Procedimiento ante la Cámara de Diputados

‘A mirror image of ourself’? Defining the Technological Uncanny

Only rarely does the psychoanalyst feel impelled to engage in aesthetic

investigations … Yet now and then it happens that he has to take an interest

in a particular area of aesthetics, and then it is usually a marginal one that has been neglected in the specialist literature.

One such is the uncanny. (Freud, 1919, 123)

Freud’s opening to his seminal essay ‘The Uncanny’ in 1919 has, in a way, taken on an uncanny existence of its own. Freud’s exploration of the theory of the uncanny –

that unnerving experience of finding the familiar and the homely made unfamiliar – has been explored in a broad of range of disciplines but uniting most of these diverse

applications is, unsurprisingly, the utilisation of Freud’s ideas10_{. Freud appears to}

remain the authority on this concept and, as this chapter maintains, the point at which further investigations into the uncanny should begin. In this sense one could not imagine that had circumstances been different, as Freud implies, perhaps he would not have even considered the uncanny as worthy of investigation. As Michael

Arnzen notes: ‘One might say that this is not only the “century of the uncanny” ... but also a century of uncanny scholarship’ (Arnzen, 1997, 315). As this thesis will

attest, the importance of studying the uncanny continues into the 21st Century but has origins which stretch further back than the 20th Century. Freud’s essay exists as the dominant voice in this wealth of scholarship but it is a strange work; despite his authority on the topic, there remains an absence, a kind of theoretical void

10 _{These subject areas include architecture (Vidler, 1992), art history (Masschelein, 2011), sound} (Spadoni, 2009), literature (Royle, 2003; Punter and Byron, 2004) and film (Mulvey 2006; Gunning). Many of these examples will be explored in this chapter.

32 surrounding the conceptualisation of the uncanny. Freud’s essay, quite paradoxically, poses as many questions as it claims to answer: it does not completely achieve what its opening sets out to do and it never quite satisfies the ultimate question ‘what is

the uncanny?’ It is this strange contradiction which I am concerned with in this

chapter. I, too, want to address this question and analyse how Freud answers this question – and how he does not answer it. What motivates Freud to write about this concept? Why should such an investigation take place at that particular time and within the field of psychoanalysis? And, importantly, what bearing do these observations have upon the relationship between the uncanny and cinema; between

filmic bodies and viewers’ reactions to them?

This chapter shall focus on answering these questions in order to establish two strands which will become the foundations of further investigation in this thesis. First, I shall define the uncanny as a physical experience of shock, unease and intrigue which occurs in reaction to intellectually challenging stimuli: for the cases outlined in this thesis, this is the challenge posed by particular – and unusual – representations of the human body on the cinema screen. Whether this filmic human is the body of a person filmed 120 years ago in cinema’s earliest days, or the performing body of an actor converted into digital as with motion-capture technology used in recent years, these cinematic bodies pose fundamental questions

concerning the close juxtaposition of the human body and cinema’s technology.

Does the cinema (re)present us with an image of real human bodies which are to be interpreted as the indexical recording of moving, organic forms? Or is the body necessarily transformed by the filming (and exhibiting) process and, if so, into what exactly? These questions focus on the conceptual slippages which occur when

33 between the real and artifice; live-action and animation; analogue and digital processes; documenting bodies and altering them through visual effects.

It is precisely these slippages which are responsible for why viewers can find the filmic body uncanny. This is evident by the language used in response to the films explored later in this thesis. These reactions draw on Freudian uncanny tropes – the double, automata, ambiguity over what is living or dead – in order to express what is strange and intriguing about the relationship between the photographically realistic human body and, as shall be explored throughout, its transformation through new and novel visual effects. The use of uncanny tropes to conceptualise these changes is also present in academic discourse and this, together with the terms used in the audience reactions, represent what I term the ‘language of the uncanny.’ The uncanny is, itself, a slippage in definitions between what is known and new; a blurring of boundaries between the familiar and the unhomely11. This chapter shall establish how the uncanny provides an illuminating theoretical framework for exploring different forms of filmic bodies and their relationship to definitions of the cinematic medium. The succeeding chapters use this characterisation of the uncanny in order to contextualise and compare two specific points in film history and visual effects technology which inspired extensive commentaries by film spectators and scholars alike: early cinema and the digital age.

