A Brief Tour of the Uncanny Valley
As the stomach turns
It’s not an actual place. It’s a state of mind: specifically the disgust or revulsion you feel when observing a human figure — say, a doll, puppet, dummy, robot or computer animation — that is amazingly realistic, but not realistic enough. “Valley” refers to the sudden dip in emotional response from “ah!” to “ugh!” “Uncanny” is the cognitive dissonance that explains the dip: something is simultaneously strange and familiar — an unresolvable uncertainty from which the mind recoils. In many ways, the uncanny is similar to déjà vu, a discrepancy in recognition when we experience something as new and familiar at the same time.
The concept of the uncanny has been known for some time — as early as 1919 when Sigmund Freud discussed it in an essay, where, not surprisingly, he traced it back to the id and repressed impulses. Later writers took a different path and decided the uncanny was, at bottom, a form of existential angst, basically the result of two conflicting mental states. For example, watching yourself in a video, you might suddenly find that the unfamiliar (but real) image on the screen doesn’t quite jibe with your familiar (but unreal) notion of yourself — an uncertainty that suggests that we are very different from the person we think we are. The subsequent feeling of discomfort, or angst, is what follows. As with many things having to do with human psychology, it was Freud who first pointed out the presence of the uncanny in literature, but others after him, beginning with Jacques Lacan, have found it a ubiquitous trope in fiction and film.
Master of the Uncanny
Alfred Hitchcock’s films are a virtual catalogue of doppelgangers, split personalities, and alter egos, as well as themes focused on the conflict between the perceived and real, the familiar and the strange, the affirmed and the denied — all of which are fertile soil for the uncanny. In Psycho (1960), it verges into full-blown psychopathy. At the center of that film is Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who is both a son and his own mother. The mother is deceased and famously embalmed but is very much alive, running the show inside Norman’s head. As a horror film, where unease and dissociation are the stock in trade, there are many scenes that rely on uncanny juxtapositions.
One in particular stands out. As Lila Crane (Vera Miles) snoops around the creepy Bates manse, almost every object shimmers between innocent and sinister. At one point, Lila sees her kaleidoscopic reflection in two facing mirrors, as if catching herself in the act of catching herself. It’s a jolting shock for her and for the audience. Though somewhat standard fare in a horror movie, here it’s woven into a larger thematic web.
That web is completed at the end of the film when Norman is sitting in a jail cell, wrapped in a blanket. As the camera dollies in on his face, we hear Mrs. Bates in voiceover addressing her son, who begins to smile as she tells him no one would ever believe it was she who murdered Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam). She tells him that the police would say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.” As she speaks this line, a skull is superimposed over Norman’s face — an image that captures the tangled moral irony of the situation: who is the murderer — the mother or the son? It’s a moment bristling with the uncanny as we struggle to make sense of the film’s many contradictions. At the most obvious level, the scene is a classic horror-film trope. But on another, following as it does an over-long explanatory speech by a psychologist, it’s the capstone of Hitchcock’s satire of Freudian psychology — or if you prefer, on an even deeper level, a criticism of any attempt to make sense of human rationality, where both lunacy and evil can so easily take root.
If Psycho is high horror, then Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is high romance. But both films deal with forms of mental derangement and the uncanny effects that result. Both films also feature characters with multiple personalities, although Vertigo does the later film one better by including the possibility of reincarnation.
In Vertigo, the story unfolds almost entirely from the point of view Scottie (James Stewart), who falls in love with Madeleine (Kim Novak), the wealthy wife of Scottie’s friend, a shipping magnate. Madeleine, who believes she is the reincarnation of another woman, commits suicide and Scottie, whose mental state is already troubled, has a nervous breakdown. Sometime later, he sees a woman on the street who bears a resemblance to Madeleine. This is Judy (also Kim Novak), a sales clerk. Scottie is so taken with her that he goes to elaborate lengths to transform her into Madeleine, changing her clothing and the style and color of her hair, not knowing that Judy (as the audience has become aware) is in fact Madeleine herself, a coconspirator with her shipping magnate lover in the murder of his wife.
Through sheer will and determination, Scottie attempts to cross the uncanny valley in the famous transformation scene when the recreated “Madeleine” enters the hotel room where Scottie is waiting for her. They embrace. They kiss. Bernard Herrmann’s romantic score soars to new heights. The camera spins in a vertiginous circle around the couple as the background is filled with images from Scottie’s memories of the time before Madeleine’s “death.” It’s a hallucinatory, deeply uncanny moment when the familiar and the strange mix in a mad dream of doomed love, tragic irony, and willful self-delusion.
In his fiction and especially in his often misunderstood novel, Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov was as much a devotee of the uncanny as Hitchcock, especially when it came to doppelgangers. Lolita features Humbert Humbert and Claire Quilty, dueling pedophiles. Pale Fire has John Shade and Charles Kinbote, dueling authors. A confounding and intricately constructed novel, Pale Fire is the supreme example of Nabokov’s use of parody, which is essentially a literary expression of the uncanny, a clash between two different ways of seeing the same thing. The point is to arouse ridicule not revulsion, although revulsion might very well be the response of the writer whose work is being parodied.
Nabokov’s book is a parody of literary criticism/scholarship consisting of two interconnected parts: a 999-line poem called “Pale Fire,” along with notes and commentary by Charles Kinbote, a mad scholar who uses the poem to tell his own story. The commentary as a parody of incompetent literary scholarship is matched by the poem as a parody of incompetent poetry. Written in the manner of Alexander Pope, the poem’s defects are readily apparent, beginning with the poet’s questionable choice to write in a style over three centuries out of date. Moreover, the poem doesn’t sound like a poem. It mostly has the rhythms of prose as it stampedes along, unconstrained by its many free-flowing lines — prose gerrymandered into heroic couplets. The mock heroic was standard fare in the eighteenth century, but in John Shade’s poem the mock heroic is self-inflicted, with the poet tripping on the hem of his robes, as here:
Sybil, throughout our high-school days I knew
Your loveliness, but fell in love with you
During an outing of the senior class
To New Why Falls. We luncheoned on damp grass.
