Nom Nom Nom

Or, “Strange Childhood Obsessions”. Yeah, this is going to be a weird one.

Exhibit A:

A clip from The Muppet Show episode in which Vincent Price guest-starred. I must have watched at least a hundred Muppet Shows with my grandmother at our family cottage. This is one of the only scenes I remember clearly.

Exhibit B:

When I was six and a half (going into grade two)*, I went to a family reunion, at which I was sat down in front of The Return of the Jedi with my cousins and second cousins and third cousins. I only watched the first half-hour of it, because we had to leave, but I distinctly remember understanding the plot as Jabba the Hut threatening to eat Han Solo and Luke Skywalker and thought as much for many years. (Actually, when I mentioned this to a friend – I forget who, maybe one of my cousins – they said that they thought this, too.)

Exhibit C:

My childhood fear and hatred of the song “The Littlest Worm”, in which the eponymous character tragically warns his human friend not to take a sip of soda with the straw in which he is currently lodged. Alas, the careless friend heeds this sage advice and inadvertently swallows him: “I took a sip/And he went down/All through my pipes/He must have drowned”. No, but seriously, I remember running from the TV when they sang this on Join In**, crawling under the dining room table, and refusing to watch that show ever again.

Exhibit D:

Another song that, as Strong Bad would say, gibba me da jeeblies: “Green and Yellow”, in which the boy Henry’s confusing stomach ailment is finally correctly diagnosed as the result of his having eaten snakes in the woods, thinking they were worms, upon which he dies. (PS – Who goes to the woods to eat worms?)

Exhibit E:

My fifth-grade fascination with the episode of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers in which evil Rita Whatsherface sends an pot-bellied monster to actually devour the Power Rangers one by one. It accomplishes this (and, with each new Ranger it swallows, a human outline in the shape of that Ranger appears on its belly), until finally the last Ranger kills it, and the other Rangers pop out unscathed. A similar fascination with the related fairy tale in which the big bad wolf eats six little kids (the goat kind), but the seventh escapes to tell its mother. Together, they cut the wolf open, rescue the kids, and replace them with stones.

I suppose I could go on (you probably are hoping I won’t) and briefly discuss things like the bit at the end of Peter and the Wolf where the Duck struggles up out of the wolf’s belly, but I think the evidence so far is enough to conclusively show that a) I am a weirdo; and b) I have always found stories of one character swallowing another character alive to be intrinsically interesting.

Why this is, I’m not sure. In the first novel-length story I ever finished (I was between eleven and thirteen when I wrote it), which I certainly would never want to be read at this point in my life, there was a scene in which the main character is baked into a giant cake and another in which he was actually swallowed alive by a giant cyclops. So, clearly, I found this sort of thing dramatically compelling.

Now, I am well aware of the, er, more adult turn this discussion could take. At a writers’ workshop, a colleague once told me she’d read a critical analysis that said food scenes in children’s literature are the equivalent of erotic scenes in adult literature. And that sort of makes sense: both are about evoking a sense of physical satisfaction, allowing the reader to vicariously experience the pleasure of gluttony through the text. But I think the whole dynamic of being eater or eaten fascinates me somewhere beyond that metaphor. Probably because of the way characters interact.

I mean, first of all, there’s a whole power-play going on here. Few things are scarier than being eaten alive – like, you know you’re being eaten, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. (This was part of the problem my sister had watching Snakes on a Plane, which, curiously, didn’t affect me at all regarding the topic of this post. My problem with that movie was that Samuel L. Jackson didn’t yell his trademark line soon enough. Once every five minutes would have been ideal, actually.) Add in the idea that the thing/person doing the eating is sentient – that it knows what it’s doing and is doing it on purpose – and you have a really psychologically sadistic, drawn-out form of murder. Not to mention that someone who wants to eat someone else alive must have complete physical power over that person.

