Review of The Muppets (2011) by Shiira — 15 Jan 2012

Nothing says "keep out" quite like an electric fence. The visitors, however, aren't deterred, not even after Walter gets fried trying to scale the high voltage security system, which protects the faded green star from his public.

Kermit has become a recluse, living alone in a Shangri La-like mansion, bitter over being surpassed by the far-edgier Avenue Q puppets(disguised as The Moopets, here). 80's Robot, a sort of manservant(shades of Sunset Boulevard), is his Rosebud.

It's not 1979 anymore. In The Muppet Movie, the narrative culminates with the burgeoning theatrical players stepping into the lair of Worldwide Studio head Lew Lord. The very familiar man behind the desk appraises them, then over the intercom, tells his secretary to prepare a contract, which allows the frog to direct the Muppets' origin story.

Sitting alone on his director's chair in an empty soundstage, it's hard not to imagine Kermit as a stand-in for Orson Welles, on the verge of directing his own Citizen Kane, a first film without any studio interference.

Ironically, in The Muppets, Kermit has turned into Charles Foster Kane. He's Citizen Frog, an exorbitantly wealthy amphibian who lost his empire...and pig. Without Kermit no longer acting as her impresario, Miss Piggy, no doubt, found out the truth about her singing, just like Kane's second wife, the failed opera singer.

Like Mrs. Kane, the pig realized that her popularity was rigged, due to the undue influence of a powerful alpha male. But whereas, the opera singer ends up on skid row, eking out a living as a club owner, Miss Piggy thrives, serving as the editor of French Vogue.

The pig wears Prada. Still harboring a grudge over the frog breaking off their wedding engagement, Kermit leaves France without his muse. "You never intended to marry me," the pig complains, and frustratingly, due to the thematic parameters of a children's movie, Kermit's misgivings about the woman whose likeness adorns his entrance gate, is never brought to light.

Past films offer clues, though. In "The Muppets Take Manhattan", the beautiful swine expresses her jealousy over the frog's friendship with a NYC waitress, whom the pig misinterprets as a love interest.

As it so happens, Juliana has fashion designing aspirations. Miss Piggy's meteoric rise in the haute coutre industry could be a response to her paranoia about an interspecies relationship, more kinkier than their own.

Unlike past Muppet projects, the subject of sex emerges from the subtext. Surely, the frog and the pig, and for that matter, Gonzo and his harem of chickens(Camilla is a swinger), got it on, but there was never any evidence of animal lust, no godforsaken byproduct of cross-breeding.

But in The Muppets, there is verifiable proof that sex occurred between a puppet and a human. Walter isn't Gary's imaginary friend, but an actual flesh and blood brother, so to speak. In a montage, an off-screen adult, a human one, presumably the mother, measures both boys against the side of a doorway, where Gary sets new highs in verticality throughout their shared childhood, while Walter remains forever short, victimized by a form of dwarfism.

The father, the probable muppet and absentee dad, isn't around to help his son feel normal. Lucky for Walter, the human brother does what he can to assimilate the felt one, but to some degree, as suggested by the post-modern diegesis, the film, therefore the subject, approaches his "skin" as an egregious malady, a disease.

At the carnival, the movie references Rocky Dennis from "Mask", in the scene where Walter sees himself as a tall person in the same sort of funhouse mirror that the deformed boy, afflicted with a cranial enlargement disorder called lionitis, realizes his dream of normalcy through the same reflection trick.

Walter's reaction to The Muppet Show is telling; it's the first time he lays eyes on his own kind, way back when Kermit could lay claim to being a comedy king. Now the frog is a has-been, or worse, a never-was, thanks to a history-challenged modern audience, too young to remember the puppet troupe's heyday.

Their nearly non-existent cultural currency entails that they abduct a celebrity(Jack Black) to host a comeback show, bringing to mind, for some, Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, in which Rupert Pupkin kidnaps a Johnny Carson-type named Jerry Langford.

The broadcast just happens to be a telethon, the genre that links The Muppets to the 1983 film, since Langford is played by Jerry Lewis, the host of so many MDA shows. In The King of Comedy, Rupert has a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality, the same dilemma bedeviling Kermit, who believes that they're close to reaching the ten million dollar plateau, when in actuality, the tote board reads something far short.

The people in the audience: Are they real? After all, the show starts with an empty studio.