Sam Downing

Julia Roberts playing a woman who looks like Julia Roberts, next to George Clooney playing a man who doesn't look like George Clooney

So you’re watching Hollywood Movie, starring, say, Male Lead Played By Well-Known Actor (for simplicity’s sake, let’s say Steve Carell) and Female Lead Played By Well-Known Actress (say, Amy Adams), and Actress’s character comments on her crush on Tom Cruise, to which Actor’s character responds that Angelina Jolie is way more bangable.

What’s really going on here?

Obviously Hollywood Movie is fictional, but scenes like this happen in films all the time, where recognisable actors refer, in character, to their real-life Hollywood peers. What are we to make of these moments?

One assumption is that Hollywood Movie is, in fact, set in an alternate reality where the actors Steve Carell and Amy Adams don’t exist (or at least, where they’re not Hollywood stars); however, a couple of regular, ordinary, non-famous characters who happen to look exactly like our reality’s Steve Carell and Amy Adams do exist.

Alternatively, we can assume that Hollywood Movie is set in our reality, and is about a couple of regular, ordinary, non-famous people who happen to look exactly like the film stars Steve Carell and Amy Adams. The problem with this assumption, though, is that you then have to wonder why none of Hollywood Movie’s other characters (played, presumably, by yet more well-known actors and actresses) ever notice Male Lead and Female Lead look awfully like Steve Carell and Amy Adams. Or why Male Lead and Female Lead never notice every significant person in their lives also looks like a Hollywood actor((Steal this idea: a comedy about a town whose residents do realise they all look like Hollywood actors, and open some sort of impersonation theme park! Charlie Kaufman, are you available to write this thing?)).

The only film I can think of that explicitly addresses this conundrum is Ocean’s Twelve, which has Julia Roberts playing Tess, a woman who looks exactly like Julia Roberts and impersonates her to gain advantage. Yet this just raises more questions – why doesn’t anyone remark on Danny Ocean’s resemblance to George Clooney? Or on Rusty’s resemblance to Brad Pitt, or on Linus’s resemblance to Matt Damon, et cetera?

It seems Ocean’s Twelve is a clumsy mishmash of both of our earlier assumptions: it’s set in an alternate reality where Clooney et all don’t exist, but in which Roberts does exist.

Glee superfans – those pale, shivering types who rabidly defend the series as “whimsical” and who are plotting to assassinate Steve Levitan because Modern Family stole the Emmy last year – will no doubt answer the question posed in this post’s title with a sugar-coated “All of them!” Oh, Glee superfans! Your optimism is painfully naive! The sad truth is, many members of Glee‘s young cast will disappear into permanent obscurity when the series ceases to be profitable even faster than the pop-culture machine got sick of Lady Gaga.

Here is a (completely subjective) ranking of which Glee cast members will remain in the limelight, from most likely to least likely.

Jane Lynch. Have you seen Jane’s pre-Glee resume? The lady had parts – ranging from “bit” to “recurring” – in damn near everything. She will continue to land parts in damn near everything long after Glee, I hope! No matter how annoying and one-note Sue Sylvester becomes, Jane will forever remain awesome.

Lea Michele. Lea has at least a couple of guaranteed film roles coming up in the next couple of years – if she doesn’t play Elphaba in the inevitable movie adaptation of Wicked, I will eat my pointy black hat. (Admittedly, the endurance of Lea’s fame is directly related to whether or not she can shake off that “Rachel Berry” persona. If every character is all fluttering eyes, pouty staginess and a vague sense of is-this-girl-going-to-shut-up-or-what, her best-before date will advance several decades.)

Naya Rivera. Yes, Naya Rivera! In early episodes of Glee, her character Santana is hardly featured at all. But! Its writers obviously cottoned on to her awesomeness quickly, because by the second half of season one she was getting to sing and everything, and by season two she earned her very own storylines! I think Naya has the potential to play much more than bitchy lesbian cheerleaders. I think she will be starring in a mix of romantic comedies and serious dramas in future years – think a non-white, non-goodie-two-shoes version of Anne Hathaway.

