Cremation Solutions' Urn

England’s Telegraph is running a “Best Pictures of The Year” gallery to wrap up 2009…and with images like the above from the “Weird Inventions” gallery — or even from their other bizarre and weird and spectacular galleries — one can only marvel over what a strange year it’s been…and how remarkably stranger it is going to get as we move into the second decade of the 21st century.

The photo above is a “personalized urn” that British firm Cremation Solutions can create, using 3-D facial reconstruction software. There is obviously an uncanny element to this urn, which reduces the body into ash stored into a simulacrum of one of its components — a dismembered head with a removable skullcap — in the form of an unblinking mannequin head whose features bare an alarming similarity to the dearly departed.

Curious to find out more about this product, I visited Cremation Solutions online, and after browsing some interesting “fingerprint jewelry”, quickly turned to their stunning catalog page for the personal urn. I call it “stunning” because I hadn’t expected to encounter an urn for President Obama!

Cremation Solutions' Floor Model: President Obama

At first I was taken aback by the image, both because of the accuracy of the likeness and because of the unexpected treatment of a living person, as if he were already dead. As it sunk in, I realized that most presidential figures and celebrities — indeed, anyone whose image is popular — are memorialized in a similar fashion, having their images frozen into postage stamps and plaster busts — and so, conceptually, this tribute is not so aberrant. But the uncanny is still omnipresent in the unblinking return of the gaze, the doppelganger of the dead person permanently placed on your mantle. There’s a reason why graveyards spook us: they are the spaces where the dead “live”; cremation urns can respect the role of the dead in a loving family’s home, but the more lifelike the urn, the more uncanny it becomes, making the boundaries between life and death — subject and object — very blurry. The commercial marketing of such memorials, both loved ones and celebrities, sold “on demand” (just $2600 for an urn that can hold all the ashes; $600 for a smaller keepsake), integrating the unfamiliar “magic” of high technology with the domestic familiarity of family photographs, brings this into the realm of the popular uncanny.

I could go on and on about the stock elements of the unheimlich in these urns. But one thing this particular practice brings to mind is a rising cultural trend toward employing 3D image rendering in ways that clone or replicate us. The art world seems to be responding to this with great interest. Visit the WebDesigner’s Depot on “Mind-Blowing Hyperrealistic Sculptures” or Eric Testroete’s Papercraft Self-Portrait series to muse over the implications and potentials of all this technology. I suspect we’ll see many more “personalized” objects mapped off images of ourselves or popular images in the media — there’s no end to our sense of wonder about ourselves, but one has to also wonder where natural fascination ends and cultural narcissism begins.

Eric Testroete's Papercraft Self-Portrait

[Thanks to Tim Dedopulos (@ghostwoods) for alerting us about the Telegraph photo on Twitter. (I'm @MikeArnzen on twitter, btw).]

While theories of the “uncanny valley” are debatable (see Hanson’s “Upending the Uncanny Valley” (.pdf)), the quest for human-like androids and automatons continue to compel their designers. At Carnegie-Mellon University’s anthropomorphism.org, I found an interesting early study of robot head design that shows how these designers sometimes make choices about when to make robots anthropomorphic (human-like), and when to avoid such resemblance.

In “All Robots Are Not Created Equal,” by Carl F. DiSalvo (et. al, 2002), analyzes the human perception of the humanoid robot head in alarming detail, from the length between the top of the head and the browline, to the diameter of the eyeball, to the distance between pupils. The researchers want to know: how human should a robot head be, and is this contingent upon the context in which they are employed? Their study suggests that eyes, mouth, ears and nose — in that order — seem to be the most important traits for us to perceive the “humanness” in a machine. But the most interesting conclusion they draw, in my view, is that the more servile and industrial the robot, the less we want to perceive its resemblance to us. Thus, not all robots are created equal: “consumer” robots often are purposely more “robotic-looking” (mechanical) in design, since they often perform servitude and routine functions that would crush the spirit of any real human, while others — especially “fictional” — robots are often the most human-like of all, reflecting our projected fantasies for them as “characters.” Desalvo and crew propose that the following elements of robot design would create the ideal “human-like” robot:

1. wide head, wide eyes
2. features that dominate the face
3. complexity and detail in the eyes
4. four or more features
5. skin
6. humanistic form language

