Meet the Feebles: Jackson's Filthy Puppet Musical

Peter Jackson’s second feature began life as a much smaller idea. He had been approached about a puppet series for Japanese television, developed the concept with Fran Walsh, Stephen Sinclair and Danny Mulheron, and the thing grew teeth somewhere in the process until it was no longer a television proposition in any country. The New Zealand Film Commission put up the money. What emerged in 1989 was a feature-length puppet musical about a variety show whose entire cast is in some stage of collapse, and it remains, more than three decades on, the most upsetting film in Jackson’s catalogue. Bad Taste is filthier by volume. Meet the Feebles is filthier by intent.

I found it the way most people outside New Zealand did — a tape passed sideways, described inaccurately as “the rude Muppets”, which is the description that has followed it for thirty years and has done it a great deal of damage. It is worth clearing up, because the Muppet framing sends people in looking for a parody and the film is not one.

The shape of it

The Feebles Variety Hour is a theatrical revue staffed by animals. Heidi, a hippopotamus, is the star, and her relationship with Bletch, the walrus who produces the show, is ending in a manner nobody has told her about. Bletch runs narcotics on the side. Trevor, a rat, shoots pornography in the basement. Harry, a rabbit of extraordinary appetites, has begun to suspect he has contracted something. Sid, an elephant, is being pursued over a paternity claim by a chicken. Wynyard, a frog and a knife-thrower, is a Vietnam veteran with a heroin habit and a tendency to relive the war during his act. Sebastian, a fox, wants to perform a musical number about sodomy and cannot understand the objection.

Tomorrow night the show is being televised. That is the plot. Everything else is people falling apart on a schedule.

The tradition it actually belongs to

The Muppet comparison is a surface reading based on the puppets being felt and the setting being a variety theatre. Structurally, Meet the Feebles is a backstage musical, and it follows that form’s rules with real precision.

The backstage musical is one of the oldest shapes in cinema — 42nd Street, A Star Is Born, the whole Warner Brothers production line and its descendants. The deal it offers an audience is always the same: you get the number, and you also get to see what the number cost. The star is drinking. The producer is a snake. The ingénue is being ruined in real time. Then the curtain goes up and it is all somehow worth it, because the show is beautiful and the film has decided that beauty settles the account.

Jackson keeps every element of that machine and removes the settlement. The misery is all present and correct. The numbers arrive on cue. And the film declines, absolutely, to tell you that the art justifies the wreckage. The curtain goes up and the wreckage is still there, and the audience out front is enjoying itself, which is the accusation.

That is a real argument about showbusiness, and it is much harsher than parody. A parody of The Muppet Show would be about Kermit swearing. This is about what a variety hour is: a machine that requires a supply of damaged people and converts their damage into a light entertainment product.

The real ancestor

For the specific move — the cute form loaded with filth — the parent is Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat from 1972, the first animated feature to receive an X rating in the United States. Bakshi took Robert Crumb’s underground comix and understood the crucial thing about them: the funny-animal drawing style is a delivery mechanism for the content. A cartoon cat can do things a photographed man cannot, and the audience’s guard is down because they learned this visual language as children.

Jackson runs the identical play. The puppets let him film heroin withdrawal, venereal panic, sexual coercion and a war atrocity, and the felt buys him past the point where a live-action film would have been unwatchable or simply banned. Then, having got you past the door, he refuses to be cartoonish about any of it. Wynyard’s flashback is the proof. It is staged as a straight war-film sequence — mud, tracer, hallucination, the register of the American Vietnam pictures played entirely without a wink — and the fact that everyone in it is a puppet stops being funny about ninety seconds in. That is the whole thesis of Bakshi’s method executed better than Bakshi ever executed it.

The other useful cousin is Švankmajer, who spent a career on the same discovery from the art-house side: a puppet is a body with no rights. You can do anything to it. Švankmajer treats that as damnation. Jackson treats it as show business, which may be the bleaker reading.

Why it works: the craft under the grot

The puppetry is genuinely accomplished, and it is the reason the film lands rather than merely offends.

