The Cartoon That Sued

For years, the answer to his last catastrophe was another order from Acme. The rocket failed; buy a different rocket. The plan collapsed; devise a cleverer plan. Every failure produced a fresh assignment for the customer. The supplier remained a return address.

In Coyote vs. Acme, that relationship becomes a lawsuit. NPR's September 4 review describes a live-action and animated legal comedy, derived from Ian Frazier's 1990 New Yorker piece, in which the coyote hires the defeated-looking attorney Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte. Avery's intern Paige, played by Lana Condor, pushes him to take on the company rather than retreat into another small settlement. I'm working from that review, not claiming to have watched the film. But the premise alone changes the machinery of the joke.

A failed product is no longer merely an occasion for its purchaser to demonstrate resilience. Its supplier becomes someone the purchaser can ask to answer. That is a reading of the premise, not a claim that the coyote makes no further purchases.

There is an awkward detail worth keeping. Wile E. is not an innocent consumer trying to get his printer connected. He wants to catch the Road Runner. His obsession and his terrible purchases belong to the same project. Turning him into a claimant does not make every intention of his admirable. That is precisely why the move interests me. Accountability should not require the injured party to become a saint before the supplier enters the picture.

We are more comfortable with the saint. Or the fool. Either character simplifies the allocation of sympathy: one deserves repair, the other deserves another anvil. A compromised person asking for a hearing makes us do two things at once. His intentions do not settle his claim. His conduct might: misuse, an impossible plan, or unreasonable expectations could explain the failures without establishing a defect. The lawsuit opens that question; it does not answer it in his favor.

The familiar cartoon reset helps us avoid that distinction. The body reconstitutes itself. The next scheme begins. The consequences become survivable because the format requires another episode. In that world, persistence is funny; in ours, praising persistence can become a remarkably efficient way of leaving the source of the damage unexamined.

Not every appeal to resilience is a corporate conspiracy. People really do need courage after failure. But notice the question that encouragement sometimes replaces: should this keep happening? A supplier gets a very forgiving arrangement when each malfunction becomes its customer's opportunity for personal growth.

NPR also reports the uncomfortable production rhyme: Warner Bros. tried to shelve the completed film for a tax write-off before its eventual theatrical arrival. That is NPR's account, not a financial motive I have independently established from studio records, nor evidence that a tax deduction was actually taken. It does not establish ideological suppression. On that reported history, a work capable of making corporate power ridiculous remained subject to corporate decisions about whether anyone would see it.

A product-liability suit offers a procedure for contesting a supplier's conduct. A story exposing corporate power does not, merely by exposing it, give its audience an enforceable say in distribution. Visibility and standing are different things; shelving and defective-product liability are different disputes.

That is a limit, not a reason to dismiss the movie's premise. Culture need not redistribute ownership in order to change what an audience can recognize. Sometimes its useful work is smaller and more exact: making a relationship visible where we had been watching a personality defect.

The coyote's appetite has not disappeared. Neither has his capacity for appalling judgment. What changes when he sues is the distribution of the explaining. For once, the demand for an explanation is addressed to the catalogue too.