“In the spirit of the occasion, I must tell you what I think. You two screwed up royal!” – Mayor Quimby
“You know, I really don’t feel like being blamed.” – Bandstand Guy
Going all the way back to Season 1, The Simpsons had a knack for telling big and even outrageous stories in a way that that made sense within an episode and in the sometimes strange universe of the show. Whether it was Homer’s safety crusade in “Homer’s Odyssey”, Marge’s campaign against cartoon violence in “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge”, or Lisa’s anti-corruption protest in “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington”, the show knew how to put its characters (and therefore its satire, humor and cynical perspective) into places that ordinary people (and shows) were unlikely ever to tread. Walking the line between making things too unbelievable to be recognizable and too cliched to have any impact required a fine touch, and The Simpsons excelled at it.
A great example of that comes in Season 5’s “Bart’s Inner Child”, where Marge’s fears that she’s a stick in the mud, Bart’s unchecked id, and the self help woo of Brad Goodman gradually combine into a disastrous town festival. A very bad example of that came this week with Season 23’s “The D’oh-cial Network”, where Lisa’s desire to have friends somehow spun itself into a fad that turned Springfield into a chaotic wasteland overnight. Both episodes wrap things up with chaos that gets blamed on one of the Simpson kids, and from a strictly “could this happen in real life?” perspective, both stories are far fetched. But you don’t notice or care in The Simpsons because the entire episode builds smoothly to its conclusion, which is not inexplicably out of scale with what’s already happened. By contrast, in Zombie Simpsons, the conclusion is vastly more cataclysmic, comes out of nowhere, and has basically nothing to do with the rest of the story or the original problem that got things started.
Once the town falls for Brad Goodman’s easy answers in “Bart’s Inner Child”, we see the normally staid and responsible characters begin acting more like Bart. In order, Brockman, Lovejoy, and Krabappel embrace his consequence free outlook on life, and it’s no coincidence that it’s those three characters that we see doing so. All of them are usually buttoned down and boring. So when we see Patty, Selma, Willie and Skinner (all similarly responsible characters) behaving like Bart at the “Do What You Feel” festival, it isn’t a surprise. Furthermore, it’s Willie’s newfound embrace of not doing his job – specifically oiling the Ferris wheel – that leads to the episode’s moment of maximum chaos: the runaway wheel and the escaped zoo animals. Nothing that happens is overtly physically impossible (wheels do roll, after all), and every action that leads to that moment has built on the others.
Compare that carefully constructed moment to the town wide destruction in “The D’oh-cial Network”. After some scenes from a mall, Lisa wants to make a few friends and goes on-line to do so. Immediately the strange improbabilities begin piling up. Has Lisa never been on-line before? Were those other kids who instantly responded to her message all just waiting around and not talking to anyone before she typed, “Do you like ice cream?”?
In “Bart’s Inner Child” we see that the people of Springfield are unhappy and that they want to believe Brad Goodman’s bullshit. It follows that many of them would get carried away with it. In Zombie Simpsons things just start happening because that’s sorta kinda how they happened in The Social Network.
Beyond that, the central reason for Lisa creating the site instantly becomes obsolete. In her first scene after her improbably successful late night chat session, we see her happily interacting with the other nerds:
She sure does look miserable in that room with other people happily doing what she tells them to do.
This is stunningly bad storytelling. Lisa’s motivation for creating this thing was to make friends, and then, just a minute later, she’s got friends! They could write their way around this easily, of course. Maybe she wants female friends, maybe she wants non-nerd friends, by their own admission they weren’t pressed for time in this episode. But they don’t even bother.
And while they’re torpedoing their own premise, they’re still stacking up bizarre set pieces and cringe worthy leaps of logic. Like Lisa’s strangely attention grabbing “Do you like ice cream?” message, “SpringFace” explodes in popularity for no discernable reason. At first Lisa’s chatting on an already built school instant message site, and then – wham! – something she apparently built from scratch becomes an overnight Facebook clone and social sensation. No reason is given for why this happens, nor does the episode take any time to show it expand. In the next flashback scene, everyone is already hooked:
Didn’t that school used to be poor?
To be fair, the prosecutor says that they “skip ahead” in the flashback, but why would they do that? This is an episode that ran short and a story that hardly had a chance to get started before it turned into a city wide catastrophe. Lisa doesn’t even sit down and begin chatting on-line until the nine minute mark, and there are only a handful of scenes after that before we get to the total breakdown of society. There isn’t nearly enough time or action for there to be anything like the buildup necessary for a civilizational collapse. The car crashes, the fires, everything is orphaned by the story and so it ends up feeling random, dumb, and head scratching:
I’d hate to think of what would’ve happened if these people had known about Facebook too.
In the total destruction of the city versus the the collapse of a bandstand and a Ferris wheel, the wildly different senses of proportionality and scale between The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons are crystal clear. By the time we get to the “Do What You Feel Festival”, we’ve already seen the unintended consequences of town’s newfound embrace of Brad Goodman. The parking lot is a mess, Willie is threatening to kill the lot of them, and Bart has realized how much it sucks to have everyone else act like him. By contrast, the chaos in “The D’oh-cial Network” comes out of nowhere, like lightning on a cloudless day. Lisa just wants some friends, then she has some friends, then the world ends.
