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In reviewing The Simpsons Movie for The New York Times (July 27, 2007), critic A. O. Scott wrote, “Ten or 15 years ago, The Simpsons Movie, which has been contemplated for almost as long as the show has been on the air, might have felt riskier and wilder. But The Simpsons, for all its mischief and iconoclasm, has become an institution, and that status has kept this film from taking too many chances”.

Online critic James Berardinelli wrote that “The primary satirical targets are religion (an easy mark), environmentalists (also easy), and government stupidity (even easier). The Simpsons Movie does not go after hot button issues nor does it tie itself to a time and place by addressing current events”. Early in the film Homer Simpson leafs through a Bible and exclaims this book has “no answers.” Is this merely Homer being stupid, or are the filmmakers attacking the Bible? If it’s the latter, isn’t that an unusual move for a family movie to take in a country in which religious believers make up the majority of the population? In the case of environmentalists, the movie comes down on the side of Lisa Simpson, who sincerely believes in the cause. As for “government stupidity,” the movie accuses the government of something worse than mere stupidity.

The more I think about The Simpsons Movie, the more I think it may be considerably more daring than the reviews I’ve read have noticed. And it is very much a satire about what is going on in America right now.

The Simpsons‘ creative freedom, on television and now on film, is particularly striking since it is part of Twentieth Century Fox, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s vast News Corporation empire. So too is the Fox News Channel, with its leanings to the political right.

According to a July 30, 2007 article in The New York Times, “Activists are urging Home Depot, which recently unveiled an environmentally conscious marketing program, to withdraw advertising from Fox News, whose hosts and commentators dismiss global warming as liberal hysteria. . . .A short video by Robert Greenwald, Fox Attacks: The Environment, has been viewed more than 380,000 times since it was posted on YouTube on July 9.”

But The Simpsons Movie voices a strong environmental theme. Earnest, liberal Lisa tries to stop the people of Springfield from polluting their local lake, and, surprisingly, manages to overcome their apathy on the subject. According to Entertainment Weekly, Simpsons creator Matt Groening “mentioned an article he’d read about a community battling hog-waste pollution,” which became the springboard for the movie’s plot. When Homer dumps a silo full of his new pet pig’s manure into Lake Springfield, he triggers a chemical reaction out of a science fiction/horror movie. A squirrel that was exposed to the polluted water grows many more eyes. (This is surely an allusion to one of the earliest Simpsons episodes, 1990’s “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish,” in which radioactive wastes from Mr. Burns’ nuclear power plant result in a mutant fish with an extra eye.

In the film Arnold Schwarzenegger is President and gives a free hand to Russ Cargill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who takes drastic action in response to Lake Springfield’s mutagenic pollution. Rather than do anything to clean the lake up, he dispatches the military to encase the entire town within an enormous dome.

How seriously can we take the satirical treatment of the EPA? The writers’ point may simply be the absurdity of the idea that the EPA, of all government agencies, could possibly engage in this sort of rogue military action. Do any of you recall that in The X-Files movie (1998), FEMA was supposed to be a major player in the all-powerful alien conspiracy to take over the world? Anyone who watched the DVD after FEMA’s catastrophic performance after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans probably finds the idea of an omnicompetent FEMA grimly funny.

There are conservatives in the Republican Party who want to restrict the powers of the EPA or to abolish it altogether; they might like The Simpsons Movie‘s portrayal of the EPA as a menace to freedom. Then again, there are also liberals who believe that the EPA has not been effective enough in combatting environmental dangers; they would notice that the EPA doesn’t do anything to solve Springfield’s pollution problem, but just literally puts a lid on it.

I realized what the movie might be up to during the sequence in which we are shown endless rows of National Security Agency employees monitoring the phone calls of apparently ordinary Americans. The NSA man who thus located Marge Simpson is ecstatic, boasting that finally the government had located someone it was searching for. This is presumably a reference to the controversy over the real federal government’s recent venture into warrantless wiretapping in its surveillance of alleged suspects in the “war on terror.”

