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David Lynch’s Doppelgangers

Published by Michael Arnzen in Film on December 26th, 2008

 In psychology, the shadow is the part of the unconscious that swallows threatening information and experiences that a conscious mind cannot hold onto and, at the same time, remain functional. However, a periodic confrontation with the shadow is necessary for a healthy psyche. In a Lynch film it is often the job of some sort of rule-maker, interrogator, or detective to engineer just such a confrontation. These detective types set boundaries on a film’s fantasy narrative and try to steer the main character back to the truth. — Adam C. Walker

The “Shadow Self and Detective” (in other words, the doppelganger and alter-ego) is one of 12 “tools” that Adam C. Walker offers in his insightful essay, “Reading Inland Empire: A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch Film” (Metaphilm, Nov 2007).  What I really like about this article is that it clearly provides a number of frameworks for comprehending David Lynch’s seemingly impenetrable narratives (not just Inland Empire itself), by looking specifically at recurring narrative structures.

My favorite doppelganger from Lynch’s work is Robert Blake as the “Mystery Man” from Lost Highway.  In an interview with Cinefantastique, Lynch describes him as  a “character [who] came out of a feeling of a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural.”

“Whether real or not” is a hallmark of not only uncanny uncertainty, but Lynch’s proclivity for subjective realism on a plane that alienates most pop audiences.  But what I like about David Lynch is this persistent use of surrealism, framed in a way that inevitably makes you wonder “Where is this going?”  That is the enigma of all plot forms, but Lynch constantly keeps us guessing because the way he puts together scenes is always skewed while remaining just “familiar” enough to hook our interest.  Something is going on, but we’re never told quite what it is.  The “Mystery Man” embodies this, employing his camera through tout the film in dastardly ways.

Beyond character, Walker suggests that the template for understanding Lynch’s narrative strategy is Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” since Lynch seems to loop plots together as if they were echo-effects of some primary event that are pinging off the walls of a central character’s mind.  There is no story so much as there is a vague sense of deja vu, as characters try to understand their own dilemmas — which are our dilemmas in the very act of experiencing the film.  Paramnesia at play: the subjective experience of a Lynch film is the cinematic equivalent of waking up from not a dream, but a concussion.

Steve Shaviro describes it perfectly, in his treatment of Lynch’s Lost Highway (here lifted from his work in progress, Stranded in the Jungle, but for his brilliant full article on LH see Paradoxa 1998):

…the first half of Lost Highway is so brooding and mysterious. It pushes up against the limits of what can be seen and said. So much is hinted at, and so little is shown. Even the event upon which the whole film turns, Fred’s apparent murder of Renee, does not take place on screen. We see what comes before, and what comes after. But we do not–cannot–see the act itself. It is missing from the body of the film, just as it is missing from Fred’s own consciousness. The murder drives the story, but it stands apart from the story. It is like an intrusion from another world.

Lost Highway explores this “intrusion” of the uncanny in many ways that are founded in earlier forms of cinema, rendering this film a double of other films in a highly subjective allusion to film genre history.  Much has been written about this.  Zizek has written a lengthy article on how the film is an “apotheosis of horror and noir genres” in his article “The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime”.  Fiona Villella discusses how its “Circular Narrative” echoes the narratology of the French New Wave.  Maarten de Pourcq looks at the uncanny way that sound and image work together in the film, referencing others.  Alana Thain (.pdf) sees the film as “haunted by Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”  And Valterri Kokko sees the uncanny at the center of “Psychological Horror in the Films of David Lynch.”

Film is a highway on which you get lost; if his movies don’t make sense to you, they are succeeding…you’re lost.

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Smoking Stunts and Growths

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on December 19th, 2008

roy_castle_3

Wow!  This image from the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation’s (UK) anti-second hand smoke campaign stunned me for a moment, with its visual echo of my recent post about the website, Photoshop Disasters. (Via the excellent advertising watchblog, AdGoodness).

In that original post, I wrote:  “We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears, the optical illusion is shattered — the collision of consumerist fantasy against marketing reality is sometimes felt as a return of a repressed desire.”

My thinking presupposed that such freakish bodily anomalies as the giant hand image above were accidental, like Freudian slips.  Here the freak skewing is intentional and inherently artistic.  Why might it still strike one as uncanny? 

Perhaps it is the various contradictions embodied in the image:  the smoker’s fantasy (smoking makes one look younger, feel relaxed,  sophisticated, etc.) is at once contradicted by the way smoking “stunts” growth and can lead to birth defects.  And it’s not just the body anomaly that triggers these feelings and negative affect. Note the empty coat hanger dangling from the knob, right beside the smoking girl, dressed in an outfit that calls attention to itself with its bold color in a sparse white room. She herself is positioned in a mirror image of that dead white space, where another knob would be (behind her head).  Her shadow seems to be peeling away from the hanger.  The implied idea is a sort of before-and-after effect:  if the smoking continues, the narrative suggests, she will soon be “out of the picture” (reinforced by the absent mother off screen who the kid is implicitly glaring at).  The empty room with its bare wire hanger is a harbinger of death.

