Becoming a Real Boy

“A.I. (Artificial Intelligence)”, the 2001 film directed by Steven Spielberg, follows the life of a boy, but certainly no “nor-male” boy. The boy, named David, is a mecha, a super advanced robot that is actually capable of not only emulating, but experiencing emotions and acting on original thoughts. Created by Cybertronics of New Jersey, David is an even more advanced type of mecha, who is able to actually feel love for whomever owns him. He is constructed to look, act, speak and love as a child does, enacting the same imprinting mechanisms that a human child does with its parents, particularly its mother. David especially imprints on Monica, his “mother,” who grows attached to him as well, until her actual son, who was sick, is able to return home and take up his role as a human son.

The story goes on for much longer than this, but first, I would like to address children as a whole. Children are some of the most familiar individuals in the world. Despite cultural differences, they follow developmental characteristics that are universal. Instinctively, the average adult will be protective and caring towards any child they come across, which is essentially ingrained within our psyches. In the most primal sense, we want the next generation, our offspring, to survive.

However, how is one supposed to react to David? He is essentially a child in all of the ways that are familiar to us, and yet he is not. Because he is not made up of the organic matter that we are made of, he cannot be human, no matter how convincing he is. He is not entirely flawless in his child-like state, either. He cannot eat, he does not blink, and he cannot dream when he is “sleeping.” He is the epitome of Freud’s theory of the uncanny, in a sense. He is everything that is familiar and homely, yet he is, concealed from perception, very much unfamiliar and unhomely. Of course, in realizing this, David’s nature is disconcerting and even frightening. He is even more frightening because he plays with our emotions, our care-giving desires. He sparks within us the desire to treat him as something he’s not, manipulating our hearts, even as we know in our minds that he is not what is familiar.

Lacanian theory can also be applied to “A.I.”, although the stages that Lacan applies to child development are skewed due to the fact that David is no ordinary child. After David’s “brother,” Martin, returns home, the two experience a sort of sibling rivalry in which Martin, who has fully been assimilated into the Symbolic, exemplifies. He is a son who has conformed to the Law of the Father. Because of this, he does not understand the queerness of David and is cruel to him, attempting to sabotage him in order to regain his position as the true son. In doing so, David’s defensive “programming” is triggered, and puts the life of Martin at risk. After this event, Henry, Monica’s husband, wishes to destroy David, but she sets off to save him.

In a pivotal scene (0:00-4:30), which I have embedded below, Monica drives David to the woods to leave him there, in order to save him from “death,” but also to separate herself from the unconditional, clinging love that David exhibits. As they drive to the woods, they pass the sign and entrance for Cybetronics of New Jersey, which represents the Father, the Symbolic realm. The creator of David is a graspable, socially real thing, and Monica stops the car, almost as if she wishes to return him, but she instead thinks better of it, realizing that he will be destroyed. She forces her reason, which lies within the Symbolic, out. Instead, she employs her fantasy that David is real, and deserving of life, reverting her mind into the realm of the Imaginary.

As Monica tries to leave David in the woods, he begs and pleads with her not to leave him there, but she, despite the tears she is also shedding, and the pain it causes her, is determined to eject David from her social reality, almost as if she is forcing him into the third term, forcing him to form a new Symbolic order outside of herself, his “mother.” When she and David first developed a bond, she read to him the story of Pinocchio, which convinced him that it was possible for him, despite the fact that he is a mecha, to become a “real boy.” As he begs, he says, “No, mommy, please no. If Pinocchio became a real boy, and I became a real boy, can I come home?” She then responds to him with, “Stories are not real!” However, as Karen Coats would say, stories inform children, shape children into what society expects of them. In this sense, David is frighteningly more real than expected. He is actually capable of taking a piece of society, even though fantastical, and applying it to himself, attempting to fulfill the example that language provides for him.

David, however, is left by Monica, and for the remainder of the film, his one true desire is to return home to her. He is aware of the hole that is missing and wants only to fill that hole with the perceived, yet literally non-existent mother of the Imaginary realm. In his quest, he both adheres to the Symbolic realm, but also diverts from it. He is far more capable of living between the Imaginary and Symbolic because he is not “nor-male.” Eventually, through a ridiculously long succession of events, he is able to have a final, peaceful, blissful day with Monica (who is not actually Monica, but a mecha who holds the memories and physical and emotional characteristics of her), in which he acts out with her all of his desires. In all his life, he does not enter into the realm of the Real, as his desires are not unconscious. He does not even have an unconscious. After all, he cannot dream. However, at the end of the film, he quite literally does. He becomes a “real boy” after Monica finally tells him that she has always loved him. His deepest desire is met and he is no longer stuck in the Imaginary, but instead of moving back into the Symbolic from which he was born, he “for the first time in his life…went to that place where dreams are born.” In entering the Real, he becomes real.