If the movie’s NSA gag has a serious subtext, then what other political commentary might lurk just under the surface? Are the film’s President Schwarzenegger and EPA head Cargill merely supposed to be a fool and a knave, respectively, with no connection to the real world? Or is this Schwarzenegger, who declares that he was elected “to lead not to read,” intended to remind us of our current President? Schwarzenegger irresponsibly allows Cargill, a man with a questionable agenda, to do whatever he wants. Are we meant to think of President Bush following the ideological agenda of his neoconservative associates in plunging the nation into what now appears to many as a hopeless war in Iraq? Is Cargill’s military assault on Springfield meant to remind us of the current administration’s reliance on massive military force to “solve” the situation in Iraq?

Were any of these allusions made consciously by the writers and producers of The Simpsons Movie? Or were they unconsciously acting to recent political developments in plotting their movie?

Over the years I’ve written a lot in this weekly column about “post-9/11″ stories, which reflect Americans’ new fears of being attacked by a foreign adversary. The Simpsons Movie seems to me to be an example of a post-“post-9/11″ story. The focus of this emerging genre is not the terrorist threat to the nation, but the dangerous measures that the government took in response to that perceived threat: the quagmire in Iraq, the assault on civil liberties.

Another target of this post-“post-9/11″ genre might be an attack on government incompetence, as demonstrated by the Katrina debacle.

Hurricane Katrina was certainly an environmental disaster, and there was nearly universal outrage at the delayed, inadequate efforts by FEMA and the federal government to aid the people of New Orleans following the catastrophe. During the hurricane and its immediate aftermath, over fourteen thousand people sought shelter in the Louisiana Superdome, there were inadequate supplies of food and water, dreadfully unsanitary conditions, and insufficient medical care.

Here’s another parallel that the filmmakers may or may have consciously intended. In The Simpsons Movie the people of Springfield are imprisoned within a dome, where the government leaves them to rot, and we watch as living conditions deteriorate over three months. Are we intended to see a connection to New Orleans after Katrina? My hunch is that this parallel is more than mere coincidence.

In other words, The Simpsons may indeed now be a pop culture institution, but The Simpsons Movie is much more biting politically than the television show usually is, or than film critics have given it credit for.

One of The Simpsons Movie‘s surprises for me was this political subtext. Another surprise was the strong mythic overtones to the plot. The early scene in which Grandpa Simpson collapses in church and begins uttering prophecies seems to me like nothing I’d ever seen on the TV show. Yes, on the surface the scene was played for laughs, and yet the prophecies came true. It was as if by ignoring Grandpa’s warnings (which he didn’t understand anyway), Homer was defying fate, thereby causing the disaster that befell Springfield. Perhaps the Simpsons Movie writers were intentionally parodying “end of the world” movies, and therefore were parodying the trope of the Cassandra-like warnings that go ignored. Still, the prophecies prepare us for the supernatural doings later in the movie.

The Joseph Campbell monomyth structure is especially evident in in the movie’s second act, set in Alaska. Less than a week before, I was reading the middle section of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in which Harry wanders in the wilderness, having escaped from his enemies, but having lost nearly everything and everybody. In The Simpsons Movie Homer and his family manage to escape from the dome (thus crossing a threshold) and flee to Alaska, where they live in an isolated cabin. But Marge and the kids head back, determined to try to help the people of Springfield. Homer refuses, but finds himself wandering through the wilderness, as if through a Campbellian labyrinth.

But Alaska also proves to be Campbell’s “enchanted realm,” and not just in the clever earlier sequence in which Disney-like animals help Homer and Marge prepare for a night of lovemaking. Homer encounters an Iniut woman who is a mystic and serves as his mentor figure. Through her guidance he has a vision in which he undergoes dismemberment: even in a cartoon, it’s somewhat shocking to see Homer’s body separated into component parts. This is the metaphorical descent into the underworld, Campbell’s “Supreme Ordeal,” and a symbolic death. Only when Homer has his epiphany, realizing he no longer cares about himself but knows he must help the people of Springfield, do the parts of his body rejoin. This is his symbolic resurrection, and his new determination to help the townspeople is the Campbellian “boon” that will enable Homer to save them in the third act.