Jayma Mays. This may seem like a surprising choice to put so high up the list! But Jayma’s most notable pre-Glee roles, in Ugly Betty and Heroes, demonstrate she is a pro at playing both innocent ingenues and catty sweethearts. She should keep doing that! (Prediction: in the not-too-distant future she will play the kindly, non-threateningly attractive mother in every TV pilot ever.)

Cory Monteith. Cory will never be a huge star. He’s too everyman for that – handsome, but not memorably so; talented, but not memorably so, et cetera. However. Can’t you totally picture him playing the kindly doofus older brother/cool young uncle/kindly dad in TV sitcoms for years to come?

Dianna Agron. I interviewed Dianna once, and let me tell you, she is one of the most stupendously beautiful women I have ever laid eyes on. Seriously. Quinn Fabray-on-TV is a fug machine compared to the high-wattage dazzle of Dianna Agron-in-real life. Fingers crossed she will parlay her beauty and ability into a film career, snaring the “Blonde Lead” role in a string of predictable Hollywood rom-coms (kind of like what Katherine Heigl attempted to do, only Dianna won’t be as hateful).

Heather Morris. Here’s what I can’t figure out: is Brittany S. Pierce a surprisingly hard role to play (thus making Heather a super-talented actress), or she a pretty simple, effortless role to play (thus making Heather a so-so actress)? Maybe it’s the former? But I’m not entirely sold on that? Either way, Heather is beloved by Glee fans, ensuring her longevity as a Cult Star for decades’ worth of TV and pop-culture conventions to come! (Plus: damn, girl can dance. If someone were to cast her in a show which was basically just her dancing in various situations, she would immediately shoot to the top of this list.)

Matthew Morrison. I realise Matthew is trying to launch a solo career as a musician. Which is good for him (so long as he never tries to rap ever, ever, ever again), though he’s a bit old to play the “Justin Timberlake” market. However! His marketing team has hopefully realised there is a great deal of potential (and disposable income!) in the “approaching middle-age sexpot mother” demographic. Those ladies could keep Matthew’s albums and tours afloat for years!

Chris Colfer. Maybe it’s only because I don’t like Kurt, but I can’t see Chris playing any other roles which aren’t prissy, annoying gay clones of his Glee alter ego – I hesitate to describe Kurt as “iconic”, but the character is almost too iconic (is there a watered-down version of that word?) for Chris to ever move past. But! Apparently he is a burgeoning television mogul. So there’s that.

Amber Riley. It would be awesome if Amber to remained a superstar – insert praise of her voice here! – but realistically, I can’t see it happening. How would she be marketed? (If the dark god of marketing can’t jam you up into your own tidy, specific box, you are doomed, and pop-culture’s designated spots for Black Divas are already taken by Beyonce and J-Hud. Sad face.) (And, c’mon, the show made her sing a song called ‘Hell to the No’. Damn, that shit is whack.)

Chord Overstreet. I guess Chord could have a solid career as one of those really famous country-music singers who no one else in the world ever heard of. (He sure has the name for it.) Or he could be an underwear model! Other than that, bzzt.

Harry Shum, Jr. Hey, someone’s got to fill the casts of all those Got to Step Up and Street Dance movies, right?

Mark Salling. Though he plays a 17-year-old on television, Mark is approaching 30 (and he looks it, too. Least convincing TV teenager ever since Luke Perry). Everyone knows that once you turn 30, you stop being famous. Yes, I’m sure there’s one or two examples that contradict my argument, but don’t bother correcting me on this.

Kevin McHale. Fortunately, Artie was a member of a boy band in his pre-Glee days – and I’m told said boy band had a tiny but devoted following! (I know, right?) So maybe all those weirdos will keep following him around, or something.

Jenna Ushkowitz. Has anyone else noticed that Tina has had, like, zero storylines in season two? I get the feeling that if Glee‘s budget were suddenly dramatically reduced and several cast members were cut, Tina would be among the first to be shipped off to boarding school offscreen.

