Desserts (Best Served Cold?)

The opening gag of Jeff Stark's 1999 comic horror Desserts is so deliciously subtle that it doesn't even register the first time we see it. The credits promise us "a stark film", a term that obviously denotes its writer-director, but slyly underscores the nature of the experience to follow, when Stark's name turns out to be no misnomer. What is immediately striking about Desserts is its bluntness. At a concise four minutes in length (a good chunk of which is occupied by credits), it presents a scenario that's part unbridled nightmare, part macabre joke, and above all a story of sweet, sweet revenge. Its execution is so unabashedly punchy, in fact, that it's not hard to imagine it being repackaged as a public information film, albeit one of the sicker-minded ones. A man (played by Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and identified in the credits as "Stroller") goes for a ramble on the beach and happens upon an unattended chocolate eclair, possibly left behind by some absent-minded picnicker. Looking around and seeing no one else in sight, he decides that the alluring pastry is up for grabs and stuffs it into his mouth. This, needless to say, turns out to be a huge mistake, and the outcome is swift but brutal. Concealed within that humble eclair is an enlarged fish hook, which pierces straight through Stroller's gob and gets him yanked (by some unseen force operating other end of the line) into the depths of the ocean to his presumed doom. A ghoulish twist that convincingly evokes the heavy-handed visual language of a PIF looking to shock viewers away from any number of situations in which they may be tempted to put something into their bodies that could bring them trouble down the road. The presence of the young McGregor might immediately put us in mind of Trainspotting and heroin addiction (the actor's participation was secured by producer Jill Robertson, who had worked as part of the crew on Trainspotting), but Stroller's demise works just as aptly as a metaphor for the pitfalls of developing too much of an appetite for sugary junk food. Or even a straight-up warning about not eating random food items you find lying around in the middle of nowhere, if you don't know where they've been or who might have tampered with them.

At the same time, there is an obvious an animal rights subtext to the short, one that naturally appeals to my vegan sensibilities while warmly recalling the ending of the "Gone Fishin'" episode of Tales from The Cryptkeeper, the younger-skewing animated spin-off of the HBO series Tales From The Crypt. Adapted from a Vault of Horror comic published in 1951, it concerns a grossly irresponsible fisherman who ultimately falls foul of a race of intelligent piscines that like to hunt for humans, in their case by using money as hooked bait. It was a story that had a very profound effect on me, in that even today, if I see any banknotes lying about on the ground, of any value, I'll walk straight past them. I'd like to say it's because I'm honest and want whoever dropped them to have the chance to get them back, but nope, it's because a cartoon show I watched when I was 10 hard-wired my brain to automatically suspect discarded banknotes of being traps (it made graspingness seem unappealing, and that's no bad thing, surely?). The point is that the twist in Desserts is in no way original (it also shows up in the "A Little Fishy" segment of the 1986 anthology film Escapes, and I'm sure there are other instances still), but that doesn't matter. It is a particularly slick, particularly efficient variation on an old theme about nature turning the tables on humanity by pinpointing our own weaknesses, raising questions about what constitutes a worthy survivor.

In the case of the Tales From The Cryptkeeper installment, the character's fate was clearly karmic - he was a bully who regarded fishing, much like everything else in his life, as an opportunity to revel in power over other living things - although ironically the talking fish that finally snagged him hadn't consciously plotted revenge, with its dialogue indicating that their culture did not tend to look on humans as individuals. Basically they echoed the same perspective the character had applied to them, with the distinguishing virtue that they abhorred wastefulness, leading to this awkward but fabulously morbid bit of wordplay: "A good manner-fish never catches more than he can can!" With Desserts, it's the film's title that carries the most weight in that regard, referring to the pivotal pastry while conveying a playful pun on the notion of getting what's coming to you. Stroller is, on the surface, an innocent. We see no evidence that he has ever personally wronged a fish, or indeed anybody. Even his name speaks to his guilelessness, suggesting someone who is going about their business in an entirely casual manner, as opposed to actively looking for trouble. And yet the title insinuates that the outcome should be seen as karmic. He is the only human who apparently exists in this time and space (although we do see a shape in the sand that resembles another footprint close to where he finds the eclair, suggesting that the process is potentially cyclic), and as such he becomes an everyman who pays the price for humanity's sins against the ocean. The sins, in this scenario, are not born of wilful malice, but of unwary consumption and the belief that whatever resources he happens across are his for the taking. The rapaciousness that compels him to bite off more than he can chew becomes a shorthand for humankind's reckless plundering of the Earth, something that's shown to be just as mindless as a fish's compulsions to chomp at any bit of bait that's dangled its way, and as likely to drag us toward our own destruction. 

It is hard to shake the sense that Stroller has been the victim of a grand conspiracy, as opposed to a random victim unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon the baited eclair. The opening credits show the underwater, distinctly inhuman perspective (its cold eeriness anticipating the alien gaze of Jonathan Glazer's 2013 feature Under The Skin) of our unseen aquatic angler as it identifies its prey approaching along the sands. Notably, it surveys Stroller's form up close (and with the waves visibly behind him), suggesting an omnipresent intimacy that feels at odds with the implied distance between the hunter and the hunted within the body of the short. To me, this indicates it is not vengeful fish per se that have targeted Stroller so much as the collective forces of nature all around him. Desserts imagines a world in which nature successfully eliminates humanity and then begins wiping away all traces of its existence; not content with merely swallowing Stroller whole, the ocean must subsequently wash over his footprints and begin the process of rubbing them out. There is something almost comical about this, as though the tides are consciously removing the evidence from a crime scene. One of the film's most vital ingredients is its puckish sense of humor, which is further accentuated when we fade to black and are greeted by a incongruously buoyant instrumental rendition of the music hall favourite "I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside".

But even if Stroller represents the failings of an inattentive human race, his fate still feels like a paradox. Throughout the short, a great deal of emphasis is placed on his insignificance in relation to his surroundings, with its opening wide shot making us particularly aware of the vastness and seeming infinity of the barren shoreline, against which he initially appears as nothing more than a tiny blot on the horizon. It underscores how nature will always be a fundamentally bigger force than man, but has the effect of making him seem like rather an unimposing entity, and thus a curious target for such a magnificent scheme. It recalls the 1972 Spanish television film La Cabina, with its protagonist who is at once too much of a nondescript everyman to appear in any way important, and yet has clearly been the victim of a plot purposely designed to consign him to oblivion. Stroller is established as a little fish in a big ocean, and we suspect that it is precisely this insignificance that makes him so vulnerable. It's here that we may be able to mine one further pun from the title, playing on our uneasy feeling that the wider world might have deliberately deserted him. Desserts grapples with the issue of mortality, touching on the extent to which humankind is as assailable as the creatures it is accustomed to exploiting, the fine line between life and death, and the helplessness of the individual fated to be removed from the picture sooner or later, only for the picture itself to shrug and carry on as if nothing much occurred. Stroller inhabits a landscape of endless and oppressive emptiness, with the opening illustrating how he is, unbeknownst to himself, already inside the belly of the beast before he's even been dragged into its depths. The barrenness of his space conveys the indifference of his own (non-existent) people, who have effectively abandoned him to his demise - we sense that the lack of anyone in sight who could potentially have deterred him from destruction or assisted him when he became caught on the line was likewise not a matter of mere misfortune, but of nobody caring to intervene. The world reacts to his obliteration with much the same coldness, as the tides wash over his footprints, negating what meagre imprint he might have left behind, and the absence of onlookers means that his vanishing does not even go acknowledged. There is no regard afforded to the little guy, and that might as well be the conspiracy in itself. 

Mr Hat's Second Biggest Mystery (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

 

The single biggest mystery surrounding South Park's Mr Hat is obviously how he managed to reach the gas pedal in the episode "Chef Aid" in order to operate a truck and break Mr Garrison and Chef out of jail. That's something that is just flat-out unknowable. It's also not the kind of mystery that I suspect many of us are liable to lose a whole lot of sleep over. The inexplicability of it all is, in part, what makes it so hilarious. More crucially still, this was Mr Hat's finest hour, and the outcome was monumentally awesome. He'd used his preternatural puppet powers for heroic purposes, atoning to Garrison for being a two-timing whore and enabling Chef to attend the benefit concert his friends from the rock business were holding in his honor. The particulars of how he managed to pull this off seem irrelevant when he brought such cheers and lifted spirits all round.

The same cannot be said for Mr Hat's second biggest mystery, which is the one that caused yours truly quite a bit of heartbreak and confusion during the summer of 1999. I speak of the theatrical feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and of the small role he played in its conclusion. Let's take a moment to reflect on how the movie, for all of its merits, has rather a vexing resolution insofar as Mr Hat is concerned, one that appears to leave him and Garrison dangling and gives out contradictory signals regarding which suitor's hand he ends up on. This one gets kind of personal, so buckle up. 

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut climaxes with combat breaking out between American and Canadian forces, and Kyle and Cartman getting caught in the crossfire. While fleeing the ensuing carnage they encounter a mortally wounded Garrison, who pleads with the boys to take Mr Hat with them. They initially attempt to honor his request, but Cartman quickly tires of hanging onto the puppet and discards it. Soon after, Satan arrives on Earth to bring about the apocalypse, accompanied by his manipulative and emotionally abusive lover, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and trailed by the soul of a damned but determined Kenny McCormick. Satan continues to be subjugated by Saddam, but with the moral support of Kenny he finally summons the resolve to stand up to him. Out of gratitude to Kenny, Satan agrees to grant him one wish (apparently he can do that benignly, not just through Faustian bargains), and Kenny asks for things to go back to the way they were before the war (aware that this would not exempt him from his own dark fate). Satan laments that he seems destined to live forever in solitude, when he notices the discarded Mr Hat and asks if he'd be willing to accompany him back to Hell. Satan throws his voice to supply the puppet's response - "Sure, I bet we could be best friends, Mr Satan" - and in doing so he eerily acquires the accent and effeminate tones of Garrison. This can be interpreted in two different ways. Either Mr Hat is literally speaking through Satan, as he can be perceived as doing with Garrison, and is actively flirting with him (which I guess tracks with his record for being a two-timing whore), OR Satan has officially hit rock bottom in his desperation and risks sinking into Garrison's derangement. (I gave my thoughts on the question of Mr Hat's reality in my coverage of "Weight Gain 4000", and am once again inclined to apply the philosophy that both things can be true.) An uplifted Satan makes his departure, still holding onto Mr Hat, and the bloodshed on Earth is duly undone. Garrison recovers from his injuries and anxiously looks around for his puppet companion, unaware of what transpired. Meanwhile, the entire town joins hands and celebrates its miraculous deliverance with a reprise of the opening number, "Mountain Town".

