Wile E. Coyote and the path of the math

The bird in blue sped across the desert, and the coyote followed.

It is how all of the cartoons begin, in motion. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. Well, “equal” up to the point that Wile E. Coyote becomes motionless, his pursuit of the Roadrunner halted by crushing boulder or intrusive wall or pitiless earth or speeding train or accidental explosion. But you get the idea. There are supposedly rules in place here but those rules are violated all the time. But that motion is consistent, something beyond a rule. An equation.

The rules are not consistent and it is interesting to go back to early cartoons and see things that feel off in retrospect. A snaggle tooth on Wile E., the Roadrunner actually driving a truck rather than relying on one to mow his adversary down. A boulder rolls awry from Wile E.’s plan and this is not surprising, but it navigates a switchback in a perspective that feels uncanny compared to later work. In later incarnations 3-D animation leads to a 360 perspective but here the stark landscape and our perspective on it frequently resolves to an X and Y axis upon which the coyote plots and is then plotted, arced across space by a catapult or dropped into the negative zone by a teeter-totter’s failure. 

The Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons were created by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, the latter wrote but the former directed and in these shorts his animation style is brought to its apex. Jones is a genius of facial expression, be it impassive amphibian or mugging mouse, and no matter how exaggerated the character or the emotion he could ground that expression in a wrinkled nose, an arched eyebrow, a gaping mouth that could fully convey the reaction because of its adherence to the basic model. And this is what defines Jones’ cartoon physics (and what is physics but applied math) — an unreal action is expressed within the realism of its existence. To venture out of the desert for a moment, think of Daffy Duck’s beak being blasted off his face and rattling around his head, yet still slowing down (only to land off-center) because of inertia.

In a crucial way this is a step backward from the liquid possibility of earlier cartoons (like those of the old weird Disney, or of Warner compadres Tex Avery and Bob Clampett), where characters morphed just as often as they were mauled and where metaphor burst into reality, where physics is at best a suggestion and mostly a nerd being pantsed. And it’s interesting that Jones’ most overt foray into this mode, the all-time classic Duck Amuck, winds up providing a reason for the insanity plaguing Daffy — revealing that he is being animated by Bugs Bunny himself breaks the fourth wall but slams the door on this kind of untethered madness existing on its own. 

But Jones understood how funny the link of the ridiculous and the real is, and how to fully express it through poor Wile E. Using a giant spring to launch oneself through the air makes a certain kind of sense (these were the first Looney Tunes I showed my young nephews, all actions here are immediately intuitive), the plan’s failure makes even more sense. It’s a giant spring! But that failure turning the body into a spring of its own is both unexpected and somehow logical, elasticity yoked to consequence. And this governs all of Wile E.’s failures — he may be flattened into a pancake but that is because of the boulder he launched into the air; he may be driven into the dirt but the hole he makes is to his exact proportions. If the animation of wilder toons said anything is possible, Jones said nothing is random in this world. 

It’s worse than that, though. As he did in Duck Amuck, Jones uses the “rules” of animation to torment his character — Wile E. paints a tunnel only to have the Roadrunner speed in and a train speed out. It is impossible, yet it follows from what the Coyote has himself done. And the real humor (or is it horror) comes from Wile E.’s apparent successes. Cutting a hole out of a bridge makes the entire bridge (along with Wile E., of course) collapse, while the “hole” and the Roadrunner on it miraculously stay aloft. “Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy,” reads one of Jones’ rules, but here gravity inverts itself. It is hilarious not because it is random but because it is sanity flipped. And it suggests not just physics but metaphysics. “The stark, absolute order of Wile E. Coyote’s universe doesn’t have to do with preserving the Road Runner’s safety or punishing Wile E.’s effort, but actively and forcibly producing his humiliation,” writes noted physicist Albert Burneko. The one true rule: The universe will always work against the Coyote.

***

This is demonstrated at a crucial moment in Coyote Vs. Acme. Wile E. has filed a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation for selling him faulty gizmos, a slam-dunk case if ever there was one, but powerful corporate venality has our Coyote and his attorney on the back foot. That lawyer, Kevin Avery (named after Tex, played by Will Forte), wants to give up and in response, Wile E. tries to leap across a canyon. He fails, falls. Gets up and tries again, with a different scheme. Guess what happens, and happens, and happens. But he eventually makes it, a lesson Avery takes to heart. At this point, the crag Wile E. has landed on cracks and sends him to the canyon floor one final time.

The universe will always work against the Coyote. But the Coyote is not suing the universe, he is suing Acme. And this leads to a weird disjunction, because while Acme is a stand-in for every giant corporation that has forced its way (or worse, been invited) into our lives and made them more miserable than they would be otherwise, it is not the universe. It is not the gods, those all-powerful beings who cursed Sisyphus to push a boulder for eternity (after Sisyphus did crimes far more heinous than trying to get dinner, by the way). The film’s reveal of Acme’s “Project Sisyphus” frames Wile E.’s torments as existential but the author of their existence exists in the same realm as the rest of us.

