TMC
05-30-2004, 11:37 PM
http://www.rlc.dcccd.edu/annex/COMM/english/mah8420/SatireSimpsons.htm
Western culture is steeped in the traditions of both violent representation and satiric exposition. However, in the postmodern age (or what we may call the age of the image), and specifically within American culture, it is often quite easy to find examples of the former, yet quite hard to find examples of the latter. One reason for this apparent lack lies in the fact that cultural consumers at large are unaccustomed to satirical forms and thus find it difficult to distinguish satire from parody or farce or even that which is being satirized--as I think the recent discourse surrounding Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers makes quite evident. But satire has not been lost. Contemporarily, the sharpest satire on American culture, including the penchant for violent representation, is to be found on that popular culture phenomenon known as The Simpsons. The satire on The Simpsons is effective precisely because it is rooted in contemporary realities: among other things, The Simpsons mercilessly exposes the hypocrisy and ineptitude of pop psychology, modern child-rearing, commercialism, consumerism, fundamental religion, environmental abuse, corporate greed, and the deceits of American education. For purpose of this paper, I wish to deal with only one instrument of the show's satire, "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," and its relationship to the representations of violence in animated cartoons.
Deep within the structure of The Simpsons lies what can be accurately described as an ultraviolent cartoon series. "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," a favorite of Bart and Lisa Simpson, details the exploits of a cat and mouse comedy team modeled on the Warner Brothers' cartoon "Tom and Jerry." But this cartoon goes its model one better: we are shown every gruesome detail of the ways in which this cat and mouse team seek to destroy each other. They are forever being sliced, diced, disemboweled, de-skinned, beheaded, impaled, and exploded, all with gratuitous amounts of blood. "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" appears on The Simpsons with great regularity and, in keeping with the host show's satirical nature, offers a biting critique of American culture. It is my contention, specifically, that "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" is a satire on America's paradoxical desire for and condemnation of violent television programming. With "The Itchy and Scratchy Show," creator Matt Groening takes the violence associated with contemporary cartoons to the extreme, thus confrontationally exposing the powerful appeal of violence, for both children and adults, the ubiquity of violence today, the crass manner in which it is marketed to children, and the blasé attitude towards it that parents adopt.
Given its content, and the fact that The Simpsons itself has been intermittently controversial, it is at first surprising that no clamor has been raised in response to Itchy and Scratchy. But upon closer inspection, a number of factors make clear why this is so. Firstly, the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon in marginalized within the larger framework of The Simpsons. Though it almost always functions as a metafictional commentary upon the action in a given episode, it does so momentarily; thus the implications of the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon are often subsumed by the "issues" raised in the primary narrative and the condemnations that this narrative repeatedly elicits--e.g., those regarding Bart Simpson as a bad role model for America's youth. Moreover, the combination of cartoons and violence is not new; it is in fact part of a tradition of cartooning. During the 1940s, "Tom and Jerry," the acknowledged model for Itchy and Scratchy, was itself a cultural phenomenon--in a few short years, its central characters became established as the MGM studio's cartoon division superstars, overshadowing even their rivals at Disney. And after this theatrical heyday, the cartoon moved to network television and ran on CBS from 1956 to 1972 as a combination of shorts from the MGM library and new cartoons. Warner Brothers, of course, had similar success in both film and then television with the often violent antics of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck, to name but a few. Due in part to this tradition, then, cartoon representations of violence have been--and perhaps still are--more readily accepted by the public than real-life representations of violence.
However, as the example of "Tom and Jerry" also points out, this form of representation was not free of critique. During the period in which Tom and Jerry ran on network television--which happened to coincide with the rise of scientific studies regarding the effects of television--protests against the cartoon were increasingly heard. Like Itchy and Scratchy, Tom and Jerry used violent slapstick routines to effect its humor, and it was often brutal: for example, a 1949 short called "Hatch Up Your Troubles" had Tom attempting to use a hatchet to kill Jerry. Ultimately, under pressure from parents' groups, the network was forced to eliminate the more offensive and violent of the original cartoons from its programming (Woolery 294).
