cutting the strings: on puppets

by ELYSSA SEFIANE

You are human ... You play up to and perform for your invisible masters. You struggle to define your complex reality. You are still trying to make sense of your soul. There is nothing alike in a human and a puppet.

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On the stage, everything that can be imagined can also be conveyed. There are hardly any limits to the instrumentation that makes this possible. Cosmetics enhance features or create entirely new ones, costumes serve to slim and bulk in ways that completely alter shapes, and the body contorts in strange displays, becoming a canvas for a wide range of emotions.

Nonetheless, there are still confines to the expressive capacities of even the most dramatic actor. The bounds of human anatomy are ultimately restricted in scope. All the cosmetics and costumes in the world can only go so far in reproducing the most surreal of concepts and the most inhuman of characters. And so, the stage must find ways to expand beyond the realm of what is humanly possible to keep up the illusion that nothing can really stop the show from going on.

In some productions, it is puppetry that further enables this illusion. Through the art of marionettes, ventriloquy, and even shadows, puppetry personifies props to carry stories into new dimensions of possibility.

In spite of the artistry behind it, there is still something, well, creepy about puppetry that seems especially pervasive in current cultural interactions with the form. Automatonophobia, the fear of humanlike figures, is common in many people’s experiences with puppets.

As I try to decipher potential reasons for this, my mind goes back to watching Tim Burton’s Coraline in 2009. I was eight years old, fairly grown, and proudly unfazed by the dark and the dentist and other childish fears. But even then, the stop motion puppets unnerved me to my core. There was something so emotionless, yet so real behind the disjointed clay movements and buttoned eyes of the characters — so real and yet, not quite Real enough.

I knew then why in the Pinocchio story I had been told since childhood, the little marionette with a soul and emotions still wished on a star to be made a human boy.

Even his anthropomorphic wooden body could never satisfy his desire to be wholly actualized, to be seen in the eyes of others as Real and a person and nothing in between.

The puppet operates in the gray area of life and fiction, separated only by a lack of consciousness outside of the puppetmaster. It is peculiar in that it occupies this intersection of humanity and mechanics but never quite achieves personhood.

I remember how much I saw myself in Coraline, despite her being made of clay. Even at my young age, the lengths she went to ground herself in reality again after being displaced in a fantastical world far away from home seemed eerily familiar.

This makes me think that it is the elasticity of their humanity that disturbs us the most. For a brief moment, we find ourselves empathizing with the puppet as they emote and search for meaning just as we do.

Like Coraline, we all desperately try to make sense of a reality that seems flimsy and, at times, imagined. What does it mean, on a cosmic scale, to have souls and to exist? Religion and spirituality have all tried to make sense of this, but it is still a question with no single verdict. And like Pinocchio, we all bow to the strings of what society expects of us, so often hinging our social interactions on the politics of acceptability. We morph our everyday lives into little stage productions of their own.

Maybe the true uncanniness lies not in the elements of ourselves we see in puppets, but in the elements of puppets we see in ourselves.

Like pawns to some invisible puppetmaster, we are intimately controlled:

By our fear of the unknown and of never finding meaning, which manifests itself in all-consuming existential dread that frequently leads to depression and anxiety.

By our inability to escape the influences of others that permeate everything from our respective cultural norms to the unspoken standards of beauty we see in the media.

By our own vices and vanities, which might dictate our whims more than the sensibility of our higher selves.

As we are daily subjected to these forms of control, can we ever fully be agents of our own desires? Can we cut the strings and declare ourselves human and nothing in between?

The answer is not that simple, but if I have one assurance for you, it is this: For the puppet, when the curtains are drawn, the encore fades, and the strings are at last loosened, the stage light reveals the lifelessness behind its eyes that was there all along. Pinocchio goes back into his box, forever paused at the borderland of Toy and Real Boy.

But it is not the same for you. As much as you may have exhausted your day at the hands of your invisible masters, you have the chance to climb under the covers and be reminded of your humanity.

When the sun goes down and you are no longer performing for anyone, the soft cricket of your conscience chirps, Now, love, you can rest. In your dreams you can be as Real as you want to be. ■