On Kermit the Frog, Television, and Puppet Theater

One of the first manufactured televisions was General Electric’s 1928 “Octagon.” Ernst W. Anderson designed the device. It created pictures using a mechanical disc inside a large eight sided wooden cabinet with a couple of knobs on the front. Today only a few of those original units are known to exist. One is part of the collection at the Henry Ford Museum.  With a picture size of only 18mm x 14mm, the octagon was a far cry from the jumbo screened plasma displays that are so common today.

Most people believe that The Queen’s Messenger was the first television program ever broadcast. In 1928 it was beamed to only four sets, perhaps the same four octagons that are still known to exist. The Queen’s Messenger told the story of a British diplomat and a mysterious woman. The drama broadcasted only the heads and arms of its players. Captured using a technology called the scanning disc, the image was clumsy and although it was probably even more blurred than we can imagine, in the context of its own time it was a technological marvel. The Queen’s Messenger predated the iconoscope (or image dissector), the technology for which the RCA Corporation fought a legal patent case for nearly a decade with a young inventor named Philo Farnsworth.

Philo was one of the pioneering engineers of early television. He drew on his childhood farm boy experience working his father’s Idaho fields. Imagine him toiling in the hot sun and displaying all the stereotypical signifiers of early Twentieth Century farming. Maybe he looks like the cover of a John Steinbeck novel, wearing a hand-stitched cotton shirt and thin black suspenders. Or perhaps he is bare-chested except for the faded blue bib of canvas overalls. In his teeth, he grinds a twig of straw, or a cheap cigar; it dangles out of the corner of his mouth and hangs down his chin. There’s a yellow lab or full-grown collie trotting at his side as he rides a horse drawn sickle bar mower or, if his family was affluent, a bright red enameled steam-powered tractor. Picture Philo cutting the hay in rows — back and forth, from top to bottom – making lines slowly and intentionally from the edge of the property line back to the farmhouse.

Legend has it that Philo was 14 and doing just this kind of work when he visualized an electron beam following the same trajectory. The device he created, “the image dissector,” reproduced images by scanning consecutive horizontal lines. It was like an electron sickle, cutting down tall grass rows of luminescence. Today our interlaced video displays are still based on the same principle. 21^st Century TV viewers, watching on 3D plasma displays or computer screens, should never forget that the moving pictures saturating our daily experience are built on the metaphorical foundation of an Idaho hay field. We’ve always been an agricultural country, even if we’re now in the age of an information economy. Likewise, the United States has always been an oligarchy in which feudal underdogs often find themselves up against the pastoral electric fence of capitalist fat cats.

Thus, when Philo refused RCA’s offer to license the device, yet another version of the classic American story pitting corporate Goliath against a brilliant, but temperamental underdog David ensued. Like the story of how the Ford Motor Company stole the intermittent windshield wiper technology from Robert Kearns, or how Charles Mintz and Universal Pictures stole Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from Walt Disney, the corporate behemoth RCA used its financial and political leverage to steal Philo’s innovation. The image dissector became the formative technology on which television is based. Unfortunately, Philo wasn’t paid for his efforts until after a decade of legal battles. And he was never given proper credit for the innovation he brought to our living rooms. Not only has television permanently changed adult leisure time. Television has also become a glowing nanny with ever-present kid’s programming such as Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues, Dora the Explorer, Fraggle Rock, Teletubbies, Barney, and The Muppets. For better or worse, Television has had irreparable effects on child rearing.

When I was a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s, televisions were large faux-wooden cabinets with bulbous glass screens, ungainly knobs, and monophonic speakers that amplified sound out of a rectangular plastic mesh of horizontal lines.  The remote control had not been invented. We actually had to stand up from the couch, walk across the room and click the knob into place in order to change channels. Cable was in its infancy and static was normal: a random chaos of tiny black and white squares in motion, the visual cathode-ray equivalent of white noise. Set-top antennae were regularly augmented with tin foil. My siblings and I swore that we each knew the best way to manipulate those “rabbit ears” in order to tune the clearest picture. An interior decorator’s nightmare, the TV “set” was placed about a foot away from the wall in order to make room for the tumor-like “tube” that protruded out of the back. The tube was covered with a trapezoidal casing often colored differently than the rest of the set, usually black. The top of the set was wide, at least 12 inches, and my mother often placed a vase of fresh cut flowers between the antenna and the family pictures that captured us at our most awkward: itchy and uncomfortable in the formal clothing that we wore only in order to conform to social mores of holidays and weddings.

