Double Vision: Adaptation, the Uncanny and Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hodgkins
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Uncanny

Abstract This essay takes a renewed look at the 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Philip Kaufman, along with its source texts: Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers and Don Siegel’s 1956 adaptation. Specifically, I use the uncanny as a conceptual lens for thinking about my own reaction to Kaufman’s movie, and what I argue is the film’s reaction to its literary and cinematic precursors. In the process, I try to demonstrate how the uncanny might prove a useful critical tool for theorizing adaptive works, especially those in the horror genre.

The embodied architect in the information age

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Coyne
Keyword(s):  
Information Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
Design Studio ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between architecture, the body and the computer is considered in this paper. Whereas the body has been related traditionally to architecture through concepts of geometry and proportion, the computer also brings to light the valorization of craft, McLuhan's philosophy of the changing sensorium, the projection of digital utopias, Freud's construction of the relationships between repetition, obsession and the uncanny, and the residence of the body in concepts of mind. The examination of these issues is productive in the context of the design studio.

Père de pierre

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Sjef Houppermans
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Mother Earth ◽  
Signs Of Death

The presence of stones in Beckett's work is linked to the essential ambivalence concerning the hard fruits of Mother Earth. Stones throw a bridge between the parental instances under the sign of the Freudian notion of 'fort-da,' seen as the most elementary psychic movement. We propose to visit the tombstones in the text and to join the old woman wandering between the stones of her garden in . The uncanny characterizes the ambivalent impressions created by these concretions, stemming from within the body of the earth, signs of death, but also incessantly pursuing the phantasmal intimacy of the mother. Strange familiarity of these tombstones, where the body of the father has been buried.

The Performance of Disappearance: Mike Parr's Amerika

2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-201
Author(s):  
Edward Scheer
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Physical Demands ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Presence And Absence ◽  
Performing Objects

Claudia Orenstein reconsiders the notion of “entertainment for the whole family” via a puppetry-centered program that, by drawing on the power of performing objects, delves into the uncanny and fantastical to appeal to young minds, inventive artists, and adventurous adult spectators alike. Edward Scheer considers the aesthetics of disappearance within Australian performance artist Mike Parr's most recent series of actions, Amerika, which involve extreme physical demands even as they posit the body as subject simultaneously to its own presence and absence.

The house of pain and the insect politician: Surveillance and the body in The Fly and The Island of Dr. Moreau

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Austin Riede
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Fear Of Pain ◽  
Human Recognition ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
And Control

Abstract David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), the definitive film of the body horror genre, poses political questions regarding the limits of human recognition and the disciplinary surveillance techniques employed over the body by ideology. This article reads The Fly alongside H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, arguing that both texts are allegorical explorations of the foundation of human politics, through surveillance and control of both individuals and populations. Brundle's transformation leads him to a Hobbesian 'state of nature', in which he asserts his natural right of self-preservation. The vivisected animals that Dr Moreau creates, however, exist in a highly ritualized political system predicated on the human capacity to experience, understand and remember pain. It is a political system that exemplifies Foucauldean notions of self-control through disciplinarian surveillance. The two texts serve as inverted reflections of one another: in The Island of Dr. Moreau, animals are humanized by the fear of pain, and in The Fly a human is animalized by the experience of pain. Both texts are reminders that, as Elaine Scarry has pointed out, pain has the capacity to eradicate individual humanity. They also remind us that empathy for the pain of others is essentially humanizing.

The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts

1997 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Worman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Field ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Field Of Vision ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
Poetic Narrative ◽  
Mind's Eye

Certain Greek texts depict Helen in a manner that connects her elusive body with the elusive maneuvers of the persuasive story. Her too-mobile body signals in these texts the obscurity of agency in the seduction scene and serves as a device for tracking the dynamics of desire. In so doing this body propels poetic narrative and gives structure to persuasive argumentation. Although the female figure in traditional texts is always the object of male representation, in this study I examine a set of images of a female body whose representation ultimately seems to frustrate the narrative strategies for which its depiction was created. What emerges in the fifth century as a rhetorical technique begins in Book 3 of the Iliad as a narrative strategy that uses Helen's cloaked and disappearing body to catalyze plot, and develops in Sappho's fr. 16 into a logic of desire shaped by the movement of Helen's and other bodies in the visual field. Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, transforms these depictions of Helen into an argument that is structured by Helen's body, an argument that Helen herself employs in Euripides' Troades, where her own body serves as the anatomy of her argument. These texts all associate Helen's body with a type of persuasive narrative that repeatedly invokes the field of vision, describing physical presence in terms that aim at attracting the eye. At the same time this verbal portraiture disrupts the audience's perspective by depicting bodies as cloaked, mobile, and/or half seen, and by obscuring distinctions between desirer and desired, viewer and viewed. As both subject and object in this viewing process, Helen's body comes to be associated with the double vision of seduction (i.e., the shunting of her body from desiring eye to desired object) and the distracting power of persuasive images, which seduce the mind's eye while eluding the mind's grasp.

