The five hundred fifty third episode of The
Simpsons is...well, it’s the five hundred fifty third episode of The Simpsons. It’s the first episode of the 26th season. It promised a “big character death,” that
turned out to be...Krusty’s father, “Rabbi Hyman.” It has some good jokes and several more “eh”
ones, it is an episode that rests almost entirely on Krusty’s shoulders, a character who just
can’t really drive the plot of an episode at this point. It’s fine. It’s whatever. It’s the 26th season of the Simpsons. None of that matters, though. This Simpsons, the five hundred fifty third
episode, is important for a reason completely disconnected from its larger script. Because right at the beginning, it has my
favorite “couch gag” of the entire series. And it’s a blowout. Nothing else even comes close. This is something we’re going to have to
unpack in stages, many stages. And I’m going to do my best to show the
relevant clips, but if you haven’t already, you should watch this thing in full. I can’t show the whole thing here because
YouTube, but the official Fox channel has uploaded it, and I’ve linked it below. Okay so first, let’s just talk through what
happens in the most literal terms we can, which is itself a surprisingly challenging
task. Homer plops himself down on the couch, picks
up a sci-fi looking remote, and turns on the TV, revealing that it’s September 28, 2014. He smacks the remote a couple more times and
the date starts going backwards, and as it does, Homer does too- his face rearranges
itself several times, ending on the “classic” Homer as he appeared on the first Tracy Ullman
show short. The television now shows April 19, 1987, the
day that first short aired. As he continues to hit the remote, time changes
directions and starts going forward, rapidly. Homer’s face continues to rearrange and
he falls off the couch, spinning through a variety of transformations and art styles
that we barely see. When it settles again, the TV reads “Todays
Sun-Date be of: Septembar 36.4, 10,535”. New Homer rises onto screen, a...floating
head on a mass of tentacles, droning [“d’oh. D’oh. d’oh.”] Text above him says that this is “The Sampsans
Epasode 164,775.7”. He looks around, then says [“Family, meet
me at the kitchen cube.”] While he does, more text has appeared on the
side of the screen. “Hail hail moon god, watch watch yes yes,
put in the eye hole, grow like plant.” There’s going to be a lot more text like
this. Homer floats into the kitchen cube, and then
we get our first peek at Bart and Lisa. Both have been reduced to a single sentence,
Lisa repeatedly declaring [“I am Simpson!”], while Bart struggles out [“Don’t...don’t
have cow, man,”] like both of their essences have been carved down to a single catchphrase. Marge has seemingly suffered the most in the
jump, a pillar of hair with eyes that’s become some mouthpiece for a new religion. [“All hail the dark lord of the twin moons”]. Maggie descends from the ceiling, grows a
periscope-like mouth, and announces [“MAKE PURCHASE OF THE MERCHANDISE.”] Amidst the din, Homer says [“I have...memories,”]
and suddenly we’re out of the kitchen cube, flashing once again through time and space,
catching glimpses of other episodes. In Number 20,254, Marge slaps Homer's head,
both of them on stilts, and she says [“still love you, homar”]. In 37,211.4, amoeba-like family members swim
towards each other, yelling [“we are happy family!”]. In a number too distorted to make out, a near-formless
Homer and Marge face each other. The subtitles say “I will never forget you.” It’s maybe Marge who says this. Back in the kitchen cube, Homer looks around,
surrounded by his screaming family. He says one final [“d’oh”]. Haha! The Simpsons! This intro was made by an animator named Don
Hertzfeldt, with-according to him- virtually no oversight from The Simpsons team or Fox
at large. He’s been making animated films for over
two decades now, and even if you don’t know his name, if you’re within a certain age
range, I would bet you’ve seen at least some of his work. [“My spoon is too big!” “My anus is bleeding!”] One of Hertzfeldt’s earlier achievements
is this short film, Rejected, which was, in fact, nominated for an Oscar Through the haze of what feels like 400 years
of bad internet humor, Rejected might seem a little...trying. But Rejected predates all of that- I mean,
it predates “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”! It’s a short that supposedly details an
animator’s breakdown over having his bizarre submissions for “The Family Learning Channel”
and the “Johnson & Mills” corporation rejected. It is quite obviously vulgar in places, but
undeniably memorable and still incredibly funny. I lose it when his, quote, “clear and steady
downhill state continued. Soon he was completing commercial segments
entirely with his left hand” and then we get this. [Random babbling] At the end, the animation falls apart entirely,
the paper ripping and drawings falling in on themself. As well as simply being an entertaining sequence,
it’s one that highlights Hertzfeldt’s physicality, both in animation and production. Although his work could be simplified to “drawing
stick figures,” the weight and momentum with which each character moves is second-to-none,
and his commitment to drawing on real paper and doing weird techniques with real cameras
