The self reflexive cartoon is a cultural practice operating as one of Lyotard’s language games where rules and players are in a constant flux. It comically renders transparent the workings of the text, providing a Brechtian distance from the work and upending the dominant classical narrative style to reviralise traditional pleasure in the act of viewing.
Cartoon intertextuality has moved from the big screen warner brother shorts to small screen tv series such as the simpsons in relation to the post modern society of the 20th and 21st century where it is possible for the audience to get all the intertextual and double coding contents of the humour due to mass media exposure since birth. An example of this is when homer remarks “its just a cartoon it’s not supposed to be realistic” and we see another homer walking by in the background
Post modernity in the simpsons
Simpsons is an animated tv show that is set in a fictional suburban American town with its own tv shows. Yet it does not just mimic a traditional sitcom like its predecessors such as the jetsons and flinstones, it fully embraces its medium as animation and injects self reflexivity and narrative impossibilities onto itself, an example of this is in the episode where homer remarks on the lack of realism in the cartoon he is watching while at the same time we see another homer walking by in the background.
To fully appreciate the humour of this scene one is faced with double-coding and heteroglossia , the Bakthian term which means the coexistense of different distinct varieties with the same linguistic code. Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech: the speech of characters, the speech of narrators, and even the speech of the author. In relating heteroglossia to the mentioned simpson’s scene, the speeches are replaced by animation conventions, that of self reflexivity in the fact that homer as a cartoon character is commenting upon the tropes of the medium he exists in himself.
This could be seen as the speech of the characters in Bakthian terms since homer simpson is not made aware of the fact that he is a cartoon character in the context that he is a living inhabitant in the fictional town of springfield which is reflexive and is an allegory of a real suburban american town. Yet the creators of the show injected the narrative impossibility of another homer simpson as a reminder to us that we are indeed watching a cartoon, albeit a cartoon that is commenting on the lack of realism about another cartoon within its world, it’s own linguistic code.
The insertion of another homer in the scene is a double coded reminder to the audience from the creator to think about what homer is saying about the medium of animation. It is a critique of the perceived teleological and authoritarian character of modernist art and culture. Homer’s role of the authoritarian father figure is completely disregarded by the speech of the authorwhich is the animator himself. This creates a direct discourse between the creator, the author and the audience.
This is a great case of example to show that animation has the ability to be a genre in which the auteur is not only dominant. But able to speak directly to their audience, as American sociologist Steve Seidman notes in his writing on comedian comedy; “animation is probably the ultimate auteurist cinema”
The irony of filmmaking as the subject of film draws attention to the craft, the business and the visions behind such enterprices, The writer / director is able to explore his or her work and question it, its techniques and its values. These films are not mere excercises in vain speculation, but serve as excursions into the fundamental nature and purposes of film.
