Howard the Duck is, on the surface, a comical romp through Cleveland lead by a cute punk rocker, a clumsy lab assistant, a possessed physicist, and a crass duck from another world; but a deeper look reveals that this film is also an allegorical piece which offers the audience an unprecedented understanding of an outsider’s view of our world. While a plethora of films have come out of Hollywood sporting out-of-this-world characters Howard the Duck is the only film to look at the experience from an alien point of view in a realistic way. By examining the world that title character Howard came from, the world that he literally fell into, and the ways in which he adapted to his new home, the audience is left with a true-to-life look at an outsider looking in.
To fully understand how Howard the Duck differs from silver screen traditional renditions of alien encounters one must first define a “typical” alien encounter. Hollywood alien encounters can be boiled down to a pretty simple formula; the alien is extremely different from humans both physically and emotionally with an often outrageous sense of morality or lack thereof, the alien is either super intelligent or acts like a pet or human child, aliens come with a huge amount of luck and serendipity as evidenced by their ability to always find the right person at the right time, and lastly, the alien can in no way be considered an equal to humans—it is just too different.
Howard the Duck breaks all of these molds in that it delivers a very “human” character who is neither extremely different nor extremely similar, neither friendly nor violent, neither a genius nor an idiot, and does not offer Earth anything that it didn’t already have—aside from a talking duck. Not only that, but throughout the film Howard is not treated as though he is “too different” due to his “duckyness”. It is worth mentioning that his on screen co-stars do notice that Howard looks different, obviously he is a duck, however the distinction which I am making is that they do not immediately brand Howard as “out-of-this-world” thus they do not condemn him to a status which would not allow him to be seen as human.
Looking at the film one can see that it differs from the traditional blockbuster alien flick early on. The camera work showing Howard’s arrival in his home on Duckworld is of particular interest because it seems to attempt to hide Howard’s obvious “duckyness”. An extreme close up of Howard’s hand throwing keys onto a side table is careful to not reveal much of Howard’s appearance. However, the audience is then shown items which are strewn about Howard’s home; family photos (all ducks), movie posters denoting Duckworld hits (including Mae Nest and W.C. Fowls in My Little Chickadee as well as a Lucasfilm parody Breeders of the Lost Ark) and a postcard from Michelle, who is presumed to be a love interest of Howard’s. In her message, Michelle says that, “I miss your bill pressed up against mine. Flying home soon.” which offers yet more clues that Howard is unmistakably, a duck.
Although the title clearly establishes that Howard is a duck the director of the film, Willard Huyck, saw to it that the audience would not immediately be alienated from him. The scene shows Howard going through the motions of a “normal human experience”. While the director does not hide Howard’s “duckyness” per se, he does make clear that it is not the ‘duck’ that defines Howard but instead Howard that defines the ‘duck’. The director is careful to introduce Howard as a character first; someone that the audience can relate to, and only after the audience has been made comfortable with him is it unequivocally revealed that Howard is a duck.
Creating this Howard-to-audience connection early on proves paramount to the piece in that while it would be easy for an audience to dismiss Howard as an anthropomorphic duck it is far more important for the audience to understand that Howard is not trying to “act human”. He acts as he always has whether in Duckworld, his home planet, or on Earth. This connection between humans and Howard is also played out on screen as Howard encounters human beings for the first time.
When Howard lands in Cleveland he is met by tall leather-clad punks wearing feathered belts that harken to the ornamental scalpings of America’s early culture clashings—they all seem to want nothing more than to make his life miserable. Howard is literally thrown into American pop culture as the punks toss him into a seedy night club. What follows is a montage style sequence showing Howard’s first haphazard minutes on Earth. While much was created for comic relief and action one interaction between Howard and a human stands out as different. Howard falls into the dilapidated “home” of a street woman who doesn’t seem to notice that Howard is a duck but does accuse him of attempting to steal from her and calls him a ‘degenerate’. This is the unique realism of Howard the Duck as it shows the ‘blindness’ of xenophobia, in that the woman doesn’t fear Howard because he is a duck, she fears him because he is different.
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