There is one further twist to this scenario that we'll get to shortly, but let me first be upfront that for my young teenaged self, who had been sitting there lapping up every solitary second of this film until that moment, this aspect of the ending proved to be the humongous fly pissing nosily in the ointment. To say that it sat uneasily with me would be an understatement, since it's all well and good for Satan to want to alleviate his loneliness with an endearingly uncanny puppet, but where exactly would that leave Garrison? I felt so strongly that Satan's happiness should not come at the expense of Garrison's, and that's a sentiment I'll continue to stand by. Because Garrison has feelings too, you know. He might be a royal dickhole in most regards, but the puppet was the one thing he genuinely loved and cared about. At this point in the series he was still very dependent on his relationship with Mr Hat, and we'd already seen in "Summer Sucks" how depressed he became in being separated from him for a prolonged length of time. With the help of Mr Twig, he was able to bluff his way through most of that absence, but he was clearly not a happy bunny deep down. Whenever the children asked him when Mr Hat was coming back (as seen in "Clubhouses" and "Chef Aid") it cut right through his facade like a knife through butter. So the implication that he was about to be subjected to round two of that process seemed really unnecessarily cruel. Not to mention that we, like Garrison's class, had just spent a good chunk of Season 2 waiting for Mr Hat to return (because Mr Twig was blatantly never going to replace him), so were they seriously about to send him packing again, not even nine months after he and Garrison were reconciled in "Chef Aid"? Was this going to be a regular thing with that puppet?

Or was this all in fact a gigantic false alarm, and I was allowing myself to get stupid hung up over absolutely nothing (and not for the first time)? Because there is this one additional detail at the end of the film that I want to call attention to and cannot emphasise enough - Mr Hat is back with Mr Garrison in the final sequence. It isn't explained how, but he is. They appear together in two different shots, the first being the crowd zoom-out during the reprise of "Mountain Town". And then at the very end, Garrison and Mr Hat are among the characters bidding farewell to Kenny as he rises out of Hell and, in recognition of his most noble deed, is welcomed by the angels into Heaven. Garrison is waving, while Mr Hat's gaze is directed upward, indicating that he is very attuned to what is going on. Neither reappearance went unnoticed in the cinema, and they definitely made me feel a whole lot better. In my head, I could rationalise it perfectly. After all, Kenny had wished for everything to be returned to the way it was before the war. He was, in effect, wishing for the restoration of the status quo, so that things could resume as normal and there would be no lasting consequences to have to grapple with in the series (his demise was the only outstanding matter that would explicitly not be remedied by the wish, but we all knew that was automatically being reset). Which ultimately required Mr Hat to go straight back to Garrison, whether Satan was on board with that or not. That might seem like a sorry turn of events for Satan, who would have had his sole consolation stripped away from him offscreen, but the dude can't just be stealing other people's puppet boyfriends. Not to mention, it wouldn't really have been a happy ending for him anyway, if the implication was that he'd have become as mentally damaged as Garrison (so which of them would actually have been taking the other to Hell?). Best just to let this one go, old Nick. You do have your upcoming relationship with Chris the nutritionist to look forward to. (Oh, and maybe give some attention to Damien, ya sodding deadbeat?)

It should be noted that this was indeed consistent with the continuity of the series, where Mr Hat was still with Garrison, and there was never any reference to Satan coming between them - although I had to wait a few months to confirm it, as the UK was currently between Seasons 2 and 3, and I didn't really get into using this internet thing until the year 2000 (and even then, mostly to look up fake Pokémon cheats...I never did get that Pikablu after wandering round the Safari Zone for hours).

Technically everything worked out. But I still walked away from the experience with a sour taste in my mouth. Having Mr Hat show up at the end was absolutely better than nothing, but I didn't like the fact that they hadn't addressed it within the narrative, making his final status a little fuzzy. How could I be certain that his reappearance was even intentional and not an animation error? That it happened in two shots and not just one, and that the second reappearance had seemed so prominent gave me some hope that that wasn't the case, but I couldn't say for sure. To this day, I still don't know what the intention was, and it's one of those things where if I dwell on it for more than ten seconds, it will bug the living snot out of me. It's for this reason that I've always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. There's a lot that I can love about it - the soundtrack, the new characters of Gregory and Mole, the interplay between Saddam and Satan, the reveal of Kenny's face and his final redemption (not that Kenny was ever in any serious need of redemption from the viewer's perspective, but he demonstrated what a good kid he is at heart). But the moment where Garrison regains consciousness and asks "Where's Mr Hat?" hurts me too damned much, and since it occurs right at the end, that's the feeling I'm inevitably left with. I just said that I liked the soundtrack, but simply hearing that reprise of "Mountain Town" sends instantaneous chills down my spine.

It's also why I'll reflexively grit my teeth whenever I hear anyone suggest that Bigger, Longer and Uncut would have been a really magnificent and logical point on which to have concluded the franchise (a discussion that seemed more pertinent nearer the time, when there were doubts about the series' longevity). I cannot tell you how relieved I am that this wasn't where it ended. If we'd lived in an alternate reality where South Park had been required to bow out early, then I honestly believe that the Season 3 finale, "World Wide Recorder Concert", would have been a much more triumphant curtain call. I've some major biases on that point, since "World Wide Recorder Concert" is my favourite South Park episode, and it's probably not a coincidence that Garrison there gets the last word and it all ends happily for him (well, happily in the sense that what he doesn't know isn't hurting him). The allusion to the ending of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country might not be on quite so epic a scale as Kenny's final ascension in the movie, but in its own quiet way I find it every bit as moving.

One way or another, Mr Hat obviously did ditch Satan and find his way back to Garrison. That much is evident from how the series carried on, even if neither the movie or series cared to explicitly account for it. I'm also aware of how very silly it is to allow a matter this inconsequential to eat any kind of hole in you. So why does it continue to bother me?

 

Everything worked out...with a happy end?

Part of the problem is that it's not altogether clear where precisely in the series' chronology the events of the movie are intended to fall. I'm not sure if Parker and Stone have given any official confirmation on where they see BLaU as occurring, but from what we the viewers have to go on, we just know that it has to be some time between Season 2's "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" (which first set up the Satan-Saddam relationship) and the Season 4 two-parter "Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?" and "Probably" (which picked it up where the movie left off). Bigger, Longer and Uncut hit US theatres on 30th June 1999, as Season 3 was roughly a third of the way through its run, and "Sexual Harassment Panda" was the first episode to air after its debut (on July 7th 1999), but I don't think that automatically makes it BLaU's immediate successor in terms of internal continuity. In my mind, BLaU takes place well before the entirety of Season 3. Sure, there are a handful of moments in Season 3 that were blatantly designed to coincide with BLaU's theatrical presence - "Cat Orgy" contained a shout-out to the film's most prominent box office competitor, the staggeringly brainless Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West, while "Two Guys Naked In A Hot Tub" had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Mole, a character otherwise exclusive to BLaU. But with regards to the contents of the movie itself, it seems more closely connected to what was going on in the second season, which is when I'm going to hazard a guess that it was scripted. Callbacks to the series are predominantly to Season 2, and to earlier Season 2 installments at that. The revelation from "Ike's Wee Wee" that Kyle's infant brother was Canadian-born proves significant, while Mr Mackey's naive and surface-level understanding of addiction from the same episode comes up again in his showstopper, "It's Easy, Mmmkay". A lot of the supporting kids in the movie are also quite vague and undefined, in a way that I'd associate with the first couple of seasons - Craig and Butters are still background characters, and I don't think Tweek (introduced in the penultimate episode of Season 2) shows up at all. But that's all very tenuous, right? Of course Kyle wasn't going to forget that his brother is Canadian (even if Sheila did), Mackey's well-intentioned condescension has long been one of his defining character traits, and when you've an extensive cast and only 80 minutes to spare, it is inevitable that not everybody is going to have a chance to stand out (heck, not even Pip, who at that point was one of the more established supporting child characters, got to be anything more than an extra in the movie). The essential detail that most firmly aligns BLaU with Season 2 would be the Saddam factor. He was kind of a looming figure in its opening stages, before just going quiet for a bit.

Saddam's appearance at the end of "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" was itself a continuity nod to the Terrance and Phillip special "Not Without My Anus", which had infamously aired in place of "Cartman's Mom Is Still A Dirty Slut", the much-anticipated follow-up to Season 1's closing cliffhanger, earlier that spring as an April Fools prank. (Note that when Sky 1 aired Season 2 in the UK, they did not attempt to replicate the trick and stuck "Not Without My Anus" on the tail-end as a weird little out of context extra, making it random as fuck when Saddam showed up in "Mexican Staring Frog", and with a Canadian accent to boot.) The term "continuity" might need to be applied quite loosely in this scenario, since "Not Without My Anus" was framed as a made-for-TV drama within the context of the South Park universe (albeit one purportedly based on a true story). The means by which Saddam met his demise in "Not Without My Anus" (suffocated by the farts of a stadium of flatulent Canadians) also differed from how he was later reported to have died within the movie (gored by a pack of wild boars), a discrepancy that I'm almost positive was due to them needing a concise explanation for the benefit of movie-goers who hadn't kept up with the series and would otherwise have been confused about why Saddam was in Hell (particularly with his real-life counterpart being alive at the time), and the events of "Not Without My Anus" being too baffling and convoluted to recap at the start of BLaU. The series offers a curious intersection between these disparate continuities - in the episode "Probably", when Satan recounts to God the circumstances under which he met Saddam, he reaffirms the death by wild boars backstory, but also specifies that it happened in April, a nod to the original air date of "Not Without My Anus". It's also notable that in the movie itself, the featured events are explicitly stated to take place six weeks after Saddam's swine-inflicted death, which suggests that they would have fallen some time soon after "Mexican Staring Frog", if Saddam was established to already be dead within the internal timeline.

Now let's consider how Garrison and Mr Hat might specifically fit into this. In the series, Mr Hat was with Garrison from the very beginning up until the Season 6 episode "The Death Camp of Tolerance" when Garrison decided to officially retire him (sob). The only exception in between would be that aforementioned arc in the middle of Season 2 where he went AWOL for a few episodes and was temporarily replaced by Mr Twig. So...if you're determined to tie Mr Hat's supposed disappearance at the end of the movie with the continuity of the series, that's the only window you have. But is that even doable? Could this actually be the origin of that whole bizarre love triangle arc in Season 2, rather than merely a harrowing echo of it? Perhaps. There is a fan theory proposing that "Summer Sucks" should be seen as the direct successor to the events of BLaU, as awkward as it would seem to have to retroactively factor in the movie before an episode that debuted a whole year ahead of it. After all, that installment opens with Mr Hat having already absconded, and Garrison struggling to comprehend what's become of him. It would also be consistent with what the movie indicates about Saddam and where he goes within the series' timeline, with bonus points for the fact that if his death occurred in April, six weeks along would be taking us into the run-up into summer. The obvious bugbear of this theory, from my perspective, is that it requires you to overlook Mr Hat's reappearance with Garrison at the end of BLaU, which I am loath to do, but I think it's an intriguing notion nevertheless and that it merits consideration.

