Homer Neither Homely Nor Heroic
The Age
Thursday July 5, 2007
ABOUT 10 years ago I was politely motoring with my family to Barwon Heads when I gazed in a bored way at another family in a Ranger Rover also heading back to town. So what? Except to say they were dressed as The Simpsons.
I thought I had seen it all in this life, and been a witness to the most macabre and unsettling sights you could hope to expect at a point in history where you expect anything. But not this sight. It wasn't funny, nor was it helpful. It was the end of dignity and the beginning of insanity. The Simpsons tooted me.I got home and my wife had a bath and our little boy put them on. The Simpsons I mean, not the real cartoon family I beheld on Geelong Road but the ordinary cartoon program.I used to like Homer and his hysteria. I thought he was subversive and completely original, and so on. I hate him now, however. He demoralises me. He conquers my mind.Seeing that family dressed as them was funnier or possibly more tragic than the series. Why would a perfectly normal middle-class Melbourne family do a thing like that? Because the show is all-pervasive and a form of animated cancer. That's it. I've hit it. They're obscene on screen and off. Right off.Maybe it's the lurid colour they use that blinds my old had-it eyes. Maybe I'm an old grump who doesn't deserve what he doesn't understand. Maybe I'm Homer. The truth is I feel under siege and overwhelmed by this violent family who are either bipolar fascists or pseudo pacifists. I need to escape them badly, but they are in everything.The aspects I truly hate are the scenes where Homer throttles Bart with such sure savagery I want to vomit. But my son laughs hard at these scenes and he explains they are just fantasies not to be taken seriously. But they nauseate me and depress me because I am a peacemaker. In need of a pacemaker, maybe.It seems as soon as my baggy eyes open, The Simpsons are on. As I cut the school sandwiches they are already throttling one another or being electrocuted or decapitated. There is no pity nor hope in The Simpsons; and, of course, that is why it is a global hit. After the World Trade Centre liquification there can be no more hope. And all we have to entertain us and look forward to is animated inhumanity.When I first looked at The Simpsons I really thought that it was refreshing material indeed. Absurdist and nihilist, and just the shot to munch your rissoles by. You readily identify with the uncertainties and brutal forces let loose in each glimpse of physical pain or spiritual horror.The language is flippant, abrupt and outrageous; and there is a touch of the poet in Homer.He can be downcast and weeping, then the viewer feels genuinely sorry for him. In the next scene he is choking his son or buying an AK47 to take out someone or something he has drawn offence from. This dangerous ground makes Homer a hero to billions of young Homers; then they copy him. The language and thinking young children create is vile also. Homer is destruction. I hate him.Television is to relax with, like an old friend, and I wouldn't wish to spoil anyone's fun because fun these days comes at a premium. I end up out the back in the old shed writing letters to friends or creating a new drawing on my desk, rather than spoiling my family's hard-earned fun. You cannot call Hitler regrettable. He existed and ended modern history. Hitler is Homer's mentor as well as tormentor.I think the thing about The Simpsons I cannot pardon is the syrupy, sloppy sentimentality that goes with the cruelty, so that the addicted viewer has it both ways - it is cynical as well as loving-seeming. Family values including lynching. Family fun includes stabbing and maiming and humiliation and mockery that is imitation sophistication.I'm just an old fart at night, out in the untelevised back shed, writing letters and decorating them with my original cartoons.The Simpsons screens every night except Saturdays on Ten.
© 2007 The Age