Unreality Companion: The False Nostalgia of the Muppets

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

In this week's Unreality article, I expressed my complicated feelings toward the Muppet franchise as a whole and The Muppets (2011) in particular.  As I mentioned in the article, the Muppets were those fuzzy, rainbow-colored puppets from the seventies that my grandmother liked to watch reenact A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island and The Wizard of Oz.  Despite my negative predispositions for the franchise, The Muppets is ultimately one of the most memorable and enjoyable films to come out of 2011.

But I took a lot more away from watching their 2011 film than a newfound appreciation for a band of anthropomorphic puppet comedians.  The Muppets was ultimately a nostalgic experience for me - which is of course ludicrous, since I have absolutely no nostalgic connection with the characters.  As a kid, I would elect to leave the room rather than having to suffer through their family friendly antics and continued this strict quarantine until earlier this year (when I just had to know what the big deal was about the movie).

But looking back the film's narrative construction, the eventuality of this false nostalgia is both obvious and inevitable.  As I have already mentioned, The Muppets was a meta-fictive justification for its own existence: coming to stark terms with the reality of their lack of Twenty-First Century relevance and defiantly proving otherwise.  The reason why this creates phantom sentimentality is because of the narrative perspective that the film adopts: not one of the jaded humans who have outgrown the Muppets, nor even the underdog puppet troupe themselves, but Walter - an outsider who grew up worshipping them as idols.

You see, we don't actually need to care about The Muppets.  All we have to do is care about Walter and we will empathically adopt his worldview for the film's hour and a half run time.  And what does Walter care about more than anything?  That's right: the Muppets.

As we watch his wide-eyed adulation of the Muppet Show, him trick-or-treating in his Kermit the Frog Halloween costume and his over-joyed freak-out when he can finally tour their studio in person, we experience a life lived loving the Muppets.  It doesn't matter that the life isn't our own, just that we experience it in the first place.  By the time he uncovers the plot to destroy the Muppet studio and commits to reuniting the Muppets in a last-ditch effort to save it, we are 100% on board with him,

During the telethon, when each Muppet brings out his or her most iconic act to raise the necessary funds to save their old studio, we experience a nostalgia-like feeling.  It is not necessarily because we grew up watching and loving these acts - it certainly was not that way for me - but because we watched Walter grow up watching and loving them.  Walter is the conduit through which non-fans of the show walk away feeling as if they have revisited a childhood favorite that still holds up well after years of neglect and disinterest.

I can imagine some people waking away from this film feeling emotionally manipulated.  While that it not necessarily untrue, I feel that it is disingenuous to what actually happened.  It would have been easy to make a film that plays to a legitimate sense of nostalgia; while the franchise has been skirting the edge of mainstream awareness for decades, it still has a loyal, if unprofitable, fan base.  I mean, they did make 6 theatrical films, 2 made for TV films and a slew of spin-off TV series well into the Twenty-First Century.

But while they would invariably have a built-in audience who would happily go to theaters to see the next Muppet movie, this film did something altogether different.  It was able to energize its viewers into an enthusiastically vocal fan base - instilling them with a lifetime of nostalgia for the franchise in less than two hours.  A simple nostalgia property wouldn't have been so critically well received, such a force at the box office nor spawn a similarly well-received sequel (and, if rumors are to be believed, a second sequel and a new TV series as well).

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