A powerful use of Photoshop to make a point.  See the other photographs in the campaign for full impact.  Or check out AdGoodness’ “weird” category.

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Gel Remote: Object Empathy and The Tactile Uncanny

Published by Michael Arnzen in Art+Music, Theory on December 12th, 2008
A 'psychodesign' from Adbusters magazine.

A 'psychodesign' from Adbusters magazine.

Adbusters # 78 asks “What if design stood up for itself? What if instead of bowing immediately to our demands, design gently pushed back?”  In the “Psychodesign” slideshow (by Sarah Nardi), products like Panasonic Design Company‘s experimental ”Gel Remote” (above) are framed as a political use of the uncanny, animating the inanimate icons of everyday life in order to challenge and subvert the objects that enable our sense of mastery and dominance over the environment:

Inert and lifeless, design is animated only through human use. It exists only by virtue of its functionality, possessing no reality independent of its purpose in our world. Would we think of it differently if it were alive?

What products designs like these are asking us to do is empathize with objects, which in my opinion (following Susan Verducci) can be a progressive and moral outcome of an imaginative representation of the uncanny in the arts. 

But the “gel remote” got me thinking about the sensation of touch.  The gel remote — and other forms of haptic technology/art/design — are inanimate objects that “touch back”  when we touch them.  So much of the theoretical work on the uncanny has been about the visual realm and other forms of representation; haptic technology and art is a new media form that projects a sort of tactile sensation of the uncanny, which in some ways is like a “return of the gaze” in the plane of the visual. 

A little web research reveals the artistic history behind the remote and other objects of this ilk.  It stems from Kenya Hara’s attempt to assemble a group of Japanese artists to design an object from everyday life that animated tactile perception.  Japan Society cites him on the concept:

“The concept of ‘haptic,’…leads to the idea that we not only design form by creating a shape or an object, we also design how it feels. A human being is a bundle of delicate senses. Science doesn’t only help the evolution of materials and media, it also helps us understand the senses, where there may be hidden a whole new, undiscovered territory. . . ‘Haptic’ means another design attempt to expand the world atlas of senses.”

The Lighthouse art museum of Glasgow hosted this “haptic art” exhibition earlier this year, showing the Gel Remote along with a few other designs that I’d place in this category of the tactile uncanny, like Naoto Fukasawa‘s “Juice Skin”:

juiceskin

These examples of the repackaging of nature (a la Next Nature) are at once novel and attractive.  A review by The Scotsman of the Haptic exhibition celebrates the mission in our audio-visual centered world to reawaken the senses of touch, but laments that samples of these art objects were rubbed smooth by passers-by. 

We are both attracted to and repulsed by such objects. 

A good starting point for explaining the feelings aroused by actually touching — rather than seeing — this sort of object might be this example from Jentsch’s essay on the Uncanny, which describes the “intellectual uncertainty” one has when one can’t tell what causes a “perceived movement”:

One can read now and then in old accounts of journeys that someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk and that, to the horror of the traveler, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake…. As long as the doubt as to the nature of the perceived movement lasts, and with it the obscurity of its cause, a feeling of terror persists in the person concerned.

The terror he describes is triggered by sitting on an object that shows itself to actually be a subject.  More than just the striking surprise of a statue that suddenly lights up with life, there is a moment of abjection on top of the terror caught up in touching what one assumed was “dead” material that surprisingly touches back with a “life” all its own.  This sensation of touch literally “pushes our buttons” perhaps more forcefully than any other form of the uncanny.  Haptic art/tech does not merely reawaken the sense of touch; it triggers a reflexive response that inherently asks us to rethink our assumptions about the environment.

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Parade Floats and the Uncanny

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on November 27th, 2008

Here in the USA, it’s Thanksgiving morning.  The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC is just getting started, and while I’ve never been a fan of parades, one can’t deny their significance in both small town culture and in big city holiday fests, alike. The news media treat them like spectator sports. For the event in NYC, millions attend – and millions more watch on television.

The spectacle of the parade “float” has always amused me. There are many variations and technologies put into practice for these objects, from novelty floats to “balloonicles” — and many of them are fictional characters from animation history, appealing to children; chief among them are animal figures, simulacra of the actual animals which used to be carted down the street (ala circus parade). The aesthetic of “balloon animals” sends us back to our childhood, here returned larger than life and, often, animistically empowered.

Which is another way of saying that these moving platforms and inflated creatures don’t merely “parade” down the street: they spectrally float, seemingly on their own accord, and their creators do all they can to hide the mechanics that move them. Parade floats and balloons glide down main street, like stages built upon magic carpets or gigantic ghosts. The spectrality of the parade float is what lurks behind the laughable logic of the possessed Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (pictured above) who attacks Dan Ackroyd and crew in the horror-comedy, Ghostbusters (1984). Parades command attention because of the communal fascination with public spectacles, and the human feats of greatness (from celebrities to heroes to marching bands) compete against spectacles of technological wonder and art. Parade floats are in every way an exhibition of the popular uncanny.

