I’ve wasted half my life, Marge. You know how many memories I have? Three! Standing in line for a movie, having a key made, and sitting here talking to you. Thirty-eight years and that’s all I have to show for it! – Homer Simpson, The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace
At the end of a long-ish year, I’m very happy to have handed my honours thesis in. Now, the nerves are setting in as I wait to hear about the marks.
The work turned into a response to Michael Billig’s call for more detailed examination of banal nationalism in the everyday and the popular. It also dealt extensively with Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. I was able to map the representational practices of nation in the show, and especially those presenting the United States. I highlighted exclusionary practices in the representation of nations, pointing out that nations were often described as much in opposition to other nations as they were in any positive sense. Certainly not a world-changing piece of work, but worthy I think of the effort.
I wouldn’t have even been back at uni this year if not for the encouragement of my nan. She wanted me to make the best I could of myself, and with very few people in our family ever having obtained any higher qualifications, she really wanted me to push ahead with my PhD. Nan passed away less than a day before I handed this thesis in, but I was lucky enough to have the chance to show it to her and tell her I had finished it. Below is the acknowledgements section from my thesis, which includes my public tribute to my nan for her role in my life. I was able to talk more about her life and her influence on our entire family at her funeral.
Acknowledgements
Well, this certainly seems odd, but, hey, who am I to question the work of the Almighty? Oh, we thank you Lord for this mighty fine intelligent design! Good job!
- Ned Flanders, ‘The Simpsons Movie’
As much as Ned Flanders might disagree, there is rarely only one being involved with the creation of anything worth being thankful for. Ned failed to notice that the multiple-eyed purple squirrel he talks about in the quote above was the product of a whole heap of (toxic) stuff being spewed out into the atmosphere and mixing with some pre-existing elements. This work started as a bunch of ideas in my head about the role of ‘the media’ (that big amorphous conceptual beast that no-one can quite define) in shaping ideas about other big concepts. Without giving ‘the media’ too much credit for their role in establishing and contesting such concepts, it does seem that many people take strong heed of the content produced. One of my favourite media artifacts is, of course, The Simpsons, and it then seemed logical to ask some questions about what Springfield had to say about the world. Thankfully, I found in Dr Dean Chan a supervisor who was very happy to guide me through those questions, usually by asking well chosen and carefully worded questions of his own. My thoughts poured out onto paper and, like the waste from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, mixed up with other stuff that was lying around. Somehow, it flowed through the work of those scholars of nation who have meant so much to the theoretical frameworks in this project. Through the whole process, Dean was there to mop it up and keep it flowing away from disaster. Without Dean, and not to labour the analogy too much, I would have been like Rainier Wolfcastle flailing about while several tons of sulfuric acid raced toward him in the episode Radioactive Man. The goggles would have done nothing. For his support and guidance, Dean has my gratitude and thanks.
Thanks also to my partner Meghan. Like a Marge to my Homer, she has been a long-suffering party to my schemes and ideas, no matter how half-thought and risky they seem. She has supported me financially, emotionally and academically in this endeavour and I hope the result is worth it for her sake at least as much as mine.
Finally, thanks also to my family. My brother, parents and grandparents have always been there for me and I would not have been able to achieve half as much without their love and support. In particular, my grandmother Olive has always encouraged me in every aspect of my life. She has been my safety net when needed, and I am sure it was our many Scrabble matches and debates that have taught me to think critically and carefully. I could not have had better training for this project. I am sure that when she tried to stop me watching The Simpsons as a kid, she would not have dreamed that I might have made as much use of it as I have.
UPDATE: If you’ve come to this post looking for information about content analysis, you might be better served looking here.
It’s been a little while since I written a post here with anything to do with my thesis. That is mostly because I’ve been working too hard on the thesis itself to write updates here.
Anyway, I’ve not long finished collecting my content analysis data from the first ten seasons of the show. It relates specifically to the appearance of nation in the show, and only counts things that I identified as relevant to the content analysis. The data seems a bit complex on first view, but offers a bunch of interesting stuff. It runs to fifty pages when printed, but the vast majority of that is the notes I added along the way. Here’s the link, if you’re interested. I welcome and comments, questions or feedback. You’re also welcome to use the data for your own purposes, but please link to either this site or my Twitter profile if you do.