Not only is this patently unpoetic, but it’s also humorously ambiguous. Did young Sybil and John sit on or consume the damp grass? Similarly, in the celebrated opening lines of the poem, the ridiculous and the eloquent are yoked together, setting up a major theme and a running joke:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the window pane
The result is a picture, though exquisitely stated, of something that at best is pathetic and at worst ludicrous: a bird flying into a window. It’s analogous to a person slipping on a banana peel and then falling to his death off a cliff. And yet this is the central image of the poem, and in fact of the entire book — the collision of the imagination into the reality that encloses us in the prison of space and time.
Novel and Film
Recently Pale Fire made a cameo appearance in Blade Runner 2049, most importantly in the scenes in which the main character, K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant, sits before a monitoring device that administers a baseline test to determine if he is functioning properly. The machine speaks what appears to be gibberish, and K is required to immediately repeat it. Hesitations and mistakes indicate something is wrong. The gibberish actually consists of three lines from Pale Fire:
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And, dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
The excerpt describes a vision John Shade had during a near-death experience following a heart attack — the ultimate uncanny valley when one enters that existential borderland between life and death and manages to survive to tell the tale. For K, who has no idea what the words mean, the uncanny manifests in a different way. The baseline test is designed to determine whether K is functioning as designed — that is, whether or not certain human traits might be interfering with his programming — qualms, empathy, uncertainty — and casting K into the unhappy valley between human and nonhuman. Failing the baseline test and revealing the presence of human emotions has dire consequences — the termination of K’s life.
At the end of the film, K dies and Deckard (Harrison Ford) becomes the focus. For years, beginning with the original Blade Runner (1982), there’s been a controversy as to whether or not Deckard, the cop whose job it is to hunt down renegade replicants, is himself a replicant. In the first theatrical release of the film, with its voice-over narration and happy ending, Deckard seems to be human. The last scene is of Deckard and Rachel, the advanced replicant of the Tyrell Corporation, setting off for unknown parts. The most recent Final Cut (2007) version strongly implies that Deckard is in fact a replicant. Blade Runner 2049 does nothing to settle the question.
In one of the final scenes of the sequel, Deckard and Niander Wallace, the head of the company that bought out the Tyrell Corporation, meet at the company’s headquarters. Wallace wants vital information that Deckard has concerning the location of a child that Deckard had fathered with Rachel (Sean Young). As an inducement to talk, Wallace presents him with a resurrected Rachel, unchanged after more than thirty years. “An angel again — for you,” Wallace tells Deckard. Rachel approaches Deckard and says, “Did you miss me?” She tenderly touches his face and he grasps her hand. “Don’t you love me?” she asks. Deckard doesn’t seem to know how to answer.
We know that the actress playing Rachel cannot be Sean Young, because no makeup artist, even an inspired one, could pull off such a feat. CGI is obviously at work, and so we watch closely to see possible traces of an uncanny valley. Perhaps a trained eye can detect one, but most audiences will not — a testament to the year that a visual effects team spent trying to achieve the holy grail of creating a computer-generated character that looks and performs like a live actor.
As for Deckard, he’s not fooled. “Her eyes were green,” he says, addressing both the fake Rachel and Niander Wallace.
Novel and Website
Stories of humans and the android creations of humans inevitably involve the effects of the uncanny valley in the same way that Freud found in the conflicts within the human personality, or Lacan uncovered in the conflict between the self and the other. As we’ve seen, film offers many more opportunities than books for developing the themes associated with the uncanny valley, which in its most obvious form is a visual phenomenon. What about the emerging possibilities now being demonstrated with the Internet and social media?
Consider my novel, River Run. It’s a kind of detective story in which a man named Travis loses his memory and identity on page one and then spends the rest of the novel attempting to recover them. At the same time, his amnesia is accompanied by episodes of dissociation in which he feels pulled out of himself into another plane of existence and a higher level of awareness where the notion of “self” has an entirely different meaning. Is he merely a helpless victim of the vagaries of chance, or is there an unseen force manipulating his course and progress through life? In the course of the novel, as his original identity is gradually revealed to him, he discovers that he is a person very different from who he was prior to his amnesia. The moment of revelation becomes a moment of revulsion.
It’s a twenty-first century version of Freud’s uncanny valley but now with an electronic component — a website that is an adjunct to the published book, an extension of the novel in breadth and depth, adding new information, alternatives, and elaborations, while drawing the reader into the mind of the author, her own influences, passions, and doubts. It’s a back story as well as an inside story, working on multiple metafictional levels. The point of the website is to take you to places not accessible via the conventional novel. It enlarges your experience of the story not just by stimulating your imagination but by making you a party to its creation.
Once readers have finished the novel, they are directed to www.katherynclegg.com. From there, a link connects the reader to “Playing God,” where the site becomes a game of increasing difficulty as the reader/player strives to uncover more and more information and attain a final revelation, a final uncanny valley — the ultimate existential contradiction that lies at the center of our own world. Writing the book was a difficult undertaking. When you work long enough in game development or as a writer of fiction, you begin to see things in a totally different way, you begin to see yourself in a totally different way. And the moment of realization — when the irony of being both the creator of, and a participant in, a simulation hits you — the feeling can be something akin to nausea. Not of the stomach but of the soul.
As if you’ve pitched headlong into an uncanny valley.
