Pushing Daisies’ quirk was Bryan Fuller grappling with the AIDS crisis

All it takes is a touch. Although Pushing Daisies’ first episode, “Pie-lette,” establishes the tricky rules of its Pie Maker’s (Lee Pace) powers of reanimating the dead (his dog, then his mother), creator Bryan Fuller also arranges its narrative, aesthetic, tonal, thematic, and emotional ingredients, at once precise — like baking! — and yet open to spontaneity of creative ingenuity. Fuller’s beloved, but short-lived, stylistically multi-hyphenated show has received much praise for its affective acrobatics. But less is said about how the show intentionally drew a close proximity between life and death, a technique rooted as much in a sense of episodic tension as it is in its relationship to pastiche and parody, and pastiche’s relationship to modes of queer art making.

And with the show’s recent availability on HBO Max during the COVID-19 pandemic, the show is able to bridge the specters of its subtext and the contemporary space it can be watched in. Which is to say everything’s touching each other, from its procedural framework to its screwball sensibilities to its absurd quaintness, and in delicate ways, as if their life and death depended on it.

Clocks are set by Critics Pushing Daisies for conjuring a “Tim Burton-esque world” and its debt to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie; but little connection was made during the show’s 2007-2009 run between Fuller’s inclination to draw from these and other sources as something directly connected to a queer sensiblity. Pushing Daisies is a show that is nestled comfortably in a kind of fantastical artifice: adult characters and situations drawn in children’s book colors, inhabitants bursting out into song, cartoonishly made up corpses, arch jokes and on-screen gags, and a gentle, but propulsive (and goofy) melodrama that frames its procedural structure.

At its center was a complicated love story between two people (Pace’s Ned and Anna Friel’s Chuck) who can’t touch. It was the break point for critics, who were astonished at its absurdity. It was called “quirky” and “twee,” a scoffing shorthand for a deliberate preciousness, and an aestheticization of the show’s procosity. It is in many ways a very good thing. You can also much — so much adornment, so many weird settings, so much artificiality applied with a snigger — and yet perfectly assembled. Although it smiles with its generic elements, the smile is more like an expression of sadness, which may be a sign that something deeper is going on.

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Bryan Fuller (38 at the time of the premiere) was a man who had lived through an epidemic that infused his art.Like Me, Dead, HannibalThat MunstersWith the recollections of his fears and worries from those experiences (the reboot never happened). The show’s queer metaphors and its scars from the height of the AIDS crisis exist beyond the immediate questions of touch between Ned and Chuck, or Ned and anyone else. These are not limited to the inclusion of queer characters on the show. Rather, Pushing Daisies situates itself in another world while using the (sub)cultural touchpoints — ones often connected, not always explicitly, to queer culture — of our own, both outside of time and yet unmistakably ravaged by it.

This Pushing Daisies Was it postmodern parody? Or was there a pastiche that ached from the psychic wounds caused by the AIDS epidemic was unlikely to get any attention. revealed, until the show’s 10th anniversary; in an interview with Vanity Fair, he spoke about how “unprotected sex meant death for so long.”

“There was danger associated with intimate touch,” he said. “I think a lot of those things were probably at the back of my mind as I was creating a universe where something so simple, something that is common in heterosexual relationships, was something that would kill you.”

Fuller elaborates on this idea by building the show’s central tension around physical touch, and considering the implications of intimacy. Pushing Daisies goes out of its way to replicate and recontextualize moments from film and pop culture in its own language and place, stacking them and making each duplication aligned to be in contact with the next element — touching, but just in the right way. Kristen Chenoweth’s beguiling performance of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” is straddled on the line of musical fantasy, both within the world of the show and the memory of the high school set musical from which it’s borrowed. Molly Shannon’s seagull attack is both intertext and arch flashback, the two conjoined temporally as if The BirdsIt is etched in the collective memory of the exhibition. Although they are different emotionally and in referents, the exhibition of them is immaculate, almost baroque. One’s swoony, at times filmed from above, the other’s terrifying, spliced up like its forebearer, both threaded together by uncanny, but not mean spirited, humor. They both have their own ways of coping with being alive or dead.

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Two of many examples are available. Pushing Daisies’ play with pastiche, a technique the show held closely to its paradoxically joyful and jaundiced heart. Richard Dyer wrote in his book Pastiche, the term is used to describe “a kind of imitation you are meant to know is imitation.” In the book, he analyzes several examples to explore What pastiche is, pulling examples like Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman, HamletOr Follies. Such works of pastiche “interrogate the truth value of the medium [they’re] working in,” and “[acknowledge] the emotional truth” of “past forms” as well as their “reprehensible lies.” Additionally, he writes that Todd Haynes’ Sirkian melodrama It’s far from Heaven “sets in play our relationship with the past” and “suggests the way feeling is shaped by culture.” Dyer’s unpacking of pastiche, particularly in relation to modes of queer art making, suggests that replication of form but a subversion of tone or context puts it in conversation with those original works while asserting its own aesthetic voice. Pastiche criticises the less normative sources that reflect restrictive social or political norms. Dyer emphasizes the difficulties in delineating pastiche from its sister terms, plagiarism and parody throughout the book. Its closeness, however, is what matters; Please beThe SomethingIt is, however, a cornerstone for queerness.

