Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life by Kenneth GrossMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Puppets and I go way back. I want to say that the Muppets and Sid and Marty Kroft shows (HR Pufnstuf, Far Out Space Nuts), though the latter was more costumed humans than puppets, I admit, introduced me to bodies animated by unseen humans. But, outside of television (and that P movie by that D company), I quite fondly recall my mother making little puppets out of felt and doing little puppet shows for me. She was a drama-girl all the way. Furthermore, I remember seeing street puppets when I lived in Italy as a boy and at least one Punch & Judy show in Brighton, England, when I lived in the UK as a teenager.
But it was later in life that I learned to appreciate the uncanny nature of puppets. In the early 90s I discovered the movies of Jan Svankmajer, which sometimes featured marionettes, then, in the early 2000s, I discovered the stop motion films of The Brothers Quay, which have become an obsession of mine. Back in 2003, I believe it was, I saw another Punch and Judy show (this one in Minneapolis, of all places), I took my kids to a live puppet show (with puppets more reminiscent of Frank Oz's early creations, than anything else) not many years after. Then, in 2019, while on vacation in Europe, my wife and I visited Salzburg, Austria and attended the Salzburg Marionetten Theatre. And just tonight, I signed up for a Domestika course on making wooden marionettes.
I think I'm becoming a little obsessed. Maybe I was obsessed all along and am just now admitting it.
Back in 2021 (it feels strange to say that - has it really been that long?), I read and reviewed Victoria Nelson's outstanding book The Secret Life of Puppets, which I had stumbled on at Goodreads, if I remember correctly. Then, my favorite podcast, Weird Studies, did an episode on this same book in November of 2022. They followed this with an episode about the movie Evil Dead II, which also dipped into the uncanny nature of puppets. This is where I first saw reference to the book being reviewed presently.
It is this uncanny aspect of puppets that Kenneth Gross examines in Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. All the while I was reading, I felt as if I had the voice of Mark Fischer whispering in my ear. His book/essay on The Weird and the Eerie could have formed the skeleton for Gross's essay, though Gross's work preceded Fisher's by five years. So, perhaps it is the other way around? However, I find no reference to Gross's work in Fischer's bibliography. Maybe this is just another magical synergy that seems to happen so often with these sorts of confluences.
The movement and intelligence that are apparent in a puppet is "weird" (in Fisher's sense) because there should be no movement or intelligence or intention in unliving material, yet that intent seems to come through the unliving (perhaps undead?) material of the puppet. There is movement in what there ought not to be. This offends our logic while simultaneously spiking our curiosity, a morbid curiosity for that which is incapable of morbidity, strangely enough.
It feels quite natural for humans to view these artificial beings as artifacts with some connection to the past. I've seen countless cast off dolls in the mud, for example, and it piques my sense of wonder. How did this get here? Who lost it? Is there some latent connection with a past owner? This begs the further question: Are puppets, dolls, and marionettes some sort of mana batteries, storing energy from some past life force? Perhaps the mystery of these unseen lives that live behind the figures is what we hope to see through to, with the "little people" serving as scrying devices into past lives, their joys, and tragedies. But are our visions clouded and warped by looking through these anthropomorphic lenses? Could some malevolent spirit twist or visions of the past if we are not careful? Do we dare look into their eyes?
Puppets and the stages on which they come "alive" ae not like us. They are exaggerated and often missing many of the subtle and not-so-subtle things that make up life. This creates what Fisher termed "the eerie". Much that should be "there" is not, yet some law of puppetry seems to govern their universe, laws that do not apply in the same way to us. Nor do our laws apply to them. So which reality is real? Which laws actually inhere?
Just as the paradox of life seemingly manifest in dead things causes unease and fascination, the utter unknowability of what it feels, tastes, smells, or sounds like to be a dead thing that was once living simultaneously terrifies us and fills us with curiosity, longing, even, to know and, with much fear and uncertainty, to experience what the dead experience. It is the age old push and pull of existential dread, brought to life(?) by the infusion of seeming intent into dead matter. The puppeteer possesses the puppet with life-force, animating it, the living possessing the dead in a reverse-seance. Who is the medium here?
Puppeteers I have met indeed often speak of waiting for some impulse from the puppet they hold, a gesture or form of motion that they can then develop often being shocked by what emerges.
The act of puppeteering blurs the line between tool and wielder. yes, the human informs the dead material, but the dead material imposes its own limitations, resisting, even fighting back!
The unliving puppet is, of course, innocent, as it can only react to others' manipulations. Yet many puppet shows are transgressive and anything but innocent (go watch a Punch and Judy show, if you don't believe me). Here the inherent innocence of the puppet allows for a buffer to the audience. Hence the shocking nature of the horror trope of puppets and other artificially animated human stand-ins possessed of self-realized inimical animation.
Remember, though, that's it not always the humans facing the puppet that have need to fear that strange intersection of life and death, of immaterial energy and material existence. As Gross implies, this liminal zone is fraught with danger for all:
Then there was the marionette of Antigone who had hung herself with the very strings that had earlier given her life. That had its own kind of truth.
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