Whether it’s with The Simpsons or Futurama, Matt Groening is always the naughty boy making fun of a bad dad – and his new DVD shows no signs of him growing up, reports Bryan Appleyard.
I congratulate Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, on Bender’s Big Score, a new feature-length DVD version of his sci-fi show Futurama. It is, I tell him, the most elegantly deranged plot he has ever devised. “Ha-ha-ha . . . er . . . well, we have . . . er, yes . . . ha-ha . . . er. I won’t deny it. I was starting to deny it, but I think you’re right . . . er . . . ha-ha . . . we were . . . here’s . . . We have resisted over the life of the series . . . er . . . er . . . time travel for the most part.”
Hesitant to the point of neurosis, self-deprecating, instantly likeable, Groening is remarkable in show-business history. This is, in part, because of his heroically low-key public persona, but mostly because of his two main creations – The Simpsons, argu-ably the most successful TV show of all time, and Futurama, definitely not the most successful TV show of all time. Futurama’s relative failure is, of course, grist to the Groening mill. At the beginning of Bender’s Big Score, the Futurama logo surmounts the caption “It just won’t stay dead!” and, in the first few moments of the film, the Fox network executives who canceled the series in 2003 are dismissed as “brainless drones” and “asinine morons”, who, we are told, were fired, beaten up, killed and ground into a fine pink powder with, apparently, many useful applications. Fox, of course, still airs The Simpsons.
Would you, I ask Groening, describe yourself as subversive? “As far as subversion goes, if you are being subversive, you still have to deny it. So, whether or not we are being subversive, I do deny being subversive.” Hesitant, self-deprecating and likeable, but also very, very clever. But what, you might ask, is he all about? This is my theory: he is all about manhood seen through the eyes of a child.
When, in 1987, The Simpsons was just a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, its hero was Bart, the bad boy. When it became a fully fledged show, Homer, the dissolute dad, rapidly took over. Did he expect this to happen? “I always thought Homer was going to be the centre. At the beginning, Bart was definitely the centre. But I knew as soon as it became a series that Homer would become the centre because there are more consequences to his mayhem and there is only so much mischief a 10-year-old boy can do before it becomes predictable.”
Futurama is set a thousand years in the future. Its hero is Bender, a swaggering robot. “I think Bender is a true advance in the depiction of robots. Bender is the first defiantly heterosexual robot in the history of science fiction. When you look back, they’re all either asexual or gay . . . There’s also something about women and robots. Women don’t understand the unique fascination and appeal of robots. Perhaps their behaviour reminds women of what they don’t like in their men.” Gay? “I’m thinking of the robots in Star Wars – they’re definitely gay.” As a child, he was fascinated by his toy robots but also afraid of them. “The problem with robots is you can’t reason with them. They’re robots, and if they want to kill you, they will. You can’t talk them out of it.” He recalls The Phantom Creeps, a television series with Bela Lugosi, which had a robot hidden in a wall panel; if you pressed a button, it came out and strangled you. Futurama is, he says, a tribute to those nightmares.
Homer and Bender – stick with me here, I’m serious – both have names ending in -er, they are doers, active, masculine, both cause mayhem by doing too much. Their mayhem is hugely, uncontrollably creative. Bender has a chest cavity from which almost anything might appear. And Homer seems to have a near-infinite capacity for doing the wrong thing.
“However, the writers on The Simpsons are finding it hard to come up with more ways for Homer to do something bad enough that you’ve never seen before, but not bad enough to drive Marge away. You don’t want the divorce, which is the logical next step for many of Homer’s stupidities – the end of the marriage. But we’re trying not to do that. Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen . . . Yeah, we can keep it up.”
Bender and Homer are extreme males.
The women around them are, in contrast, moderates. Leela, in Futurama, is a conventionally hot space babe, despite having only one enormous eye, who is constantly trying to get things back on track. Marge in The Simpsons is the dogged, occasionally irate but endlessly tolerant home-maker. Lisa, the older daughter, is a thoughtful but intensely orthodox liberal. Maggie, the younger, is just a baby, but in The Simpsons Movie, also just out on DVD, she comes into her own as a practical fixer for the family. Female moderation has the effect of casting an even more vivid light on male extremity.
