The ToughPigs Beacon is a series of articles by neurodivergent writers on the relationship between The Muppets, Muppet fandom, and neurodiversity. Find all entries in the series here.
Say, you know that episode of 30 Rock in which Frank explains the uncanny valley to Tracy? “Tell it to me in Star Wars,” Tracy says, and it just so happens that Frank can perfectly articulate the concept using only characters from Star Wars. And a little The Polar Express. Well, I’ve always wanted to do an explainer like that. So today I’ll be talking about a long-requested topic – autistic representation in media – but with Muppets! And a little The Polar Express.
Something that’s often observed in the online autism community is how creators of TV shows and movies often do a better job of creating characters that connect with their autistic viewers when they don’t mean to. When they try to make a character explicitly autistic, the character tends to end up being highly stereotypical: a white man/boy/man-boy with no social awareness and a constant need to correct people using facts and logic like a robot.
ToughPigs has previously covered some of the ways that The Muppets connect with their autistic fans, but I wanted to try to categorize some of the expressions of autistic experiences I’ve observed in Muppet media, or at least map them out. Different approaches to character result in different approaches to jokes and narratives centered around those characters. It seems that the determining factors tend to boil down to how specific and deliberate the representation is vs. how abstract and accidental it is. Here, let me show you what I mean…. (Now pretend I’m pointing at a chalkboard or something as I explain my arbitrary schema.)
#1. JULIA
Highly Specific Representation
Rarely has a character been born of as many good decisions as Julia was. Giving Julia hands/rods designed specifically for flapping? Excellent decision. The way Alan describes Julia’s autism in terms of what it means “for Julia” to highlight the diversity of the community and the specificity of the character? Beautiful decision. Even the simple decision to make the show’s first explicitly autistic Muppet a girl is a crucially important one given how autistic women and girls are alarmingly underdiagnosed. I have nitpicks about the puppet design, but besides that, I’m pretty happy with Julia, even with her and I not being very much alike.
However, the character does present certain narrative and comedic limitations. Most of the Sesame Street Muppets can suffer a little for comedy, but that feels particularly wrong for Julia. When Ernie bangs on the drums while Bert wants quiet, upsetting Bert, that’s comedy! Much funny, many ha-has. If Ernie banged (bung?) on the drums while Julia wanted quiet, upsetting Julia, that would just read as abuse. No funny, no ha-has.
And you know what’s strange about that? Bert’s actually not far from Julia in representing common autistic experiences.
#2. BERT
Abstract Representation
I understand that Bert wasn’t intended to represent anyone or anything in particular. He’s just a guy. That having been said, capturing neurodivergent experience is an easy thing to unknowingly stumble into just by creating interesting characters.
Bert has an extensive knowledge of subjects that are entirely boring to everyone else, and he finds great beauty in them, building well-organized collections of paper clips and bottle caps. He goes for quiet, solitary entertainment – mostly reading – and gets stressed easily when things don’t go according to plan. All common enough traits for the neurotypical population to be sure, but when taken to this extreme? That’s one neurospicy fella.
Yet, the plausible deniability gives us this sense of permission to laugh at his pain, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I suppose every comedic “straight man” has always represented a person with feelings who we don’t mind seeing get hurt, so long as it doesn’t go too far. I mean, Ernie’s not pushing Bert into traffic or waterboarding him or anything. In fact, I think the viewers’ empathy (and the implied writers’ empathy) with Bert’s position in any given sketch, at least to some degree, is key to making their sketches work. Nowadays, Ernie is more likely to learn by the end of a sketch/story that everything he’s done to Bert for us to delight in was actually wrong, even though we would hope that lesson doesn’t stick so he can torment Bert again. So… that’s complicated. I don’t know how to solve the Bert & Ernie problem, but at least it’s not as bad as a certain character who is almost nothing but problems…
#3 CHIP
Specific Abstraction
I’m not really talking about Jim Henson Hour Chip, mostly because doing so would require that I watch MuppetTelevision segments, and I try to take better care of myself than that. I am talking about Chip from ABC’s The Muppets (2015). Now, you may dislike Chip because of his unsettling eyes, but I dislike Chip because he’s just a bundle of autistic stereotypes played for laughs. You and I are not the same. While the puppet was based on Bill Prady, the character seems to be based on Bill Prady’s winning formula from writing for The Big Bang Theory: Google “Aspergers stereotypes” and see what you haven’t already used a thousand times.
