I thank my colleagues at Seton Hill University, Laura Patterson and Maureen Vissat, for recently passing along a YouTube link to “Doll Face” by Andrew Huang. It’s a brilliant treatment of the relationship between media technology and gender identity, using uncanny structures like automatism and the compulsion to repeat to deliver its message.

The video sent me to Huang’s website, which features many stunningly uncanny animations worth sharing, analyzing, and potentially using in a college classroom. Huang’s art is more than “pop” but it appeals to the popular imagination through iconic treatements of domesticity-made-strange. His excellent short film, The Gloaming features deja vu in a disturbingly ominous way, reminiscent of the work of Jan Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay. Even his advertisements for Moo Studios use fantastic transformations of ordinary furniture and objects, giving them an unexpected life all their own. But his music video for Eric Avery’s “All Remote and No Control” is perhaps the most horrifying and uncanny of them all, as it represents the boundaries between the urban and the domestic under transgression by an almost Lovecraftian representation of nature — with chilling results. Here’s the version from YouTube, but a higher quality version is on Andrew Huang’s excellent website itself.

"He had an excellent hand" - An Uncyclopedia Image by "Sonje"

I love dismembered hand jokes as much as anyone else, but this creepy image grabbed my attention as the featured image of the day on Uncyclopedia – a mock Wikipedia wiki that I stumbled upon when searching the web for material on the surrealist, Rene Magritte.  At first I didn’t even realize I was ON the Uncyclopedia, and as I read the parodic material on the surrealist master I thought to myself, “How clever…some cheeky monkey had fun “culture jamming” with the open source editing of the wikipedia and pulled a surrealist technique on the very surrealist himself.”  But then I figured it out and realized — they “got me.”

A site like Uncyclopedia lures the unwary google searcher into its trap.  Caught off guard, I fell into the hall of mirrors of parody — the doubling of the double — and experienced a twinge of the uncanny.  Somehow I felt on safer ground when I subsequently found the “actual” wikipedia — not on its “correct” page dedicated to Magritte, but its page on the Uncyclopedia itself.  The wikipedia’s Magritte page no longer feels stable to me…it all seems to suggest something parodic waiting to be discovered.

Everything “un-” is uncanny (“the prefix -un,” Freud tells us, “is the token of repression”). There is a degree to which my destabilizing experience of the Uncyclopedia reflects the power of das Unheimlich to redefine assumptions about boundary lines, categories, and reason itself.  Unreason, if only for a moment,  goes “all in,” and gets the upper hand.

Magritte’s own description of his work bears repeating, since there is the notion of the “hidden secret” inherent behind not only vision, but also every truth claim:

It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

"Live a Little Longer" with Big Med

My wife, Renate, recently submitted the entry above to Wired magazine’s latest “Found: Artifacts from the Future” contest, which asks readers to predict the future of chewing gum with photoshopped gumpacks.

Also on the site is Octuplemint — a parody of the most popular of uncanny of gums, Doublemint.

For me, gum is an interesting product to study, because it is a very cheap consumer good that is not exactly consumed:  it is chewed, yes, but it is also (usually) spit out, and replaced by another one.  Thus it is a potent icon of the essential “empty” value of a commodity.  And because its benefits are really nothing more than flavored saliva, its appeal is almost solely a result of highly manipulative advertising, which promises so much more than the item can really deliver.  “Eclipse” gum might promise to “hide” one’s bad breath — and perhaps it does so effectively — but its very name and “space age”-looking package taps into our cultural awe (and primitive fear, perhaps) of the sublime lunar eclipse.

Big Red’s catchy jingle ["Kiss a little longer, hold hands a little longer, hold tight a little longer.  Longer with Big Red..."] seems to promise not only fresh breath but an enhanced level of intimacy (reminiscent of a product pitch like the one done by Viagra!).  But even more fundamentally, what the jingle and package is really suggesting is that a stick of gum can magically extend time itself:  “make it last a little longer.”  This is not simply the employment of a “weasel word” (“longer” — longer than WHAT?).  This supernatural promise of advertising (see Raymond Williams’ “The Magic System”) is also the sort of incantation that summons the uncanny in so many popular consumer goods that we no longer even see them critically; instead, we playfully sing along.

Thus, Renate’s “stem cell” enhanced cancer-fighting gum — which sounds like something out of a science-fiction novel — is right on the mark:  “Live a little longer…with Big Med.”  This is what “Big Pharma” incessantly promises, too, in its myriad campaigns for the latest pill or patch or implant.  While it is true enough that medicine can indeed support a healthy, longer lasting body — and possibly one day even offer a cure for cancer like Big Med — the truth is that consumer goods always promise more than just long-lasting experience.  They promise everlasting life, for a price.  This is the heresy of the commodity fetish.  Don’t swallow it.