"The Wax Never Lies"

Literalization and Satire in "Flaming Moe's"
Episode 45 (8F08), Season 3. Written by Robert Cohen; Directed by Alan Smart & Rich Moore.

Point of entry: "A reasonable definition of satire, then, is 'a literary manner which blends a critical attitude with humor and wit to the end that human institutions or humanity may be improved. The true satirist is conscious of the frailty of institutions of man's devising and attempts through laughter not so much to tear them down as to inspire a remodeling.'" - Robert Harris, in "The Purpose and Method of Satire", at http://www3.telus.net/eddyelmer/Tools/satire.htm. Quoted text from A Handbook to Literature (eds. William Thrall, Addison Hibbard and C. Hugh Holman).

Personal note: Bravely and regularly, The Simpsons has satirized many institutions, but in contrast to the episodes in the first two seasons which featured fairly pedestrian plots and minimal jabs at the world around its viewers, Season 3 was where the show entered the new territory of the sustained "spoof" episodes (a style of episode perhaps best executed in "Cape Feare" in Season 5). "Flaming Moe's" is one of my all-time favourites because it is the episode where the show moved beyond not only the clever Poe re-tellings such as "The Telltale Head" of Season 1 or the segment of Season 2's original "Treehouse of Horror" based on "The Raven", but also beyond the cleverly-titled "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" of even weeks before this landmark episode, and into the realm of well-crafted satire.

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Over its history, perhaps the most important institution that The Simpsons has satirized is television itself, and "Flaming Moe's" (originally aired Nov. 21, 1991) quite evidently weaves in an extended send-up of the most popular television series of its moment, Cheers. But two other social institutions - the "local pub" and its surrounding "social drinking" culture, as well as the famous "American" entrepreneurial spirit - are tackled as well in this episode, making it one that lends itself well to an analysis of the satirical workings of this television series in their infancy.

The situation comedy (or "sitcom") has always come laced with clichés and characters who are little more than types one would find in their various situations, from the stereotyped family or gender roles depicted in early series like Father Knows Best or I Love Lucy through the many different "characters" one could meet on the next barstool over in a Boston pub. Indeed, later in "Flaming Moe's," this holds true, as a gentrified Barney (still a drunk, but now wearing a suit and getting chummy with "Armando and Raffi") stands in for Cheers's Norm Peterson, and new bar staff (Woody Boyd and Diane Chambers, effectively, though neither are given a name in the script) filling the roles that the viewer is familiar with from Cheers after introducing the setting - the all-important situation in this genre - with a wonderful parodic introductory theme that can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8EyvFgd_Kw.

Though this comes around the two-thirds mark of the episode, the groundwork has already been laid by Moe's hiring of an intellectual waitress and the argument from the outset that cements the parody by drawing the analogy between Moe and Cheers's owner/bartender Sam Malone, who infamously bedded both Diane and her replacement (after Shelley Long left the series), Rebecca. The waitress is obviously Diane, as she calls Moe "Morris", as Diane called all the Cheers characters by their full names (though Moe will never again be called by this name on the series); what's more, Sam Simon wrote all of her dialogue, turning back to his previous employment as a staff writer on Cheers. The knowledge of Shelley Long's career inevitably comes back at the end of the episode to add to the spoof when, Flaming Moe's having returned to just Moe's, the waitress has "left to pursue a movie career," which is of course Shelley Long's reason for leaving Cheers.

The parodied introductory theme goes beyond a simple spoof, though; in fact, one could even argue that these sketches - or at least, the type of drinking culture they depict - had already been parodied in Season 2's "The War of the Simpsons", where Homer's false memory of the party is rendered with images of well-dressed party-goers classically enjoying alcohol. (As is noted in the episode's Wikipedia entry, these sketches, are more in the style of New Yorker cartoonist Al Hirschfeld's caricature of The Algonquin Round Table.) "Flaming Moe's" montage treads into the territory of satire, however, as what is really happening in Moe's bar is as follows: Barney abuses alcohol to the point that he passes out in the street; uniformed officers are in dereliction of duty and drinking instead of upholding the law; Moe, with his hand in an lascivious postion, is slapped by his employee in response to what appears to be a sexual assault; patrons use whatever they can find around them as weapons to bloody each other in a full-on bar brawl while Moe and Barney egg them on; Aerosmith uses the Love Tester (they're Aerosmith - it's impossible that they're hard up for a lay!), and a scantily-clad Mrs. Krabappel courts two sailors ("sailors on leave", I'm sure) at once.

