The Uncurrent Dispatch

John.

It was a risky gambit to become moody and reflective in the throes of Beatlemania, but thanks to fatigue and Bob Dylan’s stash, John was feeling rebellious. Pop music was supposed to be fun and fictional, and John’s music stopped being either. As with “A Hard Day’s Night”, John’s title song set this movie soundtrack’s tone, but while “Hard Day’s Night” encapsulated an unquenchable lust for life (and other things), “Help!” captured the band’s new milestones and tensions: Individual voice vs group harmony (figuratively and literally); catchy pop vs experimentation; Paul’s commitment to “silly love songs” vs John’s painfully autobiographical songwriting. John had discovered a propensity for self-examination that would peak in 1970 with Plastic Ono Band, an album Elvis Costello would decry for making every artist’s “authenticity depend[... on] baring their souls for public scrutiny” (x). 

But in 1965, long before Plastic Ono Band and the White Album served as public therapy sessions, the other Beatles pull against John’s angst, and sullen songs like “Help!” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” get by with a little help from his friends’ chipper call and response. “Lose that Girl’s” moodiness is offset by the other Beatles’ energy, and the result is the split personality of a narrator bemoaning a friend’s neglected relationship even as his inner monologue celebrates the opportunity to make his move. The big question is whether “Lose That Girl’s” narrator is grateful for the assist or resentful of the other Beatles butting in. It’s a debate that carries over to Rubber Soul songs like “Nowhere Man” (“somebody else lends [John] a hand” as Paul and George’s harmonies uplift their nowhere man) and “Girl” (where the duo’s piercing “tit-tit-tits” make light of John’s pining pubescence). “It’s Only Love” sets the stage for the pending angst of “Girl”, with the guitar capo deliberately raising the key to strain John’s voice in perfect adolescence. But instead of “Girl’s” teasing, Harrison here offers sympathy with a fluttery tremolo effect recalling stomach butterflies. The playful tremolo contrasts the band’s first-ever use of a manual volume pedal on “I Need You” and the way its slow weepy swells grieve with George’s narrator.

The contrast is stark when the other Beatles abandon John for “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”. For this reason, the tune feels more like Beatles for Sale’s unfiltered Bob Dylan inspiration, but the layout and instrumentation shift away from John’s Dylan period songs like “I’m a Loser”. “Hide Your Love Away” follows verse-chorus protocol until the bridge section, which proxies for Dylan’s harmonica with doubled flutes before abruptly ending. Despite cribbing his first stanza from Dylan’s “I Don’t Believe You”, this song’s subject matter is pure John, possibly on hiding his marriage to Cynthia Powell, manager Brian Epstein’s closeted homosexuality, or even John’s own budding bicuriousity. (He had incited much speculation after joining Epstein on a Barcelona vacation in 1963). 

Even “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, the time-tested filler formula of John hollering a cover song in the vein of “Twist and Shout” and “Money” is groundbreaking not as a first, but as a last. This would not only be the last cover song in the Beatles catalog (forget “Maggie Mae”), but the last time John would enjoy his youthful howl. Starting with Rubber Soul, any belting John does is detached and processed with studio effects (“Tomorrow Never Knows”; “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; even the clenched-teeth seething on “Run for Your Life”). Then, after Epstein’s death in 1967 ends the Beatles psychedelic phase, John’s outdoor voice resurrects as a painful wail (“Yer Blues”; “I’m So Tired”; “I Want You”) and reaches its peak three years later as John and Yoko undergo primal scream therapy while recording Plastic Ono Band (“Well Well Well” and “Mother’s” outro). “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” is the last time John screams about being happy and the last time he sounds happy to be screaming.