Crookshanks, an Uncanny Cat?

Throughout any reading of the Harry Potter series, it is evident that what we as “Muggles,” have come to associate with the familiarity of animals is not as J.K. Rowling would have us believe. The portrayal of animals is especially prevalent in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in which we encounter the familiar faces of Ron’s rat Scabbers and Harry’s owl Hedwig, but we also have a brief stop-over in a wizard pet store; we meet animals ranging from a rabbit that changes itself into a top hat and back again, rats that skip with their tails, and most importantly, a bowlegged, grumpy-looking, ginger-colored cat named Crookshanks. One might call any of the peculiar creatures in Harry Potter uncanny, but upon a reading of Freud’s uncanny, any element of such fictitious stories cannot be considered uncanny: “…[F]airy stories…confirm the first part of our proposition—that in the realm of fiction many things are not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life” (839). Therefore, skipping rats cannot be considered uncanny because they are meant to be fictitious. Even though Scabbers seems to be an ordinary rat, especially through the first two books and throughout most of this third novel, we are not allowed to see him as uncanny when we suddenly discover that he is in actuality a human, Peter Pettigrew who is an Animagus. However, let us get back to the character of Crookshanks. Here we have an ordinary cat, as J.K. Rowling portrays him. He has no special, hidden powers, besides the fact that he has an uncanny relationship with Sirius Black. His relationship with Sirius when he is Padfoot, the big, black dog, seems quite familiar, and even when he interacts with Sirius as a human the relationship overall appears familiar.

The first scene when we see the relationship between human Sirius and Crookshanks is when Hermione, Ron, and Harry meet up with Sirius in the Shrieking Shack. Here, a lot of information and relationships are unveiled, but it is the relationship between Crookshanks and Sirius that really seems like the uncanniest revealing moment. Much like many other animals, Crookshanks seems to have chosen a preferred acquaintance, demonstrated when he decides to attack Harry while Harry and Sirius fight. He shows his loyalties here in a way that is no uncannier then when two people are fighting and their pet dog decides to bark at one over the other or even tug on a particular pant leg, if the reader doesn’t mind the random tangential example here. However, it is the next instance of Crookshank’s involvement that seems to take his loyalties to his friendly human-dog pal Sirius to an uncanny level. He decides to take action at the moment when Harry’s anger at Sirius is piqued: “…Crookshanks leapt onto Black’s chest and settled himself there, right over Black’s heart” (342). Sirius tries to get him off but Crookshanks only digs his claws deeper, refusing to budge, even as Harry raises his wand to kill Sirius. Now, if we were to consider Crookshanks as an ordinary cat, one that could be seen outside this fictional novel, then I would say that we have an element of the uncanny working here, as Freud says that the situation changes when the writer “pretends to move in the world of common reality” (840). Crookshanks senses Harry’s murderous hatred of Sirius and so he steps in and risks his own life for Sirius’s life. Would your pet cat leap onto your chest when you were in a moment of imminent danger? Maybe so, but it would be highly uncanny.

Vampire MILFs

Dear old mom. In our culture, the mother is generally a very wholesome concept–think Norman Rockwell paintings and June Cleaver. Often, mothers are seen as the key figure of a home, being referred to as homemakers, housewives, and stay-at-home moms. For those of us in our culture who actually had this presence in our homes growing up in addition to being bombarded with this socially accepted (and, in many ways, expected) role, the figure of Darla in “Buffy” is extremely uncanny.

Darla is Angel’s mom. She brought him into this life as a vampire and helped “raise” him to be a powerful and violent vampire. In many ways, the way Darla interacts with Angel is reminiscent in how a mother would interact with her son. She seems to truly care for him (as much as an amoral, supernatural being can, anyway), saying she misses him. She’s intensely jealous and (for lack of a better word) belligerent towards Angel’s new love interest, Buffy, falling into the overly jealous and protective mother stereotype (world’s worst mother-in-law?). There is also the sort of bizarre (as well as uncanny) “family” that Angel was formally a part of–the master vampire as the patriarch, Darla as the matriarch, and then perhaps Angel (who the master vampire said he had wanted as his right hand guy) and the little boy as the kids. Darla even has a sweet, almost motherly voice–very calm and in a high, breathy register. Also, technically, there was penetration that began the process of Angel’s conception as a vampire, but that leads us straight into the total uncanny-ness of the motherly role Darla plays.