Thus it is important that we momentarily situate the discussion of violence on the Itchy and Scratchy Show within the more general discussion of the relationship between televisual violence and real-life violence. This relationship, as briefly noted above, has been a concern of parents, advocacy groups, and researches for many years: sociologists and psychologists, among others, have been debating the influences of television (particularly upon children) since its widespread inception in the 1950s. Since that time, over 3,000 studies examining the links between televisual violence and real-life violence have been conducted (Clark 269). The debate found its heyday in the 1970s, when the majority of research was conducted and the majority of information--much of it admittedly disturbing--was disseminated to the public.
The most recent statistics from such studies reveal that, on average, American children watch twenty-seven hours of television each week. According to estimates of the American Psychological Association, the average child will witness 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence before finishing elementary school (Clark 267). Such statistics have caused alarm among many, and perhaps deservedly so. However, they can be misleading or overemphasized in an attempt to criticize television, censor it or both. The single problem to plague these studies is the way in which violence gets defined and how that definition is translated into the behaviors of viewers. Quantifying violence on TV is not hard, but qualifying it has always been problematic. In the 1960s, at the University of Pennsylvania, members of the Cultural Indicator's Project, under the directorship of Professor George Gerbner, produced what was called The Violence Index. Within this they offered a specific definition of violence in order to help alleviate the problematic aspects of qualifying it in sociological studies. Gerbner defines violence as "clear-cut, unambiguous and overt episodes of physical violence--hurting or killing, or the threat of hurting and/or killing--in any context" (Clark 270). The definition has remained constant over the decades, and it has been repeatedly employed. Unfortunately, however, the small and seemingly tacked-on phrase "in any context" maintains the very problematic that the definition was to rectify: it makes inexplicable some of the results in the studies--e.g., the fact that I Dream of Jeannie was the most violent series of 1968--and it allows for too easy a link between the violence of, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger blasting a shotgun in The Terminator and Snoopy fighting off the Red Baron in a Peanuts cartoon. In short, it is too all-encompassing a concept.
Despite this flaw in scientific methodology, the results of studies which employ this loose definition of violence have become powerful tools in the battle to "tame the tube." As implied above, the history of this battle is substantial. In deference to our time constraints, therefore, I wish to speak here of only the most recent entries into this historical record. The debate over the general quality of television gained national attention once again in 1989, when Terry Rakolta led a viewer and advertiser boycott of Fox Television's Married...With Children, which she believed to be offensive on numerous levels and "demoralizing." The boycott was less than successful, and the protest fell on deaf ears in the government. At about the same time, Peggy Charon founded the advocacy group ACT (Action for Children's Television) in an effort to improve the programming aimed at young children. Perhaps in an effort to jump on the ACT bandwagon, Rakolta soon cited Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which at that time were the latest rage among school kids, as excessively violent and called again for governmental action. This time she was more successful. Campaigns such as Rakolta's and Charon's helped push Congress to pass the Children's Television Act in 1991, which ordered that television programming meet the educational and informational needs of children. Of course, like many congressional acts, the terms are highly ambiguous: what was left unclear was precisely who and what would define educational and informational merit. Nevertheless, it is obvious that Rakolta and Charon are not alone in their alarm at the information regarding the possible links between television and real-world violence.
In the politically charged--and some would say politically correct--climate of the 1990s, there has been an intensification of concern over this issue and debates over censorship have again arisen. The most recent attacks on violent children's programming stem from the backlash against the Ninja Turtles but are focused around criticism of the Power Rangers. Parents are concerned with both of these because, as many have declared within the mainstream press, they see children imitating the behaviors of the characters, i.e., giving one another karate chops and resolving conflict through physical violence. The pressure from advocacy groups has been formidable and has led to further action. In December of 1992, the three major networks issued a joint statement outlining their policies on violence in which they vowed to limit "gratuitous, excessive or redundant violence" (Clark 271). Of course to many this was simply lip service. Noticeably absent was Fox Television, which has posed a significant threat to the hegemony of the Big Three. Fox, known for its often daring and/or risqué programming, was the primary target of Rakolta in 1989, and its position has only worsened with time: Carole Lieberman, head of the National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV), called the network's self-policing standards "utter nonsense" and in a ranking of television shows the following February (1993), NCTV tagged the Fox network as the most violent, with eleven acts of violence per hour (Clark 280). Of course, as I hope to have made clear previously, these statistics cannot be accepted at face value, for what constitutes the acts of violence cited here is unclear.
