Pygmalion Punks:The Shared Stitches of Puppetry and the Sex Pistols

Kevin Cooley (bio)

Abstract

The essay turns to a rarely acknowledged but rich contextual overlap between puppetry, on the one hand, and punk sartorial and musical cultures, on the other. Through readings of two texts that present this overlap most clearly, namely, the film Labyrinth (1986) and the sitcom The Young Ones (1982-84), it shows that both the punk and the puppet challenge the domestication of specific materials as unified sites of meaning.

When the political stratosphere’s objectification of people erects walls, condemns refugees, and controls people’s bodies, the language we use to refer to things that exist in liminal spaces between personhood and puppetry becomes especially saturated with critical meaning and political power. During the third US presidential debate of the 2016 election, the Republican candidate held Vladimir Putin’s contempt for Hillary Clinton against her, claiming, “Look, Putin…from everything I see, has no respect for this…person,” with a long pause preceding the word person, during which the W of the word “woman” partially formed on his lips, itching to be pronounced (NBC). Clinton’s response—”Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States”—invokes the objectifying power of the word “puppet.” The politician responds with angry, somewhat unintelligible reiterations (two times each), “No puppet…” and “You’re the puppet!” From the thin-skinned president’s distasteful nicknaming of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado as “Miss Piggy” (Barbaro and Twohey), to his writing off Chris Stirewalt & Marc Threaten as “two dumb puppets” just days before the third debate (@realDonaldTrump), calling political adversaries and bullying targets “puppets” seems to be one of his go-to moves. Why is this word such a charged and offensive one to most powerful man in the world? Perhaps the word makes him recall the 2005 Sesame Street episode “Grouch Apprentice,” in which Oscar the Grouch’s toupee’d cousin, “Ronald Grump,” offers a portion of his trash to the winner of his contest. Either way, the tycoon who inspired Grump has himself frequently besmirched his critics as puppets, and has tried to demean women by comparing them to cartoon characters and Muppets. In the process, he contributes to a reductive understanding of what it means to be a puppet.

The presidential candidates’ negative associations with puppethood are part of a larger tradition. In US politics, to be puppeted is to be objectified and to be cartooned is to be mastered. As Kenneth Gross writes, the word puppet often “gets applied to a thing or person [who is] both insignificant and subjected to the power of others—not a word people will readily apply to themselves” (3). The dominant understanding of “puppet,” one that codes the word s an insult that deprives its target of agency, situates it within master-slave relations. But the kind of complete, stratospheric control that common parlance attributes to the puppet master does not in fact apply to puppeteering. As Henrich von Kleist says of the marionette, “the limbs that function as nothing more than a pendulum, swinging freely, will follow the movement in their own fashion without anyone’s aid,” and “often when simply shaken in an arbitrary manner, the whole figure assumed a kind of rhythmic movement that was identical to dance” (22). For Kleist, the effect of the puppeteer on the puppet’s non-human movement is more like a ripple than a controlled motion, because the puppet is free of self-sabotaging human cognition, a perfect non-being that has “…that has no consciousness at all—or has infinite conciousness—that is, in the mechanical puppet, or in the God.” (26). A (non-)being that telegraphs its artificiality as much as it professes to not practice artifice, the puppet cultivates its own ambiguity for political intervention.

To exemplify the rebellious potential of the puppet, I argue that contemporary puppetry shares a barely acknowledged contextual overlap with some of the most grandiose and illustrious cultural rebels of the Western world: the English new-wave subcultures of the late ’70s and early ’80s, the most prominent of them being the punk movement. Both puppetry and sartorial punk/new-wave aesthetics deliberately draw attention to the material of their bodies and parody normative bodies. While both draw attention to the artificial construction and adornment of bodies, they paradoxically allow for a glimpse of the adorned or artificial body’s humanity and agency, even if these are only legible through seemingly inert materials. Thus the marked otherness and inhuman material of the puppet operated as a means in ’80s visual culture through which normative populations could seemingly dilute the residual nihilism of punk while covertly preserving the sticky fun of subcultural rebellion.

The payoff of this argument is a greater appreciation of puppetry as a mode of resistance to (and as marking a space outside) political repression. Jim Henson’s 1986 film Labyrinth and the absurd, 1982-84 sitcom The Young Ones articulate the praxis of the punk-puppet’s simultaneous denial and assertion of its own subjectivity. They arrive in the aftermath of the punk movement and its offshoots, and offer varying approaches to the punk-puppet’s contradictory sense of self (and non-self). Labyrinth relates the otherness of the punk and the puppet by asking a normative, bourgeois figure to navigate the titular labyrinth of the subcultural in order to preserve the domestic unity of her family, while The Young Ones begins with a world in which the puppet has already invaded everyday space and is just as chaotic and disruptive as the humans who inhabit this space. In spite of their different beginnings, both texts end in the same place, with the puppet’s (or materialized other’s) contradictory subjectivity/lack-of-subjectivity tending to do violence upon any fixed semiotic (including, for example, that of a political administration that treats only specific bodies as “American” bodies, and treats historical, racialized, Imperial violence as a hallmark of undebatably all-American virtuosity). The puppet, like the punk whose image it is tangled up in, interrupts the stranglehold that bourgeois ideology maintains on the semiotic understandings of objects and bodies. The puppet endows objects and bodies with a new kind of life, and it erodes the forms of signification around these things that otherwise masquerade as natural and timeless.