I first began thinking seriously about this notion during an ad I witnessed at the movie theater last week: a rerun of the following Coca Cola Ad aired during the 2008 Super Bowl:

In this advertisement, cartoon characters (Stewie Griffin and Underdog) virtually fistfight over a Coke bottle, careening against buildings and bouncing off one another in ways that look “realistic” — yet also impossibly conscious of what they are doing. It is a neat trick of camera work and choreography (even if one assumes CGI is involved, the trickery is pretty savvy), lending the floats a sense of autonomy in their motivated quest to beat each other to the prize: a bottle of coke. A more peaceful and happy Charlie Brown comes almost out of nowhere to steal the bottle away from the distracted pair, his permanent grin expressing his glee. In the final frame, the Charlie “has a Coke and a smile.”

There’s a lot more going on here than first meets the eye. For instance, the ad uses a lot of “reaction shots” of human beings looking up to the sky or out of their skyscraper windows, which makes the constructed scene appear to be “really happening” in the city. One might even miss, in all of these reaction shots, the inside joke to fans of the Peanuts comic: right before Charlie Brown wins the day, a little brown-haired girl walks in the city park, looking up to the sky while holding a football, as if she was Lucy (known for pulling the ball away from Charlie just as he kicked at it — sending him flying in the air and landing flat on his back. This joke doesn’t just give give Charlie his wings — it elides the difference between human and non-human, real and imaginary, in the few seconds it appears on air. Film, of course, does this anyway: actors are not “really” there before us, but trace images, recorded in light and rendered larger than life.

Even more puzzling: the Coke bottle itself, a float, a commodity as big as the characters who seek it. Clearly it is far too much to consume in reality — yet they are driven to drink it. Unlike the other balloon creatures, it does not act in human ways, but instead seems to function more like a symbol that is preordained to magically find its way to Charlie’s hands. That is, it is a transcendent signifier for the commodity itself that they all represent.

This is all fantasy, framed to pitch a product by processing cultural icons that include not only the floats, but also the “larger than life” setting of the city itself. There may be an uncanny echo of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks operating in the political unconscious beneath this Coke advertisement. The “soft” bounce of these objects from childhood against skyscrapers may reflect a repressed fear of air attack on the city, here returned to the television screen as something akin to a childhood memory, a flight of animated fancy. The only people “threatened” by the horror of the giant balloons are those who aren’t paying attention to the spectacle in the streets, caught off guard. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the simple ad, but the imagery is striking.

The above image — appearing only for a second on the screen — seems to align Coke with the majesty of the city’s greatest icons. But it also implies so much more than that, especially given the context of “fighting” that it is embedded within. And in the image above, what are we to make of the clouds — the two lines like tracers of exhaust from two airplanes — arcing behind (or toward?) the Chrysler Building, while the shot as a whole is uncannily framed by two other “twin tower”-like buildings? I think it is patently obvious that this image is about fear as much as it is about fantasy.

One must wonder what the narrative of this ad might be saying about consumerism in relation to such cultural anxieties as global terrorism. Does it suggest something about competition, world trade, and terrorism? Is America the Charlie Brown, fooled by so many Lucies, so many wars? I’m not sure what it means, exactly, but I think there is some bottled up anxiety in this advertisement, felt as uncanny when it is uncapped and released.

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Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising, Oddities on November 15th, 2008
A 'Photoshop Disaster' appears in an old Sears Catalog

Photoshop Disasters is a funny weblog that collects flawed design elements in advertisements and elsewhere (like the above image from a Sears Catalog).

The accidental amputations, bizarre hands, and other forms of freakish anatomical blunders strike a viewer as uncanny when you spot them in what would otherwise be a “picture perfect” advertisement. We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears, the optical illusion is shattered — the collision of consumerist fantasy against marketing reality is sometimes felt as a return of a repressed desire.

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Creepy Automata Videos

Published by Michael Arnzen in Oddities on November 10th, 2008

For Halloween, the readers of Oobject voted for their Top 12 Videos of Creepy Automata. A great theme, from cats in a milk churn to maniacally laughing dolls. One of my favorites is this clip of a Decaying 1880s Automaton Harpist by Vichy:

I won’t belabor how uncanny the signifiers are here, from the doll’s movement on its own accord to the way the eyes seem to cast around and occassionally return one’s gaze. The decaying apparatus is like one of Hans Bellmer’s dolls stirred into life by an electrical current. But it’s the fluid movement of the dead hands and arms that get me — human in their plucking of the strings of an absent (ghost?) harp, as the doll plays along with a creepy tune. Unheimlich!

If you go to Oobject, be careful. You might find yourself spending hours on end in their wonderful “weird” category. Or their list could inspire a day- or week-long browsing expedition in youtube for “automata.”

[See my related discussion of medical mannikins on Oobject in a previous blog entry.]

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