Pushing DaisiesCloseness can be both thrilling and terrifying, but it is also liberating. The closeness that Ned and Chuck have is at once electric in its romance and on the edge of death itself — but it, too, comes to resemble adroit slapstick pratfalling on the knife’s edge. Their closeness as Pie Hole employees and unrequited piner Olive Chenoweth (Chenoweth), is dangerous for both them. It threatens their friendship as well their relationship with their employer/employees and friends. Olive is able to cultivate an intimate relationship with Chuck (and her agoraphobic aunts Greene and Swoosie Krtz) but it can also be used as a weapon. There’s a soap operatic valence to these relationships, a question of the forms and uses of intimacy not only as a way to cultivate personal security, but possibly to undermine it. These complex relationships reflect and can be discussed. WithThe variety of costumes that the show uses. Pushing DaisiesIt is constantly assessing the physical and emotional proximity of its characters to each other, as well as its stylistic vernacular.

Fuller subverts the physical contact in order to achieve deeper emotional and historical intimacy. It borrows images from other sources and uses them. Vertigo The Sound of MusicOne of the most powerful generic tools of this genre is screwball comedy. This mode of writing and filmmaking came together during an era when Hollywood was looking for violations. The genre (which arguably began with either Frank Capra’s It happened in one night or Howards Hawks’ Twentieth CenturyBoth (1934) were in essence a result of both the Depression (both 1934), and the Hays Production Code (both 1936), which established specific rules for content following sex industry scandals. Speech is characterized by slick rhythmic dialogue and class-based comedy. This was sex. You can see it in films such as The Birth of a Baby, His Girl FridayAnd Lady Eve It was the perfect instrument of seduction.

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So while Ned and Chuck’s physical boundaries are fairly strict (the show teases us a couple of times with things like saran wrap), their romance — and negotiation of it — is cemented in how they, and the show, use language. The balletic complexity and wit of their dialog is what makes them spark.

But Pushing Daisies’ neo-screwball reflexes are also compelling given the genre’s history of queer coding, from masculine envy in The Philadelphia Story to the sultry ménage à trois of Design for Living. This postmodern impulse rears its head beyond the heavy dialogue and through visual gags, notably through the wall in the pilot (a nod to the ’50s Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedies like Pillow Talk), and in a sequence where Chuck has adorned herself with slippers with bells, prompting she and Ned to announce “coming” and “going” through the apartment. Its double entendre smirks throughout the scene, but their tête-à-tête is literalized. The homage to their near-bumps into one another is updated with dramatic tension. (She might even die!) A lot of erotic tension, but they really want to have a good time!).

Fuller incorporates queer- and camp history styles into his show’s world. However, Fuller also infuses it with a culture memory. The distance between its creation and subtextual or metaphorical function is reduced.

​​The show’s sun-kissed palette and the ironic naivete that leaks through its set and production design deliberately establishes a kind of uncanniness. It’s “quirky,” but aware of it, explicitly fusing the visual cues and tropes of other genres to both develop its own vocabulary and play with the tension of artifice and emotional authenticity. “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” which appears in the second episode, is one of the most useful examples in the show because of its versatility, imbuing in the show a bittersweet self-awareness. Olive is seen wandering around the Pie Hole looking for Ned, literally and metaphorically. The little pie shop turns into a spot that encourages a lushness in feeling. She’s alone, almost. There’s a janitor with her. The camera pans around, gesturing back to the source text. Olive is Sandy. But she’s sadder and perhaps more deluded. However, the sensation is very real.

But rather than mock the crystals of sugar adorning each beat of the musical number by making a wall-break a thing of hierarchy (we acknowledge that the performance is fantastical so you don’t have to take it seriously), the presence of outsiders bursting an insular emotional bubble actually refines the tenderness in the scene. She’d still perform, regardless of external distractions. But she prefers to be by herself.

The origins of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” as a song written for Olivia-Newton John’s star power to fuel GreaseIntentionally, the musical style of this song is not the same as the rest of film. This movie was based upon a stage musical which drenched the youths of late 1950s with nostalgia. While other songs in the show are more organic pastiches of emerging rock and roll and early R&B styles, Sandy’s heartbreak song exists slightly outside of it, but contradictorily is its most earnest moment. Und in Pushing Daisies, its initial out-of-placeness is also what makes it striking: a song so iconic that a response to it is almost predictable, until it isn’t, all the while the scene revealing that very dialectic between form, time, and viewer. It draws more inspiration from pop music of the 1970s, including a few hints of Elton John and the Beatles. Grease It is Actuallysupposed to mimicking.

And yet, the song becomes the film’s emotional center despite its slight generic discordance, aligning us with Sandy’s yearning and confusion, because, despite its difference, its emotional approximation still fits. It would garner an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, reach number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, and become a signature for Newton-John, making it Newton-John’s first go at being incorporated into a gay cultural lexicon. The song’s melancholic hums, its sorrowful opening whines, its internal dialogue transcend the work from which it originates, broadly universal and detached from both the 1950s music it doesn’t exactly try to recreate and the 1970s techniques it actually uses. It’s nostalgia, nostalgic.

Pushing Daisies is not only an amalgamation of styles perfectly rendered both as replica and as contextualized within the show’s broader televisual language, but specifically styles rooted in the past and cemented as parts of the consumption habits of a particular set of gay and queer people, artifacts that shaped an expression of queer culture. This is a reference to another time. It was made by individuals for whom the history of popular culture defined space and being. Another pandemic sees the gap between present and past shrinking, while escapist fantasies remain haunted. Maybe our reality does have a little more light.

It’s easy to watch it right now as it jumps from one parody or pastiche moment to another. Pushing Daisies has the uncanny skill of dancing on the pie pan’s edge between then and now, and love and death. You might not realize it, but they may be even closer than you thought.