PicoBlog

Larry David attacked Elmo. It sounds like a plot from Curb Your Enthusiasm, but it really happened, live on morning TV, and it was one of the great media moments of the 2020s. It was perfect on so many levels, ranging from the fact that Larry was acting so completely in character through the slightly cathartic aspect of a puppet that was lecturing about mental health being taken down a peg. That it was coming on the heels of a Twitter moment where Elmo tweeted asking how everybody was and he was buried under a deluge of people explaining how much they want to kill themselves - amazing.

But mostly it was harmless. Nobody got hurt, because Elmo isn’t real. It was just edgy enough to make old ladies do that kind of guilty laugh they do when they know it’s naughty to find something funny. It was a brief blip of silly, exaggerated misanthropy that brought a bit of light into the world during an enduringly dark time. Sometimes you just want to throttle the puppet.

By the way, one aspect of this that maybe younger people can’t quite understand is that Elmo is the worst of the Muppets. You would have to have been an adult in the 90s, during the horrifying Tickle Me Elmo craze, to really understand just how irritating this little monster is to people above a certain generational threshold. Had Larry David grabbed Ernie by the skull maybe it would have felt different (it would have been funny to choke out Cookie Monster, though), but Elmo has - for those of us over 40 - long cemented himself as a grotesquely giggling menace.

Also, and maybe this is just me, but a puppet talking to an adult audience about mental health and kindness feels weirdly condescending. I am a grown up, I would like to hear about these things from actual people, not felt. I think it's amazing that Sesame Street does this stuff for kids, but it's very weird to do it for adults.

At any rate the thing happened, everybody loved it, and then we kind of moved on. But this week Wil Wheaton, formerly of Star Trek: the Next Generation, took to his Facebook to decry the whole event. And just like that, everybody rose up to make fun of Wheaton.

I want to get one or two things straight here - while I have my own thoughts and opinions on Wheaton and the position he holds in what I’ll call the softer side of internet nerdery, he remains a human being worthy of respect. He posted a thing on his Facebook, and it feels weird that the New York Post is covering it. Also in his thing he is talking about deep emotional pain he suffers as a child of abuse, and that’s not funny and he deserves empathy and understanding. It costs very little to not be shitty to someone who is feeling bad.

That said, boy I wish I had seen it two days earlier because I just wrote a thing talking about PTSD, triggers and content warnings, and honestly what he wrote would have made that piece much more coherent and much better. The points I was trying to make in that piece - which you can read by clicking here - would have been better served by including Wheaton’s post. So I’m going to revisit the topic.

Briefly, for those who don’t want to read the previous piece - I have been grappling with what is almost certainly PTSD in the weeks and months since my wife Brittany died. She was very ill for six months and we spent a tremendous amount of time in the hospital - her last month alive she was in the hospital - and it has turned out that I have triggers related to this experience. What I have discovered is that while I don’t like seeing hospitals or cancer patients in movies and TV, I can deal with them. What’s harder for me is the sound of an IV machine beeping, the alarm that goes off when the fluid in the bag is low. This sound, encountered on TikTok, made me burst out crying.

I have other triggers related to her death and the hospital experience, but what I have come to understand is that they are my triggers. They’re specific to me. They’re reflections of my personal experience, and no one can create content warnings that will help. For one thing, the triggers are so specific that the warnings would have to be for me personally, like text before a TV show that says “Hey Devin, there’s going to be a beeping IV machine in this.” And that even if such a thing existed, the warning itself would make me think about the trigger and thus, in its own way, trigger me!

Basically this is my problem. I cannot expect others to live their lives or make their art with my personal triggers in mind, and I will need to navigate a world in which anodyne things can make me cry (and worse) without notice. This is my responsibility, no one else’s. Is it fair? No, but it’s not fair that Brittany suffered and died either. Nothing is fair. Fairness is a human concept that we keep uselessly trying to impose on a fundamentally unfair world.

On to Wheaton. His post is very long, but I think this opening - unedited - gets across the gist of it:

So I heard about Larry David assaulting Elmo on life television, but didn't watch it until now, because I knew it would upset me.