A courtroom is not a classroom and laws are not math — they can be argued and twisted and turned to the use of those with money and power. That’s what happens in Coyote vs. Acme, where our heroes lose their case despite their persistence. Screenwriter Samy Burch tries to walk a narrow path, rightly seeing that giving Wile E. a heartwarming victory would be a horrible negation of the cartoons’ pleasure and resonance. But she also can’t say that persistence is its own reward after the equivalences put in play here. In the film, “The universe will always work against the Coyote” points toward “The universe will always work for the corporation,” which goes past the existential equation of comedy and even beyond cynicism into defeatist propaganda. So the film hedges — even though the battle was lost, a timely release of video evidence of Acme’s crimes means all the bad guys go to jail. Why this couldn’t have just been released earlier is glossed over; although the suggestion that the public needed to be rallied to a noble cause and empathetically primed for footage of a conspiracy puts Coyote vs. Acme in line with Disclosure Day. 

The cleverest part of Coyote vs. Acme undercuts empathy for pathology. Wile E.’s lawsuit is justified and righteous and a metaphor for any repeat loser to grab onto, it is also a fraud. Avery discovers that his client is only pursuing this as a complicated plot to get the Roadrunner into a courtroom, where he can be more easily caught and consumed. The concept of subpoenaing the Roadrunner leads to one of the movie’s best gags, where a human SWAT team attempts to capture the fowl and finds out the hard way what Wile E. has known for decades. The switch to the perspective of the human pursuers is matched by a switch to an untethered camera (literally at one point, as “live” footage from a would-be captor’s cell phone is shown); the merciless math of Wile E.’s failure is replaced by comic chaos unmoored from axes. But this chaos is anchored by a constant, an irreducible part of the equation: The Roadrunner will not be caught. This does not mean, however, that the Roadrunner will not stop.

***

“As earnest as Coyote Vs. Acme is, it still smacks of that particularly contemporary complexity, which both yearns to psychologize and flesh out some Tunes while maintaining an imitative reverence to the IP,” Jesse Hassenger writes at The AV Club in an analysis of the movie that finds both praise and fault. And he’s not wrong. Because the Roadrunner does show up at the climax of the film, which is not the trial itself — the crooked judge rules against our heroes — but the Congressional hearings the trial provokes. With a series of “meeps,” the Roadrunner confirms Acme’s constant malfunctions, but then moves from testimony to cross-examination with a simple question to Wile E.: Are you coming back? 

Long before Wile E. Coyote chased the Roadrunner across the canyons and cliffs of the American Southwest, two other creatures roamed that landscape in a dramaturgical dyad, a relationship based on pain displayed in a game of cat and mouse. But George Herriman had his Krazy Kat be the victim of mouse Ignatz’ attacks — where Wile E. fails over and over with increasingly elaborate schemes Ignatz is consistently successful in assaulting Krazy with a brick to the head. And the reason for his success is because Krazy loves Ignatz and will forgive any and all lumps to the noggin. The desire is thwarted both ways; Krazy’s love remains unrequited but Ignatz is never free of this Kat that won’t leave him alone, his anger is as eternal as Wile E.’s hunger. There is an odd and funny and sad balance in this formula that endlessly plays out in the cartoon desert. 

And this balance becomes the heart of the film. If Coyote vs. Acme can’t square its triumph of the underdog anti-corporatism with the failure that defines its subject, it can reframe that failure that defined the previous cartoons. In them, the Coyote hungers, yearns, obsesses; while the Roadrunner is indifferent verging on sadistic, a part of the universe that always works against the Coyote. But now the Roadrunner does not just acknowledge the chase, but wants it. If the Coyote always tries but the universe will not let the Coyote win, then the Roadrunner’s desire is the dark matter that makes the math work, that makes the equation something other than one being’s despair. Ignatz and Krazy teeter at cross purposes, with the one yearning and the the other rejecting; on some level Wile E. expects to fail but the Roadrunner always wants him to try. That’s different then the universe, or even a ruthless corporation, saying that you are alone in your struggle and must make your own happiness.

The film ends with the chase resumed, of course. The plot (and title) of Coyote vs. Acme describes a struggle within the law instead of a losing battle against physics, but the fundamental nature of the equation remains the same. In one of the old cartoons, Wile E. straps himself into a rocket sled to blast along the road and catch his prey, and is immediately launched vertically instead of horizontally, arcing up over the desert and the very Earth itself, heading into space before exploding among the stars. His arc follows the slope of one of those graphs you see in a calculus class — Wile E. rides a line and finds an end point in failure but even if he hadn’t, the function defining his life will never reach a certain point even as it approaches infinity. Coyote vs. Acme says the figures will never resolve but they are more than just parts of an equation, and gives a new spin to the old math:

The bird in blue sped across the desert, and the coyote followed.