The lyrics, too, are embittered compared to those used by Cheers. Where there was once:

Making your way in the world today / takes everything you've got
Taking a break from all your worries / sure would help a lot
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name
And they're always glad you came
You want to be where you can see / our troubles are all the same
You want to be where everybody knows your name
You want to go where people know / people are all the same
You want to go where everybody knows your name

The Simpsons gives us:

When the weight of the world has got you down / and you want to end your life
Bills to pay, a dead-end job and problems with the wife
But don't throw in the towel / 'cause there's a place right down the block
Where you can drink your misery away
At Flaming Moe's (Let's all go to Flaming Moe's)
Where liquor in a mug / Will warm you like a hug
Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away
Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away

While both introductory sequences do tend to musically resemble jingles from 1940's radio commercials, the former seems to promote the more sanitized version of alcohol-fuelled escapism, whereas the latter gives us a more visceral (not to mention accurate) depiction of what it often means to use alcohol to forget one's problems. And this underbelly of social drinking is brought to life in two other ways, by (1) Homer's visit to a different bar, which, presided over by a one-eyed, tattooed shotgun-wielding maniac who thinks it stretch to provide a clean glass, provides a stark contrast to responsible drinking in a respectable establishment, and (2) by Moe's feeble and frightening attempt to explain away the 30 cases of "non-narkotik" cough syrup (shamelessly plastered with Krusty the Clown's face) by saying that he "got hooked on the stuff while he was in the service". Here it is easy to see the duplicity of the cough syrup - for I think it's not a stretch to include cough syrup among the perfumes, colognes, mouthwashes, rubbing alcohol or worse that the desperate alcoholic will drink seeking that kind of escape - that will be exemplified later in the series, when "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment" will end with that classic line "To alcohol: the cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems!"

The final image in the Flaming Moe's montage is perhaps most important, as we see Homer - the regular customer, that is to say the reason for the bar's existence - stuck outside while we hear "Happiness is just a Flaming Moe away". In the montage, two other regulars are harmed: Barney's serious drinking problem is neglected as he lies in the street, and "Glasses Guy" (does he even have a name?), another regular in the bar, looks incredulous after being attacked with a broken bottle. In the latter panel, Moe and Barney are actively encouraging the harming of the original customer base, something that Moe does more passively in this episode when it is revealed that Homer is "not on the list", and when, as Homer desperately tries to make Moe understand that he's just lost him as a customer, Moe is drowning his voice out with the sound of a cash register ringing in sale after sale. Quite literally, the entrepreneur has lost touch with his customer - the customer who in a long-ago golden age was "always right", etc. - and here we see the dark underbelly of the entrepreneurial spirit: the rise of the vice industry and cash's usurping of the customer as "king".

This institution of the local pub and traditional business success have both been successfully lampooned, as has television, and we can safely say that in each case, this episode has as its purpose to snap the viewer to attention and examine the man-made institutions around us. The show doesn't necessarily say that escaping reality through alcohol, or running a successful business, or that even the sitcom are in and of themselves a problem. If there were something wrong with this third target, after all, the show would be criticizing itself and its viewers outwardly - something they really didn't have the audacity to do at this early stage of the series (though Homer does note in this episode that "If there were any justice in the world, [his] face would be on a bunch of crappy merchandise", a fun aside coming at the moment where the series's popularity was exploding, making this already the case).

