Homer's Prophet And Loss

The Age

Saturday September 10, 2005

RAY CASSIN

WHAT is there left to say about The Simpsons, the innovative television comedy that helped to define the culture of the '90s, and whose characters are now as firmly fixed in the popular imagination as any that Disney or Warner Bros ever dreamed up? Simply that the claim, sometimes heard, that Matt Groening's animated series has lost its satirical edge is false.

Most long-running comedies do eventually succumb to terminal blandness - the long, slow death of MASH being perhaps the most notable instance - but if this fate awaits The Simpsons it is not yet in sight. The 16th series, which Ten is now screening (Tuesdays, 7.30pm) together with endless repeats of its predecessors, is as sharp a dissection of middle America, and the modern West generally, as anything that Groening and his collaborators were serving up a decade ago.

Next week's episode, "Thank God it's Doomsday", skewers the religious right in the US, or rather the bizarre literalism that has allowed the Christian right to acquire and hold substantial political clout in the most overtly religious of Western societies. Specifically, the episode takes aim at "the rapture", the belief that a time of God's choosing his elect will be taken up bodily to heaven, while those left behind on earth endure trials and torment preparatory to the Last Judgement. It is an easily politicised belief because it holds out the prospect of rule by the saints, and those who are inclined to see themselves in this light are, as contemporary American politics has abundantly shown, often also inclined to mask an all-too-human agenda with a counterfeit divine one.

Homer Simpson, despite his loathing for the saccharine pieties of Ned Flanders and the soporific sermons of the Reverend Lovejoy, is easy prey for nonsense of this kind. So are most of the good, and not-so-good, people of Springfield, who are duped by Homer's transformation into a loopy street prophet wearing sandwich boards, and by his claim that he can accurately predict the time of the rapture.

"God loves you," he bellows at them, "and he's gonna kill you!" So they dutifully follow him out into the wilderness to wait for the Lord to show his hand. Homer's prophetic leadership then unravels swiftly and predictably, but not before he experiences a different kind of rapture to the one he was expecting.

As so often in The Simpsons, the lesson seems to be that Homer, that Everyman driven by myriad blind appetites, should learn to see the blessings in the familiar things of life, and most especially in the loving and long-suffering family who put up with him. He must be wary of being diverted by apocalyptic visions, of either the religious or the political kind, and of the charlatans who tout them. And he will be - until the next time.

Religion, or rather religiosity, is not, of course, a new target for The Simpsons. It might be expected that, in the religion-drenched society that is the US, a satirical series could hardly avoid the subject, but few apart from The Simpsons and the darker animated series South Park have actually tackled it. And of the two, The Simpsons is not only less savage but also more subtle in its treatment. It has its easy objects of ridicule - Flanders and Lovejoy - and institutional religion of any kind is rarely portrayed sympathetically. But The Simpsons is not unremittingly hostile to religion, either: Marg's faith, for example, is never sneered at, and is sometimes used to trip up the bigotry and bogus religiosity of others.

It is no small achievement for a mainstream television series not only regularly to tackle such subjects in a way that shows no hypocrisy or deference to the sensibilities of the powerful, but also to become a runaway commercial success in doing so. Perhaps that is why News Ltd, the ultimate owner of the Simpsons' "brand", is so tolerant of a series that routinely satirises the politics espoused by News' papers and Fox TV network. Or maybe Rupert Murdoch just laughs along with millions of others who watch the show.

Whatever the reason, The Simpsons is a substantial part of the evidence that, despite the global blight caused by "reality" series, television continues to be a medium that draws creative minds to work in it.