Nevertheless, the pressure was on. In July of 1993, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX unveiled an "advance advisory plan" at a Capitol Hill press conference in response to the ongoing congressional efforts to curb violence in television programming, spearheaded now by Senator Paul Simon. The advisory plan outlined a process for airing warnings prior to certain shows regarding their violent content. Significantly, though not surprisingly, the plan only covered live-actor shows--cartoons were to receive no warnings. Cartoons have a history of being both in the spotlight when issues of violent content are raised and, ultimately, of being immune to criticism, because--as the argument goes--the violence is not "real" and children can easily distinguish between acts with unrealistic consequences and real ones. This is very much in line with the tradition of cartooning I outlined at the onset.
Of course, one of the things I wish to problematize is the assumption that because it is a cartoon The Simpsons is primarily for children. It is not. Although it rose on the commodification of the image of Bart Simpson and his bad-boy posture, The Simpsons is aimed at an adult audience, one that can identify with the working-class experience of the Simpson clan, relate to the difficulties in parenting faced by Homer and Marge, and recognize and appreciate the numerous allusions, both obvious and obscure, to American popular culture. But above all, the show is a sophisticated satire. And, as I have stated, the Itchy and Scratchy Show is a primary example. What it seeks to satirize most is America's simultaneous appetite for and distaste of representational violence. To discuss this cartoon, then, is to transcend a discussion of the violence in children's programming exclusively and to engage the debate surrounding the desensitizing effects of violence in general, as represented in television as well as in Hollywood film.
"The Itchy & Scratchy Show" appears on The Simpsons with great regularity, offering up its doses of extremely violent and bloody images for the sheer entertainment of its viewers, meaning both the Simpson children and us, the viewers of The Simpsons. In an early episode entitled "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge," the show for the first time directly addressed its own complicity in the issue of cartoon violence, likely in response to the controversy over censorship raging at that time in the media. In this episode, Marge launches a one-woman campaign against her children's favorite television show. This is precipitated by an act of violence in the Simpson household: one day, baby Maggie sneaks up behind Homer and hits him over the head with a hammer. "Where would an innocent child get the idea to attack her father with a mallet?" Marge wonders, then looks at the TV and sees Itchy and Scratchy attacking each other with hammers. In the next scene, Marge is cataloging the violence in an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, and before long she is sending letters to the show's creators and sponsors, with the salutation "Dear Purveyors of Senseless Violence." Like the real-life Terry Rakolta, Marge organizes a moral watchdog group that campaigns to ban the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. They win the case, and the kids lose their show. We are then given a scene wherein the children emerge from their homes into the sun-filled outdoors to the sounds of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. It appears to be the first time their stunted existences have been freed of consumer society's traps. But this traditional happy ending is quickly subverted; it is an ironic and mock-glorious ending, for a new problem arises: Marge's watchdog group now wants to ban the appearance of Michelangelo's "David." Marge is opposed to this idea and comes to realize that if "great art" is to be protected from censorship, popular art must be as well. At the end of the episode, Bart and Lisa are again watching "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," and Marge helplessly looks on, wondering if she has done the right thing. Gerard Jones states that the effectiveness of the point about censorship is "undercut by the deep, queasy ambivalence it evokes about the value of television, the impoverishment of life, and the effectiveness of social action" (268). I find no such ambivalence. "Itchy & Scratchy" is back on the Simpsons' television and The Simpsons is still on ours, offering again its satirical critique of America's "bloodthirst" and desire for violence.
