Abstract
This article proposes an investigation of the ways in which the figure of the non person in/animate body operates in Gothic cinema. It will focus on human-like objects, specifically dolls, in order to investigate the key narrative and aesthetic discourses they facilitate regarding hollowness and life. These entities establish a frightening dynamic between stasis and real or imagined (yet always unwanted) movement. In the process, they become haunting symbols of liminality that articulate particular ideas about identity and personhood, while also stressing the permeable boundaries between self and other. Gothic things undermine the normal subject-object relation and thus continually destabilize the demarcations between life and death or sanity and insanity. In so doing, they furthermore expose an irrational attitude towards existence and consciousness. Using an object-oriented approach that draws on Elaine Freedgood’s and Bill Brown’s thing theory, I explore the disruptive tendencies that in/animate agents foster in such films as Maria Lease’s Dolly Dearest (1991), Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), and Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). I will focus on these case studies to examine the manner in which Gothic dolls activate uncanniness to represent subjectivity in crisis. In analyzing the figure of the doll to investigate the uneasy relationship between human beings and human-like things, this paper contributes to the growing interest surrounding the role of objects in Gothic cinema.
Highlights
This article proposes an investigation of the ways in which the figure of the non-person in/animate body operates in Gothic cinema
Using an object-oriented approach that draws on Elaine Freedgood’s and Bill Brown’s thing theory, I explore the disruptive tendencies that in/animate agents foster in such films as Maria Lease’s Dolly Dearest (1991), Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), and Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
In analyzing the figure of the doll to investigate the uneasy relationship between human beings and human-like things, this paper contributes to the growing interest surrounding the role of objects in Gothic cinema
Summary
Let’s face it: some dolls are creepy. I am not referring to the Barbie type of doll, these, too, have had their fair share of disturbing features. A prosthetic hand or a robot, for instance, that appear lifelike but fail to act – to behave or to move – like a human being fall into what Mori calls the “uncanny valley” by provoking negative familiarity, repulse, and fear (9899). This is where dolls come into play. Human-like avatars of the odd and the weird, these paradoxically unresponsive, yet undead, entities that foreclose the possibility of impending re/animation, become haunting symbols of liminality Their “categorical interstitiality,” to use Noël Carroll’s expression, adds to both the unease with which they are perceived in film and the particular uncanny experience they produce (55). The uncanny almost-aliveness of anthropomorphic things is terrifying in the Gothic because accepting that the motionless can become mobile means accepting the existence of a residual degree of inexplicable agency in lifeless matter; in other words, it means accepting the existence of a residual degree of inexplicable autonomy in evil
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