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February 08, 2005
Our little secret, Lisa
Kotsko on Lisa Simpson (in the comments of IT's thread):
The example of Lisa Simpson tells little girls:
1. If you're smart, you'll always be alone.
2. If you try to break into a new group of "smart" friends, you'll still feel out of place, unless you've always been surrounded by smart people.
3. Your family is always going to be at least vaguely annoyed at, if not outright hostile toward, your deepest interests and beliefs.
Whilst I.T. (whose trojan-horse of a blog has crashed my computer twice today already) argues for her as, minimally, least-worst role model available:
1. She gets to be cynical and knowing at the age of 8, with some killer lines.
2. In all the futurustic bits, she gets to be doing extremely well, studying and having British men fall in love with her (imagine!) (while Bart will fall pray to the Simpson's 'male disease', which means running around with a saucepan on his head will be the apex of enjoyment). Lisa holds out the hope that intelligent working-class girls will carve out a place for themselves, whilst retaining the love of their family (she dumps the British guy when he won't wear the pig cufflinks Homer gives him).
3. Besides, if you're smart, you should be alone. How else will you get any work done? Anyway, when Lisa goes to the library, all the old folk say hello, so she's merely misunderstood by her peers, not folk in general.
Lisa would perhaps be unlikely to appeal to anyone who's not already destined for library loneliness, and it's quite true, no-one ever listens to her cleverdick advice. But K and IT are both right, really.
One has to yield to the truth of the representation The Simpsons offers us: In fact, I'm tempted to say that Kotsko's three points above seem hauntingly familiar (so it's not particularly female-specific). Of course such pouting identification with this tragic model would merely constitute a pernicious compounding of intellectualism as separate from the 'real world', an affirmation of the necessary destiny of the thinker as the ineffectual outcast, at best allowed a peculiar glamour (marrying English men!). It may be 'the truth', but in general, does 'representation', however witty, suffice for satire? We might allow ourselves a gratuitous Badiouism and say that 'telling the truth' amounts to mere reflective accounting, and that 'creating a truth' is what's required of great satirists such as Swift. The question is less what LS's character represents, than the effect of the massive diffusion of that representation and whether it achieves any status above that of a compounding simulacra.
I've always thought the out-of-control meme of The Simpsons being 'subversive' is misguided; it rather seems to be to be an inoculatory shock that confirms the world's shitty corrupt and hypocritical and there's not much you can do about it except (a)laugh ironically and have another beer (b)return to the bosom of the nuclear family for succour. The more I watch, the more I appreciate the wit and humour and characterisation, but it hasn't changed my dissent from this received opinion.
Isn't it, in fact, a parable of resignation to the state of mediocrity? One doesn't come away feeling outrage and horror and determined that the real world should never become like Springfield - of course, I'm not arguing that one should (i don't suppose it would be that funny), but rather against the received cult-studs interpretation of the show's "importance" in this respect.
And even Lisa is in a certain sense consigned and resigned to mediocrity since her destiny is prescribed - there is a certain 'place' for thinking, for reason; separate from and submissive to the inpregnable heart of family-love, for a start (how would Lisa react if she was being abused by Homer, I wonder? That's a serious question. But doubtless a step too far for this mild ironic 'transgression'). Thought that surpasses the bounds of common-sense laziness and the bounds of family values is an object of amusement at most, because we know it can never prevail.
Is 'cynical and knowing at the age of 8' really to be our ideal for the 21st century, is that the extent of what we can hope for from our children? And how will the media-studies courses cope with the explosion in student numbers?
The most that can be said is that there is a formal innovation at work. In bringing a complex character like LS's, bound up as it is with issues of social family and class constraint, personal development, and environment, into the eery stasis of the cartoon-world (where no-one grows older except in imaginary flashforwards) the problem is posed in a distinctively disturbing and insistent way. But I'm not sure that it changes anything. Lars von Trier as guest scriptwriter, perhaps....?
Posted by robin at February 8, 2005 12:27 PM