The second theoretical strand this chapter establishes is the importance of the history of automata and the figure of the double to my analysis. These areas of research form

an important part of the uncanny’s genealogy which I explore below. The link

between the double, automata, the uncanny and cinema is perhaps unsurprising: as

11 _{As Freud discusses in his own work into the etymology of the word, unheimliche} – translated into English as the uncanny – combines the homely (heim) with its opposite (the unhomely) in its very construction (Freud, 1919, 134). This is discussed in more detail below.

34 the above musings reveal, integral to this investigation are questions pertaining to the relationship between the human body and technology – in this case, the technology of the cinema. Automata are an embodiment of this uncanny unification: mechanical machines which are often made in the human form and seek to mimic naturalistic movement. The experience of watching such automata – as many spectators in the 18th and 19th Centuries attested to – is quite uncanny: the verisimilitude of an

android’s appearance and movement acts simultaneously as both an uncanny

reminder and distraction from the automaton’s clockwork insides.

Therefore the lineage of the uncanny’s history I shall utilise in my own work is one

which is particularly concerned with the uncanny potential of technology: inventions which seek to recreate the human body in mechanical form. These creations are

uncanny not only because the body’s appearance may be duplicated – the creation of

a doppelgänger – they are uncanny because this mechanised double is able to move; technology is given (and provides) the appearance of life. Such inventions evoke fundamental questions over what it is to be human or, more specifically, what it is to be human in a world where developing technologies can adopt the forms and functions of the body. I propose that these questions have been translated into cinema, where this relationship between the cinematic representation of the human form and its impact on spectators becomes a central tenet in the discussion of the medium in its earliest days, and then again over a century later as digital technology establishes itself as a dominant tool in filmmaking. What I am arguing for, then, is the technological uncanny: a specific response and accompanying theory which demonstrates how it is the merging of the human body with the mechanical which is vital to the uncanny experience. Automata – and, later, cinematic images of the body

35

– evoke an uncanny reaction through the contemplation of the invention’s

technology and its relationship to its human appearance.

I will further establish the definition and rationale for the technological uncanny in

this chapter which is divided into three main sections. First I analyse Freud’s writing on the uncanny and, as shall be seen, Freud’s work outlines several paths of

possibilities for exploring the uncanny. Interestingly, the psychoanalyst struggles to

reconcile these approaches and, I argue, it is precisely the strangeness of Freud’s text – its inaccuracies, contradictions and obscure conclusions – which points the way to

further exploration of the topic. I contextualise the uncanny in relation to Freud’s larger oeuvre and contend that it is by approaching the concept through historical analysis that the two major uncanny tropes permeating this investigation can be fully understood. To illuminate the relevance of this history to my definition of the technological uncanny, and how it is used in future chapters, I will use the nuances

of the phrase ‘a mirror image of ourself’ to structure these ideas. The words are

dialogue spoken by Clara in Hoffmann’s The Sandman, a major literary influence on

Freud’s work, and the quote appears in the title of this thesis. The relevance of Clara to Hoffmann’s tale – and how this character relates to the major themes of the Freud’s text – shall be considered in due course but, for now, I want to use the

striking image evoked by the words as a way of illuminating the complex history of the uncanny and structuring sections two and three.

