I Want Your Soul: Experiencing The Films Of Chris Cunningham

William Hughes – 26/06/2017

Student Number: 11312882

Media Studies: Film Studies MA

Supervisor: Tarja Laine

Second Reader: Emiel Martens

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Contents

Introduction ...... 2

Bibliography ...... 6

The Visceral ...... 7

Bibliography ...... 24

The Uncanny and The Sublime ...... 25

Bibliography ...... 44

Black Humour and the Absurd ...... 45

Bibliography ...... 59

Conclusion ...... 60

Bibliography ...... 63

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Introduction

Chris Cunningham is a British video artist known primarily for his directorial work in the music video form for ambient electronic musicians such as Aphex Twin, Autchre, Squarepusher and Bjork, although his full videography extends further. He began his career working on prosthetics for Stanley Kubrick’s A.I., which was not finished until 2001, after being headhunted by the legendary director. He has also worked with filmmakers such as David Fincher on Alien 3. However, Cunningham began to pursue his own projects, beginning with a video for Autechre’s Second Bad Vibel (1996). Although unhappy with the final product1, in this video we do see glimpses of motifs that will recur throughout the director’s career. The televisual distortion, the stuttering editing, the deformed human figures and robotics all reveal Cunningham’s early interest in conflicts between biology and technology as an aesthetic obsession. This recurring theme of biotechnology can be considered to mirror the cultural trend of posthumanism, or even transhumanism, we see in contemporary media culture, such as in Black Mirror (2011-), Westworld (2016-) and Ex Machina (2015), as well as in the work of the musicians for whom Cunningham has created music videos for, such as Aphex Twin and Bjork. These elements are present throughout his consequent videography and often lead him to be considered one of the most important figures in the music video landscape, alongside other music video auteurs, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, with whom he cofounded the Directors Label series of DVDs showcasing the work of significant music video directors. Unlike Jonze and Gondry however, Cunningham has never made a transition into the format of feature length films. Despite being linked to a screen adaptation of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, which never came to fruition, Cunningham has instead created increasingly experimental music videos, short films and video installations which have forgone the mainstream yet remained in the mind of the viewer.

His videos, particularly those that served as collaborations with musicians Bjork and Aphex Twin, have achieved notable critical and public acclaim. Many remember his videos for their disturbing nature and shocking break from the glamourous, sexy norm of the music video, when appearing on MTV broadcasts in the late 90s and early

1 Chris Cunningham, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (Sheffield: Warp, 2003). 3

2000s. It is because of the notoriety his videos have garnered from their disturbing, strange and sometimes horrific content that there can be said to be fertile ground for analysis. The sounds, the images and the thematic content of Cunningham’s videography have a strange ability to shock, disturb and outrage. This essay will explore the different ways Cunningham’s work achieves this; through the visceral nature of his films, his deft employment of the emotional phenomena of the uncanny and the sublime, and his sensibility of black humour.

First, will be an exploration into the sensory aspects of his work, primarily, the visceral qualities that many of his films exhibit and how these function towards the overall experience of spectatorship. This sensory element is not exclusive to the sense of seeing and hearing, but is also manifested through touch and the embodiment of the sounds and images themselves, working towards a wider synesthetic experience of viewing. This approach, which examines the ‘sensual status of cinematic perception and aesthetics’2, works on the basis that, ‘due to the contemporary culture of technologized body or ‘mediated sensorium’ (by the Internet, mobile phones, iPods, and other digital technologies), we are currently in the process of rediscovering or ‘turning to’ this necessary condition.’3 It is because of the highly visceral qualities of Cunningham’s output that this approach seems to be vital for an investigation into the sources of these feelings of viscerality. Much like the thematic focus of biotechnology, the embodiment of Cunningham’s work also consists of a somewhat paradoxical blend of the organic and the synthetic, utilising both the digital and analogue technology. The sensory aspect of touch can be seen in the strong emphasis on the disgusting in the imagery of his videos. Physical disgust, ’the most visceral of emotions’4, is achieved through the bodily nature of the images, which also contributes to their disturbing quality. These feelings of disgust are further heightened through the proximity of said images to the skin of the screen, and as a result, the viewer.

