At some point in the extremely recent past, professional old Jewish crank Larry David “tussled” with the Sesame Street Muppet Elmo to promote the last season of his sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm.
In response, Will Wheaton wrote a heated Facebook post about how the man-puppet altercation disgusted him, and how it echoed his own treatment at the hands of his father.
As with almost anything published on the Internet, I had to wonder whether Wheaton just wanted attention for saying something wild or if he really feels like a man grabbing a puppet on a talk show is an accurate reflection of his childhood abuse. Did he really want to compare his child self to a piece of foam rubber? But taking him in good faith, his post is a breathtaking slide past sensitivity and into full-blown narcissism, in which the world must reflect your personal sensibilities at all times in order to be morally good.
This is gross, but it isn’t surprising. A lot of people only want happy media. Really, really only want depictions of orderly happiness, to the point where the mere echo of a Punch and Judy puppet show disgusts them. That’s nothing new.
But Wheaton goes a little further than that, and that’s where it starts to get actually disturbing.
We’ve all heard from (and sometimes been) the overinvested dork whose fealty to the stories of their youth hinders their intellectual growth. But even the sourest Youtube-essaying nerd understands that Luke Skywalker or Batman or the Ghostbusters aren’t real.
Elmo and the Muppets offer comfort and friendship and support to a world that is starving for it.
Friendship? Really? Comfort I understand. But friendship?
Then I realized that this isn’t just about what Will Wheaton thinks of Larry David. It’s about what he thinks about Elmo. And what Will Wheaton thinks is that the Muppet Elmo is real and is his friend.
Elmo inspired a deeply meaningful and important moment of collective support among disparate people who have been struggling through the traumas of a pandemic, daily mass shootings, the rise of fascism and everything associated with Trump's violence and cruelty.
I mean, I suppose so, if you want to think of it that way, but it’s profoundly disturbing that so many people’s support isn’t a lover or a friend or a family member or even a fellow Internet stranger but a social media feed “run by” a character from a piece of children’s media. How fucked are you if the only entity you can even think will entertain your feelings is a TV puppet? Even a MAGA is deluding themselves in the service of a human being with a recorded adult life and achievements, such as they are; they’re not pouring out their despair to a fleece getup with google eyes that’s meant to appeal to three-year-olds.
Elmo probably saved lives and relationships by opening that conversation… A man who would belittle and mock that isn't much of a man at all.
Again, you can’t hurt Elmo’s feelings because Elmo isn’t real. And Elmo can’t directly save anybody’s life because again, not real. But Wheaton absolutely sees Elmo as on the same level as a real child.1
A lot of us who had the same visceral reaction to a grown man putting his hands on a child (Elmo is 4 years old) in anger, without consent […] Are you really someone who wants to hurt another person simply because you can? Maybe take the impulse to be a jerk and redirect it into being grateful you have no idea why this is so upsetting to so many of us.
He puts his “age” in there! Wheaton doesn’t relate to Elmo as a written character in a piece of media, but as a flesh-and-blood being who can sustain bodily harm. And the people replying do, too!
[A] surprising amount of today's "comedy" is just hurting people, we started to move past that for a while (or at least I thought we did) but it seems to be back in vogue these days.
Violence of any kind is wrong and having Elmo get attacked on live tv will do alot of emotional harm to alot of children.
Elmo just wants to be everyone's friend, and he deserves to be.
Well, I guess he does! I wouldn’t want to turn Elmo down, he might develop a complex in his felted heart.
For some folks, Elmo isn’t just alive and their friend, he’s alive and he’s a spiritual leader. As one poster writes:
Global warming, endless wars, school shootings, failing infrastructure, and both a government and boardroom that looks nothing like us because those in power refuse to give it up and retire.
Then, Elmo, from one of those TV shows that raised us, asked something our parents, politicians, and CEOs haven’t, “How is everyone doing?”
Someone we trust, someone we grew up with, someone who might be only three but was more of an adult than the adults in our lives asked if we were okay. Thousands upon thousands of people responded honestly about all of the pain and fear and anxiety we are feeling.
[…]
Millennials aren’t surviving. We are one of the first generations to not live longer than our parents in a long time. We are regressing as a society, and the people representing us in government don’t understand what’s happening because they aren’t us. Then, when we do run for public office, we are shamed for having been bartenders.
Silence = Death.2
If I had raised a 40 to 50 year old who was posting at an Elmo account expecting it to solve global warming I wouldn’t hand over power, either. I’d also be ashamed of myself but I suppose knowing your middle-aged child is like this is its own punishment.
Anyway, the poster above has very publicly left religion, which well and good, but he appears to have replaced it with a worldview in which the only spiritual and intellectual comfort is provided by a puppet representing a toddler. And plenty of other people have done the same thing!
I don’t think that this is the kind of mass mental state that can be sustained for long. Or maybe it is? Maybe this is the new religion and I’m an Elmo heretic. But I don’t think so; this kind of devotion to childhood things has to break soon, and it’s not going to be pretty when it does.
Although a real child of that age would not be making themselves useful by leading conversations about mental health and instead would be doing very problematic things like throwing tantrums about having to eat green beans instead of tater tots. This is probably why there are fewer and fewer actual children running about.
I have to admit that I went in on this one because I think it’s extremely tasteless to compare your posting at an Elmo account about how anxious you feel to the efforts of stigmatized gay men to speak out about a fatal disease that killed hundreds of thousands in America… and I love bad taste! This nonsense is going to keep my old ass going until they release The Day the Clown Cried.
"Elmo probably saved lives and relationships by opening that conversation… A man who would belittle and mock that isn't much of a man at all."
This is a WILD take. Some social media manager asked "how is everyone?" to boost engagement, and Wheaton sees that as a heroic act? I've mostly been paying attention to the memes of people answering that tweet in funny/unhinged ways. Thank you for this deep dive into the crazy!