What qualities do puppets have that allow the public to drop their guard? Fall under the spell? What brings about deference and what are they concealing? There’s something about moral simplicity that allows for the smooth functioning of the show, and that can be amorality too (simply not there).
With Greta it feels partly about our need for moral purity and clarity when taking lectures from anyone, and we need lectured now. Our collective guilt, because of our complicity and inaction in the face of our biggest ever problem has us deferring to children, anyone else would be too easy to deflate by pointing out their contradictions, and our own contradictions in the process.
The royal family are puppets as well as puppet masters, here there’s a bland, simple charitable morality masking the most obscene and archaic inequality. Any puppet who goes off script (Diana, Harry, Philip) has their strings cut sharpish.
Boris is a great amoral puppet because of class deference, the old boy aphorisms and bumbling speech combined with ruddy can-do body language and a ruffled teddy-bear demeanour, masking (or at least buffering) an insane hunger for power, his own and his masters’.
Holly and Phil on ITV good morning, excellent puppets! With their slickly delivered homeliness, practiced off-the-cuffness, down to earth and upbeat and in control, everything will be fine no matter what, our deference here is to they’re just like us authenticity.
The illusion of authenticity is key for many puppets, real life, plain speaking, no bullshit, the illusion that you’re not being marketed to. This is influencer marketing. Love Island contestants are a good example here, as puppets on the show itself, being very willingly manipulated before our eyes, and then afterwards used as brand ambassadors for anything and everything. The morality being played with here is the most basic script of love rats and true friends and ‘being yourself’ etc. Here our deference is about sex and beauty and youth, and what it masks is a brutally exploitative machine that feeds some of our ugliest, desires and is literally killing contestants.
All of these puppets are mostly very aware of their strings, they might even love them, show you other ways to pull them. They can be very willing shells, vessels, conduits.
This is hilariously exposed in brass eye’s drugs episode, where we get to peak behind the curtain and see Conservative MPs, noel edmonds etc collaborating with the machine, playing the game. And this trades on moral simplicity too, “it’s a fucking disgrace”