Chip is a computer nerd who makes awkward, uncomfortable eye contact. He misunderstands social situations, believing characters are talking to him when they aren’t and entering conversations unexpectedly. When he says, “I’ve been taught that when people are looking at me and talking to me, they’re talking to me,” it’s clear that he gets through life with very specific, literal rules that help him understand others’ behavior. When Gonzo tells a lie, Chip is quick to correct him, saying, “That contradicts a previous email […]” as he goes through Gonzo’s private email conversations, showing his lack of social boundaries. None of this hurts me deeply, but it’s a bummer. Given how boring and unfunny it is, I’m not quite sure how they thought writing the character this way was worth the potential offense. Honestly, Chip’s almost as bad as the know-it-all kid from the 2004 Robert Zemeckis motion picture The Polar Express.
#4 THE KNOW-IT-ALL KID FROM THE 2004 ROBERT ZEMECKIS MOTION PICTURE THE POLAR EXPRESS
Literally the worst.
Sometimes the only reason a character isn’t explicitly called autistic is that the creators of the media clearly disdain the character for their autistic traits and don’t want to own up to their ableism. This is my take on Lenny, a nerdy boy who knows a lot about trains and inserts himself into conversations to tell people his facts and remind everyone of the rules.
(Note to the editor: No, Joe, I’m not cutting this part, let me have this.)
In the end, the conductor gives Lenny the parting message, “LEARN”, suggesting the character’s flaw is a disinterest in learning. [Note from the editor: Can you try to make some connection to Muppets?] In truth, most nerds love to learn, but many nerdy white boys (neurodivergent or otherwise) are not given much social guidance because it’s assumed that they won’t really need it – that everyone else should just let them do what they want to do – which is a privilege that generally isn’t afforded to nerdy and/or autistic girls. [Note from the editor: You know we get fined when an article isn’t about Muppets.]
Fun fact: Eddie Deezen, the voice of Lenny, also voiced Donnie Dodo, a MUPPET in Follow That Bird. [Note from the editor: Thank you.]
Zemeckis has talked about how he regrets the attitude he had when he was a young, arrogant know-it-all himself, and that shame has informed multiple films of his. Zemeckis uses both Lenny and the protagonist of The Polar Express to avoid interrogating how privilege, toxic masculinity, and immaturity likely produced his youthful arrogance and instead blame it on critical thinking and an interest in facts and reason.
But then, this is not a The Polar Express website. This is a Muppet website. This is a The Polar Express website. So I return to the subject of Muppets, now turning my attention to the most abstract Muppet representation of autism ever seen to date…
#5 JULIA (again)
Total abstraction
You know, Julia was expected to represent a huge and highly diverse community in just one character. From what I can tell, questions about representation guided the development of her character more than anything else. Consequently, Julia is defined by the contradiction at the core of her being: on the one hand, she functions to repeatedly emphasize the total individuality of each autistic person, and on the other, she functions to set general expectations for interactions with autistic people. A singular character cannot give an audience the sense of a diverse spectrum of perspectives, but we all know that’s kind of the point of Julia. She exists to be an introduction, an amalgamation, and an abstraction.
This is not necessarily wrong. I do still like Julia – I haven’t changed that much since I started writing this piece. It’s just a very narrow idea of what an autistic character can be, which is great for an introduction and not so great for further exploring what has been introduced. She would benefit from being presented alongside other autistic characters, but that would mean building more puppets and devoting more time to her stories.
But you know what? They were willing to do that to give her a whole dang family. Were any of them autistic? So far as I know, no. Instead of being utilized to demonstrate the wide range of neurodivergent experiences, they serve as surrogates for the allistic (that is, non-autistic) family members of autistic people. In other words, this show devoted one new character to representing all autistic people… and three new characters to representing neurotypical people who are related to autistic people. Heaven forbid they aren’t centralized in the conversation. This is a pretty clear indication of the show’s priorities, no? If that’s what comes with explicit representation, I’m inclined to be a lot more excited by the implicit representation.
I like how Walter’s devotion to that one old TV show nobody else remembers ends up saving the day. I like how Cookie Monster’s ambivalence to others’ expressions of emotion isn’t portrayed as malice. I like how Boober Fraggle’s serious caution and preparedness create the safety net that enables Fraggle Rock to be so playful and fun. These are all a lot more entertaining than Chip! They are rooted in real human experience, and, as it happens, that’s exactly what autistic experiences are. Isn’t it nifty that caring about different people’s feelings is what drives both good storytelling and being good to others?
So, for this Autism Acceptance Month, try to remember, trite as it may be: if you’ve met one person with autism, The Polar Express is a very, very bad movie.
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by J.D. Hansel