Punks, Puppets, and Persondrag

As Dick Hebdige explains at length, the punk aesthetic was perhaps more grounded in the anti-ideology that its music championed than in that music itself. It exhibits the totality of its aesthetic ideology in its visual culture, particularly in the cosmetic and fashion designs of its participants. Hebdige describes a kind of “cut-up form” of material anachronisms left over as residual elements of a rainbow of twentieth-century English cultures and subcultures. Like the material body of the puppet, the punk was “kept ‘in place’ and ‘out of time’ by the spectacular adhesives: the safety pins and plastic clothes pegs, the bondage straps and bits of string which attracted so much horrified and fascinated attention” (26). For both kinds of artificially-bodied beings, the striking materiality of the violently rearranged body grounds bodies in the present and, at the same time, stresses the impossibility of their residing in such a present. Angela McRobbie ties the sartorial existence of the punk to the secondhand shopping practices that allowed the items of punk fashion to circulate and become costume elements, practices that “point back in time to an economy unaffected by cheque cards, credit cards and even set prices” (30).

Among the sources that McRobbie claims were “continually raided by the ‘new’ stylists in search of ideas” were television shows and “even puppet TV shows,” among several other mass culture artifacts. Like the puppet shows from which secondhand fashion entrepreneurs borrowed, television shows promoted styles that were “worn self-consciously with an emphasis on the un-natural and the artificial” (McRobbie 40). This deliberate attention to the artificial trappings of the human-punk subject’s body is paralleled in puppetry by what Paul Piris calls “the particularity of the puppet,” the puppet’s tendency “to present an ontological ambiguity because it is an object that appears in performance as a subject” (30). The puppet asserts that it has a cognitive interior, even while its obviously constructed body asserts otherwise. The puppet is, then, in a static state of unresolved contradiction and pure otherness that it cannot help but generate in its existence as an abstraction. The voice of the puppet may resonate from a being inside it, underneath it, across the room, or in a recording studio across the world. Its movements are propelled by body that is not it but attempts to animate it. . The puppet’s agency is tangled, in many ways, with the suspension of disbelief that the puppet begs from its audience, a suspension that overcompensates for the falseness of the puppet’s pieced-together and (perhaps) felt plastic, or rubber, body. These materials not only adorn bodies, but also adorn and become the same body at the same time, complicating any possibility of understanding the body through its contextualized clothes.

These attempts to locate the origin of the puppet’s being, which is scattered across time and space, reflect back on what the consolidation of organs, titles, and textiles that make up the human body and are often treated as constitutive of a concrete self. As Barthes puts it, the puppet can state “without any falsehood” that “which is refused to our actors under pretense of a ‘living’ organic unity” (172). The puppet can come closer to depicting the abstraction of a self than a human body because it is (at least, more openly) an abstraction, while the actor’s body struggles to live up to the “living organic unity” we mythologize it as having. Our puppet not only performs, it is performative: it brings a being into existence through the constitutive power of repeated action. It is here, then, in a constitution that occurs through the tangled acts of speech and gesture, that the puppet assaults the performative invention of the actor through an exaggerated parody of that same performativity, a parody that asks an audience to anoint a pile of strings, timber, and fabric with agency. The puppet uses performativity not to subordinate itself to its human referents, but to question the concrete self that is assumed to be intrinsic to the humans it references. This drag performance of human subjectivity, which I find most helpfully abbreviated as persondrag, is the tool with which the puppet pulls back harder on its strings than its puppeteer can, enticing the viewer to read it as human-nonhuman and as an odd object-subject. In this performance of contradiction and violence against the semiotics of being, the puppet not only lays out a procedure for interrogating the subject position of the human, it also tears a rift in the fixity of language categories as a whole, opening the way for the political interventions of charged puppet narratives.

A Labyrinth of Paradoxical Puppets

The puppet’s threat of subsuming and delegitimizing everything from specific social codes to the status of the human itself is covertly at play throughout the puppet world of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Henson’s film features a young woman, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), journeying into a sometimes nightmarish dreamland to save her infant brother from the campy, glam-rock Goblin King Jareth (David Bowie) and a wide spectrum of hybrid puppet-humanoids. Forced to stay in and babysit her little brother by her distant and unappreciative parents, Sarah makes the mistake of wishing that little Toby, the very emblem of the future of the bourgeois family, would be “taken away” by the Goblin King character in the play for which she’s rehearsing. In a be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenario, Jareth grants Sarah’s request, and whisks Toby away to his goblin kingdom. Immediately regretting her decision, Sarah’s only way to rescue Toby is to find her way to the center of Jareth’s immense labyrinth. While this labyrinth’s parallel in antiquity hosts in its depths the murderous Minotaur, Jareth’s labyrinth is populated by a host of fantastic puppet creatures patrolling every curve. His private army of armored goblins; a pit lined with arthritic hands, talking tikis, and doorknockers; double-headed dogs bearing shields like people on playing cards; worms living in walls; and the selfish but sympathetic hermit Hoggle are just a few of the puppet characters that help and hinder Sarah’s quest through the labyrinth. More often than not, helping and hindering blur together: most of Jareth’s pawns favor a kind of rambunctious chaos over direct intervention into Sarah’s plans to recover her brother. They swap sides casually or forget that they were working against Sarah to begin with. The film concludes with the materialization of the puppets, goblins and all, back in Sarah’s very real world, shattering any easy assumptions that the puppets might quarantine rebellious desires within a distant, fleeting space.