The trouble is that the background information regarding Saddam might ultimately hold more water with this reading than what happens with Garrison and Hat in "Summer Sucks". There are certain narrative details it seems somewhat of a stretch to have to line up with the movie (notably, that in "Summer Sucks" Mr Hat specifically goes missing on the last day of school), but it's more of a tonal mismatch that I'm feeling. The circumstances behind Mr Hat's mysterious disappearance in "Summer Sucks" are implied to be quieter and more mundane (relatively speaking) than the high-stakes drama of the movie's climax. Garrison spends the episode grappling with a low-key but intensely personal crisis that, so far as he's concerned, completely overshadows the town's apocalypse of the week, an out-of-control black snake firework destroying everything in its path. His immediate assumption is that one of the children has stolen the puppet as a prank, though he later reflects, during his psychiatry session with Dr Katz, that Mr Hat might have walked out because of a disagreement they'd had earlier that morning. What they disagreed about is anybody's guess (and Garrison seemingly attached less significance to it than did Mr Hat, if it was really that much of an afterthought to him), and I'd argue that the story works as well as it does because it keeps the details to such a vague and understated level (making it the perfect companion to the wilder, more overblown A-story about the snake). We learn few of the particulars, like what inspired Mr Hat to go or how he was able to leg it in the absence of legs, a choice that accentuates the absurdity of the situation, but also the pathos. Garrison's loneliness becomes twofold. Not only has he been unceremoniously ditched by his emotional support puppet, the rest of the town takes little to no interest in his plight and can't even begin to understand what he's going through. Even the viewer isn't totally sure on where to stand, with Katz's assessment suggesting that his testimony should be seen as unreliable, although toward the end we get a teasing glimpse into Mr Hat's side of the story, which corroborates at least some of what Garrison was saying. The puppet is revealed to have travelled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, apparently to live out his sexual fantasies involving Brett Favre (odds are that he succeeded, given that Favre seemed to be returning his interest). So if this does take place right after BLaU, then presumably he's already dumped Satan and is weighing up his options before going back to Garrison.

I do find it basically plausible that Parker and Stone might well have conceived the movie's conclusion first and then been inspired by that to do the whole arc in Season 2 where Garrison and Mr Hat spend several episodes separated. On a conceptual level it certainly feels as though there could be some intersection, particularly since they didn't land that far apart, all things considered. At any rate, it's an idea they did better justice to in the series, where they had a lot more time to explore its implications. And since Season 2 saw the light of day first, it makes the ending of BLaU feel kind of redundant as well as mean. Whatever Garrison did prior to "Summer Sucks" to drive Mr Hat away, he had suffered enough for it, and my feeling is that he'd earned the right to keep the puppet at his side uninterrupted for a few more seasons. So yes, I definitely understand the appeal of the theory. It takes what amounted to a joke and a loose end in the movie and allows it to have meaningful follow-up with a clear resolution in the series, in a way that doesn't feel as if it's rolling back on any prior development. I'm not sure that I buy the two premises as totally compatible, however. At most, I can see one idea giving rise to the other, but I'm not really sensing that they are one and the same. I don't subscribe to the theory, but I will make this one further observation about it. When Mr Hat finally returns to Garrison in "Chef Aid", Garrison is initially reluctant to take him back and throws him out the door, telling him to go to Hell. That's standard retaliation from Garrison (he said the same thing to Mackey in "Summer Sucks"), but it gives it a little extra resonance when you're watching it through the lens of Mr Hat having potentially already been there.

As I say, I'd rather not ignore the fact that Mr Hat IS with Garrison during the final sequence of BLaU. That is what my heart and my gut tell me to look toward, even if my brain is inevitably going to get in the way by asking questions. We've already discussed how the nature of Kenny's wish might potentially account for Mr Hat's return within the narrative, but since it's not acknowledged we can't be certain what was actually supposed to be going on, and that keeps me in such a queasy state of limbo when processing this ending. For that much I will forever curse South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, even as the "Uncle Fucka" sequence retains its devilish power to have me collapsing into fits of giggles. It is what it is nonetheless, and do we have any means of making sense of why the sequence plays out as it does? I suspect that I've given the matter more thought than anybody else on Earth, and as I see it there are three different possibilities we have to choose from.

The first is that Mr Hat's reappearance is indicative of something being cut from the final sequence (in spite of the film's innuendo-laden title). It's entirely possible that the epilogue was running on a little too long and needed to be trimmed down, and the solutions to Stan and Kyle's respective arcs would naturally take priority. In which case they might have taken out a follow-up moment with Mr Hat and Garrison and hoped that audiences would just roll with it. Irritating shortcuts will sometimes be taken (Pixar's Soul, for example, was meant to incorporate a sequence explaining Mr Mittens' survival that was ultimately excised, although they showed Mittens alive and well anyway, to the relief but also confusion of cat-loving audiences all over). Back in 1999, this is what I'd desperately hoped would turn out to be the case, but I don't think it ever went anywhere.

The second is that Mr Hat being with Garrison in those two closing shots was an animation error that was somehow made twice over. This is by and far my least favourite possibility, since it makes that final glimmer of comfort a total fluke and suggests that the intentions of the film were a whole lot meaner, although it isn't completely unsalvageable, by virtue of the fact that it still happened. I'm of the opinion that there can be happy accidents. Just look to the ending of "World Wide Recorder Concert". When Garrison boards the bus in the final scene and gives his directions to Ms Crabtree, you might notice that Kenny is alive and seated in the background, despite having already been killed during the disastrous brown noise incident. While it wasn't entirely out of the question for Kenny to die and be immediately resurrected (it happened earlier that season as part of a meta joke in "Succubus"), my intuition here is that Kenny's return was indeed a mistake. Bugs in the visuals are to be expected from time to time. But you know what, I'm glad that he's there. I think the closing Undiscovered Country allusion is simply wonderful, and it strikes me as only right and proper that even Kenny was allowed to be a part of it. We can apply that same logic to BLaU. If nothing else, those final shots give the appearance of Garrison not being left alone at the end or excluded from the celebration, and that too seems only right and proper. If it was an honest error, then all I can say is, bless the inattentive animators who were responsible. Whatever they were paying you was not enough.

The third possibility is the one that I tend to lean toward nowadays, which is that Parker and Stone were straight-up trolling us. They worked that interaction between Satan and Mr Hat into the resolution because it amused them, but at this stage weren't actually looking to mess with the status quo and just stuck Mr Hat back with Garrison anyway, in stark defiance of any and all prospects of there being genuine consequence. The question of where precisely the movie is supposed to fall within with the series' timeline becomes irrelevant, because everything is reset at the end, the situation with Garrison and Mr Hat included. If anybody cared enough to get their knickers in a twist about the lack of explanation, then that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? I, unfortunately, was the easiest victim in the world. But hey, at least the outcome actually went in my favour, in terms of what I'd wanted to see happen. And the following year they gave us "World Wide Recorder Concert", which I wholeheartedly adore and see as compensating for any callous disregard Garrison might have received at the end of the movie, so it's all good.

Besides which, I've made the point twice already that a number of Mr Hat's most memorable moments were rooted in a degree of inexplicability. As is befitting a character who is a puppet of ambiguous autonomy. The question of how he managed to ditch Satan and get back to Garrison's hand at the end of BLaU will just have to be added to that same list. We all know that it wouldn't have worked out between Mr Hat and Satan anyway, in the same way that it ultimately didn't work out between him and Brett Favre. Mr Hat is a flirtatious son of a bitch, but Satan is so touchy-feely, and I could see that pissing Mr Hat off before long. Maybe his last-minute u-turn was entirely unrelated to Kenny's wish, and he just realised then and there that Satan really wasn't as hot as all that and he was getting out of the arrangement through his own volition. You underestimate those preternatural puppet powers at your own peril (unless of course you're Kathie Lee).

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #56: Good Hedgehog, Evil Hedgehog (Sonic Adventure 2)

I'd have thought it would be common wisdom that all hedgehogs are good hedgehogs. Regions of the world where they'd be considered invasives notwithstanding, it is hard to imagine a creature more endearingly innocuous. Erinaceids are insanely adorable, and unless you happen to be an egg or a mollusc, essentially harmless. And yet there was apparently this guy named Shadow who let the side down back in 2001. My experience in playing the Sonic The Hedgehog games was limited to just the first three releases, so the narrative happenings of Sonic Adventure 2 remain a mystery to me. I couldn't tell you anything about Shadow himself and how he fits in with the broader Sonic lore. The game's promotional campaigning indicates that he was an exceptionally evil hedgehog and out to conquer the world right as Sonic was attempting to save it, but for all I know their rivalry could've turned out to be a giant misunderstanding, as it did with Knuckles in Sonic 3. In any event, this 30-second ad was happy to take that premise at face value and get a twisted little kick from imagining what it would look like if it were translated into real hedgehog biology. Take two hedgehogs, distil their respective natures to the very essences of good and evil, and what wonders might science behold?

Part of a series of ads from the early 00s that used footage of real hedgehogs to create a humorous contrast between Sonic's super-erinaceid abilities and his meeker real-world counterparts, this was less mean-spirited than those baffling Sonic 2 ads the UK got in 1992, at least on the hedgehogs' side of things. A cow meets a gruesome end, in a sequence that pays homage to the velociraptor feeding scene from Jurassic Park, but the carnage is handled with a heaping spoonful of absurdity that has it going down a whole lot easier. We all know that a hedgehog couldn't really do that to a cow, no matter much malevolent energy its deceptively small form might conceal (I'll also hazard a guess that the devouring of helpless cattle was not an accurate representation of how Shadow expresses his purported evil in the gameplay itself). There is likewise an intrinsic hilarity in seeing the ickle, distinctly non-threatening looking creature scurry around while the words "Evil Hedgehog" are displayed beneath it in big bold lettering. So what distinctive traits separate the good hogs from the truly rotten apples, according to the ad's internal narrative? A good hedgehog is a friendly little soul, docile enough to let you handle it and to feed genteelly from your palm, while an evil hedgehog must be safely contained behind a steel door, and its shockingly vicious appetite can only be appeased by feeding it live prey several times its size. This being a campaign that was fundamentally geared toward children, efforts were clearly made to restrict the resulting splatter to a tasteful minium, but you see enough to know that that cow did not exactly go out humanely. At the very end, the second hedgehog reaffirms its uncouth nature by belching, confirming itself as such an unrelenting revel that it hasn't even mastered civilised table manners.