To what degree is our notion of the “double” located on the head, the face and its various features? Freud’s classic itinerary of uncanny traits include doll’s eyes and language, and I would suggest that the more the traits listed above appear in a doppelganger, the more uncanny that double might be. The role of the uncanny valley is at work here, and while it not directly addressed in DiSalvo’s article, it’s worth considering the degree to which the factor of increasing “likeness” in robot head design follows the x-axis of the classic uncanny valley:

Mori's 'Uncanny Valley' Schematic

It is useful to consider not only the “uncanny” in this chart, but the way that that assumptions about use value and instrumentality lie behind its structure. There is a politics of self/othering at work in this schema that is rarely discussed. One of the fundamental principles of the Uncanny as it is classically understood in aesthetics is that, symbolically, the “double” is a harbinger of death for the subject that perceives it. This is a complicated notion, but on one level what this means is that when the self perceives itself as disembodied and located in another entity — through its mirror image — we unconsciously recognize how “replaceable” we are and this is felt as uncanny. We do not only respond, typically, with fear: we also feel compelled to separate the Self from the Other as a form of protection against the threat that the Other presents. A power relationship transpires: the psyche construes a hierarchical separation that institutes the Self in a higher subject position than the Other, in order to retain its sense of mastery over identity. The Other is subjugated into a lower position. While it is “harmless” in fiction, this is also a dream that reproduces the politics of everyday life.

There is a generalized fear of robots and other forms of artificial intelligence “replacing” mankind; we see it everywhere in science fiction, but it is also a very real threat to the labor force. Robot design participates in a self/othering dynamic that domesticates these anxieties. Could the uncanny valley be a symptom of class conflict as much as some organic reaction formation? I think so.

On a lighter note, test these theories against the Life magazine photogallery, “Robots We Fear, Robots We Like”

I am currently teaching an online horror literature course in “Psychos and the Psyche” for graduate students in our MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University. This month we are studying Freud’s article on “Das Unheimlich” and reading a fascinating new anthology of horror fiction called The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, edited by Sarah Eyre and Rah Page (Comma Press, 2008). The book features some of the best British horror authors alive, including Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, A.S. Byatt, Christopher Priest and many more…even Matthew Holness (whose double, Garth Merenghi, is echoed here). The book definitely deserved the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for “Best Anthology” for its ambition, and it makes for an interesting study in all things Unheimlich.

Mirrors, Doubles and Masks... Cover art for THE NEW UNCANNY designed by Sarah Eyre and David Eckersall

The book, essentially, is a literary experiment. All its contributors were challenged to read Freud’s seminal essay on “The Uncanny,” and then write a fresh fictional interpretation in order to explore what the Uncanny might mean 100 years later — today — in the 21st century, “to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps.”

The introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of “The Uncanny” in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. Page explains Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often, and turns to another essay on the Uncanny — Rilke’s “Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1913) — to discover convincing reasons why. I love the way Page concludes the introduction: “[The Uncanny] puts us on edge — that place we really should be from time to time — and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.”

Keeping with the experimental spirit of this book, I thought I’d ask my “Psychos and the Psyche” class to review the book as a group. I have assigned each classmate a specific story in the book, and asked them to write a response (in a comment to this blog entry) that addresses the following three questions:

1) How does the author try to “update” the Freudian Uncanny in this story?
2) Does the story succeed as a work of uncanny literature?
3) What does the story teach us about the Uncanny in today’s culture?

[Warning: spoilers are inevitable! SURPRISES WILL LIKELY BE GIVEN AWAY. And all rights and opinions belong to the commenting students themselves. They will appear intermittently between now and the deadline of Oct 6th.]

Update: You can read MY review of this book (with fewer spoilers) on The Goreletter here: “A Double-Take on The New Uncanny” — MAA

You can order The New Uncanny directly from Comma Press online (be careful to note the different options for overseas orders).

Vytorin is a single pill — a drug that combines two different medicines (Zetia and Zocor) to combat the two kinds of cholesterol (generally called “good” and “bad” cholesterol”) which they identify as coming from two different sources (“food & family”). As Time magazine reports, there may be truth in these claims, and also problems with it — but the effectiveness of the drug is not my interest. Instead, I want to focus on how all these “dualities” — of medicine, cholesterol, and its origin — are overdetermined in the advertising, repeating some strangely familiar structures of the Uncanny that we often find in consumer culture. Similar to products like Wrigley’s “Doublemint” Gum, Vytorin lends itself to a marketing campaign that actively employs the figure of the double (der doppelganger) to draw the attention of the consumer. As I argue in The Popular Uncanny, in mass marketing and advertising the structures of the Uncanny often become ambiguously attractive and repulsive representations, reflecting our ambivalent anxieties about consumer culture. Here, the idea that “you are what you eat” is taken quite literally. It’s kind of cute, the first time you see it, but in the endless stream of associative pairings between people and food, one becomes progressively convinced that there is something universal about these claims, and that, perhaps, all food mirrors people (and vice-versa). While this ad — like most pharmaceutical advertising — projects a wish for a miracle cure, the use of doubling is so overdetermined that is also uncannily disturbing, if only because these matings feel predestined and beyond our control.

