Interpretations of the Uncanny in Relation to the British Films - Movie Review Example

Consider theoretical interpretations of the 'uncanny' in relation to the British film - THE WICKER MAN and/or DON'T LOOK NOW The intersection of fear and unknowing is precisely the point at which the notion of the 'uncanny', at least in its theoretically manifestations in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, has most often been located. Ernst Jentsch, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century (1906), saw the notion of the unheimlich (literally in German, "the un-homely") as precisely a product of a cognitive uncertainty - is this being before me alive, or an automaton; is this inanimate thing I see actually not inanimate at all, but stirring with life Freud too, despite building upon a number of Jentsch's conclusions, retained the twin notions central to the his theoretical understanding of the 'uncanny': fear and a feeling that something is not known. To them he added a third concept: for something to be 'uncanny' it must also be something that has been known, something that we have once known and which has been cast away from us. This castaway returns when we least expect it, in a disguised form, and lurking in the shadows of our unconscious minds, slowly awakening old fears. For Freud, then, this is the origin of the terror that has come to be associated with things that are 'uncanny'. It should be clear from the above that, if we are to apply the notions of the uncanny to the horror film genre, then we must be quite precise about which theoretical formulation of the uncanny we are to apply. If we are to follow Jentsch's lead, and suppose that the uncanny arises purely from a cognitive lacuna, an absence knowledge, then we could say that the uncanny is utilized by almost every example of horror film. Horror relies on the unknown to create its atmosphere of terror; for example, it relies on the audience not knowing precisely when the ax-wielding murderer is about to leap out from behind the sofa. But surely this kind of scare is not precisely the same as a feeling we can call 'uncanny'. Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street may be very effective in making us scream (as too, I suppose is Scream), but we do not exit the cinema with a residual feeling of uneasiness that one might call 'uncanny.' As such we must come to the same conclusion that Schneider does in his study of the uncanny in film horror: "since not every monster that successfully instills in us a sense of horror or uncanniness is 'categorically interstitial,...incomplete, or formless,' cognitive threat could not be a necessary condition of uncanny feelings." In other words, we should turn to Freud's work and accept that the concept of the uncanny includes an element of repression, that this particular type of fear arises only when something we have repressed begins to make its influence felt once more in the forefront of our consciousness. If we do so, then the examples available to us from film history become much less common, and we must narrow our field down to the few that display a more subtle talent for terror. Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now and Robert Hardy's The Wicker Man, are two such works and, something that is hardly coincidental, are both considered cinematic greats of the horror genre. Their critical acclaim stems, in part, from their ability to create unease, as well as outright terror. They work on the level not just of film aesthetics, but of psychical processes. Before I begin our discussion of the two films in question, it may be helpful to orientate them in relation to Freud's seminal 1919 work, "The Uncanny". As we have already discussed, the point where Freud parts company with Jentsch is on the origin of the feeling of the uncanny. After an exhaustive study of the definition of the word un-heimlich in German, Freud comes to the conclusion that its meaning has evolved in such a way that, as well as meaning something that is un-homely (i.e. something untamed, frightening), it is also something that "ought to has remained hidden but has come to light" (156). It is also (and here Freud analyzes a story by Hoffmann called "The Sandman" to reach his conclusions) intimately connected with recurrence. This recurrence is not necessarily a repetition; that is, it is not a precise reiteration of what has gone before. It is, rather, as demonstrated by Hoffmann's story, a recurrence of certain motifs, reconfigured and disguised, but recognizably similar. In the "The Sandman", for example, we have the repetition of the motif of eyes: the sandman throws handfuls of sand in children's eyes that he might steal them; the spectacles sold by Coppola's are described as "a thousand eyes" (Hoffmann, 109); the evil Coppelius touches Clara's eyes and blood springs from them; Olympia, the doll, has eyes made of glass; etc. Freud concludes that the feeling of uncanniness that comes about because of these repetitions has it cause in an earlier and more originary repetition, one that does not occur in the story at all. There is, according to Freud, a "substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies;" (160-161) and, therefore, the image of the loss of ones eyes is a repetition of the primal scene of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex This is the origin of the feeling of the uncanny according to Freud, it is the repetition of something which has been repressed (often the ultimate repressed scene, the castration by the father). However, as Freud states later in the "The Uncanny", it is not necessarily the repetition of the Oedipus complex that can create the feeling of the uncanny. The feeling of the uncanny is also produced by the structure of repetition itself, because it is a reminder of beliefs or customs from an earlier age. When "involuntary repetition" occurs we are reminded of a time (both in the maturation of the ego and the progress of man through social