Again, since this is The Simpsons, the filmmakers are parodying the Campbell pattern. But the surprise is that they are both kidding the Campbell monomyth and using it semi-seriously to structure Homer’s character arc.

The third big surprise in the film for me was the portrayal of Homer’s next door neighbor, Ned Flanders. You may recall a past Simpsons episode (“Home Sweet Home-Diddily-Dum-Doodily,” 1995) in which Flanders temporarily adopts Bart and Lisa, and his attempt at baptizing them is depicted as horrific, as if his trying to brainwash them into joining some strange cult. The show usually mocks Flanders for his religious devotion and naive benevolence; this episode was anomalous in casting him as a villain. The movie changes all this, mostly avoiding jokes at Ned’s expense.

In their joint appearance on The Charlie Rose Show (August 30, 2007), Matt Groening said that the secret of The Simpsons’ success was executive producer James Brooks’ insistence from the beginning that the show’s main characters had to have “real emotions.” The movie shows this, too, through Marge’s genuine anguish in separating from Homer, Bart’s unexpected pain at feeling betrayed by Homer, and his growing appreciation of Flanders’ fatherliness. In the movie Ned, who is so often a figure of fun on the TV show, finally becomes as real as characters in The Simpsons can get. He becomes a figure of genuine goodness, an ideal father.

At the climax of the movie, however, Homer surpasses Ned. As the movie’s first act showed, Homer is capable of extraordinary stupidity and irresponsibility. But that is matched by his capacity for extraordinary heroism, as well, as Homer shows when, reunited with Bart, he succeeds in saving Springfield from annihilation.

One reason that I’m glad to see that The Simpsons Movie did so well commercially in its first weekend is that it looks like two-dimensional drawings come to life, just like the TV show–and the way animated feature films used to look! However much computers were actually used on the film, it looks like hand-drawn animation. Therefore the film’s success should help make the case that audiences will still go see traditional-looking animated films, as long as the stories and characters merit their attention.

TRAILER TROUBLES

Like the rest of you, I enjoy seeing trailers for upcoming movies when they give me glimpses of what looks like something I’ll really enjoy. Ratatouille had a spectacular trailer, with Remy fleeing through the kitchen from pursuers, and finally just avoiding being pinned to the wall by flying knives, in an iconic shot used in the movie ads. I was disappointed that the sequence didn’t turn up in the actual movie! The new trailer for next year’s Get Smart movie perfectly captures the spirit of the original television series.

Then there are trailers that seem like cheats. For example, there’s that trailer for the sequel to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight. Those of you who saw it at the San Diego Con should be advised that you didn’t get an exclusive: I saw the same trailer before The Simpsons Movie. There’s a bat symbol on a black screen, and you hear voices–Alfred, the Joker–and that’s it. Well, if they had nothing to show, why even bother?

And then there are trailers that actively persuade me not to go see the movie in question. Before The Simpsons Movie started, I saw the trailer for the upcoming computer-animated film of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. It started beautifully, with a close-up of a CGI flower, but once Horton showed up, speaking in Jim Carrey’s voice, being self-consciously wacky, it became clear that this movie has nothing to do with the gentle humor of Dr. Seuss.

But worse followed: the trailer for a CGI Alvin and the Chipmunks (and really, who asked for this?), in which Alvin tries to prove that a piece of his brother’s excrement is actually a raisin by putting it in his mouth. No, I did not make this up. What were the publicity people for this movie thinking? It’s as if they are handing us critics the perfect image to describe a movie that I fear may look like a raisin but decidedly isn’t.

DOGGING HIS TRAIL

Back in May, when I bought the Warner Home Video’s DVD set Tex Avery’s Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection from a Best Buy store in midtown Manhattan, not only did the cashier break into a smile at seeing my purchase, but he even launched into a Droopy impression. Last month, I picked up the Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD set at a different Best Buy, and the female cashier was already holding a copy of her own. Either this is coincidence, or Best Buy has a commendable policy of hiring animation buffs.