While the other’s invasion of the domestic characterizes all the puppet performances in Labyrinth, the most obvious and most viscerally immediate connection between the puppet and the subcultural subject comes in the form of David Bowie’s performance (in several senses of the word) as Jareth. In Bowie, Henson and his team chose a performer who is inseparable from a long history of complicating identity roles through material trappings and performance. Hebdige notes that Bowie “created a new sexually ambiguous image for those youngsters willing and brave enough to challenge the notoriously pedestrian stereotypes conventionally available to working-class men and women” (60). Bowie’s early alter ego Ziggy Stardust dons a vibrant streak of red face paint in the shape of a lightning bolt, dyed hair, silver lipstick, dandyish skintight jumpsuits with vertical pinstripes, and elaborate jackets trimmed with frills. Ziggy’s wardrobe illustrates what Julie Lobalzo Wright calls Bowie’s “lack of a real person to project as a public presence,” which makes him like those puppets he was cast alongside and amongst, and leaves him “without any ordinariness to balance his extraordinariness” (240). Bowie seems to understand the theoretical machinations of his drag-play as intricately as the scholars writing on him (and with delightfully succinct phrasing at that). In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Bowie offered the (perhaps only semi-humorous) quip, “Around seventeen I realized I was a mime trapped in a man’s body,” as he attempted to explain his brief involvement with a “revolutionary company” of speaking mimes. When Ellen suggests that their willingness to speak disqualifies them from mime status, Bowie replies, “That’s why they were revolutionary.” The “[‘accurate’ gendered noun] trapped in [an ‘inaccurate’ gendered noun]’s body” aphorism, commonly associated with trans recollections of confusing childhoods, is reworked here to tone down the potential to read any gender identity with which the person associates as “true.” As Bowie lays it out, in the “true” gender and identity expression’s place, we have the mime: a being who is defined by their mimicking other beings. In other words, Bowie positions his gender expression as an imitation by nature rather than something natural in itself, a move that recalls Butler’s assault on gender as imitating its own idealized self.

Hebdige partially unpacks what Bowie brings to the performativity of both gender and material personhood when he notes that “his entire aesthetic was predicated upon a deliberate avoidance of the ‘real’ world and the prosaic language in which that world was habitually described, experienced and reproduced.” But Hebdige also undersells Bowie’s work by chalking it up to apolitical escapism, claiming that Bowie was “patently uninterested…in contemporary political and social issues” (61). Hebdige’s “‘real’ world” air quotes brush away the decidedly political parody that Bowie performs by spotlighting the performative nature of gender and of the unification of the body’s material into a subject. And yet when Hebdige, in his seminal 1979 volume, describes Bowie’s fans as “exquisite creatures” playing “a game of make-believe” in following Bowie’s visual precedents (60), he unknowingly anticipates the conjunction of the puppeted figure and the fantastic Bowie personality that occurs seven years later. A look at the specific content of Bowie’s performance in Labyrinth almost immediately reveals that it exemplifies the political weight of what Hebdige calls avoidance.

It’s tempting to suggest that Sarah, Jareth, and the baby are the only human players to appear in the world of the goblins, and to claim that their bodies operate on a different visual register than that of the rest of the denizens of the puppet world. But to divvy the characters into the neat categories of puppets and humans reduces the complexity of the film’s treatment of bodies and subjects. Bowie’s body and its material trappings offer the most glaring complication of a reduction of the cast to puppets and people. His Jareth in Labyrinth is different from his other theatrical characters like Ziggy Stardust only in the degree to which Jareth offers a concentrated dose of his to-be-expected complication of gender. Bowie’s face is somewhere between made-up and painted—there is no attempt to conceal his cosmetic efforts, and every attempt to advertise them. They’re as loud and flamboyant as his choppily layered goldenrod hairdo, flowing somewhere between a messy mullet and a contemporary scene-girl cut. His wardrobe fluctuates between shimmering drag queen capes, leather jackets, heeled boots, Elizabethan ruffled shirts, and medieval armor. Brian Froud, the conceptual designer of the film, admits to sculpting Jareth’s image to evoke the alluring sexuality of the rock star, in the documentary “Journey through the Labyrinth: The Quest for Goblin City.” He says that Jareth’s crystal ball cane (or, as Froud calls it, a “swagger stick”) is meant to stand in for a microphone, and that the fan forum favorite topic of Bowie’s genital bulge “got [the team] in a lot of trouble about maybe how tight his pants were, but that was deliberate” (9:03).

Every corner of this film and the labyrinth from which it takes its name is populated with bizarre beings whose material bodies and pretensions to agency exhibit and perform persondrag. The “Magic Dance” scene, in which Jareth and his puppet-goblin cronies revel in the plasticity of their bodies inside the king’s throne room to an upbeat and dancy Bowie number, flaunts the powers of persondrag perhaps most openly. Puppet coordinator Brian Henson recalls forty-eight puppets being packed into the room with Bowie, the baby, “eight to twelve little people in costumes running around,” a handful of chickens, and a small pig on a leash (Saunders). The puppets were directed by a brigade of “fifty-one or fifty-two” puppeteers. Instead of imitating gender, the drag show performs a potentially infinite spectrum of genders whose very quantity and campy existence call into question the innateness of the male/female binary. Similarly, the puppet ensemble of “Magic Dance” conjures a spectrum of various levels of personhood, with varying levels of subjectivity and objectivity appearing as concurrent and contradictory and yet still somehow unproblematic.

The campily clad Bowie/Jareth and the baby made to act as Toby may be played by human actors, but their approaches to performance in this scene are entirely different. Jareth is voluntarily dressed in a bricolage of apparel from across temporal contexts, in an attempt to perform the magical non-personhood of the Goblin King, while Toby, like the puppet-defined-as-powerless, performs only by the proxy efforts of those around him. The happy baby sounds that Toby seems to emit are actually performed by Bowie (according to Bowie’s commentary in “Inside the Labyrinth,” the baby actor “really buttoned its lips, so I ended up doing the gurgles”), and crew members used calming puppets behind the camera in lieu of strings to direct the baby’s attention (Saunders). With Jareth and Toby’s complicated bodies, little people in goblin suits that look indistinguishable from medium-sized puppets, and, of course, puppets operated by hand and radio signal, the musical number hosts a chaotic spectacle of beings that embody different levels of subjectivity. No one being can or cannot claim an organic autonomy as a self grounded in a natural body.