2 Tarja Laine, Wanda Strauven. “The Synaesthetic Turn,” New review Of Film And Television Studies 7, no.3 (2009): 254.

3 Tarja Laine, Wanda Strauven. “The Synaesthetic Turn,” New review Of Film And Television Studies 7, no.3 (2009): 254.

4 Carl Platinga, Moving Viewers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 210. 4

The second chapter will focus on Cunningham’s use of horrific elements and how these function as a part of the overall experience. Perhaps more prominent than the explicitly horrific, however, is the more elusive and intangible emotional phenomena of the uncanny. The uncanny is a key concept and underlying in many aspects of Cunningham’s oeuvre. It is characterised by the feelings of discomfort that are experienced when something ‘gives us the creeps’, which is due to the object’s familiar unfamiliarity5. Common uncanny objects include, the automaton, a ventriloquist’s dummy, a poorly designed animated character, or a corpse. The uncanny valley refers to a point of lifelike humanity in a humanoid creation, that becomes close to appearing real, yet falls short, as a result, eliciting feelings of the uncanny in the observer.6 This occurs in Cunningham’s work frequently, however, unlike many cases of the uncanny valley, this deathly in between state of humanity is encouraged through much of Cunningham’s aesthetic. The uncanny, however, is not the only aesthetic phenomenon present in Cunningham’s work with the sublime also playing a significant role. The sublime is the feelings of beauty, awe and insignificance that one experiences when confronted with something greater than oneself. Although originally attributed to the divine power of nature we see, in Cunningham’s work, a shift towards the biotechnological sublime, an aesthetic in which technological control over nature, effaces nature itself in the production of the sublime phenomena.

Thirdly, there will be an investigation into Cunningham’s use of black humour in his films, and the way this affects the viewer. Black humour is defined by Mark Polizzotti as ‘a partly macabre, partly ironic, often absurd turn of spirit that constitutes the “mortal enemy of sentimentality,” and beyond that a “superior revolt of the mind.”’7 The macabre sense of irony, along with the absurd sensibility, are important elements in Cunningham’s aesthetic. However, far from diminishing the disturbing effects of his work, they seem to exacerbate such elements through an odd and jarring tone. Particular attention will be paid to how this functions alongside the horrific elements established in the previous chapter, with a complex, troubling atmosphere emerging from the juxtaposition of the horrific and the humorous. Further attention will also be given to the absurd

5 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. (London: Penguin Books, 1899). 6 Angela Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley In Games & Animation (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2015). 7 Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti, Anthology Of Black Humour. (London: Museum Telegram, 2009). vi. 5

aspects of Cunningham’s work. Particularly, how the absurd breaks the expectations of the viewer and further develops a sense of the uncanny.

Although the vast majority of Cunningham’s work can be said to utilise a certain degree of the uncanny in order to provoke visceral, shocking, affective responses in the viewer, amongst his videography there are some films that stand out as eliciting these viewer responses more effectively than others. Cunningham’s imaginative skills as a filmmaker are rooted in his ability to provoke such feelings within the viewer. For this reason it can be considered logical then, towards the aim of discerning the source of his works affective nature, to closely examine the films in his videography that most potently put forth these feelings of discomfort. Several of Cunningham’s films can be considered to capitalise on their affective nature, these include; Come to Daddy 1997), Windowlicker (1999), Monkey Drummer (2001), Rubber Johnny (2005), Only You (1998), Afrika Shox (1999), Sheena is a Parasite (2006) and Come on my Selector (1998). Although, much of Cunningham’s output can be seen to have similar qualities to those selected, these are doubtless the most complete examples of the aesthetic.

It will also be valuable to analyse Cunningham’s video for Icelandic musician, Bjork’s All is Full of Love (1999). This video is very interesting in respect to Cunningham’s videography as it uses similar themes, images and motifs to his more shocking and disturbing work, however in the case of this music video these elements are used to contrasting ends. The video is visceral; yet, it produces an effect different in nature to the creeping eeriness of the uncanny. Perhaps this is rooted in the related phenomena of the sublime, due to the video’s aura of beauty and splendour rather than the overtly frightening or quietly horrific. Analysis of this video can, when put into the context of Cunningham’s oeuvre, reveal ways in which elements of his work interact with one another and how this contributes the viewer’s experience of his videos. This will, hopefully, lead to a greater understanding of how such phenomena function in regards to shocking, disturbing, or even beautiful audio-visual creations.