Helena Bonham Carter does "Psycho Bitch" so well

Some criminals are so bad that the only punishment for them is death. At least, this is the view seemingly endorsed by the Harry Potter universe – which is otherwise pretty liberal in its worldview.

Bellatrix Lestrange is locked up in Azkaban, the most fearsome of all wizard prisons, for her role in torturing Neville Longbottom’s parents Frank and Alice (presumably she committed a bunch of other crimes during Voldemort’s first reign of terror, too). Several years later, turncoat Dementors break Bellatrix out of Azkaban; when she escapes, she’s still loyal to Voldemort, and still determined to bring down the wizard/Muggle status quo.

So basically, her time in prison hasn’t rehabilited her even a bit. It hasn’t deterred her from committing future crimes. Nor has it ultimately deprived her of anything: she comes out of Azkaban and instantly resumes her magical power and position at Voldemort’s right hand. Bellatrix demonstrates the failure of incarceration as a means of punishment. The only way for society to deal with criminals of this nature, then, is to execute them, and Molly Weasley comes Bellatrix’s executioner during the Battle of Hogwarts.

And, of course, there’s Voldemort himself. Through the series Harry knows that at some point he’ll have to defeat Voldemort – and it’s made clear, first implicitly and later explicitly, that “defeat” actually means “kill”. It’s not like Voldemort can be locked up in a tower for the rest of his life, Grindelwald-style (though Deathly Hallows hints that Grindelwald eventually felt remorse for his crimes, suggesting rehabilitation does work in some circumstances). The only punishment suitable for the Dark Lord is death, and while Harry technically doesn’t kill Voldemort, Voldemort does end up dead.

Along with other recurring characters like Mr Burns, Fat Tony, and Jimbo, Kearney and Dolph, Sideshow Bob is one of The Simpsons‘ long-standing villains. If asked to define Robert Underdunk Terwilliger’s primary motivation in a sentence, most Simpsons fans would probably say “to kill Bart Simpson”.

But till I recently re-watched the season one episode ‘Krusty Gets Busted’ I’d forgotten that Bob wasn’t always motivated by mere homodical rage. And nor did Bob only frame Krusty the Klown in that instalment because he was sick of being the butt of Krusty’s jokes (though he admits this was an important factor:

“Yes, I admit it, I hated him,” Bob confesses as Chief Wiggum leads him away in cuffs. “His hackney shennanigans robbed me of my dignity for years. I played the buffoon, while he squandered a fortune on his vulgar appitites. That’s why I framed Krusty.”)

But interestingly, Bob also sought to get rid of Krusty because he was sick of the clown dumbing-down his young audience, who Bob exposed to the likes of high-culture beacons including Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag. Screams Bob:

“Treat kids as equals! They’re people too! They’re smarter than you think! They were smart enough to catch me!”

Early seasons of The Simpsons focused on the idea that Our Favourite Family is so dysfunctional they corrupt everyone who crosses their path, and Bob’s speedy reduction from “homicidal cultural advocate” to “homocidal sociopath” fits pretty well with this theme. As far as I can remember, Bob’s goal to cultivate the minds of children never resurfaces as a factor in his later schemes, making it a curious, forgotten remnant of his initial characterisation.

He has a pretty good body for a street rat who never has anything to eat.

In Disney’s 1992 classic Aladdin¹, Robin Williams’ Genie can do pretty much anything – except, as he points out shortly after meeting the eponymous hottie, grant more than three wishes, kill people, or force them to fall in love. Those exceptions aside, his powers are pretty much limitless.

(Or are they? What would happen if Aladdin wished that the rule banning wishing for more wishes no longer applied? Surely Genie would have to grant it; that Aladdin can wish Genie free at the end of the film demonstrates that it’s possible for “commanders” to wish genies to overcome their limitations.)

So, on the face of it, it makes sense for the archvillain Jafar to wish to become the most powerful genie in the film’s climax. He thereby gains that limitless (for all intents and purposes) power. “Ah ha!” you might point out. “It’s actually stupid of Jafar to wish to become a genie, because genies can only wield the full extent of their powers when a commander wishes for them to do so!”

