Posts Tagged unreality
Muppets Now and Forever
Everyone knows there’s a new Muppet movie in cinemas now. The tagline is “MUPPET DOMINATION”, after all. They’re obviously taking no prisoners where publicity’s concerned. It’s the plot of James Bobbin and Jason Segel’s new film The Muppets, too: how to best return these characters from pop cultural obscurity to their rightful position as entertainment icons?
The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…
The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.
This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.
It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?
It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.
It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?
(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)
My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.
Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.
Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”
And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”
To Look Like Superman
Every week, the internet selects a zany news report to pass around like an infectious yawn, and this week it was Herbert Chavez. He loves Superman so much he’s had multiple plastic surgeries in order to look more like his hero.
Buzzfeed summed it up like this: “So this is Herbert Chavez, who looks normal and not at all creepy. Strike that. Reverse it.” (Bizarro would be proud.) Andy Khouri, much more sympathetically, described it as an “unsettling quest” symptomatic of Body Dysmorphic Disorder. “It is of course within this man’s rights to alter his body in any way he sees fit,” he writes, “but it’s not hard to imagine the Man of Steel disapproving of Chavez’s actions.”
Ignoring empathy for a moment – sorry, Superman – this makes me think about Superman’s face. All the faces of comic book superheroes look wildly different depending on which artist happens to be drawing them. And I asked last year if we were willing to accept the ever-changing facial features of superheroes “because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?”
But Superman isn’t a human being with a human face, caricatured onto the comic book page. The page is where he was born. Pencil and ink are his origin story; his planet Krypton. So what, in essence, does this Superman look like? He has a square jaw. A cleft chin. A spit-curl. Dark hair, white skin. That’s about it. Everything else can change on whim.
I’ve always wondered why Hollywood’s obsession with plastic surgery is only ever used to look young. One day, an actor will go under the knife to give themselves new emotive abilities: anime-sized eyes for augmented empathy, or expanded tear ducts to better gush during tragic third acts…
Writer Peter Milligan and artist Duncan Fegredo explored this idea in their fantastic mid-90s horror comic Face. It’s the story of David, a plastic surgeon who is summoned to perform surgery on an aged, reclusive artist named Andrew Sphinx. But Sphinx, who was a personal friend of Picasso, wants something different from the surgery. Something a little more… cubist.
If someone wants to look like Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain or Brandon Routh – sure, that’s one thing. Truly resembling the comic book Superman, though, is something else. You’d need to make your nose into two quick strokes, like an upside down seven, and abstract your eyes into featureless circles attached to the eyebrows above.
Otherwise, like Andrew Sphinx says to his surgeon: “You’re still stuck in classical realism, and you’re not even aware of it.”
They’re All Cars! All Cars!
Until recently, Cars was the only Pixar feature I’d never seen. I love almost all their films unreservedly but there was something about Cars’ imagery that unsettled me. I remember having this conversation with a friend, years ago:
“They’re talking cars, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And people watch them race?”
“The spectators are cars, too.”
“What about, like, the mechanics?”
“They’re also cars.”
“But what about…”
“THEY’RE ALL CARS! ALL CARS!”
Where do these cars come from? Are they built, or are they birthed? I’m not the first to struggle with a universe entirely populated with sentient cars. (Okay – and some trains, boats, and helicopters too.) I found this hypothetical cutaway image of Lightning McQueen, guessing at the biology that could be sitting, squelching, inside his metal frame.
I find that to be the more comforting alternative, frankly. When I was visited by the Thirsty Mayor about halfway through the frenetic Cars 2, my vague suspicion of the franchise snapped into focus.
You see, Lightning McQueen is a slick racing car, without even headlights to spoil his smooth lines. But what about Mater, his dim-witted tow truck best friend? Unlike McQueen, Mater clearly has doors.
Doors.
They never seem to open, but they’re there. Are they vestigial remnants of a time before these cars came to life? Before their engines erupted with teeth and gums and flopping tongues? Perhaps there was even a moment of truce – a time when these cars could think and talk and dream, but were still happy to let their drivers inside.
Or maybe it happened in an instant. A signal was broadcast from aerial to aerial. The doors locked. The side windows fogged to grey. The windshields eclipsed with enormous cartoon eyes. From that point forward all cars would drive themselves, and the human skeletons still belted into their seats swallowed down like bad memories.
The Twilight Zone Season One: jmag review
Here’s a quick triple j magazine review of the amazing first season of The Twilight Zone, now out on blu-ray. I get a little evangelical here, but who can resist a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity? Not me.
TWILIGHT ZONE SEASON ONE
Creator: Rod Serling
Starring: Too many to name
Country: USA
Commentary tracks and deleted scenes seemed so entrancing when DVDs first appeared, huh? Man, the novelty wore off fast. Occasionally, though, pop culture archaeologists dig up something that makes it all worthwhile. The new Twilight Zone set, collecting the first season from 1959, is a time capsule: commentaries, lectures, old sponsor advertising, and creator Rod Serling’s original pitch to the TV networks. He sells his show like a pre-Mad Men Don Draper.
Unfortunately, those extras are only on the fancy blu-ray collection, but show itself is available on DVD. And it’s more than just a time capsule. It still feels alive today. Watching it will make you embarrassed for a lot of the TV we’ve made since.
The Twilight Zone took the burbling anxieties of the time – alienation, nostalgia, war – and turned them into 20-minute nightmares, week after week, aided by some of the best science fiction writers of the day. They created little morality plays with limited budgets, gorgeous black and white photography, and narration that sounds like poetry.
Other reviews this month: The Adjustment Bureau and Never Let Me Go in cinemas; the probably-better-than-the-original Let Me In on DVD.
Issue #48 on sale now.