TV ratings for their space launches, watch a survey of “the most popular personalities on television.” After viewing a scathing parody of the sitcom Home Improvement, the NASA officials’ TV screen fills with a cartoon version of Marrieds living-room set. Al Bundy sits sullenly on the couch next to his trampy wife. “Al, let’s have sex!” she whines. “No, Peg,” Al retorts. The audience erupts in laughter and cheering. Then Al leans over and flushes a toilet that’s conveniently installed next to the couch. Explosions of whooping and whistling from the audience. And that, in less than ten seconds, is The Simpsons’ summation of the brand of humour being peddled by its colleague—a colleague that was frequently paired with The Simpsons in media analyses of the emergence of “blue collar” sitcoms in the early 1990s.
14 The Kids Have to Learn about Tek War Sooner or Later: In Episode 2F19 (“The PTA Disbands”), we learn that Springfield Elementary’s collection of textbooks consists primarily of books that were banned by other schools. It includes the following enlightening and informative titles: Tek War by William Shatner; The Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin; Sexus by Henry Miller; 40 Years of Playboy by Hugh Hefner; Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman; Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss; and The Satanic Verses (Junior Illustrated Edition) by Salman Rushdie.
15 Ironic Casting Note: The voice of Kid First Industries executive Jim Hope is provided by Tim Robbins, who is half of the most prominent left-wing activist couple in modern Hollywood, with his wife, Susan Sarandon. Among many other progressive causes, Robbins was a vocal supporter of the 2000 presidential campaign of pioneering anticorporate crusader Ralph Nader.