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Jul. 11th, 2008
the muppet musing
Jul. 11th, 2008 09:43 pmThis week I got to do a happy thing I've waited a long time for: I watched one of my lifelong favorite films, The Muppet Movie, with my kid. (To accommodate his attention span and the fact that he's just not used to watching TV, we ended up watching it in half-hour segments over three nights.)
All three of us enjoyed it, but after Ben went to bed on the last night, Willa said: "I have to confess, I've never really understood why you love that film as much as you do."
I answered, "Well, these days... mostly nostalgia. It doesn't really hit me in the same place it used to." Then I spent a while trying to remember what it was that I loved so much when I was eleven. I mean, it's not... exactly... a good film. The jokes are corny, the story is clichéd and often forced, the songs hold up pretty well but only one or two of them are truly great...
After a while I started to think about themes and metaphors and what the film says just by the way it's made. And one aspect of The Muppet Movie that occurred to me is that a lot of the time it has this sophisticated, ironic detachment--it's jam-packed with self-referential jokes playing off the fact that it's a movie. ("How did you guys find us?" "Easy. We read the screenplay: 'EXTERIOR DESERT, NIGHT'. We knew exactly where you were."). But at the same time, and to exactly the same degree, it has this happy, childlike, wide-eyed naïveté--total enchantment with the magic and wonder of it all--it's a MOVIE!
It's based on puppetry, which is the most self-evidently artificial of the performing arts (we'd never seen any of the characters from the waist down before), but the sense of artifice is blown away. Kermit's riding a bicycle, sitting on top of a tall stool with no place for a puppeteer to hide, lounging on a log in a swamp. But it's blown away selectively--he's still obviously made of felt.
In the big finale, after studio mogul Orson Welles offers the Muppets "the standard 'rich and famous' contract," they recreate their adventure with painted backdrops and special effects... only to have it all come crashing down, every artifice revealed as a cheap trick... only to have the wreckage illuminated by a glorious rainbow.
In short, one way or another, every moment of the movie depicts a tension between "believing in the magic" and "knowing it's a trick".
Which means it's about being eleven. Being right on that cusp between childish naïveté and mature (or at least teenage) sophistication, being pulled in both directions, trying to resolve the two.
The ultimate message is: The fact that it's a trick doesn't make it less magical. And that really spoke to me then. Willa was older and in a different phase of life when she saw it the first time. Perhaps I should have waited a few years longer to show it to Ben. But when I was eleven, it was made for me.
All three of us enjoyed it, but after Ben went to bed on the last night, Willa said: "I have to confess, I've never really understood why you love that film as much as you do."
I answered, "Well, these days... mostly nostalgia. It doesn't really hit me in the same place it used to." Then I spent a while trying to remember what it was that I loved so much when I was eleven. I mean, it's not... exactly... a good film. The jokes are corny, the story is clichéd and often forced, the songs hold up pretty well but only one or two of them are truly great...
After a while I started to think about themes and metaphors and what the film says just by the way it's made. And one aspect of The Muppet Movie that occurred to me is that a lot of the time it has this sophisticated, ironic detachment--it's jam-packed with self-referential jokes playing off the fact that it's a movie. ("How did you guys find us?" "Easy. We read the screenplay: 'EXTERIOR DESERT, NIGHT'. We knew exactly where you were."). But at the same time, and to exactly the same degree, it has this happy, childlike, wide-eyed naïveté--total enchantment with the magic and wonder of it all--it's a MOVIE!
It's based on puppetry, which is the most self-evidently artificial of the performing arts (we'd never seen any of the characters from the waist down before), but the sense of artifice is blown away. Kermit's riding a bicycle, sitting on top of a tall stool with no place for a puppeteer to hide, lounging on a log in a swamp. But it's blown away selectively--he's still obviously made of felt.
In the big finale, after studio mogul Orson Welles offers the Muppets "the standard 'rich and famous' contract," they recreate their adventure with painted backdrops and special effects... only to have it all come crashing down, every artifice revealed as a cheap trick... only to have the wreckage illuminated by a glorious rainbow.
In short, one way or another, every moment of the movie depicts a tension between "believing in the magic" and "knowing it's a trick".
Which means it's about being eleven. Being right on that cusp between childish naïveté and mature (or at least teenage) sophistication, being pulled in both directions, trying to resolve the two.
The ultimate message is: The fact that it's a trick doesn't make it less magical. And that really spoke to me then. Willa was older and in a different phase of life when she saw it the first time. Perhaps I should have waited a few years longer to show it to Ben. But when I was eleven, it was made for me.