Sure, we ogle "The Osbournes" and love "Everybody Loves Raymond."
But when it comes to a conjugal relationship that everyone understands,
the hands-down winner is primary-colored and two-dimensional. PT visits
the stars of America's real reality TV show, "The Simpsons."
By
Polly Shulman, published on July 01, 2003
For more than a dozen years, Fox Television has infiltrated a
family by the name of Simpson. We've watched Homer and Marge and their
2.3 children -- Bart, Lisa and baby Maggie -- dream big and lose bigger, make
up and make out, and blow off steam and responsibilities. (That last is
particularly dangerous when it happens at the Springfield Nuclear Power
Plant, where Homer works as a technical supervisor, or a supervising
technician -- or is it the safety inspector?)
We've cheered at noble gestures, such as when Marge rescued her
family from a herd of stampeding rhinoceroses, or when Homer moonlighted
as a department store Santa so he could buy his children presents. And
we've hung our heads during the low points, like when Homer vomited in
the bushes after he made Marge feed him nachos so he could use his hands
to play a video game. ("Come on," he insists when she balks, "you're
always saying we should do things as a couple.") We see ourselves
mirrored in them, even if the mirror is borrowed from the fun
house.
The gender roles at first appear hackneyed: Homer is the ur-guy for
whom what is lacking in brains is made up for in belly; and Marge is the
mom we never had, or wish we never had, or maybe the mom we fear we're
turning into. She cooks, she cleans, she nags; she takes her humiliated,
reeking, semipenitent husband to her bosom with a tube-lipped smooch and
a gravelly, "Aw, Homie!" But the ironic distance from which we see this
couple adds substance. When Homer's behavior spotlights the chasm between
the ideal father and the dumb cluck who tries to fill that role, Ozzie
and Harriet-type ideals are called into question. Similarly, through her
frequent rebellions Marge turns the image of the long-suffering wife on
its head.
Indeed, Marge tells her daughter, "Marriage is a beautiful thing.
But it's also a constant battle for moral superiority." And it's a battle
Marge is winning. She towers over her husband ethically and
intellectually (not to mention follicularly). Homer may always get his
way, but that's mostly because Marge allows him to think he has done so.
She's the woman behind the throne. And like wives in the 1850s and the
1950s, she takes care not to let her husband know how much better she is
at the business of living.
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