Pingu gifted me with my first erotic feeling. A warm surge up the esophagus—the lower lip bitten, a tear held back—the first stirrings of lust avant la lettre, fingerlings of sensation all throughout my undifferentiated body.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud theorized polymorphous perversity as an infantile sexuality that precedes the oral, anal, and genital phases, which have their own localized zones of pleasure. In contrast, the polymorphous perversity of the infant is undifferentiated: the whole body is erogenous; no one part rises into greater prominence from the totality of the body. Claymation is a prime form for the stretchy queerness of the body that’s no longer bound to normative shapes and stretches. Pingu cranks his legs up, triples their length to let a firetruck through; elsewhere, a penguin body hurled with great force does not die but simply cries a lonely, plastered clay tear.
Pingu’s speech is the precursor for a whole range of beloved adult cultural touchstones that span from Cocteau Twins to Jan Švankmajer to Antonin Artaud. His is an asemic speech woven of a series of squeaks, noot noots, and abject purrs. There, in the abyssal twilight of meaning, a primordial sensuality bubbles forth; Pingu babbles in tongues, animal-becomings, grunts and yelps that haunt my phantasy life to this day. It makes me want to take off all my clothes and reassert my adjacency to womb-space. It makes me want to cast off the dull cage of civilization and hurl my rubber body into pliable snow.
Emotions are bound to eroticism, and since I can remember nothing has been more confusingly sexy than care and pity, and how the two are bound: the former struggling for seeing the other at eye level, and the latter reveling in the other’s sorrows. Pingu gets all kinds of injustices ravaged upon him, most wrenchingly his parents’ preference for his younger sister. This is yet another primal scene, having bullied my sister, seven years younger, because she dared to be beloved.
The episodes I remember all hinge on key moments in a toddler’s development: dealing with a first conflict with a best friend, or your parents wanting alone time, or a set of unpleasant household chores. Beneath all the polymorphous pleasures of snow-frolic and deep-throated fishbones, there was a heart-retching melancholy of the loss of innocence and the introduction of the reality principle. The libido met its limits—in the face of other people and the looming demands of social norms, it could not fully be free to do what it desired. Pingu was the blueprint for all the manchildren I would later fall in love with, all the boys who had barely progressed beyond the boundaryless narcissistic phase where they would reach for anything they wanted, steamrolling over all the repercussions.
Pingu gifted me with my first erotic feeling. A warm surge up the esophagus—the lower lip bitten, a tear held back—the first stirrings of lust avant la lettre, fingerlings of sensation all throughout my undifferentiated body.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud theorized polymorphous perversity as an infantile sexuality that precedes the oral, anal, and genital phases, which have their own localized zones of pleasure. In contrast, the polymorphous perversity of the infant is undifferentiated: the whole body is erogenous; no one part rises into greater prominence from the totality of the body. Claymation is a prime form for the stretchy queerness of the body that’s no longer bound to normative shapes and stretches. Pingu cranks his legs up, triples their length to let a firetruck through; elsewhere, a penguin body hurled with great force does not die but simply cries a lonely, plastered clay tear.
Pingu’s speech is the precursor for a whole range of beloved adult cultural touchstones that span from Cocteau Twins to Jan Švankmajer to Antonin Artaud. His is an asemic speech woven of a series of squeaks, noot noots, and abject purrs. There, in the abyssal twilight of meaning, a primordial sensuality bubbles forth; Pingu babbles in tongues, animal-becomings, grunts and yelps that haunt my phantasy life to this day. It makes me want to take off all my clothes and reassert my adjacency to womb-space. It makes me want to cast off the dull cage of civilization and hurl my rubber body into pliable snow.
Emotions are bound to eroticism, and since I can remember nothing has been more confusingly sexy than care and pity, and how the two are bound: the former struggling for seeing the other at eye level, and the latter reveling in the other’s sorrows. Pingu gets all kinds of injustices ravaged upon him, most wrenchingly his parents’ preference for his younger sister. This is yet another primal scene, having bullied my sister, seven years younger, because she dared to be beloved.
The episodes I remember all hinge on key moments in a toddler’s development: dealing with a first conflict with a best friend, or your parents wanting alone time, or a set of unpleasant household chores. Beneath all the polymorphous pleasures of snow-frolic and deep-throated fishbones, there was a heart-retching melancholy of the loss of innocence and the introduction of the reality principle. The libido met its limits—in the face of other people and the looming demands of social norms, it could not fully be free to do what it desired. Pingu was the blueprint for all the manchildren I would later fall in love with, all the boys who had barely progressed beyond the boundaryless narcissistic phase where they would reach for anything they wanted, steamrolling over all the repercussions.