Through the Arc of "The Simpsons"
Well, I don’t know if anybody else watched “The Simpsons” when they were younger (or even now), but when we were discussing the ecological aspect of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest a few scenes from the show immediately popped in to my head in relation to the novel. I searched all over for the clips of “The Simpsons” but I couldn’t find them for the life of me, so I am going to use these pictures to illustrate my point instead. While we were talking about the rain forest landfill, for lack of a better title, the deformed mice with suction cup feet, and paint colored fur reminded me of Blinky the fish. Blinky appeared on “The Simpsons” in the episode dealing with the power plant dumping nuclear waste into the water, thus deforming the fish, making him have here eyes. Blinky by all accounts shouldn’t be alive from the toxins in his system, much like the mice who “were found to have extremely high levels of lead and arsenic in their blood and fat from feeding on chipped paint, yet they seemed to be immune to these poisons. The second picture of the Native American crying is in relation to the garbage episode. The Native American is crying because of what was done to his beautiful land, aka, the people of Springfield turning it into a dump. This made me think of the Matacão and Mané Pena, the former which turned into a wasteland and the latter who loved it in its original state and had to watch the change happen. I found it rather amusing that such a surreal book could tie in to one of the most basic dumb/satirical humor shows. Does anybody else catch any other parallels in this book?
I know exactly which episodes you're talking about! Though I never would've made the connection; it's interesting to see all the different ways that entirely different mediums can have connections and crossovers like that. I wouldn't call the Simpsons dumb though; they were actually pretty sharp with their satire in their early run, which is something you find in a lot of magic realism novels too.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, the crying Native American was actually a reference to these old PSAs that used to run in the 70s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM
Emily, I actually just attempted to look for that episode for you. I was able to find the title, which is "Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes for Every Fish" from season 2 but not the episode due to copyrights. I'm glad you brought this up because the book actually does seem very cartoonish and I related it to Futurama, which is another Matt Groening animated series which has a lot of commentary on how the planet is being ruined. The episode in particular that came to mind is called, "A Big Piece of Garbage." In this episode, the history of how the earth accumulated so much garbage that it ended up having no more room for any is told. They decide to collect it all into a giant ball and send it to outer space on a rocket ship. What happens is, hundreds of years later, the garbage ball is actually making its way back to earth so they need to find a way to divert it. A bomb is made and the characters land on the ball to plant it. What they find is all of the useless crap that people once thought was so wonderful. This part specifically came to mind when I read page 54 of the book about the $9.99 product.
ReplyDeleteWhat is interesting about the Futurama episode is that the bomb doesn't work and in the end, they decide to knock the ball of garbage out of orbit with another, second ball of garbage. The reasoning is that it won't return for hundreds of years so who ever is alive then can deal with it. This also makes me think of how non-chalant everyone in the book is about the matacao, even though it is a giant piece of indestructible plastic situated within the heart of the rainforest and is a very serious problem.
I am so glad I'm not the only one who references literature to cartoons. I have only ever seen a few episodes of Futurama, so I couldn't reference it like I could The Simpsons, but that is really interesting Jeff. Matt, I completely agree about magical realism being similar to cartoons with satire. Thanks for making me not feel crazy!
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