Cancel culture jumps the skunk.
It’s hard to keep up with all the targets of cancel culture, whether they be ordinary citizens, historical figures, or fictional characters. One of the latest under fire is Pepé Le Pew, the very much not-beloved animated French skunk of the classic 1950s Warner Brothers cartoons. New York Times columnist Charles Blow charges that Pepé “normalized rape culture.” After appearing in the bizarre 1996 Michael Jordan/Bugs Bunny film Space Jam, Pepé has been cut from the inexplicable LeBron James sequel, due out this summer.
I do not weep for Pepé Le Pew, who is pretty low on the list of great cartoon characters, or think that cutting him from Space Jam: A New Legacy is exactly a major blow to the American arts. But the sorts of arguments made against him are characteristic of exactly what is so stupid and puerile about the entire phenomenon of purging “problematic” Dr. Seuss books and slapping warning labels on The Muppet Show. It’s the idea that kids need protecting from bad characters and can’t tell the difference.
As you may recall, Pepé Le Pew is a skunk with an exaggerated French accent who is constantly trying to force himself on Penelope, a demure female black cat whom he mistakes for a skunk. The cartoon is certainly politically incorrect in one way — it relentlessly portrays Frenchmen as smelly, lecherous cads — but nobody is complaining about that at the moment. They’re complaining about the fact that Pepé is obviously a sexual predator, constantly embracing and kissing a female who is just minding her own business and wants no part of him. But here’s the thing: That’s the point. Every Pepé le Pew cartoon is about how Pepé is so intoxicated by his own desires and so oblivious to the possibility that he’s not completely irresistible that nothing stops him from pursuing Penelope — not her horror at him, not the fact that she’s not even a skunk, not the fact that everyone he meets is overpowered by his awful odor, and not the fact that his pursuits frequently end in cartoon violence, such as Penelope clobbering him with various blunt objects.
Pepé is the butt of every joke, and the shy Penelope is no shrinking violet about using force against him. Anyone who watched those cartoons knew this even as a small child. Pepé is a cad, and his endlessly failed efforts are comedic fodder just as are the efforts of Elmer Fudd to blow off Bugs Bunny’s head with a shotgun or the efforts of Wile E. Coyote or Sylvester the Cat to kill and eat their prey. If anything, as John Nolte argues at Breitbart, Pepé is a cautionary tale to young boys not to be like that with women — a message that was not always the one delivered by Hollywood romantic leads in films for grownups in the Fifties.
The utter inability of people of Charles Blow’s ilk to grasp this reminds me of one of the earliest shots in this type of culture war: when Sesame Street felt compelled, nearly 15 years ago, to have Cookie Monster lecture kids that “cookies are a sometimes food.” Who did they think needed this? The entire character of Cookie Monster — he’s a monster, remember — is built around the fact that he has a deeply unhealthy relationship with cookies. He’s a goggle-eyed zealot who cannot stop NOM NOM NOM devouring anything even vaguely resembling a cookie, even if it’s a trash-can lid or the moon. His driving impulse, like that of Pepé le Pew, is a normal one — who doesn’t want cookies? — but every toddler can grasp that he takes it way too far.
Earlier generations understood this sort of thing, and took children more seriously. They told fairy tales that were often shockingly dark, but that appealed not only to children’s imagination but also to their capacity to work out the moral lessons. As G. K. Chesterton once wrote:
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
The darkness in our nature — whether that of a creepy Lothario or a glutton for cookies — does not come from cartoons and Muppets. It is always with us. Trying to stamp it out of children’s entertainment for fear that they might be too fragile to process it is a lousy way to prepare them for adulthood, when the dragon is unavoidable.