In the YouTube video above — from Vytorin’s infamously clever television campaign a few years ago — the ad showed a series of screens in which a diversity of overtly costumed actors are associated (first by “dissolves” into a single universal plate, then in panels, side by side on screen) with tasty foods and fancy dishes. The overt correspondences between body morphology, fashion choices, and food dishes is quite striking; the symmetry in design and the patterned replication of color schemes across the frame is orchestrated in a way that one simply cannot overlook the “double” message: people are food. Physical traits as well as personality are “naturally” reflected by our choice in food products. We are what we eat; and in the case of cholesterol, it can kill us, because we can’t help ourselves, and the inheritance of our family lines only affirms this.

This visual personification of ice cream and waffles and hot dogs is more than just clever ad design. Here we have an example of uncanny doubling, but it is different than the traditional “doppelganger” in that we are presented with a live human being whose “alter ego” is the food product — an inanimate (or in the case of meat, dead) object on a plate…a double which the living implicitly consume.

There is a subtle cannibalism at work in the dreamlike psychology here. If you see a scrumptious pile of pancakes in one shot, you probably don’t want to eat the person they associate with it, but the implied message is that these people consume these projections of themselves (and perhaps more subtly, vice-versa). Vytorin is suggesting that some people are “naturally” attracted to foods, no matter how artificial or prepared they might be — and by showing these associations in a lengthy series, subtly argues that this compulsory food choice can be generalized as a “compulsion to repeat” that is, simply, human nature.

The double is the “harbinger of death” and Vytorin presents itself as a cure not for cholesterol, per se, but for our anxiety about our predestined fate. If it is “natural,” moreover, then it is “healthy,” and a manufactured pharmaceutical company obviously benefits from framing itself as a “natural” cure or preventative medicine. Commercial pill brand names often pun on our desire for infinite life and health (as I have argued elsewhere about the pain reliever, Aleve). The name “Vytorin” even sounds life-giving in its prefix (“Vyt-”, implying “vital,” as in “vitamin”), before it battles choles-”tor”-al with its “statIN”-based formula. But beyond that, in the ad, the focus on the communion of “food” and “family” transforms the scary point it makes about the origin of cholesterol into a story of “organic” harmony and healthy wish-fulfillment. All these implicit health claims drive home the subtle message that Vytorin is a healthy choice, enabling you to go ahead and eat whatever you like, because it is your destiny, your nature, and the pill fits into this schema as natural law.

Of course, no matter how healthy and uplifting the product might sound, or even be, the ad benefits, too, from fear, as all advertising does — and with most medical advertising, the fear being alluded to here is the fear of death. If you look like a egg salad, and you compulsively eat egg salad, you are only one step away from becoming the equivalent of egg salad. The blurring of boundaries between signifier and signified is an ambivalence that is both cutely humorous and darkly scary. The harbinger of death is the uncanny double.

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.

If you don’t already know, LOLcats are artfully captioned photographs of animals, as in the image above. They’re pretty funny, entirely created by the visitors to icanhascheezburger.com (whose domain name refers to one of the first LOLcat images that got widely distributed online and started this whole thing).  Like many online “sharing” sites, I consider LOLcats a fantastic form of new media folk art that attests to the popular draw of the uncanny.

