Ode to Mr. Magoo
Near-blind cranky sprite who goes around alarming everyone, nearly blowing things up, driving one-way streets the wrong way, talking to oddly accommodating inanimate objects… Not completely sighted, whatever that would mean, but not completely sightless either. Continually mistakes this world for some whole other world, constructs his own coherent parallel universe error upon error, and yet manages miraculously to maneuver his way safely along—often while leaving, however, a trail of amusing wreckage for everyone else.
Art of functional
misinterpretation.
Art of building whole livable worlds
out of like. And only like.
Cartoon cars puffing and chugging. Roundheaded Magoo way of seeing and being.
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Mr. Magoo, smoothly fumbling semi-blind little grumbling man. Who picked you for a hero?
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Magoo's world is Soloi, blundering devious indecorous. Magoo's world doesn't match up. Things do not align with themselves, though Magoo feels perfectly aligned with Magoo. In a world like the world, he lives approximately but is happy perfectly. Towering confidence in exact proportion to ever-descending circles of wrongness.
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And then of course his mumbling and chuckling and thinking
out loud. He is his own running commentary. He talks to make sense, talks
his way around, around the world of his own deeply dug mistakes, the inexorable
chains of events, gone underwater or up in the sky, talking to lamp posts
and animals, set off always by some initial misjudgment, some unacknowledged
and out-of-kilter reading. He mutters sense down out of the resistant texture
of things, babbles and chortles his jim backus chortle which is always so
ebullient, triumphant, self-pleased of course because self-blurry, we dig
his cockamamie certainty. We dig his fluid inventiveness. We dig his not-knowing
and odd-knowing. We love that he survives. And more.
We love his happiness. We love his mastery of chance. We love his always cheerful
orchestration of the flubbed.