I remember years ago when I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes (1980), a film which documents the inner anguish that leads a successful, educated, and intelligent man to commit the seemingly unmotivated murder-rape of a prostitute. It was a film that was both brutal and startling, but all the more powerful for Bergman’s somewhat tender directorial approach. The film’s title presents one way in which its central character can be framed -- he is controlled by forces, both internal and external, which he can no more understand than he can quell, and which leave him as a kind of human marionette. While it is easy to see Bergman’s intellectually and psychologically oriented films lending themselves to such metaphorical interpretations, it is less common to read American action and sci-fi films and television series in the same manner. Yet this doesn’t mean that such readings are any less applicable. Thunderbirds (1964-66) was a British television series about the Tracy family who operated an organization called International Rescue which captured villains, saved lives, and thwarted disaster. The show’s angle was that it starred marionettes instead of actors and utilized a technique called "supermarionation" which involved the use of wires connected, not to the puppet’s body parts, but to internal mechanisms that allowed for synchronized mouth movements. The Hollywood remake of Thunderbirds has tried to reach as wide an audience as possible, and their first order of business has been to replace the ‘super-marionettes’ with live actors. Not that you’d notice. They give us a cardboard cut-out family living on an island paradise that is still soaked in good old fashioned 50’s values. Three words come to mind: clean, wholesome and sparkling. It’s a family that is functional as opposed to dysfunctional and where ‘swell’ has become the pseudo-futuristic ‘F. A. B.’ It’s a family where the father can still look his son in the eye and say things like, "Saving lives is a serious business, son". The plot can easily be pressed into a single line: all adult members of the Tracy family are captured by The Hood (Sir Ben Kingsley), leaving it up to the youngest Tracy and his pre-teen friends to stop this dastardly villain and save their parents.

Ironically the original Thunderbirds series with its marionettes was designed to appeal to adults, whereas the remake is strictly kids-only. The ‘super-marionettes’ were not only an essential element to the enjoyment and success of the original Thunderbirds series, but they provided a rich thematic subtext. For a start while the characters and narrative of the original series did affirm mainstream middle-class values, the use of marionettes was tongue-in-cheek and tended to slyly undercut these very same values. The changed tone and feel of the Thunderbirds remake can be put down to commercially-minded producers, but it also has a lot to do with the director Jonathan Frakes, better known as Commander William T. Riker, or Number One, from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). Frakes directed several Star Trek episodes, not only for The Next Generation, but for Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) and Voyager (1995-2001), as well as two films, Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998). Frakes conception of Thunderbirds, on a thematic and character level, reminds me a lot of The Next Generation with its stress on team players and the opportunities for self-growth and self-awareness that come from confronting obstacles. All in all, a fairly simplistic moral universe that exerts no great gravitational force.

I find myself thinking about Bergman again, and about his marionette metaphor, wondering if perhaps I’d missed something. Perhaps his ‘marionettes’ weren’t the film’s protagonists, but the audience, sitting in their seats like puppets and following the emotional and intellectual contours Bergman presented -- in fact, all Bergman’s films seem to be begging the viewer to see something beyond what he is showing us, something which he can’t show us in images and which he is leaving for us to fathom: an understanding of ourselves. And I guess, to a much small degree, the original Thunderbirds series’ ‘super-marionettes’ enabled us to laugh at our own conceptions of heroes and of life-values. And what do we see in Frakes’ Thunderbirds? Perhaps only the kind of day-dream we might have had as young kids about saving the world -- a kind of thin imaginative line that might be vivid but is lacking in richness -- and other than that, very little.