Poetics of Puppetry: Dan Hurlin's Work in "Puppet"

Several weeks ago, I was napping on my parents’ living room couch and watching afternoon television with their two-year-old Yorkie. There was nothing on TV and, worst of all, my parents had made the quantum home technology leap to a satellite dish, so I had no idea how to navigate the seemingly random order of the channels (not to mention how lost I felt in a new digital landscape full of hundreds of new and unknown channels that no doubt promised amazing television content beyond my wildest dreams). I was depressed. Not just about the new-fangled television stations, but about the state of my world in general: writing had stopped being fun, I felt stressed out at work, and I hadn’t made any real human connections in the graduate writing program. My mood was perfect for a day of couch-napping with a lap dog.

Not knowing what to watch on TV, I flipped through the limitless stations until I landed on the Biography Channel. “I like biographies.” I lied to myself, and settled in for a sleep-inducing meditation on some weird aspect of a historical figure’s life who no one really cares to know anything more about. But after a brief commercial break came to an end, I found that the channel’s current programming wasn’t based on an historical exploration of General Grant’s favorite color of wool socks. Instead, there was a documentary airing about the history of American puppetry. My mind jumped fondly to childhood memories of the Muppets and Kermit the Frog singing songs about hard times. But the puppetry being discussed in the documentary wasn’t about anthropomorphized farm animals teaching American children about morality and arithmetic. The puppetry in the film was deeply theatrical, postmodern in design and production, and powerfully moving in ways I hadn’t experienced in any other medium. Despite the pull of the documentary and the beauty and novelty of the artistry I was seeing on the television screen, the warmth of the lap dog and the personalized comfort of the worn-in cushions on my parents’ couch were successfully nap-inducing. I faded off to sleep with images of automatized wood, clay, and strings dancing and speaking and singing for their lives.

The day after dozing to the documentary, my thoughts were dominated by all things puppets. I discussed issues of performance and embodiment with my first-year writing students (they found my interest in the unique medium both childish and weird). I searched the Internet for puppetry resources and Midwestern theatres that might put on contemporary puppet performances. There wasn’t much out there to satisfy my puppet appetite; few people wanted to talk about the aesthetics of puppetry that I had found so fascinating and engrossing the day before. Shut down by an audience of colleagues and peers who had bigger academic fish to fry than discussions of puppet politics, I buried my new interest deep inside myself. And so puppetry as a concept went the way of so many of my artistic inspirations: it filled a day or two of thought and then disappeared into the imaginative mental file cabinet labeled “Things I Tried to Be Into But Ultimately Feel Somewhat Alienated Because Of.” A week of academic and personal responsibilities quickly passed and I forgot all about the film and its conceptual and theoretical promise.

I always spend Thanksgiving Eve alone. It is a holiday tradition I have come to truly enjoy. While Thanksgiving itself is spent surrounded by other people who I love and respect, Thanksgiving Eve is spent reflecting on the things I am thankful for about my own life and pursuits. I spent yesterday morning and afternoon reading, writing poetry, and chatting with a friend at the coffee shop connected to the university library. By evening my eyes were tired and my mind was tapped of creative ideas to put down on paper. In short, it was TV time.

After scanning my trusty basic cable television preview guide (of less than 500 channels, thank goodness) and finding nothing of substance, I decided to peruse my Netflix queue. And there it was, Puppet – a film Netflix describes as an “illuminating documentary [that] looks at the history of American puppetry - its cultural roots and influence - as well as its current renaissance.” - sitting serenely in the “Arts and Culture Documentaries You Might Like” category. The sweet felicity of Netflix interest profiling! I clicked “play” and spent the next 74 minutes enraptured by art, humanity, and the creative spirit.

Although Puppet might claim to be a historical look into “the history of American puppetry,” what it fundamentally documents is one man’s search to find out more about himself, and his reality, through an artistic medium he finds beautiful, mysterious, and strangely human. Dan Hurlin is a New York-based artist, choreographer, and theatre professor who takes on the role of puppet show director to tell the larger/weirder-than-life “true” story of Mike Disfarmer, a deceased Midwesterner who made his living running a portrait photography studio in the early 20^th century. As the character of Disfarmer slowly realizes his livelihood (and, more importantly, his artistic passion/identity) is being made obsolete by modern technology (i.e., personal cameras), Hurlin takes the opportunity made possible by the narrative and meditates on themes of human mortality, artistic extinction, and the often disharmonizing role technology plays in the modern world.

While too much of the film is spent trying to validate puppetry as a legitimate American art form that should be in the same conversation as live theater (“The book was better!” “No the movie was better!” “There would be no movie without the book!” blah blah blah), Puppet actually makes several strong arguments for puppetry as a category of performance in and of itself.

First, Hurlin discusses how puppetry is the perfect medium to express notions of queerness. One of the voices in the film notes that puppetry plays on the ultimate human taboo: the lines between life and death, “the living” and “the dead.” A puppet, having the qualities of an inanimate object that is “brought to life” by human manipulation, is the ultimate other. That is, a puppet is not really “dead” and not really “alive,” either. Existing in an in-between state of mortal ambiguity, the puppet serves as a symbol of that which cannot easily be forced into a single, definitive category. Puppets, simply by existing and performing, teach us to embrace things as they are, not as what we want them to be or what we think they should be.

Secondly, and more importantly, the transparency of puppetry promotes understandings of trust and empathy amongst audience members. Puppets, unlike human actors, are not alive, and we know this. But less obviously, as one of the puppeteers in the film points out, puppets are not trying to be alive (in fact, they’re not trying to be anything. They’re just puppets!). Where we might see Marlon Brando in The Godfather and believe, in the actor’s finest moments, that he actually is the Godfather, we ultimately know on some level at all times that Brando lives a life off camera that has nothing to do with Vito Corleone. In some sense, Brando is pleasantly “tricking” us when he convinces us, through his performance, that he actually is Corleone. This “tricking” does not happen in the same way in puppetry because the puppet has no agency; it is clear that the puppet is “performing” only insomuch as humans are allowing it to perform. When we feel empathy for a puppet character (like the down-and-out character in Disfarmer), we are not feeling empathy for a suffering human actor who is pretending to be another suffering human character. When we feel empathy for a puppet character we are responding to suffering itself and witnessing how it can be communicated even through non-human mediums. Puppeteers argue in Puppet that if humans can feel empathy for a block of wood and the strings that bring it to life, they can learn to be more empathetic to the beings and environments the puppets represent. In this way, puppetry is not just another mode of performing narratives, but an empathy-teaching device that transcends its merely aesthetic goals.

Ultimately, Puppet was a joy to watch because it argued for the importance of art as being both delightful and critical, both beautiful / haunting as well as practical in its human objectives. I have yet to watch the entire interview linked below, but it introduces Dan Hurlin and his work more extensively (and in the artist’s own words) and will hopefully offer ideas that contribute to the theoretical discourse of puppetry and the performing arts.

 I suppose the moral of this story is: if you nap enough, you’ll find an artistic outlet that wakes you up.