A Review of The Simpsons Movie

July 29, 2007 12:15 AM by S.M. Oliva | Other posts by S.M. Oliva | Comments (9)

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The funniest and most truthful line from The Simpsons Movie is delivered by Albert Brooks, playing the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, in response to the charge that he’s going mad with power: “Of course I am. Have you ever tried to go mad without power? It’s boring. No one listens to you.”

The 87-minute film, based on the longest-running comedy series in television history, offers much for libertarians to cheer. The government is the villain, and despite opening the door for the feds’ criminal activities, everyman Homer Simpson triumphs in the end, saving his family and hometown of Springfield in the process. For those of you who want to see the film before reading about its storyline, don’t click on the jump.

The movie opens with a short story about a president abusing his power to preserve his own authority. Only here, the president is Itchy, a psychotic cartoon (within the cartoon) mouse, who wins election after landing on the moon with his bitter rival, Scratchy the cat. Itchy promptly kills Scratchy after the two claim the moon on behalf of “cats and mice everywhere.” Itchy returns to Earth a hero, claming he did “everything he could” to save Scratchy. Itchy is elected president, but soon thereafter he spies Scratchy still alive on the moon, vowing to tell everyone the truth. Itchy responds by “accidentally” launching a barrage of nuclear missiles at the moon, which finish Scratchy off in comedic fashion.

Government abuse and incompetence run rampant throughout the film. The main plot point is the pollution of Lake Springfield, which residents use as a dumping ground in classic “tragedy of the commons” fashion. Lisa Simpson, the town’s liberal stalwart, offers a briefing at a town meeting (“An Irritating Truth”), and Democratic Mayor Joe Quimby promptly orders a large retaining wall built around the lake to prevent further dumping. This doesn’t stop Homer, however, from later breaking through the barrier to dispose a makeshift silo containing the waste products of his new pet pig.

Homer’s act leads the EPA to declare Springfield the most polluted city in the history of Earth. EPA Administrator Russ Cargill—coincidentally a successful businessmen with multiple government contracts—gets a blank check from Republican President Arnold Schwarzenegger to deal with Springfield’s pollution. (Schwarzenegger won’t actually look at Cargill’s proposals because, in the Terminator’s words, he was “elected to lead, not to read.”) Cargill’s solution is to drop a giant glass dome, made by his company, around the town, sealing the residents off from the outside world.

The Simpsons later escape from the dome through a sinkhole on their property, making them fugitives in the eyes of Cargill and the state. At one point, a giant NSA surveillance room is depicted where thousands of agents listen to every Americans’ conversations. Marge and the children are captured by a gulag of EPA agents in Seattle, and they’re brought back to Springfield, where Cargill unveils his final solution to cover up the rapidly decaying city—kill the entire population with a bomb that, as an added bonus, will create a new Grand Canyon for the government to market to tourists bored with the old canyon. (Tom Hanks appears as himself in a commercial for the new canyon, noting that he’s “lending his credibility” to the beleaguered U.S. government.)

Of course, Homer eventually returns and manages to save Springfield from destruction, and Cargill gets his comeuppance from, of all people, one-year-old Maggie Simpson. (This is in keeping with the series’ continuity: Maggie once “accidentally” shot C. Montgomery Burns when he blocked out the sun and later defended her father in a shootout with the local Mafia.)

The movie’s story is simple but well executed. Aside from its anti-government theme, the film reaffirms the series’ longstanding portrayal of the Simpson family as a dysfunctional-yet-functional unit. There’s a good libertarian message in this. While there have been many times where the five Simpsons could, as Homer once suggested, “agree to disband and join other families,” they continually chose to remain together. In the film, Marge abandons Homer in the Alaska wilderness and Bart seeks out his more “consistent” neighbor Ned Flanders as a surrogate father. But in the end, wife and son choose to rejoin Homer, faults and all, because ultimately there’s greater subjective value remaining with him than in seeking alternatives. It’s not that Homer is a great husband or father; it’s that he’s the best husband and father for Marge and Bart, respectively.

Homer’s greatest asset and flaw is his lack of impulse control (which is not the same as a lack of intelligence, a characteristic that ebbs and flows with Homer.) He’s a chronic risk-taker by nature. In one episode of the series, he chides Lisa when she vows never to take a stupid risk; Homer points out that earlier in the episode, a stupid risk helped Homer save Lisa when she was in trouble.

Homer is ruthlessly entrepreneurial. He’s made at least 100 attempts to replace his worker-drone job with a new business or career. Most fail, but a number of them succeed, at least in the short-term. Many of his more successful ventures had anti-state themes: a private police force, a bootlegging operation (when Springfield briefly reinstated Prohibition), a ministry that performed gay weddings, and selling an anti-impotence tonic that actually worked despite lacking FDA approval.

The central question of the series (and the movie, where actress Julie Kavner delivers the best performance) is why Marge stays with Homer despite his many spectacular failures. Surely she’d be better off without his baggage. But consider Marge’s closest relatives—her twin sisters, Patty and Selma Bouvier. The sisters constantly denigrate Marge’s marriage, but their lives are hardly worthy of emulation. The sisters are single spinsters who work at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Compared to life as a lonely bureaucrat “who sucks the joy out of everything”—creator Matt Groening’s description of the sisters—Marge does quite well with her entrepreneurial, stupid-risk-taking husband. Their marriage is a true exchange of values: He shows that life is worth living to the fullest, and she keeps him alive so that he can keep risking it. It’s certainly a better trade-off than one gets selling herself to the welfare state.

As for the kids, Bart and Lisa both emulate their father’s risk-taking and passion for life. While Lisa and Homer in particular are often in conflict over their specific beliefs—such as Lisa’s vegetarianism, feminism, and environmentalism—their shared sense of independence liberates them from the mob democracy that rules Springfield (and by extension the state-centered society.) Lisa’s radicalism would be squashed in most other Springfield homes, if not by the town’s wretched public school system. And while Homer often expresses annoyance at his oldest daughter, he ultimately admires her more than anyone aside from his wife. In an episode that flashed forward to Lisa’s wedding, an older Homer told an adult Lisa, “You’re my greatest accomplishment, and you did it all by yourself.” It was arguably the series’ best emotional moment and it demonstrated the value of family in a manner that puts the boilerplate political candidate’s sermon about “family values” to shame.

Finally, regardless of one’s take on the storyline or humor, every libertarian should stand and applaud the epic accomplishment of the people who put together the film and the series. Movie director David Silverman—who also helmed the series’ first episode in 1989—led a team of hundreds of animators in the U.S. and South Korea (take that, Lou Dobbs!) Even with today’s computer aides, the Simpsons still rely on hand drawings to produce 24 frames of animation per second. Freed of television’s size and time constraints, Silverman and his colleagues produced a gorgeous work of art that’s a worthy testament to social cooperation. Government planning or “social democracy” does not produce feature animation of this quality.