NFR Project: “Duck Amuck”
Dir: Chuck Jones
Scr: Michael Maltese
Premiere: Feb. 28, 1953
6:53
Poor Daffy. Created by Tex Avery and Bob Clampett on April 17, 1937, he
was soon to be one of cartoon history’s indelible characters – and perhaps its
most unfortunate.
The Warner Brothers’ cartoon studio was by far the most imaginative and
captivating of all motion-picture cartoon-crafting outfits of the period,
giving us a slew of immortal characters housed in a slapstick paradise, a hilariously
visualized space where the gags come thick and fast, where reality is bent, a reality
in which heads flatten out and rebound upon being struck, where duck bills are blasted,
spinning them to the rear and carefully swivelled back into place. The
permissive atmosphere at “Termite Terrace” led to extensive, brilliant,
experimental and successful comedies. Their efforts resulted in the creation of
a body of animated short subjects that express the unique American comic
sensibility.
The sarcastic, egotistical little black duck was born as a zany,
anarchic prankster (read my essay on his first film, Porky’s
Duck Hunt, here). It was a role he would play, usually with Porky Pig as his
innocent foil, until 1940, when Bugs Bunny came along and took over being a
witty miscreant in Leon Schlesinger’s Looney Tunes and Merrie
Melodies cartoon shorts of the era.
So what’s a duck to do? Daffy turned into a much more complex character,
an anti-hero usually hoisted by his own petard, a greedy, cynical coward – who regularly
played Bugs’ nemesis in battles of wits staged in front of a befuddled Elmer
Fudd. Bugs was cool, a consummate trickster. Daffy was an insecure, vain mess.
We watched it all, growing up, fixated on the adventures of Bugs, Daffy,
Porky, Elmer and the rest. Their restless, intense artistry was engraved on our
little skulls. We were children of Daffy.
The anything-goes vividness of this attack on Daffy bears the
fingerprints of the immortal animator Chuck Jones, who wielded the director’s mace
in most of Warner Brothers’ best cartoons. Jones was capable of pushing and crystallizing
his characters’ ethos, resulting in gems such as The Rabbit of Seville, The
Scarlet Pumpernickel, Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½ Century, and One
Froggy Evening. This film stands as a classic beside them.
The movie is a tantalizing thought-product spawned by writer Michael Maltese,
expressing a kind of existential despair about the certainties of reality. First
Daffy dashes out in front of the camera, clad as a musketeer. The background
disappears. Daffy appeals to us, as the acknowledged creator of the film, to put
in some scenery. The artist obliges, brushing on a rural scene instead of a
Gothic one. “Stand back, Musketeers, they shall sample . . . my . . . blade?” Daffy
exclaims. He re-costumes himself. He is switched then to the Arctic, the
tropics . . .. and back to nothingness. He complains, and is erased.
He is brought back as a cowboy singer – but there is no sound. Soon
mismatched sounds come out of Daffy’s guitar and out of his mouth, culminating
in him raving, “And I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life!” He begs the
animators to quit kidding around. And is transformed into a misshapen creature.
Then he is redrawn as himself, in a sailor suit. And let fall into the sea. He
suffers from long shots and close-ups.
Finally, the darkness of the frame-edge above him droops and sags,
descending like goo. Daffy fights it, goes berserk, tears it to shreds. He is
doubled, and fights himself. He is given a plane to fly, and a mountain to fly
into. He bails out of the plane, and is given an anvil for a parachute. Dazed
and woozy in front of an abstract background, he hammers the anvil, chanting Longfellow’s
“The Village Blacksmith.” The animator erases the anvil, replacing it with a
bomb. Daffy strikes it until it explodes. Singed, he raves at the cartoon’s
creator. “Who are you?” he screams. A door is drawn and closed upon him, and
camera pulls out. The animator is Bugs. “Ain’t I a stinker?” he confides.
Daffy learns that he’s at the mercy of the animator – incapable of
doing anything but rapidly adapt to the prevailing conditions. In that, he becomes
an enraged existential hero. Daffy’s predicament is descended from Buster
Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) dream sequence, in which Buster enters the
film and flails about in the rapid and seemingly spiteful changes of scene. But
Duck Amuck can go further into the absurdity, pulling aside the curtain and
showing the mechanics of making a cartoon come to life – a self-referential folly
that illuminates the fragility of our assumptions about reality. We all get the
rug pulled out from beneath us, repeatedly, hilariously.
Duck Amuck is the ultimate expression of the rivalry
between Bugs and Daffy, and Bugs is again the easy winner. His magical
qualities let him transcend the cartoon page and have agency in our reality. Daffy,
no matter how hard he tries, will always be the victim of fate or of himself.
Jones comes close here to being the cartoon equivalent of Samuel Beckett. Identity
and reality are up for grabs, and the choices are not our own. A pretty gritty statement,
truth be told.
The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to
review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological
order. Next time: Eaux
d’artifice.
