Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

I was exhausted by the relief of my terror when Tal’s arm turned into a normal human arm again, with a normal human hand on the end of it instead of an ugly little talking man. The terrible little man who had spoken was once again limp and impotent, and he was put away somewhere out of sight where he could not bother me. After this incident, I think the other scientists at the lab started taking Tal even less seriously than before.

The next time I was watching my beloved Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street , Lydia may have pointed out to me that even they were puppets of a certain sort — that these benign figures whom I loved were puppets, too, and I didn’t find them frightening, did I? True as that may have been, a key difference with Bert and Ernie was that the puppeteers of Sesame Street took pains to mask the human agency and artifice behind them. As long as the viewer is fooled, it doesn’t matter what they are. I was perfectly willing to believe that Bert and Ernie were real. I was willing to invest all my conviction in them, that they were autonomous, sentient beings, not artificial things designed to mimic the look of actual organisms, given movement to mimic life, and given voices to mimic conscious intelligence. Puppets are frightening only when the artifice is noticeable. It was also pointed out to me that one of my favorite films at the time (and still!), Pinocchio , concerned a puppet. That did not lend me any reassurance, either.

For one thing, Pinocchio is clearly not set in a universe that obeys our own conceptions of reality. This is evident right from the beginning of the film. The film opens with the lonely old puppet maker and clock maker, Geppetto, fashioning Pinocchio from a block of wood and painting him. When he completes the project, Geppetto dances the puppet (a marionette) around his home, to the general vexation of his two pets: a kitten named Figaro and a fish named Cleo. Before retiring for the evening, the childlike old man happens to look out of his bedroom window and notices that a new star has messianically appeared in the firmament. He wishes upon it, wishing that the puppet he has just made, Pinocchio, were a real boy. While he sleeps, the star becomes a beautiful semitranslucent woman who floats into the room through the window and, with a touch of her magic wand, animates Pinocchio. Pinocchio slowly blinks his wooden eyelids and stirs his wooden limbs, and — the strings attached to his head, arms, and legs having vanished — comes to life. Pinocchio arrives in the world already knowing language, but with an otherwise only partially formed consciousness. He is conscious, but without conscience , knowing nothing of the norms or moral conventions of the civilization into which he has just been born. For this purpose the blue fairy employs Jiminy, an anthropomorphic cricket drifter who happens to have earlier broken into Geppetto’s home unnoticed to seek shelter inside one of the room’s many clocks. The cricket finds the fairy sexually attractive. Jiminy, who obliges the fairy partly out of his attraction to her, is given a suit of fancy new clothes and employment as Pinocchio’s moral tutor. The fairy tells Pinocchio that he will be made into “a real boy” if he completes a sort of moral trial period as a living puppet. With this, the fairy retreats back through the window and goes back to being a star. Just then Geppetto wakes up. At first he is astonished that his wish has come true and the puppet has come alive, indicating that this is an unexpected event, but he surprisingly quickly readjusts his understanding of reality and soon has accepted that Pinocchio is alive. The very next morning, Geppetto decides that Pinocchio must go to school. He gives him a textbook and an apple to give to his teacher, and with no clear directions sends him on his way. However, Pinocchio is waylaid by an evil fox and a cat — both wearing clothes and anthropomorphic — who convince him to pursue a career in the theatre. Pinocchio’s naïveté causes him to easily fall victim to their chicaneries, and the fox and cat sell him into a life of indentured servitude to a brutal puppeteer named Stromboli. (Throughout the story, Pinocchio’s greatest vulnerability is his blithely trusting naïveté.) Many adventures follow, and Pinocchio, after repeated errors of judgment and understanding, is finally reunited with Geppetto; at the end of the film he is rewarded with becoming a biological human child. The fox and the cat, however, seem perfectly at ease in the human sphere of activity, communicating with and even engaging in economic transactions with humans, who never find it at all strange that they are animals: clearly, this is a universe in which Pinocchio’s quest to “become a real boy” is absurd. He is already anthropomorphic! — what else does he want? This is a universe in which some animals are merely animals — such as Geppetto’s pet cat, Figaro — and other animals have been given the pass of full human consciousness with which to enter into the dealings of ordinary human civilization. I have often wondered what would have become of Pinocchio had he chosen not to become a real boy, but rather to defiantly remain forever a puppet. When he becomes a real boy, his new human flesh grows smooth over his knobby wooden joints, and his eyes suddenly glisten with authentic moisture. He has become fully human — but at what price? Now that he has traded his wooden body for an organic body of electricity, bone, blood, and water, he will presumably now grow into a man, who will eventually die. Does Pinocchio realize he has traded a state of emotionally immature immortality for the mere right to call himself a human being, even though this is a world in which such a right matters little in the course of everyday business? Surely no right-thinking consciousness would swap gold for bronze like that! He’s only let himself get cheated one more time! Later, Pinocchio the real man will have to come to terms with the full implications of his humanity (wisdom, death) in order to realize that he doomed himself with the final mistake he committed in his prehuman puppethood.

As we drove home from the lab that day — or maybe it was the next day, or the day after — I noticed Lydia seemed to be in higher spirits than usual. Not that she was ever morose, but she was typically serious. Yet today she was in a jocular, airy-fairy mood uncharacteristic of her. My own fragile soul was still a little rattled from my encounter with Tal’s horrifying puppet. It was the beginning of spring. I think it was among the first days of the year that were not abysmally cold. All over the city the gutter pipes whispered with snowmelt, and maybe even a hopeful bird or two dared to sing an early requiem for winter. As soon as we got in the car, as soon as Lydia had buckled me in and chortled up the engine with the keys, her hand leapt to the radio dial, and turned it on and turned it up, and proceeded to sing along with the song that issued from the holes in the dashboard of the car. She was in a good mood. She drove us home.

Scarcely had we shut the door, scarcely had our coats been hung and our shoes kicked off, when she started to cook. I offered to help. Lydia glanced down at me as I stretched my long hairy arms up at her with my eyes pleading for the mere privilege of her permission to participate in this activity; she smiled sweetly at me, patted my head and declared that she “could handle it.” She played joyful music on her stereo and sang along to it. Suddenly the kitchen was alive with the clamor of pots and pans, with hissing water, with warmth and rising steam, with the smells of chopped ingredients releasing their biological perfumes into the air as the blade of the chopping knife liberated the odoriferous chemicals trapped inside the bulbs of garlic and the onions.