The chorus “Dance, magic, dance” mingles and mixes the noun form of the word “dance” with the verb, coding the repeated phrase as both an imperative to dance and a description of the kind of dance performed. Our puppet goblins are of course performing a kind of magic dance, not only as dancing goblins, but, more importantly, in the expectation that we believe these material contraptions are dancing goblins, with a kind of semiotic magic animating their artificial bodies and lending them a frenetic being. The only participant in the “Magic Dance” scene that seems to be puppeted is, oddly enough, the only character that the narrative expects us to believe is entirely human: the baby Toby. The song itself is celebratory in nature, and seems to be looking forward to the completion of the theft of Toby after Sarah’s thirteen hours in the labyrinth are up, when Toby will (how, exactly, remains mysteriously unspecified) become one of the denizens of the puppet-populated goblin realm. “In nine hours and twenty-three minutes…,” Jareth whispers in a spoken interlude, “you’ll be mine” (24:55). The number begins with an exchange between Jareth and the goblins, in which Jareth reflects on the traces of the human that exist in the goblin-puppet, and on the puppeted nature of any organic whole treated as human:

Jareth:
You remind me of the babe.

Goblin:
What babe?

Jareth:
Babe with the power.

Goblin:
What power?

Jareth:
Power of voodoo.

Goblins:
Who do?

Jareth:
You do.

Goblin:
Do what?

Jareth:
Remind me of the babe…

Jareth (spoken):
Quiet! [pointing at Toby]. A goblin babe!

(22:55)

During the song, we see Toby’s transformation (into something Jareth can call “mine”) unfold before our eyes as he flutters between object and subject. Here his body serves more as an object-prop than as a being, tossed around by Jareth and the goblins like a football. At times, this morphing into an object is material as well as semiotic: when Jareth tosses the baby half a dozen or so feet in the air and then passes him off to a goblin henchman, the baby is replaced with either a digital or a physical model (it’s difficult to discern which, especially because the film was released during the advent of CGI, and its blending of the computer-generated with physical puppetry is rudimentary). In the forced performance of this act, Toby performs the kind of jump to which Jareth/Bowie’s lyrics allude when he and his goblins sing, “Put that magic jump on me/ Slap that baby, make him free.” The lyrics function as a kind of plea for some external animator of the body to enable impossible feats of motion, movement, and liveliness, a plea that paradoxically equates the controlled motion of the puppet with freedom, and is answered as the goblins perform wire-assisted jumps. The goblins themselves seem to understand that the baby is not so different from them, in juxtaposing their own ability to move and jump with their reference to the freedom of the baby. In one sequence, two goblins (seemingly costumed performers) use Toby’s arms as strings and puppet the child actor: in other words, two costumed humans posing as puppets that are posing as goblins playact at turning a human body into a puppet. If you’re finding that sentence hard to follow, then you’re in the ideal position to understand it.

As an artform that deliberately dwells in the hard-to-follow, it’s no surprise that the persondrag of puppetry manifests easily in dreams. Dreamer, in a sense, perform a kind of perfect puppetry, becoming the dupes of their own duplicity in performing/puppeting the real and unreal people they dream of (and all for an audience of which they’re the only member). Shiloh Carroll notes that Labyrinth can be read as a “dream vision” in the tradition of medieval dream poetry; the film “contains many of the same elements, such as the nature of the dreamer, the dream guide, and allegorical figures” (103). The more local example, however, that Labyrinth channels in its play with dreams and reality is the work of Maurice Sendak: its final credits state outright that “Jim Henson acknowledges his debt to the works of Maurice Sendak.” The acknowledgement refers most directly perhaps to Outside, Over There, Sendak’s 1981 picture book from which Henson borrows the core plot in which a girl’s younger sibling is captured by goblins. But it’s also a reference to Outside, Over There‘s prequels, Sendak’s acclaimed picture books Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, both of which appear scattered about Sarah’s bedroom, and are like Labyrinth in that they complicate the line between fantasies of dreamlike childish play and reality. Both picture books rip young protagonists from their domestic lives, reinstall them in an exciting fantastical realm, and, after some chaotic adventuring, allow them to return home, refusing to comment on whether the fantastic body of the story, framed by the quotidian on all sides, was the stuff of imaginative fancy.

And yet, Labyrinth doesn’t exactly perform the Sendak formula. Whereas Sendak refuses to say whether the fantastical journey was real or imagined, Labyrinth simultaneously confirms that, like the bodies of the puppet-people who populate its world, the journey was both real and imagined. That these are contradictory conditions is not an issue. At the end of the film, after Sarah decides that growing up does not mean abandoning all that is childish and wild, an entourage of partying puppets from Sarah’s adventures appears in her room. She does a double take in response to the visions of her closest puppet companions in the mirror, as if asking the same question that audiences familiar with the Sendak picture-book structure might be compelled to ask: “So did the stuff with the puppets actually happen?” Sarah’s puppeted friends defiantly assert their existence as the film closes, kicking off a dance party in the very real bedroom. The moment seems to resolve the matter of the puppet’s reality: they’re not puppets at all, but indeed, animated creatures with a claim to exist in the film’s world. In a blatant contradiction, however, Sarah’s room is also the site of confirmation for the “it was all a dream” approach that the film paradoxically makes possible. The astute viewer will note that Sarah’s bedroom is littered with objects that are dreamed into an adventure: each major puppet has a corresponding stuffed animal or item that Sarah seems to have dreamed into a breathing being. Jareth has two defining objects. The first, a statue of a campy performer, occupies a prominent spot on Sarah’s nightstand. The statue stands out from the picture books and teddy bears of her childhood, as if it were a recent purchase embodying a liminal, less domestic identity. Jareth’s other symbol is, in a certain sense, not Jareth’s at all. Sarah’s biological mother, who, as a pan over of some collected newspaper clippings reveals, was a Hollywood actress, is featured in one photograph pinned to Sarah’s mirror and in another with none other than David Bowie as her celebrity lover. Not Jareth, but David Bowie, the musician and performer himself.¹ The newspaper clipping of Bowie and Sarah’s mother bears the legend “On-Off Romance! Back Together?” injecting a kind of semi-Elektra complex into Jareth and Sarah’s already sexually charged encounters (6:16). As if Sarah understands the photograph’s foreclosure of the reality of the puppets, she examines it and tucks it away in a desk drawer, just before she communes with the specters of her puppet friends in the mirror—who, as mentioned, shortly reveal themselves to be more than specters.