Usually I only buy DVD sets if they have special features I want to see. (Otherwise, I can just record the film off television.) The Droopy set includes a documentary about director Tex Avery that tells viewers such things as (1) that Avery’s cartoons move fast (yes), (2) that Avery had great comic timing (true), (3) that Avery’s cartoons frequently break the fourth wall (correct), and (4) that Droopy speaks with a “Southern drawl” (absolutely wrong). In other words, this documentary mostly offers only basic information about Avery’s work which will come as a surprise to those who are first learning about him, but that most animation collectors who purchase this set will already know. Moreover, even though Turner Broadcasting, which owns the MGM Droopy cartoons, also holds the rights to all the cartoons Avery directed at both Warners and MGM, the documentary only shows us clips from the Droopy shorts. So this is a disappointment.

But, of course, the set is worth getting because it has all twenty-eight Droopy cartoons that Avery directed, all of which are good, and one of which, Northwest Hounded Police (1946), is one of the greatest cartoons of his career. I’d always considered this to be a remake of the first Droopy cartoon, Dumb-Hounded (1943). But having this DVD set allowed me to watch them back to back, and now I consider them more as variations on a theme.

In each one a criminal wolf is hunted by Droopy, the slow-talking, slow-moving, melancholic dog who represents the law. But no matter where the Wolf goes, Droopy is there. If there’s one thing that the Wolf succeeds in leaving behind, it is any pretense of realism. In Dumb-Hounded the Wolf flees by car, plane, and boat, at velocities that might make the Flash’s head spin, yet Droopy, who seems barely to move, settles into his hideout, only to find Droopy patiently awaiting him. In Northwest Hounded Police the Wolf races to the Arctic wilderness, finds Droopy, known in this short as Sgt. McPoodle of the Mounties, flees again, and eventually ends up on a tiny Pacific island, where Droopy is concealed beneath a tiny rock. Many times when the Wolf comes face to face with Droopy, his surprise and horror are so great that he does a “take” that bursts the body’s normal limitations: his eyes bulge out like telescopes, or his entire body will fly into disconnected pieces.

Chuck Jones’s Wile E. Coyote has been likened to Sisyphus, in that both eternally strive at a task at which they will never succeed. In these two Avery cartoons, the Wolf is in a Sisyphean situation as well, unable to evade his mild-mannered pursuer. It’s like Les Miserables as surreal farce. Or it’s like a nightmare, in which the dreamer is unable to escape his doom, no matter what he does. It’s a funny-animal version of Kafka. Droopy is like the Greek god Nemesis reinterpreted as an inoffensive-seeming little dog.

Watching the two shorts back to back, I discovered that even though they have the same premise, they consist of nearly entirely different sets of gags. The prominent exception is that at one point in both cartoons, the Wolf is so desperately racing to escape Droopy that his momentum carries him past the sprocket holes at the edge of the film into a blank, white void whereupon he swerves and runs back into the film, his version of reality.

This is a perfect example of the one truly illuminating point that the DVD’s documentary makes: that whereas Disney animated films sought to create a credible reality, Avery broke the rules of reality and reveled in demonstrating that anything can happen in a cartoon. In effect, he was the anti-Disney.

Northwest Hounded Police is the better of the two cartoons because it pushes the comedic nightmarish aspect even further beyond the bounds of reality. At one point the Wolf undergoes plastic surgery, only to look in the mirror and find that his new face is Droopy’s! How can he outrun Nemesis when it is part of himself? (This might also suggest that Droopy represents the outlaw Wolf’s sense of guilt, which is indeed a part of himself he cannot escape.) At another point in Northwest, the Wolf hides in a movie theater and starts watching an MGM cartoon, which turns out to be, in effect, Northwest itself: Droopy looks out from this cartoon-within-a-cartoon and addresses the Wolf, who understandably panics.

In these two cartoons Droopy and the Wolf do indeed break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience. Avery goes still further in indicating that these characters know that they are in an a film: not only does the Wolf run past those sprocket holes, but at one pint in Dumb-Hounded, Droopy tells the audience, “I surprise him”–the Wolf– “like this all through the picture.” It’s as if Droopy is an actor who has read the whole script, or an actor who has been in repeated performances of the film, like a performer in a play. Avery emphasizes the artificiality of the animated medium, and this is a subject to which I will return next week.