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Bibliography

Breton, André, and Mark Polizzotti. 2009. Anthology Of Black Humour. London: Telegram. Cunningham, Chris. 2003. The Work Of Director Chris Cunningham. DVD. Sheffield: Warp. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 1899.

Laine, Tarja, and Wanda Strauven. 2009. "The Synaesthetic Turn". New Review Of Film And Television Studies 7 (3): 249-255.

Plantinga, Carl R. 2009. Moving Viewers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tinwell, Angela. 2015. The Uncanny Valley In Games & Animation. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

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The Visceral

Cunningham’s films are notable for their quality of viscerality. His thematic focus and desire to make ‘films about bodies’8 likely contributes to the visceral nature of his work. Not dissimilar to the filmmakers that make up the focus of Beugnet’s ‘Cinema and Sensation’9, his work is highly experiential and affective, both in terms of emotion and immediate response. Unlike these filmmakers, such as Denis and Breillat, on which Beugnet based her analysis, the viscerality of Cunningham’s work is more elusive, having been abstracted away from the definite physical properties of film through means of digital distribution. Perhaps the visceral nature of Cunningham’s work lies in his manipulation of analogue technology, or through a digital yearning for a bygone analogue physicality. This is a recurring aspect of Cunningham’s work, a somewhat paradoxical symbiosis between the real and the artificial, the analogue and the digital and the biological and the technological. This, however, is not the only source of the visceral in his films. Particular attention should also be paid to Cunningham’s development of the synthetic futurist aesthetic of electronic music in an audio-visual music video form. This includes the synaesthetic nature of his work, such as how the effects of the images and music flow into one another, working in a cooperative relationship towards the visceral achievements of the work. Finally it will be explored as to how Cunningham’s imagery is affective, through its textured and disgusting qualities, as can be seen in some of his photographic work with Grace Jones, as well as in the music videos for The Horrors’ Sheena is a Parasite and his own Rubber Johnny, in which the proximity of the image also plays a part.

There has been much discussion as to what medium the work of the ever-experimental director Chris Cunningham most belongs. This discussion is necessary if one seeks to examine the embodied nature of his work, and how this contributes to the visceral quality of his aesthetic. In his essay, ‘Come to Daddy? Claiming Chris Cunningham for British Art Cinema’, James Leggott does exactly that, claiming that Cunningham’s directorial work is a part of the sphere of British art cinema. However whilst one can argue that the overall aesthetics of his work does fit within several ‘British’ cinematic

8 Chris Cunningham, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (Sheffield: Warp, 2003). 9 Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2013). 8

contexts, such as the post-rave electronic musicians associated with the Warp record label, as well as the film production projects of the label’s associated Warp Films. It can also be said that the primary medium in which Cunningham’s output exists within and exhibited through is through digital platforms such as YouTube or home video, relocating the medium from the all-encompassing confines of the darkened theatre, and instead taking it beyond the physical realm of the cinema into the digital ether.

Cunningham’s directorial work has themes that are consistent throughout his body of work. His aesthetic content is made of juxtapositions between the technological and the organic, which are recurrent throughout his filmography, spanning several forms; including video art, music video, and television advertisement. This creates difficulties in pinning Cunningham down as ‘belonging’ to any specific form or medium, as his work spans several mediums whilst maintaining the thematic consistency of an auteur. His status as an auteur being self-evident from his inclusion in the Director's Label series of DVD releases consisting of the selected videography of important directors in the medium of the music video. However it has been stated that to refer to Cunningham as a music video auteur is to diminish the involvement of the other creative forces at play within his music videos, such as performance and music.10 Furthermore, Leggott criticises the notion that Cunningham entered ‘the discourse of contemporary art’, stating that Cunningham’s work in the context of contemporary art was shortly lived and infrequent.11

In regards to Cunnningham’s ‘films about bodies’ 12perhaps in an investigation into the films viscerality, it will be useful to first examine the body of the films themselves. Cunningham’s work is shot on film, giving his more well-known works, such as Come to Daddy and Windowlicker a cinematic quality, which is also further developed by the influence they draw from cinematic genres, such as horror and the musical. Film is a physical medium; the images on the screen are produced by light penetrating through the celluloid itself. However, Cunningham’s work is not experienced through the cinema; his films are not projected. Formerly, they were beamed into a person’s home

10 James Leggott, “Come to Daddy? Claiming Chris Cunningham For British Art Cinema,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 13, no.2 (2016): 245.