The most flavoursome twist on offer was the decision to present this grisly scenario in the musty, washed-out aesthetic of an old-school educational reel, taking the absurdity to a degree that extends a little beyond the basic contrast between a good hog who eats politely and a bad hog who guzzles whole cows. The thing that most captivates me about this ad (besides the hedgehogs themselves) is the slight resemblance it bears to the cult BBC series Look Around You, a spoof of 1970s era science-focussed programming. It has the same cursed vintage tones and the same eye for understated detail that feeds into a bigger picture of omnipresent chaos. We might notice, for example, that the scientist tending to the evil hedgehog is missing an arm (if you look closely, you can make out the telltale bulge protruding from his chest where his arm has evidently been hidden away, but I think we can all suspend our disbelief for the sake of a morbid joke), indicating that live cattle aren't the only things the little pin cushion has a taste for. An even more macabre touch is the drain in the floor of the evil hedgehog's enclosure, hinting at the extreme amount of bovine blood these men anticipate being spilled. As with Look Around You, it plays like an artefact from a vividly uncanny bygone world, in which the rules of the universe appear significantly more unstable and the voice of authority becomes all the more suspect. Is this a window into an alternate reality where it's a fact of nature that hedgehogs can be divided into the conflicting camps of good and evil, and you have to know which one you're dealing with in order to live a long and healthy life? Or is the implication that these scientists actually created these little freaks of nature right there inside their labs (a line of thinking that is certainly invited by the Jurassic Park allusion) - an exceptionally good hedgehog designed to be the perfect pet, and an exceptionally evil hedgehog that's most likely in the running to join some kind of biological weapons program? Something tells me this won't end well for humanity.

The question of how the two opposing erinaceids would react if confronted with each other is not addressed here, but was answered by another installment within the same campaign, featuring two similar-looking hedgehogs, as well as an off-screen director engaged in the evil practice of inciting them to go head to head in the hedgehog equivalent of cock fighting. Once again, it was explicitly identified as a conflict between good and evil, yet despite being polar opposites on the moral spectrum, it would appear that they did not actually harbour any animosity toward each other - as soon they were set loose, they exercised their mutual pacifism by turning their pudgy round butts toward the screen.  Sometimes it's only proper that adorability wins out.

Door (End of Snivvelyzashuns)

End of world narratives were to be David Anderson's speciality during his time creating experimental animations for Channel 4. Starting with 1986's Dreamless Sleep, his contribution to David Hopkins' Sweet Disaster series, he showed a flair for conveying the disquietude of a hauntingly fragile reality on the brink of unravelling. In the dwindling stages of the decade he teamed up with American author Russell Hoban, and a brace of five minute pieces was formed under the banner of Deadtime Stories For Big Folk. The first of these was Deadsy from 1989, which went on to inspire the "Mark" entry of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" series of PIFs. The second was Door from 1990, a grisly tale of ill-advised choices that is, for me, as perfect an animated short as they come. The busy, overstuffed and wildly abstract nature of the visuals (created through a combination of stop motion animation and pixelation) keeps us swamped in a nightmarish mix of stimuli, yet it never detracts from the elegant and poetic simplicity of the narrative. The agitated atmosphere gets increasingly sinister as it goes, culminating in the kind of ghoulish punchline that could only work in animation, and which has really stuck with me over the years.

Though overtly apocalyptic, Door does not explicitly link its narrative to the topic of nuclear war, giving it a more mystically parabolic flavour next to its predecessors. Dreamless Sleep had centred on a couple who'd awakened shortly before the detonating of a nuclear weapon, sensing that something in their environment is profoundly amiss but being unable to pinpoint the source until the blinding flash of oblivion was upon them; like When The Wind Blows from the same year, it made a harrowing statement by bringing the all-encompassing matter of nuclear war to the personal level, from the perspective of innocents who were powerless to change their fate. Deadsy took a more comprehensively allegorical approach, relating a humorously macabre monologue about a gender-bending personification of death and nuclear proliferation, and their quest to win over the entire world (their grim spectre also haunts the action in Door, where they put in a cameo appearance). In Door the threat of nuclear annihilation exists on an entirely subtextual level. The central characters, an unnamed man and woman, discover a key marked with a tag, "This Is The Wun". After much deliberation on its meaning, the woman suggests that "This Is The Wun" indicates that this is the key to the one door that should never be opened, lest it unleashes something with the power to warp their reality beyond all recognition. Sadly, their inability to agree on how to manage this most gargantuan of responsibilities reaps devastating consequences. You don't have to reach in far to locate the nuclear allegory, although it can be interpreted quite a bit more broadly than that, evoking as it does the stories of Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden (for a welcome change, it is here the male figure who makes the fatal move and dooms everyone), suggesting that there may be something innate in the human psyche that compels it toward its own destruction. Compared to Deadsy, where vanity and the lust for domination were the driving forces for cataclysm, the snake in this particular Eden (which isn’t exactly a paradise to begin with, mind) is simple curiosity. The risk is in going so far, in our quest to keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits, that we end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back. Door explores the possibility of how a single and all-too human error might seal not only our own undoing, but cast the whole world into ruin along with us - very pertinent in an age where destroying the world had apparently become as straightforward as pressing a button.

As with Deadsy, Hoban himself takes up narration duties in Door, voicing a couple of characters who remain offscreen until the closing moments, one of whom is relating the cautionary tale of the “wun” key you had better not mess with to the other. Our first hint that these are specifically the voices of a post-apocalyptic landscape comes with their speaking in the slurred, degraded dialect that previously appeared in Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker (Hoban reasoned that people would hardly be speaking in BBC English following the collapse of civilisation and another dark age), and which I will state upfront that I will not attempt to accurately transcribe here. Connoisseur Video, the people behind the 1992 VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film, were nice enough to include a full transcript of the Deadsy monologue on the inner sleeve, in Hoban’s degraded survivor tongue, but they didn’t bestow that same honor on Door. The dialogue remains close enough to contemporary English that it is still intelligible, so I will be treating it as though it were more or less the same, but for the two key phrases: “This is the wun”, in relation to that very special key, and “the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit”, the outcome that the characters most fear. We hear the story of the man and the woman (represented by two-dimensional cut out figures), who inhabit a world ("a great big some kind of place") consisting of innumerable doors and have many adventures navigating the surprises they conceal. Even before they discover the key that has the power to dramatically alter their destiny, there is something terrifying and intensely alien about this world, depicted as a sphere covered in a surreal hodgepodge of doors, none of which seem to offer any clear path or exit, only a deepening of chaotic entrapment. It resembles a puzzle box, of the sort that is liable to confound anybody curious or masochistic enough to try engaging with it. At one point a door swings open to reveal a figure positioned within a corridor who is seemingly incapable of doing anything but banging their head interminably against a brick wall, a sign that they've encountered a few dead ends too many. Some of the doors conceal pleasant surprises, which the man and the woman enjoy, while others are direct portals into nightmares ("You opened them, you would just keep falling for a long time"). 

On the making of documentary that appears on the Connoisseur Video release, Anderson shares that he came to the project wanting to explore human relationships and what causes us to self-destruct at an interpersonal level, with Hoban being the one who chose to take that interest in destruction to more cosmic heights. Door actually feels like a perfect amalgamation of their respective fascinations, with the script placing a great deal of emphasis on the interplay between the man and the woman (it's never stated, but we presume that they are a married couple) and their constant bickering, as interminable as anything the maze of doors has to offer. The clue that they are a husband and wife arises from the distinctly humorous nature of their arguing, indicating that they have spent just little too long in one another's company ("Sometimes they would say, why did we ever come here anyhow? Then one of them would say it wasn't my idea, and the other one would say, well it wasn't mine neither, maybe we could go some other place. Only they didn't know any other place."). Their adventures within the world of doors becomes a metaphor for navigating through life within a partnership, with all the highs, lows, surprises and tedium it may bring. As we join them, it isn't exactly trouble in paradise; their relationship doesn't yet feel that it's corrupted, but it has reached a point of stagnation that is wearying, but ultimately survivable. It is the discovery of the wun key that drives an irreparable distance between them, with the woman's cautiousness conflicting with the man's impatience. She suggests that they at least sleep on it before making any decisions, but he is unwilling to do even that and sneaks away with the key, intending to seek out the wun door and uncover the answer by himself. This amounts to an act of infidelity (it isn't a stretch to see the act of inserting a key into a keyhole as a penetrative one), and effectively severs their partnership; his search for the door takes him far away from the woman and they are not reunited. On an allegorical level, their relationship is a reminder that we are all in this wun world together and need to figure out how to make it work; the division over the key indicates the failure of conflicting parties to handle a mutual responsibility that should perhaps never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals to begin with, one that stands between life as we know it and total devastation. Eventually, the man finds a strange rotating door and attempts to get close enough to locate the keyhole - in doing so, the narrator tells us, he ended up getting sucked in by its spinning motion and was dragged into the ground to his demise. A fortunate turn of events, for the woman was right about this being the wun key you had better not mess with, and if the man had gotten any further it would have meant nothing less than "the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit!"

At this point the narrator's companion speaks up, challenging him on whether he's certain that the man didn't get as far as inserting the key into the keyhole. The narrator responds that he doesn't think that he did. His companion then makes the short's most haunting observation - if the man did commit the reckless deed and bring about the end of snivvelyzashuns, they would not be in a position to even know the difference. The final sequence pulls back to show the sphere of doors, now busted and disintegrating, as the narrator and his companion are revealed to be a couple of disembodied, heavily decayed heads drifting through the debris of the ruined world. The narrator reiterates that he doesn't think the man opened the door. "Wow, what a lucky us," says his companion, and the film fades to black.

