He has a distinguished ancestry. There was Shakespeare’s fat, lying but
ultimately fabulous drunkard Sir John Falstaff. There was Sancho Panza,
another fat, worldly character, the foil to Cervantes’s crazed Don Quixote.
And there was Wilkins Micawber, the hopeless but hopeful spendthrift in
Dickens’s David Copperfield. Every age needs its great, consoling failure,
its lovable, pretension-free mediocrity. And we have ours in Homer Simpson,
the greatest comic creation of our time.
Since The Simpsons started 20 years ago, Homer’s stature has grown and grown.
Matt Groening modelled the family on his own and had intended his personal
avatar, Bart, to be the hero. But a bad-boy character – even one as smart as
Bart – will always remain two-dimensional. A superficially bad but
ultimately good father, a fat, cowardly but loving failure, is something
else entirely, something huge.
And he’s about to get even bigger. Not only has he survived for 400 episodes
of The Simpsons, he’s also about to hit the big screen in The Simpsons Movie.
Could any screen ever be big enough for Homer Simpson? Everywhere we look we
see Homer and every time we fail, we console ourselves with his bewildering
exclamation – “D’Oh!” With America’s greatest poet, Walt Whitman, Homer can
say, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
It is time we faced up to this colossal inclusiveness, time to look into that
big yellow face with its five o’clock shadow, massive overbite, pop eyes and
two combed-over hairs and realise that Homer is nothing less than a mirror.
Homer is us. And the weird thing is we should be flattered.
It’s weird because, on the face of it, he is a human catastrophe. Born on May
12, 1956 (his social security number is 568-47-0008, so he’s fully available
for identity theft), he was brought up by his father Abraham, who tried and
failed to compensate for the absence of his mother. She had run away to be a
hippie. He was hopeless at school and launched himself on an uncaring world
utterly devoid of qualifications or competences of any kind. He was also
cursed with an ungovernable appetite for junk food, the more
cholesterol-laden the better, and Duff beer – alcohol, he points out, is the
cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.
He was saved by two strokes of quite undeserved good fortune. First, he won
the heart of his high-school sweetheart, Marge Bouvier, a woman of infinite
patience, virtue, fidelity and towering blue hair. What Marge sees in Homer
mystifies her two cynical, manless chain-smoking sisters Patty and Selma. He
doesn’t smell great and he eats like a ravenous dog. When his underpants get
burnt in some weird cult ritual, devils last seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark
fly howling from the flames. His favourite activity is watching TV – he
calls his television his “teacher, mother, secret lover” – though when beach
volleyball is on, it stirs him first to drooling lust and then to his second
favourite activity, making love to Marge.
His second stroke of luck was, against all the odds, getting a job. Montgomery
Burns, the evil, decrepit owner of the Springfield nuclear power plant,
cared so little about his customers that he made Homer safety inspector, as
a result of which Springfield is constantly threatened by meltdowns and
radiation poisoning. At the beginning of every episode, Homer casually
tosses a stray piece of glowing plutonium out of his car window. Marge and
the job are always there for him when he returns from his forays into space
flight, telemarketing fraud, grease-selling, car-designing or chilli-eating
contests.
As a family man, Homer is dramatically sub-optimal. He periodically attempts
to strangle Bart and continually embarrasses his brilliant daughter, the
child prodigy Lisa. He is only dimly aware of the existence of Maggie, the
baby. If Marge ever goes away, the kids run riot and the house is trashed
within minutes.
He spends hours drinking Duff at Moe’s Tavern and he pays almost no attention
to Abraham, who is rotting away in Springfield’s retirement home – motto
“Thank you for not mentioning the outside world”. He is the world’s worst
present-giver and, even when he remembers to buy something for Marge, it’s
always something he really wants himself. On one occasion he buys her a
bowling ball, knowing she hates the game. It is just Homer’s luck that, as a
result, she almost gets seduced by a bowling instructor.
He is also the role model from hell. “Kids,” he says at one moment of crisis,
“you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try.”
The three statements he recommends for getting through life’s scrapes are,
1) “Cover for me.” 2) “Good idea, boss.” 3) “It was like that when I got
here.” And he advises doing every job “half-assed” because “that’s the
American way”.
But – and it is a very big but indeed, bigger even than Homer’s – beneath it
all beats a gigantic, golden heart. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, once said The Simpsons was “one of the most subtle pieces of
propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue”. Homer is, in
spite of everything, a good man. At once it should be said that much of the
credit for this goodness goes to Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer. He
says he always rejects anything in the script that requires Homer to do
anything mean.
“He’s boorish and unthinking, but he’d never be mean on purpose. I try to keep
him on track.”
Homer is good because, above all, he is capable of great love. When the chips
are down, he always does the right thing by his children – rejecting an
offer of $1m from Mr Burns for a teddy bear of Maggie’s – and by Marge – he
is never unfaithful in spite of several opportunities. And it’s not because
he fears being found out; it’s because he can’t. What Marge understands and
what her sisters don’t is that having all of Homer is far, far better than
having half of any ordinary man.
This capacity for love dwarfs his failings. Even God sees this. Homer can’t
stand his fundamentalist Christian neighbour, Flanders, and is bored to
death by the sermons of the weary Reverend Lovejoy. He also has little time
for the Bible – “If the Bible has taught us nothing else,” he tells Lisa,
“and it hasn’t, it’s that girls should stick to girls’ sports.” But when God
drops in for a chat, he discovers in Homer a surprisingly convincing
theology. Basically, this is that life is tough and humans are hopeless but,
without making a fuss about it, God is always there as the last safety net.
And, when He’s not around, there’s love.
“It is Homer,” writes Mark Pinsky in his book The Gospel According to The
Simpsons, “who has the most personal relationship with God.”
It is this superbly maintained balance between failure and epic
self-indulgence and deep, unconditional love that explains the success of
Homer. He is a greater creation than, for example, Charlie Chaplin’s tramp,
because all sentimentality has been eliminated from our love for Homer.
Chaplin’s tramp is nice and well-meaning, but Homer really is as unattractive,
as inept, as stupid and as selfish as he seems. The great triumph of
Groening and his team is to allow even this hopeless case to be redeemed
through love.
The effect is irresistible because Homer’s failings are our failings, his
appetites are gargantuan versions of our own. He just lets it all hang out.
We spend our lives concealing it. The world loves Homer because he tells us
it’s okay to be us.
This subtle and complex message took a while to sink in. George Bush Sr said
in 1992: “We’re going to keep trying to strengthen the American family, to
make them more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.” Nobody could
love or identify with the priggish Waltons. It’s no wonder the Americans
went on to elect Bill Clinton, a man much closer in spirit to Homer Simpson
than Pa Walton.
When the message did sink in, Homer became a global, cross-cultural saint. He
has been voted the greatest TV character of all time and children across the
world prefer him to their own dads. He is studied by theologians and
philosophers and his unorthodox parenting skills are celebrated by
psychologists.
His image, meanwhile, is attached by rubber suckers to car windows and printed
on T-shirts and oven gloves. He is not on any celebrity list except his own
and his stature makes a mockery of the attempts of lesser stars to appear
cool and in control.
Homer makes celebrity out of what we all have – incompetence – and what we all
want – love. And, when it all goes wrong, as it always will, he utters what
has become the curse and prayer of Everyman – “D’Oh!”