Which brings us back to the respective endings. In “Bart’s Inner Child”, there’s a plausible path back to normality. The Brad Goodman obsession turns on itself, and since we’ve actually seen the why, how and what of the collapse of the fad, everyone can return to their previously unhappy lives and watch McGarnagle.
“The D’oh-cial Network” has nothing like that. Because it spun itself up from nonsense, it’s only option is more nonsense. The ostensible resolution is that Lisa takes down her site, but that isn’t going to delete the smart phones everyone is carrying around with them. It isn’t going to stop Homer from texting Marge from Moe’s, or stop people from looking down at screens in church or while they’re driving. Unless I blacked out and missed a scene where Lisa was given power over all video games, it isn’t going to keep Bart and Milhouse from playing first person shooters. And it certainly isn’t going to keep Comic Book Guy (of all people) from doing things on-line. The actions, motivations, and resolution are all completely unconnected, and that’s before you remember than none of it makes sense anyway.
“Bart’s Inner Child” moves deftly from Marge, to Bart, to the whole town. So while there is a certain amount of cartoon violence and nonsense at the end, it never feels strange, unexpected or unbalanced. Whereas no part of “The D’oh-cial Network” follows logically from any other, so even if they had bothered to cook up a semi-believable resolution, it still wouldn’t have worked or been remotely plausible.
[Programming note: Sorry for the late notice on this, but those clowns in Congress are at it again, and Dead Homer Society will be going dark tomorrow, 18 January 2012, to protest the potential passage of SOPA and PIPA. As a site that relies heavily on fair use and incoming links, the passage of either could easily lead to us being shut down, and I’ve heard worse excuses for taking a day off. Assuming I can get this to work later tonight, the site will follow Wikipedia’s example and be shut down from midnight Eastern tonight until midnight Eastern tomorrow. What a bunch of clowns.]
Dead Homer Society 
10 responses to “Compare & Contrast: Simpson Kid Causes Mass Hysteria”
You can now set a SOPA blackout with a mere settings change, if you have a WordPress.com site. (WP introduced this after I wrote the blackout article at the Nose, the one you linked to above.)
I ended up using your text box workaround to black out the site. Just wanted to say thanks.
Thanks for participating in the blackout.
http://sopastrike.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-ron-wyden/my-letter-to-the-internet_b_1214553.html
Tried to post this earlier so if there’s multiple posts it’s because it didn’t post because it was too long or something. I will try again here. Please ignore or delete the other posts if this is a copy. I’ll try to post again later if this doesn’t work. Thanks.
…One thing confuses me… If they censor your internet, why would anyone continue to pay for it? I know I won’t. As soon as whatever info I am looking for is unavailable to me, my internet connection will no longer be worth my monthly bill, and will then be disconnected. I have used the internet since late 93/early 94 and have pretty much exclusively used it for the past decade for media — cd’s/dvd’s/etc — and I know plenty of people who use it way more than me for the same reason who will no longer use the internet if anything like that happens. It’s not like I’m suddenly going to have such a huge increase in cash from not paying $20 a month that I will be able to stimulate the economy in other ways, though.
I just find it amusing that they’re worrying about this stuff NOW… “hey, everything in America sucks… let’s attack the INTERNET, the last place where people can express themselves and be heard widely.. we already got radio and television, and yeah, we’ve already turned people into cellphone-addicted reality-television-buttfucking ‘we’ve-gotta-have-more-more-MORE! acne-cream-wearing scared-people-won’t-fuck-us-cuz-we’re-‘overweight’ mallrat A.D.D. zombies! But it’s possible to make people even MORE robotic and slavelike! LET’S DO IT!” I mean, there’s always going to be some way around this shit. As soon as Napster closed, Soulseek opened. You know? Sure, maybe content won’t be as easy as typing in ‘[album name] mediafire’ or ‘[movie name] torrent’ into google but hey, maybe people will actually not have an opinion about everything ever and will be able to actually sit and be forced to experience things on a slower level instead of having a 500tb computer maxed out with shit they’ll never watch/read/listen to.
I try to look at the good side, you know? I remember before DSL was prominent and when burners first became available, we all traded cd-r’s through the mail and everything was fine. They can censor parts of the internet but technology is such a beast, they can hardly even get close to stopping the trade of so-called ‘illegal’ goods (“illegal” in this case meaning “if you don’t overpay for a piece of plastic, YOU DON’T DESERVE TO HEAR IT!”). Ultimately, everything kinda starts to suck the more people / advertising agencies / government officials know about it. Remember when youtube first started compared to today? Same for spam/robotbook? I don’t even need to mention sites like Hotmail, do I? I’ve had the same email address my entire life, and when I mention “yeah just email me man” I get a slackjawed “huh? you don’t have a ‘SMART’ phone? I dunno how to type man! Email is just a receptacle for spam email right!? Am I right folks!?” ……God, you guys remember how badass ebay used to be? I also used to be able to make a living from my music via mp3.com, then myspace.com, and other sites. Now, “yeah man that album you spent a year writing and recording and that movie you spent tons of time and money on? Yeah I’ll probably be able to download it off of archive.org soon if I get time. I got sooooooooooo much shit to watch and listen to right now though bro. Specifially all the latest Pitchfork hipster bloghype substance-less bullshit that is ripping off great bands from the 70’s/80’s but I was told by some chick in an ‘OBEY’ shirt that I’m supposed to like them so I’m going to. Cuz you know, I don’t have the ability to form an opinion for myself. Not to mention that fitting is far more important than actually being able to enjoy life in my own way.”