First of all, that penetration occurs between Darla and Angel in a variety of ways. There is the initial vampire fangs to victim penetration, followed by any number of sexual penetrations between Angel and Darla. This is not how the typical mother-son relationship plays itself out. It directly feeds into Freud’s Oedipal complex, except, instead of the son, Angel, being forced to suppress his desire for his mother, he, as a supernatural creature who seems to dwell only within the Id, he’s able to feed this desire to both his and Darla’s hearts content. Interestingly, we, in our discussions over Freud’s Oedipal complex, never really touched on whether or not the mother desires any sort of sexual encounter with her son. It’s clear Darla does in her continuous attempts to seduce Angel, both with sex and with human blood (when she comes to his home and when she bites Buffy’s mom), and this only adds to her being uncanny. Most of all, Darla is dangerous, most definitely to Buffy, Angel’s love interest, but also quite possibly to him as well. While Darla desired Angel at the time, her volatile behavior suggests that her feelings towards could potentially changed, given enough fear for her own survival. So, of course, mothers in the homely sense, are not dangerous. In fact, they are quite the opposite, but Darla, as the uncanny mother, turns that idea on its head.

This idea of the unhomely/uncanny mother is seen in almost the exact same way in another vampire show, True Blood. Bill, the Angel equivalent for the show, also has a maker/mother who harbors sexual desires for him, and in the same way Darla went around with Angel, wreaking havoc and teaching him just how bad a vampire can be, Bill and his maker had the same relationship. When Bill decided he was tired of being this creature of evil and destruction, he left his maker, but years later he is still dogged by her. The difference here, however, is that Bill doesn’t seem to repress his desire for her because he senses the wrongness of their incestuous relationship, but because he doesn’t like her as a person (she really is a pain in the ass) and because he’s found love with Sookie Stackhouse. I think this is an interesting way to look at vampires (or any sort of creature who typically dwells solely in the id), because Bill, who is considered to be a vampire with a conscience, still doesn’t toe the same moral line as his human counterparts. I probably would have written about this if it hadn’t been months since I last was able to watch True Blood.

Zither music

I thought of Carol Reed’s film noir The Third Man, a picture permeated by a subtle uncanniness. Here’s a synopsis for those who haven’t seen it- the film opens on the arrival of the American Holly Martins (a hack writer and a fool) in post-World-War-II Vienna. On looking for the man he came to visit, his old friend Harry Lime, Martins discovers that Harry has just died in a car accident. In the midst of his heartbreak he finds a hole in the official story of Harry’s death and so begins trying to find out what really happened to Harry. I’ll spoil the ending later in this post. Reed complements his pulp fiction plot with a masterful use of the techniques of film noir, plenty of long shadows and off-kilter shots and jolting cuts. These techniques contribute much to the film’s sneaking uncanniness, presenting to us a slightly strange world whose dissimilarities somehow speak to our world.

The film begins by introducing the situation in post-War Vienna: after the war Vienna was split up into four zones by the Allies, each zone governed by an imported police. The center of the city is a fifth zone governed by a multinational police. This has given rise to a confusion of tongues and a bureaucratic mess, a lawkeeper’s nightmare which has led to a booming black market. A psychoanalyst might say that the id has gained the upper hand because of a breaking down of the Language and Law of the Father.

This introduction to Vienna is given by a cheery English accent while charming zither music plays, a joviality unnervingly dissonant with the darkness it rolls over; the voice is that of a professional criminal; it mentions “amateurs” as we are shown a body floating in a river near some chunks of ice; it describes Vienna as “bombed about a bit” while a series of images of Vienna in ruins is shown to us. The voice is in some ways a manifestation of the id: cheerily indifferent to law and culture and ‘humanity,’ closer to the fundamental drives of the organism. The uncanny effect of the introduction is not uncanny by Freud’s definition; it does not play upon “infantile complexes which have been repressed” or “primitive beliefs which have been surmounted” (950 in the blue book). It is rather the uncanny defamiliarization Dr. Johnson speaks of in his post “Bags of Blood”; it shows its audience (originally an audience of the late forties and early fifties) several familiar things (a post-War European city in recovery, the seedy underbelly of a city, the post-War economic boom) but presents those things in an unfamiliar way, (in corresponding order: suffering from its own recovery, gaily, and in conjunction with crime). The truly uncanny thing about this gaiety is its seductiveness; I, for one, went along with it on first viewing, and thought the film was going to be a good romp. Thus this ‘unfamiliar’ gaiety is really familiar, for many of us can easily sympathize with a criminal’s view- he speaks to our own lawless desires, our ids.

