WALKER TEXAS RANCER Season 7 DVD Box Set Elmo’s World

Harvest Bird

cold discipline for solo travellers

3 July, 2011

in at home,commentatrix,we are family

And it grew both day and night/ Till it bore an apple bright

We watch a lot of Sesame Street in this house, for the usual complex miscellany of reasons. It is one of the shows I remember fondly from my own early years; it blends the imaginary with the every day; it wears lightly the ways of thinking and living that inform its mise-en-scène, and these in turn are things that sit easily with me. There are other reasons of expediency, not least that, at fifty-five minutes, its episodes are long enough to engage my daughter for significant amounts of time, but also allow her to go away and come back without losing the thread of the action. Television is one of the tools with which I support the simultaneous care of my daughter and getting my work done, a contingency in which I have no special pride, but of which I am, at the same time, not especially ashamed.

Furthermore, the commercial mysteries of special offers mean that it has turned out a saving to include a T-box in our domestic phone-internet-television conurbation. This means that we have, for the moment, two fresh Sesame Street hours each day, a useful substitution, for now, for the usual supplementary YouTube searching.

Most of what we daily see is continuous with my memories of the show from my 1970s and 80s childhood: letters and numbers (now up to 20!), music largely of a funk, soul and Broadway turn (now with hip hop!), the wry humour of disappointed expectations and relationship lessons humbly learned. New adults and young people have joined the neighbourhood, while others continue their domestic and stoop-dwelling life. Luis and Maria, whose relationship began around the time I stopped watching, are one of several sets of characters who have led the way into the middle age I am also, I suppose, here approaching. I remember, as a young viewer, struggling to tell Luis and Bob apart, each falling into the world of beardless men who all, to my eyes, looked alike. (This image of my parents in 1973 may provide some context for that remark.)

It is a curious experience to be viewing again what during my teens and twenties my friends and I did our best, variously, to subvert. As third- and fourth-formers we ran a swift, mean line in regulating each other’s behaviour by singing a quick round of “One of these things is not like the other” to bring any who departed from our narrow norms back into the group: a murmuring that “One of these things just doesn’t belong here” was usually all it took. Later, a flatmate kept as her desktop image one of what the internet would later reveal to be a diverse library of images that took the close companionship of Bert and Ernie to variously bound and and mutually consenting conclusions.

The subjectivity that looms large over the street now, however, is one that also comes after my dedicated childhood viewing of the show. This is, of course, Elmo, that curious, innocent, persistent and intractably childlike puppet whose habit of speaking of himself only in the third person in tones higher-pitched even than Grover‘s serves as an ongoing irritant to otherwise reasonable adults (NSFW).

I was, similarly, an Elmo sceptic; from the outside he seemed to me too light on complexity and too heavy on pitched charm, a 1980s’ smoothing of the grittier, funkier 1970s’ aesthetic. As might be expected, however, I have come to revise my position, for reasons that sit squarely but separately with my daughter and me.

The first is simple enough: my daughter loves Elmo. That high-pitched voice, that steadfast gaze: she gazes back and giggles delightedly. I am not wholly helpless in the face of the enthusiasms of a one-year-old child (she giggles at Barney too, but only for the amount of time it takes me to switch that subject-of-another-post irritant off), but neither am I wholly independent of mind. Imagined through the filter of her experience, Elmo’s world of colours, drawings, singing and inquiry is not much different from the way we try and live here, day-to-day. Small, wry and yet unbounded in the way the childish imagination is itself unbounded,Lights Out Season 1 DVD Box Set, it is now readable in a way it did not use to be.

The other is my reason, and one I noticed at random, but which has stuck. Elmo has a best friend called Zoe, who carries with her at all times a pet rock called Rocco. Zoe expresses not only her own wishes, but also those of Rocco, in more or less every discussion about what is to be done. This continual articulation of subjectivity on behalf of an inanimate object is an ongoing irritant for Elmo, who, reasonably, cannot get past the fact that Rocco is a rock. This is compounded, repeatedly, by the acceptance in the rest of their circle that Rocco’s wishes are to be taken into account when Zoe expresses them. The problem between Zoe and Elmo is by and large intractable, and cannot be resolved; it must be tolerated, or tiptoed around, or ignored. While for others it is an idiosyncrasy of Zoe, between the two intimate friends this disagreement could quickly grow, if not checked, into something like the apple on Blake’s poison tree. It is always between them. It seasons their love.

This is a complex emotional state, and one I spent much of my PhD navigating in the poetry of Robin Hyde. It gets aphorised in various self-help manuals – wanting what one has, perhaps, rather than having what one wants – and contains within it the seeds of disappointment and tolerance that grow in any long-term friendship. If only Zoe would abandon that rock, and all the ways with which she manipulates the status quo, then Elmo could have a better measure of equality in that friendship. But she cannot, or will not; her wishes must have their avatar. Of course, friendships between the very young are also struggles for dominance and control, and Zoe’s various deferrals to, and articulations of,WALKER TEXAS RANCER Season 7 DVD Box Set, the wishes of Rocco are ways of keeping for herself some space in that struggle with Elmo. In that world we projected in our twenties, where puppets grow up and Bert and Ernie behave in ways inappropriate for children’s television, I expect Zoe is reading Hélène Cixous.

The tension in the Elmo, Zoe and Rocco triad gives me hope that the inclusive values that inform Sesame Street are not the social engineering of escapism that such worldviews are sometimes alleged to be. If disappointment, if teeth-grinding tolerance, can sit however briefly at the heart of one of the key character’s key relationships then there is already the chance to weave some of life’s longer lessons into a world of largely pleasant guises. This, in particular,Life Season 1-2 DVD Boxset, is what I think philosophies informed by the relative and the contextual, the consideration of others can achieve: by acknowledging from the start that this work is difficult to do, we might forestall the more painful extremes of disappointed expectations that inform our earlier grand narratives. Elmo and Zoe are puppets, and young, and not at all exempt from this. Their interludes tell a tale of tolerance in miniature.

Tagged as: baby, Elmo relationships, Sesame Street, television