But we know this isn’t so: when Aladdin is trapped with Genie in the Cave of Wonders, he tricks Genie into freeing him without wasting a wish. This proves that, in the Aladdinverse, genies can use their powers under their own steam. They may not like doing so – even when Aladdin is unconscious and drowning, Genie doesn’t save him until Aladdin kind-of-but-not-really “wishes” to be saved – but there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for granting these “freebies”.

(If you wanted to fanwank a little, and I do, you could make out like there’s some “genie equivalence rule” which dictates that, since Aladdin scored a free wish from Genie, Genie is thereby obliged to “trick” Aladdin into making a wish – which he clearly does in the above scene, by almost literally putting the words of the wish into his mouth.)

The magic carpet really is magic: it transports Aladdin and Jasmine from Egypt to Greece to China in (what appears to be) a single night. I'd calculate its average speed if I a) were good at maths, and b) weren't so lazy.

However. Further analysis reveals that your initial impulse to believe Jafar is stupid is correct, albeit not for the reason you supposed. It is stupid of Jafar to wish to become the most powerful genie in the world – because he had already wished to become the most powerful sorcerer in the world, which is already powerful enough.

(Jafar’s first wish to become sultan of Agrabah was a total wash, by the way. First, why not just wish to become ruler of the whole world? Granted, we don’t know big Agrabah’s empire is, but it’s sensible to cover one’s bases. Second, why not just wish to become a sorcerer in the first place, then use all that sorcery to usurp the Sultan?)

It’s telling that, after Jafar becomes the most powerful sorcerer, one of his first acts is to strip Prince Ali of his ersatz royalty and transform him back into plain old Aladdin. In other words, Jafar undoes the effects of Aladdin’s first wish. In other words, he overcomes Genie’s powers. In other words, at this point of the story Jafar is at least as strong as, if not stronger than, Genie.

The fact that Jafar – who is ostensibly a clever man, having managed to rise to the position of Grand Vizier in the Sultan’s palace, though in hindsight he probably only managed that because he had that hypnosis-snake-stick-thing – is then stupid enough to allow some riff-raff street rat to trick him into eternal imprisonment in a lamp, basically stripping him of the benefits of all his wishes, means he deserves what he got.

(Note that when Jafar wishes to become a genie, he’s immediately trapped in a lamp, suggesting imprisonment is the “natural” state of geniedom. Thus, the freed Genie at the end of the film represents a perverted abomination of nature. Furthermore, is it reasonable to assume that Genie was also once a man who was somehow turned into a genie, or do genies exist as entities separate from humans? Sadly, the film provides few hints to the answer – unless you assume it’s set in the far distant future, and Genie was somehow trapped in his lamp sometime around the late 20th century and has languished there for millennia. It’d certainly explain all his relatively contemporary pop-culture references, which would be lost on Aladdin.)

So while from Aladdin’s perspective the moral of the story is “wishes can’t grant happiness”, from Jafar’s perspective the moral is “wishes can grant happiness, but only if you choose your wishes carefully, you idiot moron.”

1. Which, by the way, is the only source this post references. I haven’t seen the 1994 direct-to-video sequel or the spin-off TV series, and I don’t intend to. [↩]

Pictured: Homer struggles to comprehend the theory explained in this post

In ‘Lisa’s Substitute’ Ms Hoover tells the class her lyme disease is psychosomatic. “Does that mean you’re crazy?” wonders Ralph. Another student responds: “No, that means she was faking it.”

“Actually,” Ms Hoover replies wearily, “it was a little of both.” Wiktionary concurs, more or less, telling us “psychosomatic” pertains “to physical diseases, symptoms etc. which have mental causes”.

So is Homer Simpson’s infamous stupidity psychosomatic? That is, is Homer only stupid because he wants, on some deep subconscious level, to be stupid? Could he really just be faking it?