This is made more explicit in later episodes, tellingly ones which situate Lisa--the show's overriding voice of reason and center of intelligence--as wholly complicit. Despite her age, Lisa is well-educated in the ways of the world, and it is her voice that most readily and most effectively denounces the amoral behaviors of those around her. Over the years, she has promoted feminism, liberalism, and multiculturalism, and as vociferously denounced bigotry, racism, sexism, political graft, governmental corruption, and the "sins" of stealing and adultery. It is significant then that Lisa is not an opponent of Itchy and Scratchy. She is, like her brother, Bart, seduced by the images of violence in a violent culture and is implicated in this by her uncritical laughter at the violent antics of the cat and mouse team. This stance is firmly presented in an episode called "The Front," which opens with Bart and Lisa watching Itchy and Scratchy, ready as usual for blood and laughs. But when the cartoon turns into a public service announcement (Itchy and Scratchy encourage kids to "Just Say No to Drugs"), Lisa denounces the "lifeless outing" and proposes that they write a cartoon themselves. Their effort, a violent piece entitled "The Little Barbershop of Horrors," ultimately wins them an award for Outstanding Writing in a Cartoon Series.
The idea of complicity is more emphatically presented in a rather recent episode, wherein the Simpsons go on vacation to Itchy and Scratchy Land, a theme park modeled overtly on Disneyland. Its central theme, however, is violence. The promise of the thrills awaiting Bart and Lisa at "the violentist place on earth" reflects the promise for thrills we can all recognize in the concept of the American theme park. It is no surprise that the plot of this episode is loosely based on the premise of the film Jurassic Park--here Itchy and Scratchy robots malfunction and start attacking the customers. Marge is concerned that the park is too violent for her young children, but she is convinced to go when they tell her of Parent World--an vast oasis of gambling casinos and bars within the desert of violent entertainment. And the violence is expectedly played up at the park: for example, to enter, the family has to run past a gigantic cleaver that continually chops down over the entrance. But the indictment of this brand of entertainment does not remain diffuse--it finds very specific targets. While at the park, Bart and Lisa attend a movie history of the park and its creator, Roger Myers, an obvious stand-in for Walt Disney. The documentary provides glimpses of Roger Myers' seminal work, including a film called Scratchtasia. This film reinvisions Disney's Fantasia in ultraviolent terms, with Scratchy in role of Mickey Mouse in the famed "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence. Later, in a parody of Pinocchio, as the wooden doll's nose pierces the eyeball of its creator, Lisa queries "Does this really desensitize us to violence?" Of course it does, the show implies, for at that very moment the crazed robots burst through the screen. Bart, Lisa, and everyone else in attendance are perfectly blasé: "Want to get a sno-cone?" Bart asks.
What the allusions to the "art" of both Disney and Spielberg makes evident is not only the degree to which violence is a part of American culture but the extent to which it is a commodity within it. The "thrills" people expect, whether at theme parks or in Hollywood film, are hard to dissociate from violent representation. Disney is firmly entrenched, despite its objectionable qualities, and Jurassic Park is enormously popular. This is not to say there was no clamor over this film when it appeared. Certainly many people were upset by the PG-13 rating and how frightening the film might be for kids. Interestingly, Jurassic Park in a similar position to The Simpsons in this regard, for it too was perceived as being for children--and thus was successfully marketed to them--as well as adults. Nevertheless, it became the single highest grossing movie ever made. In short, people flocked to the violence, not away from it. And this seems to me the very point that Itchy and Scratchy is designed to highlight.
Past satirists such as Aristophenes, Rabelais, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire attacked the faults of their societies with humor that was intended to reform those ills. They hoped that exposure of corruption would resolve some of the problems that existed in their respective societies. This established the norm for satire and the criteria for judging satire that came after. However, it is inaccurate to apply the notion of satire transhistorically without qualification. As Donald McCaffrey notes, "As readers and viewers of the modern, complex modes of the novel, play, film, television, or cartoon, we cannot expect twentieth-century writers to conform to the classical models of satire" (xi). Creators of satire are social critics who have much to say about the flaws of society, though what they say can often seem only topical and fleeting. At times "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" has appeared on The Simpsons without any overt commentary, but most often the show self-consciously addresses both its own critical stance regarding censorship in the popular arts and its own complicity in the production of controversial material. I believe, and I hope to have demonstrated, that the very excessiveness of "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" allows it to transcend mere complicity in the creation of violent cartoons and thus function within the discourse on American popular culture as powerful social satire.
