Review: Karma Waltonen and Denise Du Vernay, The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield (2019)
The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland Publishing, 2019).
Since its first full-length episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (1989) (Fig. 1), The Simpsons (1989-) has been nominated for a plethora of awards. It is the first animated series to win an esteemed Peabody Award (1997), which was created to honour powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in media, and it has won 34 Emmy Awards across all areas of its production, which is an impressive result for an animated TV series. These awards, among many others, demonstrate the show’s sustained popularity among television critics for its ability to capture the cultural zeitgeist over successive decades. It is no surprise then that scholars Karma Waltonen and Denise Du Vernay make the argument, in their recent edited collection The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield (2019), that The Simpsons remains timely and valuable in its reflection of the current socio-political climate.
The editors significantly frame themselves in the introduction of The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield as avid fans of the animated show. Like their previous book released in 2010, which makes a strong case for studying the television show and using it as a learning tool in the classroom, they argue that The Simpson still offers plenty of resource material for further study. They describe that the key aim of The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield is to demonstrate how “the Simpsons continues to change the way we watch TV” (5), and argue that their continued study of The Simpsons offers notable interventions into an area otherwise neglected in scholarship. As such, the editors open The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield by reflecting on the success of their earlier book that was released in 2010. They note how this initial work opened avenues to discuss the importance of The Simpsons on social media platforms. Then they move on to celebrate some of the show’s funnier moments, before contesting that “although there’s a groin-grabbingly good number of books and essays and podcasts on The Simpsons out there”, including their previous book, “we were still missing some vital pieces of scholarship” (6). Accordingly, The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield provides a far-reaching selection of diverse essays, spread across twenty-one chapters, to address the lacuna in the scholarship.
Fig. 1 - The first full-length episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (1989).
However, unlike their earlier book, which was published at a time when The Simpsons was still a celebrated show, this new collection is forced to address, among other things, whether The Simpsons is still relevant and popular in today’s (animated) media landscape. It is perhaps no surprise that as self-confessed fans of the show the editors show bias toward The Simpsons, arguing that it has remained a timely and impactful series – despite the evidenced resistance from diehard fans to the show’s repeated renewal. Ten years since Waltonen and Du Vernay’s first publication, The Simpsons franchise has continued to grow and includes an expanding range of merchandise from games and comics to clothes and more; collectively valued at over an estimated $2 billion. Recently, the show has reached more milestones after airing its 700th episode and becoming the longest-running animated series and primetime television sitcom. Despite the show’s obvious success and strong presence in popular culture, many fans started to object to its repeated renewal. In 2020, a year after The Simpsons was controversially acquired by Disney as part of the overall purchase of 21st Century Fox, it was announced that the show would continue for its 33rd and 34th seasons. Fan objections to the show’s renewal prompted the “Stop! Stop! He’s already dead” meme, suggesting that the show creators had long killed the humour of the show, as well as prompting several jokes about the show creators “squeezing every penny” (see below). On a dedicated fan site No Homers Club, die-hard fans debated over “just how bad modern Simpsons is”, particularly after the show creators teased that a second feature-length film was in pre-production. Given this context, which is, surprisingly, only briefly alluded to in the introduction to the collection, The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield opens with the argument that The Simpsons is the same, but “it’s we, the audience, who are different. We expect a lot now – because the show has taught us to (sic)” (4). Despite Waltonen and Du Vernay’s Simpsons’ fandom, which could potentially cloud their approach to its analysis, the collection of essays demonstrates the breadth of ways that The Simpsons can be approached in academia, although the question of whether the show is as good as it once was remains contentious.
