Lisa’s Substitute

My Recollection

MORE ASBESTOS MORE ASBESTOS. There were no Jewish cowboys. What’s a spirochete?

When you spend most of your life having your otherness and exclusion as a constantly enforced fact, you get to thinking that you know as much as you can about it. There can’t be any more surprises, I’m weird. Fine. But the weird you settle on is a weird defined by contexts, and as these change then so too does the nature of your weirdness. I bumped into this at Uni, as the only person in all but one of my tutorials to come from one of the underclasses. I bumped into it again when out on prac.

The little ways we reveal parts of ourselves not obvious to the naked eye are fascinating things to see. In retrospect, obviously, as it never occurs to you in the moment. When asked if I had any further questions regarding my time as student teacher, my first question was a sad look into a reality that my mentor had no reason to ever consider. “What do I do if a fight breaks out or someone throws a chair or something?” I may as well have asked about the procedure for when a student reveals itself to be The Thing. They’d blink, vocalise some permutation of “Uhhhh…”, and look at me like I were insane. This gap in experience explains some of the things I saw from substitute teachers when I was young.

I think it was around year 5 that the turds started showing up. Amazingly well-formed clumps of human faeces would be found places they shouldn’t be, like on stairs or in front of toilet blocks. This lasted about a semester and no culprit was ever publicly acknowledged to be found, though they may have caught someone and simply kept it quiet to discourage copyscats.

The mystery occupied our small minds entirely. It was the most misbehaviour the school had seen without an immediately obvious perpetrator. Ferals commit crimes of passion. Angers and frustrations that overload what little social coding the vessel had. Even thefts were easily resolved, as when someone’s bike was stolen, and the thief was seen riding it to school the next day. This was the administration made powerless through a heretofore unthinkable blow that elevated the shitter to super-villain.

I still think about it. It could have been one person, but they occurred with the kind of arrythmia that humans can’t reproduce. The turds occurred in ways that never suggested a throughline of intent or even the predictability of human attempts at unpredictability. It could have been that the individual was wholly unaware, just going when they needed to and never being caught through some farcical series of coincidences. A team of shitters was theorised, but that would have required a level of organisation considered beyond the level of house unbroken. And if they weren’t coordinating, surely someone would have been caught at some point.

Years without factual pruning, my theories have grown wild. They were of such construction that it almost ruled out the poorly fed obvious suspects, so perhaps a teacher? For a variety of reasons, too long to list now, I’ll never be able to rule this out.

It was about two months into this that a substitute saw her turd. The student body still discussed the matter, but with no clues or even rumours about a responsible party, the excitement had subsided. These were just part of the things that happened at school. These were not just part of the things that the substitute had happen at her school. Seeing something you know you shouldn’t be seeing takes a moment as, when presented with an impossible situation, the brain will reconcile the situation, often by denying the evidence.

These are stairs. Poo doesn’t go on stairs. That can’t be human poo. But it is poo.

The brain will snap its fingers and blame an animal, some wild thing or another, maybe a dog, but these are just levies breaking under the waters of the truth. Eventually, her mind had to concede that this was human poo but that just presented her with another impossible thing to reconcile. None of the children under her care were surprised by this.

There’s something magical about watching someone’s reality collapse. I’ve been fortunate enough to see it a few times and I hope to, and try to ensure that, I will see it many more before I die. Most thoughts zip about the face too fast to appreciate, and few of these ever lead to some great revelation. Big moments spurred by the absurd or impossible shift about a person like giant duplo blocks, so big and easy to follow that you can know which ones are going where before the poor victim does.  

A cascade of thoughts hit the substitute. Each impossible and vile. Each pulled her face into a new wretched configuration.

The human poo realisation was already more than she was prepared for, but we weren’t surprised by this. We weren’t surprised because it’s happened enough to be boring. There are people shitting around this school as a thing and nobody can stop it. The children have acclimatised. This is normal here. The world is hell.

She subbed at Goodna a few more times, but the light had gone out. That giddy vibrance common to young educators was replaced by the nervous energy of an animal’s stubborn desire to survive clashing with a human mind’s desire to follow its light into the dark.

 

The Episode.