11 Ibid., 247. 12 See note 1 9

via the analogue signal of television, being broadcast through various music channels, most significantly, MTV. Yet in current times, it is through digital formats that his work is most frequently experienced. Online uploads to platforms such as YouTube rack up millions of views displaying his work, making it possible to claim that Cunningham’s work has transcended the physical realm of the analogue and has reached the intangible body of the digital. Laura Marks states of the immateriality of digital video, that ‘it perceives for us humans the uncanniness with which it is possible to slip out of life and into virtuality.’13 This suggests that in the way Cunningham’s work has lost its materiality, mirrors the uncanniness experienced through reminders of our own immortality. How then, given the immateriality of the digital medium, can we still experience Cunningham’s work as visceral?

Marks makes the claim that, whereas ‘analog video perceives and embodies the world, so we in turn share video’s embodied perception’14, ‘Digital video art explores the medium’s embodiedness by playing not with the signal, but with a discrete set of information.’15 And that therefore, ‘In the database medium, the image’s origin is less important than the decision to actualize the virtual image in a particular way.’16 We see this in Cunningham’s work. The recurring themes of the biotechnological can be considered to mirror the paradoxical aspect of embodiment of his work. Much like the conflicts between the organic and the synthetic, through the nature of the medium we also experience similar struggles through the analog and the digital. We can see these contradictory modes of embodiment in two of his videos particularly; Bjork’s All is Full of Love and the video installation, Monkey Drummer. In All is Full of Love, robotic figures are depicted. These take the form of the humanoid Bjork-like figures and the industrial robotic arms. On these artificial figures, the face of the musician, Bjork is digitally superimposed. In Monkey Drummer, however, the central robotic monkey figure, with its human limbs, is achieved through the digital removal of drummer Sigtryggur Baldursson’s torso from the image via postproduction

13 Laura Marks, Touch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002), 159.

14 Ibid., 148.

15 Ibid., 149.

16 Ibid., 151. 10

techniques. This is what Marks terms as the ‘morph’. ‘Morphing and the morph deflate in humanly meaningful temporal value proportionate to their inflated spatial display of material transformation as both seamlessly reversible and effortless.’17 ‘The morph effaces mortality and replaces it with the endless recuperability of the database.’18 It can therefore be said that Cunningham circumvents this sense of the uncanny in terms of the video body by nullifying the temporal sense of mortality and instead manipulating the spatial aspects of the database.

Furthermore, the frame and quality of the image in Monkey Drummer purposefully illustrate the analogue nature of the image whilst, simultaneously, being a digital addition. The frame consists of a visualised green analogue signal, with an aesthetic that directly connotes analogue recording equipment, whereas the image quality is made to look like the imperfect and distorted image of an out-dated, but very physical, technology. This, according to Marks, is Cunningham displaying a degree of analogue nostalgia, the desire to ‘re-create immediate experience in an age when most experience is rendered as information.’ 19 Cunningham here uses a digital employment of fetishistic nostalgia for the tangible immediacy of analogue body, doing so through means of digital postproduction. By doing so retains a feeling of viscerality, a reminder of the absent physicality of the video.

An interesting parallel is made by Marks regarding the work of digital video artists and electronic musicians. Cunningham has made videos for several electronic musicians; Autechre, Squarepusher and Aphex Twin in particular, whose music can be identified by the frequent arrhythmic breakdowns and experimental glitch aesthetic. It is in his videos for these ‘IDM’ musicians that his videos take on this synesthetic stuttering aesthetic:

‘Following the innovations of electronic musicians, video artists now provoke the digital image to stutter and break down in ways only a digital image can. Many works mimic digital errors like the skipping of a CD, and are structured around the resulting rhythm. Also, in what Tess Takahashi calls “hand-processed” digital video, artists are intentionally messing with the hardware: turning the computer on and

17 Ibid., 151. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 153. 11

off, or plugging the “audio out” into the “video in,” liberating the 20 electrons to create random effects.’

