Muppets from Space.
No joke! A good friend of mine loved this movie, always going on and on about how brilliant it was. I teased him mercilessly, thinking it must be a silly stoner’s fetish. But lo, I watched it, and was not only astonished, but was truly awoken from my dogmatic slumbers.
Even my dear friend, high on weed and goofballs, had not fully plumbed its murky depths.
This Muppet movie is no standard caper, it is a meditation on how we as a species confront the existential implications of a godless universe. It is the most honest and unflinching confrontation with atheism ever committed to celluloid, and the most moving statement on the topic since Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman.
It wasn’t the most successful Muppet movie ever made, and many involved were disappointed with the final result. But isn’t that how it often is with great works of art? Sometimes even their creators knew not what they were creating!
Peer deep into this Muppet escapade, and view it through the lens of atheistic implications. You will be stunned by how artfully it wrestles with the question of what it means to accept, and finally live in, a world without salvation; a world unshackled from religion, belief in God, and the sense of meaning and purpose such beliefs provide.
The film begins with Gonzo being left behind on Earth by Noah just before the Great Flood destroys all living things. He awakes, screaming in terror, wearing dinosaur pajamas (representative of the 90% of species who’ve lived on Earth but have gone extinct).
From there on out, Gonzo seeks to get in tune with the universe, to listen to the voices he hears coming from it (to interpret its message and meaning), and is quickly considered a madman by his peers (just like Nietzsche’s madman, who proclaimed the Death of God!).
Gonzo is haunted by his singularity on Earth. Like humankind, he doesn’t know where he comes from, what he is, or why he finds himself free-floating through space on this pale blue marble. A mite in an incomprehensibly vast cosmos! Billions of solar systems in billions of galaxies, in what may be billions of multiverses! And we float here in the middle of it all! A speck of dust!
Muppets from Space out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft, in its portrayal of a universe so infinitely boundless, so howlingly alien, that to fully comprehend means going completely mad!
Gonzo is lost, alone, with no explanation of how he got here, or why. Much as we men and women are lost when it comes to explaining consciousness, why or how we became self-aware, and are left puzzling over the mystery of our own existence.
As Gauguin remarked, in the title to his most famous painting: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”
Not only that, Gonzo is alienated from his fellow Muppet friends, merely for feeling the crush of existential dread! Very few people want to confront this dilemma, so Gonzo has nobody to speak with except Jeffrey Tambor’s government agent, K. Edgar Singer, a technocratic madman hellbent on using technology and the state to impose meaning on a populace on the verge of nihilism.
And here we are, just as Gonzo is, bereft of the psychological and emotional tools to deal with the fact we may indeed be a meaningless blip, an accident of evolution, a brief flickering of conscious awareness in an absurd world.
Muppets from Space offers only two realistic responses to standing along the rim of this bottomless abyss: getting lost in an orgy of song, dance, and sensuality (the hedonistic way, as shown in the grocery store food product orgy at the end of Sausage Party, a film that deals with similar themes); and human friendship and bonding.
And yet! At the end, Muppets from Space even questions whether these fine things can really distract us from the hollow void waiting to consume us all.