The Popular Uncanny

The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations” — are dedicated to science fiction, fantasy and horror television. My favorite section is the Weirdness Isolation category, collecting tropes which are “based around making the world stay close to ours with the sole exception of specific strange things.” Those “strange things” are elements of the uncanny that are often brought to the surface of popular television programs.

Take, for example, the trope they term the “Weirdness Censor” — a story universe where “it seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. Literally, they [the minor characters] can’t see anything too strange” and therefore ignore the weirdness that surrounds them…while the main characters in the story are entirely focused on interacting with it. This trope is otherwise known as “Sunnydale Syndrome” — named after the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where everyone is oblivous to the vampires and other evil creatures who walk around right under their noses (quite literally, the high school is located right on top of a portal to hell, the Hellmouth).

Sunnydale Syndrome is, essentially, a social allegory for what psychoanalysts term “disavowal” on a cultural scale. Like “living in denial,” disavowal is a process where the mind unconsciously refuses to acknowledge something potentially traumatizing to the ego when confronted with it in reality — the very idea is instead “inconceivable” to the mind. This is closely related to the repressive nature of the Uncanny; that is, the “return of the repressed” is at once felt emotionally and yet also disavowed as irrational or impossible.

I find such psychoanalytical approaches interesting because they expand our understanding of horror stories beyond such “reductive” notions as battles between good and evil. Thus, for example, when Buffy and her pals battle the demons of Hellspawn, we are witnessing something symbolically healthy and pragmatic in contradistinction to the culture in which the story is staged, which is treated as unhealthy in its passive, perpetual state of denial. That denial, that passivity on the cultural level, is what contributes to the social problems that the heroes of the story are symbolically grappling with.

This schema allows for some interesting play on the field of the uncanny throughout the Buffy the Vampire TV series. See, for example, Kelly Kromer’s essay, “Silence as Symptom” in Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies (5.3).

Heavy Metal Satan Fingers by John 'Bean' Hastings

A little known fact (to me, anyway…and it may not be a fact at all) about signs of the horns (aka “Devil’s Horns” aka “the Goat” aka “Satan Fingers”):

Though not necessarily the first to ever use [horned hand gestures] in a “rock” setting, [heavy metal singer Ronnie James] Dio was without question the one who turned it into a popular symbol. So while legions of rock fans test their metal (as it were), they are also unconsciously forming an enormous protective shield against the power of the evil eye. The next time you feel the uncomfortable gaze of a stranger and fear the wrath of the evil eye, perhaps the safest place to go is your nearest heavy metal venue.

– from “The Eyes Have It” — an interesting cultural history of the Evil Eye at the Wunderkammer at Curious Expeditions: Traveling and Exhuming the Extraordinary Past.

In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud describes the “source of the dread of the evil eye” as a sort of sublimated jealousy, rather than a fear of supernatural power:

Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its commend.

By comparing a person “who possesses something…valuable and fragile,” Freud seems to level the person who glares with an evil eye to something akin to a dog snarling over its bone when anyone approaches it. Thus, I read Freud’s argument about the evil eye as not merely about the psychology of envy (see Hakim Bey’s musings on this), but a manifest sign of a power conflict, an ideologeme of the political unconscious. That is, the evil eye can be read as an ideological sign that circulates in a political economy: those with fragile (symbolic/economic) power unconsciously wield it over those without such power, out of fear that they’ll lose such power.

So where in contemporary culture do we find the archaic sign of the evil eye? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has become generalized as a cyberoptic, embodied by the camera lens of “big brother” and integrated into the panoptical gaze of a paranoiac culture. I need to think about this more fully, because the evil eye has become so domesticated, its everywhere.

But for now, is it too much to suggest that when metal fans thrash their devil horns along with the rich rock musicians on stage, this is a collective sign of class resistance? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s as patently obvious as a crowd of subjects giving a king the middle finger in a transgressive festival. But the grounding of the “mal occia” heavy metal hand sign in the uncanny folklore of the evil eye makes it a very rich metaphor to consider, in terms of popular culture.

In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud writes:

…an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on.

Freud’s notion about the uncanny power of the symbol overtaking its referent is everywhere evident in pop culture and vox populi is doing a great job documenting our culture’s fascination with the popular uncanny on the internet. Indeed, there are so many websites that function as virtual “curiosity shoppes” online that it would be impossible to gather them all here. From the most popular weblogs (like Boing Boing) or magazines (like Wired) that seem fixated on uncanny and fantastic gadgets — and whose very names and logos imbue a sort of living energy to symbolic language — to the everyday blogs on myspace and elsewhere where people routinely post the photoshopped or animated images they find in some public gallery, or on youtube where homemade animations and films are everywhere, our human fascination with the uncanny saturates the online environment. And this makes sense, because personal computers excel at animating the inanimate and connect with the “worldwide” culture in its metaphoric web.

Along these lines, I recently found a a provocative weblog called Next Nature, which I adore. Next Nature is documenting Freud’s “uncanny effect” of the autonomous symbol on a cultural scale by calling attention to phenomena where “culture becomes nature” (and vice versa). It is not “environmentalist” in the traditional sense — its definition of “nature” is more akin to AdBusters’ emphasis on the “mental environment” or what we might term our cultural ecology. The symbols that we create and bring to life in our culture not only have an impact on our environment, they become a living part of it. As Next Nature’s authors say in their FAQ, “Old nature, in the sense of trees, plants, animals, atoms, or climate, is getting increasingly controlled and governed by man. It has turned into a cultural category. At the same time, products of culture, which we used to be in control of man, tend to outgrow us and become autonomous.” (Read Koert Van Mensvoort’s essay, “Real Nature is Not Green” — or explore his professional website — for extensions of the logic behind this).

It’s a fun and fascinating site, posting everything from articles on postmodern theory to offbeat photoshopped (or is it?) images of the strange, like that World Cow image above (which is disturbing not only because it captures the essence of the quote by Freud cited above, but also because it seems to hyperrealize the idea that we are consuming our planet). I especially enjoyed discovering their pointer to Metalosis Maligna (also on YouTube): a mockumentary about an imaginary disease that occurs not to our bodies, but to the implants and other cyborg technologies we put into our bodies, resulting in transhuman horrors. I recommend browsing through their categorical tags, which reads like a catalog of the uncanny, with keywords like anthropomorphobia or toys are us. If you are interested in the academics of all this, check out their theory section, where you’ll find profundity like this idea from Eric Hoffer:

You dehumanize a man as much by returning him to nature - by making him one with rocks, vegetation, and animals - as by turning him into a machine.

Both the natural and the mechanical are the opposite of that which is uniquely human.

So often — perhaps because the idea emerged along with modernist Industrialism — we align the uncanny with the mechanical or “unnatural,” rather than the natural. The uncanny is often about the confusing loss of boundaries between the two, stunning us by calling our assumptions about what constitutes the natural and the human into question. I find Hoffer’s notion that the ‘natural’ is the antithesis of the ‘human’ a very counter-intuitive yet nonetheless extremely profound, notion.

Mensvoort and others associated with the Next Nature website have produced an image and theory-laden paperback book worth seeking out.