The Simpsons Movie? How About The Simpsons Cinema!
"For the average consumers such as ourselves, television is virtually an anonymous medium."
If there is a medium that fully realizes the ideas of postmodernism – the deconstruction of authorship, the dismantling of fixed meaning, the collapsing of high and low forms of culture into a completely undifferentiated vacuum of Mass Art, and the championing of irony – it must be television. For some of these very reasons, television is only of partial interest to me. It is not the medium that I love, but it is a medium from which, I believe, cinema can learn.
The Simpsons has become the longest-running situation comedy in television history, and for good reason. Like many television series, The Simpsons has created its own universe that seems to exist, whether we are watching or not. Jeffrey Sconce confirms this with the concept of the “haunted TV,” the unique electronic presence of which suggests “that even after a program is over and the receiver [is] turned off, the television set itself still loom[s] as a gateway to oblivion simply by sitting inert and watchful in the living room.” Though this characteristic is most acutely realized with serialized television, it was also true of classic Hollywood movies. Read on...
On classic Hollywood “types,” such as the Public Enemy, the Priest, Bogart, and the Fallen Woman, Stanley Cavell writes: “Hollywood was the theater in which they appeared, because the films of Hollywood constituted a world, with recurrent faces more familiar to me than the faces of the neighbors of all the places I have lived.” Just as The Simpsons has an enormous cast of characters whom we imagine to be leading their lives even when the show is not focused on them, or even when we are not tuned in, classic Hollywood had its own cast of types, often typecast with the same actors, who would show up in movie after movie, similarly creating the illusion of a self-contained universe.
One can speak of a particular genre as its own self-contained universe with its own cast of types. One can even speak of a particular auteur as owning a self-contained universe, so that, for instance, L. B. Jeffries of Rear Window and Norman Bates of Psycho might co-exist in the same world, though they will probably never meet. The trouble with the auteurist universe is that every character begins to take on the same traits and learn the same lessons. The auteur’s world is a deeply religious one wherein every character is made in the auteur’s image: there is a little Hitchcock in both Jeffries and Bates.
On the other hand, classic Hollywood and serialized television create richly diverse universes that resemble Dostoevskian polyphony, only they are not constructed by a single author. Despite the auteurist impulse to assign total creative responsibility for The Simpsons to its creator, Matt Groening, the series has had many authors over the course of its fourteen seasons. In his introduction to Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, John Alberti writes:
"Television journalists regularly identify The Simpsons as Groening’s show, although he has only written or co-written a handful of episodes once the program became a series. Clearly, in his role as executive producer, Groening is an important part of the creative team, but it is probably safe to say that the identification with Groening is most strongly maintained by the visual look of the program, a style that extends to the level of orthography, as it is even possible to install a Simpsons/Groening font on word processing programs."
The Simpsons must be viewed as a collaborative enterprise, not only because the show was co-developed by James L. Brooks and Sam Simon, but also because of the ninety-three producers, ninety-one writers, thirty-five directors, sixteen regular cast members, and uncountable number of animators who have contributed enormously to the success of the series. As one of the thirty-five directors, Brad Bird speaks very highly of the process:
"I learned a lot from being part of that process because there were such brilliant writers on The Simpsons, and I got to have a ringside seat. Some scripts sailed through, some got reworked endlessly, some got ruined right before they went to the air, and some got saved right before they went to the air with brilliant bits of editing and rejiggering. It was like the most condensed storytelling school that I could have gone to, and that saved me on Iron Giant, because I learned to troubleshoot."
The workshop atmosphere that Bird describes is precisely what contributes to The Simpsons’s realization of a self-contained polyphonic world. But the example of The Simpsons can be extended even further. On top of the ninety-one credited writers who were paid to work on the series, The Simpsons has also inspired a plethora of amateur scriptwriting.
It is increasingly well known that the way to enter the television industry as a writer is by writing a TV spec script. What this means is choosing a television series that is currently running, preferably one that has enjoyed a fair amount of success but not necessarily too much success (as this increases the likely competition of other TV spec writers who have made the same choice), and writing a hypothetical installment in the series. The spec script is then submitted to agents and producers in hopes of being recognized. Rarely are spec scripts actually aired, but sometimes they can land the writer a job on the show, or a similar show that is in development.
