The Greatest Furniture in Fiction [Think Tank]

[This week’s Think Tank is inspired by an article in the New York Times describing fans’ fixation with one of the most famous pieces of furniture in fiction, Captain Kirk’s chair from the original Star Trek TV series. The Overthinking It writers offer their own choices for the greatest furniture in fiction–vote for your favorite at the end of the article, and suggest your own in the comments.]

Superman’s Bed (Superman II)
by Belinkie

I’m not talking about the bed Clark Kent has in his Metropolis apartment. That bed is probably utterly uninteresting. Nice hard mattress, plain white sheets, maybe boxes of sweaters stored underneath. But the bed in the Fortress of Solitude is pretty fascinating.

The Fortress grows from a single Kryptonian crystal in the first Superman film, and until the midpoint of Superman II, we have no reason to believe there’s anything in there that’s not a crystal. “Minimalist” is a good word for it. In fact, they joke about this earlier in the film, when Lex Luthor sets foot in Superman’s inner sanctum. “It has everything!” he exclaims in wonder. “Not everything,” Miss Tessmacher grumbles. Lex sighs. “Why didn’t you go before we left?” “That was two days ago.” (POSSIBLE ISSUE TO OVERTHINK LATER: What are the odds that Lex made it from Metropolis to the North Pole in only two days, traveling largely by balloon?)

The Fortress has definite grandeur, but it is short on creature comforts. Or is it? Because in the middle of Superman II, we suddenly see the Man of Steel and Lois snuggling in a vast expanse of silvery fabric.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we3FHiN3nqA&start=237

I suppose Superman could have lugged a bed up there from the Metropolis Crate and Barrel. But the weird shiny fabric suggests suggests this bed came with the fortress. This is a traditional Kryptonian bed. And it drives me crazy, because we never really get a look at it beyond a couple closeup shots. Is it a rectangle, or the shape of the Superman emblem? Is it 20 feet wide? Is that fabric some sort of alien material that breaths like cotton but insulates like wool?

And if the Fortress of Solitude has a freakin’ bed, then what else does it have? A night table? A dresser? A microwave? You know, despite Miss Tessmacher’s earlier grumbling, I’m going to assume that the Fortress actually does have a bathroom. Because even if Superman himself doesn’t pee, or has some sort of super bladder that can hold it for months, I doubt he’d take Lois to an igloo with no plumbing for their first date.

The Couch (The Simpsons)
by Mlawski

The Simpsons wasn’t the first show to revolve around a couch, but it certainly put the Platonic ideal of “Couchness” under a whole new light.  In other domestic sitcoms, the couch was a place to commune, much like the kitchen table in The Golden Girls or M*A*S*H’s Swamp.  The Simpsons’ couch was something very different.  It was not a place to meet and talk as a family about the quotidian problems of suburban life.  It was much more important than that.

It was a place to watch television.

Other sitcom families watched TV, sure.  Archie Bunker’s chair, from which he watched the boob tube, is an obvious precursor to The Simpsons’ couch.  But the Simpsons didn’t just watch TV.  Their lives revolved around it.  From their glorious couch, the Simpsons family—and, importantly, their viewers—ingested The Itchy and Scratchy Show, Krusty the Clown, The Happy Little Elves, any number of shows featuring Troy McClure, and the collected works of Rainier Wolfcastle.  Interestingly, though these parody TV shows were clearly meant to be objects of our scorn, neither we nor the Simpson family could keep our eyes off them.  After all, no TV and no beer make us go something something*.

The show’s opening credit couch gags also show The Simpsons’ complicated relationship with television.  The couch gags started off fairly realistic but soon became progressively more parodic in nature.  Over its 20+ years as the center of its series’ universe, the Simpsons’ couch has played the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, the girder in the famed photograph Lunchtime Atop a Skyscraper, a two-dimensional trap in a Roadrunner cartoon, a piece of the David Letterman set, part of the Monty Python opening credits sequence, part of the Starship Enterprise, encased in carbonite and stolen by Boba Fett, a horse in a western, a murderous creature from a horror flick like The Birds, and the Titanic.  These are parodies, yes, but loving parodies.  And they show us what the show’s writers and creators think about television.  That television is silly, an easy target of ridicule.  But at the same time, television can show us the entire world–maybe even the entire Universe–right from our cruddy old couch.

*Go crazy?  Don’t mind if I do!