Sarah is not so different from the masses of children watching the film in 1986: her gradually nuancing sexuality is stimulated by her erratic consumption of the texts around David Bowie, and her exposure to Bowie’s play with gender and personhood seems to have opened the door to a fantastical world. It’s a world where one is always unsure who is the puppeteer and who is the puppeted; who is the creator and who is the perceiver; who is the real, historical musician and who are the identities read onto that body. The dream, in this sense, becomes the ultimate triumph of persondrag: the person pulling the strings is asleep, and the dream-persons that the deeply latent places of the dreamer’s mind breathe life into can hardly be said to be animated by the dreamer as an active agent. But then who is the subject animating them? The first material referent (the real David Bowie), the second material referent (the real David Bowie playing the real David Bowie in Labyrinth’s photograph), the puppeteer intermediary (Sarah), the Bowie-amalgam she puppets in dreaming (Jareth), the armies of puppets that Jareth strings along, or the person at the beginning of this headache of a chain: the first material referent, in our case, David Bowie? Power, life, and agency seem to come from nowhere once the puppet is brought into play, as if an agentless passive voice whispered these things into being. It becomes necessary, then, to perform a simultaneous confirmation that the puppet world is both real and not real, that its inhabitants are both objects and subjects who are not eradicated by this contradiction, but created by it.

The Plastic Ones, the Flesh Ones, The Young Ones

Labyrinth draws on the ontological ambiguity of the punk and the puppet by inviting the human into the fantastical realm of the material other. Yet, the unsorted subjectivities of the punk and the puppet demand that we also examine the opposite case: the materially othered being crossing over into the domestic realm. The 1982-84 British sitcom The Young Ones follows a group of four subcultural miscreants living in a London where punk-puppets have made the fear of invasion a reality, shattering the quotidian with spontaneous animation and visual hijinks. Evan Smith describes The Young Ones as “an over-the-top and surreal portrayal of student life” in which we can locate “the zeitgeist of Britain under Margaret Thatcher” (14-15). It’s tempting to suggest that The Young Ones, in throwing the orderly systems of the Thatcher-era English bourgeoisie into disarray, harbors a residual fear of invasion by rebellious youth subcultures, but this fails to acknowledge that The Young Ones treats the invasion as already complete. A seemingly infinite army of costumed figures, hybrid puppets, Eastern European immigrants, men chained to rafts, and musical celebrities populate the teeming liminal spaces between the not-quite private space inside the walls of the young ones’ rundown home and the public space of the world beyond it. Anyone from a sentient broom to an anti-terrorist task force to Buddy Holly hanging upside down as if he were a puppet can freely navigate what would seem to be private space as if were public. Even without the fantastic interruptions by those hybrid and prosthetically-adorned humanoids lurking in and bursting forth from the walls, the titular characters themselves realize the fear that the subcultural would undermine the hegemonic. These “students” mostly stand in for archetypal (and silly) personages associated with subcultures: Neil the hippie, Rick the socialist intellectual youth, and Vyvyan the punk (while their fourth roommate, Mike, is something of a generic cool guy and a semi-straight man). With the extravagant material of their costumes (studded stars, tiny ponytails, wigs, eccentric clothes) and the aimlessness of their pursuits, the boys are just like the puppets that populate their space: angry, angsty, and stomping all over the image of the nuclear family grounded in the home.

Any household object in The Young Ones reserves the uncanny right to animate itself at any moment, with clever cuts of the camera swapping out models for puppets or humans in wearable apparatuses that reside somewhere between puppet and costume, as if it were useless to try to differentiate between them. At the beginning of the second episode, “Oil,” the young ones move into the rented house where they’ll perform a twisted parody of domesticity for the rest of the series. A dime-store “The Thinker” statue knockoff, perfect for a tiny garden, and a colorful sunflower flank the boys’ front porch, suggesting an odd twist on domestic tranquility that the audience is well aware will be destroyed by their antics henceforward. With no warning, the garden variety statue becomes animate and complains to itself in a vernacular that contrasts with its philosophical pose. “More bloody students?” it grumbles to the sunflower peeking over its shoulder (1:40). The flower’s brown center disc morphs into rough eyes and a mouth, and it snaps back: “Oh, shut up, and put some clothes on!” The domestic objects of the garden have found their voices, and they sound nothing like the signs they’ve been mythologized into by a bourgeois world. Straying out of their symbolic context, time, and space, the material beings resist their status as the never-signifying and always signified; they grow mouths at will to define themselves, and they define themselves as they see fit.