In section two I consider the ‘ourself’ part of Clara’s metaphor: how the

technological means to construct the human body – to create ‘ourself’ in mechanical form – is an integral part of the development of automata. The automaton is at the

heart of understanding Freud’s analysis and its wider historical relevance. The automaton is a key figure in Hoffmann’s work and other literary examples, and this

36 points to the importance of the language of the uncanny. This section will reveal how it is the creation of the human form through technological means which is key to my definition of the technological uncanny as it shall be used in future chapters. In the

third section I focus on the ‘mirror’ part of Clara’s phrase. Here I am concerned with technology’s ability to create other forms of double and, in particular, those

technologies and practices which focus on the reproduction of the human body

through projection and, eventually, photography. I argue that it is photography’s

perceived relationship to the index – the idea of images retaining an essence of trace of the object photographed – which is integral to the technology’s uncanny potential. This potential informs the reception of early cinema and my definition of the technological uncanny. The history of the double therefore reveals a specific mode of spectatorship: a viewer who marvels at the realism of the illusion of this doubling but is encouraged to think about the processes of this mediation. This chapter will conclude with a short section outlining my definition of the technological uncanny as result of this analysis. As I will show, the technological uncanny finds its roots within the 18th and 19th Centuries which are inextricably linked to the emergence and experience of the human body as uncanny. To illuminate this link I begin, once again, with Freud.

Freud’s Uncanny

Freud states straightaway at the beginning of his article a definition for the uncanny:

the uncanny is that which ‘belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread’ (Freud, 1919, 123). However the uncanny is different from general

feelings of horror and it is through his investigation of the German word unheimlich

that Freud finds a fortunate coincidence: ‘Heimlich thus becomes increasingly

37 Unheimliche, ‘the unhomely’) is in some way a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, ‘the homely’)’ (134). The unfamiliar, therefore, is not enough in order for

an occurrence or interaction to be experienced as uncanny: something ‘must be

added to the novel and the unfamiliar if it is to become uncanny’ (125). Freud briefly discusses his theory in relation to some common uncanny occurrences and objects, including the automaton. But the main focus of his analysis, around which his subsequent analysis will orbit, is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman. Published in

1816, Hoffmann’s short story focuses on the troubled life of a man named Nathaniel. As a child Nathaniel becomes fixated upon the fictional figure of ‘The Sandman’

who was said to prey on naughty children refusing to go to bed by removing their eyes. The young Nathaniel identifies this horrific figure as a lawyer named

Coppelius and, after the boy’s father dies in an accident, this man – the object of Nathaniel’s terror – mysteriously disappears. Nathaniel’s childhood trauma gains a

revival when, as a student, he is at first convinced that an optician named Coppola is none other than the evil Coppelius. His fiancée Clara convinces him, momentarily, this is not the case and, in the meantime Nathaniel devotes more and more of his time watching the home of a university professor, Spalanzani, because in one

window he can see the professor’s strange daughter Olympia. Just as his love for the

girl has overwhelmed him so much that he plans to propose, Nathaniel encounters a heated argument between Coppola and Spalanzani where it is revealed that Olympia

is in fact an automaton. The sight of the girl’s synthetic and detached eyes evokes a

fresh delirium in Nathaniel, who is committed to an asylum. Sometime later Nathaniel is reunited with his fiancée Clara who, when out walking together one day, decide to climb the tower in the town square. Nathaniel sees Coppola in the crowd and, with his madness induced again, attempts to throw Clara over the edge of the

38 steeple. As the townspeople rush to save her, Nathaniel eventually spares Clara and throws himself over the side, onto the stone floor below. Coppola disappears into the crowd.

