“You’re nothing but a pack of fickle mush-heads!” – Mayor Quimby
“He’s right! Give us hell, Quimby!” – Residents of Springfield
Few shows in history can boast such a bewildering array of fully-realised characters as The Simpsons. Springfield’s modest community is positively heaving with distinctive personalities, the local sea captain as recognisable as the town’s misanthropic bartender, disaffected church minister, or repressed school principal. As much as The Simpsons revolves around characters, be they the central nucleus of the eponymous heroes themselves or the vast roster of citizens who populated Springfield’s pothole-infested streets, it’s also a show about the masses and the mob – not Fat Tony and his Mafia cronies, but rather the unruly crowd that speaks and acts as a single definable entity.
America’s cartoon sweetheart is always operating on two distinct levels with regard to the inhabitants of its squalid little town: the people themselves and those citizens once they are formed into a single, homogenous unit. The Simpsons, of course, is concerned with individuals, the need to quite literally have identifiable characters speaking specific lines fundamental to a show that relies heavily on its densely written, razor-sharp sequences of dialogue.
But much of The Simpsons’ deeper humour and much of the social critique that gives it its true satirical edge emanates from its deconstruction of the American psyche through the lens of the Springfield crowd. The unruly mob, in this instance, forms its own distinct character, and it’s one that is susceptible to hysteria, manipulation, coercion and maddening unpredictability.
Like many others, Springfield finds itself wildly attached to the strange rituals that permeate almost all cohesive societies, the odd events, holidays and celebrations whose origin stories and warped mythologies have only become increasingly obscured by the march of time. Just as the town’s vociferous reaction to any potential slur, slander or physical defacement of fraudulent founder Jebediah Springfield reveals a desire to preserve the past to maintain the present, the town’s odd ritual of Whacking Day evidences a society that gains so much from its worship of history.
Homer is of course completely suckered into these mythologies, but the extent to which the entire town, save for Lisa, is consumed by festivities designed to maim innocent reptiles is striking. Even Marge, usually one of the show’s voices of reason, is pulled into the orbit of this chaos.
Just as Jebediah Springfield turns out to be something completely different from that which he originally claimed, Whacking Day’s origins have also become woefully lost in translation. Like so many of our traditions, from football hooliganism to hazing initiations, the understanding and reverence for its origins have been replaced by mindless violence and the need for social validation.
As a recently-studious Bart reveals to an assembled mob looking to pulverise some innocent reptiles, Whacking Day is nothing more than a sham “started in 1924 as an excuse to beat up the Irish”. In Springfield’s case, the violent element was ever-present in this bizarre ritual, but it nevertheless carries a confused and misunderstood heritage.
Not only does the cult surrounding Whacking Day reveal the Springfield mob’s susceptibility to having their behaviours changed by the indoctrination of prevalent mythologies, it’s also a great episode in revealing just how changeable the inhabitants of this small town can be. Bart’s revelation causes such a comedically immediate change of heart among the assembled masses, that Mayor Quimby’s boast of “twelve dead snakes” is met with boos and hisses.
As Quimby quite fairly complains: “I’m sick of you people. You’re nothing but a pack of fickle mush-heads!”. Springfield may have clung to their devotion to Jebediah, but Bart’s words have an immediate effect. It seems, then, that Springfielders are even unpredictable with regard to their unpredictability.
The inherent gullibility and changeability of Springfield’s residents make them the perfect victims of manipulation by others. Power structures exert themselves heavily on America’s forgotten town. Mr. Burns, the archetypal brooding businessman exerting control over his de facto subjects, uses this susceptibility to his own nefarious ends, either via bribing health inspectors, Homer in his role as union leader, Lisa, and even the mayor himself.
When Burns goes head to head with established Governor Mary Bailey in the excellent Season 2 episode ‘Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish’, he uses his power and influence to try to sway the election, and later pumps his fortune into a self-aggrandising motion picture in “A Star is Burns”. The residents of Springfield, on this occasion, are just sly enough not to buy it.
Burns’ attempts at manipulation come from a powerful place of wealth, but on the whole, the residents of Springfield are pretty happy to be persuaded to do almost anything if packaged appropriately. When evangelical self-help peddler Brad Goodman floats across to Springfield’s shores, his frankly misguided encouragement for the town to emulate Bart’s errant behaviour is met with unfailing obedience.
Likewise, in the timeless ‘Marge vs. The Monorail’, shameless huckster Lyle Lanley is able to convince the town of their need for a Monorail transit system despite the fact the town’s funds could be better put to a myriad of other uses, from putting out fires to fixing van-sized potholes.
Once again, it is the town’s crooked mayor who summarises the extent to which Springfield can exercise rational thinking: “We’re twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville. Just tell us your idea and we’ll vote for it”. A myriad of better options exist, but the flashy lights of showmanship win the day against the sensible voice of reason so often drowned out by the need to chase a social trend, be part of a zeitgeist, or simply listen to the voice that shouts loudest.
The need for social validation motivates the town’s susceptibility to this ploy, each member desiring to fit in with the other. Homer, unsurprisingly, is desperate to fit in with his fellow townsfolk, a trend he often exhibits throughout the show, be it via his desire not to be humiliated at the town’s local chilli cook-off or to impress his neighbours by hosting a decadent backyard barbeque.
When they’re not being coerced into projects that bring them little to no benefit, the inhabitants of Springfield are also prone to hysteria, panic and mass delusion, all fuelled by a sensationalist media and a general lack of basic education. When Osaka flu hits the town in “Marge in Chains”, yet another angry mob refuses to heed the advice of someone more qualified than themselves. Dr. Hibbert’s rational explanation that “the only cure is bed-rest. Anything I give you will only be a placebo” leads immediately to the crowd tipping over a truck full of killer bees in the vain attempt of discovering this so-called “cure”.
In the same episode, the unveiling of “history’s greatest monster” Jimmy Carter provokes widespread looting, vandalism and the breakdown of social order. The writers’ critique of small-town American society as being one characterised by a mistrust of expertise and reason due to the vacuum left by an ineffective education system has not diminished in its relevance.
Like so much of the greatest writing on The Simpsons, the show’s characters, events and even town itself operate as models through which American society can be viewed as a whole. In populating the town with stock characters and easily-recognisable archetypes, the show could easily make it very clear which sections of society it was deriding and those which it felt were getting a rough deal. Springfield itself acts as a microcosmic representation of small-town communities, the sort of place that is easily swayed by manipulative news corporations, predatory capitalists or spreaders of cynical (mis)information.
Through a combination of poor education, lack of state funding and a general sense of exhausted apathy, Springfield represents a town looking for a quick fix to its rather more substantial problems. It may only be a modest place notable for an ever-burning tyre fire and a sub-standard baseball team, but within Springfield dwell many of the ills that the show’s writers perceived to be plaguing modern American society.
The Simpsons’ powers of prognostication have been well-documented, from its anticipation of the Disney/Fox merger to quite literally predicting that Donald Trump would become President, but it’s unlikely that the show’s writers were truly harnessing supernatural forces to paint eerily precise visions of the future.
Instead, most of these predictions were borne out of an inherent understanding of how societies function, of how people are often manipulated, exploited and influenced by the communities of which they are a part. The writers of The Simpsons understood the mind of the mob, their insights into their own contemporary society making them better equipped to demystify the fog of the future.
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