Western culture is steeped in the traditions of both violent representation and satiric exposition. However, in the postmodern age (or what we may call the age of the image), and specifically within American culture, it is often quite easy to find examples of the former, yet quite hard to find examples of the latter. One reason for this apparent lack lies in the fact that cultural consumers at large are unaccustomed to satirical forms and thus find it difficult to distinguish satire from parody or farce or even that which is being satirized--as I think the recent discourse surrounding Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers makes quite evident. But satire has not been lost. Contemporarily, the sharpest satire on American culture, including the penchant for violent representation, is to be found on that popular culture phenomenon known as The Simpsons. The satire on The Simpsons is effective precisely because it is rooted in contemporary realities: among other things, The Simpsons mercilessly exposes the hypocrisy and ineptitude of pop psychology, modern child-rearing, commercialism, consumerism, fundamental religion, environmental abuse, corporate greed, and the deceits of American education. For purpose of this paper, I wish to deal with only one instrument of the show's satire, "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," and its relationship to the representations of violence in animated cartoons.
Deep within the structure of The Simpsons lies what can be accurately described as an ultraviolent cartoon series. "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," a favorite of Bart and Lisa Simpson, details the exploits of a cat and mouse comedy team modeled on the Warner Brothers' cartoon "Tom and Jerry." But this cartoon goes its model one better: we are shown every gruesome detail of the ways in which this cat and mouse team seek to destroy each other. They are forever being sliced, diced, disemboweled, de-skinned, beheaded, impaled, and exploded, all with gratuitous amounts of blood. "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" appears on The Simpsons with great regularity and, in keeping with the host show's satirical nature, offers a biting critique of American culture. It is my contention, specifically, that "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" is a satire on America's paradoxical desire for and condemnation of violent television programming. With "The Itchy and Scratchy Show," creator Matt Groening takes the violence associated with contemporary cartoons to the extreme, thus confrontationally exposing the powerful appeal of violence, for both children and adults, the ubiquity of violence today, the crass manner in which it is marketed to children, and the blasé attitude towards it that parents adopt.
Given its content, and the fact that The Simpsons itself has been intermittently controversial, it is at first surprising that no clamor has been raised in response to Itchy and Scratchy. But upon closer inspection, a number of factors make clear why this is so. Firstly, the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon in marginalized within the larger framework of The Simpsons. Though it almost always functions as a metafictional commentary upon the action in a given episode, it does so momentarily; thus the implications of the Itchy and Scratchy cartoon are often subsumed by the "issues" raised in the primary narrative and the condemnations that this narrative repeatedly elicits--e.g., those regarding Bart Simpson as a bad role model for America's youth. Moreover, the combination of cartoons and violence is not new; it is in fact part of a tradition of cartooning. During the 1940s, "Tom and Jerry," the acknowledged model for Itchy and Scratchy, was itself a cultural phenomenon--in a few short years, its central characters became established as the MGM studio's cartoon division superstars, overshadowing even their rivals at Disney. And after this theatrical heyday, the cartoon moved to network television and ran on CBS from 1956 to 1972 as a combination of shorts from the MGM library and new cartoons. Warner Brothers, of course, had similar success in both film and then television with the often violent antics of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck, to name but a few. Due in part to this tradition, then, cartoon representations of violence have been--and perhaps still are--more readily accepted by the public than real-life representations of violence.
However, as the example of "Tom and Jerry" also points out, this form of representation was not free of critique. During the period in which Tom and Jerry ran on network television--which happened to coincide with the rise of scientific studies regarding the effects of television--protests against the cartoon were increasingly heard. Like Itchy and Scratchy, Tom and Jerry used violent slapstick routines to effect its humor, and it was often brutal: for example, a 1949 short called "Hatch Up Your Troubles" had Tom attempting to use a hatchet to kill Jerry. Ultimately, under pressure from parents' groups, the network was forced to eliminate the more offensive and violent of the original cartoons from its programming (Woolery 294).