The mythologies around quotidian objects, then, in a very dramatic sense, immaterialize: without hesitation a carrot heartlessly abandons his lover, a stick of butter, after Vyvyan crushes her with a plate and in spite of her heart-wrenching plea, “Darling carrot? Could you ever love a cripple?” (“Boring,” 19:48). The critters that crawl through these walls aren’t compelled by cheese and definitely don’t sleep in matchbooks like the tame postwar protagonist of Tom and Jerry. They proudly munch on the poetry of high culture as if it were worth nothing more than the material it’s printed on. One rat crudely muses, “I managed to nibble away at a few lines of Hippolytus the other day,” to which the other responds snarkily, “Oh, lucky you! Euripides is my dream poet” (“Demolition,” 6:30). Even the word “Euripides” is stripped of its semiotic stickiness of culture and context and boiled down to its material (in this case, sound), in the form of a punny knock-knock joke whose punch line is “Euripides trousers, you-menda-dese trousers!” by the puppet-rodents. They treat all culture as material substance and all material substance as worthy of disposal down the same digestive system. This is especially evident when one of the rats cannibalizes the body of his recently smashed friend, justifying it by saying that “It’s what he would’ve wanted.” As Kenneth Gross says of Collodi’s original Pinnochio story, the “image of the hunger of the puppet” here “even suggests a hunger that belongs to objects themselves, a desire in objects for voice, for play, for relation and use—though also their being lent a power to devour the humans who make and use them” (105). Here, the physical nonhuman item is not hungered for by the consumer, but is imagined to have a rabid, predatory hunger of its own, and threatens to undo the central tenets of object relations as it eats. Rats are, of course, unwelcome house guests, but the domestic pets are indistinguishable in their (vocally and culinarily) foul-mouthed countercultural bristle. Vyvyan’s often-puppeted hamster, named “Special Patrol Group” after the London law enforcement division, is the constant perpetrator of odor-based humor, flatulating wildly in one bean-related gag and protesting the use of Vyvyan’s deodorant on his body in another. “And was I consulted, pally?” he shouts, now visibly bearing four punky metal stars on his forehead just like Vyvyan, which the hamster has apparently picked up since his last appearance. “How do you think I feel, stinking like a student’s armpit?” (“Bomb,” 3:05). Even a box of generic corn flakes, about as everyday middle-class domestic as it gets, doesn’t hesitate to come to life and speak its mind with a crude countercultural vernacular. The white-bread suburban family branded on the box bicker amongst themselves about the artificiality of their positions; the daughter complains that, “I wish I’d had time for a crap before we started!” and her father scolds her and her brother for the subsequent argument, bellowing, “Would you two shut up and keep smiling! We’re supposed to be the ideal nuclear family!” (“Bomb,” 8:24).

The language of these material performers rings of the crass vernacular of punk speech, and the puppets’ foul-mouthedness shatters the fragile linguistic safety of domestic space. Their language is the same as the Sex Pistols’ in their infamous 1976 interview with Bill Grundy on the Today show, when Steve Jones called Grundy a “fucking rotter” on live television (ThamesTv). But this language performs a more specific kind of bricolage when erupting from the mouth of a puppet. Hebdige recalls the studies of working-class youth subcultures performed by John Clark and Tony Jefferson, who wrote that “when the bricoleur re-locates the significant object in a different position within [a characteristic form of] discourse, using the same overall repertoire of signs, or when that object is placed within a different total ensemble, a new discourse is constituted, a different message conveyed” (qtd. in Hebdige 104). Grounding this rewiring of sign-systems in examples, Hebdige notes that “the mods could be said to be functioning as bricoleurs when they appropriated another range of commodities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble which served to erase or subvert their original straight meanings” (104). By giving the puppet a lexicon of swear words couched within the cadences of the working class, The Young Ones shatters the friendly-domestic mythology around the puppet in the contemporary Western world—it would be difficult to imagine, after all, Henson’s Muppets, the cast of Sesame Street, or even the puppets of Labyrinth using this kind of language.

Though the puppets of The Young Ones are certainly bricoleurs, the fact that they are objects that speak at all performs an even more powerful kind of bricolage—especially when they’re domestic objects that barely resemble creatures, as Henson’s creations at least try to do. Though the speech act is so ubiquitous amongst humans that the signification of agency and subject-hood granted to the speaker often goes unnoticed, the should-be inanimate object complicates the authority and subjectivity associated with the speech act by maintaining its object-ness while speaking like a subject. Like the subcultural mod’s use of the capitalist prop of the tie, the teddy boy’s appropriation of Edwardian dress, and the punk’s semiotic sharpening of the domestic safety pin, the puppet re-signifies, but it re-signifies the speech act itself. It does so by dragging speech out of subjectivity and allowing those things that should not have voices to speak (and speak raunchily). As Connor puts it, “the shifting conditions of vocalic space are illustrated…in the curious, ancient, and long-lived practice of making voices appear to issue from elsewhere than their source” (13). The puppet exists out of time, place, and possibility when its material body speaks in this shifting vocalic space, but that same material paradoxically reminds us that the puppet is present and grounded in the present.

Though the act of speaking by an object may be revolutionary in nature, it does not dictate the content of the puppet’s speech. At times, the objects in The Young Ones that animate themselves into existence do so in an over-the-top eagerness to fulfill their roles as servile objects. Their parroting of the language of servility emphasizes the object’s instrumentality, but at the same time eliminates the grounding for that instrumentality in speech. The declaration of its inherent uselessness and status as an object, as opposed to a subject, presents a message with one specific claim and a medium with a contrasting claim; the language says one thing and the act of speaking in language says another. By hyperbolizing the language of self-denial, the performance of the ability to speak contrasts disarmingly with the self-deprecating words that are said, a kind of bricolage that intersects with the logic of the appropriation of the tie. Both the puppet and the subcultural bricoleur appear as impossible beings, and the contrast between the words of some of these self-denying puppets and the fact that they can speak at all illustrates that The Young Ones‘ puppets live in the contradiction rather than attempt to resolve it.

The delicate dance between self-denying words and self-assertion through speech is most potently enacted in The Young Ones by those most mistreated of household objects: the cleaning supplies that make their abode in the small cupboard beneath the stairs. A hesitantly rebellious puppet sponge begins the conversation in a broom closet under the stairs, couching the terms of its rebelliousness in apologies and backtracking: “Ah, dear me, ma’am. Our whole job is to serve the young gentlemen and look out for them the best we can. But, I’m sure young master Neil do treat us very rough sometimes” (“Oil,” 19:40). The sponge’s voice is like that of a child’s, but the seemingly wiser and older Broom, who speaks like the patriarch of the cleaning supplies, sets the poor sponge straight. “And so he should, young Lucy,” he corrects the apologetic rebel. “For we love it. The complete negation of our personality, the mind-numbing servility, the eighteen-hour work day. And we expect no reward but a staircase over our heads.” “Oh, dear, yes, Lucy,” a spray can of “Pledge” chimes in. “We love it. The personal abuse is our lot, and the further back you go, the better it gets.” At the sound of Neil and Rick approaching for a “house meeting” in the broom closet, the Broom commands absolute reverence and continued servitude: “Oh, no! The young lads are coming down to beat us. Everyone on your best behavior, or you’ll have me to answer to.”