Like most of the United States, the TV was the focus of our “family room.” This was where we convened after dinner and before bedtime. While my older brothers and parents watched programs that I was too young to comprehend, or sporting events in which I had no interest, I imagined how this strange light box worked. Apparently, the explanation I created was common. Most three year olds come to the conclusion that tiny little people live in parts of the TV that can’t be seen.

At the time there was space enough: televisions weren’t flat yet. The physical shape of the device – its boxiness and width – made the miraculous seem possible. Surely behind the wood grained paneling, like a little theater with a back stage maze full of costumes and set pieces, the television hosted a troupe of miniature actors, athletes and comedians.

I imagine Jim Henson, creator of Kermit the Frog and the Muppets, must have come up with similar theories as a child watching the boob tube. After all, he has often been celebrated for understanding that the box itself was the perfect puppet proscenium. He realized that the faux-wood bezel around the glass screen was like the technologically grown up version of a child’s fabric and corrugated cardboard puppet theater. His hand held puppets utilized the tangible characteristics of the television set in the same way that an amateur puppeteer like “the Amazing Schwartz,” utilized handmade ply-wood window frames to create pseudo-magical renditions of fairy tales like “the three little pigs” at my friends’ fourth and fifth birthday parties.

Jim Henson’s first television show was only slightly more sophisticated than the Amazing Schwartz’s “Princess and the Pea.” Schwartz used foam balls atop scrap fabric dresses. Henson made jumbo furry sock puppets. Henson controlled their hands and arms with poles from below like upside down marionettes. Eventually he’d even name them “Muppets,” smooshing the words “marionette” and “puppet” together.  But first he made Sam and Friends, a show on which goofy characters lip-synched comedic tunes.

Sam and Friends was broadcast twice daily from May 9, 1955 to December 15, 1961. Each episode was five minutes long and aired on WRC-TV in Washington D.C.. Viewers who watched Henson’s early creation would have owned one of the 52 million TV sets that were in U.S. homes at the time (nine out of ten households).  They might have owned the Zenith model T1816R, a black and white metal-cased set with rounded corners and cat’s eye shaped knobs that protruded out of cylinders on each side. The sixteen-inch set was the ipod of its generation. It had a cutting edge design that served as a status symbol for those lucky enough to own one. As Henson’s characters pretended to sing funny songs they would have looked out of place. Sure, Sam’s bulging ears matched the knobs on the Zenith, but his clunky choreography as he sang Louis Prima’s “Old Black Magic” would have contrasted against the set’s slick Buck-Rogers-like futuristic aesthetic.

Although Kermit was a regular on Sam and Friends, he was not yet a frog.

Kermit began his life as a giant lizard-like sock puppet crafted from Jim Henson’s mother’s old wool coat. Unlike a tadpole, his eyes, made from ping-pong balls, already bulged.  He not only appeared on Sam and Friends, but also in various commercials for companies like Wilson’s Meat. However, he was not a frog until Johnny Carson introduced him as “Kermit the Frog” on The Tonight Show in 1965.

Why a frog? He only slightly resembles the species Ranidae, of the order Anura. He might just have easily been christened Kermit the Lizard. Or just Kermit: certainly there are many Muppet monsters — Grover, Telly, Gonzo — whose physical characteristics bear no taxonomical resemblance to recognizable critters. How, and why, did Kermit the non-descript sock-shaped creature become known as a frog? Sure, Kermit is green, but frogs aren’t. Frogs are just as likely to be green as any other color in the spectrum.

Even if I allow that frogs tend to be associated with the color green, viewers wouldn’t have known what color Kermit was in 1965. Color television didn’t become common until GE introduced the 11inch “Porta-Color” TV set in 1966. Advertisements boasted that the “lightweight” set weighed 24 pounds. It had a handle on the top and a “compact design” that made it “truly portable.” It is on this type of television that many viewers would have watched the original Sesame Street in 1969. By then Kermit was already well established as an amphibian due to numerous appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Mike Douglass Show, and The Hollywood Palace.  I wonder if young Jim Henson ever considered the implications of amphibiousness while preparing for those performances.