The evidence Homer’s faking stupid lies in the episode ‘HOMR’ – maybe better known as ‘The One Where Homer Learns He’s Had a Crayon Lodged in His Brain the Whole Time’. Helpful scienticians believe the crayon is impairing Homer’s intelligence. When they remove it, Homer becomes smart, which apparently validates their theory.

But what if it’s not the process of removing the crayon which makes Homer smart, but the process of removing the mental block which prevents him from believing he is smart?

To put it another way: we know from what happens later in the episode that Homer does not want to be smart. Homer wants to fit in (well, what Homer actually wants, I think, is to live life as effortlessly as possible, and fitting in requires less effort than standing out). Smart Homer is alienated from all the other cretins in Springfield, The Simpsons’ microcosm of society; only Dumb Homer is able to fit in. Homer’s subconscious desire to be dumb manifests itself literally at the climax of the episode, when he has a qualified surgeon reinsert the crayon into his brain – much to Lisa’s dismay.

But it’s not the crayon that makes Homer stupid. The crayon is just a symbol, an excuse for Homer to believe he’s stupid. The “real” Homer Simpson is a man of average intelligence – he merely chooses to behave like a dunderhead of sub-average intelligence (though generally he’s not consciously aware of making this choice). In other words: he’s faking stupid.

We see more evidence of the Homer’s-faking-stupid theory in ‘$pringfield’. When Homer dons Henry Kissinger’s lost glasses, his subconscious desire to be dumb lifts long enough for him to quote Pythagoras’s theorem (well, he mucks it up by confusing right-angled triangles with isosceles triangles, but I did only say he’s a man of average intelligence).

“Ah ha!” you cry, attempting to poke holes in my outlandish theory. “What about the episode ‘Lisa the Simpson’?” That’s the one where Lisa discovers the existence of the so-called “Simpson gene”, which transforms Simpson men into dolts around the onset of puberty. “Doesn’t that episode prove that Homer’s stupidity is genetic, not psychosomatic?” you ask.

Well, no, because the events of ‘HOMR’ show that the Simpson gene is bunk – if Homer were genetically determined to be stupid, he would not be capable of demonstrating the intelligence he does in ‘HOMR’. (As for Bart and Grandpa: Bart isn’t stupid either – he merely suffers from ADHD, and becomes ruthlessly smart when he takes medication to treat it. And Grandpa… well, Grandpa probably is just plain stupid, for reasons unrelated to the Simpson gene. He did cancel Star Trek, after all.)

I watch a lot of television, the bulk of it reruns of classic American sitcoms on pay TV. I’m noticing a pattern here: pretty much every American sitcom character is a jerk.

And I’m not just talking about Seinfeld, where the lead foursome are acknowledged as jerks and you love them for it anyway. I’m referring specifically to Friends (though there’s plenty of other examples out there. See: pretty much every other sitcom ever to come out of the US), which on the surface is often held up as a shining example of the closeness that every modern clique should aspire to.

But even a cursory examination of the show (which I’m generally a fan of, by the way, lest you think I’m just dumping on it here) reveals that Monica, Ross, Chandler, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe are pretty much huge jerks. Like, no wonder they don’t have any friends outside their immediate social circle.

In the episode that inspired this post, Rachel steals Phoebe’s answers when they go to a book club together, Joey shoves Ross (who flies off the handle because of a vile-sounding sandwich) in Central Perk, and Chandler makes disparaging comments throughout.

So if the characters are such jerks, why was Friends so phenomenally successful?

TV Tropes (which, by the way, is one of the greatest sites on the internet¹) offers one answer: the Friends get away with being jerks because they’re funny. They are. The scripts are snappy. The cast has fantastic chemistry. So you forgive the characters their jerkiness.

I propose another answer: the Friends are, as already shown, jerks. Yet they remain friends for 10 years. And isn’t that everyone’s fantasy? To have people in your life you can constantly snark at and speak down to, yet still remain close to?

1. Warning: you will end up spending more time than you have to spare browsing TV Tropes [↩]