Recite again, fond muse, the stratagems
Devised by Wiley E. Coyote, whose jaunts and dives,
sprints, leaps, and twisted somersaults
Are mocked by Acme’s product line…..
*********
If Emily Wilson was disappointed by how the “complicated man” of her translation of The Odyssey turned out in her opinion to be “uncomplicated” in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation, then she needs to take an afternoon off and buy a ticket to Coyote vs. Acme, a film that almost ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor in its entirety. Salvaged by a protests from fans of the eternal return of Coyote vs. Road Runner, the film features an Oscar-winning performance by the titular character. I kid you not: this biopic, in which the protagonist plays himself, offers the Academy Awards committee a chance to have the shortest acceptance speech ever given: “I have a limited number of signs.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of this film is that it is a comedy that has little interest in making its audience laugh out loud. Instead, this is a delightful intellectual exercise in which Mr. Coyote accepts the astronomical odds of failure with undiminished appetite. The courtroom he confronts is not the one empaneled in a civic building; it is also in the motel lobby where the desk clerk humiliates Mr. Coyote by citing the rule, “No pets allowed” when the lawyer checks in to his by-the-week abode. Fed up with the clerk’s dismissals of his equality with the other guests at the motel, Mr. Coyote holds up a sign with a macabre rejoinder: “I eat pets.”
Lest one think that Coyote vs. Acme is merely a piece of entertainment in which live action and animation are a perfect tag-team, one should consider how the final scene at a congressional hearing drives home the protest point: corporations have used animals for their ghoulish experiments for decades and decades, all in the name of the “progress” promoted by Foghorn Leghorn. That’s the obvious target. The less obvious one is us: corporations see us, the consumers, as nothing more than cartoon characters whose dignity is a laughing matter at board meetings. We exist not merely for their profit, but for their finicky, outlandish entertainment.
One beep for no. Two for yes.
Beep, beep.
About Bill Mohr