“Ticket to Ride” is one of Help’s most groundbreaking achievements, but the victory isn’t John’s alone. The song owes its futuristic syncopation to George: The mournful drone on the A chord and its suspended forms, further complicated by the use of a 12 string guitar (on which a standard guitar’s six strings are doubled or paired with an octave, as on a sitar) simulates a sort of Zen “Aum” that foreshadows what Harrison would soon pull from Eastern instruments (tabla on “Love You To”; sitar on “Within You Without You”), then more traditional psych-rock instruments like guitar feedback and electric organ (“It’s All Too Much”; “Blue Jay Way”). George utilizes the same A chord drone on “I Need You,” and the result is just as wretched and tender as “Ticket”. The Loner Beatle starts songwriting in earnest for Help!, after 1963’s lone filler track “Don’t Bother Me” had discouraged him for two years. His middle-child status in the Beatles serves as a lyrical motif throughout his catalog, from “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (to which the other Beatles were apathetic) to “Only a Northern Song” (voted off Sgt Pepper’s) to “Not Guilty” (vetoed entirely). “I Need You” and “You Like Me Too Much” have the tentative tenderness of Harrison’s constant rejection and his need for the band both emotionally and financially. Both songs explore the uniquely George dynamic in which someone is emotionally dependent on an apathetic partner. While lovers in Lennon/McCartney songs routinely come and go, George’s lovers are stuck in a perpetual state of ambivalence.

While John and George raced into the band’s burgeoning psychedelic phase, Paul’s wheels spun in the mud. A crowd-pleaser who routinely played it safe, Paul was consistently the last Beatle to experiment in both music and drugs, and he was perfectly content trying to duplicate Hard Day’s Night’s frenetic partnership with John’s songs. The Cute Beatle offered staunch competition on that album: “And I Love Her” was as dusky and ethereal as “If I Fell”, and “Can’t Buy Me Love” rivalled the pulse and energy of John’s title hit. But Paul couldn’t keep pace for Help! “The Night Before” and “Another Girl” offer weak A-side competition against John’s four game-changers, and “Tell Me What You See” is fourth quarter filler that Paul would supply again on Rubber Soul in the form of “Wait.” Where John and George show vulnerability, Paul displays only a persistent bubbliness as he falls for someone (contrast “I’ve Just Seen a Face” vs “It’s Only Love”), falls for someone different (“Another Girl” vs “Lose That Girl”), and even loses someone (“The Night Before” vs “I Need You”). 

“I’ve Just Seen a Face” is mostly noteworthy as a more democratic vision of what genre-bending could have looked like for the band compared to “Yesterday”. All four Beatles share in the stripped-down instrumentation, with Ringo on percussion and the others strumming away on acoustic guitars. The result is lively and full, thanks to a balance of power (and the power of the band’s balance) that recalls the traded guitar solos on “The End”. McCartney’s infusion of British pop into American folk pastiche makes this track more listenable than the straight-forward cover of “Act Naturally,” which adds little to Buck Owens’s original beyond the pleading texture of Ringo’s strained baritone. Ringo’s love for country music meant he spearheaded the band’s 1965 American folk departure in each album’s “let Ringo sing one” throwaway. He sang Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t” on Beatles for Sale and would get an original tune with Rubber Soul’s “What Goes On” before reverting to an English folk feel for 1966’s “Yellow Submarine”. (Though his country/western phase would return with a vengeance on the White Album’s “Don’t Pass Me By”, a Ringo original the other Beatles had been suppressing since the drummer joined the band in 1962.)

That message, the one our demographic constantly resists, is that even the most passive and well-intentioned observers are complicit in the narrative they’re observing. Hamilton challenges a “color-blind” audience that favors itself free of implicit bias by demanding constant scrutiny of the show’s storytellers-- who are themselves actors of color portraying America’s whitest figures. Caricatures like King George embody the obvious bias white liberals scapegoat to avoid their own culpability (i.e. Bob Ewell or southern conservatives). But even likable and seemingly reliable witnesses like Eliza and Angelica invite scrutiny when “Satisfied” pulls the rug out from what the audience accepted as true in “Helpless.” Hamilton also demonstrates how much an observer reveals without discussing themselves, a point proven by Leslie Odom Jr beating Miranda for the Best Actor Tony in a musical that could just as easily be called Burr.

