Dark & Twisty

After reading Freud’s treatise on the uncanny in horror, I started seeing the uncanny everywhere.  I will note that I have not had an antennae, cable, or satellite since 2006, but I do watch DVD’s often. 

One of the first places I noticed this uncanny use was on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The character of Lt. Commander Data fits into the uncanny.  He is an artificial life form who acts like a living human.  He lacks certain qualities of humanity, however.  He cannot emote.  When he attempts to mimic human emotions, the attempt always seems creepy.  His laughter is stilted; his smiles insincere.  Data is like the puppet or the automaton.  He is likeable, however, because we feel for him.

Then I noticed the uncanny in play on the old British series, Are You Being Served?  One of the continuing gags on that show was the display items used to advertise products.  Many of the displays imitate human behavior and at times are mistaken for actual humans.  I remember the episode where the dancing robots, which are very creepy looking, end up being entered into a dance contest instead of the actual human dancers.  Then there was the episode with the robotic father Christmas that flashes people. 

The Twilight Zone besides having numerous episodes of the uncanny, of course has the eyeball at the beginning.  Eyes are so heavily used in the literature of the uncanny.  I think of the Dark Tower Series where the eye represents the Crimson King.  It was part o the uncanny too. 

Now I hate the uncanny because I see it everywhere.  Everywhere I look, even talking with my patients, I find that some of their delusions fall into the uncanny.  They talk about all powerful creatures, living human-like creatures or mannequins.  Delusional ideation about how we can see their souls through their eyes.

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Before I started working for Northwest Alabama Mental Health, a horrible thing happened in the town I was assigned to.  A 18-year-old male was arrested for driving a stolen vehicle.  He was being booked when he took the gun from the police officer and shot the three officers in the station killing them all.  His statement upon being arrested for multiple murders was, “Life is just a game.  Sometimes people die.”

The defense for this boy was that he played Grand Theft Auto so much he didn’t know reality from fantasy, and so when he was arrested, he thought he was playing a video game.  He got the death penalty from a jury of all women. 

I considered it uncanny when I read a short story that took that very idea and expanded on it.

“Continuous Manipulation” took the idea that life is just a game and showed how horrific that could be.  In the story, somehow a little girl’s game of The Sims becomes reality. Her family is mimicked on the game and they then act out the game play, so much so that the family never grows older.  Although this sounds wonderful, the problem arises in that the family of Sims characters are aware of the fact they aren’t changing and that things don’t seem to change.

It is something out of The Twilight Zone.  You are a character in a video game that a little girl who wants the perfect family manipulates to keep everything the same, but the characters are aware.  It is a form of perpetual hell.  I remember a similar TZ episode from the movie, where the little boy kept everything the same with his mind.  It was very similar.

Of all the stories in The New Uncanny, this bothered me the most because of the story about the kid in Fayette, but also because, I play only two computer games, The Sims and Civilization.  I sometimes let my Sims die because I tire of them.  Imagine if they were real people somewhere.  I would be playing God with their lives and killing them just because I want to.  According to “Continuous Manipulation”, life is just a game, but you never die.

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In a strange turn of events, our reading course had us watching a film.  But not just any film, The Brood.  Before I get into the details of my anaylsis of this film, I'm going to make a few general comments.  One is that this was hard to find.  I had to finally buy it off of Amazon because no store in Alabama apparently carries this title.  Two, it stars Oliver Reed, who I greatly enjoy in movies. Three, later that night I was watching Star Trek: TNG and Nola was a character. 

Now to The Brood.

This film continues this sememster's study of insanity in horror.  The probably with this film in this category is that Nola, the mother character, isn't really the bad guy.  The brood, themselves aren't the bad guys either.  They are both just victims of the real bad guy, which is the doctor. Don't misundertand me Nola and the brood are the characters that cause all the gore and horror of the story.  Nola even provides us with a great disgust moment when she births one of the brood then licks the after birth off of it.  Oliver Reed, however, is the true cause of all the horror.

This story really seems to be more about a mad scientist and his plan for perfection.  Sure that is done through the somatic expression of psychological rage, but he is still little more than Dr. Frankenstein.  Reed's character works hard at his theorectical form of psychotherapy.  In reality it is a strange mixture of Freudian theory and Gestalt therapy.  He does everything wrong according to how therapist and psychologist are trained.  He purposefully always transference and countertransference to occur.  For laymen, this means allowing the patient to act toward him as they would a family member or cause of psychological distress and he in turn responds as that family member or psychological stress would.  This is bad business from the start. 

Reed's character takes this a step farther.  He then has trained this ever disturbed people to physically express their psychological stress.  At the beginning of the movie, the fat red haired man bursts out into large bleeding welts akin to stigmata.  Later in the film, we see that he doesn't need the doctor for this because he can do it himself when under extreme distress. 

Now to Nola.  The problem with Nola is that her somatic expression of rage is imp children.  She produces like spores from her body a small army of evil ski suit wearing children who kill who is focused her rage on.  She is unaware this is happening.  She knows that she is producing the brood but she doesn't know that they are carrying out her unconscious whelms. 

