Uncanny Experience on Film - Essay Example

?Uncanny Experiences on Film: from the unintentional to the sublime. In Nicholas Royle’s exhaustive study, The uncanny: an introduction, he s that, “the world is uncanny” (2003, p. 3). This is quite a large claim that may be hard to grasp because of its vast implications. It can be taken to mean that uncanny phenomena are manifest in all aspects of our world. I will analyze occurrence of the uncanny in the animated motion picture The Polar Express and the film The Double Life of Veronique. In doing so, I intend to illustrate a small facet of Royle’s claim and will endeavour to show how such uncanny manifestations affect us and mould our perception and understanding. The concept of the Uncanny (throughout this paper, I distinguish the capitalized concept from its un-capitalized colloquial counterpart) was popularized in scholarly circles by Jentsch’s publication of ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ in 1906 followed by Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ in 1919. Interestingly, the development and popularization of motion pictures was gaining momentum at the same time. The chronological correspondence of the academic dissection of the Uncanny, with its close relationship with psychoanalysis and dreams, and the development of motion pictures, which were perceived as highly uncanny fantastic waking dream sequences, aptly renders the concept and the medium historically entwined associates. It seems that most scholarly discussions of the uncanny begin with a close examination of the connotations and etymological implications of the term. This already poses a bit of a challenge, since the etymology of the German unheimlich/heimlich and the English uncanny/canny cast different shades of meaning onto the discussion. Instead of over-scrupulously attempting to pinpoint the precise nature of the term, I would rather give a general overview of the meaning and its breadth of associations following in the manner of Royle’s inclusive approach to collecting all possible interpretations of the uncanny. The simplest definition of uncanny, which is a succinct conglomeration of the various dictionary definitions Royle presents, is something strange, mysterious, un/supernatural or unsettling (2003). To extend the dictionary definition of the term “uncanny” to include the psychoanalytical concept of “the Uncanny” introduces a sort of paradox; the Uncanny becomes something both strange and yet familiar, too. The uncanny is something consistently different that somehow remains the same. It “entails a sense of uncertainty and suspense” (Royle 2003, p. vii), which arises from confusion of reality and imagination, or incertitude of the boundaries between dreaming and waking. Speaking of boundaries, Royle also comments that the uncanny is often “associated with an experience of threshold, liminality, margins, borders, frontiers” (2003, p. vii). Oftentimes, it is some form of transposition that creates the sense of the uncanny, like something familiar transposed to an unfamiliar setting and vice versa. With all of these rich significations and associations, it is nonetheless crucial to remember that one of the prime characterizations of the concept of the Uncanny is that it is inherently elusive. As Bernstein put so eloquently, “’the Uncanny’ has tended to become a fixed psychoanalytic concept whose descriptive potential overshadows the fact that the uncanny puts in question the possibility of definition itself” (2003, p. 1112). In modern times, fast-paced technological development has significantly contributed to a heightened sense of the uncanny. With the advent of photography people, places, and things were captured in their exact likenesses for the first time. The technology seemingly stopped time, seizing and freezing an infinitesimal fraction of it for posterity, while also providing the ability to make infinite multiples; both being uncanny potentials. After the initial shock value of photography wore off from time and habituation, motion pictures were invented. And so this cycle continues: with the assimilation of the latest technology, its initial uncanny effect is subdued and transferred to the newest and most uncannily innovative medium. A pertinent effect of advanced technology and its rendering capabilities is, in point of fact, called the “Uncanny Valley” (see Figure 1). The Uncanny Valley is basically a portion of a graph that charts the progression of positive or negative emotional responses that humans have to human-like creations (dolls, robots, etc.). The graph shows that humans generally relate to humanoid creations. Their similarity allows us to identify and even empathize with them and the more lifelike the more positive the response garnered? up to a certain point. Once the creation begins to very closely resemble humans, the chart takes a plunge. This dip in the graph is the Uncanny Valley, which indicates a strong negative reaction (akin to repulsion even), to those creations that are eerily human yet lacking in certain key aspects of humanity. Figure 1. (Mori 1970) When a humanoid object’s