Holy shit it's even worse than I thought. What the fuck is wrong with that guy? Elmo is, like, the best friend to multiple generations of children. In the Sesame Street universe, ELMO IS A CHILD, who is currently putting mental health and caring for others in the spotlight.

And Larry Fucking David ... did ... that? And thought it was going to be ... funny? What?

What an asshole. What a stupid, self-centered, tone deaf asshole.

Full disclosure: all the time, when I was growing up, my dad would grab me by the shoulders and shake me while he screamed in my face. He choked me more than once. He was always out of control, always in a furious rage, and always terrifying. I'm a 51 year-old man and my heart is pounding right now, recalling how I felt when I was a little boy who loved Grover the way today's kids love Elmo.

So this appalling, unforgivable, despicable act hits more than one raw nerve for me, and I'm going to say what I wish I'd been able to say when this sort of thing happened to me.

You can read the whole thing here.

I think it is very brave of Wheaton to be up front and open about his own abuse. By doing this he is helping other people feel less alone and possibly inspiring them to get help.

But the rest of it… here’s the thing: Wheaton knew it would upset him and he watched it anyway. When I say one’s triggers are one’s own responsibility this is a big part of what I’m talking about. Don’t watch it! This would have saved everyone a lot of aggravation.

What’s interesting is how Wheaton’s response is very personally nasty at Larry David. And of course it is, in his emotional state Wheaton is conflating his abusive dad with Larry David. They’re one and the same. But this is not true, and this is the responsibility of the person with PTSD to work through before responding. Larry David did a stupid, funny thing and it’s not his fault that it impacted you very negatively. He is not responsible for that.

I’ve seen a lot of arguments online coming out of this, including an exchange where someone said it was dumb to be triggered by a puppet getting lightly manhandled and someone else replying that everyone’s triggers are different - if they are triggered by pea soup it’s no dumber than anything else. And that’s totally right, and it kind of illustrates my point. You may very validly be triggered by pea soup, but that does not mean a person who unknowingly serves pea soup to you is a “stupid, self-centered, tone deaf asshole.”

If Larry David came to Wil Wheaton’s birthday party and accosted a Muppet in this fashion, knowing Wheaton’s history, that would make him an asshole (and could in fact be a plot on Curb, where the misanthropy is often turned up to 11 for comedic effect), but in this case it’s ludicrous to hurl these invectives at him.

As for the rest of Wheaton’s points: the argument that children may have been watching strikes me as absurd, because I’m not convinced morning shows are a favorite of toddlers. Could one have caught sight of this? Yeah of course, but 9/11 happened live on the morning shows, I’m sure if parents could talk to their kids about that they could figure out how to discuss the bald man choking Elmo. I’m not even going to touch the fact that Wheaton continuously talks about how Elmo, a non-living puppet introduced in 1979, is a child; I have a lot of empathy for Wheaton’s position in general but this part weirds me out and feels like a blurring of reality and fantasy.

I think it’s super reasonable for Wheaton to have had a very negative reaction to this, given his personal history. And I think his initial response - to not watch it - was the right one, and the responsible one. Now, I also understand the pull of watching something you know you shouldn’t; I follow some people on social media just because I know every stupid bad opinion they tweet will make me mad and I have mental problems that drive me to seek this state. I know what it’s like to have that tugging at you, the need to see the thing that should be unseen. But it’s still your responsibility when you see it, and how you respond is your responsibility.

The sad thing is that Wheaton’s post is just going to compound his own bad feelings; getting dunked on for 24 or 48 hours on social media sucks. It sucks that it’s getting picked up by newspapers and websites, spreading the dunking far and wide. This week Kumail Nanjiani was on a podcast where he spoke about his personal experience of dealing with the “failure” of Eternals, and how much the negative response and the negative reviews beat him up. He was roundly mocked for saying this, and it sucks. It sucks that we live in a culture where people being open and vulnerable find themselves getting such shit for it. It’s not fair.

But then again nothing is. And when you have personal traumatic history and there are things that trigger you, it is unfairly your duty to deal with these things. It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility. The world cannot be made safe for you, all you can do is try and make yourself safe for the world.

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