Next come the spoilers.

The film’s other prominent id-manifestation is in the form of Orson Welles. As it turns out Harry Lime (played by Welles) faked his own death- he was profiting from a penicillin shortage by selling diluted penicillin (extremely dangerous and often lethal to those who use it; in the film we visit a hospital ward filled with children made deathly ill by Harry’s) on the black market. And then, in this scene, Holly speaks to Harry for the first time:

The uncanny I see in this scene is closely related to the uncanny in the introduction: a cheerful child-murderer appears in an amusement park to sound of the cheerful zither theme. Holly’s ridiculous imitation of the hard-boiled noir hero seems stupid, and one’s first inclination is not sympathy for his side. Especially if one takes into account the hypocrisy of the film’s ‘good guys.’ Philip Kerr points out in his explication of this scene in his essay “Seeing Greene” (included in the booklet of the Criterion edition of the film), that all of the good guys in this film are part of nations (many of the good guys are even ex-soldiers) that have just spent years taking part in the killings of thousands upon thousands of “dots.” What right have they (Kerr asks), or the audience for that matter, to judge Lime?

Thus the scene is a perturbing vision of the uncanny. Our old (childhood?) friend comes back, at once familiar and unfamiliar. (This side of Harry existed when Holly knew him, as we find out in Holly’s allusion to the gambling story; yet Holly’s managed not to remember this before, in his longing to see Harry.) Our friend speaks to a part of us that we find revolting and that we reject as quickly as possible. Yet it is still a part of us. I remember that when I first watched the film the logic of Lime’s offer (of 3.43) momentarily appealed to me. It’s a damn good scene and a damn good film.

Bags of Blood

As you’re thinking about your response to the psychoanalytical theory assignment (see the previous post), you might consider ways of using these concepts without necessarily being strictly Freudian (or Lacanian or Cixousian). The idea of the “uncanny” seems to me to have more general applications. In some ways, we might even regard the uncanny from a kind of formalist perspective—as a sort of mirror universe version of defamiliarization. For Shklovsky, defamiliarization results in aesthetic pleasure, but the uncanny, which also involves the unfamiliar familiar, evokes a different set of emotional responses (revulsion and fear, perhaps, but also other less intense kinds of unease).

For me, there are two moments of the uncanny in the “Angel” episode. When Darla opens the fridge and shows the bags of blood hanging there, that’s a nice moment of the unhomely. Something that is familiar(a refrigerator)  is made unfamiliar, and, by extension, Angel’s normal-looking home becomes similarly a suddenly unhomely place, and we realize as well that Angel, as familiarly human as he may look is not really so. A strictly Freudian analysis of this scene would look for some connection to repressed infantile experience, particularly to primal sexual experience (and blood might suggestion castration, or, for that matter, menstrual blood and thereby a fear of female sexuality), but I don’t think we necessarily need to go there to describe this moment as uncanny, as an occasion  of the familiar and homely made unfamiliar and unhomely in a disturbing way.

The other uncanny moment, which might be more easily interpreted through a strict Freudian lens, is Angel’s transformation into a vampire as he’s kissing Buffy. This is certainly a moment of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar in a distressing way. If this were Buffy’s dream, we might interpret it as having Oedipal overtones. The much (much much) older man she is kissing is a father substitute (and you noticed that Buffy is without a father), and the transformation of the familiar and attractive Angel into a monster might be interpreted as a kind of self-punishment (she is the one doing the dreaming) for breaking—even in a fantasy, a dream—the incest taboo.

As you are thinking about your posts, be thinking of ways you might illustrate the psychoanalytical ideas, but you also might be thinking of ways to apply those ideas more flexibly than, say, Freud does.

