Being Elmo Isn't Nearly As Emotionally Wrenching As I Feared, Mainly Because It's So Superficial

The critically acclaimed 2011 documentary Being Elmo depicts subject Kevin Clash not just as an unusually gifted, passionate and talented puppeteer but rather as something of a contemporary saint, a man who uses his gift and incredible popularity to do things like realize the dying wishes of children to meet Elmo, his most beloved character. 

Being Elmo was rapturously received at the time of its release in 2011 as a sort of real-life pop culture fairy tale, a Horatio Alger success story about an intense young man who was born of modest means and rose to the very apex not just of his craft and art form, but of American society as a whole. 

Then the sex stuff came out. This was back in 2012, when we, as a culture, were much less accustomed to our most beloved and successful entertainers and creators being accused of sexual indiscretions. I will not rehash the details of the allegations here, but they involve inappropriate sexual relationship with teenaged boys and led to Clash resigning from Sesame Street.

I really got into Sesame Street as a forty-year old dad, particularly Elmo. When he was three year old, my son Declan got too old for Elmo. Not me. Honestly, some days Elmo loving me is all I have going for me. Most days. And I am a man with an amazing family and a career as great as it is frustrating. I’m just wholly dependent on the validation of Elmo telling me that he loves me just to get by. 

If I were ever to discover that Elmo did not, in fact love me, as he had so often and sincerely professed, most notably at the end of his “Elmo’s World” segments, I’m not sure I would be able to get over it. You’d come to this site and wonder why it hadn’t been updated in months and the answer would be because I was too despondent to work. “What happened?” a smattering of commenters would ask, and the answer would be, “He found out Elmo was a fictional character who didn’t love him, and that was the last straw. Lost all faith in humanity and monster kind and now just kind of stares at a wall limply muttering, “Elmo lied to me. He doesn’t love me.” 

So you see, dear readers, I have very intense feelings about the popular children’s character Elmo. I suppose I put off watching Being Elmo because I was worried that it would make it impossible to put any distance between Elmo, a three and a half year old furry red monster who is pure love and ebullience excitement in puppet form, and Kevin Clash, human adult and alleged sexual predator. 

Would Being Elmo ruin Elmo for me? Being a grown-ass man and having a three year old son who out-grew Sesame Street before me certainly didn’t. Neither, I’m pleased to report, did watching this loving documentary on Clash’s rise. The fall, needless to say, happened post-documentary. 

I thought I would have a much more intense emotional reaction to Being Elmo than I ended up having. Don’t get me wrong. I was moved, almost to the point of tears, on more than one occasion, but it did not tug at the heartstrings nearly as much as it could have. 

Being Elmo did not destroy me the way I had anticipated in part because it is so terribly slight. A lot of that slightness has to do with its length. At 75 minutes, Being Elmo is barely feature length. It’s about as short as a film can be and still qualify as a feature film and not a short. 

75 minutes simply does not allow for a whole lot of substance. Accordingly, Being Elmo is frustratingly content to skate along the heart-warming, crowd-pleasing surface of Clash’s story rather than plumb the depths underneath. 

Early in the film Clash talks about the incongruity of being a private person behind one of the most famous faces and voices in American life. The film respects that privacy to the point where it sometimes feels more like a feature-length press release or infomercial for its subject than a proper film. As a Blu-Ray special feature for Elmo in Grouch Land, this would be amazing. As a stand-alone film, it feels awfully insubstantial. 

This is the version of Clash’s story that he wanted to share with the world, the cleaned-up, family-friendly, Disneyfied take. To give the filmmakers and Clash credit, it is an amazing, inspirational, heart-tugging American story. It just feels incomplete, particularly in the current social and political climate, where powerful men are increasingly and correctly being held responsible for their misdeeds and the damage they caused. Clash has certainly been punished. He will forever be known as the man behind Elmo and an alleged sexual predator. In the heat of the sex scandal he resigned from Sesame Street rather than have the institution tarnished for his own actions and his professional life as perhaps the most successful puppeteer alive seemed to be over but he has actually been working a fair amount in the past five years on projects like The Happytime Murders, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Earth to Ned and Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock.

