Perfect Petzzz Sales Kennel

“These adorable pets offer a real pet ownership experience without the hassles and expense. Say goodbye to feedings and vet bills. Say hello to lots of love and cuddles. Perfect Petzzz – the ultimate pet.” — Perfect Petzzz website

“It is not a toy,” [VP of Marketing] Clarkson says, “but this is the closest you can get to real pet ownership without the hassles or responsibilities of owning a real pet.” — journalgazette.net

“In 2005, Perfect Petzzz® generated more than $20 million in retail sales in its first full year of operation. In fact, the Perfect Petzzz cart program was named the most successful new product concept in 2005. With the overwhelming demand for these lifelike puppies and kittens, we’ve seen other companies try to produce imitations.” — CD3 Press Release to PP Mall Dealers

Perfect Petzzz are stuffed animals that breathe.  The autonomous movement of their fur — controlled by a battery-powered engine you don’t expect to be there — is enough to trick the eye into presuming that the puppy or kitten curled up on the floor is actually a living, breathing, pet.  Cute, and perhaps attractive to your hand’s caress, until you touch it and realize it’s not real.  Then you are startled and the toy enters the already doll-crowded realm of the popular uncanny.

Of course, the Perfect Petzzz (the ”zzz’s” are for snoring)  are plastic.  And therefore the animal it represents is literally as dead as it looks, with its eyes closed and body stiffened into a disturbing fetal curl.  It should not move, but it does, and it is this representation of death-stirred-to-life — of the presumed inanimate object surprising us with its animation — that gets our reaction.  The tricky switcheroo of statuses between familiar and unfamiliar spin the roulette wheel of certainty:  the domesticated animal is rendered un-familiar (stuffed, inanimate) then restored to a heimish (cozy) status of sleeping and napping..

It is surely cute, and there is little difference between a breathing stuffed animal and a toy doll that burps or blinks.  Of course, even the cutest of dolls are inherently uncanny in the way they are semblances, pale imitations of life…but the creepy thing in this case is not so much its status as automaton, as the fact that this “sleeper” never wakes up.  These are comatose pets…and that, perhaps, is what makes them so “perfect.” Like the commodities these organic creatures have become, our domesticated pets are “perfect” when they are behaved, controlled, and easily replaceable after they expire.  Even more, these plastic pals are simulacratic forms of taxidermy (and surely a savvy taxidermist has already borrowed the motor or at least the concept for an experiment or two).  Another form of death, fantastically alive through the magic show of animism, nostalgia and fantasy.  Living, breathing, death.

Petzzz Adoption Center

"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.

Rob Horning‘s recent essay in PopMatters — called “Doomed to Dilettantism” — performs an alarming and fantastic excoriation of the trend toward substituting “professionalism” in the arts with “amateurism” by consumers. Ingeniously, Horning connects the proliferation of faux-artisan strip mall stores like Michael’s (the chain craft store “Where Creativity Happens”) to the consumerist propensity for instant art without work found in such manufactured-but-ultimately-empty products for purchase like Paint-by-Numbers kits and Guitar Hero. These are simulacra that pre-package the artistic process, transforming it into a consumer item, slowly depreciating the cultural value of art in the process.

Horning’s essay is important, I think, especially in the way he ties all of this in to the economy. His article is not so much a snubbing of folk art or a call for a return to the great divide between high art and lowbrow, as it is a lament about the erasure of meaningful production altogether under capitalism. He’s captured what is so pathetic about games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band — whose karaoke appeal (as I discovered over the holidays personally) is really quite fun, but whose faux instruments are irrationally consumerist and whose existence would seem unfathomable a decade ago. As Horning points out: for the same price of the kit needed for Rock Band, you can buy real musical equipment! Instead of creating art what happens is that players are trained to play along, buying more and more accessories (available in an infinite shopping mall that opens up via online access, with its downloadable songs and pricey plastic “instruments” and much, much more). While a game like Rock Band does involve players in a team and there is a joissance to be experienced that is not unlike group dance, the truth is that even the relationships between players is a faux social relationship. The players’ attentions are mediated by the TV screen which must be studied and followed like a script, rather than performing as a harmonious ensemble, riffing off the sounds created by one another. Indeed, you often have to ignore your fellow players’ mistakes if you hope to survive, and the only impromptu action you can take is lifting your guitar into the air to pretend that you’re doing a solo. Yet the pleasure of the game comes when everyone is working in uncanny synchronicity, timed with the pulsing lights — we win when become the stars on the screen by rote repetition of the programmed score, keeping the machine streaming prefab sounds in a steady and uninterrupted stream. Mechanical reproduction is the objective. It is, ultimately, the very antithesis of artistic production.