 

On the VHS documentary, Anderson clarifies that he saw the epilogue as happening several centuries after the events involving the mysterious key, with the talking skulls representing the subsequent generations who've lived with the consequences ever since. Within context, they can hardly be described as survivors, given their advanced state of decay; rather, they are fragments of the damaged landscape that have been floating in infinity for so long that they've lost sight of what that landscape once was. The bitter irony is that the "snivvelyzashuns" in question already ended long ago, and what they now know is barely civilisation at all. Their continued existence speaks not to the resilience of humankind (if these skulls could even be defined as human), but to the elongation of its decline, their inability to distinguish between the so-called snivvelyzashuns of then and now indicating yet another layer of that protracted decay. The legend of the man and the woman with the wun key might be exactly that - a mere legend, now that the world is far-removed enough from whatever events first set it on its course of irreversible deterioration, but its purpose has been subverted, not to preserve the truth but to reassure listeners that the world was actually saved. It becomes a denial of a reality that should perhaps be all too stark, but which is ultimately too bleak to accept. Door closes, then, by presenting us with a paradox, in the contrast between the man's fatal need to know what lurked behind that wun door and the skulls' desperate need to not know the truth of their hopeless situation. Curiosity might be the factor that propels us to our ruination, but having opened those doors that would have been better off remaining closed, to what extent would we sooner remain ignorant of the consequences? Which proclivity is stronger - our need to know, to understand and keep pushing ourselves into unmapped worlds, or the ability to close our eyes when we're on the cusp of uncovering something truly unpalatable? It is also possible to project a degree of conscious irony onto the second skull's closing statement, as though he wishes that the current state of snivvelyzashuns would be brought to an end.

I honestly don't remember when I first saw Door. I first knowingly came across it in 2012, back when I had started my mission to locate each of the Sweet Disaster series, which led me to check out some of Anderson’s other, less elusive projects, and I found that it had this instant and uncanny sense of familiarity, like the thing had already been haunting me for the better part of my existence. It is possible that I had seen it, or at least an excerpt from it, somewhere before and not quite taken it in (I don’t know if you-know-who would have covered it in his Cartoon Club), but I'd like to think that its freaky ambience just struck a chord with me because it felt so reminiscent of some half-remembered nightmare I'd once had (there is a third option, which is that I’d seen the McEwans lager ad that Anderson later animated using many of the same sets as Door). I do recall becoming utterly obsessed with it then and there in 2012. Not because I was fearing any imminent apocalypse, but because I was, at that point in my life, having a hard time coping with uncertainty in a more generalised sense (in a way that leaves you wide open to intrusive thinking), and I found the ending chilling but also strangely cathartic. I didn’t know if I saw something defiantly reassuring in the concept of being damned and unable to tell the difference, or if that inability represented an entrapment in itself, if you couldn't see beyond it and had no lingering appreciation for what was lost - I just liked that the characters acknowledged that they would have no way of knowing either way. It seemed exonerating, a reminder of how we're all just crumbs of debris floating around in space with only a narrow inkling of the bigger picture (both on a cosmic and on a personal level), and in those circumstances there's not a whole lot we can do other than to learn to trust whatever our own judgement is telling us. What a lucky us indeed.

The Victor (aka I Wondered If That Might Happen...)

The title of Derek Hayes and Phil Austin's 1985 animation The Victor conceals a couple of cunning contradictions. Within context, it is explained in an acronym that is revealed in three separate stages across the narrative, as the action cuts intermittently to a computer screen indicating the successive phases of a sinister experimental procedure - "Violence Induced", "Control Terminated" and finally "Operative Reaction". The last of these phases is followed by a question mark, not present in the title, which plays a vital role in how we are prompted to make sense of the film's macabre developments. The operative reaction is the unknown being tested by the experiment, but the question ultimately raised has to do with who really wins in the end. Is there a victor to be had at all in this scenario? 

Mixed in with the bitter irony is an incongruous dash of loving affection, for the title is also a reference to a British comic from Hayes and Austin's youth, renowned for its "boys' own adventure" type narratives, the art style of which their film was intended to evoke. The Victor is suffused with a warm undercurrent of boyhood nostalgia, which feels paradoxical, given the dystopian forces that prove as prevalent, lingering on the sidelines and pulling the strings from above. 

The protagonist of The Victor is identified, via a montage of computer images shown in the opening sequence, as Jimmy Mullen, a pacifist who resisted conscription into the military and attempted to go AWOL. Now, he finds himself undertaking a mind-bending journey, from the shadows of a seedy bar-room and into a distorted mirror version of the promenade at Brighton, guided by a mysterious rectangular light and bombarded with a flurry of nightmarish stimuli that repeatedly challenge his inclination toward non-violence. When his resistances are shut down, Jimmy discovers that he's capable of unleashing quite a devastating rage upon anybody who threatens him. By the end, it's revealed that Jimmy was the subject of a horrifying military program designed to convert the pacifistic into brutally efficient killing machines, by loading them with doses of violence-inducing drugs. The rectangular light he's been responding to all this while was the window from which his captors were observing as he made his way around the testing field. The adversaries he's been fighting and destroying one by one were none other than his fellow soldiers, including his best friend Vince, who meets a bloody demise when Jimmy momentarily fails to recognise him and hurls a pool ball at his temple.

The Victor was the second film created by Hayes and Austin's company Animation City (the first being the wordless fantasy short Skywhales from 1983). Commissioned by Channel 4 as part of its early commitment to giving the UK animation industry a much-needed shot in the arm, the film took inspiration from a 1970s World In Action documentary about the testing of the drug BZ on US soldiers (in that regard it has thematic parallels with the 1990 Tim Robbins thriller Jacob's Ladder), but also a personal anecdote concerning a friend's recent experiences in combining two lots of prescription drugs, which resulted in hallucinations. The prescribing doctor's response - "I wondered if that might happen...I haven't used those two drugs together before" - became dialogue inserted verbatim into the mouths of one of the characters, revealing as it does authority at its most offhandedly slapdash. At just shy of 15 minutes in length, the project was an ambitious one and faced some budgetary hurdles, but paid off handsomely when the completed film proved popular in the festival circuit and received a theatrical run at the Scala cinema in London, attached to the comic horror feature The Return of The Living Dead. Its Channel 4 debut was highly belated (Clare Kitson, in her 2008 book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, speculates that the film was initially withheld on account of its theatrical release, after which it just had trouble securing a suitable timeslot), but finally saw the light of day - or, more accurately, the dimness of night - in 1989, going out at a 23:30 airing when few children were likely to be watching. 

Jimmy's backstory is laid out in the beginning through a series of predominantly still images, offering glimpses into his life pre-conscription and establishing not only his ordinarily peaceful nature (he is seen sporting a shirt with the peace symbol and bearing an anti-war placard) but also that he was a highly sociable being, constantly surrounded by companions. Close scrutiny of these images is required to appreciate that the friends from his past are the same figures who'll be turned against him in his drug-induced nightmares; in the meantime, the synthesising of Jimmy's likeness with computer data foreshadows his impending degradation to the status of a machine. The blurring of fantasy and reality brings an uncanny element of déjà vu to the proceedings, a memory that feels ready-made and ready-distorted, and is as troubling for us to pin down as it is for Jimmy. In the film's strangest running gag, Jimmy is harassed by a figure who seems oddly familiar in more ways than one - he bears a striking resemblance to public schoolboy Billy Bunter, a character created for weekly boys' story paper The Magnet in 1908 (his ability to morph into a mutant bat is a total liberty on Hayes and Austin's part), but if we're attentive we'll see that he's actually a monstrous parody of one of Jimmy's former schoolfriends. In spite of the bleak subject matter, there's a playful, anything-goes quality to the fantasy sequences, in which references to British popular culture are abundant (eagle-eyed viewers will notice that Jimmy walks past the TARDIS on the promenade at Brighton, the Fourth Doctor having paid a then-recent visit to the town in the episode "The Leisure Hive"). These references, along with the funfair amusement-style scenarios navigated by Jimmy (a camp haunted house in which the perils become all-too hairy, a dizzying helter skelter and a dodgems track that transforms into a missile-heavy war zone) are suggestive of innocent diversion gone feverishly wrong. The action sequences, meanwhile, are staged with a boldness that evokes the frenetic escapisms of contemporary arcade games (at multiple points, Jimmy decries the inducement to fight as participating in a stupid game), with the consequences proving painfully real even as the details are illusory. 

The surreal visuals and action set-piece might be the most immediately commanding things about The Victor, although for my money its most impactful moments are to be found in its quieter intervals, which convey a sadder and more subdued sense of how Jimmy's once-earnest world has been corrupted and turned against him. The significance of Brighton to Jimmy is not made totally explicit, but we might notice that the steps on which he stands while surveying the deceptively peaceful promenade are the same ones he was glimpsed upon in one of the opening images, where he was seen palling around with Vince and friends in what was evidently a more carefree juncture in their lives. A balloon bearing the RAF roundel floats silently overhead, a signal of the military surveillance that is already omnipresent, as Jimmy muses on the likelihood that Vince (already brutally dispatched) will be in his usual spot, chatting up the waitresses at the local cafe. This was the ground on which he forged his community. It seems as solid as ever, but is only a few movements away from giving way into a pit of hallucinatory carnage, where his erstwhile allies are recast at best as leering bystanders or, at worst, as direct adversaries. Jimmy is plunged into his nightmare with the expressed warning that he is now on his own; the experiment plays out by not merely heightening his inclination to attack, but by eroding his very concept of connection, prompting him to destroy the people he would, under more auspicious circumstances, have greeted as his own. 

Hayes has shared that he approached the film with an interest in exploring what was the more innate human characteristic, aggression or cooperation. Is Jimmy to be seen as a fundamentally peaceful individual whose nature has been forcibly inverted by external forces, or was his pacifism solidified by his sense of social belonging, something that breaks down the instant he loses that camaraderie and has only his primal urges to fall back on? The obliterated of Jimmy's social identity is cited as a necessary factor in his transformation into an ultra-efficient killer, in the joking observations of one of his captors' lackeys that he couldn't expect to find much affinity with the protestors in CND after unleashing such a violent display. Jimmy's repeated howls of disbelief make it plain that he is having difficulty consolidating these conflicting impulses, much to the perturbation of the army general overseeing the procedure. For as futile as Jimmy's objections might seem while he's fastened to a gurney and barely lucid, they represent a spanner of unpredictability within the works that his captors have been unable to weed out, troubling to the general because it indicates a battle not yet won. But then some victories have the potential to prove unmitigatedly Pyrrhic.

The Victor closes by turning the viewer's own perception of violence back on them, with the startling climactic development where Jimmy breaks free of his restraints and his drug-induced demons become solid and real. It amounts to a thorough rejection of the calmer interlude following the experiment, in which rationality appeared to have taken a hold and we were offered a logical explanation for everything Jimmy had been through. Not only do Jimmy's fantasies spill over inexplicably into the external world, his captors' own reality becomes fluid and unstable, with the gun that fails to protect them from Jimmy transforming into what looks like a clew of little pink worms. The barrier between reality and hallucination has been eviscerated, leaving the world to make its inevitable descent into the realm of full-blown nightmares. Given Jimmy's implied destruction of his captors, it might be tempting to read the final outcome through a redemptive lens, with Jimmy rising up against the oppressive forces that had manipulated him into killing his allies - it does, however, come at the expense of his pacifistic nature, which has by now been completely annihilated, to the extent that he no longer expresses resistance or disbelief over his actions. Jimmy has surrendered to his violent impulses, whether induced or innate, and become the ultimate killing machine, so potent that it cannot be contained, with the black abyss that consumes the screen pointing not to triumphant rebellion, but to the impending oblivion. Jimmy's is a battle lost, and it is through an unseen side effect that he takes out everything else along with him. The victor? This is a game that was always fated to have no winners. Jimmy was right to not want to play. 

