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Before them all, one spindly giant lurks in the cinematic shadows. Yes, years before Mr. De Niro gained 75 pounds of gut lard to play Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull”, or Mr. Hoffman perfected the bird-like gaze of the matchstick-counting idiot-savant of “Rainman”, or Ms. Kidman squeezed on the silly putty of her prosthetic nose in “The Hours”…long before any of them, an unheralded TV actor named Donald Knotts gambled a safe and modestly lucrative career as a Mayberry deputy sheriff to transform himself—physically, psychologically and emotionally—into an achingly credible cartoon fish in “The Incredible Mr. Limpet.” And thus changed the course of American movie-making forever.
Personally, I can recall only one other performance in the past fifty years that astounded me half as much: I speak, of course, of Wilson the volleyball, Tom Hanks' scene-stealing co-star in “Cast Away”, who, in shameful display of the rank prejudice still prevalent against inanimate objects, lost the 2000 Best Supporting Oscar to Benicio Del Toro. Even now, I can feel the tears and sputum dripping from nose and chin into my Jujubes and Zagnuts, yet hear the howls of grief wrenched from my twisted guts as that sweet-natured, stitched-leather piece of sports equipment bobbed away, ever the uncomplaining stoic, over that last wave into the nothingness which awaits us all. What a faithful friend! What a good listener! Mr. Hanks should get down on his knees every day of his life and thank the Good Lord Jehovah for the privilege of sharing his lost island and hairy coconuts with Wilson the volleyball.
But back to “Limpet”: by any measure, Don Knotts as Henry Limpet the accountant (before he became the fish) was the kind of woebegone, life-whipped schlimazel most people could feel good about kicking half to death to relieve the impotent peevishness of ordinary existence. So perhaps it’s not really surprising that Limpet glimpsed a better world than ours inside the murky algae bloom of his fish bowl. How he would gaze with infinite tenderness at the dull-eyed, worm-eaten goldfish, floating upside down around the plastic castle in the shit-strewn water. How he would croon in mournful longing. Frankly, after the 2004 election, it’s hard not to empathize.
Jung tells us that to return to the ocean, the Great Mother, is an archetypical yearning of the collective unconscious. Though I’ve myself never longed to be a fish or sea mammal (the barracuda in the “Diver Dan” show terrified me as a toddler), I’ve oft dreamt of becoming a street-wise, cane-swinging, tap-dancing Louisiana crawdaddy—kind of a freshwater-crustacean blend of Sammy Davis Junior and Mr. Peanut. My best friend, G, for his part, constantly fantasizes about being one of those weimaraners they dress up as flappers and saloon girls on all the greeting cards and calendars. His attempts to realize that whimsy have not been pretty, or even legal, and, candidly, given the option, I’d trade a a thousand G’s for just one sports sphere of Wilson’s caliber. Why oh why couldn’t it have been G who bobbed away over that wave into the void?
In the East, they believe that men can be reborn as rodents, snakes, toads and chimpanzees (and apparently still end up working in the White House). The mystic-mathematician, Pythagoras, was so convinced of our reincarnation into the fetal-shaped kidney bean that he stopped eating chile con carne, up til then a staple of the ancient world menu. And Castaneda’s enigmatic brujo, Don Juan, abandoned our human universe for that of the biscuit weevil, as did one of my seventies’ girlfriends after a triple hit of bad blotter. She seems sincerely happier now, and I can’t help begrudging the companionable peace and reduced housing expenses she and her husband have attained as a result.
But, of course, it’s not always that simple. Indeed, at the very moment Mr. Knotts tumbles into the refuse-laden waters off Coney Island to unexpectedly morph into an animated porpoise, a Greek Muzak chorus in the background sings “Be careful what you wish for,” a dark reminder that on the flip side of our dreams of freedom, lies…the tuna net, the tartar sauce and the Bush administration hood-hose-and-electrode chat room. Without giving away the movie’s magnificently Wagnerian ending (Limpett's pince-nez slide off his fish nose at a critical moment in the war on Nazi U-Boats), I will admit that the dreamy-liberal, surrender-monkey-Democrat side of me yet cherishes the lambent hope that Limpet the porpoise and Wilson the volleyball, two solitary misfits who deserve so much better, ultimately met on the edges of those watery wastes...fell in love...and were allowed to marry in the blue state of their choice.
(Alternatively, the mixed-race, homoerotic action-buddy thing—a la Mel Gibson and Danny Glover or Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan—might be kind of fun, if done tastefully.)
Except for the French (who awarded Knotts its highest civilian honor and feted him during an extravagant week-long national holiday), the critics ignored “Limpet” and the long-deserved recognition of Mr. Knotts’ talents would only come later, after his lesser film, “The Ghost & Mr. Chicken”, went on to become Ronald Reagan’s favorite, avidly watched during every cabinet meeting of the last five years of his presidency. For those with continuing interest in the premier cartoon-fish and idiot-deputy* of our times, I strongly recommend Mr. Knotts’ heartbreaking autobiography, “Under Andy’s Heel, Aunt Bea’s Thumb & Opie’s Shadow: A Melancholy Fella Called Barney Fife.”
* Note: By calling Mr. Knotts the premier idiot-deputy of our times, I do not mean to belittle the enormous contributions of Gunsmoke's Festus Haggen and F Troop's Corporal Agarn to this most difficult metier of the thespian's craft.
By Henry E. Panky
Grab a Club, Dear Friend,
& Dance with Me Around the Mysterious Space Obelisk
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