How can a cute little kitten be “uncanny”?  The given framework for these captioned photos imbues the subject of the image (the cat) with a language it does not speak (a regressive, childlike “kitten” language of its own invention that gives the cat a distinctive “voice”), blurring the boundary between human and animal.  Freud calls this “the omnipotence of thoughts” in his article on “The Uncanny” — a psychological projection inherent to animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic fantasies.  Thus, it is quite normal that this unnatural and imaginary language of the LOLCAT is the equivalent of “baby speak”:  the animals are really like children more than they are like cats.  The language in the caption, moreover, matches the human-like expressions and gestures in the image so well that a spectator may be struck by the synchronicity at play, and perhaps feels the uncanny affect because reality (these are actual photos) and fantasy (the imagined/joke situation identified by the caption) become blurred, if only for a moment, springing us into laughter.  Not all the LOLcat images are about danger and death (as the one above — “nositz!”), and rarely are they “dark” or “scary” in their affect, but the humor can be intellectually unsettling because there is often a “secret” desire that the cat seems to be expressing in its caption which also reminds us of Freud’s discussion of the Uncanny as an expression of that which was to remain a secret (for him, the Repressed), suddenly returned and revealed.  Our childhood wishes (for a pet, like a doll, that can talk) seem actualized.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that the group responsible for “LOLCats” would build on their popularity by hosting a similar “photoshopping” site in the form of a “doppelganger” maker: totallylookslike.com.

The pictures that users upload speak for themselves, by displaying side by side graphic associations.  Most users upload pictures of celebrities and film characters that look alike, as if they were unintentional “doubles” for one another by virture of their physical features and poses.

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply that they look like long-lost-twins, but they also provide the sort of “a-ha!” moment of recognition that Freud talks about in his essay on “Das Unheimliche” — the click of comprehending a “secret” correspondence, as if — with the image above, for instance — the unspoken inspiration behind Tim Burton’s artistic treatment of The Penguin was suddenly unveiled. 

Of course, there are also “natural” lookalikes, or body doubles in the popular imagination.  More common on totallylookslike.com are jokester post that bend the rules a bit to generate humor in ways that touch on uncanny similarities to make a point.

Here we have “New York” — a realiTV personality — matched up with Janice, a character from The Muppet Show. Yes, they both wear too much mascara and lip gloss. Is that a sufficient condition for them to be lookalikes? Or is this simply a photographic slur? 

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply the unexpected correspondence between the appearances of these TV “celebrities,” but the momentary confusion that opens up between puppet and human being when first glancing at the images side-by-side. Consciously or not, there is a degree to which the person who is making this visual pun is calling “New York” no more than a media puppet. The aggression “revealed” by the uncanny logic of this joke could betray a racist or sexist hostility, as well.  But beyond this hostility, perhaps there lurks a suggestion that this form of folk art has the ability to disempower the dominance of mass marketed artforms, such as the ”manufactured” celebrities and characters of popular TV, through uncanny expressions of mockery and parody. 

The site, at its most brilliant, can be relevatory of how forms of new media folk art perform populist expressions of resistance to (if not an outright subversion of) dominant discourses, by taking familiar images of power and status (often embodied by celebrities) and employing them in unintended ways to make a counterpoint. Above, the Vogue magazine cover is taken to task for not only suggesting something racist in its treatment of an African American basketball star as an animal (its “King Kong” reference — which is similar to the Muppet joke above), but also by lowering the ‘high fashion/high art’ status of Vogue down to the level of mere propaganda (the Army poster that originally intertextually borrowed from Kong).

Of course, the comparison attempted in the ‘totallylookslike’ image above is a bit of a stretch on behalf of the person who posted it, because they could have easily just paired the Vogue cover with an image from the King Kong film itself, which it clearly alludes to. Thus, we feel the critic, rather than the creator, at play, being highly selective, and the joke therefore doesn’t quite succeed on the level of the uncanny. Anything smacking of a critical human agency at play — a mediator — reduces the uncanny affect to a mere joke.  The person who is making the comparison cannot be present for the uncanny response to “work” — it is like spotting the zipper on the monster’s back in a horror film:  it betrays artifice and it’s “magic” is therefore disempowered.

In the above, a rock band’s album cover is equated to a familiar popular photograph that tabloid journalists famously proclaimed to be proof of an alien landscape or the “face of god” on Mars. The supernatural “face” is apparent in the accidental cast of shadow, itself an uncanny appearance.  But anyone looking at the image of Queen next to it recognizes the latter as a carefully posed and purposely abstract work of photographic art, if not also a nostalgic memory of something they may have forgotten in their record collection.  It is a clever comparison.  And it’s quite funny.  But it’s not quite uncanny. What we have, actually, is art referring to art — photos referring to other photos — and ultimately this is true of the entire site. 

