The Haunted Landscapes of The Simpsons

I've been finding myself drawn, during odd periods of downtime at work, or on solitary late Saturday nights, to a point of nostalgia, probably my most salient point of nostalgia, and probably the thing that shaped my worldview more than anything else – classic episodes of The Simpsons. 

I say, “classic episodes,” because like most 30+ year olds (and like many younger), I stopped watching as the show got shittier. This is a woefully unoriginal observation, to the point where every time someone brings it up I cringe a little. And besides, many people more talented than myself have written whole essays on how and why this happened, as well as why this tends to happen with long-running series in general (jumping the shark and all that). But the fact remains that watching newer episodes feels a little like running into the coolest kid from your elementary school – the one whose parents shelled out for a pair of L.A. Lights and could sing all of the lyrics to Green Day's “Longview” – and seeing him 50 pounds heavier than his high-school prime at a Main Street bar, before he cashes out his tab and drunkenly swerves his car out of diagonal parking.

In a way, I never left those episodes behind – I still remember banks of dialogue, and it's how I received so much of my early cultural education.

Here is a story about how this works in a different time. In 1944, Patrick Leigh Fermor was sent to Crete to capture a notorious Nazi officer. Having found that the general hat already left the island, he went for a secondary target, a career soldier named General Heinrich Kleipe. For days, he had marched the general through the rain and over the desolate terrain, until in a cave, having a smoke together, they see the peak of Mount Ida emerge from the clouds.

“Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte…

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.”

Being of this century, my points of resonance with strangers from across the ocean are nothing like the odes of Horace. Rather, my version of Fermor's encounter with Kleipe is bound to be something more like me running into an asshole Irish expat going off about something, and muttering across the table: 

Itchy runs afoul of an Irishman... 

And one of my tablemates responds: 

Look out Itchy, he's Irish! 

Fermor had Horace. I have season 7, episode 18 of The Simpsons.

Of course, I'm pretty sure that classic episodes of The Simpsons does have far more universal appeal than Horace, even Horace 100 years ago when your options were far fewer. But not everyone took the deep dive like I did, although quite a few did, and wherever I've lived, I've found those fellow souls who, as Fermor put it, drank at the same fountain.

So the dialogue was at the surface of my mind, that I knew. But there were still things to be discovered.

The thing I notice more than anything else, that I never really understood before, was that part of the reason I was drawn to The Simpsons was that there was a loneliness at its core. Sure, a lot is made of the show's much-vaunted “heart,” which it had in spades in its golden years, but that sense of heart hinges on a deep-seated sadness. This is a family consisting of a father who worked a job he hated day in and day out, the housewife who once had dreams, the fundamentally good kid whose rebellion was inevitable, the isolated intellectual daughter, the youngest child who literally doesn't have a fucking voice.

And the aesthetics of Springfield bear this out. I know I'm late to the party in discovering it, but I keep finding myself drawn to the Scenic Simpsons Instagram page. Each image is by and large devoid of human presence, and consists of all of the background stuff that forms the show – an open telephone book, a flickering television screen, interior shots of familiar buildings, landscape.

Its creator uses the word “beautiful” to describe the imagery collected there, but that to me is missing the point. Rather, the first thing I am reminded of is the terrifyingly empty piazzas of Giorgio De Chirico.

 As a kid, I adored maps and photos of unknown places – my first childhood hero was Indiana Jones – and Springfield was just such another place, fictional and unknown and yet totally familiar to any American in the '90s. It was another thing I wasn't aware of then, but the background drawings of Springfield are hyperreal. It is a painfully anodyne suburban or small-town landscape, simplified and abstracted to almost childlike levels, and yet with the colors exaggerated and the occasional touch of the absurd, the laconic simplicity almost evoking something hidden, the scenery becomes resonant.

And this, too, reflects De Chirico's idea of the pittura metafisica. To De Chirico, the haunting effect comes through contrast, between light and dark, between monolith and emptiness, and, like Springfield, between the everyday scenery of the Italian city and the patently surreal.

 

It has embedded itself deeply in my consciousness. I need only look to the peace lily on my coffee table, my tweed sofa, the garden outside with its potted palms, and it takes only the slightest stretch of imagination to see it stylized, oversaturated, and transformed into flat fields of color, odd details haunting the corners.