As for the thesis itself, some chapters are looking better than others. Following are some extracts from the introductory sections.
Abstract
When Benedict Anderson proposed the nation as “an imagined political community” (1991: 6), he established a central role for mass communication methods in that imagining process. His arguments were underlined also by nation as a limited entity, which means that beyond the borders of each nation lay other nations. The nation was as much a reflexive imagining as a positive one, in that it was defined in opposition to other nations as much by what it inherently was. We extend this notion to argue that a core aspect of the representation of any nation is its opposition or exclusion of outsiders. The tropes of nation identified by Anderson have persisted into fictional television and the American television series The Simpsons is no exception. For a show that is ostensibly about small town life, The Simpsons is full of representations of nation. Many of these fit neatly into Michael Billig’s conception of banal or everyday nationalism. Further, there are a range of characters presented as outsiders, as Edward Said’s seminal “other” (1978). By examining the representations of eight different nations throughout the first ten seasons of the show, the method and form of their imagining, including the inherent politics of exclusion, is established. The key research questions answered in this paper focus on the construction of notions of nation in The Simpsons and the ways in which characters are constructed as American or non-American.
Five key symbolic elements in the representation of nation are identified from relevant literature, namely national days, flags, gastronomy, territory and language. These are supplemented with another practical marker of any nation – its name. These six symbolic elements cover a range of ideas about constructions of nation and provide a rounded view of nations through which their appearance in The Simpsons is analysed. A comprehensive 10 season, 226 episode content analysis was conducted in search of appearances of these six elements. Other elements of representations of nation manifested themselves during this content analysis, particularly historical events and national institutions. Following the initial content analysis, a detailed discourse analysis of a further five episodes provided significant qualitative data to support the findings from the quantitative data analysis.
This thesis demonstrates that ontologies of nation in The Simpsons are indeed constructed primarily by representations of the five symbolic elements identified from the literature, and that historical events and national institutions are also important. It is shown that the politics of exclusion and othering are clear in representations of particular characters and that most non-American nations represented in The Simpsons are objects of self-referential ridicule, where the show’s creators seem to be highlighting their audience’s own prejudices rather than indulging or presenting new versions of them. Meanwhile, American nationhood is strongly positioned as a banal norm.
Introduction
In many ways, The Simpsons defies any sort of neat theoretical framework. For a show written by “Harvard geeks” (Angell 1993), it does very well with the mass public. It is a cartoon, but arguably not for children. Bart is problem child and Homer is an absent father, yet they also represent the conservative middle American nuclear family (Cantor 1999). The Simpson family often struggles for money but they are well-travelled and can afford for Marge not to work. Their town, Springfield, has everything it needs to be simultaneously self-contained and yet connected to the outside world. The town’s evening news is delivered by Kent Brockman, a newsman who lives in the family’s neighbourhood. As Principal Skinner tells his Springfield Elementary students in Lisa on Ice, “grades are at an all time low”, and yet the town has two universities. Springfield’s citizens are notoriously reactive, as evidenced by their wholehearted embrace of the smooth-talking monorail salesman Lyle Lanley in Marge vs the Monorail. Springfield is small-town, but in a big town kind of way. It has an international airport, a well-utilised harbour, and interstate railways and highways. The headquarters of the international television conglomerate Itchy & Scratchy Publishing are located in Springfield, as is the chief brewery of Duff Beer. After moving in across the road from the Simpsons, former first lady Barbara Bush says Springfield has the “lowest voter turnout in America” (Two Bad Neighbors), and yet in Bart Gets an Elephant, both the Democratic and Republican national conventions arrive in Springfield, and the American President regularly comes to town. So Springfield is worldly and cloistered at the same time.
…
This thesis is located at the intersection of nation and nationalism, but situated firmly in Springfield. It finds those representations of nation in The Simpsons that may ignite nationalism in audiences and teases them out, highlighting the inherent politics of exclusion in any process of representing nations. To demonstrate the appearance of such exclusion, the thesis will address how The Simpsons imagines both American and non-American national communities. It engages also in debates about how particular characters are ‘othered’, or presented as somehow different (and deviant) from the ‘mainstream’ American community. The interest here is not to examine national identity as it appears in The Simpsons, but conceptions of nation itself through representations of particular nations. We accept that nation is a highly contested and problematic term because “no satisfactory criterion can be discovered for deciding which of the many human collectivities should be labelled in this way” (Hobsbawm 1992: 5). As such, it is not the concept of nation that is under interrogation here, but its particular representation in the show. Anderson argues that representation is antecedent to existence in any case. The characteristics, organs and symbols of the nation-state as portrayed in The Simpsons are the main focus in this thesis, while certain characters are shown to be representative of their affiliated nations. This thesis is not an attempt to de-sacralise nationhood; nor is it an acceptance of naturalised national identity. It is a study of a particular conception of national identity, as constructed through complex, layered iconography and allusion in The Simpsons.
In assessing the representation of nation in The Simpsons, it is important to be conscious not to ascribe too much importance to the role of those representations in defining audience views of nation. To do so would be to fall into the trap that Couldry calls “the myth of the mediated centre” (2003). This myth reminds media scholars that the media is not the sole arbiter of culture and worldview. Hall concurs, writing that within a positivist strand of media scholarship: “‘meaning’ tends to be conceptualised in a very reductive way – largely, in effect, as manifest content or message, on the basis of a very simple notion of ‘language’ as one-way communication” (1999: 310). The active audience paradigm is very much evident in the interpretation of data in this thesis, but is not a central concern. How those representations are received or understood by audiences is a matter for further research. Whether it then influences audience members’ own schema of their national identity or anyone else’s is also for another study. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that there are occasions where audiences and broadcasters in countries like Australia, Brazil and Japan have reacted strongly to episodes portraying their peoples and places (Dobson 2006). The Simpsons creator Matt Groening is also conscious that depictions of particular nations can spark strong reactions, even apologising to a journalist for the episode Bart vs Australia (Idato 2000).
Following this line of enquiry, this project is committed to an exploration of the manifest content in the show through two interrelated research questions:
How are notions of nation constructed in The Simpsons?
How are characters constructed as American or non-American in The Simpsons?
The first question seeks to establish what conceptions of nations are present in The Simpsons, and how tropes and symbols are employed to construct such conceptions. This is the overarching question, and it assumes conceptions of nations are constructed. Nonetheless, the data collected demonstrates that such constructions are indeed present. The representation of both American nationhood and other nationhoods can be interrogated collectively through the manifest audio and visual content in the show.
Please note, it’s too fiddly for me to put up the references, but I’ll come back to it once the thesis is submitted. If you are interested in a particular reference, please get in contact and I’ll help you out.
UPDATE: If you’ve come to this post looking for information about content analysis, you might be better served looking here.
I have been doing some considerable reading for the last fortnight and I came across one text that has thrown me a bit. The problem is the author writes quite strongly that national identity is “a conceptual chimera not worthy of serious analytical pursuit. It is a concept that is theoretically vapid while also lacking clear empirical referents” (Malesevic 2011: 272-73). Which is fine, as everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, after reading and re-reading this essay, I agree. Which leaves me in a bad position given one of my research questions is “How is American national identity constructed in The Simpsons?”
So, I compared the arguments of this new work with Benedict Anderson’s ideas and found that they’re not incompatible inasmuch as Anderson talks about the construction of nationalism, not the construction of national identity. It also cleared up something I had struggled with about Anderson’s work and that was that he didn’t say much of what tied people to nations. He mostly concentrated on finding why nation and nationalism came to be rather than what they are.
So, where does this leave me?
Well, I’ve re-written some of the draft and altered one of the research questions. On the whole, I think it makes the arguments stronger, makes the use of content analysis easier and more relevant, and narrows the focus of the thesis a little more (because I can avoid questions of whether the characters see themselves as American or whatever, and just focus on how they are positioned).
I hope, however, that I don’t look back forlornly on the decision as Robert Frost’s famous poem would have me do:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Reference
Malesevic, S. (2011). The chimera of national identity. Nations and Nationalism, 17(2), 272-290. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2010.00479.x
When Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) visited a high school in upstate New York in May 1991, he received an unexpected civics lesson from an unexpected source. Speaking on the timely subject of school violence, Senator Schumer praised the Brady Bill, which he helped sponsor, for its role in preventing crime. Rising to question the effectiveness of this effort at gun control, a student named Kevin Davis cited an example no doubt familiar to his classmates but unknown to the senator from New York:
It reminds me of a Simpsons episode. Homer wanted to get a gun but he had been in jail twice and in a mental institution. They label him as “potentially dangerous.” So Homer asks what that means and the gun dealer says: “It just means you need an extra week before you can get the gun.” (Cantor 1999)
The NSW Government has recently announced some changes to gun laws to help restrict the flow of weapons and ammunition in the wake of a series of shootings.
Most people would not disagree with two aspects of the proposed changes, being (1) a specific offence for drive-by shootings and (2) an increased gaol term for firing at a home as part of an organised criminal activity. Most people would also not take issue with the plan to tighten ammunition sales and carry gun licences when the weapons or their ammunition is in your possession. After all, to drive a car, you need to have your licence with you.
However, those involved in the gun trade, plus farmers and recreational shooters are seemingly outraged, as the Central Western Dailyreports:
Bullets & Bits part-owner Ray Hawkins said it was unfair that law-abiding gun owners would be restricted by the proposal.
“Why should we have to prove it [ownership]?” he said.
“It seems to be a knee-jerk reaction.”
Yes, why would anyone need to prove they have a right to access lethal weapons?
Not to be outdone by the Central West’s esteemed publication, the Port Macquarie Newsreported:
PROPOSED changes to toughen laws around the ownership and sale of ammunition will not reduce firearm crime, a dealer says.
The draft laws put forth by the NSW Government aim to combat organised crime by making it more difficult to buy ammunition for stolen and unregistered weapons.
But Port Macquarie ammunitions dealer David Lenord said the legislation was “stupid”
As this thread on Seabreeze.com.au shows, the discussion can sometimes get a little unruly and nonsensical:
will appease the wallys in la la land that good ol uncle Barry is doing someting tho .Too lttle too late .Just do away with the war on drugs ol mate and the problem will be solved
(I think he was saying gun crime will go away if we stop targeting drug crime?)
Unlike Homer, Barry’s law doesn’t mean you’ll have to wait an extra week to get your gun or ammunition, even if you are “potentially dangerous”. In NSW, it will only mean you wait until you sign the paperwork.
Reference
Cantor, P., 1999. Atomistic Politics and the Nuclear Family. Political Theory, 27(6), pp.734-749. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20688622 [Accessed April 1, 2012].
UPDATE: If you’ve come to this post looking for information about content analysis, you might be better served looking here.
A key data collection method for my thesis will be content analysis. Basically (and I could well be shot for simplifying it this much) content analysis is simply counting things in the text. In my case, I’m counting the number of times particular characters appear in each episode and what they appear with. Symbolic items of national identity associated with particular characters will also be counted.
I first conducted a content analysis way back in first year. Then I was looking for simple acts of violence in The Simpsons. I achieved very good marks for that assignment, and it is probably a big part of why I’m still at uni, and still studying The Simpsons. At the time, that task seemed very complex. I only analysed three episodes, and did little work beyond the content analysis. For my thesis, the content analysis is the launching point and will be accompanied by a detailed discourse analysis of selected episodes. I’m only studying the first ten seasons of the show, but that still means I’m planning to do a content analysis of 226 episodes.
All of this is why I’m sitting at my computer at 10pm on a Saturday night writing about content analysis. I’m quite excited at the moment since I just finished my draft coding sheet for my content analysis. I’m even about to conduct my first pilot content analysis of a random episode. For this exercise, I’m choosing an episode outside of the first ten seasons. I’ve embedded my coding sheet below, and would be interested in your feedback*.
*This is probably the single most boring graphic to ever accompany any blog, ever.