The word “amphibious” literally means living on both sides. It comes from the Greek amphi (both) and bios (life). The designation is reserved for animals that physically mutate. In their youth, amphibians breathe water through gills. When fully grown, they inhale oxygen into fully developed adult lungs. In Sesame Street # 2615, May 1989, Kermit discusses his amphibian mutation in a biographical sketch called “My Polliwog Ways.” Kermit was no longer singing in mono. The industry adopted stereo broadcasts in 1984 using the Zenith multichannel television sound (MTS) transmission system. Kermit wore a velvet and satin smoking jacket and looked like a fuzzy reptilian cross between Tom Jones and Hugh Hefner. Kermit sings his biological life story – from egg to frog — in Las Vegas style cabaret form (search YouTube, its well worth it). In one chorus, he belts out:

So long wiggly tale,

goodbye polliwog,

I started growing legs and became a frog,

 

As this is a volume about depth psychology, it seems appropriate that I analyze Kermit’s frog-ness as if it were part of a dream. To do this, I use a depth psychological process termed amplification. I amplify the image (in this case: frog), making it stronger and more precise, by collecting corresponding mythological, scientific, cultural and social ideas. For example, the depth psychologist might ask: what is the difference between a frog and a toad? Why not Kermit the Toad?

In fairy tales, frogs tend to be good; toads tend to be bad. Kissing a frog might even reveal a charming husband. Kissing a toad will give you warts. Frogs tend to be masculine, such as the cursed frog prince. Toads tend to be feminine, associated with mother earth and symbolically connected with the moon and the uterus. Kermit is a frog. Kermit is male. But kissing him won’t turn either of you into anything.

Scientifically toads are frogs. Toad is a word used to identify frogs that spend more time on land. The distinction is primarily visual. Toad skin often appears rougher or dryer, not slimy and wet. Toads’ back legs are shorter and suited to hopping on dirt and stone.

Kermit, being fictional, does not fit neatly into either distinctive category. He sometimes seems toad-like, spending most of his time on land; he works in television and movie studios in New York and Los Angeles. His skin (made from fabric) is dry. But his back legs are long.

When analyzing fairy tales, mythology or dreams, depth psychologists often see the water as a symbol for thinking, thought processes, or knowledge – specifically knowledge from the unconscious. “Water” Carl Jung wrote, “Is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.” The Swiss psychologist is not referring to some kind of esoteric or mystical symbolism. He is talking about the way imagery manifests in our everyday life. For example, we use water imagery when talking about our thought processes: the flow of thought, the stream of consciousness. Ideas are either shallow or deep. Marie-Louise von Franz wrote, “Usually, we interpret water as the unconscious, and differentiate its specific meaning according to the context.” Land, then, in the context of amphibian life, can be understood the opposite of water. Land can be understood as a symbol of the opposite of the unconscious: the habitual conscious attitude, the foundation or the thinking processes in which our daily actions are logically grounded.

Some Jungian and archetypal thinkers find it useful to use imagery of wet and dry to help make a distinction between “inner” and “outer” experience. “Wet” or “Inner” refers to the private personal experience, the thoughts and emotions that are within each individual. “Dry” or “Outer” refers to the external events of our lives, such as our public interactions with other people and objects. Wet has to do with feeling and intuition. Dry has to do with thinking and sensing. Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams and oceans could be symbolic of chaotic and liquid inner experience – the unknown: where thoughts and emotions can sometimes flow crystal clear, but can also be murky and swamp-like. Mountains, valleys, and roads could be symbolic of outer experience – made up of tangible landmarks: easily mapped, diagrammed, and represented.

Frogs are amphibious: of both land and water. They begin as chains or groupings of underwater eggs. Then, quickly, they develop into water breathing tadpoles, or polliwogs. They sprout appendages in their youth. They loose their tales as they enter adulthood. In fact, they hardly resemble what we’d think of as frogs until they are fully grown lily-pad hoppers with lungs suited for oxygen.

