Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday
So here’s Alice Cooper, rising out of a coffin with his stringy black hair and big black smudges around his eyes, wearing a blood-red lined Dracula cape. A monster band is playing “Welcome to My Nightmare,” there’s some bats and skeletons, and Alice is sort of flouncing around swishing his cape. And I’m thinking, So what exactly about this is supposed to scare me?
See, the problem is that this is The Muppet Show, circa 1978, and the song is about getting people hooked on drugs. It goes like this:
Welcome to my nightmare.
I think you’re gonna like it.
I think you’re gonna feel like you belong…
Welcome to my breakdown.
I hope I didn’t scare you.
That’s just the way we are when we come down.
So, drugs then. But this is The Muppet Show, and we can’t just give him a shabby hotel room and a big ol’ hypo of heroin — so, instead, we give him a haunted house set and a Dracula cape and tell him to have at it.
It makes for a weird half hour of television. The whole episode keeps messing around with the idea of what Evil is supposed to look like. Is there real Evil in the world that involves drug pushers, sexual exploitation and anti-social destruction? Or can you be Evil just by wearing too much eyeliner?
Backstage, Alice offers Kermit a contract to make him rich and famous. Kermit thinks it’s creepy and won’t touch it, but Gonzo is immediately interested. He’d do anything for recognition, even sell his soul. Am I wrong in thinking that this storyline would have been a hard sell in the 90’s? Postmodern end-of-history ironic detachment aside, there’s no way a current kids’ TV show would even mention a contract with the Devil these days. Apparently 1978 was way more interesting than I remember it.
But if you really want to talk weird, then we’ve gotta discuss the Piggy seduction scene. We come in on Alice, who’s spread out a lot of rugs and pillows on his dressing room floor, and he’s lying on this makeshift love bed with a hideous bird monster. They sing a romantic song and cuddle, stroking each other. Then Scooter comes in, turns on the lights, and calls for Miss Piggy to get ready for Pigs in Space. The bird monster looks up and responds to Scooter in Piggy’s voice. Then she sees herself in the mirror, and screams in panic. She turns to Alice: “The deal is OFF! Make with the magic.” Alice shrugs, waves his hands, and turns the monster back into Miss Piggy. “Tell your man I wouldn’t sell my soul if you PAID me!” she screams, and slams the door on her way out. Alice gets on his demonic ham-radio set, saying, “No, boss, I didn’t make a sale… tell me, do I make any commission on hourly rentals?”
Okay. Where to begin. In the first place, since when do Muppet Show guest stars lay rugs down to make a bed in their dressing room? Since when do Muppet Show guest stars entice Miss Piggy with promises of fame and seduce her into what is at the very least some serious horizontal snuggling? Very deeply weird. And maybe I’m just a cynical adult, but how are we supposed to interpret Miss Piggy seeing herself in the mirror as a monster, except as a metaphor for post-coital regret?
I’ll leave you with that one, because it’s just too strange. So here’s Sam the Eagle’s take on the whole thing. He enters Alice’s dressing room, looks him straight in the eye, and says: “You, sir, are a demented, sick, degenerate, barbaric, naughty… FREAKO!” Alice just smiles: “THANK you!” Sam is despondent. “Freakos: 1, Civilization: 0.”
So this is my question: What in the sam hill is going ON here? There are some hints of real actual depravity with Alice — one song about drug use, another about blowing up school and killing the teachers. He seduces Gonzo into darkness with promises of fame. He seduces Piggy and apparently sexually exploits her in some way. And when Sam, the self-elected voice of mainstream morality, tries to take Alice to task for these crimes, Alice’s response is a good-natured shrug.
There’s a kind of cheerful teenage nihilistic savagery behind Alice’s act — like he’s taking all the fears of mainstream 1970’s America and saying, yup, we’re gonna destroy everything you hold dear. We’ll seduce your daughters and blow up your schools, we’ll sell drugs and wear ugly clothes and we don’t care what you think about it, because we’re beyond your bourgeois rules and laws.
And The Muppet Show‘s way of depicting this is just to Halloweenise the whole thing, to drape bats and skeletons and goblins over it and pretend that it’s all just a big joke, a costume we can put on for the day and then forget all about it.
And I honestly can’t quite figure out how I feel about that. Maybe the Halloweenisation of Evil is helpful, taking the sting out of it by depicting it as a figure of fun rather than a real threat. Or maybe the ghosts and skeletons are just distracting people from actually paying attention to the smug, destructive amorality at the core of Alice’s persona.
I can’t decide what I think about it, and I think the show can’t figure it out either. Alice seems to be playing along in a jolly way, but there’s a weird uncomfortable edge to his laughter, like he’s not exactly on the same page as everyone around him. They don’t resolve the Contract-with-Satan story — Gonzo appears with a scary-looking document at the end, but it turns out to be a bill for special effects. It’s a funny gag, but they never make it clear whether Alice was really an agent for Satan, or just playing a joke on everyone. It feels to me like they thought bringing Alice Cooper onto The Muppet Show would be a hoot, and they didn’t realize how deeply weird it was going to be until it was too late to back out. So they just Halloweenised as best they could and moved on. Looking at it from the distance of a couple decades, it just looks confused, a weird historical document from a period when we were grappling with some big scary changes in American society.
Oh, and also: Robin sings “Over the Rainbow,” which is really really cute.
Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday
by Danny Horn