Weight Gain 4000 (aka Man Say Thing Not)

Who is Kathie Lee Gifford anyway?

That was the question lurking persistently at the back of my mind on a Friday night in the summer of 1998, when I had my first ever South Park experience (the proper old school way, by sneaking into the spare room and keeping the volume down, so that my parents wouldn't figure out what I was watching). The episode I saw was "Weight Gain 4000", then making its UK terrestrial debut on Channel 4, which follows the Colorado mountain community's ill-fated love affair with Kathie Lee Gifford, a celebrity I'm pretty sure no one in the UK had ever heard of before this series came along. At the time she was well-known to Americans as the host of a popular syndicated morning talk show, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, but as a name she gained absolutely zero traction across the pond. They couldn't have picked an individual to whom the Wickershams and Decklers were more indifferent - so unlike Barbra Streisand, with whom I've since had ample opportunities to get acquainted through countless other media, the send-up she received in early South Park is still what I primarily associate with her. There is exactly one other thing that I know her for, that being her strange guest appearance (alongside her co-host Regis Philbin) in the "Terror of Tiny Toon" segment of The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IX", in a rare instance of the characters interacting with live action footage - it's a sequence as aesthetically and narratively jarring as you would anticipate, but Gifford herself got a memorable line out of the deal ("I'm going home! Dom DeLuise can interview himself!"). I don't know Kathie Lee and am only vaguely aware of her reputation, but I've never felt that was a particularly insurmountable barrier to appreciating "Weight Gain 4000", since I get the impression that the episode is treating her as something of an arbitrary celebrity anyway. So far as I can tell, the only dialogue taking any kind of really personal jab at Gifford is the observation by one of Mayor McDaniels' aides that she loves children...if they're working in a sweatshop, an allusion to a line of Gifford-branded clothing that became a source of controversy in 1996 when it came to light that sweatshop labour was used in their manufacturing. Otherwise, she could have been swapped out with any number of contemporary celebrities and most of the jokes and plotting would still have made every bit as much sense. The point isn't really Kathie Lee Gifford per se, but what she represents in context, ie: celebrity at its most empty, vapid and disposable. How am I supposed to feel about Gifford? However I want, I suppose. For the purposes of this story, she becomes a total non-entity, a blank slate propped upon a rickety pedestal, onto which the characters can project their adoration and yearning for proximity to that more elevated state of being...or alternatively their self-loathing and feelings of scuppered ambition.

A question that did not play on my mind at all throughout that initial viewing was how I was supposed to feel about Mr Hat, a quirky-looking glove puppet and the South Park resident who is most firmly in the anti-Gifford camp. He and the puppet master, third grade teacher Mr Garrison, have a long-standing grudge against Gifford that dates back to their childhood, when Gifford (then identifying by her birth name, Epstein), snatched a talent show victory from them at the eleventh hour. Her upcoming visit to South Park represents an opportunity to settle the overdue score, and Mr Hat is determined to see that Garrison takes it, and takes it the old-fashioned way, by acquiring a gun and blowing Gifford's brains out. His character I had no difficulty figuring out where I stood on - Gifford might be a non-entity, but I'm positive that Mr Hat isn't. 

Watching "Weight Gain 4000", it never once crossed my mind that Mr Hat was anything other than a living being with a mind of his own. It was extremely easy to buy into his reality, and the show's characteristically flat art style had a significant hand in that, since Mr Hat has the exact same eyes as every other "real" character within the cast. He doesn't emote, and his pupils remain in a mostly fixed position, but he looks no less conscious than anybody else. When I look into the puppet's eyes, I don't see the vacant gaze of an inanimate object, but rather the uncanny intentness of a sapient, if preternatural being that is quietly observing and taking in everything around it. That Mr Hat spends most of his screen time looking directly into the camera doesn't exactly quell my unease. Let's face it, this wouldn't be any stranger or any more absurd than any of the other weekly happenings within this pissant white bread town. If you were on board with the monsters and aliens, the regenerating Kenny, the talking crap as a part of this reality, then why would this living puppet be any more of a stretch? And yet, I remember it coming up in a discussion on South Park back in the day and being mildly perturbed that I was the only one who saw it that way. Everyone else at that table was convinced that Mr Hat was just the alter ego of Garrison and that this was the real joke I wasn't getting. I countered that if you paid close attention to the puppet, his eyes frequently moved. I knew this because whenever Mr Hat was on screen, he was usually what I was focused on. At first I was mainly just guarded against that uncanny stare of his, but I quickly picked up on the fact that the position of his pupils intermittently shifted between shots, in a way that indicated a responsiveness entirely independent of Garrison. It didn't happen in every episode, but it happened enough times to make it worth looking out for. The discussion's response when I cited all of this? "I think you're the loony one in this room." Or something to that effect. I felt like I was being aligned with Garrison, in having some deep-rooted emotional need to see life in the inert puppet. Eh, maybe. It could be that I just have an innate affinity with the delusional. It had never occurred to me that the feral hippo raiding the trash cans in Lily Takes A Walk might be all in Nicky's mind either.

I still believe. I am, however, obliged to reconsider "Weight Gain 4000" from the perspective that it was almost certainly written with the intention that there be some level of ambiguity on this point, and that the average viewer is liable to approach it with the assumption that Mr Hat is just a common or garden puppet and Garrison just very severely disturbed (not an invalid assessment regardless), at least until the end, when the situation is somewhat muddied. After all, this is a familiar trope: the ventriloquist who brings life to an inanimate prop that he subsequently can't control. The implicit question prompted is a fantastically eerie one - who is the real puppet and who is the real puppeteer? It also plays into a very prevalent fear, automatonophobia, the aversion to anything designed to suggest a pseudo-humanity and sapience where none should reasonably exist (puppets, dolls and dummies are among the most common automatonophobic subjects, but it may also apply to statues, mannequins, masks, animatronics and waxworks). It was featured with particular notoriety in the 1945 Ealing anthology Dead of Night, and there are also at least two classic Twilight Zone episodes dealing with this premise (three if we count Talky Tina). The malevolent puppet tale that Garrison's arc in "Weight Gain 4000" most strongly recalls would be Richard Attenborough's underrated 1978 horror Magic, where Anthony Hopkins plays a socially awkward ventriloquist named Corky whose dependence on his dummy Fats takes a deadly turn when the dummy incites him to kill (you'll notice that even their names point to the ominously subverted nature of their dynamic - which of them is flesh and which is wooden?). Mr Hat isn't really like the dummy Fats, however. Fats is a distraction; we spent the whole movie staring at that unnatural little bugger, waiting for the much-anticipated moment where he'd come to life on his own terms (a la the circus doll from Poltergeist), and yet he confounded us by remaining perfectly stationary. This was all our own folly; we were warned from the start, on no uncertain terms, how this was going to work and of the real meaning behind the title: "Magic is misdirection, and misdirection is getting the people to look in the wrong place at the wrong times." Not so with Mr Hat. His is a presence that both demands and rewards close scrutiny. Keep your eyes on him for long enough and he'll move.

As a concept, Mr Hat didn't come from nowhere. He is thought to have been based on Mr High Hat, a real educational tool designed to help kindergarteners develop language skills (South Park co-creator Trey Parker confirmed that Mr Hat was modelled on a puppet used by one of his own teachers to deliver lessons - the kicker being that, unlike Garrison, she didn't bother to throw her voice and just synced up its movements with a vinyl record - although Garrison himself took inspiration from a fruity literature teacher who'd had some novel opinions on Beowulf). I suspect that the whole Garrison-Hat dynamic originated with the observation that it would be hilarious to see a teacher who used a Mr High Hat puppet getting into a Magic-type scenario with it, and "Weight Gain 4000" is the episode that attempts to mine the most out-and-out spookiness from that prospect. On the automatonophobia scale, Mr Hat occupies a curious middle ground. He's uncanny, but he doesn't take you all the way into the valley. He was based on an actual educational puppet, and as such he was designed to look basically cute and ostensibly innocent, although the beady intentness of his gaze runs contrary to that.  It is interesting to note that his original design, as seen in the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", didn't have eyes at all. I couldn't tell you if this was revised specifically for the purposes of "Weight Gain 4000" (which was the second episode produced, although "Volcano" aired ahead of it in the US, leaving me a bit unclear on the official ordering), but the addition of eyes completely rewires your perception of the character. As well being more consistent with the design of the original Mr High Hat puppet, it makes him a whole lot more convincing as an antagonist here. The eyes become a window into the puppet's crazed little soul - without them, it becomes harder to suppose that he has one. In "Weight Gain 4000" they are put to particularly sinister use in a sequence where he tries to cow Garrison by making his pupils glow red and doing an Exorcist-style head spin (for the record, I don't count this among those instances of eye movement suggesting independent responsiveness, since it is framed in such a way that it could be in Garrison's mind; the others are not). Another unsettling touch is that most of Mr Hat's dialogue in this episode is delivered in a voice that is significantly deeper and more threatening than the one Garrison usually gives him, which becomes especially creepy in shots where the focus is on the puppet and you can't see Garrison's lips moving (notably, when he retrieves Mr Hat from the dresser drawer), making it easier to buy into the premise of the voice being the puppet's own. Also, while I doubt this allusion was intentional, something that doesn't escape my notice about Garrison is his ambidexterity, with his left hand being his "own" hand and his right hand the one claimed by Mr Hat. Same predicament as Norman Bates, then.