It is the both-ness of frogs – their ambiguous position between wet and dry — that leads me to call Kermit a depth psychologist. I think of him like an amphibian of the psyche. He is, metaphorically, of both water and land, of both inner and outer. That is, Kermit lives and performs in between, in liminal, threshold, or boundary spaces. And all the while, Kermit is teaching, inspiring and motivating his audience to do likewise.

When he sings, Kermit’s lyrics often describe a world that is congruent with my ideal. It is a place where dreams come true, where magic is ubiquitous, and impossible things can and do happen. Yes, it sounds like a Disney vacations brochure, but Kermit knows it. Don’t worry; the frog sees through his own platitudes. Always of two worlds at once, he transcends the ambiguity between his utopian fantasy and the reality that he is made of material.

Kermit is puppet, lifeless without his operator, and yet his is arguably the world’s most recognizable frog. Fabric skin and ping pong ball eyes tie Kermit to the laws of inanimate matter, yet puppet and puppeteer are both struck by the other’s autonomy. The puppet seems to exist independent of the puppeteer. Despite the fact that Jim Henson’s arm forms Kermit’s skeletal structure, the performing puppet becomes more than just the operator’s talking hand.  Does something magical happen? No, even Kermit is skeptical of magic. He binds his vision of the miraculous to its shadow, reminding us constantly that he is constructed of fantasy. He reminds us that he manufactured by acknowledging the long-haired bearded puppeteer in a headband that controls him as if he were his autonomous unconscious. Likewise, Jim Henson acknowledges Kermit as a puppet. He often allows the public to see Muppet and Muppeteer together: Henson’s lips moving in full sight as Kermit talks. Henson once said he never bothered to learn how to throw his voice, figuring people would rather look at Kermit the Frog then a freakishly tall bearded hippie. Audiences don’t watch to see Henson; they watch to see Kermit.

Kermit is not simply an extension of Henson, nor is Henson driving Kermit. Jim Henson, on many occasions, commented that the frog had a life of his own. Henson wasn’t alone. After he died in 1990, Steve Whitmire took over as Kermit’s operator. Whitmire described the first time he placed Kermit on his arm: “I looked him in the eyes and he just stared back, almost as if he was saying, ‘come on, I need a voice.’”

What is it about puppetry? Eileen Blumenthal calls it “created actor art.” Puppetry, she writes, is “the most transcendent mode of performance” because it is made up of “inanimate objects endowed with vital force.” She sees puppets as metaphorical symbols of the human experience.

Think about it. I’m human and I’m assuming you, the reader, are also human. However, like a puppet, I perform as if I have a vital conscious awareness but I’m not always sure that I’m in control of myself. I often act against my better judgment. I often wonder why I do the things I do. I often act against what I would ordinarily declare to be in my own best interest. There seem to be unconscious motivations that conflict with my conscious intentions. C.G. Jung explains this phenomenon using the concept of complexes. He does not mean “complex” in the colloquial sense, as when we explain a person’s negative behavior by saying, “he has a mother complex, an inferiority complex, or a power complex.” Instead, for Jung, complexes are “feeling toned ideas.” Daryl Sharp writes that they “accumulate around certain archetypes, like ‘mother’ and ‘father.’” Constellated complexes can make us fall in love. Constellated complexes can make us feel extra confident, charming, or outgoing. Constellated complexes can influence our decisions because they create unconscious feeling reactions to everyday events. For example, mundane activities, like choosing a breakfast cereal, could be inextricably mixed up with deep childhood feelings about my mother. Sometimes — perhaps all the time — I am a puppet of unconscious complexes.

And, like a puppet, at the end of my performance I become matter, a lifeless body, a corpse. Puppets are a metaphorical reminder of the idea that my material body is on loan to an operator that some people call the “soul,” or the “psyche.”  For this reason, puppets, like effigies and masks, play a major part in the death and funeral rites of many cultures. The operator or puppeteer serves as metaphorical reminder of the vital life force that animates a human being. Depth psychologists use the word “psyche” to describe not just the operations of the physical brain, but also the force that gives life to our material existence: our inner puppeteer. Psyche is the Greek word that means soul. The soul/psyche is the part of the self that speaks the language of the imagination. By engaging in the world of images — the imaginal — I make meaning out of everyday experience. I soak a material reality in the moisture of imagination.