history) when we believed in what Freud calls "the omnipotence of thoughts"- or when we believed that the world was ordered by our own egos. It is this beliefs that we have surmounted and repressed. An example of this is the the impression of uncanniness we feel when we have been thinking of someone we have not seen for a long time, then we see them the very same day. Our rational minds can put the occurrence down to coincidence, but there is a notion of an earlier superstition clamoring for attention, demanding to be considered. The same occurs when confronted with a double, we return an earlier stage in our ego development, in which the double was created as a narcissistic object of love. As such, reminders of old systems of beliefs that have been overcome are, like images of the primal castration, occasions for uncanny feelings - they too, are the recurrence of feelings or desires that have been repressed in modern man. The question now is whether the notion of the uncanny, as Freud outlined it, can be seen to explain the feeling of uncanniness that is presented to us by the British horror films Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man. In the case of the Don't Look Now, it is quite clear from the very opening scenes that the film is intimately involved with the notion of trauma and mourning. The opening sequence, in which a John Baxter (played by Donald Sutherland) finds his child drowned in a pond outside his home, works precisely as the primal scene does in the Freudian framework. It is the scene to which the film continues to return in momentary flashbacks. The ultimate impression is one of harrowing pain and suffering, as a father cradles his dead child in his arms, its mother letting out a single, piercing scream. After the incident the Baxter's move to Venice, in an attempt, it seems, to escape and forget the trauma of the loss of their child and to complete the work of mourning. However, as the film continues, the instances of the uncanny are always intimately related to this initial scene. Precisely the traumatic event that the Baxter's have left England to forget is the one that makes itself felt in the uncanny incidents of the film. An important thing to note, and something that Freud himself notes in the later parts of "The Uncanny," is that, at least in the aesthetic realm, the uncanny is not compatible with the fantastical or the imaginary; as he says "I cannot think of any genuine fairy story which has anything uncanny about it" (164). That is, in a situation in which the animistic, the supernatural, the 'omnipotence of thoughts' is considered to be normalized within the fiction setting, then instances of the uncanny cannot occur. If, as in Shakespeare's MacBeth, say, or Hamlet, the fictional words already allows for the world of ghosts or spirits then these ghosts or spirits do not have an uncanny effect on us. It requires the tension between our present, civilized world and the notion of beliefs or concepts that have been suppressed for the uncanny to take effect. This is demonstrated in Don't Look Now, by the dichotomous relationship between John Baxter and his wife Laura. When confronted by two sisters, one of whom claims to have seen their dead daughter, Laura Baxter believes her and asks her to tell her more. John, on the other hand, when told of the incident, shows disbelief and cynicism and, whilst she goes to the arranged sance, he slowly gets drunk in a bar. It is this background of modern disbelief that allows those events in the film that appear to be supernatural to take on their uncanny form. The film itself is almost entirely wedded to the notion of realism. The camera picks up sun flares as it passes directly across the sun, the acting is, in the main, improvised and as naturalistic as possible. Indeed, in critical circles, it is said to have one of the most realistic sex scenes ever captured on film - Sutherland and Julie Christie's uncheoreographed writhing is inter-cut with the mundaneness of their getting dressed to go for dinner. The scene is long and their silent dressing lingered over by the camera, precisely to accentuate the ordinariness of what they are doing. It is within this context that those things that appear to be of a previous belief system, the notions of predestination and foresight, are introduced into the film and it is precisely because they impinge on what seems to be a realistic world that they create their uncanny effect. A case in point is the scene in which John Baxter is traveling on a canal barge and he sees his wife, flanked by the two sisters, dressed in black and riding on a funeral boat. He is, unbeknown to himself, foreseeing his own funeral. The incident is introduced with no prior warning from either soundtrack or camera-work; the barge passes as though it were merely are unimportant part of the location rather than an integral part of the plot; the audience might not notice it at all were it not for Sutherland's reaction - he runs to the edge of the boat and shouts his wife's name. After he has seen this vision, he does not even consider the possibility that what he has seen might have a supernatural origin, instead he goes to the police, believing that his wife has been kidnapped by the two sisters. That there is no supernatural explanation, is tremendously important to the operation of the uncanny. The outright supernatural is not uncanny; it is merely the partial viewing of an older supernatural world that gives us a sense of unease. The old beliefs, those of predestination, foreseeing and the ability to live beyond death, must merely raise their heads then duck down once more beneath the parapet of the unconscious for the truly unsettling feeling of the uncanny to take hold. Also, central to the fear with which Don't Look Now instills us, is the film's use of the uncanny effect of repetition. Motifs are used to great effect by Roeg and his team of cinematographers and editors. The color of the mackintosh worn by Baxter's drown child is