Both Bender and Homer loom. They are often seen from below, from the perspective of a child. They are frightening, fascinating and exotic in the extremity of their schemes and appetites. The joke is, of course, that they can always be subverted. Whether Groening admits to subversion or not, the naughty boy getting his own back on Dad is the mood of much of his comedy. Describing one plot line, he says it was “probably the most underhanded sarcasm we’ve ever had on the show – and presented with such innocence and glee”. Black humour softens the pain caused by the bad dad.
As in all the greatest comedy, this is a joke that toys with tragedy. Groening’s father-fear is accompanied by a bleak sense that the world is an irredeemably awful place. He’s still doing his comic strip entitled Life in Hell. And one device in Futurama is a coin-operated suicide booth – Bender tries but attaches a string to his coin so he can get it back. “Fox were worried we were positing a future in which people wanted to kill themselves. They wanted a fun, happy-go-lucky future. But I thought that was just a utopia, and utopia is boring – you’ve got to have dystopia.”
In spite (or perhaps because) of the underlying bleakness, the bad dads are, in the end, lovable. The mayhem-makers anchor their families by being wicked but not quite wicked enough. And their failings are put in perspective by the presence of much more sinister grandad-like males – Mr Burns, the decrepit and evil businessman, and Homer’s father in The Simpsons, and the mad scientist Cubert Farnsworth in Futurama.
Which means that, in a deep sense, Futurama is simply an alternative perspective on the primary dynamic of the Groening psyche. So, since The Simpsons perspective has been such a global success for so long, why isn’t Futurama? Well, for a start, the latter isn’t exactly real. “In the course of doing Futurama, I came to the realisation that one of the reasons The Simpsons resonates the way it does is because people relate to human beings, even though they have cartoonishly yellow skin, more than they can relate to robots and cyclops and alien crab creatures.” As a result, Futurama ran for just four years on Fox – The Simpsons will hit 20 years in December 2009 – before moving to the Cartoon Network. The latest deal between Fox and Comedy Central is for four feature-length DVDs, which will be shown on TV as 16 episodes. This is scarcely a failure, but the contrast with The Simpsons is stark. Yet now it’s back.
“I always told fans the show wasn’t dead. We had this idea that we would bring it back, Star Trek-style, and go on to greater glory. On the Cartoon Network, we’ve built up this cult following that I think far surpasses the enthusiasm for the show when it was on the regular network. The original plan was to take this cartoony, grotesque world and really stick to serious sci-fi concepts. That’s part of the show’s success and could be the secret of its failure as well.”
Of course, the sci-fi automatically limited its appeal and loaded the demographic with young males. But, also, the space adventurers are not a family and, therefore, they are less globally recognisable. “The Simpsons is basically about children and middle-aged parents, and we had left out young adults – unmarried people in their twenties, making their way in the world. If you want to reduce Futurama to its basic premise, it is a work-place ensemble comedy, set in the future, and we use sci-fi themes – that’s the situation.”
Millions of words have been expended on the significance of The Simpsons, not many on Futurama. But having watched Bender’s Big Score, I suspect it contains just as much food for thought. Groening, without question, is one of the few geniuses of popular entertainment. Typically, however, he tends to see his impact on the world as limited. He says the main effect of The Simpsons is the “large number of other animated projects that don’t look like anything else”. He does say, however, that the show may have helped America get over some of its hang-ups.
“I think in the beginning The Simpsons alarmed some people for its depiction of disrespect and disobedience and blasphemy, and it seems to me that people have loosened up and realised that the Simpsons are not bringing down the culture. Maybe it’s lightened America up a little.”
“Lightening up” here means liberalising. Groening is a Democrat, though he declines to endorse either Hillary or Obama, saying both were better than McCain and certainly better than Bush. But lightening up also means getting the joke, seeing the ultimate futility of human aspiration. The Simpsons is about the intimate mess of the world; Futurama is about our ultimate bafflement. It all makes sense in laughter.
Has he got another show in mind? “Yes, I think about it a lot. But the problem with animation is it’s really time-consuming. If I could figure out a way of not caring, I’d have it made. But you want everything to be great and so . . . ” He also promises this year he’ll get his website – www.mattgroening.com – together. At the moment, it’s just a picture of a big, dumb rabbit. And he’s working on Life in Hell. But he will do another show. He’ll have to. He’s 54, but he’s still the little kid staring up at the monstrous dad. One way or another, he’s going to have to get that fixed.
Futurama: Bender’s Big Score is out now on 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
