9.07.2009

Why Don't You Get Things Started?

Every once in a while, you discover a book that strikes you as the perfect book, made especially for you, the book for which you must surely be the ideal reader. Lethem's Fortress of Solitude felt that way for me, as it touched on many things that mattered to me in my own childhood: comic books and rock music and race relations and urban living and the difficulty of connecting, even to close friends. Even the Fortress' messiness is endearing to me. It's a book that never travels very far from my bedside -- I like having it close.

I may not develop the same emotional attachment to Kermit Culture: Critical Perspectives on Jim Henson's Muppets, but like Fortress it combines two things that unreasonably important to me: Thinking Too Much About Stuff, and The Muppets.

At the risk of sounding like an Onion op ed, I have always had a pretty involved relationship with the Muppets. My father worked at the same Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate where Jim Henson put on his first televised show, and years later when The Muppet Show was being test-marketed, I had an opportunity to see a pilot episode well before the series showed up in syndication. My brother had seen the first episode of Sesame Street. Somehow, as a five- or six-year-old, I'd assembled these different things to mean that Jim Henson and I were distantly related. I had hopes that he might visit at Christmas.* Henson was probably my first hero, and I doubt I've missed an episode, movie, or TV special since the premiere of the show in 1976.

So a book which pairs the Muppets with scholarship and critical connections creates an opportunity to tether the seven-year-old me to the 38-year-(at least for another 21 days)-old me. The best of the essays within, to both my academic eye and my seven-year-old patch-covered eye, are "How to Become a Muppet; or, The Great Muppet Paper," by Ben Underwood, "The Muppet Show as Educational Critique," by Julie G. Maudlin, and "Muppets and Money" by Andrew Leal. (Other works worth a mention examine Gonzo the Great as a cultural critic, and Miss Piggy's post-structural feminism.)

Underwood's essay explains, or comes the closest I've seen, why a kid like me would have been so fascinated with the Muppets, arguing that as the show blurs the line between performer and audience. A "Muppet Show" employee (and I'm speaking here of the show within the show) is just as likely to work as a gofer or stage manager as they are to perform, and Statler and Waldorf -- the critics -- also appear as performers. When we see the show's audience, they are not humans but chickens and pigs and weirdos. Further, as the meta-show's audience, we too move from watching the acts on the Muppet Theatre's stage to the goings-on in the wings and in dressing rooms. Thus, Underwood points out, we -- the TV audience -- also become Muppets (or are "Muppetized," in the academic parlance) and therefore share in their dreams and goals -- of which, more below.

Maudlin's chapter argues that The Muppet Show can be seen as a 1970's counter-argument to Sesame Street, suggesting that:
In spite of the gratuitous explosions and excessive nonsense, there is a certain nostalgic sweetness about the Muppets, an implicit compassion that seems to undergird the chaos. . . This particular quality of The Muppet Show brings to light the ... work of Nel Noddings, who challenges us to adopt care-centered curricula and suggests that the post-Sputnik organization of school studies around the academic disciplines is unfair to students because they receive schooling for the head but little for the heart and soul. Perhaps if "a sense of caring" and "positive feelings" were the focus of our educational experiences, the learning process might be a more meaningful and valuable life experience, and, just maybe, we could enjoy a little madness along the way. (178)
Prof. Dryer, were he to read this, would be reaching for his air sickness bag, but I'm alright with it. When one loves the Muppets, one learns to accept a fair amount of hoovy-grooviness.

Leal's chapter, "Muppets and Money," traces Henson's history as a businessman, negotiator, and creator, but also refutes some of that hooviness and/or grooviness. (Some of this is also addressed in Underwood's chapter.) Sure, Henson had long hair and beard and would have, if given a little bit more time on Earth, saved us all through puppetry, but he was also a capitalist, just as his Muppets are capitalists. Kermit and Company's goal, in their trek towards Hollywood in The Muppet Movie, was -- after all -- to become "rich and famous." What was important, Kermit claimed, was sharing one's dreams with others, creating togetherness and inclusion, accepting people (or chickens or pigs or weirdos) for who and what they were.

Each Muppet story, in its way, is an origin story: here's how the Muppets came together to get to Hollywood, solve a jewel heist, put on a show, change Scrooge for the better, help Gonzo learn about himself, whatever. The TV shows and the movies all demonstrate, to those of us who feel different or misunderstood or lonely, that it is possible to choose one's own family, to find a place where we belong, to accept our own weirdness, to connect. "Someday," Kermit tells the lovers and the dreamers, "we'll find it."

* If you should ever need to hear an embarrassing story about me, say the words "Christmas" and "Muppets" within hearing range of my parents. Or the word "Scooter" would do just as well.

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