Miranda worries about Alexander Hamilton’s likability as much as he worries about the musical’s veracity-- which is to say, only insofar as being seen to possess both those things helps to deliver the show’s actual message. Cherry-picked blunders like the Reynolds affair mainly serve to draw attention to the power of the storyteller. Up to “Say No To This,” Burr has been Hamilton’s biased but faithful narrator, but when his enemy makes his first fatal error, Burr demures to “let Alexander tell it.” The audience loves to see Burr hate Hamilton, but even Hamilton’s lifelong foe recognizes the injustice of denying someone their own voice: If Burr sang the events of “Say No To This” in third person, his narration would garner far less sympathy than Hamilton’s. The show again emphasizes the importance of controlling one’s own narrative a few scenes later when Hamilton elects to “write his way out” rather than letting someone else spin the facts. If after all this the audience finds homewrecking Hamilton likable, Miranda’s succeeded-- Not in redeeming the Founder’s infidelity after 216 slutty slutty years, but in demonstrating the power of someone controlling their own story.

The musical is built from these parables on narrative. Getting the audience to like and believe Hamilton (both the man and the musical) is merely one necessary step toward Miranda’s central objective of exposing his power as a storyteller and the audience’s power as observers. Miranda fills the show with cherry-picked inaccuracies and biases (including his own) because he’s not contrasting truth with slander, but representation with anonymity. Thomas Jefferson is Hamilton’s arch-enemy but always gets to represent himself (as in the “Thomas claims” section of “Room Where It Happens”), while John Adams never speaks for himself and is dismissed by the audience as a completely forgettable part of America’s narrative. Audiences love or hate Jefferson, but Adams is consigned to apathy, the worst possible fate for any figure hoping to remain a part of an historical narrative. 

In Snicket’s world, children are victimized not only by the absence of adults, but by their presence. The only child in town with two physically and emotionally present parents is Stew Mitchum, who seems to be wicked not in spite of this but as a direct result. Stew watches his parents argue like a “shark [...] circles a tank while schoolchildren tap on the glass,” patiently awaiting the day he will “no longer be trapped [... but] will be in the open water, right where you’ll be swimming” (2.88). This is why Snicket chose to apprentice for the least capable chaperone, one whose first name is implied to be “Solitude” (4.289). The more absent the adult, the more autonomy provided the child. The wickedness of aging is most apparent in the town’s largest-looming threats, Hangfire and the Bombinating Beast. The Beast refrains from attacking Ellington and Snicket only because, as Hangfire’s daughter instinctively knows, “it’s not old enough” (3.221) to hurt people yet. Hangfire’s ability to “imitate the voice of anyone” speaks to a base childhood fear that adults are not who they say they are or “might not [even have] a real voice” (3.138) or identity anymore. Snicket, as a child character written by an adult, has a complex relationship with these villains and the dual apprehensions that “every adult [does] something terrible sooner or later [...] and every child [...] becomes an adult” (2.176). Snicket has “a box of matches in [his] pocket” but lies about it to Hangfire because he “[doesn’t] think adults should be encouraged to smoke” (3.27). Snicket literally carries the hidden potential to turn into a wicked fire-wielding adult like Hangfire, but is held back by a youthful idealism about resisting bad habits.

Nevertheless, Snicket ultimately turns to “a wild, lawless place” on a divisive “night [...] different from all other nights” (4.247). The titular question of Snicket’s final chronicle is itself a reference to the Jewish tradition of Ma Nishtana and is typically asked by the youngest member of a Seder so adults can “fulfill the [...] obligation to tell the story to one's children [and …] pique a child's curiosity,” just as Handler (who was raised Jewish) strives to pique curiosity in his young readers. Snicket saves Stain’d-by-the-Sea from Hangfire, but Hangfire posthumously claims Snicket’s integrity, having lured him out of a morally sound childhood. Snicket’s last words before walking away from his friends and colleagues are “I’m not old enough” (4.288), a callback to Ellington’s explanation for why the Beast didn’t attack them. Snicket’s claim is wrought with irony and denial, as he and the Beast had both just exhibited the “wild, lawless” nature of adulthood by killing Armstrong Feint. (You can read my dissection of the ending here.)

