By Myles McDonough
By now, we all know or at least suspect that Disney has hijacked our brains to make us obsessed with a certain big-eared puppet who has gone on to become the internet’s littlest meme factory.
Baby Yoda, with his soft, tiny body, stubby limbs, and ginormous eyes, ticks all the boxes in what ethologist Konrad Lorenz first called Kindchenschema (“baby schema”) — that set of physical features that makes us lose our minds at the sight of anything remotely resembling a human infant. In other words, whatever we perceive as “cute.”
But there’s more to this character than biological imperative. The notion of “cuteness” is also a product of culture — one that only really developed in the past century. And believe it or not, there is a dark side to cuteness. Think about that while you watch Baby Yoda sippin’ on that itty bitty cup of soup.
The Origin of “Cute”
In her article “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” literary critic Sianne Ngai explains that the idea of cuteness, as we know it today, owes a lot to twentieth-century toy manufacturing — specifically, the shift from realistic toys made of wood and metal to ones made of squishier, less breakable materials.
This change was, according to Ngai, the result of early twentieth-century insights into the psychology of children — specifically, their potential for aggression and even cruelty. As Ngai puts it:
“Once children were no longer imagined as miniature adults or as naturally moral or virtuous creatures, manufacturers found new impetus to produce indestructible toys that could survive the violence with which children were increasingly associated.”
In light of such findings, it only made sense to make toys more pliable — a teddy bear is more likely than a china doll to survive being thrown across the room. But the end result of the change was about more than just different materials used to make toys.
By the later half of the twentieth century, Americans were increasingly exposed to a growing number of household objects with features we find adorable in children. In other words, an increasing prevalence of kindchenschema in American life can be tied back to our efforts to deal with childhood aggression.
Of course, tactile qualities aren’t the only things we can understand as cute. As Ngai points out, cuteness is also “identified with a ‘twittering’ use or style of language” — think of Baby Yoda babbling as he toddles along behind Mando. And cuteness goes beyond the particular traits of the cute object. The properties we associate with cuteness like smallness, softness, or simplicity, as Ngai argues, also conjure helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency.
To put it bluntly, we seem to find things cutest when they are completely miserable, like a teary-eyed kitten.
Which isn’t what we would say, if asked why we think a given object is cute. It certainly isn’t very flattering. But Ngai isn’t the only one to have noticed a link between cuteness and the enjoyment of others’ suffering.
“Unhappiness, Helplessness, and Deformity”
Caregiving impulses aside, there is something a bit sinister about the way we relate to things, animals, or people we label “cute.” Psychological research into “cute aggression,” for instance, explains why otherwise reasonable people feel a sudden urge to crush — or even eat — cute children or animals.
But no one has explored the dark side of cuteness with more venom than Daniel Harris.
Harris’s article “Cuteness” is a blistering ten-page screed denouncing everything from Cabbage Patch Dolls to E.T. (the article was first published in 1992) as examples of a “seductive and manipulative aesthetic” that appeals as much to a desire for control as it does to any hardwired caregiving instinct.
Harris stakes this claim on the observation that we tend to find something cute because of “a quality it lacks, a certain neediness and inability to stand alone, as if it were an indigent starveling, lonely and rejected.”
In other words, cuteness is about more than Konrad Lorenz’s Kindchenschema. Big eyes and a large forehead alone are not enough to qualify something as cute. In order for an object to be perceived as truly cute, it must also appear to be dependent on us for survival, totally subject to our whims. As Harris puts it:
Cuteness […] is not something we find in our children, but something we do to them. Because it aestheticizes unhappiness, helplessness, and deformity, it almost always involves an act of sadism on the part of its creator who makes an unconscious attempt to maim, hobble, and embarrass the thing it seeks to idolize.
Less provocatively, Ngai points out that “it is crucial to cuteness that its diminutive object has some sort of imposed-upon aspect or mien.”
Which is enough to make us think twice about Baby Yoda. The puppet is designed with a slight downward turn to the lips, so that he often seems just on the verge of shedding tears. And it’s hard to escape the fact that the best Baby Yoda memes involve him struggling to accomplish basic tasks, or looking sad over a small injustice the world has dealt him.
According to Harris, we look at things like Baby Yoda with “a transformative gaze that will stop at nothing to appease its hunger for expressing pity and bigheartedness, even at the expense of mutilating the object of its affections.” Yikes.
Selling, Always Be
Harris believes that this roundabout narcissism is the stuff of marketing dreams:
[A]dvertisers have learned consumers will ‘adopt’ products that create, often in their packaging alone, an aura of motherlessness, ostracism, and melancholy, the silent desperation of the lost puppy dog clamoring to be defended — namely, to be bought[.]
In a rare miss, it seems Disney has been caught completely off guard by the insane demand for Baby Yoda merchandise, with an official plush toy not scheduled for release until April 2020. (It seems the delay came, at least in part, at the request of show-runner Jon Favreau.)
Not that that’s stopped a handful of intrepid marketers from taking creative liberties with product descriptions in a bid to get consumers what they want.
And boy do we want. The urge to adopt Baby Yoda, raise him, and put him through college took root in our collective unconscious when The Mandalorian first started airing back in November, and it shows no signs of dying down anytime soon.
Now, Baby Yoda is only a puppet, albeit the most adorable one ever captured on screen. It’s probably fine not to interrogate our feelings around him too deeply. After all, even if there is an element of hostility to the way we project cuteness onto him, he isn’t an actual child who could be emotionally harmed by our distortions.
Still, when you find yourself groping for your debit card, under an irresistible compulsion to mash that plushie pre-order button, you might want to ask yourself — what do I really feel for you, Baby Yoda?