features are blatantly off, exaggerated, or abstracted like in the case of an android robot with stiff clunky arms and legs and big round saucer-like eyes, then the observer knows how to classify the familiar and the foreign elements. It poses no cognitive challenge. The repulsion from things that fall into the Uncanny Valley, however, comes from the experience of something familiar that feels wrong. It is more of an intuitive discomfort than a perceptive one. Whatever is off may be so slight that it might make a person uncomfortable without being conscious of why this is so. A perfectly suited example of technology gone awry is the humanlike rendering seen in the animated motion picture, The Polar Express, which regrettably tumbled into the Uncanny Valley. The animation for this film was created using motion-capture (mo-cap), a technique that records a live-actor’s movements and then maps them onto the animated character, making the actor a “human blueprint for creating virtual characters” (The Polar Express, n.d.). The technique is based on highly advanced technology, and is designed to capture even the minutest movements. This gives the characters a highly life like on-screen presence, yet there is something missing, making them rather disturbing. In Figure 2 there is a split image. The top half is actor Tom Hanks decked out in the mo-cap gear and acting out a scene for the film, and the bottom half is the post-production result. We see the character of the Engineer complete with the proper outfit and added weight. Seeing these two images juxtaposed has a particularly uncanny effect because you can see that they are simultaneously doubles and yet worlds apart. Not simply because one is of an actor and the other a character, nor because one is process and the other result. Figure 2. (Image taken from: Ward, 2004) What stands out is the amount of vitality and emotion present in Tom Hanks’ features in comparison to the Engineer’s languid grimace. Hanks’ eyebrows are puckered together, the lines around his nose and mouth tracing a dynamically expressive countenance, and the skin drawn towards his ear and neck emphasizes his demonstrative face. The Engineer, on the other hand, has smooth brows giving him an expression of tired apathy; his mouth is wide open yet not showing much of an expression at all. Nevertheless, while these differences may account for much criticism of this animated production, they alone do not produce the uncanny effect. The uncanny emotional response to the animated characters of The Polar Express comes from what is not seen in the lower figure. Some spark of true animation or life is missing from the meticulous rendering of human flesh and motion. This makes the human-like figures into something disturbing. Although the movie was not a box office disaster, the result of this situation was that the characters did not appeal to audiences quite as much as the creators had hoped, making the movie much less successful than it could have been (Box Office Mojo, n.d.). A quick perusal of film reviews and blogs discussing this movie will bring up the word “zombie” numerous times. Clearly, a bubbly Christmas season children’s movie did not benefit from the uncanny sensations unintentionally caused by the hi-tech animation. On the opposite end of the uncanny spectrum, we can consider the intentional use of uncanny tropes within a creative work. The arts, due to their elusive nature and hard to delimit boundaries, often tend to generate uncanny emotional responses. Unlike in the previous example, these responses are intentional and serve to enrich the scope of the work and endow it with a fertile ground for interpretation. An example of such use is in the film The Double Life of Veronique, which is a sublime meditation on the Uncanny. As indicated by the title, this film uses the trope of the double to create a heightened sense of the Uncanny and then proceeds to manipulate this theme to produce various complex connotations. The film begins with Veronika, a beautiful young Polish musician. In one of the earliest scenes, she tells her father that she always feels that she is somehow not alone in the world. We follow her story as she goes to Krakow to visit her aunt, by chance wins a competition for a solo singing part, incidentally sees her double taking photos aboard a tour bus, and finally dies in the middle of her solo during a performance. From there, the film switches to Veronique, the French double, played by the same actress- Irene Jacob. Veronique seems to sense the loss of her double; though she does not understand why she feels the way she does until later on in the film. Veronique’s conviction that she has a double is confirmed when her new lover Alexandre the puppeteer, finds the photograph of Veronika that Veronique unwittingly took from the window of the tour bus during a trip to Poland (see Figure 3, below). In the film, Veronika discovers her double while they are both alive while Veronique only does so once Veronika has died. Veronika Veronique’s photo Veronique Figure 3. Stills from The Double Life of Veronique The look on Veronika’s