This is why Snicket reflects on Ellington as a “line [...] right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days” (4.161), a fact Handler had foreshadowed from her introduction. Snicket’s first impression of the femme fatale includes the distinctive line “green eyes she had” (1.131), a reference to Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King when Arthur first sets eyes on the beautiful and dangerous Guinevere: “Green eyes, she had, with a kind of cruelty deep inside them. [...] If you can master me, that look seemed to say, then you can master whatever else this wicked world might bring” (Cornwell 183). Ellington and S. Theodora Markson are the town’s only other outsiders, which is why the two share “Solitude” as a musical motif and first name respectively. Snicket befriends several locals, but only Ellington can commiserate over something as specific and foreign as “blueberries picked in a field at the height of summer, miles and miles and miles from anywhere this train will go” (4.158). Snicket defends Ellington to the Associates because their xenophobic mistrust recalls his own cold reception in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, where locals like the officers Mitchum are only too eager to connect “the arrival of two strangers” and “the town experienc[ing] a crime” (1.90).

These musings recall King Lear’s vain wish for his kingdom’s survival, as well as Frank Chaudhary’s observation that celebrities “want to be seen” and ultimately “remembered” (187). Arthur gets his wish in life and death, endlessly perceived by Miranda, Clark, Jeevan and later, Kirsten and other post-apocalypse tabloid collectors. However, Arthur only leads his narrative in the final section’s apologia-- Like Elizabeth and Tyler, he crosses many people’s stories but can’t tell his own. He and the woman to whom “nothing bad has ever happened” (173) create Tyler, the inheritor of his parents’ self-importance and second-degree immortality. Like the Undersea’s population, Tyler longs to see and be the sunrise (“How do you bring the light if you are the light?” [293]) and actively derails humanity’s improvement to immortalize himself in brainwashed followers and multiple wives’ children. 

Tyler’s equal and opposite reaction is his spiritual half-sister, Kirsten. Kirsten can’t remember her biological parents; she’s instead raised on the undying fragments of Arthur and Miranda. Before Arthur can die and the apocalypse can begin, the three share a brief but essential domestic tableau in Arthur’s dressing room, where Miranda plants the seed for her Doctor Eleven-style disciple. While Elizabeth hands down to Tyler her privileged solipsism, Kirsten’s surrogate mother bequeaths a comic book about outsider survival, as well as a paperweight for when survival is insufficient-- After all, what’s more notoriously useless than a paperweight? 

The paperweight’s storm cloud, immobile but perpetually visible, represents the post-apocalypse mood that propels Kirsten and Doctor Eleven. The final act of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns dissects this mindset in a medieval pageant/musical written by second- and third-generation apocalypse survivors. Springfield’s deceased represent the values their extinction punished: Homer dies in blind optimism, Lisa and Marge die longing for home. When Bart emerges as Springfield’s sole survivor, no one’s more perplexed than he is, and that’s because his unwilling and unwitting spirit is a key feature of the new humanity’s mindset. Dr Eleven and the people of Year Twenty aren’t sure how or why they’re alive, but the planet continues to propel them forward. 

As Arthur had hoped, his children manage to redeem his life’s selfishness. The surname “Leander” suggests a Lear who meanders, a deluded and disgraced ruler wandering through worlds and generations attempting to save his kingdom. This would seem to apply to both Tyler and Kirsten; as Arthur’s surrogate child, Kirsten would share the Leander name, and her earlier role as Cordelia promised that her loyalty and perseverance would redeem her king’s legacy from her wicked sibling. But Cordelia was the disinherited child and, as such, Kirsten no longer bears the family name. Recall instead Kirsten’s symbolic conception: Miranda entered Arthur’s feminine domestic space and sowed the seed of Station Eleven, the story of a man who inherits a different kind of broken kingdom through a process resembling patrilineal descent. Kirsten is Arthur and Miranda’s child, but she isn’t a Leander-- She’s a Carroll. Miranda’s gender-bending role as Captain Lonagan means that “[in Lonagan’s] absence, [Kirsten] must lead” (304) her inherited lost kingdom not with Lear’s vanity, but with Dr. Eleven’s selfless determination. 

George.