Thus it is important that we momentarily situate the discussion of violence on the Itchy and Scratchy Show within the more general discussion of the relationship between televisual violence and real-life violence. This relationship, as briefly noted above, has been a concern of parents, advocacy groups, and researches for many years: sociologists and psychologists, among others, have been debating the influences of television (particularly upon children) since its widespread inception in the 1950s. Since that time, over 3,000 studies examining the links between televisual violence and real-life violence have been conducted (Clark 269). The debate found its heyday in the 1970s, when the majority of research was conducted and the majority of information--much of it admittedly disturbing--was disseminated to the public.
The most recent statistics from such studies reveal that, on average, American children watch twenty-seven hours of television each week. According to estimates of the American Psychological Association, the average child will witness 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence before finishing elementary school (Clark 267). Such statistics have caused alarm among many, and perhaps deservedly so. However, they can be misleading or overemphasized in an attempt to criticize television, censor it or both. The single problem to plague these studies is the way in which violence gets defined and how that definition is translated into the behaviors of viewers. Quantifying violence on TV is not hard, but qualifying it has always been problematic. In the 1960s, at the University of Pennsylvania, members of the Cultural Indicator's Project, under the directorship of Professor George Gerbner, produced what was called The Violence Index. Within this they offered a specific definition of violence in order to help alleviate the problematic aspects of qualifying it in sociological studies. Gerbner defines violence as "clear-cut, unambiguous and overt episodes of physical violence--hurting or killing, or the threat of hurting and/or killing--in any context" (Clark 270). The definition has remained constant over the decades, and it has been repeatedly employed. Unfortunately, however, the small and seemingly tacked-on phrase "in any context" maintains the very problematic that the definition was to rectify: it makes inexplicable some of the results in the studies--e.g., the fact that I Dream of Jeannie was the most violent series of 1968--and it allows for too easy a link between the violence of, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger blasting a shotgun in The Terminator and Snoopy fighting off the Red Baron in a Peanuts cartoon. In short, it is too all-encompassing a concept.
Despite this flaw in scientific methodology, the results of studies which employ this loose definition of violence have become powerful tools in the battle to "tame the tube." As implied above, the history of this battle is substantial. In deference to our time constraints, therefore, I wish to speak here of only the most recent entries into this historical record. The debate over the general quality of television gained national attention once again in 1989, when Terry Rakolta led a viewer and advertiser boycott of Fox Television's Married...With Children, which she believed to be offensive on numerous levels and "demoralizing." The boycott was less than successful, and the protest fell on deaf ears in the government. At about the same time, Peggy Charon founded the advocacy group ACT (Action for Children's Television) in an effort to improve the programming aimed at young children. Perhaps in an effort to jump on the ACT bandwagon, Rakolta soon cited Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which at that time were the latest rage among school kids, as excessively violent and called again for governmental action. This time she was more successful. Campaigns such as Rakolta's and Charon's helped push Congress to pass the Children's Television Act in 1991, which ordered that television programming meet the educational and informational needs of children. Of course, like many congressional acts, the terms are highly ambiguous: what was left unclear was precisely who and what would define educational and informational merit. Nevertheless, it is obvious that Rakolta and Charon are not alone in their alarm at the information regarding the possible links between television and real-world violence.
In the politically charged--and some would say politically correct--climate of the 1990s, there has been an intensification of concern over this issue and debates over censorship have again arisen. The most recent attacks on violent children's programming stem from the backlash against the Ninja Turtles but are focused around criticism of the Power Rangers. Parents are concerned with both of these because, as many have declared within the mainstream press, they see children imitating the behaviors of the characters, i.e., giving one another karate chops and resolving conflict through physical violence. The pressure from advocacy groups has been formidable and has led to further action. In December of 1992, the three major networks issued a joint statement outlining their policies on violence in which they vowed to limit "gratuitous, excessive or redundant violence" (Clark 271). Of course to many this was simply lip service. Noticeably absent was Fox Television, which has posed a significant threat to the hegemony of the Big Three. Fox, known for its often daring and/or risqué programming, was the primary target of Rakolta in 1989, and its position has only worsened with time: Carole Lieberman, head of the National Coalition on Television Violence (NCTV), called the network's self-policing standards "utter nonsense" and in a ranking of television shows the following February (1993), NCTV tagged the Fox network as the most violent, with eleven acts of violence per hour (Clark 280). Of course, as I hope to have made clear previously, these statistics cannot be accepted at face value, for what constitutes the acts of violence cited here is unclear.
