#3
matt groening called this segment pretentious. i have a feeling i'll be begging for pretension when i hit those double digit thohs. it would be enough to merely designate this segment as the greatest anomaly in the series, it's comedy nearly bereft of joke composition to keep the story flowing and instead relying on performance and character to juxtapose the material, but what makes it a stars-aligned masterwork is the divinely perfect way it fell on the timeline, amidst the show's most sophisticated season, and into the hands of a young but hungry david silverman, who in these few minutes essentially sent the quality standard of animated television as a storytelling medium to such a high ceiling that most television show's crew would have to totem pole atop each other to graze it. silverman and his animators would certainly seem to get the material, the silent hysteria engineered within one's dense loneliness, skyscrapers of bookcases intended to act as a cave beneath the world that birthed the loss within our protagonist. in the hands of homer, its a tome of escapism, yet surrounding him precariously as if they may tumble at any moment, snuffing out his form and suppressing his truth-telling shadow. surreal dream-like passageways meld with waking life in an expressionist architecture of escalating dread, a tale we have stepped in on far too late to properly distinguish the two in their elucidation of the spiralling illness. per the nature of iconic and oft-repeated poetry, the malleability inherent in performance allows the words to take unfamiliar shape. some audio versions of this tale allow for an arc of denial, but homer almost immediately swells with a stammering cowardice, so unhelpably frightened that his form faces its consequential breakdown in equal measures of pathetic blubbering and raving mania. castellaneta's performance is perfect, a theatrical eruption thats every bit as satisfying in the climaxing of mood as it is in the subtext of reading him and the raven as well, bart and homer, another squabble with the ever-stubborn boy, further accentuated by bart's cyclical "nevermore"s sounding less like a checkmark next to the box labeled dread and more like an eloquent nanny nanny boo boo, a good measure to incense homer to a rage that sends him chasing after the raven, to no avail. we end as we must, a collapsed shell trapped in the shadow of the corvid that made plain the darkness, its mantra the trigger that encases the poor soul, lost and lonely and in truth trapped in its own shadow, in its own self. the simpsons. now this story is a complex winding road of wordplay and rhythm i'm ill-equipped to tackle on that level, and as such it takes this level of dedicated deliberation to truly appreciate it, so when bart provides the comic relief peanut gallery asides it doesn't feel like fear to let the story happen, even if it was. as potently passionate as this pint-sized play is in performance and production, it's still the simpsons, and its worth remembering that despite all i've put into illustrating how masterfully silverman evoked the soul of this poem, or how wonderful castellaneta was in wrangling the material into a triumphant performance, in the end this is a fun scary story reading between bart and lisa, its meant to be a little playful, a little tongue-in-the-cheek-not-stuffed-with-candy. thankfully, you only need a few meta references here and a poke at the changing of times there and you've done your work without really intruding upon the tension, not that it'd be easy to do so. indeed, the fear within poe is not as horror has designated itself to work over time, a genre of volume, of intensity, of nifty tricks and ghoulish manifestations, but once you find its horror it sticks with you in its own way. regardless of how this segment sees itself, its nice to see the series give us a chance to see that, to take that risk. would i have ever put this much time into analyzing the poem without it? i would not have. so thank you simpsons, for your pretentious segment, here's a pretentious review to compliment it.