There was, two years ago, much celebration of Greta Gerwig’s achievement in making an intelligent feminist entertainment of the world-conquering Barbie. Pointy-headed columnists pored over it for weeks. A diverse audience made it the highest-grossing film of the year worldwide (and the highest-grossing ever in Ireland).
There were, however, worries about how the industry would react. The greatest fear was that the success would encourage endless films about dolls. Nobody wanted a Cabbage Patch Kids movie. Less troubling was the notion that some bright spark might happen upon another pop-cultural heroine whose hitherto underacknowledged feminist credentials could be exploited on the biggest screens.
It took a while. But it looks as if we have our first such project. Jennifer Lawrence dropped the news during the current press tour for Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love.
“I don’t know if I can announce this but I am just going to ... Emma Stone and I are producing a Miss Piggy movie and Cole [Escola] is writing it,” she said on the Las Culturistas podcast. Its hosts, Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, delighted at their scoop, asked if Stone and Lawrence would be in the film. “I think so. We have to!” J-Law enthused. Variety confirmed that the two actors would act as producers and that Escola, a Tony-winner for the play Oh, Mary, would indeed be writing.
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If you take a breath and flick through the memory banks you may reasonably conclude that Miss Piggy is not just the best but, perhaps, the only option for such sub-Barbie treatment. Expect a postmodern jamboree peopled by the industry’s slickest and shiniest.
It is just over 50 years since Miss Piggy first appeared on television screens. Only the sharpest trivia nerd will know that was as an unnamed guest on the variety special Herb Alpert and the TJB. Two years later she was beginning her rise to novelty fame on the well-remembered Muppet Show.
Even after all that time it is scarcely necessary to outline her biography. A chorus-line performer who pushed herself to the front in pursuit of the Muppet host Kermit the Frog, she fast ended up as the ATV series’ biggest draw. She sang Jackson with Johnny Cash. She sang Help Me Make It Through the Night with Kris Kristofferson. She sang Don’t Go Breaking My Heart with Elton John.
Miss Piggy tended to be flirtatious with those stars – and with chatshow hosts such as Michael Parkinson – but one got the sense this was partly intended as provocation to a watching Kermit. The frog came across as a reluctant partner who, nonetheless, knew where his romantic destiny lay. An announcement of their separation 10 years ago fooled nobody.
Yet, when I met Miss Piggy in 2014, there was none of the coquettish playfulness. Indeed, I have rarely encountered such an openly hostile interviewee.
“The Irish Times?” she asked with a glowering look. “Didn’t you give us a good review? When I say ‘a good review’ I don’t mean it was well written, of course. I mean it was a positive review.”
I babbled something about wondering how she had remained so unchanged over the decades.
“You mean, how do I still look so beautiful?”
Well, umm, yeah. Obviously.
“You should use the right word, then,” she cracked back. “It’s very easy. I just woke up one morning and said, ‘I am not going to have any of that ageing.’”
Good for her. Looking through the archives, one finds a number of models – the torch singer Peggy Lee for one – being put forward, but the creation always struck me as owing most to the Bette Midler of the 1970s: aggressive, funny, fearless. A feminist heroine? Possibly.
With the death of Prunella Scales a few weeks ago, one can’t help but set Piggy beside the contemporaneously fearsome Sybil Fawlty. Both were attached to weaker men (or frogs) who saw their other half partly as lover, partly as jailer. But Piggy had ambition and agency. She would not have settled for life in a downmarket Torquay hotel. As recently as 2023 she was a guest at the coronation concert for King Charles III.
So she fits the bill for the post-Barbie deification. Sadly, few other pop-cultural entities of similar vintage present themselves. Wonder Woman has had her disinterment. Lisa Simpson is, astonishingly, still employed by the same family firm. The attempt, in 2023, to turn Velma, the sensibly shoed detective from Scooby-Doo, into a contemporary oddball was a disaster of All’s Fair proportions (as we then didn’t yet say).
It remains to be seen if Piggy’s physical aggression will survive the translation to a tuned-in motion picture of the 21st century. No doubt she will still be rude to journalists, but karate kicking your boyfriend in the head may no longer be acceptable. PC gone mad?
