“Archaeological Photography, the Uncanny Valley, and Lomography” by Colleen Morgan touches on the way documentary images of archaeological sites use particular photographic techniques to produce an uncanny effect (whether consciously or not).  I hadn’t heard of “lomography” before, which Morgan describes:

“lomography…employs low-quality toy cameras for an intentionally “bad” photograph that is blurry, off-color with light leaks.  These photos are more atmospheric but obviously not as accurate.  They contribute to an aesthetic of decay that compliments the subject.  HDR is too precious to me, too bejewelled and fantastic.  Lomography represents a more “accurate” view of the past in that it is hazy, hard to discern, never quite all there”

I’m reminded of horrorshow gimmicks, of course.  But looking at the images on this site got me thinking about the way that these photographs not only represent an eerie scene, but how the camera lense substitutes for the healthy eye of the viewer; our very perception is “decayed”…ergo the specter of death is felt as interior, subjective, and what the ph0tograph captures is not a haunted space, but a space which we inhabit and haunt, if only for the the momentary duration of the initial affect of uncanny.  (The HDR photographs, too, could be said to similarly introject the subjectivity of the cyborg).

Related, but different:  lomography is a nostalgia fetish for toy and archaic/outmoded cameras and film technology of the past.  Lomography.com reveals this fascination with toy cameras in all its glory.

In the digital and mobile millennium, we are seeing a shift in the ground of the uncanny, away from the home to the experience of being in the world through its representations of time and place.  Analog has become the Other.

I discovered the “cover song” web podcast site, Coverville, earlier today, and was musing over the way in which one band’s version of another band’s overly familiar song can chime the chords of the uncanny. But then I saw this video for Sour’s “Hibi No Neiro” — which I don’t think is a cover song — and my chords were chimed directly. The unexpected synchronicity of the choreographed shots — across so many webcams (if that’s really what they did here) is pretty remarkable. As the writer at Coverville puts it accurately: this video is very “Michel Gondry” (who, incidentally, I just learned released a second volume to his classic Works DVD exclusively on his website!). Like Gondry’s work, it made me do a double-take in one of those “I can’t believe my eyes” sort of experiences. But it’s not really scary; it’s more of a celebration of the potential for social connectedness through internet technologies. Enjoy:

SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.

And here is my favorite all-time Michel Gondry video, adapting the Chemical Bros. song: “Let Forever Be”.

Last year, writer Jason Jack Miller shared with me a popular YouTube video: Uncanny monsters born by placing a layer of water and cornstarch on a subwoofer.  I find myself returning to this video often, contemplating the animism made possible by the rhythm of sound and the chaos of vibration. This neat effect “animates” the preternatural spatzle dough (a.k.a. “Oobleck”) in a way that makes it seem like the liquid gives birth to monstrous blobs that have a will to dance all their own. It gets progressively creepier until the “mass” writhes with uncanny life.

One of the reasons this neat trickery appeals to me is because it is also so familiar from fiction and film. This is but one of many examples of something we might call the “Oobleck Effect” in uncanny narratives: a representation of “living fluid” in the works of popular culture (especially film). Liquid, by its very nature, often seems animate since it is subject to gravity and other forms of push-and-pull in the natural environment. Ocean waves are scientifically explained, but one can’t help but wonder at the unseen forces that cause the phenomena — a ripple is a ghostly after-trace of an often unseen and unknown activity. Things stir underwater, and we see this after-effect — something is “there” but not quite there at all. Shark films like Open Water achieve much of their horror this way, by giving us a partial view — fin breaking through or not — as things move beneath the surface of the visible. But the Oobleck Effect is achieved with the surface itself takes on a life before our very eyes where we presumed there was no life whatsover. When liquid shapes are represented as “alive” in the arts, they become particularly uncanny objects. Perhaps because their monstrous bodies perform a sort of polymorphous perversity as much as they erase categorical distinctions based on physical boundaries and question the “natural” laws that we presume shape all organisms in any determined way. The liquid itself is as “alive”; we project sentience, if not outright ill intention, upon it.

Oobleck — a word that itself is derived from pop literature (Dr. Seuss) — is an effect apparent in the image of the T-1000 (or the “liquid metal” robot) from Terminator 2: Judgment Day who, by virtue of spectacular effects, seems as polymorphic as a postmodern shape-shifter, his metallic alloy bendable into any horrifying shape that will serve the purpose of disguise or murder. When he is melted in the lava-like smelt of the factory at the end of T2, his liquid body expresses numerous characters as he is returned to the mercurial hellfire — and this scene, as much as the one where he emerges from a puddle on a hospital room floor, is perhaps the best example of the Oobleck Effect at work in contemporary cinema.

The T-1000 is an iconic instance of the Oobleck Effect

I invite comments that cite other appearances of the Oobleck Effect in fiction, film and elsewhere in pop culture.