Now sit on your own couch and watch this: almost every Simpsons couch gag from the past twenty years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl2o2fCJf30

The Dresser (“Trapped in the Closet, Chapter 1”)
by Lee

“What dresser?” you might be asking yourself. If you forgot, let me refresh your memory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RtY-iJy6MU&start=213

Checks under the bed
Then under the dresser
He looks at the closet
I pull out my Beretta
He walks up to the closet
He goes up to the closet

The dresser doesn’t figure too prominently in the story–it’s just one of several places that the woman’s husband checks to find the source of R. Kelly’s ringing cell phone–and you barely even see it in this segment. So why am I choosing this obscure piece of furniture to stand along the likes of the Simpsons’ couch and Superman’s bed? Well, I think R. Kelly’s own words speak for themselves:

Now, to be honest with y’all, the Beretta, uh, I really needed a rhyme word for dresser, you know, and Beretta just came out. But at the same time, it make sense. That’s the interesting thing about Trapped in the Closet.

In other words, the presence of the dresser provides the creative spark for R. Kelly to introduce the Beretta into the story (he clearly would have had no pretense to introduce firearms into the story otherwise). With one stroke, R. Kelly raises the stakes of the game far above that of a simple love affair and a closet. The stage is now set for all of the high drama that ensues over the following 21 chapters. The midget? The stuttering pimp? It’s all made possible by this dresser.

Dr Claw’s Chair (Inspector Gadget)
by Fenzel

When I heard about a Think Tank on fictional furniture, I was excited to write about the World’s Most Comfortable Chair from The Tick. It’s a chair so comfortable that it has become a powerful weapon – anyone who sits in it is overwhelmed and incapable of doing anything else. I frequently quote the episode of The Tick (this is the cartoon, ‘natch) in which it appears, when this chair hoists the villain by his own petard: “Maybe I don’t have to conquer the world. Maybe I can just sit in this chair.” It’s a stirring sentiment.

But then I thought about it more, I realized it was less interesting to talk about fictional furniture, and more interesting to talk about furniture in fiction. Well, I didn’t exactly realize it – my Overthinking It colleagues made it clear to me that I was a bit off the mark with my appraisal of the topic.

Very well then. Maybe I have to get up from that super-comfy chair. No matter. Just like 7:30 on a Monday morning. Okay.

So, let’s talk about what makes furniture in fiction interesting. I’ve performed in a lot of stage shows, and I have a good sense for when I think a piece of furniture is accomplishing something interesting narratively or aesthetically and when it is not. When it does accomplish something, and it manages to be aesthetically pleasing, and it manages to be dense on content, compelling, and thrive on reinterpretation and second looks, that’s when I think you’ve got something.

Regular readers of Think Tank may know that I tend to prize elegance as one of my chief aesthetic values. Symbols or works of art that manage to say many things at once without appearing to have too many moving parts always impress me.

Behold:

Dr. Claw’s chair is not unique in its role – there are several other fictional chairs that mainly serve the purpose of ominously obscuring the sitter. For the uninitiated (or the only Matthew Broderick initiated), on the cartoon Inspector Gadget, the back of this chair was usually all you saw of the series primary antagonist Dr. Claw, who ran the fictional criminal organization M.A.D. – well, you also usually saw a KISS-army-style gauntleted hand stroking a fat cat with uncanny coloration. But that dense symbolism is fit for another post.

The thing I love about Dr. Claw’s chair is how backhanded (no pun intended) it is – while it mainly serves to hide the identity of the antagonist, it also tells us almost everything we know or need to know about him. It makes a HUGE statement. The old European styling, the unfinished, heavy wood frame, the emblazoned devil mask and company acronym on the back – this is a chair that brags, people, not a chair that hides. Very ironic, very elegant.

The M.A.D. organization is a pretty nonsensical and comical thing – it’s a super-evil spy organization that doesn’t really do much to effectively hide itself. Its henchmen tend to dress fairly conspicuously, albeit in black. Its schemes are outlandish and seem likely to drift into the public eye fairly easy. The whole gang is borderline flamboyant – the only people who really effectivley keep secrets are Penny and Brain, the bumbling robo-inspector’s niece and dog, respectively.

For the show to work, the symbolism surrounding M.A.D. and Dr. Claw needs to instantly communicate the core irony behind M.A.D. – that it is a flamboyant secret organization that draws heavily on traditional ideas of villainy, but has its own sort of zany spin on things. This wouldn’t really work if the first thing you saw of M.A.D. was just a chair in the darkness. No, it has a crazy devil mask emblazoned on it – no, it has a shape that belongs in a French court or an English gothic romance.

Also, note how low-tech the chair appears to be, even though M.A.D. is a pretty high-tech organization. This further strengthens the sense that these people are the enemies of Inspector Gadget, who tends to be pretty sleek and modern with his aesthetic preferences, up to and including his narrow-cut, pale grey trenchcoat.

I’d argue that Dr. Claw’s chair is the real antagonist in Inspector Gadget. It accomplishes more than the Good Doctor ever does, it makes a huge statement – and, you know, it really pulls the room together (See, fictional furniture, rather than furniture in fiction, would have been an interesting topic!).

Want to write in a piece of furniture? Leave a comment below.