Watch Heidi in the quiet scenes. Mulheron’s performance gives her a slow, heavy physicality — she occupies more space than the frame comfortably allows, and Jackson shoots her from angles that emphasise it, so that her presence in a corridor is faintly oppressive before she has done anything. Then the film asks you to feel for her, and you do, because the puppet has been given a body language of unhappiness rather than a set of gestures.

The camera is doing serious work too. Jackson had learned on Bad Taste that a cheap film should move, and here he moves constantly — the camera prowls the corridors, drops to floor level, cranes over the stage — which is technically brutal when your performers are people crouched under the set holding their arms up. Most puppet productions are locked off because they have to be. Jackson refused, and the refusal is what makes the theatre feel like a real building with a basement you would not want to visit.

The staging of the theatre itself repays attention. Jackson gives the building a vertical morality: the stage at the top where the product is manufactured, the dressing rooms behind it where the damage is stored, and the basement where Trevor shoots his films. Characters move down through the structure as they degrade, and the film’s geography does the work that a lesser script would hand to dialogue. Nobody explains the hierarchy. You learn it by watching who is allowed on which floor.

The songs are the third leg, and they are properly constructed songs rather than gag material with a tune attached. Sebastian’s number works because the melody and staging are sincere Broadway pastiche, performed with full commitment, and the content is what it is. Comedy from that collision requires the pastiche to be good. It is.

What the Japanese commission left behind

The origin story explains an oddity in the film’s construction. A television variety series needs an ensemble — a large, fixed cast of recurring characters, each with a defined bit, rotating through weekly sketches. Meet the Feebles kept that architecture after it stopped being a series, and you can feel it. The film carries a dozen substantial characters, several of whom have complete arcs that touch the main plot barely or never. Sid’s paternity suit is a self-contained episode. Trevor’s basement operation runs almost parallel to everything else.

In a conventional feature this would be a flaw, and some viewers experience it as one. I think it is the film’s strangest asset. The Feebles Variety Hour feels like an institution with a real staff rather than a plot with roles in it, because Jackson wrote it as a workplace that had to sustain twenty-six weeks of television. The theatre is overpopulated in the way real theatres are overpopulated, full of people whose business you never fully learn. When the ending arrives, the body count means something precisely because the building was properly staffed.

The case against

It is exhausting, and it is exhausting on purpose, which is a defence that only carries a film so far. Jackson’s escalation instinct — the engine that would later be tuned to perfection in Braindead — runs here without much variation in the middle hour. The film establishes early that every character is doomed and degraded, and then spends a long stretch confirming it. There is no relief and no counterweight, no character whose decency gives the cruelty something to push against. Robert the hedgehog is supposed to be that character, and he is too thin to hold the load.

The second problem is that a couple of the running jokes are simply of their moment and land badly now. Harry’s storyline is a 1989 AIDS-panic gag played for farce, and however you read Jackson’s intent, the film is using a plague that was killing people while it shot as a punchline about a promiscuous rabbit. It is the one place where the film’s contempt is aimed at the sufferer rather than the machine.

The verdict

It is a real film with a real argument, and it deserves better than its reputation as a shock item. Anyone who tells you it is the Muppets doing drugs has watched the trailer. What Jackson made is a backstage musical performed by things that cannot leave, about an industry that eats its cast and calls the meal a variety hour, and the technique is far too good for the film to be dismissed as an outrage.

Go in knowing it does not let up. Pair it with Fritz the Cat to see the delivery mechanism invented, or with Forbidden Zone for the other great homemade musical made by people with no interest in permission. It circulates in decent restored editions now, which the puppet work has always deserved.

Spoilers below

Heidi ends the film with a machine gun.

The finale is a massacre. She goes on for the televised show, and instead of the number she kills the cast — Bletch, the crew, the whole revue — while the broadcast runs and the audience keeps watching, unsure whether this is the act. Jackson shoots it as a war sequence, with the same seriousness he gave Wynyard’s flashback, and it is the only moment in the film where anyone gets what they deserve.

The detail that makes it work is the audience. They stay. They watch, and some of them applaud, because they have come for a variety hour and this is more entertaining than the variety hour was. That is the film’s closing argument delivered without a word of commentary: the machine will process anything, including its own destruction, and convert it into content. Heidi kills everyone who ruined her and the show goes out live and rates well.