face when she recognizes herself in the unaware tourist girl (i.e. Veronique) ironically brings to mind Freud’s interpretation of the double phenomenon: “Freud construes the double as an idea an infant employs to ward off fear of death” (Freeland 2004, p. 91). Her expression is also a perfect illustration of the polar tension caused by something uncanny. We can read shock, surprise, pleasure, uncertainty, awe, hesitation, joy, and even fear into the widened eyes, barely lifted eyebrow, and tight lipped grimace that nevertheless gives way to a hint of a smile in the upturned edges. Veronique, conversely, is disturbed by the discovery of her double because it confirms her sense of someone once close who is now gone. In Freud’s terms, the double recalls the fear of death that it originally was supposed to prevent. Both of the women, however, see something of utmost familiarity- themselves- in the most unfamiliar place- in the other. The film furthers its play with uncanny doubling in the scene where Veronique discovers Alexandre, the puppeteer/ Veronique’s lover, has made her into a puppet- two, actually. In their conversation he starts telling her that he thinks he will call this story “The Double Life of...” and then deflects and says that he hasn’t decided yet. At that moment, the movie becomes self-referential and not only are the puppets additional doubles of Veronique, but both Veronique and Alexandre become doubled in the sense that the audience is reminded that each of them is both character and actor? a real person and an imaginary one. And then again, since the reference to the film within the film makes it a metaphor for itself. Alexandre the puppeteer, also becomes Kieslowski the director and then Veronique the woman, the puppet, the actress is being manipulated by all of those different men in one and the same moment. The heightened sense of the uncanny in this moment happens within the diegetic action of the scene as well as extra-diegetically. The uncanniness extends to our intellectual involvement. Freeman mentions that, “it is unnerving or uncanny because we may also feel that we are participants in this violation because we too see her as ‘just a character in a story’” (2004, p. 104). In both The Polar Express and The Double Life of Veronique, disparate as they may seem, the uncanny effect is a result of vacillation between opposing sensations. When we approach something expecting it to be strange and foreign, it may disturb or frighten us, but we do not perceive it as uncanny. Conversely, when we expect to find something comforting and familiar and instead sense something strange or “off-beat”, we experience that opposing tension: Jentsch’s “intellectual hesitation” (1906), Royle’s uncanny. This sort of impression is an essential part of how humans perceive the world: we understand things in terms of ourselves, and we categorize our world based on what we can relate to, and to what degree we can relate to it. Bibliography Bernstein, S 2003, ‘The ambulatory uncanny’, MLN, Comparative Literature Issue, pp.1111-1139. Box Office Mojo, n.d., Available from: [25 July 2011] Cromwell, N 2006, ‘The uncanny and: the seduction of the occult and the rise of the fantastic tale (review)’ Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 429-433. Freeland, C 2004, ‘Explaining the Uncanny in the Double Life of Veronique’, in SJ Schneider (ed.), Horror film and psychoanalysis: Freud’s worst nightmare, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Freud, S 1955, ‘The Uncanny’ in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, pp. 219-256, Hogarth Press, London. Jentsch, E 1906, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ trans. in Sellars, R 1997, Angelaki, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 7-16. Lawton, C 2010, Uncanny Tales. Available from: http://www.uncanny-tales.com/ [25 July 2011] Masschelein, A 2011, The unconcept: the Freudian Uncanny in late- twentieth-century theory, SUNY Press, NY. Mori, M 1970, ‘The Uncanny Valley’, Energy, vol. 7, no.4, pp. 33-35, trans. MacDorman, KF & Minato T. Royle, N 2003, The uncanny: an introduction, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Spadoni, R 2007, Uncanny bodies: the coming of sound film and the origins of the horror genre. University of California Press, Berkeley. Tatar, MM 1981, ‘The houses of fiction: toward a definition of the uncanny’, Comparative Literature, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 167-182. The Double Life of Veronique, 1991. Kieslowski, K. USA: Miramax The Polar Express, 2004. Zemeckis, R. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures The Polar Express, n.d., Film Production Notes, Warner Bros. Available from: http://polarexpressmovie.warnerbros.com/dvd/movie_prodnotes.html [25 July 2011] Vidler, A 1992, The architectural uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely, MIT Press, Boston. Ward, J 2004, The Polar Express: A virtual train wreck (conclusion). 18 January 2004. Wardomatic. Available from: http://wardomatic.blogspot.com/ 2004/12/polar-express-virtual-train-wreck_18.html [25 July 2011] Read More