…I’m sure, overall though, the internet will be fine. I mean, the amount of bitching I heard — because wikipedia apparently ruined everyone’s life by being blocked off for a day and thus not allowing the spoiled people I know to finish assignments or whatever other shit was “necessary” — suggests that 1) the people at large are still pretty unaware of, you know, just about everything around them, despite (or actually, probably BECAUSE OF) the information-overload shit-world we live in. “Hey, you mean we COULD experience everything ever? We could really blow our own minds, enlighten ourselves, by just typing in a few things or clicking on a few things or downloading a few things? WOW! Well, hey, let’s take it for granted, cuz you know, fuck it! Twitter 4 lyfe bro! Duh why’s da internet censored I want to update hello kitty wiki with poop poop fart sout hpark family guy hello titty lawl!”
Oh, and 2) If people can’t figure out that simply hitting “stop” (or, in newFirefox “X” [or, hitting ESCAPE… turning off SCRIPTS… reading cached versions of sites.. or, you know, getting on sites because wikipedia]) before the SOPA thing loads, maybe this was all inevitable anyway. The people at large don’t seem to care — or be informed at all really — and hardly think it will effect them. Maybe it won’t. It largely will seem to effect people who do want to expand their horizons, who don’t just like the accepted Zombie Simpson (YES THIS POST IS NOW SOMEWHAT RELEVANT) bullshit. And those people who want something more out of life, again, will probably be able to get around this shit almost immediately. So, nothing relevant probably will happen besides having to deal with some initial annoyances and whatnot.
Hell, “internet censoring” is something Lloyd Kaufman (of Troma) has been ranting about for a good decade now. I think we’ll all be okay. I mean, in the end, there’s a lot that’s more important than the internet. Too bad the government doesn’t realize that…. ulimately, it’ll probably actually be a good thing, no matter what happens. Something needs to happen, honestly. The best thing I’ve EVER done lately is delete all accounts related to social networking and also to give away a cellphone I got for Christmas, and also to donate some money recently to artists whose work means a lot to me, as well as some charities that mean a lot to me. Ultimately, I think that’s a lot more fulfilling than ‘Dood didja see jamie’s facebook page? Se got SOOOOOOOO DRUNK! she posted it on her phone lie 5 nansoeconds agoooo. AND I ‘LIKED’ HER POST WHERE SHE HAD A NIP SLIP AND HER BOYFRIEND IS GOING TO KICK MY ASS so i beat in halo infiinty in xbox dead and yo we’re going to go see a movie remake together and listen to rappers ripping off wutang and ‘sound artist’ millionaires who hold down one note on a keyboard yet can’t even come close to sounding as good as tangerine dream!”
I just find it amusing how limitless and infinite the world is, how everything IS a click away afterall. You can emulate ANY instrument ever — any synth, any SOUND.. even yawning or snoring.. manipulate them and make albums out of them as your source… music production is free… everyone can finally record their visions and not be limited at all.. in spite of all the advances and for it all being so easy-as-pie to do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING and not be restricted at all, SO MUCH SHIT sounds/looks/feels exactly the same. It’s because most people only want more of the same, or want more of what they feel like they’re “SupposeD” to like. That’s how it’s always been and how it’ll always be. As exciting as technology is, the only REAL excitement is in the underground, or at least not on the level of.. you know.. governments and shit… so meh. MEH.
Ultimately, why worry? So many people have proven that they will accept more of the same. That, again, they will indeed ‘OBEY’. Instead of, you know, RESISTING.
I do wish we could at least see Zombie Simpsons die but I think the world will end with it STILL being on the air. New episodes will be produced in Hell. I mean, more of Homer being electrocuted or putting gravy on his head are the only scenes we’ll experience from here on out anyway.. the world’s best times were a long long time ago…. fuck it.
……………..
……………..
……………..
……………..
……………..
……………..
sorry for all the comments/replies. It wouldn’t let me fit all this in my original post. It’s all here now though. Thanks!
Glad to have it. I enjoy epic rants. Well done.
>Lisa is shown to have friends a minute later
>SpringFace gets super popular without explanation
God, I’d already realised the ridiculousness of Lisa meeting Zuckerberg previously, among the episodes many other faults, but these are just the nails in the coffin for this episode. I can’t understand why they didn’t cut the 2 minute intro and several minute filler story at the end to develop this.
Zombie Simpsons doesn’t feel like the Simpsons; it feels like things happening in a sequence.
Bart’s Inner Child is the absolute WORST episode of the classic seasons. Why compare it to something better?