Rarely do we see a more instinctive and apt collaboration between electronic musicians and video artists than in the work of Chris Cunningham. In many of his films, particularly those which collaborate with the aforementioned artists, the rhythm of the visuals is dictated by irregular and complex musical accompaniments. Although present to some degree in all of Cunningham’s work, this visual expression of the complex rhythms of the music can be seen especially in three of his films; Rubber Johnny, Come on my Selector and Sheena is a Parasite.

In his research into the phenomenological film body through the aspect of sound, Connor recognizes the inherent tactile aspects of the image, but also emphasises the relation of hearing to other sensory experiences.

‘Sight has a close synesthetic correspondence with touch – Merleau- Ponty has spoken of the association between seeing and grasping and the eye’s action of palpitation. But the majority of the remaining sensory apprehensions of the world – of wetness, texture, weight, heat, texture and odour – are channeled in film through sound rather than vision. Hearing, which is anyway more intrinsically mixed than the action of seeing, seems to be more inclined to enter into synaesthetic exchanges than seeing.’21

In accordance with these claims, perhaps it would be a useful exercise to examine how the musical aspects of Cunningham’s videos work as a sensory experience within themselves, and how these elements work along with the tactile nature of the image within his work. In terms of editing, this is achieved through the stuttering effect Marks described, however, Cunningham uses several other effects that can be considered to develop this ‘stutter’ aesthetic.

This is evident in Rubber Johnny, Come on my Selector, Sheena is a Parasite. In Rubber Johnny fast cuts and movements coincide with the complicated rhythms of Aphex Twin’s music, afx237 v7 (w19rh basement remix). The unnatural rhythm of the music is mirrored

20 Ibid., 158. 21 Steven Connor. "Sounding Out Film". StevenConnor.com (http://www.stevenconnor.com/soundingout/, 2017.) 12

through the unnatural cinematography. The image stutters in time with the music, creating a symbiotic flow of awkward technology. In Come on my Selector, the complicated breakbeat sequences are manifested visually through a variety of fast jump-cuts and fast- forwards. This is particularly notable in the moment in which the warder is bitten on the foot by a dog, or when he is attacked by the young girl. These moments highlight the way sound leads the images, with the fast cuts and motion of the video being timed so as to function as an extension of the music itself. This works in a particularly sensorial aspect as it is also used as a way of portraying pain. We see this in the girl’s attack of the warder. As she punches him in the stomach, a grinding glitch sound within the music is triggered. This sound is, within the composition, attached to the physical experience of pain. By doing this Cunningham establishes a sensory and tactile element of the video through the sound. The connection is developed through the combination of the imagery and sound, but this nonetheless contradicts Connor’s assumption that touch is exhibited primarily through the image.

Connor claims that sound can only serve secondary to images in terms of necessity to the experience of viewing; ‘the sound of a film can never really achieve or maintain autonomy as sound.’22 This sentiment, it would seem does not apply to that of the music video, particularly those directed by Cunningham. In traditional narrative cinema, the image takes the lead, sound asks ‘where?’ and the image replies ‘here’23. For the music video however hearing is the privileged sense. The image is merely a response to the main event, sound, or rather, music. The music video, originally being a form of televisual advertisement for the recording artist, inherently places the musician on center stage. However, increasingly since the music videos conception, the music video has, in certain cases such as in the work of music video auteurs Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, moved further from the exhibition of a musicians output, and more towards an art form in its own right. As the music video as a form matures, and moves away from its commercial roots, the sound and the images begin to work together in a more symbiotic way than in cinema. Neither the sound nor image takes a precedence over the other. Never more so than in Cunningham’s music videos, music and images work together to form an overall visceral experience.