Lacan’s Anamorphic Object

Janus Head ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Athena V. Colman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
Efficient Technology ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Century Thought

Much of the current research on the constitution of subjectivity has been grounded on attempts to conceptualize the body without collapsing into reductive materialism or, to the contrary, theorizing a completely historical subject in the hope of doing ontological and ethical justice to formative specificity. With the rationalism-empiricism struggle put to bed by Kant’s transcendental turn and tucked in tightly by Hegel’s dialectic, the twentieth century was greeted with a maelstrom of world wars and efficient technology which produced the greatest number of corpses in the shortest time in world history; and still, to use Hegel’s famous saying, thought stood “at the crossroads of materialism and idealism.” Wrestling with articulating the interpenetrating quagmire of consciousness and body marked the beginning of twentieth century thought. For instance, Freud’s science of childhood development aligned emerging aspects of subjectivity with the very development of the body itself. In another effort, Husserl identified eidetic constructs which structured experience and, most importantly for our purposes, he distinguished between the phenomenal lived-body of the Lebenswelt known as Leib, and the anonymous thing-like quality of the body known as Körper. In this context, the corpse is the very opposite of the body insofar as the body is the site of the unfolding of subjectivity whereas the corpse seems to be the limit of subjectivity: a spatial-temporal marker of a subject which was. For instance, although it has been suggested that the corpse has somehow been emptied of subjectivity, is it not just as likely that it is we who are emptied before it? What is it about the corpse that disgusts us, intrigues us, fascinates us and reveals us to ourselves? The notion of the ‘uncanny’ is frequently invoked as a placeholder for the specific and irreducible character of such threshold experiences (such as encountering a corpse). But what is the structure of the uncanny? Moreover, what are the broader considerations regarding limit experiences as integral to the constituting of the subject?

Appropriating Ovid’s Tyrannical Raptures in Macbeth

2019 ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
John D. Staines
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Human Understanding

In contrast to Titus Andronicus, Macbeth adapts few Ovidian sources; nonetheless, the play reveals how completely the mature Shakespeare appropriates Ovid’s poetics, especially the element of raptus, seizing and being seized. Macbeth himself is the body rapt, and raped, as he experiences the sublime terror of being swept up and violated by forces at the edge of human understanding. The tyrant is both the rapist and the raped, seized by passions he cannot, or will not, control, tortured in “restless ecstasy” that drives him to greater violations. Using the rhizome and assemblage of Deleuze and Guattari, and the hauntology of Derrida, this chapter sees Shakespeare, Ovid, and human culture as fragmentary records of violent appropriations and traumatized ghosts haunting past, present, and future. The uncanny, spectral experiences Maurizio Calbi finds in postmodern Shakespearean adaptations are thus intensifications of experiences Shakespeare found in Ovid and made central to his art.

Kubrick and Horror

The Shining ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Laura Mee
Keyword(s):  
Horror Films ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Horror Genre ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Popular Work ◽  
The Grotesque

This chapter discusses Stanley Kubrick's relationship with the horror genre. The Shining (1980) is a clear example of Kubrick's status as ‘an artist of complex and popular work’—rather than being exclusively one or the other. Many approaches to understanding the film see it as a ‘serious’ work by a master filmmaker operating without commercial imperative, or elevated above a disreputable genre. This overlooks a number of important contextual considerations, not least the fact that Kubrick had been clear in asserting that he wanted to make a supernatural film and liked a number of horror films. Moreover, Kubrick, whose films ‘repeatedly mix the grotesque and the banal, the conventions of Gothic confessional morbidity and the self-conscious involutions of modernist parody’, was ideally placed to make a horror film. If The Shining is in many ways typical of the Kubrickian style, then it surely follows that the Kubrickian style was ideal for horror. His auteurist style—the use of black comedy, his artistic approach to mise-en-scène and cinematography, an interest in the uncanny—all lend themselves to the genre.

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