Like the mystic Beatle, Yellow Submarine was a late bloomer, underappreciated and largely ignored. Though George’s introduction of Eastern religion and instrumentation helped define the band’s psychedelic phase, Revolver and Sgt Pepper (1967) gave him the short end of the stick. The other Beatles vetoed “Only A Northern Song” for Pepper, meaning Harrison’s sole contribution was “Within You Without You,” a song sped up in post-production to trim Harrison’s presence by another minute and a half. Harrison featured more prominently on Revolver with “Love You To,” “I Want To Tell You,” and one of rock’s greatest album openers (and George’s only opener in the Beatles discography), “Taxman”. However, John and Paul once again outpaced the introverted Beatle-- Paul even stole the lead guitarist’s role on “Taxman”, performing the solo after George couldn’t play it fast enough.

Yellow Submarine is different. For the first and only time in the Beatles’ discography, George shares an even third of the credit with John and Paul, who were unenthused about the project and reeling from Epstein’s death. “All Together Now,” like many McCartney songs, is catchy fluff; even McCartney branded his lone contribution “a throwaway.” Two of John’s three contributions had been previously released: “Yellow Submarine” and “All You Need Is Love,” while both iconic songs, already had their heyday. However, “Hey Bulldog” was in its prime. The only Yellow Submarine song recorded after Epstein’s death, it carries an intoxicating blend of Sgt Pepper psychedelia and White Album (1968) return-to-roots mentality. The blazing guitars of “Taxman” and Sgt Pepper’s title tracks collide with the jaunty piano-slamming of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Sexy Sadie”. The song’s climactic howling is half “Good Morning Good Morning” barnyard samples and half “Yer Blues” shrieks, the sound of the Beatles’ rose-tinted mystery tour giving way to austere self-examination.

Though “All You Need Is Love” is Side A’s closing song and the ostensible climax of the Yellow Submarine movie, “It’s All Too Much” eclipses John’s sappy singalong with its own acid-driven revelation. Ringo admitted that George’s song “really sets the mood of the movie [Yellow Submarine],” providing the moment in the final abstract sequence when “the music and the movie really gel.” “Too Much” starts with one of psychedelia’s signature sounds, the wail of guitar feedback, until the Hammond organ enters with the suggestion of a religious epiphany. For the next six minutes, these two instruments contribute a droning “Aum” previously reserved for the tabla and sitar, and the result is a Westernized meditation on consciousness within the Summer of Love. George’s dry, literal lyricism finds a home in psychedelic rock that it would struggle to find again. (For example, 1976’s dragging “See Yourself” informs the listener that “it’s easier to see the books upon the shelf / than to see yourself.”) That lyrical bluntness becomes an anchor in a sea of alien noises and blaring feedback. “Too Much” reaches transcendental heights in its lyrical austerity, simulating how LSD endows menial details with life-changing emotion. After four minutes of hallucinogenic reverie, Harrison’s non-sequitur “With your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue,” borrowed from a Merseys song and repeated for emphasis, feels like nothing short of a revelation.

“Only A Northern Song” contains a similar transcendental austerity, this time with a fracture in the fourth wall. (Once again, Paul steals the lead instrument, but this time he’s purposely underperforming on trumpet, a half-developed skill from his teen years.) From the first line, the singer is addressing the listener. It’s a common narrative tool in pop songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”, but this time the singer and listener are exactly that: “If you’re listening to this song, / you [the listener] may think the chords are going wrong.” And Harrison’s right; the chords are dissonant, the instruments awry. But the same stanza assures us that “they’re not, / We just wrote them like that.” What is this narrator’s relationship to the music? How much agency does this band actually have over the sounds they produce? Does this person revel in dissonance, or are they as helpless to “repair” the song as the listener is? (Thanks to the limitations of analog technology, the Beatles were no strangers to unfixable mistakes: Listen for the previous take’s flubbed guitar solo in the background of “Can’t Buy Me Love”.)