22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 13

This, it would seem, counters Connor’s claim that ‘Film only has one visual mode into which to transcode all of this variation of intensity and amplitude: the rhythm of camera movement and cutting.’24 Although camera movement and cutting is useful technique in harnessing the ‘variation of intensity and amplitude’, in Cunningham’s videos there are more complex synaesthetic tools at play. As previously noted, the tactile elements of the image and its intimate connection with sound in the music video enables empathetic experiences such as pain to be experienced vicariously within the viewer. Cunningham also uses light as an important tool in the visual expression of the qualities of the sound. Furthermore, Cunningham distorts the image of the body within his videos as a means of creating an overall audiovisual experience that uses the musician’s work as a starting point.

In Rubber Johnny light is distorted to coincide with the glitches and stutters of the music. Beams of light fly past as Johnny dances and body-pops, bringing to mind images of the rave scene of the 1990s, in which lightshows mesmerized club-goers, whose faces were often distorted by drug use. Perhaps this is an explanation for the importance of light in the more hectic music videos in Cunningham’s Oeuvre; a visual throwback to the history of the musical genre, which is also parodied through Johnny’s casual drug use. This use of drugs within the video seems to link to the rave scene and brings together the idea of an overall sensory experience. As Johnny sniffs a line of an unknown substance, the music increases in tempo and becomes more chaotic in nature, so do the visuals, becoming more abstract and increasingly distorted. This reinforces the notion of experience in the viewer. The drugged experience of Johnny is, through the sonic and visual aspects of the video, projected onto the viewer via the complicated rhythms of the music, the bending of the visual image, and of light itself. Furthermore, the entire musical sequence of the video can be considered to be a drug induced delusion. The music begins after Johnny is given a sedative injection to calm down. There is, later in the video a break in the flow of the music video, when an abusive male figure enters Johnny’s room. The figure shouts and curses at Johnny before, apparently, lashing out physically. This break suggests a disruption of Johnny’s drug induced delusions. The idea is further encouraged by the increase of sonic and visual intensity at the

24 Ibid. 14

point in which Johnny ingests a large amount of the substance, assumed to be cocaine or speed.

Also used in Rubber Johnny is the employment of strobe lighting. This creates a greater sense of chaos in the video, by having the lighting conform to the musical stuttering aesthetic. The sense of panic it instills on the viewer is due to overload of the visual sense, which only serves to exacerbate the sonic overload of the chaotic music, provided by the Aphex Twin. This also brings to mind the uncanny effect of a seizure. The flashing lights that are known to trigger, in some people, the loss of bodily control and consciousness are present in this video, as in others such as Sheena is a Parasite, as is the erratic and strange movement of the body. Johnny’s body deconstructs, jitters and flails along with the intense music and stroboscopic lighting. This it would seem is a common motif in Cunningham’s work. The music video for The Horror’s Sheena is a Parasite contains similar epileptic imagery. The female character, Sheena (Samantha Morton), shakes in a fast motion blur in time with the kinetic garage punk music of the horrors. As the guitar noise reaches crescendo, the stroboscopic lighting ensues, creating a hectic and disorienting experience that is expressed both visually and sonically. In this sense it can be said that Cunningham’s visual attunement to sound contributes to the visceral nature of his work, by developing an overwhelming audiovisual experience.

Having mentioned Cunningham’s technique of using the intensity of the visuals to correspond with the more hectic elements of the music, a closer analysis of how he distorts the very physicality of the human body in his films could also be revealing. Having said that in Rubber Johnny light is disintegrated and distorted as a part of the electronic music aesthetic in which glitches and jumps are frequent, it should also be examined how the image of the body is also distorted as a part of this aesthetic and how this works towards the overall viscerality of the film. The character of Johnny within the music video/short film illustrates this bodily breakdown clearly. His appearance is deformed, with a large elongated head that hangs behind him. This initially sets up a sense of the uncanny that is further established by the disintegration of said body. The deformed body is further distorted, it bends and disappears as if seen through a curved lens. The glitch aesthetic of the electronic ‘drill’n’bass’ music is imbued on multiple levels of the film by Cunningham. Not only is the 15

body of the film manipulated to work with the chaotic musical aesthetic, in the form of light, but the body of those characters within the film are also manipulated to the same ends. How, then, does this affect the viewer? The all-encompassing nature of the video’s attunement to music absorbs the viewer on multiple levels, through the overwhelming chaos of the music and imagery which is to such an extent that it even dismantles the environment, as well as certainty of the human form itself. This can be considered to be another way in which Cunningham’s contradictions between the biological and the technological, the analog and the digital and the sound and the image are brought together to function as a unit.

