For this Simpon's Lover, only Sadness

Rating: 1/10 (2 March 2010)

It's difficult to explain to someone who "doesn't get it" just why I can watch the Simpsons year after year after year. I'm old, somewhere between the age of Homer and Abe, which is quite a stretch of time, but I watch the same shows over and over.
There had been something that was so true, so human, that was expressed in only the way that this show was able to do. Sadly, this film could have been written by someone who got their character descriptions from a one paragraph synopsis.
So Bart was this bratty thrill seeking kid who sort of hated his dad, and a part of him preferred the Flander's family. Give me a break! The Homer strangling Bart, the regular routine of Bart's face distorted in agony, never ever really happened. It was another level, part of the insider's gag in the TV shows, but the one page synopsis didn't convey this. Those of us who saw the episodes when Homer was a child, or a teenager, know that he wanted to be more but it didn't work out that way. He would never ever harm one of his children.
I love the guy, and all of the people in the Simpson's home, and all of those in Springfield, because I know they are so much more than that one page synopsis described. Homer is a screw up....because that's just the way he is. And yet he is loved by his family, and finds a home there as well as in his job. And what a job that the series has created, where he had the status of controlling a nuclear reactor that was immune to endless spilling of coffee on it.
And Lisa is not just a dreamy eyed kid who would dump Milhouse for the Irish boy. The real Lisa would have agonized over this, would have felt Milhouse's pain. That's what the TV series was.....complex. Milhouse was a person, a weak person who had a best friend, and even an aspirational love...Lisa.
As much as I was a Simpson fan, or maybe because I was, I avoided watching this film; but then it appeared on FOX, available on my new HDTV. I feared it would be something like this, destructive of the fragile, rich, interwoven world that had been created over twenty years of brilliant programs.
I know it's been a tremendous financial and critical success. But, for me it's a betrayal. It's evidence that the Simpsons has become just another vehicle for maximizing profit for inside stakeholder. That's why they sold out to Coke in that Super Bowl ad last month. They got their ten-twenty million to lend their public affection to a brand of cola; but in doing so their own brand was tainted, as just another property to be sliced and diced as the market dictates.
And so this movie is to me part of the final dissolution of a great artistic cultural phenomenon. Like a giant star of the outer reaches of the cosmos, that expands into a super nova before shrinking into nothingness, this spectacle of movie was an explosion of vacuousness, soon to be replaced with only the memory of the vast light it shined in the universe.
Nothing lasts forever.