The two parental puppets send contradictory messages in their speech, exemplifying the very rebellious behavior they detest by speaking, but speaking to express their disapproval of rebellious behavior. These puppets undermine the subcultural young ones who are their masters by drawing attention to the callousness with which the masters treat them in their pathetic existence. But beneath this seemingly pro-puppet, anti-punk understanding, they embody many of the values of the punk, hippie, and more broadly anarchist movements the boys stand for. Were it not a joke, the puppets’ almost academic precision in explaining the instrumentalization that is regularly performed on their bodies, paired with their decidedly un-critical and comfortable acceptance of their objectification, would make even a lukewarm Marxist cringe. Their bricolage is a strange one that taunts the seemingly stable mythologies of objects into which bourgeois logic shepherded both people and materials, by eliminating these objects’ limits and exaggerating their complacency.

The puppet’s role as violator and critic of domestic space and domestic material does not prevent those characters who seem to be coded as human from breaking the rules as well as the architectural structures that mirror those rules. The boys in The Young Ones are constantly smashing through the barriers of their own space, so frequently intruding upon one another by crashing through cabinets, walls, and doors that they almost never take notice of the intrusions of puppets and costumed characters. Labyrinth and The Young Ones only seem to differ in the distance with which they hold the domestic and normative world away from the subcultural one. But they share a common ground in their eventual illumination of a spectrum of personhood that ultimately complicates the organic unity of the human being in a spectacle of persondrag. The material otherness of the puppet serves more to complement the material otherness of the young subculturals than it does to distinguish the puppets from them. As if he were made from felt and fur instead of skin and bones, Neil’s body takes an absurd amount of slapstick damage without any real or lasting repercussions. As The Young Ones Production Manager Ed Bye puts it in the show’s twenty-fifth-year anniversary documentary, all of the show’s “cartoon violence actually kind of worked, because in cartoons people get smashed to pieces and then four seconds later they’re alright again, and there was a lot of that going on in the The Young Ones, I mean, well, obviously otherwise they’d all be dead” (“25 Years”). Poor Neil, almost always the butt of the joke and the target of the fist or projectile, was particularly prone to this cartoon violence from which only the non-human body can regenerate. Toward the end of “Boring,” after a demon impales his head with a metal skewer, Neil wanders around unaware of his injury, telling Rick, “I’m just going down to the local paper shop, okay?” When he meanders outside, he notices the long spike and removes it, musing out loud to the camera, in a calm monotone, “that’s funny, I don’t remember ramming this skewer into my head” (30:50). This is a comparatively ordinary incident in Neil’s life. In “Interesting,” Neil takes a drag of marijuana and literally gets high, as visible wires raise him to the moon. He’s puppeted through the cosmos, where two astronauts comment from a rocket-ship model that “it’s like that song by David Bowie,” and jokingly recite lyrics from Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” mumbling, “hey, look…the planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing we can do” (“25:40”). Neil finally arrives at the moon, where two puppeted robot-alien creatures blast him with dynamite. Surprised that it has no effect on his body, one robot laughs out, “Hey, that hippie must be really out of it.” Like Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Jareth, Neil is otherworldly, and like the bodies of the puppets in Jareth’s court, Neil’s otherworldly body is animated in ways a normal humans cannot be and, we’re asked to believe, made of materials that are not human. “I’m gonna hide in the wall cavity and pretend to be thermal insulation,” Neil muses aloud in “Demolition,” when the authorities demolish the boys’ first home. His fantasy is really to be human—that his body might finally be destroyed like the human he wishes he could be when the authorities come to demolish the house. Neil fulfills the maxim laid out by Margaret Williams: “the death or suicide of the puppet is a recurring theme in puppetry, since it exposes the problematic nature of the puppet’s ‘life'” (18). The material of his body, which is more text than it is flesh, “remains a human form, able to be empathized with,” as Williams says of the suicidal puppet, “and to be revived and to ‘die’ all over again at the next show” (18).

As the obvious representative of the punk scene, Vyvyan’s person is also defined by the material his body is adorned in and, in a sense, composed of. The back of his vest, which reads “VERY METAL,” can be understood in more than one way. In addition to the obligatory bricolage of punk memorabilia (the metal studded belt and vest, Doc Martens, three-pointed Mohawk, and dyed hair), Vyvyan wears a lock on a steel chain and bears four metallic stars which seem to be grafted into his forehead. He even makes these stars into a metonym of his body when he whines, “I don’t want my forehead to rust!” as his reason for exemption from grocery shopping duty (“Flood”). Like Neil’s body, his body operates as a performance object and, as such, can take a serious beating and constantly reanimate for the next show. “Oil” sees him taking a pickax to the head with no lasting consequences, but this is not the most gratuitous of injuries performed on his inhuman body. When the group goes by train to do three years of laundry, Vyvyan learns the hard way why the train has a small sign that says “Do Not Lean Out of the Window” and literally loses his head when it collides with a passing object. In spite of the gratuitous blood that jets out of a hole in his neck, Vyvyan is for the most part okay; his headless body wanders around the tracks while his impatient decapitated head plays a frustrated game of “follow my voice” (22:57). When his body finally arrives, instead of picking up the head and holding onto it for safe keeping, it kicks the head along like a child kicking a rock along the street. Next we see Vyvyan, he is, of course, in one piece, as if the accident had been no more severe than a papercut (“Bambi”).

