Before Banksy became a multimillion dollar selling "Art Star," his often political and frequently strange work would stop you in your tracks, even if only for a few seconds. Once he started showing in galleries and the likes of Brad Pitt started buying his work (at his first show in the U.S., we saw Christina Aguilera wandering the halls), his art began to become a little too obvious, and his sloganeering tended toward the ham-handed. But you know when leftist punk bands would sign to large corporate major labels and claim they were about to "subvert the system from within" but never quite managed to? Well, it looks like Banksy just did.
On last night's episode of "The Simpsons," the credit sequence started as normal. The only hint that things might be awry was the word "Banksy" scrawled across a few of the walls and billboards of Springfield. But once the family hit the couch, things got interesting. The show outsources much of its animation to South Korea, and the sequence focuses on the sweatshop conditions of a Fox animation gulag: overworked adults and children dip cels into toxic materials, decapitated dolphin heads seal packages, and a chained and sickly unicorn punches holes in "Simpsons" DVDs.
Okay, as satire, it's a bit over the top. What is shocking is that Fox ran Banksy's ballsy critique of outsourcing, "The Simpsons," and the standards and human rights conditions that people in first world nations accept. It's uncomfortable and dark, and not what's expected from the modern "Simpsons," which mainly consists of "Homer hurts himself" jokes. With the pretty funny "Flight of the Conchords" episode that started the season off, and now with Banksy's critique-of-capitalism credits, it might even be possible that "The Simpsons" has caught a second wind by finding its dark side.