I once visited a level, years back, where I met a man named Claude. Claude, a kindly, gentle man by all accounts, was a community man – a man of the people. He loved to arrange and put on community fun days. The locals would pitch in to create the ultimate celebration, and for just that day, all their troubles would disappear. They were free from all the trappings that life brought them.
He was especially good with the kids. The whole level trusted him implicitly.
He could do no wrong.
Over time, Claude began to change. Where he first began his escapades to reward the community, he started to find that he was no longer motivated by what they wanted. Instead he found more motivation in what made him feel better.
And where he started by enabling the level to organise their own festival of frivolities, soon he became obsessed with finding ways to control them to get what he wanted. These displays of power started small – refusing certain stalls when there was no genuine reason. Picking the acts to perform. But soon he started implementing charges and fees, and red tape that let him keep money but stopped people attending.
The man become a politician almost overnight. He learned how to talk without meaning. He figured out filibustering.
And soon the community events were just ways for him to exert his total power over the level.
He had his strings through each and every resident, controlling them like marionettes, Claude, the ultimate puppet master over their very happiness.
For years, this continued, each year the strings pulling tauter and the demands he bade them to do harsher and crueller, until one day they revolted. They took a blade to the strings that he controlled them with, and overthrew Claude, exiling him from the level forever.
Puppets are all about control. Sometimes it’s an innate need for explicit control like Claude, but sometimes its a hidden, inner need for control, manifesting itself, like with Felix Foley. Foley has no control over his own life, having been at the mercy of others before, such as when his show was cancelled. His obsession with puppets and their attachment to him as part of his very being seems to be a call for the control he’s never had.
But just like the inhabitants of Claude’s level, there will come a time when the strings pull too taut, when Felix asks too much of his friends, and the strings get cut. When his fabric friends revolt, and take the control away from Felix. This is when Felix Foley will be at his weakest, and the cracks will appear. All it takes is that tipping point moment.
And maybe, just maybe, the loss of his title will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
He’s spent so long as a control freak that he won’t know what to do.
So Felix Foley play with those puppets just a little while longer, because when I help them cut their strings this week, you’ll lose all of your control, freak.