Like the instrumentation, “Northern Song’s” disparate subject matters strengthen the song’s overall conflict. The track is a passive-aggressive jab at the band’s imbalanced partnership. George had stayed on John and Paul’s Northern Songs music label to selflessly grow the others’ payouts; John and Paul each owned 15% of Northern Song’s shares, while George owned a minuscule .8%. At the same time, the song title playfully references the boys’ childhoods in Liverpool, the “holy city” of Northern England. George’s contribution to the Fab Four’s nostalgic period remains conspicuously absent from the contest between Paul’s “Penny Lane” and John’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” (“Penny Lane” leaves me cold, but I’d struggle to choose between “Strawberry Fields” and “Northern Song”.)

While Pedro and Deb are vital to Napoleon’s journey to selfhood (and one wonders whether Kip wouldn’t have gone astray if he’d had friends like them), the critical intrusion into the Dynamites’ stasis is Grandma’s removal. Grandma has been the orphan brothers’ anchoring role model, a sexless matriarch providing shelter in a sea of gender performativity and social isolation. The brothers’ first conversation shows the stark contrast of these two worlds as the wounded Napoleon seeks refuge with the school receptionist (herself a Grandma-type haven) to call Kip at home, where he “chats online with babes all day” and revels in the freedom to remotely assume an identity so far from his real-world grasp. When the hypermasculine Uncle Rico replaces Grandma (an unwelcome intrusion in itself), he reveals that she’s been adventuring across dunes with a secret boyfriend. Now lacking Grandma’s ostensible solidarity, the Dynamite brothers begin their quests to find the companionship and adulthood they’d convinced themselves they were successfully living without.

Napoleon latches onto Pedro. The day after Rex Kwon Do’s emasculating karate demonstration, Napoleon echoes the macho-man and asks if Pedro has his back. Pedro’s confused “What?” evokes a rare moment of vulnerability as Napoleon looks off and breathes “Never mind.” To Napoleon, Pedro is an enviable specimen of masculine maturity, possessing bike pegs, confidence with women, and the ability to grow a mustache. When Pedro says he intends to ask Summer Wheatly to the dance, Napoleon attempts to match Pedro’s masculinity by showing off his made-up girlfriend. “I like her bangs,” Pedro says. “Me too,” Napoleon replies, staring at a picture of a stranger.

Kip’s identity is even less stable than his brother’s. Despite being older, Kip is physically and emotionally weaker than Napoleon. Uncle Rico becomes Kip’s first stable companion and masculine role model. Kip, happy to play the toady instead of the victim (voyeuristically watching the steak hit Napoleon rather than receiving Rex’s slap himself), becomes a tool for Rico’s deluded ambition. Rico’s masculinity exudes the usual toxicity: Self-absorption, disrespect for women, a desire to get ahead. His fixation on his life’s masculine peak as a young athlete is particularly telling, revealing both his worship for manhood and his own stunted maturity. In their first one-on-one hangout, Rico and Kip talk about women, and it’s Kip’s turn to try on masculinity as he describes his own incredibly suspect girlfriend. She has a vague, “pretty good-looking face,” as well as “sandy-blonde hair” that Lafawnduh doesn’t have.

Like so many “Magical Black” characters, Lafawnduh is interesting and underdeveloped, entering the story to provide solutions for White characters. In this case, it’s Black identity itself that offers Kip an answer. Just as Rico’s retro style embodies his antiquated vision of manliness, Kip’s transformation reflects the widespread early 2000’s appropriation of Black fashion and music to express White masculinity: Third wave ska bands like Reel Big Fish, clothing trends like pants-sagging, and white rappers like Eminem all brought Black culture into vogue to an extent unseen since the 1950’s.

Meanwhile, backed by the proper companionship and cultivating a respect for the feminine, Napoleon continues to hone in on his adult identity. Napoleon’s companions, largely devoid of the White (or Black-appropriated) masculinity Kip is chasing, are feminine archetypes, compassionate and artistic. The duo serve as surrogate parents for Napoleon, with Deb demonstrating the power of feminine vulnerability and creativity and Pedro teaching Napoleon that a mustachioed, socially confident man can exude femininity. Pedro’s head-shaving provides a key lesson in Napoleon’s education. The replacement wig, provided courtesy of Deb’s pink-draped studio, exposes gender identity as performance, malleable and superficial. “I think this matches your season,” Deb declares. Pedro responds with a soft smile.