The premise of "Weight Gain 4000" has it that Cartman has been named the winner of a national environmental essay contest, and is due to have his award presented to him by Kathie Lee Gifford in a televised ceremony. Cartman refuses to elaborate on the details of his winning paper, which was reportedly chosen from out of over a million entries, causing his peers to suspect that his victory was not legit - in particular Wendy Testaburger (RIP Mary Kay Bergman), who'd put a lot of work into her own submission, an essay about the plight of bottlenose dolphins, and feels cheated by the outcome. The adult characters, meanwhile, are all too wrapped up in the prospect of Gifford's visit to care. For Mayor McDaniels, this is an opportunity to boost her own profile by showcasing what an efficient and cultured little town she's running, with the hopes that she might be able to ditch all of these stupid hicks and move onto something more glamorous. For Chef (RIP Isaac Hayes), who's been asked by McDaniels to perform a song at the ceremony, it's an opportunity to get his rocks off with a sultry queen of sexual fantasy (his words). And for the town, it's a chance to experience an ephemeral sip of elevation, by basking in the aura of the celebrity passing through and maybe working their way into a fleeting crowd shot on national television. What nobody is talking about (apart from Wendy and Stan) is the dolphins. There are no actual dolphins in the episode, but they represent the real aggrieved party in this scenario - the worthy causes for which the essay contest was presumably designed to promote awareness, but that end up being lost amid what it ultimately becomes, a spectacle of publicity whoring and vacuous celebrity worship. When Cartman dismisses dolphins as "intelligent and friendly on rye bread with some mayonnaise", he does so in explicitly meaner and more forward terms than everyone else, but he sums up the basic indifference of the whole town.

I don't think it's controversial to say that the individual we most care about in all of this is Garrison. Later installments would go to lengths to cement him as a man (or woman, depending on when you were watching) whose unpleasantness and depravity knew no bounds, but for now, we are just two (three?) episodes in and he is by and far the most sympathetic character here. It is difficult not to feel for anyone whose life is as screwed up and vulnerable as his evidently is, but he's also appealing because he is, among the adults, the only dissenter who doesn't accord with the town's mindless worship of Gifford. Which is not to say that he isn't just as warped by the allure of celebrity as the others. His resentment of Gifford stems from her having beaten him in a national talent show as a child, and (as he sees it) costing him his own shot at stardom. The underlying insinuation is that celebrity is interchangeable, and that the media stars we put on pedestals are no better or more deserving than the rest of us, but just had all the lucky breaks. When it comes to Gifford he is both right and wrong. On the one hand, it would be churlish to deny that Kathie won because she was the better ventriloquist, and she clearly stoked young Herbert's feelings of inadequacy in that regard - the thing that upset him the most about young Kathie's performance is that she was able to throw her voice with two puppets at once, something he struggles to do with just one. But then it can't also be denied she had an unfair advantage with all of that luxuriously over the top stage production. As Garrison puts it, "She had choreography. How could we compete with that?!"

Garrison's increasing urge to destroy Gifford is driven by his distorted sense of justice, and by Mr Hat's (blatantly erroneous) assurances that it will make everything better, although he initially sets his sights on merely upstaging her, when McDaniels enlists him to direct the children in a play about the history of South Park as part of the ceremony. He attempts to assert control over Mr Hat by confining him to a dresser drawer, but finds that his disdain for Gifford won't be so easily suppressed; McDaniels sits in on a rehearsal and is naturally horrified to discover that it consists of the children beating one another senseless in a recreation of a historic confrontation between pioneers and the Utes. Garrison's defence is that his play is historically accurate, though we suspect that this violent spectacle stems less from any noble obligation not to whitewash the atrocities committed against the Utes than it does the passive-aggressive expressing of his loathing for Gifford (whether he's conscious of it or not). To give McDaniels her due, she is the closest thing this story has to a semi-sensible adult. She's in it for herself and is explicitly indifferent to the matter of whether Cartman won the contest fairly, but she at least has a decent handle on what is and isn't appropriate for the ceremony (it's just unfortunate that she didn't think to vet the song Chef had prepared as she did Garrison's play). When she challenges Garrison on whether their esteemed guest would actually enjoy seeing children crack each other's heads open, he lets his disdain for Gifford slip, loudly and in front of the entire town, and gets completely ostracised for it. It's for this reason that we don't lose sympathy with Garrison, in spite of his startling aloofness toward the injured children, and McDaniels clearly being in the right about the inappropriateness of his play - we can feel the crushing loneliness of where he stands. The residents of South Park, much like the residents of Springfield, are governed by the law of mob mentality, which Garrison has found himself in the dire position of being vocally out of step with. Hence why he goes back to Mr Hat. The puppet is the only ally he has.

In the meantime, Cartman faces a quandary of his own, since McDaniels has suggested that he get in shape for his television appearance, but he isn't inclined to break his ingrained habit of sitting on the couch all evening and stuffing his face with Cheesy Poofs. In "Weight Gain 4000", Parker and Stone are clearly making some kind of statement about television culture and the media we're primed to emulate, with the episode title deriving from the dubious nutritional product into which Eric invests all of his hopes and dreams of looking his best for the day of the ceremony. After seeing an ad on TV (and being naturally undeterred by its disclaimer that it might lead to irreversible damage to the liver and kidneys), he's convinced that he can achieve a perfectly toned body through a program of non-stop consumption and parroting of the promotion's inane "Beefcake!" sloganeering. In reality, it proves a fast track to morbid obesity. Although Wendy would appear to be Garrison's obvious parallel, in being similarly aggrieved about losing a contest under circumstances she considers unfair, when you look at it his story actually has more in common with Cartman's. Both are subjugated by a voice that compels them to unquestionably obey. In both cases this voice arises from an object that serves as a substitute for human companionship, and gets to them by playing off of their inadequacies and selling them a facile solution to a problem it will, in actuality, only exacerbate. The television promises Cartman speedy buffness, but causes him to become more overweight than ever. Mr Hat promises Garrison instant healing for his long-term psychological distress, but goads him down a route that can only finish off his already wrecked mental health. There's not such a difference between Cartman's misplaced faith in what his television is telling him to do and Garrison's willingness to go along with what his puppet buddy is asking (outside of Garrison at least having reservations in the beginning). Both are equally insane. At the same time, the whole town buys into a mass delusion regarding the ceremony, a parade of lightweight gestures designed to fuel the sensation of getting their fifteen minutes of fame while nothing of real substance is accomplished, not least as far as those suffering dolphins are concerned (Man say thing not!). Lacking from the occasion is any spotlight on Cartman's paper or on the thoughtful issues he supposedly raised, because that is decidedly not its purpose.

Determined to not lose sight of that point is Wendy, who is the most competent participant in all of this, something that might put her in the loneliest position of all, for competence is not in abundant supply in South Park. Garrison, for his part, is really not adept at this assassination business. Not only does he show up to the ceremony openly brandishing a rifle (which he acquired from Jimbo with minimal questioning), he approaches the last person it is within his interests to be seen by, Officer Barbrady, to ask for pointers on where to get a clear shot view of Gifford. But then neither is Barbrady adept at this policing business, cheerfully directing Garrison to the book depository, so it balances out. Since no one with any authority has had the initiative or curiosity to take a look at Cartman's paper, Wendy chooses to take justice into her own hands, by breaking into the classroom filing cabinet, where she discovers that Cartman's winning paper was nothing other than a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 1854 publication Walden; or, Life In The Woods, a plagiarism so slackly barefaced that all he did was cross out Thoreau's name on the cover and pencil in his own. Even so, her subsequent efforts to expose Cartman's cheating are thwarted by the town's illiterate disinterest, as Wendy realises, despairingly, that they are uniformly lacking in awareness for one of the seminal works of American literature. A pronounced link is drawn between all this mass worship of celebrity and the televisual image and the dumbing down of cultural standards, when Wendy admonishes the town with the rejoinder, "I bet if Walden was a sitcom you'd all know what it is!" And it would be unfair to suggest that this problem is limited to South Park. Whatever screwy virus has infected this town has already spread out far beyond its confines - the fact that Cartman's paper got past every check in a national competition without anybody noticing is pretty fucking telling. To say nothing of the episode's most bizarre gag, when Wendy pulls her own submission from the cabinet to find that the anonymous judges who marked it had the same inexplicable misconception about (and lack of compassion for) dolphins as Cartman, questioning why, if they're so smart, they would live in igloos.^[1] The masses are a mindless bunch. But then the wayward individualism Garrison embodies also gets flipped on its head, once the ceremony is underway and he discovers that, for as isolated as his Kathie Lee hatred has made him in his own community, on a national level he would have to get in line. Gifford is driven into town in a bullet-proof dome (a parody of the popemobile) and it dawns on Garrison that he isn't the first person who's attempted to take a shot at her. Clearly that woman has pissed off a lot of people. But then what celebrity hasn't?

It falls on Wendy to be the moral centre of the episode, when she overhears Garrison discussing the assassination plot with Mr Hat and resolves to put aside her grievances with Cartman until she's ensured Gifford's safety. Which is ironic, in a way, because if we're viewing Season 1 in a vacuum then I think Wendy ends up being the most profoundly evil South Park resident of them all. At this stage, I'm not even sure that Cartman's got that much on her. His rap sheet within those first 13 episodes is already pretty ugly - he's awful to Pip (but then so is everyone else), he dehumanises Marvin and he takes an unsettling amount of joy in dressing up as Hitler for a Halloween party - but rarely takes him above the level of a particularly mean and ignorant school yard bully. In terms of all-out unbridled malevolence, there's surely nothing that tops Wendy's actions at the end of "Tom's Rhinoplasty". Justice for Ms Ellen, who was perfectly lovely and never did anything to hurt anyone (no, Kenny doesn't count - that was just fate working its usual way with him).

Still, you can't deny the girl's got guts. When Barbrady proves useless in locating and apprehending the armed Garrison (in spite of his having earlier told Garrison where to go), she's prepared to confront him directly, along with Stan, the only one of the central four who could be convinced that saving Gifford was a nobler endeavour than being on television. By now, they're getting to the point in the ceremony where Gifford is about to hand Cartman his award, for which she's presumably going to have to briefly open up her glass bubble, and that's all Garrison needs. Wendy tries to talk him out of it by speaking to him from a position of empathy, insisting that she understands how he feels because she's just been through a similar experience with Cartman. This affinity is something that Garrison wasn't expecting and responds to, leaving the matter teetering on a knife edge as to where it might go. During their confrontation, you'll notice that Mr Hat is only visible in shots where Garrison is leaning toward shooting Gifford; whenever it looks like Wendy might be reaching him, the puppet can't be seen. It's a neat way of illustrating the tug of war between Wendy and Mr Hat for Garrison's senses, showing us which of them has the advantage in that given moment. Wendy finally gets Garrison to lower his gun, making it look as though she might have clinched it, but all hopes of a peaceful resolution are brutally dashed when Stan transpires to be a terrible judge of when to keep his mouth shut. He makes the fatal move of expressing awe for Gifford's ventriloquist mettle, triggering Garrison's feelings of inadequacy and ensuring that Mr Hat gets the final word. The shot is fired, just as the stage cracks under Cartman's immense weight, causing Gifford to be flung from it and Kenny to take the bullet instead, to nobody's real horror. Kyle does his thing and acknowledges Kenny's death in the moment, but otherwise the town moves on almost instantly from what by all rights should have been an appallingly traumatic spectacle, too hung up on the premature departure of Gifford and the TV crew to care. It's almost as if they all know this isn't a consequence that will actually stick.