But, what of the body of sound and the way the accompanying music functions in terms of spectatorship? In this respect, we see a similar contradiction in terms of the analogue and the digital, as well as the organic and the synthetic. Altman illustrates the body of sound as thus; ‘vibration creates pressure, which is communicated through a medium. At the other end of the sound’s path, the human ear collects that pressure and transforms its mechanical energy into electric 25 impulses that the brain understands as sound.’ It is in this way that the body of sound reaches our own; however, the source of the sound is not in itself, physical. The music created by electronic artists, such as those Cunningham has created videos for, including Aphex Twin, is a synthesised reproduction of organic and physical sound. The means through which electronic musicians have produced their music has become increasingly intangible, as technology itself has progressed. Early synthesisers, drum machines and sequencers worked exclusively with the pure analogue signal, however, with the advent of more advanced computer technology, even this analogue signal is itself a digital reproduction produced by the complex sprawl of the database. However, in spite of the ever more ethereal nature of electronic music, there remains a level on which it can be considered to visceral regardless.

In the history of electronic music, in Detroit techno especially but also in the work of earlier proto-techno artists such as Kraftwerk, there is a futurist, sometimes even brutalist aesthetic. Techno music, from its birth in Detroit, was a cultural response to the environment of industry. It transformed the afro-musical genres such as funk into a more futurist, or afro-futurist aesthetic with the repetitive sound of

25 Rick Altman, Sound Theory, Sound Practise (London: Routledge, 1992), 20. 16

industry at its core. The strong rhythmic elements of funk can be traced into techno music, a genre in which rhythm takes entire dominance over other musical dimensions such as melody. The abundance of drugs in the scene also increased the aesthetic focus on experience, in its extremes reducing the music to a brain-dead brutalism. The focus of the music became rhythm, no longer to be heard in standalone tracks but in hours long DJ mixes. The euphoric, drug induced trance of the club goer, surrounded by speakers, is now the focus. This is a form of music that wants to be felt. The rhythmic pound of early techno and house music is so prominent that it can be felt through the entire body, if the embodiment of sound has a heart, it can be felt pounding through the body of the listener in techno music. In this sense music that is, at its core, artificial is made visceral through the rhythmic experience of the listener; the physical vibrations that the listener perceives.

A similarly contradictory physical/ghostly existence is claimed by Altman to also be within the nature of recorded sound: ‘Between the illusion of reproduction and the reality of representation lies the discursive power of recorded sound.’26 Altman, here, refers to the indistinct nature of recorded sound. It is just an echo from the historic physicality of the drum, the note or the voice. ‘We follow the trail that has been laid for us all the way to an apparent sound event having all the aural guarantees of reality but only partial correspondence to the original sound event.’27 This refers to the difference in perception between live and recorded sound. With live sound we are able to determine the location and nature of the event, however, with recorded sound we are given only the source of the recording. ‘Live sound situations reveal the actual relationship between the sound producer and perceiver.’28 With this taken into account, we can say that the aural component of Cunningham’s music videos, the electronic music videos in particular, go through several filters of artifice, yet, due to the visceral, rhythmic focus and a mix of tangible organic sound and ethereal synthesised instruments they remain experiences rooted in the body, both of the videos themselves and the listener that perceives them.