But more than this, the show gives us countless signals of its desire to test our limits, and to make us see the way the seams are exposed in such institutions. The show opens with "Eye on Springfield", a TV news magazine hosted by Kent Brockman that seems to focus on nothing but women in bikinis. The unwittingly astute Homer relaxes to this progam and channels a term used (if not coined) by Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death to decry the decline of the institution of television news programs in the heyday of shows like A Current Affair: "ah, infotainment". (It is also worth noting how Brockman in this segment - with two women on his arms - is equated to Krusty the Clown when the latter makes a similar entrance to Flaming Moe's, dressed uncharacteristically in maroon that matches Brockman's usual suit. Acutally, Brockman too comes to Moe's with an attractive woman on his arm, proving that as a "legitimate journalist", he is as big of a celebrity as the television clown.) Homer's blind acceptance of the term shows - as does Homer's choice to jump on the opportunity to sock Bart on the arm for speaking while jinxed, claiming simply that these are the rules - the dullest character, Homer, accepting an institution blindly.

The acceptance of conventional wisdom in the face of a duplicity challenging it is also seen in one of the games played during Lisa's slumber party - in one of the series's only moments where Lisa has more friends than even the rarely-seen Janie - in which the girls drip a candle's wax into a bucket of water, and the shape that the wax takes is to represent the girl's future husband's trade (a sad convention in the institution of the slumber party). Lisa's friend drips the wax, and is upset that it appears to be a mop, signifying that her husband will be a janitor. But the open-minded Lisa challenges this right away, turning it upside down so that it is an olympic torch and saying the man in her future will instead be a triumphant athlete. The girl drips again, and says "oh no, a dustpan," at which point even Lisa admits defeat: "the wax never lies." It has always been my opinion though (seriously, from the first time I saw this episode as a kid!) that this supposed dustpan looks like a paintbrush - albeit a wide one more likely to be used by a house-painter than an artist, but nevertheless still not such a seemingly negative fate.

Mrs. Krabappel in this episode straddles two worlds as well: the childrens' educator by day, the veneer is stripped off when, upon Bart's presentation of liquor bottles to the class, she tells him to take them to teachers' lounge, and that he may collect what's left at the end of the day. By night, Mrs. K. is a drunken floozie throwing herself at the declaredly married Homer as well as Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer (in addition to the sailors). Not only is the educational system satirized, but so too is the political institution when Mayor Quimby declares a given day in the episode's time frame to be "Flaming Moe's Day", despite its already being Veterans' Day. In response to this slight, he simply says from his high authority "It can be two things!".

Indeed, it would appear to be the point of this episode to expose those things that can be "two things" and to show that most may not be only what they seem: Bart discovers that "Hugh Jass" is not just a funny-sounding name, but is actually a bar patron's name, and is forced to back out of his prank call; Tipsy McStagger doesn't actually exist, but is "a composite of other successful logos"; and ultimately, the Flaming Moe is also the Flaming Homer, which trips Bart up during his show and tell segment on "inventors we admire". In the classroom, though, such duplicity can't exist: Nelson Muntz cries out to Bart that this drink is called a Flaming Moe, and "Your Dad didn't invent it, you wuss, Moe the Bartender did!", giving Moe but one identity (his profession). The origin of the drink is hastily confirmed by Mrs. K., who says that "everyone knows that," and from her position as educator, displaces truth with a commonly held falsehood. Pity poor Bart in this case, having to reconcile the images of his father as either inventor or fraud - Bart thought that simply by bringing enough for everybody he would avoid reprimand, as would be the case if he brought cookies or donuts...

It is important, though, that not all things in the episode are duplicit. The contrast between those that are and those that aren't is drawn by literalization; in addition to this concretizing of Moe's only role, for example, we can note Moe's pointing out of the "sneeze guard" on the salad bar, on which Barney promptly sneezes and declares that "these things really work". This may be the only thing in this episode that is exactly what it appears to be - what else could a specifically engineered item such as this be? Everything else, however, is up for grabs.

