"Homer Loves Mindy": Desire At A Distance In "The Last Temptation of Homer"

Keeping in the spirit of working through heady, philosophical topics through episodes of The Simpsons, I want to analyse the fifth episode of season nine, "The Last Temptation of Homer" through Lacanian desire. The character of Mindy Simmons, a new employee at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant (voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer), performs as such desire for Homer; threatening to disrupt his model nuclear family and his marriage with Marge. Since Lacan's writings on desire is quite a hefty topic and I envision this post to be on the shorter side, I want to look particularly at how Mindy, as the object of Homer's desire, exhibits Lacan's objet petit a.

Whilst the episode's B-Plot sees Bart transition from cool kid to bullied nerd because of some over-zealous private practitioners, the A-Plot of "The Last Temptation of Homer" launches from a safety mishap in the Nuclear Plant. This inciting incident, caused by a masculine disregard for safety protocol, characterises working at the plant as a sort of 'Men's Club'; setting the stage for Mindy Simmon's hiring and her intrusion on the masculine space. Homer, Lenny and Carl gather to lament their incoming castration, fearing that the arrival of a singular female worker will so totally disrupt their workplace atmosphere that certain masculine freedoms will be removed from them (be it taking off their pants, spitting on the floor or peeing in the water fountain). That male anxiety is soon abetted by her seamless integration into the workplace, but whilst the rest of his co-workers move on quick from this new element, Homer is smitten. For him, his encounter with Mindy is a moment of pure desire upon first sight and it is accompanied by humorous hallucinations.

"Hey, Homer, you're hallucinating again!" "Not a good sign."

The hallucinations (and later in the episode, dreams) are important to how the episode communicates Homer's desire for Mindy. It is within them that we see what the objet petit a is: an intangible, extra-natural quality that is the actual point of what we desire. Caviar, for example, is not desirable to us because of its intrinsic qualities, how it looks, how it smells, how it tastes, but is instead only desirable because of the multitudes of meanings that its physical form belies: if you eat caviar, you will have social status, you will be a connoisseur, a person of taste and so on. The objet petit a, though, is an entity that is permanently absent. In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, when discussing the Freudian character of the butcher's wife, who tells her husband that whilst she loves caviar, he must never buy it for her, Lacan wrote:

“You love mutton stew. You’re not sure you desire it. Take the experience of the beautiful butcher’s wife. She loves caviar, but she doesn’t want any. That’s why she desires it.” (1998: 249)

Importantly, the objet petit a does not actually exist. This is why when we finally attain what we desire it loses the metaphysical, theological quality, the objet petit a, which made what we desired desirable in the first place. Homer's hallucinations represent the fantastical excess of the objet petit a: his first feelings of desire towards Mindy are not grounded in material reality, but are rather concerned with such untraceable, intangible qualities.

"Ain't you never seen a naked chick riding a clam before?"

Later in the episode, an interjecting dream sequence depicts Homer's Guardian Angel (who takes the form of Colonel Klink from Hogan's Heroes) showing the difference between the world where he stays with Marge and the world where he instead pursues a relationship with Mindy. Rather than this being a undesirable world though, it is quite the opposite. Not only are Homer and Mindy together, rich and happy, but Marge is the President of the United States, and her "approval rate is soaring". Here we see Homer's unconscious fantasy, that his affair would not only bring him a selfish, short-term happiness, but long-term happiness for himself, Mindy and Marge. But it is a fantasy of which there must be no attempt at realisation. Homer's desire for Mindy is based on the idea that his life, and that lives around him, would improve. To bring that to reality would only expose his desire as a farce, as reality can never live up to the fantasy.

 "Think unsexy thoughts. Think unsexy thoughts."

One of the great strengths of this episode is how Mindy is never shown to be some kind of disruptive, evil woman, a seductress with the explicit aim of destroying the nuclear family; she's given a nice bit of humanity. Meanwhile Marge has very little presence in the episode and even in the dream sequence exposing her potential, alternate life as President, she's only heard from off-screen. Unlike an episode like "Colonel Homer" (S3E20), where a conflict between Homer/Marge is clearly apparent, the story here is not a story about how awful Homer's life is and how he needs an outlet to assuage his mid-life crisis, but rather a story that is concerned with those tumultuous, sudden moments of desire that simultaneously manage to feel essential to our being and completely alien from us.

In Lacan's formulation, the act of desire is not a desire for just one thing (be it a person, food or whatever item you may desire), but is always a desire for desire itself. It's a wholesome sight when Homer returns to Marge at the episode's end and the relief an audience feels is made all the more tangible by how close it seemed Homer had come to pursuing a life with Mindy, instead of persisting with his marriage. Yet, can we not say that this was actually the true calamity? In that, were he to pursue his relationship with Mindy, he would realise she lacks that objet petit a and would realise that his fantasy did not exist in reality. That he returned to Marge has meant that, whilst he ostensibly loves his wife, he has also liberated himself to fantasise about Mindy ad infinitum. In this sense, Homer doesn't want what he thinks he wants, rather he wants to sustain the very act of wanting. By returning to Marge, he frees himself up to desire and fantasise about Mindy with no fear of reprisal. That is, on one level, he no longer has to concern himself with the deterioration of his marriage because of Mindy, but, further, his decision to keep his object of desire at a distance means that he never has to worry about the destructive convergence of his fantasy and reality. By not committing adultery on that one night, Homer frees himself to wander, lust and cheat on Marge every night, in his dreams and unconscious fantasies.

As a final point, I'd look to the scene where Homer and Mindy are eating dinner together at a fancy, romantic Chinese restaurant called Madame Chao's. After dinner, Homer opens a fortune cookie, it read: "You will find happiness with a new love".

"Hey, we're out of these "New Love" cookies." "Well, open up the "Stick With Your Wife" barrel."

This is a notion that Lacan would reject. Rather, we find happiness within our very distance from the objects we believe will make us happy. Desire is a Sisyphean phenomenon where the actual attainment of what we desire is one of life's most morose experiences. That Homer rejects the cookie's advice is telling; we will not find happiness with a new love.


Lacan, J. (1998). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. London: Vintage.