Horning argues that such an activity deifies consumption and that this sort of artistic paradigm transforms how we relate to artwork. We see it as a collectible, rather than an experience. The “aura” of the artist dissipates, replaced by the commodity fetish. We begin to value quantity over quality, in order to display and advertise our pop culture status, rather than genuinely appreciating what it is we’re collecting, or attempting to create anything of use or cultural value on our own. In the case of paint-by-numbers art, we have no time to develop the skills required to refine our talents; we have no desire to work for pleasure. In the process, the arts become a deskilled industry — just like the handcraft of furniture making is replaced by push-button factory labor — and we subsequently become bored and alienated by the arts, driven only to fill the void with more and more stuff as we throw away one thing (or momentarily give tribute to it in the collection) and move on to the next one. The result is ultimately ennui and a quest to stave it off with more consumer goods that ultimately leave us dissatisfied all over again.

In games like Rock Band and Guitar hero, we don’t create the music: the music creates us, and we recognize this in the uncanny avatars that refract back to us, screaming and pounding the skins on our TV screens.

A cheeky November 2008 webisode on TrendHunterTv.com reveals just how strange American’s fascination with such things has become in “Faux Rockstar”:

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”:

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.

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.

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.

There’s a lot of talk lately about how uncanny Tina Fey’s impression of VP hopeful Sarah Palin really is, and with the next season of her Emmy-award winning TV show,  30 Rock, getting ready to launch at the end of the month, I thought the timing was right to post a considerationabout this very self-conscious — and hilarious — program, which directly referred to “uncanny valley” theory last season, helping bring the issue to light in the popular imagination.

Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley” theory is gaining notoriety in popular culture already, generally. Mori argued that as non-human entities (monsters, robots, androids, etc.) evolve to appear and move more and more like actual human beings, the more repulsive we find them. The “valley” refers to the negative emotional response we feel in response to an encounter with these entities, as represented in this chart (c/o Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato at the journal, Android Science):

Conversations about the “uncanny valley” have been taking place in numerous communities recently, from researchers in android science to digital animators to performance artists. Artists and designers have been chatting, for example, about the differences between the success of Pixar’s Incredibles or Wall-E and the failure of shows like The Polar Express, suggesting that the latter comes too close to the valley while the former avoids it altogether. (Ward Jenkins elaborates in depth). Gamers especially are getting into the concept; fans of PS3′s upcoming game, Heavy Rain are talking about its uncanny realism, and fans of the Wii are talking about how the design of the games on that platform avoid the valley altogether. But these conversations and experiments have been on the margins of media culture for the most part… until a popular television sitcom this year employed the theory in an overt and hilarious way.

On April 24, 2008, the NBC television comedy 30 Rock aired its 13th episode of its second season, called “Succession.” The theory is actually debated overtly during the show when the two most radically off-kilter characters, variety show headliner Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and staff writer Frank (Judah Friedlander), become obsessed with designing “Grand Theft Pornography” — the “world’s greatest pornographic video game” — and this ludicrous plot arc unfolds with wacky and surprising results as the characters become more and more obsessed with perfecting their game.

On Television Without Pity, Michael Neal summarizes the way the theory of the Uncanny Valley is delivered in the show, which employs a parody of the above chart:

Frank is attempting to explain to Tracy why his porn video game idea won’t work. It’s because of something called “the uncanny valley.” As artificial representations of humans become more and more realistic they reach a point where they stop being endearing and become creepy. Frank whips out a chart to prove his theory exists and when Tracy asks him to break it down in Star Wars he does just that: On one side of the scale are R2D2 and C3P0. “Nice,” remarks Tracy. On the other side is a real human like Han Solo. “He acts like he doesn’t care but he does,” again says Tracy stating the obvious to usual comedic perfection. But the lowest point on the scale is “a CGI storm trooper or Tom Hanks in Polar Express.” Paying careful attention I notice that only slightly above that low point is “wax figure of Nicole Kidman.”