 

The Muppet Movie was made in 1979. I was two at the time. I didn’t watch the movie until it was available on VHS video. Likely I watched it on the 27 inch SONY Trinitron set in the family room of my childhood home. Sony’s Trinitron technology, which produced brighter, clearer images, was introduced in 1966 but it didn’t become popular and common in every home until the 1980s. The name Trinitron is a combination of “trinity” and “electron,” because it combines three different types of electron cathode ray technologies. I consider myself lucky to have seen the movie on a TV set rather than in a movie theater. In some ways, I think the physical television adds another dimension to the film’s layered messages.  The Muppet Movie uses puppets to explore the ambiguity between the magic of the imaginary and the inherent reality in show business’ construction of fantasy.

The imaginary can be slapstick: a karate chopping pig wrestling an evil mad scientist (played by Mel Brooks) into his own brain-sucking machine. The reality of show business is full of frustratingly ironic choices: the easiest and quickest way for Kermit to accomplish his dreams of singing, dancing and world fame would be to work for Doc Hopper.

Throughout the film these poles – magic and constructed fantasy — get closer together and in the end a rainbow becomes the symbol that holds the tension. Puppets are like rainbows. They “are visions, but only illusions.”

Yes, rainbows are just prisms of light reflecting off moisture droplets in the atmosphere. And yes human perception and meaning-making also render rainbows more than just physical events that can be attributed to photons or light waves. But the magic of the phenomena is not any less awe inspiring when we understand the laws of physics.

Likewise, a puppet is simply a manufactured object that becomes meaningful in the context of its relationship with puppeteer and audience. The puppet becomes meaningful when placed in a liminal space – an in between, transitional space — between real and imaginal. Or in the words of Gideon Haberkorn, the Muppet “exists only when the liminal space opens up – it exists, therefore, only during the process of performance. A puppet is not just crude material; it is performed material” (Garlen 2009, p. 30).

Kermit’s famous rainbow song, “The Rainbow Connection,” (written by Paul Williams with Kenny Ascher and Jim Henson for the movie) is quick to remind us of the ambiguity between the real and the imaginal: “So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it, I know they’re wrong, wait and see. Some day we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me.” The rainbow connection is what we find when we engage in depth psychology. Or, when we engage in what James Hillman calls Psychologizing. “Through psychologizing,” Hillman writes in ReVisioning Psychology, “I change the idea of any literal action at all – political, scientific, personal – into a metaphorical enactment” (1977, p.127). By psychologizing we find (or make) meaning out of what was and is taken for granted, like the refracted light of a rainbow or the textiles that are sewn together to make a puppet.

We often laud Kermit the frog for his singing, his dancing, or his sense of humor. Perhaps his real skill, however, is his aptitude for psychologizing.

I’ll be honest.  Even as an adult with children of my own, I get tears in my eyes every time I watch the The Muppet Movie. It could be simple nostalgia. The film is associated with many memories. I popped it into the VCR on early weekend mornings while my parents and older siblings were still sleeping and unwilling to play with me. I performed the songs on stage at middle school assemblies. My wife and I watched it together on video for our first date. Now I watch it with my own children. We project the movie onto a 100inch diagonal screen using a Optoma HD66 DLP video projector. The movie streams using WIFI from the itunes software on the upstairs desktop computer through an Roku HD media device. My three year old is much more technologically savvy than I am and he can already work the remote. He selects movies himself, recognizing Kermit, Fozzie, Gonzo, Miss Piggy and the rainbow that appears on the screen. I’m always happy when he chooses The Muppet Movie.

The older I get, the more the movie’s psychological and philosophical themes grab me. Plus, I love the irony that puppets posit ideas worth pondering. I’m glued to the screen as I recognize the theories of depth and archetypal psychologies dramatized with fur and fuzz.