I’ve already described another cartoon in this DVD set, The Shooting of Dan McGoo (1945), in a previous installment (see “Comics in Context” #100). But before I move on to another subject, I want to mention another of my favorite Avery cartoons in this collection, The Three Little Pups (1953). As its title suggests, it’s a parody of the story of the Three Little Pigs, and in particular, the Disney version, which was then two decades old, with Droopy as Practical Pig. The Wolf of Three Little Pups, cast as a dogcatcher, starts out wearing an expression of melodramatic villainy and conducts a fast, frenzied assault on Droopy’s brick doghouse. But then, abruptly, he stops, shifts into what will be his usual manner for the rest of the cartoon and speaks to the audience in a laid-back Southern drawl (a real one). This Wolf is voiced by the great Daws Butler, using the same Southern drawl that will eventually become the voice of Huckleberry Hound. Unlike his frenetic counterpart in Northwest, this Wolf moves and speaks slowly and quietly, much like Droopy himself. Their ensuing battle reminds me of Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts like Them Thar Hills (1934) and Tit for Tat (1935), in which the comedy duo and their adversary move with a quiet, grave dignity in the course of unleashing slapstick violence on each other. I will also return to the evolution of Butler’s easygoing Southern canine in next week’s column.

OH YOU SQUID

I surrender. I can resist no longer. My Quick Stop colleague Fred Hembeck is right. SpongeBob SquarePants really is as good as he says it is.

Nickelodeon premiered five new SpongeBob episodes during the last full week of July. I caught some of them in the midst of watching a good number of animated cartoons from the Hollywood studio period for this week’s column and next week’s. SpongeBob may not have their high production values or masterful animation, but in terms of wit and invention and strong characters and voice acting, the new SpongeBob cartoons I saw were equally enjoyable as many of these classics, or even more so.

Among the new SpongeBob shorts I saw was “The Krusty Sponge,” which introduces a feared food critic who is nonetheless less imposing than Ratatouille‘s Anton Ego: Gene Scallop, based on–and voiced by–Today Show movie reviewer Gene Shalit. After Scallop’s review of the Krusty Krab restaurant singles out cook SpongeBob for praise, owner Mr. Krabs, the very personification of greed, converts this fast food establishment into a SpongeBob theme restaurant. It’s a subversive satire on the omnipresence of SpongeBob merchandising in real life, suggesting that it threatens to overwhelm the original character in the cartoons.

I’ve been thinking that SpongeBob is like a 21st century equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Each has a boyish persona, and each has an iconic appearance based on simple, appealing geometrical shapes: circles for Mickey, and a square–along with the curves of his mouth and eyes–for SpongeBob. The big difference between Mickey and SpongeBob is that SpongeBob is allowed to act downright weird at times.

Here’s an example. In another new short, “To Love a Patty,” SpongeBob encounters a “Krusty Patty” hamburger that he deems to be so perfect that he literally falls in love with it. Though SpongeBob is old enough to have a full time job, live on his own, drive and (in another new short, “Boat Smarts,” even shave), he is basically a big kid who doesn’t appear to have hit puberty yet. His creator, Stephen Hillenburg, has asserted that SpongeBob is “somewhat asexual”. Nonetheless, in “To Love a Patty,” it’s as if SpongeBob has enormous sexual urges that get misdirected onto his perfect hamburger, whom he names “Patty” (of course).

This allows the cartoon makers to satirize the blindness of love. As time wears on, “Patty” starts to rot and stink, but SpongeBob sees and smells only “her” imagined beauty, until the stench and decay finally becomes too great for even him to ignore.

Since SpongeBob, as a cook, creates hamburgers, then you could read “To Love a Patty” as a satire of the creative artist’s obsession with his own creation, and his blindness to its flaws.

Finally Mr. Krabs persuades SpongeBob that passion for a Krabby Patty is good, but it must be fulfilled by eating the Patty, which SpongeBob proceeds to do. Mr. Krabs has convinced SpongeBob to redirect his sexual drives into hunger, consuming and destroying the object of his desire. If you think about it, this suggests something a wee bit disturbing about Mr. Krabs. It’s just as well that he clearly sublimates his own sex drives into his ecstatic passion for money.