Even Rick’s absurdly short ponytails, pathetically chalk-drawn anarchy symbol, and menagerie of activist lapel pins emphasize the material elements of his costume as a part of his archetypal personage and physical person. Like his friends, he is immune to human death, only crumpling under the weight of violence to reanimate for the next joke. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the only flatmate who is not immune to death is Mike (the only one who is not immediately associated with a cookie cutter subcultural archetype). While most humans outside the quartet of stooges do not fall victim to the kinds of physical violence that the young ones seem immune to, they also behave like puppets. Alexei Sayle, for example, plays various essentially identical members of the Balowski family (the most prominent member being the faux-Russian landlord of the four young subculturals, Jerzei Balowski, who appears in three episodes). Every Balowski practices a humanity that is as flexible as that of Jerzei’s tenants. The only way to tell which unpredictable and volatile Balowski character he’s playing at any given moment is by the way the other characters refer to him, and what name he identifies with. The expectation that his body could signify so many different beings strips away its claim to being representative of a being and relocates the source of “being” from an innate truth grounded in the body to language and perception. Even as a human in the flesh, his perceived and muddled subjectivity is like that of the puppet: contingent, corralled, and ultimately played for kicks.

Don’t Cut the Strings—We’re Going to Need Them

In March 2017, the Trump administration’s proposed budget would have eviscerated funding for the public broadcasting network, which houses Sesame Street. In “Elmo Gets FIRED,” a two-minute-and-eighteen-second viral video created by What’s Trending? in advocacy of PBS, the audience witnesses Elmo sitting alone at a table while an offscreen voice informs him that, due to these budget cuts, he’s being laid off. “It does me no great joy to inform you that, due to recent cuts in government funding to PBS, you are no longer employed by Sesame Street Workshop.” Bewildered and stumbling over his words, the devastated Elmo finally manages to reply (in his high-pitched, singsong, child’s voice): “just like that? Elmo’s been working at Sesame Street for thirty-two years….Elmo doesn’t…Elmo doesn’t, Elmo doesn’t….” After waving away Elmo’s concerns about his rising rent, his access to health insurance, and the impending vacuum of educational content for children, the faceless PBS executive sends Elmo on his way. “Elmo will go bye-bye now,” the puppet concedes, but the executive interrupts him: “One more thing…leave the puppet.” Before Elmo can finish saying “Leave the puppet? What do you [mean?]” a faceless body enters the shot and tears the Elmo puppet off the performer’s hand. The human hand—still curved into a duck’s bill shape, as if it had never stopped operating the puppet now lying dead on the table—bounces offscreen, leaving behind most of the body of the being it is performing into existence. Elmo’s lifeless puppet strewn across the table, the message “PBS is an essential source for preparing children for the future” flashes across the screen, followed by “Support PBS today,” as the video fades to black.

The Trump administration must rip the puppet off of the human hand because even on Sesame Street the puppet is a punk. This is the case in the puppet’s assault on individual human subjectivity, in its punking of the domestic fabrics and materials of the household occupied by the heterosexualized nuclear family, and in its redistribution of agency collectives (and public networks) instead of individuals (and private corporations). The puppet and its punk tendencies are an ideological threat to that administration. Even in defeat, Elmo’s complicated intersubjectivity performs a rhetorical battle with the Trump administration. As his body falls, the actant network that Elmo was a part of lives on, embodied by the now homeless hand of the puppeteer, able to retreat, rethink, and rematerialize elsewhere. All the while, the limp body of Elmo, in twenty-two excruciating seconds of motionlessness, grates against our usual experience of the frenetic and upbeat puppet, pulling at the heart-/puppet strings of anyone who is attached to Sesame Street. Margaret Williams says that, in Phillipe Genty’s untitled performance in which a puppet commits suicide by cutting its own strings, the puppet’s “reduction to object status is incomplete…it still retains that ‘after-life’ that lingers around any figure with which an audience has emotionally identified” (18). Like Genty’s puppet, Elmo’s body was never charged with a biological life, and yet, as it lies on the table, it has never looked more dead and never been more alive.

Of course, there is a risk of overstating the comparison here between Elmo’s body and real bodies: the bodies at risk of being owned, mastered, deported, and sanctioned as a result of the political and social turmoil in our very real world are not, unfortunately, like those of the superhumanly regenerating Young Ones stars, which can bounce back from any injury, or like Elmo’s, which can survive, in some state, the fracturing of its operator and its husk. But, like those cartoonish bodies, these real bodies at risk of being made into objects can resist by animating themselves and by speaking. In many cases, resistance is performed by the simple condition of the material presence of their animated bodies that testifies to their status as subject. And when more direct forms of resistance are compromised, the specter of the punk-puppet and its disruptive persondrag suggests an alternate narrative that could inspire any number of plans for resistance—plans that find a power in being puppeted when being the puppeteer is not an option. The puppet’s strings are, after all, not a tool by which some “puppet master” controls the puppet. They are, rather, tethers to lives of levity beyond the physical and its embodied restrictions, lives that, like Kleist’s marionettes, “possess the virtue of being immune to gravity’s force” and, “like elves, the puppets need only to touch upon the ground” as a point of departure, and then “the soaring of their limbs is newly animated through this momentary hesitation” (Kleist 24). Elmo, in communication with a long and nuanced tradition of the contradictory figure of the puppet and its assault on traditionally inflexible configurations of meaning, has shown us just such a point of departure. Our challenge, then, is to learn how to renew that flight during a momentary hesitation.

Footnotes

1. Even in the A. C. H. Smith novelization and its tie-in manga series by Forbes and Lie, both of which call the Jareth character Jeremy, the character is very much like Bowie: Sarah swoons at his associations with culture, his European sensibilities, and the degree of fame he enjoys that makes it necessary to dodge paparazzi.

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