Last night my fiance told me we had to watch a new episode of The Simpsons because he heard that Michael Stipe from R.E.M. guest starred on the show and sang a song. What neither one of us realized was that the main plot of the episode revolved around the character Kirk Van Houten’s bipolar disorder.
The episode begins with a bizarre and pretty funny sequence of events involving a mass of animals freed from captivity only to disrupt the town’s supply of psychiatric medications. Soon follows the explanation that because of the disruption of this supply, Kirk has gone off his medication for bipolar disorder. (When we first saw Kirk hyping up, talking quickly, missing sleep, and interrupting himself with epiphanies, me and my partner just turned to each other and said “It seems like…he’s manic?”)
Completely unexpected to myself, this episode (# 805 – “Homer? A Cracker Bro?”) presented a surprisingly accurate and empathetic portrayal of bipolar disorder. The plot follows Kirk from the most brilliant and charismatic moments of mania, to the point where he ratchets up to a more frightening and delusional state, and then finally to the inevitable moment where he hits the “other pole” of manic depression and begins struggling with daily hygiene and functioning.
While a twenty-minute cartoon can’t possibly capture all the nuances of a complex mental illness, it can try, and it can succeed in surprising ways. The way Kirk rambled in a manner where he couldn’t keep up with all of his ideas, his boundless energy, and his odd ensembles all reminded me of bits and pieces of mania, and the low where he didn’t have the energy to get up and Marge had to force him into the shower reminded me of debilitating depressive episodes.
Here’s one thing the show got right: oftentimes, people in a manic state actually *do* have pretty insightful creative ideas. Kirk manages to invent something that makes him incredibly rich before he goes too far off the rails. You’ve probably heard that famous saying “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.” I would say just because you’re manic, doesn’t mean your idea isn’t brilliant. In fact, in the early stages of mania, it’s not uncommon for people to sound brilliant and convincing to everyone else around them. I loved that the show depicted this reality even though it would have been easy to just have Kirk “go crazy” really quickly.
In case anyone was wondering, or maybe you’ve probably already heard, the R.E.M. parody song in the episode is “Everybody Kirks” in the place of “Everybody Hurts,” played during Kirk’s depressive episode as he struggles to get out of bed or shower. While the song was amusing in an absurdist kind of way, I found the most poignant use of an R.E.M. song to hit at the episode’s ending.
The episode’s story arc follows Homer’s shift from dodging Kirk, who he finds boring, to his growing interest in the exciting, innovative, and lucrative ideas Kirk is developing. At the end of the episode, when Kirk has balanced out, he makes a remark about how Homer misses the “manic Kirk.”
I love that the show doesn’t really sugar-coat the fact that this is probably true. Instead, Homer and Kirk push nonexistent cracker crumbs (an in-joke in the show) from their chests, almost as if to say they shared a secret moment that they could brush off to begin again. In the background of this resolution, the R.E.M. the song “Superman” plays, with its rousing lyrics “I am Superman, and I can do anything.”
If “Everybody Kirks” was Kirk’s song for a depressive episode, “I Am Superman” is certainly the song for his manic episode. It’s an interesting choice for the end of an episode that accurately depicted how a manic episode can spiral and tip from charming to frightening pretty quickly. Especially in the context of the show’s ending, the song could be read as an anthem for the secret life of boring Kirk. An even more bittersweet and meaningful interpretation to me is that Kirk, and people like him, really *can* do pretty much anything, under limited circumstances—circumstances that, sadly, have not really found their balance in nature. In a way it ties back to the stampeding animals in the beginning, gaining their exhilarating freedom only to be medicated and brought back down to Earth.