I’ve only seen a few episodes of Modern Family, some from season 1 and one from season 9, and I spent a lot of the season 9 episode wondering who the new character they added was. I recognised Phil and his wife, but there was some guy in the kitchen I assumed to be a late series addition, like the baffling Kirby Gardner in Frasier. It wasn’t, it was their son who had simply grown as youth tend to do. Phil and his wife, along with the other adult characters, remained, not just recognisable, but practically unchanged.

It’s not odd for the adult characters of The Simpsons to look identical across a fairly long timespan, after all, Paul Rudd has looked the same for the past 24 years. Children, though, are creatures defined by their constant difference. Even a small gap of 4 years, if between 12 and 16, can see change to the point of being a whole new person. So, it is that the timeless void of The Simpsons’ universe impacts the children particularly hard.

Bart fares best, as the typically burdensome yoke of being more an archetype than a character ironically protects him from chafing against his existential stasis. He is a comedic tool, too stupid to change, whose only real character growths occur in hypothetical futures or forgotten pasts.

Lisa gradually mutates into a form of this, but only much later. In the early series, she is the primary source of character development and long-term narrative universe changes. Her youth binds her to a spectrum of experience, but her odd-but-not-impossible level of intelligence gives her a much larger emotional range to explore, of which Lisa’s Substitute is a stand out example.

Prior episodes that focused on Lisa have been interesting markers in her maturation, if a bit out of sensible order. The pious Presbylutheran Lisa is not an irregularity to the idea of Lisa, but its position in her history is. The girl experiencing her first taste of depression in season one doesn’t reach for faith like the religious girl who fears for her cable stealing father’s soul in season two. Nonetheless, both are good windows into one of the few characters the show has who is capable of meaningful development and change.

There is an endless discussion around the idea of children who don’t see themselves in their surrounding media, but Lisa is a nice if sad example of when a child doesn’t see themselves in even their own family. This sense of being an outsider as one of Lisa’s core traits is a well-worn part of her nerd trope, but it is also one given authentic life through her various character moments and focal stories. Her father is an oaf who could never hope to understand her, her mother is a dull doormat whose infrequent flashes of depth still don’t match her daughter, and her brother is her tormentor. This story expertly draws on this to take what would seem an odd juvenile crush and turn it into a perfectly understandable emotional response to the first sense of contact with a familiar she has ever had.

Mr Bergstrom recognizes what is probably an element of past self in Lisa, and if not, he is otherwise immediately aware of how important he will be to her. All his interactions with her are about giving her the skills to navigate lonely waters, as he knows he will be only a tiny part of her life. Dustin Hoffman does a fantastic job as Mr Bergstrom, some of his lines would otherwise be the cheesy, disingenuous soundbites of a motivational speaker had Hoffman not so committed to them. Given that the whole plot revolves around this relationship, his performance is a particularly vital one and I cannot immediately bring to mind another celebrity cameo that has the emotional force or character relevance of his.

Continuing this theme are his interactions with Homer. Lisa’s father is a man burdened by many weaknesses whose sole intellectual strength is the ability to push on in spite of his awareness of them. Every time he is pushed, he breaks, and his immediate collapse into sobbing self-pity while talking to Bergstrom at the museum is another look at this. It’s a frequent mistake people make, to assume the bravado or self-assuredness of a man to be the true self, Homer’s immediate shift when he thinks he’s done something to benefit his daughter is a good example, but it’s not. The truth is the pain and the fear.

This is manifest in the completion of the emotional arc for the episode. Lisa has been left by the only person she has felt an intellectual connection to, and Homer’s attempt to understand it intellectually is a stunning failure. But his emotional connection lands because it is vulnerable, and in his honesty, he repeats a point of Bergstom’s: that Lisa will one day find a place that is for her. This symmetry allows Lisa to split her idea of connection. It is not that she does not connect with her family, it is that she does not connect intellectually. The lack of that connection has dominated her life to the point of obscuring the emotional connection she has with her family. She realises this as Homer admits to her that, in her paradise, guys like him are serving the drinks. His empathy has him deal with something painful to his self-esteem, and this proves the connection she had forgotten. The intellectual place is still far away, but this is okay as now she is not alone while she waits.