makes all of his animations stand out from the countless other stick figure flash animations
of the mid-aughts. Hertzfeldt’s work continued to evolve over
the next several years, in a phase that culminated in his film, “It’s Such a Beautiful Day.” His first feature-length work, “It’s Such
a Beautiful Day“ is actually three short films combined into one hallucinatory, movie-length
attack on the senses. The plot focuses on Bill, a man who gradually
loses his grip on memory and reality due to a brain...something. It’s a difficult watch, both thematically
and aesthetically. Throughout the film, we see Bill grow increasingly
more sick and more detached from reality, and spin through a whirlwind of his family
history. From the first couple minutes, it seems like
the ending is obvious: Bill dying, forgetting everyone and everything he knows. But in “It’s Such a Beautiful Day”’s
boldest choice, the narrator refuses. In the last few minutes of the film, we’re
told that Bill will not die- not now, not ever. He lives on, thousands and millions of years
into the future, learning everything there is to know, seeing everything there is to
see. It is...a beautiful form of denial. It’s unexpected and touching. But if the years after the film are anything
to go by, Hertzfeld’s art couldn’t shake its themes: memory, death, deterioration. It’s Such a Beautiful Day uses eternal life
as an ending, a rejection of the expected. His next films- the Simpsons intro included-
use that as a beginning. So you’ve achieved eternal life. Now what? “What’s interesting is when you talk about
that—“living forever” or as long as you possibly can—what you really want is
a continuance of your memories and your experiences. If I said you could live another 200 years,
but we’d have to reboot you, that’s not attractive. Nobody wants that... To me, that’s where memories are very interesting
because what happens when we start losing memories? What happens when you can’t take your memories
with you? Who are we without our memories, without our
past?” The Simpsons, in their current permutation,
don’t get any older and they don’t get any younger, but time keeps passing. For a show more than 30 years old, this means
characters’ memories get...weird. In a recent episode, a flashback revealed
that when he was a teen, Homer wanted to be a DJ. In the 90s. Homer wanted to be a teenage DJ, a decade
after Homer had already been on the air as a middle-aged power plant worker. This isn’t like, a “plot hole” moment,
it’s an irreconcilable impossibility at the center of the show. What happens when you don’t change, but
the world does? The references, technology, and lingo all
shift, but the family is in the same place. This happens on scales both small and society-wide. As many people have pointed out, during its
existence, The Simpsons family have gone from lower-middle class to almost absurdly luxurious
without actually changing their material situation (wage stagnation is REAL, dog, Mr. Burns ain’t
the only one stealing from his workers). The Simpsons are in stasis in an ever-changing
world, and- to treat them like real people for a second- it’s hard to decide which
would be a worse existence. To actually reset themselves at the end of
every episode, returning to zero each time? Or to somehow retain the memories of their
thousands of lived experiences, remember both being a middle-aged man in the eighties and
a teenager in the nineties, of being hand-drawn and CG, of making progress and regressing
infinite times. That question might feel inextricably linked
to the sitcom format, a world made up of ends and resets in 30 minute chunks. But, as Hertzfeldt’s next project would
argue, that’s just because we’re thinking on too small a time scale. Viewed in the context of Hertzfeldt’s body
of work, every part of that Simpsons intro feels like setting up a springboard, one that
he’d use to jump into his magnum opus: World of Tomorrow. What happens when you both can, and can’t,
take your memories with you? The Simpsons couch gag and World of Tomorrow
released about 6 months apart, but on an animation timescale, that means they were absolutely
being developed in parallel. The production links are evident- these are
the first pieces Hertzfeldt did digitally and a lot of the imagery feels related. But the far more obvious links are thematic-
both about the far future, both in ways about living forever, both about the corruption
of memory. In World of Tomorrow...okay, deep breath. In World of Tomorrow, at some point in the
future, the earth is going to be destroyed. No, that’s um, let me start over. In World of Tomorrow, a very young child gets
a call from her adult, third generation self. That is, a clone of herself in the future,
with most of her memories. [“One day, when you are old enough, you
will be impregnated with a perfect clone of yourself. You will then upload all your memories into
this healthy clone body]. That adult, let’s call her “Clone Emily,”
brings the child- let’s call her “Emily Prime” into the future, using time-travel,
because the cloning and mind-uploading process is imperfect [“with very few signs of mental
deterioration”] and Clone Emily wants to retrieve a comforting memory from Emily Prime
before the world...ends. Along the way, Clone Emily shows us what the
World of Tomorrow looks like- in effect, unlimited technological power used in an attempt to
