The Spatial Affliction of the Uncanny

Anyone who knows me tolerates my dreadful taste in obscure arthouse movies. The trick to luring an unsuspecting friend to participate in watching these atrocities, is to entice them with a slightly overexaggerated description of the plotline. Believing they are about to experience a noteworthy and influential film, holding crucial weight that impacted the entire history of filmmaking, they begrudgingly sit through two hours of torment, ending with an occasional public tantrum. One such film that captures this exhibition is ‘The Exterminating Angel’ directed by Luis Bunuel in 1962. The Spanish surrealist film focuses on a group of affluent guests that attend a formal dinner party at a lavish mansion. By the end of the night, as the guests begin to gather their belongings, gesture to leave and say goodnight, they are overcome by a strange affliction, preventing them from leaving the music room. After numerous attempts to step over an invisible threshold, they surrender to the uncanny force and sleep on the chairs and carpets overnight, eventually residing in the room for a number of days. The film illuminates the degeneration of weakened morals among the upper class, using their return to a state of savage primal instincts to expose the barbaric catastrophe of characters’ deepest and darkest predispositions. The oddball storyline examines the uncanny force as ‘the great leveller’ of human nature, exposing the vulnerability and susceptibility of persons through psychological distress. The uncanny is experienced initially during childhood. As a child lays in their bed, certain of every object in their bedroom, as soon as the lights are switched off, their mind misconstrues seemingly everyday occurrences into scary monsters. Tree branches outside the window suddenly transform into the long fingernails of a boogie man scratching on the glass pane. The dirty jumper shoved under the bed unexpectedly resembles a lurking crocodile, ready to bite off a foot should it hang out of the bedsheets. Or the sound of a neighbour’s whistling kettle as they brew a late-night coffee suddenly sounds like a ghost murmuring and wailing from underneath the floorboards. The perceived danger of the uncanny may not necessarily be life-threatening, but causes nightmares through the influence of unconscious impressions.

The familiarity of the uncanny also gives rise to ghost stories as we re-live this shared feeling of intellectual uncertainty. In some shape or form, everyone has listened to these tall tales that happened ‘to a friend of a friend of mine’ – creating validity and extra caution to an absurd series of unlikely events. Ghost stories play on the uncanny by placing the listener as an active participant, creating fear by contextualising a story to suit the setting. If one was to gather around a campfire in the middle of no-where, stories that played on isolation, mysterious forces in the trees, the sudden appearance of a stranger, or perhaps even a rogue animal, deliver the right dose of disturbance to cause stress and give a good freight. Participants return to their bed after a good laugh, quietly hesitant to avoid visiting that dark cave on the ridge at midnight where the ghost of old man Rogers was said to have kept the ears, eyes and tongues of foreign campers until his abrupt disappearance. A storyteller that attempts to recall this same narrative to a group of office workers trapped in a lift, clearly does not understand the spatial context required for creating impact through the use of the uncanny.

The uncanny as a space is also contained within the mind’s processing centre. I recall experiencing this firsthand during a holiday to the Jenolan Caves in Sydney. An intimate group of us had been caving with deep tunnel exploration, and found ourselves in a cavern with significant artificial lights. The tour guide decided he would turn off all light sources for us to experience total darkness and imagine the spatial disorientation of early explorers. As we stood motionless, he suggested we hold out our hands in front of our faces and speak up as soon as we saw its outline. Not long after, people verbalised their extrasensory abilities, to which the tour guide replied “congratulations, you are now all hallucinating.” The uncanny, it seemed, had also got the better of me, as the familiarity of my own hand overwhelmed my ability to distinguish reality from imagination during this delirious state. The uncanny is essential to recognising that we have not yet conquered the spatial relationship between our minds meaning, our eyes perception, and the truth of reality unfolding. The childhood game of Chinese whispers reminds us of the unreliability of human recollection. The line of communication conducted between two end points creates ample distance for an uncanny misrepresentation of facts. Errors typically accumulate in the retelling of a message, creating confusion for all participants involved through the incomprehensibility of original meaning. The uncanny seemingly does not exist as anything other than a hysterical deduction of our mind’s tricks, but as a space, the uncanny deliberately alters our state of being with consequences capable of inspiring absurd relationships that otherwise do not exist. One cannot use pure reason to understand the uncanny, for anyone attached to a conventional outcome fails to accept the senseless irrationality of this deliberate spatial affliction that transcends all possible explanation.