D’oh!-zart: The Simpsons v. Amadeus

By Justin D. Burton

NOTE: This is a guest post by my friend Justin, who's a musicology grad student at Rutgers and one of my favorite people. The topic is still intertextuality, but here it's between a movie and a TV show. Justin and his wife Kathryn also have a great movie blog. -Scott

In episode FABF06 (‘Margical History Tour’) of The Simpsons, Marge takes her children (and Bart’s friend Milhouse) to the Springfield Public Library to research papers they must write for school, only to find that the library no longer carries books, opting instead for Yu-Gi-Oh! price guides, Everybody Poops: The Video, and newspapers perched atop snoozing bums. Unperturbed, Marge gathers the children around and offers lessons on historical figures to help the children write their papers. After telling of Henry VIII for Milhouse and Sacagawea for Lisa, she turns to Bart.

Marge: What famous historical figure do you want to write about?

Bart: I don’t know. Boogeyman.

Marge: C’mon, Bart. We can make this fun. History’s like an amusement park, except instead of rides, you have dates to memorize.

Bart: Mom, everyone who ever lived is boring.

Marge: Boring? Is there anything boring about a bad-ass rocker who lived fast and died young?

Bart: I know there’s a catch, but tell me more.

With that, Marge launches into the story of Mozart, complete with a raucous piano concert, a scene at the Austrian Music Awards, a snippet of Bart/Mozart’s latest opera The Musical Fruit, and Bart/Mozart’s untimely death. The story, as Lisa points out, ‘sounds a lot like the movie Amadeus, which was historically inaccurate.’

The Simpsons is a richly intertextual television show, as it demands its viewers to be conscious of a vast reservoir of popular culture referential material. Often, the point of this intertextuality is to engage and critique the texts to which the show refers. Jonathan Gray, author of Watching with the Simpsons, puts it thusly:

[M]uch of [The Simpsons’s] humor is deeply transitive, pointing outside the borders of The Simpsons to all manner of other genres, texts, and discourses. To laugh at these jokes is frequently to read those other genres, texts, and discourses as much as it is to read The Simpsons. The Simpsons talks about other texts, and if its jokes ‘leak’ out of the program—if we activate them in everyday discussion, if they force a reevaluation of other texts, or if we recall them when watching other texts—then it becomes important for us to study how and with what effect this parody attacks other textual forms and formats: we can no longer focus on The Simpsons alone.

When we find within The Simpsons a lengthy reference to Amadeus, then, we are obligated, as Gray tells us, to study the effect of this parody. What I’d like to do here is talk briefly about why The Simpsons lampoons Amadeus.

Writer Peter Shaffer and director Milós Forman weren’t the first to conceive of Mozart in infantile and savant-like terms. Rather, the stories that fuel the myth of Mozart the eternal child had arisen immediately following his death. Importantly, though, Amadeus, as mass art, was situated in a position that allowed it to crystallize this notion in the public’s consciousness.

By caricaturing Amadeus with its own characters, The Simpsons impoverishes the Mozart myth expounded in Amadeus. In The Simpsons, we are confronted with a rock-star child genius whose musical ability is effortless and punctuated with infantile scatology, a pared-down version of the pared-down story Amadeus offers.

One explanation for The Simpsons’s intertextual tangling with Amadeus is de-mythification. As Roland Barthes explains myth, it is an impoverishment of a meaningful exchange. That is, I may say, ‘Mozart is a genius’ (though it’s not likely that you’ll hear me say that), and the statement is fully of history. That is, the statement involves the contingencies of both ‘genius’ and ‘Mozart,’ as the histories surrounding each word are immediately consultable to better understand the many different aspects of the statement ‘Mozart is a genius.’

When the statement is mythified, however, the statement is distanced from history. As Barthes puts it, the statement ‘leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself…history evaporates, only the letter remains.’ What is important in Barthes’s postulation, however, is that history is not entirely extinguished in the form; rather, it remains available as ‘an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alternation.’ The statement becomes, then, something of a proof text of itself, to which one might point for salient historical facts or ideas, while disregarding its original multivalence.

Why a statement such as this one is impoverished is a bit tricky to nail down, but one explanation is the fear of the loss of the Great White Man. Since the Enlightenment, our histories have been filled with tales of great individuals who transcend their bodies and their cultures to do great things. With the growing sense of multiculturalism, however, many have noticed that these great transcendent people are always white and always men. As we try to reconfigure our understanding of history, several have balked at the notion and feared that white men are actually becoming the racist target of the rest of the world (see Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind for some nice examples of such a paranoia). If ‘Mozart is a genius’ can be proved by streamlining his history and turning him into a rock-star child genius, then his status becomes much more difficult to assail.

Now, in order to undo myth, Barthes tells us, we must mythify it, in turn. This involves impoverishing a myth. So, while ‘Mozart is a genius’ became impoverished in a myth that became crystallized in Amadeus, this myth is then impoverished in The Simpsons. As it turns out, a funny cartoon challenges to re-think and critically engage the history and person of one of our most revered artists. Not bad for seven hilarious minutes.

-JDB