Puppets?

February 19, 2008

People always ask me why I work with puppets, to which I first respond, “I have no idea.” I don’t necessarily like puppets; puppeteers are often the kind of weird folk who you avoid at all costs at parties, and the examples of puppets in contemporary media are deplorable. These puppets, generally speaking, are gross and dumb and are used to exercise the vilest inclinations of the lowest form of homo sapien. Still I insist on making “meaningful” films using them.

When I began investigating my subconscious proclivities for the little figures, I discovered that what the puppet represents is deep, vast, and totally amazing (to me, at least). The puppet figure, or “human simulacra,” as Victoria nelson calls them in her wonderful book, The Secret Life of Puppets, is ancient; it is the most visceral expression of our connection to the divine. She says, “These statues and figurines, like embalmed bodies, seem closer to the divine body than does a living human body because their static, unchanging nature imitates the permanence of the immortal.” Deep. When I started thinking about what was arresting to me when I first saw a puppet being animated by human beings (in the bunraku tradition), it was exactly this: that puppets, inert replications of the human form, only have vibrant life when a human being gives it to them, and it isn’t the human animator we see, it is something entirely new, an emancipated life, a free life, a distilled form of life energy that compels us to think beyond our own limited function.

When I think back to my first experience with puppets, I remember, as many Americans do, The Muppet Show, which featured crude felt hand puppets that had the most memorable characterizations I can fathom in my young mind. Why were these weird puppet pigs and frogs and bears so compelling? I think it is because they were liberated from literal human form, and therefore had a freedom that made all humans feel free from themselves. They were silly, profound, contentious, ridiculous, like all of us, but without the translatable pathos that invariably, albeit subconsciously, bums us out when watching “human” actors. Those puppets were life distilled, intensified, unencumbered; like the life of a saint or a spirit. Nelson says, “…what seems on the surface like a hollow shell, the antithesis of life and a parody of its expressive nature, in some ineffable way embodies its deepest essence.”

So I pursue this mis-utilized genre with great hope – is the puppet figure, and the genre of “puppet films,” capable of offering an enlivened vision of the human spirit to a fatigued, over-stimulated, computer-rendered civilization? Do we even care?

I’m betting my collection of little plastic people that we do.

A quote from our good friend Henrich von Kleist:
“Grace appears purest in that human form which has no consciousness or an infinite one, that is, in a puppet or a God.”

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