The next day brings another lesson as Napoleon offers a bullied student one of Deb’s boondoggles to symbolize Pedro’s protection-- A feminine craft symbolizing a masculine strength. The boondoggle’s promise is quickly called upon, and Pedro’s cousins chase off the bully. Napoleon witnesses the paradox of masculinity, one that CJ Pascoe observes in her theory of “fag discourse”: Though masculinity offers endless ways to dominate and police others, even the manliest identities are never secure. Masculinity is a never-ending performance, a contest that can’t be won. (Uncle Rico learns this lesson as well, and his broken arm, along with his broken masculine delusion, ushers a female energy into his life that the gentler Rico welcomes with Pedro’s soft smile.)

Napoleon’s perception of Rico and the adult manhood he represents continues to sour as the adolescent realizes what misery and delusion the grown man brings in his wake: Clogged toilets, electrocuted groins, and superficial relationships. Rico shames Napoleon for not having a job, and the subsequent chicken-cooping work earns Napoleon a dollar an hour and a Hamlet-level resentment toward his uncle. He courts Summer’s popular friend Trisha, only to find the relationship with her brand of femininity unfulfilling and unsustainable. When Napoleon and Rico finally come to blows in an impasse that can only be described as Oedipal, two important revelations emerge. Napoleon realizes he has reached his tolerance for toxic masculinity, and that that toxicity is, when elbowed, vulnerable to Napoleon’s own masculine strength. Napoleon is no longer willing to lie about wolverines or supermodel girlfriends to survive within masculine discourse-- now he knows he can harness the power of his emotions. (It’s been suggested that the Tree of Knowledge provides Eve not with a magic apple, but with the indelible knowledge that she has the ability to disobey. Does it seem fitting that Napoleon initiates this confrontation by throwing fruit?)

The identity struggles within Napoleon rise up for a final confrontation at the school election. Napoleon’s relationships with his masculine and feminine pillars, Rico and Deb, have been thrown into jeopardy, and Napoleon realizes which character’s energy is most important to him. With proper guidance from his companions, his masculinity has taken the form of a quiet strength that protects others and knowingly performs gender (i.e., the brown suit he takes off a female mannequin), and his femininity carries an emotional intelligence that can’t be acquired from Uncle Rico’s herbal supplements. And once again, Black gender identity arrives to save a White character, but now Black femininity rather than masculinity supplies Napoleon with the tools for victory. D-Qwon’s dance tape gives Napoleon the feminine power of dance as physical expression (contrast this with Kip’s physical outlets of Rex-Kwon-Do and cage fighting), and Lafawnduh herself gives Napoleon the soundtrack he’ll have on hand at the election. (That said, I’m aware that Napoleon’s dance moves are incredibly White.)

Napoleon’s dance, a triumph of femininity over masculinity, performs a vulnerability that brings the previously blank-faced student body to its feet. The students see themselves not in Pedro’s or Summer’s campaign speeches, but in Napoleon’s harrowing self-expression. Napoleon gambles his physical and emotional self on his friend’s behalf, in an act so free and selfless that Deb realizes this person would never fall prey to a “Bust Must+” brand of femininity. But the fact that the audience connects with the dance, the fact that it wins Pedro the election, doesn’t matter. What’s important is that, like Spirited Away’s Chihiro or Russian Doll’s Nadia, Napoleon confronted a final test and produced a correct answer. The prize is an immutable inner truth that will endure any bullying or masculine taunts.

After the climax, with one at the end of his journey and the other hopelessly lost within it, the Dynamite brothers cross paths one last time. (The wedding was a campy, fan-service ending tacked on after MTV’s acquisition, and I don’t consider it canonical.) Kip, in full hip-hop regalia, doesn’t notice his brother as he and Lafawnduh board a bus (in an ending reminiscent of Ghost World). Napoleon watches helplessly from across the street. This scene always makes me sad, partially because we don’t see Kip telling anybody he’s leaving-- it seems like another confused, uncharacteristic move. These brothers, having started the story together in their sexless grandma’s stasis, have ended in completely different worlds, and Napoleon, after painstakingly forging his adult identity, can only watch as his lost brother continues his own quest for meaning.

