coming out of basically retiring just to stick my head in and say that izzy hands is not the sole human in the muppet movie that is our flag means death. izzy is the sam eagle role. sam eagle as izzy hands gasping furiously, monobrow just barely lifting, and protesting “it is not the way piracy is DONE, edward!”. sam eagle as izzy hands turning to the camera and grumbling “WEIRDOS.” in your heart you know this.
the only human is obviously lucius.
I think the flaw to the Only One Human approach is that people forget the Muppet Christmas Carol is the ONLY time it’s been One Human and all the other movies are full of humans being as muppety as the muppets.
so like. yeah lucius is a human (in a relationship with muppet pete). olu and jim are humans but in the “still get wild musical numbers and a subplot” sense of amy adams and jason segel in the 2011 movie. ed might be a human but STRICTLY in the way tim curry was a human muppet in muppet treasure island.
coming out of basically retiring just to stick my head in and say that izzy hands is not the sole human in the muppet movie that is our flag means death. izzy is the sam eagle role. sam eagle as izzy hands gasping furiously, monobrow just barely lifting, and protesting “it is not the way piracy is DONE, edward!”. sam eagle as izzy hands turning to the camera and grumbling “WEIRDOS.” in your heart you know this.
I know the joke about Izzy is “human dropped into a muppets movie” but the tragedy is that he’s a queer-coded character from some 1940s or 50s popcorn flick dropped into a pride parade in a floating gayborhood & he flat out has no idea how to deal with it. We learn he’s a great swordsman in the most homoerotic way possible when he uses his skills to cut open a man’s shirt. We see him react more openly and with less inner conflict when Ed slaps him on the back and says “I need you here” than when Ed implies to him, a minute earlier, that he could be a captain. When he’s part of an overtly queer scene where other characters get the romance & he just gets the subtext, Con O'Neill’s body language stands out even more—go back to the scene where Izzy tells Stede that Ed adores him, the way he strokes his fingers down the curtain dividing him from Stede. There is literally no straight explanation for this choice, but there is also no explicit acknowledgement that the character is queer; in a different, older show or movie, that body language would be the acknowledgment. He imbues the character with the looks and pauses that you would see in, like, Ben-Hur or something, where everyone knew a character was gay but nobody could say it out loud. Keep in mind that in the comedies where these characters would exist, the subtextually gay man would sometimes be best friends with a Strong Leading Man who got the girl in the end.
We hear him say outright that there’s no retirement for people like Izzy & Ed, only death, which is itself a hugely loaded analogy next to the title statement “our flag means death” when you consider our history & our use of flags throughout. And Izzy’s so focused on pure survival that he ends up nasty, manipulative, violent—the only way men like him can survive in his mind, or in the genre he’s from, if they don’t have a Strong Leading Man best friend like, say, a Blackbeard to protect him from the narrative. When Ed starts to live in Stede’s world, Izzy is both losing his subtextual boyfriend and also acting as though Ed’s going to get himself (and Izzy) killed if he keeps going down this path.
I will never be sane over this. Izzy is a Celluloid Closet case study who’s been dropped into a Logo TV original, and so much of the conflict of his character comes from his trying to use the coping techniques from that world (including techniques used by queer coded villains! He’s not healthy!) in a world where these techniques are actively harmful rather than a way to survive.
i’m in the middle of finals, my internet is down, i haven’t been able to work… and all my brain can think about is ed and izzy getting into a fist fight and ed splitting open izzy’s lip and then kissing the blood off his mouth
