The Late Donald Sutherland Will Always be MY Homer Simpson, Though I'm Fond of the Cartoon Character as Well
When Donald Sutherland died recently at eighty-eight, he left behind an extraordinary body of work. It’s so impressive, in fact, that it’s downright astonishing that he’s never been nominated for an Academy Award.
Sutherland was a giant of New Hollywood. In any decade other than the 1970s, a man who looked like Donald Sutherland would be relegated to supporting and character actor roles.
The iconic Canadian eventually settled into a prolific career as a character actor specializing in playing stormy authority figures, but first, he was a leading man in some of the greatest and most important American films of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Sutherland starred in M*A*S*H, Kelly’s Heroes, Little Murders, Klute, Don’t Look Now, 1900, The Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And that’s just in the 1970s! His first impressive credit is for 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, but he entered the 1980s strong with the Oscar-festooned smash Ordinary People.
One of my favorite Sutherland performances from this era is in John Schlesinger’s 1975 adaptation of Nathaniel West’s apocalyptic takedown of Hollywood and the movie industry, The Day of the Locust.
The Day of the Locust is not a great film, but it has copious moments of greatness, thanks largely to an extraordinary cast. It’s just a shame that the lead role is also the least interesting character, played by its most forgettable cast-mate, William Atherton.
There is a reason why Atherton is famous for playing the Ghostbusters’ antagonist rather than his lead roles in New Hollywood fare.
Burgess Meredith picked up the first of what would be back-to-back Best Supporting Oscar nominations (the second would be for Rocky) for the small but essential role of a sad old vaudevillian turned door-to-door salesman.
Karen Black, Billy Barty, and Sutherland do some of their best and most overlooked and underrated work here.
If The Day of the Locust had not been overlooked and underrated despite its flaws, someone at FOX would have put their foot down and explained that the bungling patriarch of the Simpson clan should not be named Homer Simpson because that was already the name of the character that Sutherland plays in The Day of the Locust.
When Matt Groening was hastily dreaming up names for his fractured satire of the modern family, he inexplicably, to me at least, chose one that was already famous and infamous and was unforgettably played onscreen by a film legend who would go on to be a memorable guest voice on The Simpsons.
It’s not as if The Day of the Locust is an obscure work FOX wouldn’t know about. It is a famous book by a famous author that was later turned into a big-budget, nearly two-and-a-half-hour-long prestige period piece directed by John Schlesinger, the famous, Oscar-winning director of Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man. It was shot by Conrad L. Hall, a cinematographer famous for winning three Academy Awards, and starred famous actors and actresses like Black, Bart, Meredith, and Sutherland.
Sutherland is absolutely heartbreaking in The Day of the Locust, playing a character who is sad, vulnerable, and deeply lost in every way.
Yet, thanks to Matt Groening’s curious choice, it takes a good twenty minutes for the name of Sutherland’s character to stop being distracting.
It’s a testament to the power of Sutherland’s performance that we do eventually forget his character’s name and focus instead on just how good Sutherland was at playing melancholy characters who know life’s horrors all too well.
Confronted by glitches like these, my autistic brain rebels and shouts, “No! There are rules to these things! You can’t just give a character an already famous name without commenting upon it in some way.”
Granted, this rule does not exist outside my brain, but that does not make it any less valid or universal.
I had a similar response upon learning that the gloomily boring protagonist of Five Nights at Freddy’s is named Mike Schmidt.
“No!” my brain once again cried out unnecessarily but loudly. “You can’t just name someone Mike Schmidt. He’s one of the greatest baseball players of all time, a member of the 500 homers club, and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Mike Schmidt is a legendary third baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, not a temp facing surreal complications while looking at a long-dormant pizza place.”
I don’t know if this is a pet peeve for anyone else, but it sure is for me.
So Hollywood, please stop giving new characters names that are already famous so we can appreciate one of Donald Sutherland’s finest performances rather than getting hung up on the character’s distractingly over-familiar moniker.
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