Nevertheless, the pressure was on. In July of 1993, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX unveiled an "advance advisory plan" at a Capitol Hill press conference in response to the ongoing congressional efforts to curb violence in television programming, spearheaded now by Senator Paul Simon. The advisory plan outlined a process for airing warnings prior to certain shows regarding their violent content. Significantly, though not surprisingly, the plan only covered live-actor shows--cartoons were to receive no warnings. Cartoons have a history of being both in the spotlight when issues of violent content are raised and, ultimately, of being immune to criticism, because--as the argument goes--the violence is not "real" and children can easily distinguish between acts with unrealistic consequences and real ones. This is very much in line with the tradition of cartooning I outlined at the onset.
Of course, one of the things I wish to problematize is the assumption that because it is a cartoon The Simpsons is primarily for children. It is not. Although it rose on the commodification of the image of Bart Simpson and his bad-boy posture, The Simpsons is aimed at an adult audience, one that can identify with the working-class experience of the Simpson clan, relate to the difficulties in parenting faced by Homer and Marge, and recognize and appreciate the numerous allusions, both obvious and obscure, to American popular culture. But above all, the show is a sophisticated satire. And, as I have stated, the Itchy and Scratchy Show is a primary example. What it seeks to satirize most is America's simultaneous appetite for and distaste of representational violence. To discuss this cartoon, then, is to transcend a discussion of the violence in children's programming exclusively and to engage the debate surrounding the desensitizing effects of violence in general, as represented in television as well as in Hollywood film.
"The Itchy & Scratchy Show" appears on The Simpsons with great regularity, offering up its doses of extremely violent and bloody images for the sheer entertainment of its viewers, meaning both the Simpson children and us, the viewers of The Simpsons. In an early episode entitled "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge," the show for the first time directly addressed its own complicity in the issue of cartoon violence, likely in response to the controversy over censorship raging at that time in the media. In this episode, Marge launches a one-woman campaign against her children's favorite television show. This is precipitated by an act of violence in the Simpson household: one day, baby Maggie sneaks up behind Homer and hits him over the head with a hammer. "Where would an innocent child get the idea to attack her father with a mallet?" Marge wonders, then looks at the TV and sees Itchy and Scratchy attacking each other with hammers. In the next scene, Marge is cataloging the violence in an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, and before long she is sending letters to the show's creators and sponsors, with the salutation "Dear Purveyors of Senseless Violence." Like the real-life Terry Rakolta, Marge organizes a moral watchdog group that campaigns to ban the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. They win the case, and the kids lose their show. We are then given a scene wherein the children emerge from their homes into the sun-filled outdoors to the sounds of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. It appears to be the first time their stunted existences have been freed of consumer society's traps. But this traditional happy ending is quickly subverted; it is an ironic and mock-glorious ending, for a new problem arises: Marge's watchdog group now wants to ban the appearance of Michelangelo's "David." Marge is opposed to this idea and comes to realize that if "great art" is to be protected from censorship, popular art must be as well. At the end of the episode, Bart and Lisa are again watching "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," and Marge helplessly looks on, wondering if she has done the right thing. Gerard Jones states that the effectiveness of the point about censorship is "undercut by the deep, queasy ambivalence it evokes about the value of television, the impoverishment of life, and the effectiveness of social action" (268). I find no such ambivalence. "Itchy & Scratchy" is back on the Simpsons' television and The Simpsons is still on ours, offering again its satirical critique of America's "bloodthirst" and desire for violence.