The Freudian Uncanny in Mulholland Drive’s Scariest Scene

The film work of David Lynch is absolutely running over with exploration of the unconscious. Lynch deals very frequently in dream-logic and has established a love-it or hate-it career out of committing the repressed aspects of human existence to film. Repression commonly has found its way into Lynchian work through lengthy, murky, seamlessly interpolated dream scenes and/or harsh visions of sex, violence, and other entities that usually dwell in the realm of the taboo. One could write for days about the instances in Lynch’s work of the “Uncanny” as it was defined by Sigmund Freud in his essay. Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead, is completely uncanny; it is perhaps the only film I have ever seen which is comprised of more metaphoric symbols than realistic situations. From there, the director continued to weave Freudian symbols of the repressed Id into his films, oftentimes juxtaposing them with realistic depictions of the Id running rampant (remember Frank in Blue Velvet, his Id has completely taken control and his Oedipal needs were clearly never met).

Without attempting to analyze Lynch’s entire body of work through a Freudian lens (which I’m sure has been done several times anyway), I have decided to present one memorable scene that is surely a strong example of the uncanny. This scene comes from Lynch’s 2001 masterwork Mulholland Drive. The scene, like many in the movie, appears to be a non-sequitor, a fragmented imagework that floats into the narrative with no warning. The two characters are new to the movie and, save a brief cameo appearance in the last act, do not have a further purpose in moving the “story” forward. However, it must be noted that Mulholland Drive functions heavily according to the “rules” (or — better stated — lack thereof) of dream logic. I intend to approach the scene as it appears on this blog, that is, detached from the context of the movie.

In the scene, the character Dan describes a dream that he has had twice before, each time unfolding in the same exact way, with the same details. The dream begins inside of the restaurant Winkie’s, then progresses to the area directly behind that establishment. The dream climaxes with Dan encountering a horrifying “man” that he wishes never to see “outside a dream”. This “man” embodies fear itself; his presence in the dream is experienced by Dan so intensely that he claims to be able to see the man “through the wall”. Dan and his companion have met at Winkie’s to investigate the area behind the restaurant to “get rid of [the] god-awful feeling” that such a being could exist. Freud’s definition of the uncanny focuses on infantile complexes resurfacing, but allows for the uncanny to also stem from “primitive beliefs which have been surmounted” suddenly becoming “confirmed.” The fact that Dan’s dreadful dream-villain, the monster of a “man” that has haunted him in two nightmares, appears in his waking life is terribly uncanny. For Dan, such a monster probably had not seemed feasible to exist since he was a child, yet the recent dreams he’s experienced involving the familiar location of Winkie’s and mostly familiar cast of characters have caused him to re-evaluate such feasibility. Eventually, his worst fears are confirmed when this monster surfaces during his waking hours.

For Freud, this terrifying “man”-creature must surely represent some infantile fear or other repressed aspect of Dan’s existence. If you freeze-frame the video at 4:40 you can get a pretty good look at the creature, which I refuse to accept as human. Perhaps the weathered, dirty creature, in terms of its role as a dream signifier, is an embodiment of Dan’s childhood fears of being abandoned by his parents and thus left to live a primal, wild life. The creature seems to be a hyperbolated homeless man, so far removed from society and human relation that he barely appears human anymore. Growing up in an industrialized nation, especially in a city like Los Angeles, Dan surely came to fear the stigmatized lifestyle of the homeless, so perhaps his dream creature is a manifestation of his adulthood fears of losing everything to the point of poverty combined with his childhood fears of abandonment from his parents. Regardless, the emergence of the man from behind the wall is completely uncanny, if only because it is exactly what Dan has dreamed and hoped not to experience in his waking life.

It must be noted, however, that at 3:23 there are plates of food clearly visible on the table that Dan and his friend had just been sitting at. These plates of food are mysteriously missing from the next shot, as the same table is visible just seconds later at 3:26 and it is completely cleaned off. This could be a continuity mistake, but the meticulousness of David Lynch’s direction would lead me to believe otherwise. I believe the lack of continuity in respect to the table is a clear indicator that Dan is once again dreaming. This leads me to question the role of the uncanny as it relates to nightmares. Can nightmares like Dan’s be considered uncanny as Freud has defined the term? If events in a fictional text can be deemed uncanny, surely the events of a dream can have the same label.

For more uncanny Lynch fun, check out this clip from Lost Highway (1997). I almost analyzed this scene, but I always get too terrified by Robert Blake’s uneasy portrayal here.