(Neal also posts Tracy Jordan’s hilarious “notes” for the video project on his blog at slapclap.com).

What’s funny about this to me is that the theory is employed in such a serious fashion about a ludicrous and juvenile gamer fantasy. Highbrow and lowbrow elements are thereby swapped in a topsy-turvy fashion, transgressing unspoken cultural boundaries and thereby revealing them. The least intellectual characters on the show — empowered by their silly quest for porno perfection — suddenly become studious and drop their slacker routines to engage in more serious work than they ever have on the show before. Naturally, all of this juvenalia “works” so well because it ostensibly shows fans a “new” side of the characters, suggesting that they’ve really just been slacker heroes all along: given incentive, they could be geniuses who create masterpieces…it’s just that the world they live in rarely gives them “incentive” enough on their own terms.

Is 30 Rock mocking Uncanny Valley theory as a geek fetishism, or is something more at play here than just mockery that theories of the uncanny might explain? I’m not entirely sure, but when I consider the progam in terms of uncanny “doubling,” I find its clever allusions to popular culture at work here very interesting. As serious and studious as Tracy and Frank become in their creative act, there worldviews are entirely delimited by references to other forms of popular culture (Star Wars, Polar Express, etc.). One could read these “slacker heroes” as engaged in active “play”, poaching from culture high and low, manipulating its tropes to their own creative ends, breaking out of their passive role as consumers of media. They are, like dedicated fans, “scholars” of their genre, capable of theorizing and applying scholarship to their productive work. But the problem here is that they already ARE media tropes in and of themselves. Thus, everything can only be understood self-reflexively. The comedy becomes a parody not simply of intellectualism, or of game fandom, but also of itself.

Tracy: “My genius has come alive, like toys when your back is turned. I see potential for erotica in everything around me. This cup. This table. Even you Kenneth.”

Kenneth: “Well, I am wearing a cuffed trouser today.”

Kenneth’s deadpan response to Tracy’s crazy mixture of references to the uncanny is apt because it suggests that, just like any given object in the room (cup, table), a character is ultimately always a non-human object, operating as a “stand in” for real human relations that nevertheless is alive and seemingly autonomous…just like Tracy’s “genius” which “comes alive”.

The show constantly turns inward, nods at — and more often mocks — itself, before deflecting back out to the culture at large. And this episode’s treatment of the uncanny raises the status of the show as a work of popular culture itself to the foreground. The metafiction of the whole “uncanny valley” plot arc ruptures the seamless fantasy of the already metafictional sitcom, because 30 Rock is already a show about the making of a show: in the narrative proper, Tracy and Frank are an actor and a writer on a fictional TV show called “TGS” — which is already a sort of “doppelganger” in its own right, since the familiar actors from “SNL” (Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan — and Alec Baldwin, who has appeared on SNL so often he might as well have been a cast member) are playing actors/writers on the fictional set of a fictional variety show very much like SNL, which is run on the same network as SNL, and produced by the same producer as SNL. This chain of intertextuality is difficult to follow because of the parallels that it incessantly solicits, the constant cloning of cultural semes, the textual reproduction of other texts at a rate of near-panic. All of these levels of plot and intertextual references bounce off each other in an echo chamber of meaning that is not unlike a “hall of mirrors” narrative about popular narrative itself.