The Muppet Movie is a fictional account of how the Muppets became famous. The central narrative is told as though it were autobiography: made by Muppets, about Muppets.  It tells how Kermit leaves the swamp, meets his Muppet cohort, and heads to Hollywood to follow his passion. He discusses his dream during the big show down that takes place about halfway through the film. The scene is constructed like a Hollywood back lot parody, exhibiting all the signifiers of the western cowboy movie genre. Dust blows; tumbleweeds tumble; Kermit is wearing needle-sharp spurs; lone whistles punctuate the soundtrack.

Kermit:

I’ve got a dream…

Kermit is face to face with the film’s antagonist, Doc Hopper.  They stand on the main road of a ghost town inhabited only by the goofy scientist/inventor Professor Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker. Doc Hopper has been chasing Kermit the entire film, halfway across the country. He’s got Kermit and his fuzzy friends cornered, held at gunpoint. Doc Hopper wants to make Kermit the spokes-frog for his corporate chain of French fried frog leg restaurants.  But all Kermit can see is “millions of frogs on tiny crutches.”

Doc Hopper:

All my life I’ve wanted to own a thousand frog leg restaurants, and you’re the key, Greenie.

Kermit’s voice is unmistakable. It is nasal and squeaky. It is fun and child-like. But it is also full of wisdom and pathos. He pleads with Doc Hopper,

Kermit

I’ve got a dream, too, but it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy. That’s the kind of dream that gets better the more people you share it with, and, well, I’ve found a whole bunch of friends who have the same dream, and it kind of makes us like a family…

…I don’t think you’re a bad man, Doc. But I think if you look in your heart, you’ll find you really want to let me and my friends go, to follow our dream.

Kermit’s sentimental monologue is nice. It reinforces the traditional American-Christian rhetoric that we hear in self-help seminars and read in best-selling spiritual paperbacks. It emphasizes a focus on community and a do-unto-others mentality that seems to resist a cultural standard of might makes right – a cultural standard where profits come before people, or frogs. But Kermit (and Jim Henson) know that anti-corporate dogma is not necessarily resistant. In fact, a quick survey of New York Times bestsellers list, a flip through hundreds of cable television channels, or a glance at the blogosphere shows that Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington attitude is as prevalent (and profitable) as unchecked commerce in our capitalist democracy. Like two sides of a nickel, corporate greed and anti-materialism go hand in hand like David and Goliath. After all, doesn’t the underdog always beat the establishment in every fairy tale made by corporate behemoth Disney? The righteous meek-shall-inherit-the-earth dogma saturating cartoons not only led the Walt Disney Company to become a global entertainment conglomerate (which now owns the rights to Kermit and the Muppets), it also served as the revolutionary ideological bedrock on which the United States built an oligarchic empire.

No Kermit’s sentiment is not special. In fact, it can be understood as the same old swamp to riches American dream story with a little do-good thrown in for public relations purposes.  And Kermit knows it. The Philo Farnsworths of this world never get the credit they deserve, even after winning decades of legal battles. That is why in the Muppet’s reality, like our own, monologues don’t save the day. No, that honor is reserved for puppetry of the absurd. Animal grows into a giant fuzzy and frightening monster because he has eaten Dr. Honeydew’s insta-grow pills. He scares off Doc Hopper and his thugs.

Animal is a Muppet that might be described as half cave-man and half kind-hearted, untamed beast. He is like the Freudian uninhibited Id covered in yarn and frizz. He is at the whims of his instincts and emotions. His desires are not filtered through the censorship of civilization. Animal does not dress up for weddings and holidays. Animal does not conform to cultural mores. Instead, Animal takes joy in destruction like a toddler toppling a tower of blocks. When I watch him I’m reminded of my childhood temper tantrums: the elation of unfettered sentiment. I imagine my arms flailing. I can feel my throat sore from screaming. I imagine the tickle of salt-tears flowing down my face as my nose wells up with snot (not the thick mucousy kind of snot, but rather the thin liquid that flows like water).  I can feel my heart race and my muscles tighten.

Like temper tantrum personified, the ground shakes and Animal’s giant head breaks through the roof of the building that houses Dr. Honeydew’s lab. Animal belts out a huge growl and smiles a rebellious childish grin. Doc Hopper and his men run.

Kermit

Okay everyone, on to Hollywood!