One of the unique concepts I broach in The Popular Uncanny is the notion of doublement — a term I employ to refer to the uncanny regress that occurs when a textual double (such as a remake or other adaptation) foregrounds the capacity for media to reproduce or “double” itself. In a recent entry on The Watchmen over at the Graphic Engine blog, new media critic Bob Rehak captures the uncanny spirit of this concept, and what is at stake in reproduction, remarkably well:

…here’s where the real uncanniness resides. We’re often hoodwinked into thinking that the visual (indeed, existential) crisis of our times is the rapidly closing gap between profilmic truth and what’s been simulated with computer graphics. But CG is merely the latest offspring of a vast heritage of manipulation, a tradition of trickery indistinguishable from cinema itself. Watchmen is uncanny not because of its visual effects, but because it comes precariously close to convincing us that we are seeing Moore’s and Gibbons’s graphic novel preserved intact, when, after all, it is only a copy — and a lossy one at that. In flashes, the film fools us into forgetting that another version exists; but then the knowledge of an original, an other, comes crashing back in to sour the experience. It is not reality and its digital double whose narrowing difference freaks us out, but the aesthetic convergence between two media, threatening to collapse into each other through the use of ever more elaborate production tools and knowing appeals to fannish competencies. At stake: the very grounds of authenticity — the epistemic rules by which we recognize our originals. — Bob Rehak, “Watchmen: Stuck in the Uncanny Valley” (3.9.09)

Brilliant. Moreover, this is not only the case with Computer Graphic enhanced cinema or graphic novels adapted to screen like the very popular Watchmen; I would argue that all remakes raise these very same stakes, because they engage in a tension with their “originals” that threatens to destabilize boundaries, which is felt by us as uncanny. In the introduction to my book, I make the case that Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho — which is nearly identical to Hitchcock’s — is perhaps the purest form of this destabilization, by virtue of being so nearly identical that the differences between the two are psychologically overdetermined by the spectator, rendering the text “uncannily” similar-yet-different.

Neat find: Professor Heard’s Magic Latern Shows is a traveling act that nostalgically recreates the “phantasmagoria” of the 18th & 19th centuries for contemporary audiences. (I learned about Heard’s show via his article, “The Lantern of Fear” published by Grand Illusions, a fun online shop for offbeat science toys, uncanny gizmos, and illusionary devices.) As I further pursued this, I found that magic lantern shows and phantasmagoria are still very much a living art. The question I have is whether these are quaint celebrations of our domestication of their uncanny spectacle, or does the nostalgia for these “dead” technologies make their apparitions all the more uncanny?

Terry Castle provides a marvelous history of these uncanny special effects in her book, The Female Thermometer.

 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.

Tron

Software designer Daniel Wellman writes about an uncanny experience where a game he was programming seemed to come to life with a will all its own in his essay, “Real Life Tron on Apple IIgs”:

One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border. Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped. But this time was different – instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned. The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field. Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen. It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.

Shortly after, the system crashed.

Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen. The computer had found a way to get out of the game. When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory – just like in the movie.

(Thanks to Dennis Jerz for calling attention to this interesting essay.)

TRON is a silly movie (those outfits!), but “remaking” it across media (i.e., “transmediation”) generates the affect of the uncanny: re-imagining the “light cycles race” from the film as a computer game turns the narrative into a hyper-realized metafiction when testing it. It isn’t that the game was “just like the movie” in the way that it crashed — it is that the experience of the game is “just like” the fantastic experience of the characters in (and the spectator’s phantasy during) the film: the computer seems to have taken control of the very computer the gamer is playing with and, as artificial intelligence, has “come alive” in an autonomous way (by “going off the grid” and choosing to escape the game altogether).

We are the ghost in the machine. That’s the fantasy of Tron. And its lesson.

I enjoyed reading Wellman’s discussion of the joy of repeating this experience and making the somewhat primitive Apple IIG machine itself crash over and over again (because “protected memory” was not a part of computing yet). The compulsion to repeat the spectacular end — is this not a reenactment of the Freudian “death drive” (quite literally driven on light cycles) on the level of machines and artificial intelligence?

On Vanneman, Alan. “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone.” Bright Lights Film Journal 42 (Nov 2003).

In the “Dead or Alive?” section of his photo essay, “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone,” mystery writer/film critic Alan Vanneman gives us a veritable slide show lecture that reveals Hitchcock’s fixation with uncanny “inanimate objects that suggest life.”  To reveal Hitch’s fetishism of death, Vanneman especially is interested in the use of taxidermist art in the mise en scene: shot from below, cast in pools of shadow, or shot in extreme close-up, these inanimate bodies imply a sort of living, supernatural menace — whether to foreshadow a threat to a character (Jimmy Stewart encountering a stuffed tiger in The Man Who Knew Too Much) or to associate a character with that unnatural agency/threat (Norman Bates in Psycho, with a large stuffed bird peering down over his shoulder).