mirrored throughout the film: Baxter spills water on a slide and a smear of red appears, the candles in the church glow a bright red, there are red marks on a statue Baxter is restoring, there are bright red flowers on his funeral barge and, of course, the blood that flows from the fatal gash in his neck is a dark red. Equally, the image of the rain falling on the pond in which Baxter's daughter died is repeated numerous times in Venice, as well as in the rain falling on the windscreen of the car as Julie Christie's Laura looks out at the home and the child she is leaving behind. Finally, the image of broken glass is also a central motif: the Baxter's son drives his bicycle over a mirror just before his sister drowns, when Laura Baxter collapses in the restaurant glass is knocked off the table and shatters, when John Baxter nearly dies in an accident a wooden beam from the church's roof smashes through a glass window and, in the final scene, as Baxter convulses in the last throes of death, his leg smashes through a small pane of glass. This final example of an often repeated motif in Roeg's motif-laden film is particularly important because it stands as a representation of precisely how motifs function in Don't Look Now. If we accept that the young girl's death is the film's primal scene (in a Freudian sense), then these repetitions - with difference - of the first scene's central images are the functioning of the uncanny on the level of the mise-en-scene. The primal scene, because it is too horrific, too traumatic, for the Baxters to directly confront, is shattered - like a piece of glass - into many different, sublimated images. The feeling of the uncanny occurs because the audience is drawn into an attempt to gather all these disparate images into a complete whole that means something. But the film, whilst purposefully drawing these attempts on, also purposefully frustrates them - there is no way - no reasonable way at least - that the red candles of the church can be connected to the red raincoat worn by their daughter except as a not-so-amazing coincidence. The film has drawn its audience into a neurotic position in which we start to acknowledge the repressed side of us that longs for a world governed by the 'omnipotence of thoughts', it opens up that uncanny dialectic within us. As such, the grammar of Roeg's film does not merely work on a stylistic level, but also on a psychical level; it does not merely present itself to our aesthetic sensibilities, but also interacts with out unconscious processes. This is why criticisms of Roeg's films, such as, "the texture, not the framework, is what is interesting" (Kleinhans), somewhat miss the point. Speaking specifically of the use of the accent color red that we have just discussed, Kleinhans says, "from time to time we also find apparently gratuitous red presented. For no reason John at one point toys with a piece of Venetian glass with a red bottom. The audience is primed to think it must mean something, but what it means is not at all clear." His point is extremely astute, if unintentionally so. The audience is primed to think the red means something, and its meaning is unclear, that is precisely the point. The audience is tempted into precisely the hopeless guessing game that Kleinhan refuses to play; it is precisely in the realm where meanings are "not at all clear," that the uncanny holds sway. I cannot leave Don't Look Now, without discussing the resonance of its important, shocking climax. Baxter, having seen what appears to be his dead daughter running around the streets of Venice a few nights before, sees the red-hooded figure once more and follows it into an empty church. He manages to chase the figure down and, as it stands facing the wall, crying, he approaches it. Suddenly, the figure turns and, far from being his dead daughter, is a horrible wizened dwarf who takes out a knife and cuts him in the neck. He slowly bleeds to death and his blood forms the same pattern as the red liquid that seeped across the slide in the first scene; the slide, of course, which, presciently, featured a red-hooded figure sat in one of the pews. This red-hooded figure, always just in sight, always out of reach, is the very incarnation of the uncanny. It is the repeated signs looming to the surface of consciousness, bringing with them the remembrance of old supernatural beliefs about the dead. This final confrontation, which is so sudden and so other and which - as Kleinhan would probably point out - has no clear meaning, is that which lies beyond the theoretical notion of the uncanny: the dissolution of the self. The dwarf is like the allegorical figure of that which Lacan has termed the "Real" (Lacan, 193), that which is the inexpressible before and beneath language. The dwarf appears at the point at which the uncanniness of Don't Look Now falls away, and all we are left to do is look into the void. The Wicker Man, although an excellent piece of work in itself, does not have the complexity of imagery and the fineness of construction that marks out Roeg's work. However, compared to its natural forbears that emerged from the Hammer Studios, (many of which also, as The Wicker Man does, starred Christopher Lee), it is a thoughtful and interesting work in which the uncanny emerges in short sharp shocks. Like Don't Look Now, it's plot centers around a girl who is presumed dead. It also is centrally involved with the question of the current rational world being stripped away slowly to reveal an underbelly of old beliefs that are repressed and stifled. In it, Edward Woodward plays a policeman who is called in to investigate the disappearance of a young girl on the island of Summerisle. The film begins in a realistic style. The villagers all speak with broad Scots accents, as does Woodword. The script, the locations, all emphasize the mundaneness of village life. The postman walks into a post office, and it is an extremely normal, rural post office. However, slowly, The Wicker Man starts