It’s because of this, maybe, that few things are more dramatically compelling than being eaten alive and surviving. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of psychologists who’d make this all about going back to the womb or whatever, which is an interesting way to look at it, but I think it ties in more with the archetypal hero’s journey of death and rebirth. This is probably most clear in the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale (big fish, actually, but, you know what? Let’s let it slide). Or, if you’re feeling less spiritually inclined, maybe let’s talk about the end of Pinocchio. In both stories, the main character runs away from his responsibilities – Jonah runs off to sea rather than obey G-d’s commandment to chide the people of Nineveh for their dissolute ways, and Pinocchio ditches going to school and helping his father Geppetto to go play at Pleasure Island. Partway through, each realizes his actions are causing pain to people he cares about – G-d causes a storm to nearly wreck the ship on which Jonah is travelling, and Pinocchio learns his father has disappeared in search of him. Each allows himself to be sacrificed for the sake of the people he’s harming – Jonah tells the sailors to cast him overboard, and Pinocchio rows out in search of Geppetto. Each gets swallowed alive by a large, whale-like sea creature, and, “in the belly of the whale” – at the worst things can possibly get, each finds the moral courage to shoulder his responsibility and be redeemed.

Clearly, not all the instances I mentioned above follow this archetype, because not all of them are stories. The Muppet Show video is just a visual gag; in the songs, the main character is either never redeemed or not the character being swallowed. But I think part of the vivid dramatic potential of being swallowed alive is the way it represents an escapable death.

When the person being swallowed isn’t a protagonist, I guess the whole scenario makes things scarier. After all, “killing someone for (seemingly) rational reasons” is much less frightening than “killing someone for random, psychotic reasons”. Like, if you want to kill me because I’m the last person standing in your way to inheriting a fortune or because it’s been prophesied that I will cause your death or because I killed your father, then we are coming at this scenario with a common understanding of your goals, and we can still figure out a reasonable solution for both of us (eg. “But what if I just give you the fortune?”/ “Maybe I could move to Siberia?”/ “I didn’t do it!”).

But appetite is implacable, as I’m sure anyone who’s ever tried to modify his or her eating habits can tell you: your stomach doesn’t care whether you can’t afford take-out sushi right now or if you’ve already had five chocolate bars today or even if dinner will be ready in just five minutes, all right? It knows what it wants, and it wants it now. And no matter what all those healthy eating books say, you can’t trick it into being happy with whole wheat toast and sugar-free preserves when what it really wants is Belgian waffles with oodles of chocolate syrup and whipped cream. In other words, there’s no room for negotiation with someone acting out of appetite.

Worse, appetite reduces whatever (or whomever) you’re eating to mere objects: just something to satisfy your physical hunger. It could just as easily be a cheese quesadilla, or a Boston Cream doughnut (mmm… doughnuts… I think maybe I should’ve eaten lunch before I started typing this…). Appetite is also a fundamentally selfish thing – it’s about the person who feels it and only that person. It’s also only about the “now” – one can’t be hungry for, say, a mint-chocolate-chip ice cream milkshake (mmm… mint-chocolate-chip ice cream milkshake… excuse me for a minute…) in an hour or next week or three years in the future. Basically, everything we like to think separates rational beings like humans (hahahahaha… let’s just take that as a given premise for now) from non-rational ones like sponges and dogs and oak trees is the opposite of appetite: planning for the future, putting other people’s needs above one’s own, changing one’s mind as new information becomes available. So being asked to sympathize with the character doing the eating is frightening, too: like all the best accounts of villainy, it reminds the reader of viewer that there are parts of you, too, that you wouldn’t like very much if you ever brought them into the light.

With that in mind, and because I have no good ending for this blog entry, I leave you with this. Bon appetit!

PS. Attn: Sigmund Freud. You can stop having your field day now kthx.

* I know this for a fact because at that same family reunion, I was introduced to my soon-to-be second-grade teacher, since he’d just married my mother’s cousin. Fun times.

** Also known as that crazy show where the wooden dolls on the window ledge come to life in a random, creepy fashion throughout each episode. They move by themselves, but the adult hosts never notice!