Casper Kelly’s new film continues his deconstruction of mass media, and our relationship to it.
As a child, I watched countless hours of TV. My parents rarely would watch with me, partially because they were busy, but in no small part because they found the things I wanted to watch odd, unamusing and often just “not for them.” To this end I mostly entertained myself, and the TV guided me towards endless content I have since entirely forgotten about but meant very much to me at the time.
Now as an adult, it is my turn to be perplexed, bored and sometimes morbidly amused by my children’s preferred entertainment. My wife and I are especially fond of musing about the secret cult at the center of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.
Buddy, the new film from Casper Kelly, is another trademark musing on the relationship between people and their media. It operates within the structure of traditional TV children’s programs, gesturing towards their shady history of being intentionally exploitative of an extremely vulnerable demographic. But Kelly clearly sees a larger phenomenon in play, in how shared attention is constantly being drawn to the closest glowing screen. We love what we watch. What if it loved us back?
Buddy the film starts out being a straight forward episode of It’s Buddy the TV show. Set in a park that has a giant dream clubhouse in the center, and surrounded by a picket fence, the show stars a group of kids who learn lessons about how to be better friends and community members. There is a human sized bunny named Betty, an on staff nurse and a friendly postal worker. And every inanimate object, of course, can talk.
And then there is Buddy. A giant orange unicorn who comes to life from a stuffed animal (great product potential) when you say his name, Buddy runs the Park and the Clubhouse. He dictates the day’s events, more often than not teaches the lesson at hand, and generally serves as the glue that keeps the paradise of the Park in place.
Of course this being a Casper Kelly film, things fall apart relatively quickly, but not before we can get a sense of exactly what kind of show Its Buddy is. It has low stakes, lighting that is both aggressive and friendly, and a series of loosely connected skits that all teach a lesson (such as, you have to be scared to be brave.) And there is a very easy analogue.
I was too old for Barney when it first broke out (my first memory of it was as a punchline,) and in the current media landscape my children are too young to have been exposed to it during its peak in popularity. But I have watched it, almost as a curio, so am generally aware of the rhythms of Barney. More over, I have watched countless hours of Sesame Street, which both Barney and Friends and It’s Buddy borrow from liberally.
Suffice it to say, the degree to which Kelly and his production team matches the exact look, sound and general emotional undertones of shows like Barney and Friends is impressive, bordering on obsessive. The style of music, the inane problems given emotional weight, even the way that the lighting makes you painfully aware of every small detail in the environment. It is cheerful but in a way that even children would read an manufactured. It is all a little too perfect, too frictionless to exist.
Led by the curious and suspicious Freddy (Delaney Quinn), the kids start to question if everything about Buddy is as it seems. And the more they push, the more they discover the dark truth about their circumstances. They have no memory of where they were before the Park, and there is no indication if they will ever leave. If you are familiar with Casper Kelly’s work for Adult Swim (the Too Many Cooks “infomercial” is probably the most famous), you won’t be surprised that the film goes into some unsettling directions. It bleeds through different levels of truth and reality, deepening the mystery of what is precisely happening.
Perhaps the biggest surprise about Buddy is how effective it works as a lucid, linear narrative. Kelly is careful to give the world(s) of Buddy plenty of details to suggest a larger story just outside of frame, but it shows restraint in always focusing on the primary narrative thrust: the kids are trapped, they know they’re trapped, and have to find a way out. Even as more of the misty mythos starts to be filled out, that core story loop (kids are trapped, they need out) stays effectively at the center of the frame throughout.
The most chilling aspect of Buddy has very little to do with its subversion of the cuddly Barney persona into something sinister. That would be easy enough to just have Buddy do violent or upsetting things in a sweet voice, perfectly captured by Keegan-Michael Key’s vocal work and puppeteering led by Surgey Zhurasky. But the deeper horror of Buddy is concerned with how these shows already manipulate emotions. Buddy needs to be loved, because it provides him the power to make his show possible. He requires the love of children to end each episode, so everything can reset and be the same forever. Buddy is a predator who demands the adoration of children, and doesn’t care how he has to get it. The same media always demands our focus, our attention, our precious time that could be spent doing anything else.
Buddy was not my favorite thing I saw at SXSW this year. But it is by far the thing that stuck to me the most, that opened trains of thought about how we allow children to interact with mass media, how it literally reshapes their mind and sense of self, and the way that sense of self reflexively becomes tied to that early media. “Evil Barney” is a concept that could be and has been done in myriad different ways. The genius of Kelly is not just going for the easy shock, but to tie that low hanging fruit into a wider horror story about the way we long to live the lives we consume. You better keep loving Buddy forever, or else everything will quickly fall apart.