Freud observes that ‘the author leaves us in doubt as to whether we are dealing with

the initial delirium of the panic-stricken boy or an account of events that must be

taken as real within the world represented in the tale’ (137). This ambiguity can be

located in the doubling of the characters Coppelius/Coppola/The Sandman which may represent the presence of real doppelgängers or these doubles could be the

fictitious imaginings of Nathaniel’s disturbed imagination. For Freud the most relevant part of Hoffmann’s story is within ‘the figure of the Sand-Man, and

therefore to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes’ which ‘is quite often a substitute

for the fear of castration’ (138-9). The nucleus of the uncanny is, according to Freud,

the castration complex: a fear which can be traced back to childhood and is the ultimate representation of the strangely familiar or unheimlich. There are two sources through which this uncanny process can occur: infantile fears or infantile wishes or beliefs. The latter relates to the automaton and thus the unease over what is animate or inanimate, living or artificial. Freud expands his thesis to include a range of experiences which may evoke the uncanny including: the double; wish fulfilment;

the compulsion to repeat; feelings of an ‘evil eye’ watching; and the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’. In all these examples the uncanny is the ‘frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns’ (147). Freud’s (tentative) conclusion for the

uncanny is summarised as thus:

[The] uncanny element we know from experience arises either when repressed childhood complexes are revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted appear to be once again

39 confirmed ... in real life it is sometimes impossible to distinguish between the two species of the uncanny that we have posited. As primitive convictions are closely linked with childhood complexes, indeed rooted in them, this blurring of the boundaries will come as no great surprise (155).

Freud’s commentary on Hoffmann is by far the most illuminating passage in his text.

Freud offers a compelling interpretation of Hoffmann’s tale which captures the eerie

mood of the ambiguity surrounding Nathaniel’s versions of events in the story.

However, Freud quickly begins to doubts the conclusions he draws from the story. At first Freud asserts with confidence how one should distinguish between the uncanniness of real life experiences from those in fiction, and even the latter should make this difference clear in the construction of the story world. Yet Freud undermines his own argument by then claiming: ‘This is the fact that an uncanny

effect often arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred’ (150).

In this instance the blurring of boundaries is integral to experiencing the story as uncanny. Freud also struggles with his different methodological approaches. The essay opens on an etymology of the word unheimlich which reveals the uncanny to be an experience of the familiar made strange. However Freud attempts to prove this thesis through several disparate areas of inquiry including: the close-textual analysis

of Hoffmann’s work; applying his ideas to real instances of the experience; and linking this all back to the anxieties fostered in childhood. Freud’s argument for the

castration complex, return of the repressed and the experience of the familiar made unhomely as all embodiments of the uncanny translate awkwardly onto each other. Indeed, Freud’s assertion to have finally explained the uncanny is undermined near

the end when he admits his analysis did not ‘exhaust the possibilities’ (157). I

believe the reason for these difficulties is revealed by considering the findings of another author – and fellow psychoanalyst – who is analysed but rejected in Freud’s

40 work. In 1906 Ernst Jentsch published ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ and so pre-dates Freud’s exploration of the topic. Jentsch’s influence on Freud’s work is evident as both authors identify the blurring of boundaries as key to an uncanny experience: Jentsch notes that an uneasy feeling can arise when what is known

becomes ‘new/foreign/hostile’ (Jentsch, 1906, 219). Jentsch also links his conceptualisation of the concept to language, finding the same ‘fortunate formation’

in unheimlich, noting that ‘the word suggests that a lack of orientation is bound up with the impression of the uncanniness of a thing or incident’ (217). As such, the two writers adopt very similar approaches – Jentsch also offers a reading of Hoffmann’s work – and construct comparable conclusions.

However, where Freud wants to account for the uncanny in its entirety – to pin down this strange experience through theoretical discourse – Jentsch aims instead for a

‘working definition of the concept’ (217). It is this ‘working definition’ which Freud

forcibly rejects in his own work. Jentsch writes that the experience of the uncanny is

reflective of an ‘intellectual uncertainty’ on behalf of the viewer: to experience the

uncanny is to suffer a cognitive dissonance, struggling to comprehend the event

perceived in relation to the mind’s interpretation of this situation. This highlights the

difference between the two theorists again. For Freud, the uncanny is a universal concept, applicable to all because of the processes of repression inherent in the mind. For Jentsch, the uncanny occurs only when the mind's capacity for conceptualisation