In the 1980s, New York was dangerous and decadent, but also a city brimming with energy and ideas: from the most imaginative to the most perverse. In the same bad streets in which an entertainment and educational genius like Jim Henson displayed his latest adventures, there was room for the criminality of the mafias, the lumpen of drugs and the new (and opaque) real estate opportunities, which allowed the son self-conscious of a harsh and racist businessman, Donald Trump, building his megalomaniac empire and everything that would come after. Kermit the Frog, new music—the record, the hip hophe punk or the house– or the artistic avant-garde of the East Village coexisted in that decade with the disaster in a city that was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in the United States.
The documentary Jim Henson: the audacity of ideas (Jim Henson: Idea ManDisney+), directed by American Ron Howard (Cocoon, Apollo 13), and the miniseries Eric (Netflix), by the British Abi Morgan, agree on reliving that era in a very particular context: the protagonist of Eric, played by a spectacular Benedict Cumberbatch, he is a puppeteer admirer of Henson who lives in Manhattan at the end of a turbulent marital relationship. The street is just as inhospitable as his marriage, but the life of this puppet creator is completely shattered the day his son disappears, engulfed by the city’s underworld.
Eric is the name of the doll that the boy dreamed about and that is now his father’s rough imaginary friend. Between beggars and junkies, Cumberbatch, the alcoholic son of a real estate magnate—and the unfriendly version of James Stewart in The invisible Harvey (1950)—, will comb the streets alongside a blue stuffed monster that could very well have escaped from Fraggle Rock (1983-87), the last television puppet show that Henson imagined.
In the fourth episode of this interesting and somewhat unbalanced series, the name of Sesame Street when Vincent (Cumberbatch) reproaches his partner on the children’s show Good Day Sunshine that the day he introduced him to the “god Henson” his ignorance was evident, because he did not know who Burr Tillstrom was.
The aggressive and clueless Vincent refers to the creator of the television series Kukla, Fran and Ollie, who met Henson and his wife, Jane, in 1960 at a puppeteers’ convention in Detroit. It was a providential meeting for Henson, as Tillstrom introduced her to his agent and puppet craftsman Don Sahlin. In the experimental short film The Idea Man In 1966, Henson included the Kukla doll in his limbo of objects and people. The character created by Tillstrom floated next to Kennedy’s face, a Super 8 camera, a Volkswagen Beetle, a gun, a Coca-Cola bottle cap or the original Kermit (Kams the Frog), the alter ego of his creator whose body He was born from his mother’s old coat and his eyes were from a ping-pong ball split in two. Kermit’s face was shaped like a hand, and that allowed Henson to recreate all kinds of emotions.
Howard’s documentary, which inevitably borders on hagiography, includes a significant fund of archival material and a range of authoritative voices that introduce little-known aspects of a fundamental creator. In the beginning, Orson Welles and Henson are on a television program in which Welles declares his admiration for a figure who has always been enigmatic. The New York Museum of the Moving Image, in the historic Astoria studios (Queens), dedicates an important part of its space to this visionary and the advertisements he devised before the revolutionary Sesame Street. Looking at these small commercial pieces confirms the extent to which Henson transgressed any format. His advertisement for Buffering headache pills, narrated by him and titled Memoriesreveals two of his interests: experimental cinema and LSD.
In the 1980s, Henson—who died in 1990 at age 53 from pneumonia—was a puppeteer with a rock star aura who did not allow himself to settle. In that decade he continued to push boundaries in the world through films inspired by his characters and other darker fantasies, such as Dark glass (1982) or Inside of the labyrinth (1986). His New York funeral was at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and, just as he had wished, no one dressed in black, the musicians were from jazz and the muppets They were in charge of firing him.
This pilgrimage of furry and colored dolls fits with the chaos of the decade that was ending, a backdrop of Eric but also at least two films from the next season. Limonov: The Ballad, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, focuses on the Russian writer’s New York exile, right at the end of the seventies, and shares a landscape and texture similar to that of The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s film about Donald Trump’s beginnings in business.
This talks about the young Trump’s relationship with the far-right lawyer Roy Cohn and how he helped him carry out the Trump Tower, built between 1980 and 1984. Very close to there and only a year later, at Christmas 1985, Paul Castellano, godfather of the powerful Gambino family, was shot dead outside a steak restaurant. John Gotti, a gangster who strutted around the city flaunting money and power, had dealt this blow to renew the leadership of his crime family, a bloody soap opera that the Netflix documentary series details. Gotti, in which the sordid panorama of violence and extortion in which New York lived immersed in the eighties is recreated. The construction of the city was in the hands of the mafia and Gotti was the first godfather who understood the new power of fame.
In The Apprentice, Roy Cohn’s character is played by Jeremy Strong and one of his parties summarizes all the madness of the time: bohemian artists from the Village and young yuppies in orgies organized by an unscrupulous guy who, with dirty tricks, destroyed the political careers of other homosexuals while he He lived a hypocritical double life. Cohn died in 1986 of AIDS, continuing to insist that he had liver cancer.
The sinister lawyer is also one of the main characters of the miniseries Angels in America (Max). Released in 2003, it is Mike Nichols’ adaptation of the famous Broadway play by Tony Kushner (who has no relation to Jared, Trump’s son-in-law). In it, it is Al Pacino who plays Cohn and, in one of the last chapters, between the delirium of his agony, he hears from the mouth of the gay nurse, played by a wonderful Jeffrey Wright, a dark ode to life and death of big cities: those strange organisms, like that dirty New York, that look “covered in weeds and some flowers, while a demolition team waits on every corner.”
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