Much has been said about Wile E. Coyote, who costars in the short before the film, but not as much about the Roadrunner. Of course he’s enigmatic (and yet why he, and not she?), but this time I felt a clue emerge where I’d somehow never noticed it before: I refer to the sound effect when he stops, the thwang of an arrow sunk in its target, still vibrating from the blow. So the question is, in that caesura of his perpetual blur, what has he penetrated, into what material has he sunk? The slack answer would be, he pins possibility to the agenda of universal law. But I’m tempted to propose, instead, that he punctuates nature’s impossible enthrallment with the machine. In other words, he tempts the coyote to wield technology so that he might circle around or double back to enjoy the spectacle of its limitations—that very quality nature cannot perceive in itself.
Not to refute that maxim of Jakob von Uexküll, the zoologist quoted by Giorgio Agamben: “No animal can enter into relation with an object as such.” The chief of dog headquarters wears little glasses, and the Nick Nolte-voiced hound deploys a jetpack. But it’s not as if the dogs built or even moved these artifacts into place, nor—and here’s the fascinating part—neither have humans done so on their behalf. The dog jetpack is not simply a human jetpack being used by a dog, no, it is impossibly but truly a dog jetpack. Little glasses—that cracks me up.
Am I barking up the wrong tree? Cats are the bad guys, one is waterboarded, there’s a gag where one’s done up like Hannibal Lecter, that never gets old. “Radical felinism”—Bette Midler as Kitty Galore, and Wally Shawn as a foul-tempered Persian, Rudy wakes me up at 5:45, lately, I wouldn’t care if when I fed him he would just go back to sleep. But he keeps on crying out. Nothing is clear—cats and dogs team up against a common foe. “I shone, I was shattered, I shouted to the ends of the earth. I shivered, my shivering was a barking.”—Henri Michaux
Dude you are truly some kind of mad genius.
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