This is a frightening idea.  It takes the idea of a fugue state to a new level.  The patient can be completely coherent even dealing with other people while sending out unconcious vibes to her minions to do her evil will.

The truly scary part about this movie is that people do express psychological issues somatically.  I titled this entry "horrific vision of IBS" because irritable bowel syndrome is a somatic expression of stress.  Stress is heavily psychological. In IBS, the body response with rotating bowel trouble and severe GI cramps.  The brood are little more than this, except they kill people. 

The strange thing is that therapist can train their patients to do just about anything.  That is the way with things like progressive muscle relaxation.  You train a patient to recognize how it feels not to be tense and then imitated that.  It is a well documented fact that a borderline personality disorder patient can be trained to have multiple personalities.  Nola in this film seems to have a bit of BPD.  She would the perfect candidate for such training and manipulation.  The character of Nola isn't at fault for anything she has done until she becomes aware of her power.  This is because her husband tells her about it.  Then she turns it toward people purposefully.  That is truly when the insanity on her part becomes the true problem.  Until then, Reed's doctor character is to blame because he trained her to use the brood.

The brood is frightening because what if people could do that.  We know people can be trained to do many things psychologically.  Although, creating little imp children isn't possible, how about a fugue state where people kill other people.  This was a sort of issue in Psycho but Norman wasn't trained for it.

The Brood has several "crazy" characters in it, but Nola and Reed's character are the true evil because they let the killing and rage take over.  That is the truly frightening issue of the story.

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Every now and then you come across a work of fiction that is both humorous and thought provoking.  Recently, I listened to The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.  For those unfamiliar with his volume, it is an anthology of poetry.  Each poem is about a person buried in the graveyard at Spoon River, IL.  Masters tells a little bit of that person’s story through their own voice.  The overall connection of the poems, however, tells the story of the town.

Not all the people Masters wrote about had died, but he lampooned (maybe harpooned in a better word) them in this work.  It caused much controversy in the time it was published. Some of the Spoon Riverians didn’t care for it at all because he actually used the names and stories of real people.

For the most part, this work drags on a little too long.  It is nice to get a story from multiple angles, but there are only so many times that you can hear about the bank getting broken by the greedy owners, and about the various sins of different community leaders before things start to feel redundant.  The anthology does this.  The idea was novel for its time and still remains so.  To give voices to the dead of a cemetery is a great way to get ideas for stories, but moderation is in order.

The overall connection in the poems tell the story of little town of Spoon Rive with all its warts and herpes sores showing. The town seems idyllic like many small towns, but just the same looks and the truth aren’t the same.  Greed, politics, liquor, and sex permeate the small town.  Most all the poems deal with one of these, even the reverends and priest are guilty as much as the crooks and drunkards.

The town of Spoon River is a disease.  It infects all the narrators and brings all of them low.  Masters did his job well.  The town is a horrible creature and monster in its own right. However, the anthology takes too long to get through, and too many of the ghosts have the same story to tell. 

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Psycho is one of the greatest films of all time.  Sequels and remakes have attempted to catch the original lightning in a bottle, and have fail miserably.  The movie, so masterfully created by A. Hitchcock was based on the text by Bloch.  The text and the movie are similar but there are significant differences.  The text, as is typical, proves more subtle and disturbing relying on the inner moods instead of shadows and stuffed birds.  (Hitchcock and his birds.).

The main issue in the text version of Pyscho is if Norman is aware of his own illness.  This is an important part of the story because it changes the way it makes the reader feel.  Bloch never makes it clear if Norman is aware that he is his mother.  There are hints that he understands he has a different relationship with his mother.  Norman reads a lot  of books about Freudian analysis and Oedipus complex, but he also reads things that would make his mother very angry if she knew.  This would cause a psychological phenomenon called cognitve dissonnace.  Now, this could be the reason why Norman goes on his two man killing spree.  He is doing something mother wouldn't approve of, but at the same time he is his mother.  What is brain to do?  The two parts of his psyche are in direct conflict. 

This is the obvious cause for the split when Norman becomes Mrs. Bates.  The issue is does the Norman alter know what the mother alter is doing.  Bloch never makes that clear.  This wonderful for many reasons.  In terms of writing, it gives the audience the ability to make that decision.  The story is less scary to me if Norman knows what he is doing while he is mother.  So I chose to think, he has the rare and perhaps fictional dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder).  The reason why this seems scarier is that he can snap at any minute without any premeditation.  Scary stuff.  Of course not knowing, Bloch has left it up to the reader in a tiger or lady issue.  I can chose.

Bloch uses a lot of psychological issuesfor the day.  He uses it as a way of making his character ordinary and terrifying.  This is grandfather of our psychological horror in many ways.  The author helped to give birth to a new subgenre.  He did this with his use of psychopathology and not giving away much about that pathology.  It was a wonderful feat in such a small text.

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