As someone who has recently written a TV spec script, I feel comfortable positing that there is an art to this craft. The trick lies in a simultaneous conformity and injection. In other words, one must write in the language, style, and tone of the show, so that one’s script feels completely natural and could hypothetically air without any spectator noticing a difference from what is regularly scheduled. At the same time, however, one must inject one’s own personality so as to stand out from other spec writers and to make the next episode interesting. Spec scripts must be at once familiar and foreign, redundant and original. Of course, this is no different than the challenge that faces professional television writers who are constantly trying to maintain the tone of their series without becoming banal or losing public interest.
Though TV spec writing is now a common feature of the business – it is the “in” for those trying to infiltrate the industry – it has also become a feature of culture at large, particularly in the case of The Simpsons. I have known thirteen-year-old kids who have written spec scripts for The Simpsons. This phenomenon is in fact parodied on the show itself. In an episode titled The Front, Bart and Lisa become disillusioned with the latest episodes of their favorite cartoon show, Itchy & Scratchy, and they decide to write their own. They use Grandpa Simpson as a “front” because the makers of Itchy & Scratchy will not take the work of children seriously, but Bart and Lisa’s work goes on to achieve great ratings and awards. David L. G. Arnold explains what this episode is about:
"In Bart and Lisa’s success at infiltrating the world of mass media production, we can glimpse possibilities of cultural participation beyond a slavish devotion to television and the manipulations by the social elite who control it. Here Bart and Lisa display what television critic David Bianculli calls “teleliteracy,” an awareness of and facility with powerful cultural codes disseminated through television."
By this analysis, the act of TV spec writing becomes an almost utopian enactment of Benjaminian democracy, wherein media functions as an educator that produces new authors.
The example of The Simpsons is revelatory for the sheer number of authors who, one can imagine, have in some way engaged in its universe. Let us imagine that there have been thousands of Simpsons spec scripts written over its fifteen-season run, and let us be generous by estimating that hundreds of them are any good (in that they successfully pair the familiar and the foreign). Add this number to the number of hired writers, not to mention the producers, directors, animators, and actors, and The Simpsons becomes the work of possibly over one thousand individuals. What is amazing about the show is that it has a consistent, coherent voice that appears as though it could be that of just Matt Groening, but really it is carefully constructed by the voices of many.
So how can movies learn from The Simpsons? – a show that is often, if not always, about the very process of watching TV (which is why this is probably a bad idea). Movies are not serialized, and so The Simpsons’s full realization of democracy of production is not easily transferable. What classic Hollywood proves, however, is that there does not need to be a serialized narrative for it to work. Even today, movies are made that are in a dialogue with older movies, like Unforgiven, which borrows the tone, character types, and themes of the Western, but bends them for application to a modern context. In this sense, Unforgiven belongs not only to Clint Eastwood, but also to John Ford, Budd Boetticher, and Sergio Leone. Pauline Kael once applied this point to two Humphrey Bogart performances:
"I don’t think [Bogart] could have been as good as he was in Casablanca if he hadn’t done the [The Maltese Falcon] first, because he really discovered his powers in the Falcon. He created more tension in his scenes than he ever had before. And I think afterwards he drew on the qualities he had discovered in himself in the Falcon. So I think it was Huston who brought those things out. And Curtiz benefited from them."
Because classic Hollywood created its own world, in a sense creating one mega-narrative (or discourse) that spanned the decades of the 1920s through the 1950s, John Huston’s work on The Maltese Falcon becomes a component of the authorship of Casablanca. This kind of mega-narrative does not exist today in Hollywood or in independent film. The industry is currently made up of more authors than ever before, but they are all fragmented into subjective I’s, each of whom wants to create their own disparate mini-narratives. Likewise, the market is fragmented into niche audiences that are segregated by class, race, gender, sexuality, degree of education, and age.
When people arrive in the office on Monday, what do they discuss at the water cooler? Friday’s film releases? They usually didn't see the same one, if they saw any. The latest episode of The Sopranos or 24? Absolutely. TV is showing the way.