After presenting the argument that The Simpsons is still a worthy area of study, the collection goes on to unpack the show through a variety of critical frameworks. The collection is undoubtedly comprehensive, containing writing on immigration, gender roles and witchcraft, “good enough” parenting, discourse on music, rhetoric’s of death, abjection, commercials and consumerism, food politics, science and religion, parody and pastiche, environmentalism, mental health, social science, and sex. The collection certainly benefits from covering a wide range of topics covered and, consistent with Waltonen and Du Vernay’s previous work, will be especially useful for students seeking a wide variety of contemporary scholarship on The Simpsons – particularly since many chapters reference episodes from the past ten years. It also features a helpful index and bibliography, which will be beneficial to students searching for focused topics. However, the collection would have benefitted from being divided into subsections that group essays around common themes, and, with so many topics covered, the size of the chapters restrict the scope of the arguments. For example, Brent Walter Cline and Matthew Nelson Hill’s fascinating chapter “The Grotesque and the Beautiful: The Bodies of Springfield” presents an original argument about the repulsive appearance of many of The Simpsons’ characters. The authors explain that “by having the grotesque so ubiquitous, Matt Groening and company have created the physically repulsive to operate as the normative […] the constant grotesquerie of Springfield’s citizens makes us aware that what is hideous and what is beautiful is subject to perspective” (68). This chapter offers a fascinating new approach to the show, concluding that The Simpsons successfully disrupts ideas about beauty and normalcy. That said, it would have been valuable to further unpack Selma and Patty’s grotesqueness through a feminist lens because these characters are infamously hideous.
Fig. 2 - Malibu Stacey, Lisa's treasured doll.
Fortunately, Selma and Patty’s appearance is discussed at some length in Sarah Antinora’s chapter “The Simpsons, Gender Roles and Witchcraft: The Witch in Modern Popular Culture,” which explores the representation of witches across a variety of episodes. This chapter is a personal favourite of mine for its focus on the presence of fantasy elements in the show. For this reason, the chapter will appeal to those studying fantasy media as well as television representations of witches and witchcraft. Antinora provides plenty of primary resources throughout the chapter, but her analysis is restricted by the space she is given for her discussion. Likewise, many of the essays in the collection touch upon feminist frameworks, contending with female identity and representation, especially regarding Marge’s role as matriarch, Lisa’s coming-of-age, and representations of beauty in supporting characters (Fig. 2). In Waltonen’s essay, “What We All Came Here to See – Sex”, she explores “how The Simpsons has tackled feminism, sex, and sexuality”, with specific a focus on kink and consent (8). This chapter is helpfully divided into subsections, using subheadings including “Feminism”, “Dirty Words”, “Transgender”, “Fidelity”, “Predation and Consent”, and “Kink and Appetite”. Here, yet again, the scope of analysis is limited by the chapter length. It probably would have been more effective to focus on one or two of those subsections to allow for analysis expansion. For example, Waltonen writes briefly on the topic of transgender representation in The Simpsons, which does not fit the overall theme of the chapter. She also concludes that the show “has yet to tackle transgender in a substantial way” (250) which deserves unpacking further given the LGBTQ+ representation in the show. This lack of unpacking may leave the reader dissatisfied.
Still, these minor criticisms come from wanting more from the collection for it being such an enjoyable read. The essays are always fun - something that the editors were keen to ensure to keep with the tone of their primary subject matter. By seamlessly bringing together scholarship and fandom, the book will appeal to fans of the show as well as students and scholars - indeed, the writing style contains many in-jokes and nods to specific episodes that fans will appreciate. The collection is thorough, opening with an updated timeline of key moments from The Simpsons’ long history, and closing with an extensive index of references to many episodes, many of which I confess to rewatching after this book reignited my own love for the show. In the introduction, Waltonen and Du Vernay make an unwavering claim that The Simpsons has, and will remain, one of the best animated television shows and, by the time I had finished reading their collection, it was hard to disagree with them.
**Article published: November 5, 2021**
References
Henry, Matthew. 1994. “The Triumph of Popular Culture: Situation Comedy, Postmodernism and The Simpsons”. Studies in Popular Culture 17, no. 1: 85-99.
Waltonen, Karma and Du Vernay, Denise. 2010. The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield. North Carolina: McFarland & Co.
Waltonen, Karma and Du Vernay, Denise. 2019. The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield. North Carolina: McFarland & Co.
Biography
Amy Harris is a self-confessed The Simpsons fan currently completing a fully funded PhD at De Montfort University. She works as an Archiving and Digitisation intern in the Hammer horror, SCALA, and Peter Whitehead archives. Her research expertise is in British horror and British cultural history, focusing upon intersecting representations of gender, class, and race. In her spare time, Amy posts about her PhD experience on Instagram under the handle @the_horrorhag.