SpongeBob’s relationship with the female squirrel Sandy Cheeks seems to be a platonic friendship. Then again, those two express their friendship by having karate fights with each other. What’s being sublimated through all this mock aggression?

Well, Hillenburg was quoted in the same article as saying “The character SpongeBob is an oddball. He’s kind of weird, but he’s kind of special,” I can agree with this.

However, watching several new episodes reinforced my decision that my favorite character in the show is SpongeBob’s neighbor and co-worker Squidward, who is perennially annoyed by SpongeBob’s wacky behavior. If SpongeBob is childlike, then Squidward is an adult. Moreover, whereas the extroverted SpongeBob likes almost everybody, Squidward feels no obligation to put on a happy face to please other people when he doesn’t want to. Perhaps Squidward’s appeal is that he gets to voice the exasperation and irritation that we normally have to hold back.

Squidward also reminds me of a 1971 film by Federico Fellini, The Clowns. In it, Fellini concentrated on two types of clowns, which are often paired; the White Clown, who is the straight man, an actual or wannabe authority figure, and the Auguste, whom Fellini called a “rebel,” who engages in slapstick. The White Clown represents order; the Auguste is comedic chaos. Squidward is in the White Clown tradition, forever annoyed by SpongeBob, his personal Auguste. (I figured out that Squidward is analogous to the White Clown before starting this week’s column. And in the course of writing it, I discovered a Wikipedia article that also labels Squidward as White Clown and SpongeBob as Auguste.)

Next week Ill be reviewing the new Woody Woodpecker and Friends DVD, and Woody and his recurring antagonist Wally Walrus also fit the categories of Auguste and White Clown, respectively. But SpongeBob and Squidward aren’t actually antagonists: SpongeBob regards Squidward as his friend and is normally oblivious to Squidward’s disdain towards him.

Moreover, the SpongeBob series even grants Squidward some sympathy for putting up with SpongeBob’s manic efforts at friendship. In “The Thing,” a short that debuted in January, but which I saw last weekend, Squidward is accidentally covered in cement, rendering him unrecognizable and unable to talk. SpongeBob finds him, decides that he is some strange kind of animal, and adopts him as a pet. The short takes Squidward’s point of view, focusing on his horror at being caught in this nightmarishly absurd situation, and being unable to stop it.

It may be that Squidward secretly envies SpongeBob and wishes he were more like him. In the new short, “Good Ol’ Whatshisname,” Squidward discovers that the popular SpongeBob knows the names of all of the Krusty Krab’s regular customers. Squidward becomes so obsessed with learning the name of a customer before SpongeBob does that he steals the customer’s wallet and lands in prison.

In another new short, “Squid Wood,” SpongeBob creates a puppet version of Squidward. The puppet presumably represents Squidward as SpongeBob envisions him, and keep in mind that SpongeBob is generally oblivious to Squidward’s grumpiness. Everyone prefers SpongeBob’s kinder, gentler puppet version of Squidward to the real Squidward, to the latter’s horror.

And in another new short, “Breath of Fresh Squidward,” an electric shock temporarily gives Squidward an alternate personality. Squidward’s Mr. Hyde turns out to be even happier, nicer and more extroverted than SpongeBob. Thus SpongeBob and Squidward reverse roles, with Squidward unwittingly driving SpongeBob to distraction. Finally another electrical shock restores Squidward to his grumpy normalcy. The more benign side of Squidward is once more trapped within his subconscious, and it would take the equivalent of a bolt from the blue to free him once more.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

This is the final weekend for “Stan Lee: A Retrospective,” the exhibition that I co-curated at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Manhattan (www.moccany.org). The show closes on August 6.

The ComicMix website recently ran Mike Gold’s very appreciative review of The Marvel Vault, the book I co-authored with legendary Marvel writer and editor Roy Thomas. You can see the review here, and ComicMix, a mix of news blogging, columns, and even podcasts about comics and related subjects, is well worth visiting on a regular basis.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson