Marge and Homer Simpson are kissing in bed when they stop and begin talking:
Marge: “So good to have you back.”
Homer: *Yawning* “It’s good to be back.” *Rolls over as if to go to sleep.*
Marge: *Sighs in a frustrated way.*
Homer: *Waking Up Again* “Hmm… Can we cuddle for a little while?”
Marge: *Gasping, putting hands in prayer position and looking upward* “Thank you Svengali!”
Then turning to Homer, Marge says, “I knitted us a blanket” and throws a green cloth over the screen. We hear Homer “Hmm….,” implying of course that they’re about to do what married couples do. Then cut to Maggie holding up a Je Suis Charlie flag, in the pose of, as Time points out, French artist Eugène Delacroix‘s Liberty Leading the People.
#ParisMarch Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix pic.twitter.com/On7THb58yY
— alexis (@itsmealexis_) January 12, 2015
What to make of this? Who is “Svengali”? Why does Marge pray to him? If you stopped watching The Simpsons around about the time you matured beyond high school then you probably missed the first part of the episode.
And that’s what we have the internet for today: finding out what’s happening in parts of the culture that aren’t worth much of your time anymore (if they ever were at all…)
It’s such a strange, sad synchronicity that this of all episodes is the one that just happens to air right after a series of violent attacks in Paris of not just satirical provocateurs, but Jews in a Kosher market…
This is a rather odd episode for a number of reasons. First, it was actually written and submitted “on spec” 22 years ago, and was only filmed and released today because the author is now a famous filmmaker and producer, Knocked Up auteur Judd Apatow. Thus, it’s written in more of an “older style” akin to earlier episodes of The Simpsons. Here’s the plot, summarized via Wikipedia. Turns out “Svengali” is actually “Sven Golly,” and the premise is that he hypnotizes Homer into thinking he’s a 10-year-old boy (sort of like the plot of Big with Tom Hanks):
Homer learns that his co-safety inspector Don Bookner of Sector 7G retires, which means that he will have to do the work by himself. He is put under pressure and is unable to take a break. Marge suggests that the family could go to a circus. Here, Homer still can’t have fun and even punches a clown who attempts to trick him. Bart suggests that they could see the hypnotist. The hypnotist Sven Golly makes Homer believe that he is 10 years old again. At the hospital, Dr. Hibbert explains that the only way to bring Homer back is to contact Sven Golly again.
So what we’re seeing at the end of the episode, before the Charlie Hebdo tribute, is the suggestion that while the show has been “reset” to the status quo with Homer going back to his boorish adult self, supposedly a little of the brainwashing has been left behind and he’s just slightly more decent and kind to his wife. This has been done before. Reviewing the episode this morning at BubbleBlabber.Com:
However, for Simpsons fans, it had to seem pretty damn redundant, right? Consider this: we had a plot reference to an episode from season 12, a sax song from season 9, an attempt to change Homer’s long-running tradition of choking Bart, and – oh yeah – we’ve already had a Simpsons episode where Homer was hypnotized into thinking he was a young boy. That’s right, in “The Blunder Years,” a less cleverly named hypnotist, Mesmerino, made Homer recall his days as a twelve year old. I know the script for last night’s show was originally inked 25 years ago, so it may have seemed unique then, but it has already been done.
Apatow wrote the episode when he was 22 — I don’t expect him at that young to really know what he was doing. But Fox’s producers should have been able to manage a google search and picked a name for this new character with a less problematic history.
“Svengali” is one of the most infamous antisemitic stereotypes of all time. Wikipedia again:
Svengali is a fictional character in George du Maurier‘s 1895 novel Trilby. Scholars call Svengali a classic example of anti-Semitism in literature because he is Jewish, of Eastern European origins, and he seduces, dominates and exploits Trilby, a young English girl, and makes her into a famous singer.[1] The word “svengali” has come to refer to a person who, with evil intent, dominates, manipulates and controls a creative person such as a singer or actor.
But don’t take Wikipedia’s word for it. The author of 1984 wrote about the book too just after World War II…
George Orwell analyzed the antisemitism of Trilby in a 1946 “As I Please” column:
With great enjoyment I have just been rereading “Trilby”, George du Maurier’s justly popular novel, one of the finest specimens of that ‘good bad’ literature which the English-speaking peoples seem to have lost the secret of producing. Trilby is an imitation of Thackeray, a very good imitation and immensely readable — Bernard Shaw, if I remember rightly, considered it to be better than Thackeray in many ways — but to me the most interesting thing about it is the different impressions one derives from reading it first before and then after the career of Hitler.
The thing that now hits one in the eye in reading Trilby is its antisemitism. I suppose, although few people actually read the book now, its central story is fairly widely known, the name of Svengali having become a by-word, like that of Sherlock Holmes. A Jewish musician — not a composer, but a brilliant pianist and music-teacher — gets into his power an orphaned Irish girl, a painters’ model, who has a magnificent voice but happens to be tone deaf. Having hypnotized her one day to cure an attack of neuralgia, he discovers that when she is in the hypnotic trance she can be taught to sing in tune.
….
There is no question that the book is antisemitic. Apart from the fact that Svengali’s vanity, treacherousness, selfishness, personal uncleanliness and so forth are constantly connected with the fact that he is a Jew, there are the illustrations. Du Maurier, better known for his drawings in Punch than for his writings, illustrated his own book, and he made Svengali into a sinister caricature of the traditional type.
Here’s the way Maurier illustrated the character:
Now I’m obviously not claiming here that this is evidence that Apatow or The Simpsons writers/producers are antisemitic. Rather, it’s more a sign of the broad cultural and historical illiteracy about the history of antisemitism common across both “the Right” and “the Left.” Most people will just hear the name “Svengali” and shrug it off, others will think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill for even pointing it out.
I mean, come on, what’s the worst that could happen if fictional stories about malicious Jews who brainwash people into becoming their slaves start to circulate more in the culture? Surely nobody would ever be inspired to commit real violence just from taking in art and fantasy ideas, right?
Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon the depths of darkness, riven by dreams, it seems like the vertiginous imaginings of opium.” (Baudelaire, author of The Flowers of Evil, meant this as a compliment.) The twenty-three-year-old Gustav Mahler, after hearing Parsifal, wrote, “I understood that the greatest and most painful revelation had just been made to me, and that I would carry it unspoiled for the rest of my life.” For the first time in history, a composer lent his name to a cultural movement with ramifications far beyond music. As Adolf Hitler observed in 1943, “At the beginning of this century there were people called Wagnerians. Other people had no special name.”
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