What the site really shows us is consumers of popular culture trying to make sense out of the infinite stream of messages and images that circulate in the media.  That sense can only be an allusion or a visual pun – the associative logic of the dreamwork.  What is the dream of icanhascheezburger.com?  Perhaps it is about what its namesake reveals:  an inner child crying for junk food.  Only here we have the commodification of art into something resembling a cheesburger.  The dream-wish expressed by the site depends on a withdrawal from reason and a repression of our awareness that popular art is a commodity, a manufactured experience that substitues for the authentic.  By pointing out the “doppelgangers” of mass culture through visual puns and pop culture allusions, the site is like a church of the popular uncanny, its posters bearing witness to “miracles” of fantastic correspondence.

 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.

If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering:  gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins? 

The ad itself is a twin:  it almost directly mimes the dancing silhouettes of those iPod TV commercials in its use of lighting, illuminating the pocket-sized product with its magical tracer lines that string back like earbud lines.  I have discussed the uncanniness of the iPod marketing previously on this blog; here the gum is imbued with a sort of magical power in that it seems to dance along with the dancer, spinning on his finger. 

But what’s more, it is also a media doppelganger:  the song is by Chris Brown, whose “urban” Doublemint jingle was commissioned by Wrigley’s with the full intention of being reproduced as part of a separately-released R&B song (called “Forever”) by Brown for his 2007 album, “Exclusive.”  The Wall Street Journal explains:

Other than the “double your pleasure” line, the lyrics to the song and the TV jingle are different. But the melody and the music behind it are nearly indistinguishable. A 60-second radio ad scheduled to air starting Friday further blurs the line between the song and the commercial. It starts with a section of “Forever,” and moves seamlessly into lyrics promoting the gum. “I’ma take you there, so don’t be scared,” Mr. Brown sings. “Double your pleasure; double your fun. It’s the right one, Doublemint gum.”

The campaign was conceived and executed by Mr. Stoute, a former senior executive at Interscope Records who counts rapper Jay-Z as a partner in his business. The idea was to connect the hit song and the jingle in listener’s minds. That way, Mr. Stoute says, “by the time the new jingle came out, it was already seeded properly within popular culture.”

Similar campaigns also took place with jingles for Juicy Fruit and Big Red. Although rap has always engaged in the art of cultural appropriation (referencing consumer goods to comment on mass culture or to appropriate the power of the dominant discourse for their own use on the margins), here the planning and deal-making that goes on behind such crass commercialism gives one pause. The literary form of “allusion” (an intertextual referencing strategy already widely practiced in the hip-hop) is not used to make an artistic statement of any kind, but is instead a prefabricated ruse, calling the integrity of the songwriting (if not the writer and the industry itself) into serious question.  At best, the stunt is redeemable as a sort of inside joke: Brown could be winking at us, suggesting that all music is commodity anyway, so what’s the difference?  Might as well make a buck, and one might excuse Brown’s selling out as yet another symbolic appropriation of the dominant culture by the marginalized. But at its worst, Brown’s jingle is the music industry’s desperate attempt at something akin to product placement in the movies: a orchestrated attempt to “plant” a cultural reference in the bald interest of breeding brand familiarity and loyalty for a commercial product.  Either way, a listener should feel cheated, I think, because it’s clear that there is advertising revenue at play here that cuts across markets which would otherwise be kept separate…unless, that is, one thinks of music as freely available as commercial TV.

I’m not writing this just to damn the campaign, but to show how tropes of the uncanny often function to wow us in order to make a spectacle out of consumerist fantasy. There’s little difference, ultimately, between Chris Brown choosing Wrigley’s Doublemint for his “dance partner” and any athlete who accepts a product endorsement on his uniform. But on a broader, cultural scale the signs become detached from their products and float freely in a quest to saturate the audience’s memory. When the boundaries between art and commerce are erased, tropes of the uncanny often become the method of erasure — and when the click of recognition hits us between the two texts we respond with a sense of deja vu that seems supernaturally predetermined. Clearly, it is not supernatural — it is, simply, a pretty savvy marketing scheme — but what it ultimately does is reify the “power” of the advertising industry as a “magic system” (as Raymond Williams theorizes it). As I show in the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny, Wrigley’s gum campaign has a long history of accomplishing this, with its doppelganger twins and its never-ending quest to get consumers to “remember this (w)rapper.”

The song hit #3 on the Billboard charts. There are direct gum references in the song and also in the music video, such as when Brown pops a stick of gum that almost “magically” launches the fantasy sequence in its opening segment. The ad at the top of this entry uncannily is resurrected in various light tricks in the video, as well, in which Brown “dances forever.” In the video, his partner is a woman; in the ad, a consumer product — are they not therefore fundamentally equated as ‘objects’ of pleasure in this intertextual way?

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!]