The Alien Mysteries of Easter Island

by Willy Staley

The caption above, selected from a pool of hundreds in the New Yorker’s caption contest #378, and then voted to the top of the pile by New Yorker readers, is reasonably witty on the surface, insofar as Cadbury Creme Egg commercials are witty. But like the best satire, this caption works on two very different levels. Masquerading as complete and utter pablum — literally fodder for children — it hints at a violent end to Western Civilization as we know it.

It might be hard to understand why this caption won the contest if you only look at its surface features. The losing captions of this contest’s three top choices — “I’m rebranding” and “He’s a temp” — at least address the presence of the other pirate, and incorporate him into the author’s temporal interpretations of the scene. In those instances, the pirate on the right, surprised by the bunny on his Captain’s shoulder — where cartoon tradition, if not pirate tradition, would call for a parrot — has clearly asked him, or at least indicated the presence of the question, why there is a bunny on his shoulder. Not only do the Captain’s responses incorporate a proper dose of New York-style ennui, and the ironic use of corporatespeak to evoke it, they have a sense of timing. In both the losing captions, something has happened before we entered.

But, then again: has it? Upon further inspection, little action has taken place, because the authors of the losing captions have merely made the second pirate into a “bridge” character for themselves — they are surprised at the bunny, therefore he is surprised at the bunny, and therefore all the Captain can do is offer explanations for it. By creating a universe wherein the Captain’s bunny is not actually surprising — or at least by muffling this impulse — the winning entrant, Bucknell Webb, has actually outdone the competition, though it required making a caption that is comparatively static.

The Easter Bunny joke is so obvious, it makes explanation a bit of a chore, but the questions it leaves unanswered reveal the same issue Webb has with establishing a timeline before this caption “happens”: Does the bunny speak, and so did the bunny tell the Captain to go to Easter Island? Does the Captain just really like Easter, and so the bunny is an outward affectation of this love? Certainly it’s amusing to infantilize a raider of the high seas by making him excited about getting a basket stuffed with paper grass, pastel candies and Peeps, but Webb’s caption offers no causal relationship between the Captain’s utterance and the bunny perched on his shoulder. (And I’m sure you’ve noticed this, but let’s just set aside the strangeness of the fact that Webb’s Captain addresses a subordinate with “Aye.”) But on the surface, it is only clever thanks to the associations already in our heads: that bunnies go with Easter, and so do gift baskets; that Easter Island is an island, and therefore plausibly a place a pirate might go pillage. But this soon breaks down when we consider the contrapositive: would a parrot-wearing pirate demand to go to Parrot Island, if such a place existed? And could his parrot demand it of him?

This is where Webb’s brilliant caption requires effort on the reader’s part. As little as his caption offers temporally on the front end, it hints at a much longer narrative afterward. Environmentalists know Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, as a harrowing, microcosmic parable for what awaits our unsustainable society: environmental collapse, followed by a return to the brutal Hobbesian existence from which we emerged tens of thousands of years ago.

The long-held story of the island goes like this: by the time Westerners first made contact with the Rapanui, for the people carry the same name as the island — and on Easter Day, hence the name — the culture was already in decline. Their population had been decimated, reduced to cannibalism. To the new arrivals, it seemed rather unlikely that such savages could be capable of constructing 887 massive stone faces, the moai, that line its shores. And, indeed, if you check the Ancient Aliens website — that show dedicated to the notion that non-white people are so totally incapable of creating anything lasting that alien visitors must actually be responsible for most of their accomplishments — we learn that it is highly unlikely that “human beings without sophisticated tools or knowledge of engineering craft [could] transport such incredible structures.” So: aliens?

But, despite what the History Channel considers to be an inborn deficiency, the Polynesian natives of Rapa Nui had actually figured out a way to move the moai: they cut down trees, and built roads, so they could roll the massive slabs of rock around the island. Eventually, the story goes, they cut down all their trees. And without them, they had no wood to make boats, so less fish, but also no fruit, and no tree-dwelling animals — and presumably little shade. Eventually, Rapanui society collapsed under the weight of its strange version of ancestor worship. Apparently, the moai were made for ancestors, based on the belief that the dead would provide for them. Eventually, the dead did indeed provide sustenance, though not in the way anyone had intended.

(But then came, as it always does, the anthropological reassessment. Rats, and their loves of trees, and then the European invaders, were what largely claimed the lives of the people and of the trees of the island. “It was genocide, not ecocide, that caused the demise of the Rapanui,” summarized anthropologist Terry Hunt.)

So our Captain, perhaps misled by his bunny, is foolhardy to think he will find bounty on the shores of Easter Island. He will find only rat-starved cannibals and massive stone faces he will likely assume to be the work of aliens. Then, in the logic of all cartoons, he will be boiled in a large cauldron with his comrades while the Rapanui wield comically large utensils, his fellow pirates cursing the Captain for listening to that traitorous bunny.

We hope that winning captionist Bucknell Webb read The New Yorker’s excellent coverage of Mitt Romney’s 2012 fool’s errand, and if that’s the case, then somewhere in his brain there likely exists an image of Romney’s face carved into the moai — it was Caption Contest #348, for September 10th, 2012.

The winning caption seems obvious. Romney, Webb has certainly not forgotten, was what we called a “corporate raider” in the 1980s: a private equity man. And aren’t pirates — tied to nothing, profit their only compass — not the perfect metaphor for the ills of footloose capital?

The bunny, traditionally a symbol of fertility (hence the syncretic Easter association), has whispered into our Captain’s ear and led him to certain death at the stony hands of the monuments of the Rapanui by tempting him with earthly bounty. Fertility has ensured death; Malthus has been vindicated. We laugh at these two pirates’ certain doom because it makes us uncomfortable to know that, within a generation or two, we as well will likely be reduced to cannibalism by the ratty system we have created to quarry, haul, carve and erect so many profane moai — Angry Birds merchandise, Go-Gurt, PT Cruisers, and so on.

Webb has taken these three symbols — environmental ruin, fertility, footloose capital — and constructed a perfect parable to show us the inevitable endgame of our precarious arrangement. Of course it all ends in death and destruction. Of course humanity is brought low by its arrogance, punished for thinking any gods hold us dear, for thinking the Earth considers us anything but parasitic.

Or, perhaps, Webb was just making a joke about bunnies and Easter. And islands. But New Yorker readers voted for this caption in particular, and one hopes they weren’t so easily swayed.

Willy Staley contributes to Shitty New Yorker Cartoon Captions.