Tony Abbott, Plucka Duck: What the --Hey Hey--

Travel and work have kept me silent here and my screen memories would have remained mute for longer were it not for chancing on the image below.

This is just too much. It led to an email conversation which provides the basis for this post. There's something to be said about the "alternative prime minister" appearing on an infamous show (and I don't use "infamous" like The Three Amigos), judging a talent competition comprising incest jokes, a geriatric hooking up with a teenager, and some other crap I can't bear to think about. I knew Abbott was going to be on the show but there was no way I could put myself through it. I mused that I couldn't believe I used to have fond memories of Hey Hey It's Saturday. Then I remembered Plucka: pure avian Id.

The internal rhyme of Plucka Duck and its homophonous wavering between a proper noun and a verbal phrase already indicates a self-referring subjectivity, one that runs checks against the self to determine its mode of address with the Social. This results in a recursive loop where that which is supposed to exist beyond the id – the ego that is the psyche’s apparatus of engagement with itself and the external world and the superego that internalises the structure of social relations – has little effect.

This creates not a human but a monster, a polymorphously perverse child, responding in a very basic and powerful way to the instincts and the drives. Plucka, that mute monstrosity, that foul fowl, humps whomever “he” comes across, chugs alcohol to satisfy an oral fixation that cannot be sated, and continually wanders off camera and out of frame, explicitly not recognising the conventions of televisual entertainment. His refusal to wear pants is an atavistic sign of the similarly aberrant Donald Duck, that curmudgeon sans culottes who warred against social mores with very little success. Donald’s failure derives from the presence of his nephews and Daisy who uphold the strictures of the Family.

Conversely, Plucka is open in his sexuality (either man or fowl, woman or Opposition Leader) and is quick to violence. Indeed, in his refusal to speak, his singular facial expression, and his wonderful, impossible contraption that is powered by his own volition and comprises miniature versions of himself, Plucka is more reminiscent of the great silent slapstick comedian Buster Keaton. Both cut across and violate what is expected, introducing the destructive elements of a desire unhinged and uncontained.
Thomas Pynchon offers a disturbing observation of Donald Duck in his latest novel, Inherent Vice. In No Sail (1945, below), Goofy and Donald get stranded at sea on a life raft. To signify their dire situation, the animators show Donald with stubble. This means the duck shaves his beak every day. There's some kind of man in there. There's no-one inside the Plucka suit, not a chicken nor a cow.