Then, according to one of the multiple layered narratives, the movie ends when Kermit and his gang of Muppets arrive in Hollywood. Orson Welles, in the role of movie producer, hands them the “standard rich and famous contract.”  The Muppets head straight to the back lot.

They fill a soundstage with hand painted, cartoon like, set pieces that reflect sequences from the film. The characters prepare to shoot the Muppet movie that the viewer has just seen. Under Kermit the Frog’s direction – he barks into a bullhorn and sits with frog legs crossed on the classic director’s chair – they wheel in a plywood swamp, a constructed county fair, and giant wooden rainbow. It is another nod to Kermit’s autonomy.

Is Jim Henson proposing that autonomous Muppets deserve the credit for this work? Is the visionary puppet master commenting on the gap between his own persona and an authentic Self? Or, are Kermit, Fozzy, Gonzo, and Miss Piggy like tangible self-determining voices of what C.G. Jung would call active imagination? Are they inward self-determining, and autonomous voices that speak from deep within the psyches of their operators?

James Hillman, founder of post-Jungian archetypal psychology, writes, “Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us” (1977, p.17). The film seems to be playing with the implicit ambiguities of Hillman’s suggestions. Who has whom: is the puppeteer in the puppet, or is the puppet in the puppeteer?

In the finale of The Muppet Movie, Kermit reprises the opening number. He sits in a soundstage swamp and sings once again, “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?” The other Muppets join in, adding a new verse, “Rainbows are memories, sweet dream reminders; that’s part of what rainbows do.” We, the audience, get the point; the movie Kermit has dreamed of making is, in fact, the movie we have just seen – the movie we are still watching.

The camera tracks Gonzo, holding balloons, levitating to the giant rainbow set piece. “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and . . . ” The voices of singing puppets trail off with a smash and a crash, the set is destroyed, the dream falls, one plywood prop at a time. First the rainbow crashes. Then the sky blue background collapses. The cardboard bus (painted to look like the tour bus that carries Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem) falls down. The fake palm trees tip. The paper El Sleezo saloon is left in pieces. Chaos ensues: broken lights, electric sparks. Explosions bust through the sound stage ceiling. The dream has come crashing to the floor.

Magically, however, just when we accept that all reality may be nothing more than fantasy constructed, a real rainbow slides in through the hole (Real? At least within the implied reality of one narrative: this rainbow is not a soundstage construct).

Harps strum and Kermit sings: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending.”  Life is fantasy, the arrival of one set piece after another, but that doesn’t make it unreal. “Keep believing, keep pretending.” Construct it consciously, but believe in your construction. What is made (puppets by puppeteers) and phenomena that present as if from nowhere (rainbows) are both of equal validity. The Gods are internal and external.  The line between the divine and the material becomes obfuscated when we approach the world archetypally.

As Kermit finishes the song, I can barely hold back the tears when suddenly a six-foot puppet creature named Jack rips through the movie screen (remember this is a movie inside a movie).  Jack cuts through the sentimental and emotional tension screaming “Hollywood!” The implication is that this monster has been chasing Kermit and his pals since the beginning of the film. They met him while trading in Fozzie’s uncle’s Studebaker. But we are also reminded that scenes of Muppets viewing The Muppet Movie premier have framed the entire narrative.  Audience is jolted from one narrative reality to another, reminded that there is always another layer to see-through.

In this case, the audience is asked to see-through the moral banality of Kermit’s rhetoric. Yes, Kermit offers a message familiar to audiences in the U.S.A. raised on Hollywood blockbusters: follow your dreams; you can do anything you can imagine. However, the Muppets’ strength and authenticity is located in their felt covered pathos. Frog and friends are not satisfied with the one sidedness of candy-coated wishes. By breaking through the fourth wall of the puppet proscenium, when one layer of narrative breaks through the next, Kermit and his furry friends are creating a web of meaning-making. They are reminding us to be cynical by de-literalizing one surface narrative after another. They are even skeptical of the songs’ lyrical rhetoric. Muppets reject their own literal moralities, acknowledging that an alternate mythical reality lies directly beneath each surface. Soon the newly revealed reality is exposed as fantasy.