The stuffed dead bodies are evidence enough (and in Psycho they obviously all echo the role of Mother in Norman’s life).  But I particularly like this capture of Vera Miles as Lila Crane, virtually spinning in the mise en abyme of infinite reflection:

Of this shot, Vanneman writes:

Although Hitchcock used mirrors endlessly in his work, they are rarely used for overt drama. However, he achieves a phenomenal effect in Psycho when Lila Crane (Vera Miles) sees a double reflection of herself in two mirrors. Notice how the gaze of the “second Lila” (the far-right image) takes us deep into the center of the frame, where the gaze of the “third Lila” directs us back out of the frame toward the “first Lila” at the far left, who is turning around to confront who? Us? Someone behind us? Mrs. Bates?

Such fragmenting of personality is not only about us, but about the character implicitly experiencing an uncanny schizm of identity, encounter the self-as-Other — which is precisely what spectators do throughout a film, projecting their identities into character identification, while also introjecting them back into the self.  Uncanny moments like those in the shot above are moments where we recognize this process of doubling — when the world becomes a hall of mirrors and our self is palpably felt as always already being located — and dislocated — somewhere else.

On: “Looking For The Quintessential Scary Moment: Hughes’ Tiger, The Uncanny Valley and the Eye of Yamamura Sadako” by Adrian Bott (aka “Cavalorn”). 03/28/2004

The very first concrete thing I wanted to do with this weblog is call attention to one of my favorite weblogs — Stephanie Gray’s wonderful doctoral research project, “Exploring the Uncanny Valley”. On her home page she mentions the above livejournal article by Adrian Bott as the original source for her interest in all things Uncanny (especially zombies, clowns, and “real baby dolls”), so I read it today and wanted to post my reactions. But Gray’s livejournal and her “gallery of the uncanny valley” are must-sees and I recommend them highly for anyone reading this who is interested in Das Unheimliche in popular culture.

But on to The Ring. Bott’s conversational essay on “The Quintessential Scary Moment” is a good informal inquiry into the “mechanics of horror” that was prompted by his viewing of this classic of J-Horror cinema. Bott effectively describes what film theorists have called “the return of the gaze” when he discusses the film in detail. I particularly like how he describes the infamous climactic moment from The Ring, when the ‘ghost’ of the well steps out of the television screen to attack:

…the most frightening part…is not that Sadako emerges through the television screen. It is the moment when you suddenly know she is going to. This is literally nightmarish. Everyone is familiar with the nightmare when you suddenly know what is going to happen and you still cannot take your eyes away…..
And then, with a nerve-jangling screech on the soundtrack, the screen is filled with a clearly human-but-not-human eye, grotesquely distorted, reminiscent of a face pulled by a child. (What the rest of her face is like, we can only guess.) The effect is staggering. The faceless enigma of Sadako, which the film has steadily and subtly built up, is replaced by something horribly actual, which is looking at us. It is the one and only time that we look through the mask of hair and see Sadako clearly, and although what we see is the briefest of glimpses, it shows us all we need to know. There is nothing more quintessentially alive than an eye, and yet we know that Sadako is dead.

He goes on to describe how facial distortion generates fear, and touches up on research into what critics call “the uncanny valley” – roboticist Masahiro Mori’s assertion (back in 1970) that the closer that androids, robots, dolls, and other “nearly human” entities come to looking human, the more repulsive they become (primarily, because they appear as something like living dead corpses).

I intend to post more on the “uncanny valley” another time, particularly as it relates to prosthetic hands. (If you’re fascinated by the topic, do go to Stephanie Gray’s website for more). For now, I want to briefly note one other element that might be relevant to Bott’s ideas: the status of The Ring (Verbinski, 2002) as an American remake of a popular Japanese cultural artifact, (Ringu (Nakata, 1998)).

While I believe Bott may be discussing the original version, his point reminded me that the film gained popularity as a remake featuring Naomi Watts here in the USA, perhaps single-handedly launching the “J-Horror” craze (which, as my old friend Nicholas Rucka suggests, may be on the wane). Cinematic remakes, as I see them, always carry the potential for the uncanny by virtue of their status as “double” texts: that is, they are the “same” text, yet “different” — much like the embodied Self-as-Other of the doppelganger. Could not the “eye” that returns the gaze in the remake also be a return of the gaze of the Other — not the ghost of Sadako, but the spectatorial guilt of the violence that has been done to the original text — the repressed appropriation of another country’s popular culture — that is done in the name of profiting off the original? In other words, does the remade “eye” confront the American spectator with his own guilt over enjoying and reinforcing this cultural appropriation by Hollywood with his ticket?

These are the sort of questions I raise in my book, The Popular Uncanny (Guide Dog Books, 2009), and which I hope to expand in this weblog. I’m only getting started, but comments, feedback, discussion, and other links will always be most welcome.