Indeed, the most troubling aspect of the ending is not Kenny's improbable impaling on the flagpole, but the way Wendy ultimately betrays her own principles. I'm not talking about her attempts to publicly expose Cartman as a cheater, coming after that seemingly heartfelt speech to Garrison about her own experience in learning how to lose gracefully. The script definitely frames her as something of a hypocrite in this regard (Stan: "What about not holding anything against the person who wins?" Wendy: "Well, not if it's Cartman!") but the thing is, she's not wrong. Cartman committed a really audacious act of plagiarism; I don't think it was petty to try to expose him at all. No, I'm talking about how, when she fails to inspire the faintest level of outrage over Cartman's cheating, she gives up and accepts a consolation prize in the form of Stan's offer of a tuna fish sandwich. Tuna fish, you say? From the girl who'd written so passionately about the suffering of bottlenose dolphins? See the incongruity there? I mean, for all we know the tuna Kyle's mom buys is all dolphin-friendly (Shelia Brofloski is nothing if not conscientious, right?), and the script doesn't explicitly call Wendy out on this point, but I find it hard to believe that it wasn't a deliberate choice to specify that the sandwiches would be tuna of all things. It's a contradiction made all the more unsettling for the fact that it passes without comment, with Wendy giving only a resigned "What the hell" and following after Stan. Does it imply that she was never that sincere in her cause, or that she's giving up then and there, having realised the futility of what she's up against? Either way, this shit's bleak.

Fortunately the ending is a little less unhappy in other regards. The only character who's left with no form of consolation (besides Kenny) is McDaniels, last seen lamenting her thwarted ambitions of escaping the town and inadvertently insulting its populace before a microphone. Garrison gets hauled off to the nearest psychiatric hospital, which in theory should mean that he'll get the help he needs, although when Stan and Kyle later pay him a visit he indicates that Mr Hat is the actual target of the psychiatric intervention. Misdirection, or does the puppet's psychosis indeed put Garrison's in the shade? In either case, the extensive therapy Mr Hat went through evidently got results; as far as I'm aware, he never expressed any further desire to kill Kathie Lee Gifford. Actively pushing Garrison into doing bad or questionable things also wasn't his raison d'etre going forward, at least not in this way. Elsewhere, Cartman's blind adherence to Weight Gain 4000 has paid off, in the sense that he gets to be on television after all, in an interview with Geraldo Rivera (ah, now this is a US talk show host I am familiar with - the Al Capone's vault guy, yes?), having become so morbidly obese that he can't leave his house. Despite the distinctly derogatory nature of the feature, Cartman proclaims himself to be living proof that a person can attain their dreams. Judging by his continued spewing of that "Beefcake!" nonsense, he's still entrenched in the delusion that he's achieved optimum buffness, although maybe that's of no odds. After all, it got him on the receiving end of national media attention, however dubious and however transitory, and that's all the affirmation he needs. And at the very end we see that Chef also achieved his short-term goal of getting Gifford to sleep with him, in spite of how mightily perturbed she'd looked by his public serenade about hummingbird sex (a simile Chef went even harder with in the version appearing on the Chef Aid album, where he sings about the male hummingbird letting his humming gravy fly all over the nest, or somesuch). Unfortunately, she might even be too much of a rabid sex maniac for him to handle.

There is a certain bitter irony in the episode's final arrangement with Garrison and Mr Hat (both are confined, but the latter is much more heavily restrained), given the way their characterisation would subsequently go. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" would drop the first all-important hint that Garrison's mental health issues were further compounded by his being a self-hating gay who was terrified to leave the closet. It also came to light that Mr Hat was enjoying a freedom that Garrison had adamantly denied himself, in that he was more at ease with his sexuality and routinely fantasising about being in a sauna with pro-footballer Brett Favre and a bottle of thousand island dressing, a pleasure that Garrison could only experience vicariously, via his connection with Mr Hat. Mr Hat was so much more liberated in fact that in "Summer Sucks" of Season 2 he was able to temporarily abandon Garrison to pursue his kinky fantasies for real, driving Garrison to attempt to replicate their relationship with a vaguely human-shaped twig that, most tellingly, wore a pink triangle on its shirt. I will say that if Mr Hat is nothing more than Garrison's alter ego, then I'd be considerably less disturbed and confounded by the events of "Weight Gain 4000" than by whatever is meant to be going on with that bizarre love triangle between Mr Garrison, Mr Hat and Mr Twig. The Gifford murder plot would at least be comprehensible.

Actually, the Garrison-Hat interaction that gives me the most pause is a fairly low-key one, from the Season 1 finale "Cartman's Mom Is A Dirty Slut". We find the two at a bar, with Garrison wanting to go home for the night and Mr Hat insisting on "just one more cosmopolitan". Garrison tells the puppet it has a drinking problem it needs to admit to, but wilfully orders the requested beverage. The implications of this exchange are quite a bit more unsettling than first meets the eye. From Mr Hat's words, it isn't clear if the craving for cosmopolitans is his own, or if he's enticing Garrison to keep drinking (thus becoming the devil on his shoulder yet again, albeit less dramatically than in "Weight Gain 4000") - Garrison's response indicates the former, although in practice it might make little difference. It's safe to say that, either way, Garrison will be the one physically drinking that cosmopolitan, even if it is to accommodate an alcohol dependency originating with his other half. If it's not his problem, then he's obliged to make it his own. Their partnership hinges on a shared energy, an uncanny interrelation of both form and personality. Garrison relies on Mr Hat to articulate the forbidden regions of his psyche that he's too terrified to face alone, while Mr Hat relies on Garrison to articulate him. That is the nature of their symbiosis - they are both each other's voice.

So is Mr Hat real? That is a silly question. Of course he is. You only have to pay attention to him across enough episodes and I promise you'll see the evidence.

Look, to play devil's advocate for just a moment, the most compelling case against Mr Hat's reality is that characters who attempt to come at Garrison's relationship with the puppet from a rational standpoint often end up sounding pretty danged convincing. In particular, the psychiatrist Garrison sought out in "Summer Sucks" whilst pining for the absent Mr Hat (actually the titular character of another contemporary Comedy Central series, Dr Katz, Professional Therapist) really did seem like he had Garrison's number: "I think Mr Hat was actually your gay side trying to come out. It's you who is gay, but you're in denial, so you act out your gay persona with a homosexual puppet." It makes sense as he says it. But then Katz never met Mr Hat in person. And in the same episode we also get what seems like irrefutable proof of Mr Hat's reality, when we go inside Brett Favre's sauna to find him in the company of the stray puppet. Favre greets him cordially and there's a close-up of Mr Hat blinking and returning his gaze. The puppet blinked on screen, and the puppet master wasn't anywhere in sight. What more proof do you need, people? A similar situation occurs in "World Wide Recorder Concert", when school counsellor Mr Mackey attempts to talk to Garrison about his daddy issues (they are a doozy, I can tell ya) but is blocked by an aggressively protective Mr Hat. Mackey offers the rational explanation, that Garrison has switched personalities to Mr Hat as a coping mechanism for his traumas. Mr Hat does not himself disagree with this assessment ("Good one, Sherlock. You figure that out all by yourself?") but goes on to wipe the floor with Mackey in a round of fisticuffs, during which he is removed from Garrison's hand, and the children who witness the incident independently acknowledge that it is indeed Hat and Mackey doing the fighting. Clearly the show liked to mess with us by suggesting both possibilities within the same breath. And here's the beauty of it - they don't actually contradict one another. There's no reason why Mr Hat can't be alive and a figure onto which Garrison projects all of his insecurities, hostilities and latent desires. Both things can be true. The real ambiguity might lie with where one stops and the other starts.

Sometimes the puppet's actions defy any and all rationalisation, as seen in "Chef Aid" of Season 2. Mr Twig, then making his seventh appearance with Garrison, becomes the target of a series of strange attacks by an unseen assailant who obviously has access to Garrison's residence. Garrison sets up a camera and summons Barbrady the instant the photos arrive from the developing lab, hoping he'll arrest the culprit, but instead gets branded a "weirdo" by Barbrady and discovers the pathologically jealous Mr Hat lurking inside his closet (ho, could there be a clearer metaphor?). Crucially, the viewer never sees what the pictures actually show, taunting us with the possibility that Garrison might have captured his own unconscious rejection of the twig (and whatever he sees, he has to concede that he's wasted Barbrady's time). This is what Chef presumes to be going on; when he and Garrison later cross paths in police custody (Chef having been arrested for non-payment of a fine and Garrison for his increasingly concerning public behaviour), he offers the diagnosis (less sensitive than Mackey's) that Garrison has "split personality schizophrenic jeebies." And then Mr Hat, determined to get back into Garrison's good graces, shows up and is able to bust them out by using a vehicle to break down the cell wall. Chef is witness to this occurrence, confirming that it isn't just in Garrison's head. By the end of the episode, Chef is a believer. When asked how he escaped, he has to credit the jailbreak to Mr Hat, even though he has lingering questions about how the puppet managed to reach the gas pedal.

Is Mr Twig real? Sure, why not? Given enough time I've a feeling he could have gone full Otesánek.

Finally, while Mr Hat is typically perceived as a reflection of all of the most awkward, problematic and messed up traits in Garrison (we haven't even touched on his role in "Chef Goes Nanners"), it is only fair to acknowledge that there are occasions where he's conversely been the voice of reason in their dynamic. In the Season 3 episode "Succubus", he (rightly) advised Garrison that his "poontang" facade was pulling the wool over nobody's eyes. A more subtle instance of Mr. Hat being able to claim the moral high ground over Garrison occurs in another Season 3 episode, "Jakovasaurs", when McDaniels reminds Garrison of a sorry incident where he was entrusted with caring for a wounded pigeon with which he supposedly attempted to copulate. Garrison tries to blame the pigeon, insisting that it was promiscuous and asking the townspeople to raise their hands if they can honestly say that they've never slept with it. A split second later and everyone except Garrison has their hands confidently in the air - and if you look at Mr Hat, you can see that his hand is also directed visibly upward. Apparently even he considered that pigeon a low point for Garrison.

 

[1] A lot of people assume it was Garrison himself who wrote that, since it came from his filing cabinet, but he didn't judge this contest and the official script (which differs slightly from the finished product, mind) does indeed specify that it was written by the judges. I'll admit that it's not particularly clear, however. The implications of the people who ran this national context being just as churlish and ill-informed on these issues as Cartman are definitely a whole lot wilder.