preserve memories of the world before. But the film isn’t simply a condemnation
of technology making us lethargic. Clone Emily’s purpose in life, for instance,
is to continue the mind of Emily Prime, helping her “live forever.” If Clone Emily doesn’t retain those memories
then, what is she? She just exists, ages, and dies, a reset back
to zero at the end of the episode. She is cursed simply to...live, live without
knowledge of the generations of herself that have come before, and one day take all those
memories to the grave. In World of Tomorrow, the potential of living
forever means the reality of dying has to be avoided at all costs- even if the alternatives
are unimaginably hellish in their own way. [“Our grandfather’s digital consciousness
currently resides in this cube, where I upload the latest films and books for him to enjoy
every week. We are also able to download correspondence
from him. Over 1000 letters were received during his
first storage, as this was approximately four years of time inside of the cube. I will read one of his letters to you now. ‘Oh oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh my god. Holy mother of god. Oh oh oh oh god.”]. And even though there are far more ways to
live- a human, a clone, an art exhibit, a consciousness- the existential panic about
living correctly has only increased. The residents of future earth know that there
are so, so many ways they’re living sub-optimally in one way or another. Not maximizing their lifespan, not fulfilling
their purpose, not wealthy enough to escape the end of the world. This is further emphasized in World of Tomorrow
2 (there are three, actually). We meet another clone of Emily, a backup,
only made in case the main lineage of Emily failed or needed an organ transplant or something. But since the world ended and Emily’s genetic
line did too, this clone is a branch on a tree that no longer exists. [“I was next in line to be Emily, and now
I am no one”]. This backup Emily has time traveled back to
Emily Prime, again. This time, instead of just retrieving one
memory, she wants to duplicate Emily Prime’s mind entirely and overwrite her own. She wants to become the person she feels she
was born to be- even if that erases all of her already-lived experiences. Even World of Tomorrow 3 is about this anxiety
of being alive without purpose, how much you’d be willing to give up to feel like you were
doing things for a reason. These are not themes that can be resolved
in an animated short, or a feature, or...or a lifetime, for that matter. The World of Tomorrow films are instead about
perpetually struggling to resolve the unresolvable, of trying to exert oneself in the world and
attempting to survive when the world doesn’t answer. I think, if viewed by one of the many Emily
Clones in World of Tomorrow, the Simpsons would seem to have...done it! They have achieved eternal life, they forever
have purpose, they will continue their line until the end of time and nothing can stop
them. They were the Simpsons, and are The Simpsons,
and will be The Simpsons [“...with very few signs of mental deterioration”]. And having achieved this, they get- they get
what, exactly? Constant reminders of the ways they’ve changed,
and constant reminders of the ways they cannot. World of Tomorrow 2 is subtitled “The Burden
of Other People’s Thoughts.” It’s a reference to how the Emily Backup
can’t live simply as herself, but must live up to the ideal of what she feels an “Emily”
must be. I think you could probably call the past,
I dunno, twenty years of Simpsons episodes “the burden of other people’s thoughts.” A cultural parody that became the culture,
written now by the people raised on it. Adults suck, then you are one. I’m not particularly interested in if or
when The Simpsons jumped the shark, but the bizarre impossibilities of the show are only
going to increase; Homer is an adult in the 80s and a teen in the 90s, or he’s dead. There is no victory in Hertzfeldt’s depictions
of eternal life. The morals are not that what’s good is living
forever in perfect shells of your former body. In World of Tomorrow, the only character in
the whole series who seems to be totally without despair is Emily Prime. She’s five and has no concept of death or
annihilation or backup clones. At the end of the first film, after the entire
convoluted plot, time traveling to retrieve a memory from a previous version of oneself,
Clone Emily delivers a carpe diem-esque speech that seems like she’s stating what she cannot
do: [“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift
apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.”] In The Sampsons Epasode 164,775.7, the most
agency Homer can exercise is the simple fact that he has memories. Fragments of time, seconds of tenderness amidst
a near-infinite stream of daily trivialities and petty details. Lost in memory because the present moment,
a crushing of him and his loved ones into grotesque caricatures, is too hard to take. This couch gag argues that this fate isn’t
a possibility, it’s a virtual guarantee. Through a fog of episodes, each character
becomes a walking shell of itself; filled not with thoughts and passions, but our collective
memories of what it once was. The burden of other people’s thoughts, blocking
out every other speck of light, until just outlines remain.