Despite its maddeningly insufficient, abbreviated runtime and generic filmmaking, Being Elmo captures the underlying magic of puppetry. It conveys how in the right hands, puppetry becomes a casual miracle where cloth and fur and stitches are lovingly assembled and then given the glorious illusion of life by artisans pursuing an increasingly anachronistic trade that requires a masochistic, all-consuming level of devotion to master. 

As the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos program boasted adorably of ventriloquism, “Yo…on some real shit? The art of ventriloquism is straight-up amazing. How the fuck do they throw their voices like that? It’s truly an epic art form that has been passed down throughout the generations, shrouded in secrecy, and only bestowed upon the chosen.” 

This is even truer of the kind of puppetry Clash performed on Sesame Street. On the real shit, being Elmo’s voice and body is straight up amazing. How did Clash throw his voice like that? 

But before Clash could grasp that brass ring of puppeteers everywhere and become part of Jim Henson’s world he was a ferociously talented black teenaged prodigy who benefitted from a series of mentors who saw something special in the hungry, creative young puppeteer, particularly Kermit Love, a white-haired, Santa-looking gentleman who created many of the most famous and beloved Sesame Street puppets, including Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. 

Clash was living an ambitious puppeteer’s dream. He went from worshipping Captain Kangaroo and Jim Henson to working with them. But things didn’t really explode for Clash until he gave a helium-pitched voice and exuberantly enthusiastic personality to a furry red puppet the world would come to know and love and occasionally be annoyed by, as Elmo. In her depressingly boiler-plate narration, Whoopi Goldberg talks cloyingly about Clash possessing "a gift for bringing smiles to the faces of children who needed them most.”

But you know what? Motherfucker really did possess a gift for bringing smiles to the faces of children who needed them most. It would take a heart of stone to look at Clash performing Elmo for sick children and not be deeply moved. 

There’s simply not enough Elmo in Being Elmo. He figures prominently in the film’s opening but most of the film’s runtime is devoted to Clash’s meteoric rise through the ranks of puppetry. Elmo’s superstardom really only takes up the last half hour of the film. That’s just not enough. I could watch Clash perform Elmo for hours. There’s a fascinating disconnect between Elmo’s incredibly expressive face and body, which is constantly moving, reacting and acting even when the character is simply sitting still or listening to other characters, and the look of intense determination and focus on Clash’s face as he performs his art at the highest possible levels. 

Being Elmo depicts Clash’s job and his work as his life. His ex-wife factors into the documentary only as the mother of a now-adult daughter who the superstar wasn’t able to spend as much time with as he’d like when she was growing up because he was too busy entertaining the children of the world. 

Life is never as tidy or as clean as we’d like it to be. That’s particularly true when it comes to art. I’m not sure how accurate or fair it would be to call Being Elmo a lie but it does represent a calculated decision to present a flawed, complicated man in a way that obscures his flaws and complexities for the sake of presenting him in the best possible light, as not just a gifted performer but a role model, a hero, an inspirational figure children and adults alike can look up to.

I’d like to believe that Clash is the man portrayed in this movie, a compassionate and profoundly gifted man who lives to bring joy to children through his art. But that’s obviously just part of the story. There’s the adult part of Clash’s life, and Being Elmo perhaps understandably is reluctant to delve into his extra-curricular proclivities. 

I left Being Elmo with two seemingly contradictory convictions. The first is that on an existential level, Kevin Clash is Elmo. He’s his voice, his sunny personality, his irrepressible enthusiasm and free-floating love for everyone and everything. The other, contradictory belief is that Elmo is not Kevin Clash, that he’s bigger than Kevin Clash, and transcends Kevin Clash and his flaws. 

It turns out I’m not ready to let go of Elmo, but instead of problematizing the character Being Elmo made it easier to separate Elmo from Clash. Clash’s puppeteering career may be over but Elmo remains a fixture of Sesame Street. I don’t know what it says Clash, or myself, or his successors, that I like Elmo just as much post-Clash as I did when he was performing the character. 

In that respect, Being Elmo wasn’t as emotional, shattering or disillusioning as I had anticipated. It’s simply too superficial to get to that place of profound pain, which, depending on how you look at it, is either a tremendous flaw or a secret strength, given what we have learned about the film’s subject since its release. 

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