Fifteen Years Too Late for the Borovnian Fair

Did you ever get something you dreamed about long after you imagined it? I mean really long, like a decade and change. Growing up in an area without an established revival film circuit, I can remember wishing that I could go back in time and see movies that TV stations, for whatever reason, did not show. That era, of course, is as dead as the antebellum South; nowadays people expect access to nearly every film still in existence with almost no delay. And in large part, they get that access. The idea of waiting, say, for a TV show to rerun an episode has become nearly as anachronistic as a hat blocker.

Bear with me through the the remainder of the segue. A few weeks back I missed an episode of The Simpsons. This was a disappointment to me, since I had been told that it took inspiration from the Chronicles of Narnia. But tonight I remembered Hulu.com, and when I pulled up the episode in question my interest increased ten fold. Here's how Hulu describes it: "Lisa meets an equally academic and creative new friend named Juliet." It took me about five seconds to realize the full implications of this statement.

At this point, I should note my mid-1990s obsession with the film Heavenly Creatures, which documents (well, sort of) a real life occasion where the meeting of two "academic and creative" girls set off a chain of events that ended in a horrific murder. You can guess the name of one of the girls involved: Juliet. Granted, this is pretty icky territory, and perhaps not something that a sitcom should ideally do. But really, The Simpsons gets a pass in my book.

Or at least it used to. Now, I don't know, especially in the wake of this episode. Heavenly Creatures came out in 1994, and despite the subsequent success of its stars, screenwriters and director, remains obscure. While movie references and parodies form a significant segment of The Simpsons' humor, fifteen years is a stretch. But what is more disturbing is that the writers pulled back from the most disturbing aspects of the case. Granted, part of this may be do to maintaining the integrity of Lisa's character; she's not one who normally strays too far away from reality. But this itself brings up a disturbing thought: why did the writers jackhammer the plot of an obscure movie onto a character who does not really fit the profile? Unfortunately, Occam's Razor suggests that The Simpsons writers room is so bankrupt of ideas that it will piece together an episode out of anything.

So I've drifted into Comic Book Guy territory. But I think that this is evidence that the party has finally come to an end in Springfield.