This is made more explicit in later episodes, tellingly ones which situate Lisa--the show's overriding voice of reason and center of intelligence--as wholly complicit. Despite her age, Lisa is well-educated in the ways of the world, and it is her voice that most readily and most effectively denounces the amoral behaviors of those around her. Over the years, she has promoted feminism, liberalism, and multiculturalism, and as vociferously denounced bigotry, racism, sexism, political graft, governmental corruption, and the "sins" of stealing and adultery. It is significant then that Lisa is not an opponent of Itchy and Scratchy. She is, like her brother, Bart, seduced by the images of violence in a violent culture and is implicated in this by her uncritical laughter at the violent antics of the cat and mouse team. This stance is firmly presented in an episode called "The Front," which opens with Bart and Lisa watching Itchy and Scratchy, ready as usual for blood and laughs. But when the cartoon turns into a public service announcement (Itchy and Scratchy encourage kids to "Just Say No to Drugs"), Lisa denounces the "lifeless outing" and proposes that they write a cartoon themselves. Their effort, a violent piece entitled "The Little Barbershop of Horrors," ultimately wins them an award for Outstanding Writing in a Cartoon Series.
The idea of complicity is more emphatically presented in a rather recent episode, wherein the Simpsons go on vacation to Itchy and Scratchy Land, a theme park modeled overtly on Disneyland. Its central theme, however, is violence. The promise of the thrills awaiting Bart and Lisa at "the violentist place on earth" reflects the promise for thrills we can all recognize in the concept of the American theme park. It is no surprise that the plot of this episode is loosely based on the premise of the film Jurassic Park--here Itchy and Scratchy robots malfunction and start attacking the customers. Marge is concerned that the park is too violent for her young children, but she is convinced to go when they tell her of Parent World--an vast oasis of gambling casinos and bars within the desert of violent entertainment. And the violence is expectedly played up at the park: for example, to enter, the family has to run past a gigantic cleaver that continually chops down over the entrance. But the indictment of this brand of entertainment does not remain diffuse--it finds very specific targets. While at the park, Bart and Lisa attend a movie history of the park and its creator, Roger Myers, an obvious stand-in for Walt Disney. The documentary provides glimpses of Roger Myers' seminal work, including a film called Scratchtasia. This film reinvisions Disney's Fantasia in ultraviolent terms, with Scratchy in role of Mickey Mouse in the famed "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence. Later, in a parody of Pinocchio, as the wooden doll's nose pierces the eyeball of its creator, Lisa queries "Does this really desensitize us to violence?" Of course it does, the show implies, for at that very moment the crazed robots burst through the screen. Bart, Lisa, and everyone else in attendance are perfectly blasé: "Want to get a sno-cone?" Bart asks.
What the allusions to the "art" of both Disney and Spielberg makes evident is not only the degree to which violence is a part of American culture but the extent to which it is a commodity within it. The "thrills" people expect, whether at theme parks or in Hollywood film, are hard to dissociate from violent representation. Disney is firmly entrenched, despite its objectionable qualities, and Jurassic Park is enormously popular. This is not to say there was no clamor over this film when it appeared. Certainly many people were upset by the PG-13 rating and how frightening the film might be for kids. Interestingly, Jurassic Park in a similar position to The Simpsons in this regard, for it too was perceived as being for children--and thus was successfully marketed to them--as well as adults. Nevertheless, it became the single highest grossing movie ever made. In short, people flocked to the violence, not away from it. And this seems to me the very point that Itchy and Scratchy is designed to highlight.
Past satirists such as Aristophenes, Rabelais, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire attacked the faults of their societies with humor that was intended to reform those ills. They hoped that exposure of corruption would resolve some of the problems that existed in their respective societies. This established the norm for satire and the criteria for judging satire that came after. However, it is inaccurate to apply the notion of satire transhistorically without qualification. As Donald McCaffrey notes, "As readers and viewers of the modern, complex modes of the novel, play, film, television, or cartoon, we cannot expect twentieth-century writers to conform to the classical models of satire" (xi). Creators of satire are social critics who have much to say about the flaws of society, though what they say can often seem only topical and fleeting. At times "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" has appeared on The Simpsons without any overt commentary, but most often the show self-consciously addresses both its own critical stance regarding censorship in the popular arts and its own complicity in the production of controversial material. I believe, and I hope to have demonstrated, that the very excessiveness of "The Itchy and Scratchy Show" allows it to transcend mere complicity in the creation of violent cartoons and thus function within the discourse on American popular culture as powerful social satire.