When rumors of this corruption first emerged, James Monroe and two others investigated the treasury secretary, only to beat a hasty retreat from the Hamilton household after Alexander proved to them, for hours, in excruciating detail, that the money James Reynolds kept gambling away was merely blackmail-sex-money from Hamilton’s own pocket. Concerned only with potential embezzlement, the three visitors kept quiet. But in 1797, the gossip reemerged that Hamilton was having an illicit affair using the government’s money. So Hamilton holed up in a boarding house and wrote the Reynolds Pamphlet, aiming to permanently dismiss the charges of embezzlement.

The pamphlet didn’t work. Opponents and friends alike pointed out that pleading guilty to adultery didn’t clear him of embezzlement. But the pamphlet did free Hamilton from further blackmail-- and not just from James Reynolds. For years, Republican knowledge of the affair had prevented Hamilton from fully thrashing his opponents. When Hamilton, in anonymous open letters, hinted at knowledge of Jefferson’s ongoing assaults of Sally Hemings, one of Jefferson’s cronies insinuated knowledge of the Reynolds affair in his open response. Now Hamilton could strike freely, knowing that any remaining gossip or accusations against him were untrue.

Additionally, the book-signing isn’t Enid’s last or most important brush against the fourth wall. Thanks to an elusive graffiti artist (another Clowes avatar), Enid knows her own story’s title, a story with “a haunted quality” and a road “with many forks, all of which lead [...] to gloom and darkness” (78). At the novel’s end, Enid spots the Ghost World writer in the act, cementing Enid’s certainty that Ghost World is a place (and an author) Enid can confront.

Meanwhile, wearing an old lady cardigan and glasses (but still looking nearsighted,) Becky at once resembles an old woman and the hipster “woman of intellect and leisure” (78) Bob Skeetes foretold in Enid’s palm reading. It’s possible Skeetes was envisioning Becky, but it’s more likely he was envisioning the archetypal “beautiful young woman” (80) either girl would become by remaining in Ghost World. Dating Josh cements Becky’s metamorphosis, since Josh has represented an adult conscience for both girls throughout the story. With his own car and apartment, he’s responsible and financially independent. He’s also likable and mature, donating to the homeless and making the girls feel guilty for their “fucked-up trick” (43) at the Hubba Hubba diner.

Within all this, I say again that Homer Simpson is massive. Homer Simpson, the patriarch, the epitome of Springfield and its deformed characters, the embodiment of both our and Springfield’s worlds and the chaotic absurdity that governs them both. There are other characters in Springfield that are larger than Homer: Drederick Tatum and Rainier Wolfcastle are enormous, and Barney Gumble and Chief Wiggum are almost spherical. But these characters work within our world’s proportions: They’re body-builders, they’re obese, etc. 

Homer has a perfect sphere in his abdomen that juts out as much from his back as from his stomach. He has thick limbs and he’s virtually indestructible, enduring every physical trauma that comes his way. In our world, Homer Simpson’s head would be 2-3 times larger than anyone else’s; even Springfield’s other residents don’t come close to Homer’s head-to-body ratio. Add jaundice-yellow skin and four-digit hands (three fingers and a thumb), and Homer Simpson is absolutely terrifying. (Maybe that’s why this episode always scared the hell out of me as a kid.)

There’s only one character who shares Homer’s proportions. Tellingly, it’s Springfield’s comedic demigod, Krusty the Clown. (Fans will recall that Homer even spends one episode as a Krusty impersonator: “Boss, I’m seeing double! I see four Krustys!”) In Springfield, Krusty the Clown is larger than life, an omnipresent celebrity and a figure of almost mythic proportion to kids like Bart and Lisa. We live in a similar universe, where Homer Simpson is less a character than an archetype plastered across the clothing, tchotchkes, and collective memory of the past 30 years.