to strip away this veneer of normalcy, and with an uncanny effect that unsettles and confuses. The film has a habit of introducing images quickly and sharply, with no palpable introduction. The normal method of editing a film of this sort - in which a stranger comes to a new place - would be to present the film from the stranger's point of view. The film-maker will take a shot of the stranger looking at a feature of the town, cut to the feature, and then cut back for the stranger's reaction: this establishes the relation of viewer to viewed. There are no establishing shots in The Wicker Man. For example, we are watching Woodward go for a walk in the night and suddenly the screen is filled with an orgy in a grave yard. Only after a few seconds of being confronted with this alien and dislocated image are we given the shot of Woodward approaching the scene. The effect of this on our relationship to the film is a strange one that both distances and unsettles; we are made uneasy and I would argue that the effect is due, again, to the movements of the uncanny. The reason why these sudden images can be related to the uncanny is their nature. Not only do they appear suddenly, without warning, they are also of a particular kind. There are a number of orgies: the one in the graveyard already mentioned, and young girls dancing naked amongst stone ruins. These are primal, almost bestial, scenes. There are also elusive images, that seem familiar but are slightly out of kilter: inside a school desk there is a beetle, slowly reeling itself around a nail, in the grave yard, there is a woman sat upon a grave stone, suckling a baby and holding an egg as if it presenting it for inspection. The images are of the kind produced by the surrealist artistic movement, and the way they are planted in the film - so that they explode suddenly on the consciousness, coming out of nowhere - gives them, like the surrealists' work, the quality of dreams. This is precisely the operation of the uncanny, this feeling of uncertainty but of familiarity, and most of all of helplessness before what you are seeing, having no control of the meaning the images might present. As Freud noted, the uncanny certainly does "recall the sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams." Perhaps the reason for the uncanniness of the images presented in The Wicker Man is precisely that they are familiar, or at least are part of our psychic heritage. The images, as the film explains as it reaches its climax, are gleaned from ancient rituals, pagan ceremonies. The function of the images in the film is to lead the audience - not as a narrative leads, but rather as a preparation of the audience's collective unconscious - to the climax, in which it is revealed that the people of Summerisle are worshipers of the old religion, and are intending to sacrifice Woodward's character to their sun God, and the goddess of their orchards. In this film then, more explicitly than Don't Look Now, the film-makers are delving the depths of those beliefs and practices that we have repressed on our way to civilization. As Christopher Lee, who plays the affable but demonic Lord Summerisle says, "The old Gods aren't dead." They are lurking beneath the surface of civilization (controlled, and managed, as Freud thought, by the superego), a civilization that is represented by Woodward's policeman, a virgin and a firm believer in Christianity. And yet, like John Baxter in Don't Look Now, the feeling of uncanniness that has been marshaled throughout the film, now, at the film's climax, blossoms into an awful, inconceivable terror. The final image of the Wicker Man, the burning straw man, stretched out across the sky, is as sudden and as unprepared for as the image of the dwarf at the conclusion of Don't Look Now. Like the dwarf, it represents the horror of the Real, or, alternately, the lifting of repression in all its horrific and violent fury. The notion of the uncanny relies, to some extent, on the continuation of repression, the uncanny exists on the boundary between repression and the echoes of that which lies beneath - old customs, old belief, even the primal scene of castration. However, at the climax of both these films, the teasing interplay between repression and its transgression blows open as absolute horror is unleashed. Both Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man, then, are infused with the notion of the uncanny. They both work almost as structural models of how Freud believed the uncanny functioned. They both reside within the interplay between the new repressive world, and an older world of surmounted beliefs and ideas. Don't Look Now - like the Freudian model of the uncanny - has its own primal scene, the drowning of the Baxter's daughter and, like the Freudian model, ties itself intimately to the notion of repetition being at the uncanny's center. The Wicker Man also has its repetitions, but these repetitions come from an earlier time, and leap upon us, unsettling us. At the end of each the uncanny gives way, or rather reaches its ultimate climax, the collapse of all repression and the unleashing of the horror and unmeaning of 'the Real'. Works Cited Don't Look Now. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. 1973. DVD. Warner Home Video (UK) Ltd., 2002. Freud, S. "The Uncanny." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Hoffmann, E.T.A., "The Sandman." Tales of Hoffmann. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Jentsch, E "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Angelaki. 2.1 (1996): 7-15. Kleinhans, C. "Permutations without Profundity" Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. No. 3, 1974, pp.13-17 . Lacan, J. Ecrits: A Selection. trans. A. Sheridan. Routledge, 1989. Schneider, Steven. "Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror." Other Voices. Ed. Vance Bell. 1.3 (January 1999) . The Wicker Man. Dir. Robert Hardy. 1973. DVD. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2004. Read More