Thus, when “Succession” depicts these characters creating yet another fictional plot (for the game) inside of an already many-chambered plot, it becomes a metacommentary that threatens to reveal how flat their characterization really is, how constructed the storyline is from the thin tissue of other texts, and therefore shatter our suspension of disbelief. This may very well be why the creation of the video game storyline becomes like a parody of the film Amadeus Amadeus when it mocks Jordan’s lowbrow quest for a “masterpiece.” Often the show will spin plotlines more reminiscent of SNL sketches than they are of genuine charcacter conflicts, since the introduction of yet another “text-in-production” threatens to topple the metafictional coherency of the show. There are moments so hyperreal that the writers are driven to seek an intertextual touchstone elsewhere in pop culture, suggesting that the characters in THOSE shows are the flat ones, that THESE characters know better and are just acting. But it can never quite evade the control of the media. These media characters — who are media consumers themselves — are also, uncannily, autonomously, themselves creations of the consumerist media. Thus, while the “porno video game masterpiece” quest narrative is perhaps the most ludicrous and unbelievable of all the plotlines of 30 Rock, it somehow transcends mere mockery and opens a doorway into intellectual uncertainty that probably hasn’t been as successfully tried since Seinfeld boldly told the imaginary story of it’s own show as a show about “nothing.”

This is the genius of the structure of 30 Rock (and perhaps why it survives while similar shows such as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip die off) — as an ongoing metafictional series, it can refer to other texts — even those from cultural theory and android science — indefinitely, while at the same time parodying itself. This is not merely self-depricating humor; the show works so well because it is itself a reflection of another text, a “looking glass world” of SNL’s variety show format — while remaining just different enough from that show to avoid any “valley” of repulsion that audiences familiar with Saturday Night Live might feel. It successfully avoids the status of Saturday Night Living Dead by being more than SNL’s other.

Bread that Talks

Obviously, no one believes bread can talk. But Schwebel’s ‘taliano — “The Bread with the Foreign Accent” — would like us to believe its Italian bread has an identity so Italian that it can speak to us. 

I used this example in my recent lecture at the Alpha Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop for Young Writers, arguing that fictional “fantasy” is everywhere around us – and that the Uncanny is the genre of our everyday lives, lurking in messages like this that we see so often in popular culture that we’ve become immune to them. 

Part of my reason for bringing this up was to suggest that creative writers should be on the lookout for messages like these, because everyday life is ripe with concepts that can prompt ideas for fantastic tales.  Another reason I raised this matter was to discuss the differences between fantasies in advertising and fantasies in stories:  and the difference, we agreed, was that stories provide meaning to our lives, whereas consumable goods simply pretend to do more than they really can, in a quest for profit and attention. They use not only consumer fantasy, but also tropes of the literary fantastic and the uncanny to persuade us…into not only making a purchase, but also to develop a sort of brand loyalty. They accomplish this by anthropomorphizing their objects and framing them as living creatures just like us, with personality and voice.

We don’t believe it. We have, in Freud’s words, “surmounted” our infantile belief in the “omnipotence of thoughts” — the anthropomorphic and animistic fantasy that would allow something like dough to be more like man than flour and water. But we suspend disbelief anyway, because the regressive “inner child” still wants to believe and the unconscious will believe whatever it wants to in a quest to consume.

I didn’t go too far into psychoanalysis at the Alpha Writer’s Workshop. But to stimulate story ideas with the group, I asked the students: “What if bread could talk to us? What do you think it would say?”

They laughed, and started saying things like “Don’t eat me!” and “Oh no…not the toaster!” in funny accents.

Exactly. The back of the bread package features a nostalgic-looking image of an old style baker shoving a loaf into the fiery oven. Does this not take on a creepy and chilling meaning, if we are to suspend our disbelief in bread that talks in a foreign accent? My point is ludicrous, of course, but this is because the message is mixed: they seem to be saying, “our product is just like people — so let’s throw it in the oven.” How are we to make sense of such horrifying contradictions?

One answer lies in the psychology of projection. If we were to entertain the childhood fantasy that these products really are living creatures, with human abilities, then our own desire to consume logically becomes mirrored back at us: we will fear that what we want to eat might also want to eat us. Consumption is inherently aggressive. (My point is related to object-relations theory, especially Melanie Klein’s theory of the “bad breast”). Thus, we must be reminded — with images of ovens and kitchens that appeal to our adult sense of mastery and civilization — that this really is just dough we’re talking about, after all.

Even so, nothin’ says lovin’ like…dough.

[See the disturbingly brilliant "Yeast Infection" exhibition to see how various artists have explored the Doughboy's dark side!]