The Muppets is very muppety in a lot of ways. It captures the tone of the Muppets, and it made me
laugh a whole bunch of times. It was fun to see these familiar characters acting like themselves, and Jason Segal also acting like a Muppet--possibly the only more adorable person on earth is Amy Adams. It was especially great to watch this movie, which is largely about restoring a beautiful but shabby old theater, at the Byrd. But I have some problems with
The Muppets.
The premise of the movie is that the Muppets, formerly huge television stars, have fallen out of popularity. I found this very confusing. I understand that this story takes place in an alternate universe, but I'm not at all clear on its relationship to 1) the real world or 2) the world of The Muppet Movie(s). In the real world, the Muppets have never stopped being popular, and they certainly did not disappear from public view during the three decades since The Muppet Show went off the air. I believe that
The Great Muppet Caper came out after the show ended, and
The Muppets Take Manhattan came out in 1984. In the 90s, after Jim Henson's death, three Muppet movies came out in theaters, and while they're not all stunningly successful as films, I would argue that
The Muppets Christmas Carol is among the best of the many, many versions of that story. I asked my resident five-year-old pop culture expert about the Muppets, to see whether they have fallen into obscurity, and she readily identified the main characters and named her favorite (Piggy, of course). The Muppets may not be as popular as they were in, say, 1981, but they have never disappeared. I do not for a second believe that the real Selena Gomez in the real world doesn't know who the Muppets are. That said, I do not think the movie wants me to believe that the Muppets are very unpopular now exactly, so much as it wants me to believe that (in the world of the movie) they were once much
more wildly popular than they ever were in real life.
The film is preoccupied with celebrity. That's okay--after all,
The Muppet Movie ended with Orson Welles giving the Kermit & friends the Standard Rich and Famous contract. Being famous was always part of the Muppet dream. But I feel sure that Kermit's desire to be famous, way back when he met Dom Deluise in that swamp, was all about bringing people joy, and none about having people like him. Being famous is a necessary side-effect of making people happy, not an end in itself. So in this new movie when the rousing happy ending is this obscene celebrity orgy, when Wally is validated by hordes of fetishy screaming fans, that moment rings very false to me, not just because it contradicts or undermines everything that comes before it in the plot of the movie, but also because it has always seemed to me that the public aspect of being an entertainer, the part where people are staring at you, was the part that made Kermit a little uncomfortable.
Speaking of things that make Kermit a little uncomfortable...what happened to the relationship between Kermit and Piggy? Piggy's aggressiveness, both sexual and otherwise, is a big part of what makes her a feminist hero. Kermit's romantic relationship with Piggy has always been complicated by the fact that she is very intimidating. Kermit's mushy monologue to her just made me squirmy and uncomfortable.