So what do we do other than revel in all of these satire-enabling double-edged swords? I think the best thing to do may be to consider Homer's famous speech about "making people happy" from his "gumdrop house, on lollipop lane" with his drink despite not getting any credit for it and his subsequent storming out of the bedroom. He sticks his head back in the door, of course, to tell Marge that he was being sarcastic, in case she couldn't tell. To Homer, who takes things as they are without questioning them (as do those who literalize Moe's figure of speech and spit out the drink due to the "blood and sweat" in it), using sarcasm is a big step, and indeed, this is one of the first episodes of The Simpsons that is not as straight-ahead as it appears. (For Marge, it is evident... "Well, duh," she sarcastically responds.)

But it is Homer's ability to conceive of a secondary alternative that gets the action of the episode started in the first place. Out of beer, he has to think of a second way to drink away the memory of Marge's sisters' hairy legs. He makes a mixed drink, accidentally adds cough syrup and - once seredipitously ignited by a stray ash from Patty's cigarette - discovers a new drink. This alternate use of the ingredients - the refuse from both bottoms of liquor bottles and already consumed tobacco, plus the cough syrup - shows the potential that all things have within them to be multifacted (like Aristotle's differentiation between things in actu - realized - and things in potentia - their potential). Moe's bar already has this problem: its potential is not realized before the new drink is sold, and it is serving as no more than a cigarette machine for the junior high students in the neighbourhood. By recognizing the potential - which could also be called the dark side - of the cough syrup, the secret ingredient in the drink around which the whole plot turns, the bar is brought to life. One man's junk is another man's treasure, as Barney (the alcoholic)makes clear by telling Homer that "only an idiot would give away a million dollar idea like that". Unbeknownst to Barney, "that" is a drink based in cough syrup, elixir for a desperate drunk and in a way the height of the vice industry - fitting, no?

And it is similarly this dark side of the drink that will bring about the downfall: the shame of the ingredient and the theft of the idea are, like Quasimodo, the repressed dark secret of Victor Hugo's extolled Notre Dame de Paris - a likeness that Homer takes on while exposing the truth. (Yes, I will propose the Disney's depiction of Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame owes something to Homer's appearance in this scene). In a way, the arrangement is almost Faustian: Moe, out of beer and desperate (as "increased job satisfaction and family togetherness are poison for purveyors of mind-numbing intoxicants") makes a deal with the devil, turning to Homer's cough syrup concoction and learning what he doesn't have the right to know to increase his standing.

Even if Moe too defines himself by his profession as Nelson did, the episode's final line points to a double-faceted Moe as well: it ends with Homer telling Moe that he is the best friend a guy could ever have. While this might just be a barb at a typical sitcom ending, we have to note here that Homer finally has what he has wanted ever since the drink became popular - recognition and, more importantly, his watering hole back. Moe didn't make the million dollars - which he would have shared with Homer, though Homer didn't know this - and welcomed Homer back, which to Homer, seeking only to get drunk, was enough. But out of all of this, we have to note that while Moe may step on Homer's toes to get to the top, he can be reasoned with; it is Homer who cannot be stopped from cruelly exacting revenge on Moe by exposing the secret ingredient. Homer's obsession with revenge dominates the episode, and in the end, though Moe's bar goes back to being what it was beforehand, the satire is complete, as everyone has been exposed, punished and taught a lesson, and no one has risen above his station. Though Homer appears to be the hero, all along he may have been the villain - the best double-edged sword of them all.

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Other observations:

• Among the many "Moes" that Homer utters when obsessed with revenge on Moe, one of them is Marge asking Bart to mow the lawn, to which he responds "Ok, but you promised me moe money." I had some ideas as to wher this came from, but once I researched them I was proven wrong. Particularly: "Mo' Money", a Wayans brothers film from Columbia Pictures, but it was released the following July. (In passing, the Notorious B.I.G. song "Mo' Money Mo' Problems," was released in 1997.) What this is based on, then, I wish I knew.
• Did anyone else notice that the invention for which Martin Prince says to thank A.J.P. Martin, the Gas Chromatograph, is what Professor Frink uses to deduce the secret ingredient ("Love?!?") in the drink? As far as I can recall, Professor Frink is always using machines he invents, except in this instance... unless he is of course getting credit for someone else's invention, which would dovetail nicely with the episode's theme...