This character exploration is backed up by an episode that is excellently (in spite of Springfield Elementary’s impossible architecture) structured. Using Bart’s run for class president as the B story allows the show to give the school setting a narrative primacy, which subsequently strengthens the perceptions of youth that the stories are based around. Instead of cuts to distant locations that force some expository element, scenes can shift through continued shots and create new scenes that build on what we were already watching. The great separate-but-interwoven technique of blending Bart’s comic schoolyard nonsense into Mr Bergstrom’s lesson to Lisa about the greater world out there are each made better by their entanglement. Lisa’s story is about her family through her eyes, and these techniques allow Bart’s story, an ultimately small part of the episode, to exist as more than just a thing Lisa observes, which in turn deepens the reality of her narrative.

There are a lot of typical elements in Lisa’s Substitute. The narrative uses its comedy character for the comedy parts and its serious character for the serious parts. The emotional rift between the father and the daughter is easily patched up with a heart-to-heart. But the way the episode combines these parts leads to a whole that is so much more. A sitcom family comes together in the end because of some trite narrative lie where a character learns a lesson without having to change or they get the thing they supposedly learned they don’t need to be happy. Lisa doesn’t have any of her problems solved. She is still distant from her family, town, school, and everything else in her life, and Mr Bergstrom didn’t teach her how to be popular. But she learned that there is something out there for one part of her life, and her family are there for the other.

The Lisa in this episode is the prototype of the girl we get for many years to come. Her intelligence and manner are settled by the end, and probably as a result of the events of this episode. It’s a little light on the laugh out loud moments, but Lisa’s Substitute is one of the great character episodes of the series.

Yours in taking the train, Gabriel.

 

Jokes, Lines, and Stray Thoughts.

The opening shot of the clock, fifteen minutes past nine, is a great episode start. The children in chaos because of a late teacher establishes the schoolyard perspective the rest of the story lives in.

Lime disease sounds bad.

Our vice principal took my class in year 4 once and he taught us about the schwa too. I’m beginning to think it was something common a couple of generations ago.

HEY, LET’S PLAY “THINGS THAT CAN’T EVEN HAPPEN IN A TV SHOW ANYMORE”! A teacher shooting cap-guns in an American classroom, wild, don’t know if I’ll ever see it be okay again in my lifetime. Haha, that country is turning into Mad Max so slowly but certainly that I’m beginning to feel the pangs of my culture being appropriated.

Bart’s class is above Lisa’s as Skinner looks up to the sound of screams, but later, Lisa’s is on the top floor. I sure hope someone got fired for this reference.

Hoffman going by Sem Etic is a bit weird but I suppose it beats J. Ew.

Substitute teaching, or any situation where what you are doing doesn’t require testing or anything, is a lot of fun. Being a novel stimulus makes the children pay more attention to you, and you can just work on being entertaining and the kinds of leadership and guidance this episode focuses on.

Bart pulls the comedy wagon, this episode, and does it well. MORE ASBESTOS is something that has stuck in my head for years, I’ve shouted it at people making terrible life decisions and it pretty much sums up the underlying problem with a democracy full of nitwits.

We get a proper introduction to Ralph here. You’d think his “talent’ would set the bar low enough but boy, does he get under it.

It’s sad to see a museum close down but considering the exhibits it has for a tiny town, it may have been a long time coming.

Lisa’s infatuation with Mr Bergstrom is an interesting thing because it is a combination of the platonic and romantic that only children can manage. It is well beyond mere admiration, but the idea of it being romantic is never even acknowledged, to a degree that feels more like an explicit statement. In ten years, Lisa’s emotional focus would have absolutely involved some form of sexual attraction, I know plenty of girls who’ve either pined for teachers or acted on feelings after leaving school, but here it’s just the intense want of someone without hormones. Avoiding it was a good idea, as the idea would fill up too much space, and corrupt the value of the relationship to Lisa’s personal growth.

The original plan for the note was to add an exclamation point. You are Lisa Simpson! It’s an awful idea. The calmness of the declaration affirms the fundamentally calm nature of the self. An exclamation point screams an idea because the idea is afraid of not being heard. The self does not need external validation, otherwise it is not the self, it’s something you’ve demanded from others.