The Muppets’ believability, what makes them life-like, is their complexity of meaning. They consistently see-through their own crayola colored moral dogma severing the suspension of disbelief with unorthodox dramatic devices. They recognize the precariousness of their puppet world and the dubiety of their own autonomy.

The film premier that frames the story is actually a narrative about the film’s larger scenario that references the narrative itself. It is a film-within-a-film-within-a-film that presents itself as the autobiographical work of Kermit, Fozzy, Gonzo, Miss Piggy, Scooter, and friends. Yet even in the opening screening room scene, when Kermit’s nephew Robin asks his uncle if this is really how the Muppets met, Kermit tells him that they took some liberties with the story. The audience is never sure where to focus its belief in the absurd.

I’m reminded of a famous Muppet sketch. Kermit and Fozzie are chatting. As if from nowhere, a startled Fozzie panics. “Don’t look!” He warns Kermit, looking downward, “but there’s somebody underneath you, and he has a beard . . . oh my god, there’s somebody underneath me too!” The irony is perfect. Fozzie is pathologizing the puppeteer. He sees his operator as a kind of illness. He sees frank Oz as something like a hideous blemish, a wart, a growth, a pimple. From audience perspective the puppeteer is natural, even healthy and necessary. A puppet without a puppeteer would be a criminal aberration fit for a late night horror film. However, from the puppet’s perspective, strings are pathological. Fozzie tries not to look and advises Kermit to do the same. As if the puppeteer might just go away if he elects not to pay attention to it.

Of course, when two puppets openly discuss the invisibility of their puppeteers, pretending not to notice, the phenomenon manifested is, in fact, the visibility of, and increased attention to, the operator. The interdependence between Kermit and Henson, between Fozzie and Oz, becomes obvious.

Kermit and Fozzie often talk to Henson and Oz in full view of the camera.  Puppets witness the puppeteers and vice versa. The pole that controls Kermit’s arm can always be seen hanging from his hand, acknowledging the puppeteer that drives and operates the being. The puppeteer is like the complex, the dream, the symptom. What would happen if Kermit or Fozzie eradicated Jim Henson’s or Frank Oz’s hands? They would find themselves limp, inanimate. They could ignore the hands, but then they would become blind instruments operated by another’s autonomy. The best bet is dialogue.

Kermit teaches us amphibiousness. He calls for a dialogue between puppet and puppeteer, between outer and inner. Kermit teaches us to listen. Listen to the symptom — the complex, the hands that control us — to see where they want to go. Kermit teaches us to join them willingly and actively.

Kermit teaches us that sentimentality won’t save us. Platitude is pretty but life’s perfect song and dance numbers are often interrupted, dues ex machina, by the unpredictable, the silly and the absurd. Kermit teaches us not to be like any old puppet, but rather, to be a Muppet.

Most importantly, however, Kermit brings awareness to the puppet proscenium. In Kermit’s case the proscenium is the movie screen or the bezel of the television. He makes us ask what goes on inside the box: GE’s Octagon, the Zenith model T1816R, the Porta-Color, the Sony Trinitron, the Optoma HD66, and today’s 3D Flat-panel, Plasma, LCD, LED, rear-projection, jumbo diagonal, net-connected, DVD combos. Are there little people in there?  Wearing little costumes? Controlling little puppets? Who’s telling the stories, and who’s listening?

The cultural metaphor I’m writing around is trite and obvious. Who are the puppets and who are the puppeteers? We live in an age when desires are manufactured into needs by savvy marketing departments. Thanks to an advertising mega-machine, technological wonders that we didn’t even know we wanted a decade ago are now necessities. Political pundits on TV and radio tell us what to think about social issues. Newspapers tell us how to talk about yesterday’s “current” events. Pop songs tell us what romance is supposed to feel like. Amazon and the New York T

imes tell us which books to read.

Carl Jung counseled each of us to ask what is the myth that we’re living? Kermit the Frog counsels us to ask who’s writing it and who’s performing it?

Jim Henson (or Steve Whitmire) looks into Kermit’s ping-pong ball eyes. One hand controls a fabric amphibian’s mouth; the other hand controls his arm.  Muppet and Muppeteer together tell us always to remember the physical characteristics of the puppet theater and to be willing to knock it down if need be.

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