26 Ibid., 30. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 29. 17

Fig 1, Rubber Johnny DVD Cover Art Fig 2, Grace Jones Photoshoot for Dazed and Confused

Fig 3, Grace Jones Photoshoot for Dazed and Confused

18

Fig 4, Grace Jones Photoshoot for Dazed and Confused

Connor has stated of photography, and as an extension, cinema, that:

‘Already the form of the photograph (where the cinema is an extension of) itself establishes a relationship between touching and looking, skin and images. Photographs have been touched by the world’s light, leaving its trace on the surface of the photographic film; photographs have been touched and can touch us back.’ 29

In reference to this relationship between skin, touching, looking and images it is also perhaps interesting to examine both Cunningham’s DVD cover art for Rubber Johnny as well as his photographic work with iconic musician Grace Jones. These images are notable primarily for their uncanny auras, stemming from the deformed and twisted depictions of the human body. The images strike one as being particularly tangible, given their graphic representation of the skin. The cover for Rubber Johnny, for example, is lifelike in its depiction of

29 Tarja Laine, “Cinema as Second Skin,” New review Of Film And Television Studies 4, no.2 (2006): 95.

19

the hair, the skin as well as the flesh and bones underneath. The form is however unidentifiable, it is at once obviously human and inhuman, producing the unfamiliar familiarity of the uncanny. The same can be said of the images from Cunningham’s photographs of the subject Grace Jones. The photographs depict the fashion icon Grace Jones, however the photographs show Cunningham in essence. The distortion of the human form is central; it is squashed, stretched, twisted and deformed. The nature of the photograph is affected by the physical world; light changes the film. However, in these images especially, they touch us. The lighting shining on the skin, the hair, the mist on the glass all adds texture it makes a flat image three dimensional and tangible. These photographs illustrate Cunningham’s use of skin as a means of reaching out from the frame and touching the viewer.

Fig 5, still from Only You (1998)

Another way Cunningham uses skin to develop his work towards a visceral experience can be seen in his music video for Portishead’s Only You and his short film/video installation Flex. In these videos skin takes on an uncanny quality of a different kind. Cunningham shot these videos underwater to achieve the dead, corpselike muting of human skins natural warm glow. In these videos skin enters the uncanny valley. However, this revolves not simply around the corpselike appearance and its reminder to the viewer of their own 20

mortality, but instead develops a more tactile and temperate sense of the uncanny. By muting the warmth of the bodies, they take on the cold blue tinged skin of a corpse. When one views this, they experience the cold clammy skin through a mediation from sight to our fingertips, the images work so as to trigger deep aspects of our sensory memory and understanding of the world. The water that deadens the image, works, in a way, as a skin that obscures our vision, a paper-thin membrane that takes image out of our world.

Fig 6, still from Rubber Johnny (2005)

Fig 7, still from Sheena is a Parasite (2006)

21

There are moments in Cunningham’s work also, especially in videos such as Sheena is a Parasite and Rubber Johnny in which skin is removed from the work in its physical sense. It is in moments such as these that we are given a deeper sense of viscerality, a sense of reaching inside the bodies depicted. Take for example the latter portion of Rubber Johnny. In this video we see a full disintegration of the biological organism. Amid the chaos it appears that Johnny smashes his head against the invisible skin of the screen, he is inviting our eyes to touch. His face falls apart, like a Picasso painting made from raw meat. The multitude of textures contributes to the tactile nature of the image with the teeth, hair, bumpy skin, hair and gristle inviting the optical touch of the viewer. The smear it leaves on the screen remains, testament to the sticky physicality of the form. A similar form is unleashed in the intense Stooges-esque garage rock of The Horror’s Sheena is a Parasite. Sheena shakes and jerks in a fast motion to proto-punk style music during peak intensity of guitar noise, as the strobe lighting flickers, her physical form falls apart. It is similar in nature to Rubber Johnny’s but has a more tentacled physicality to resemble a sea creature, like a squid or octopus. It shines under the lighting given it a look that is wet to the touch. It has the look of the gristle that lies under the skin, as if someone peeled the skin from a kneecap.

Through these very visceral images, it can be said that one also experiences disgust as an immediate response, a result of the proximity and close intimacy with these twisted bodily images. ‘it is among the most visceral of emotions’30, according to Platinga, and can be considered so due to its foundation in the immediate qualities of perception: ‘All emotions are launched by some perception; only disgust makes that process of perceiving the core of its enterprise.’31 Platinga also breaks down the feeling of disgust into two categories, the physical disgust that will be discussed in relation to Cunningham’s invasive images of grotesque bodies and sociomoral disgust, which will be explored in greater depth later in this essay, in relation to the dark sense of humour within his work. The way in which these images are thrust upon the viewer in brief yet impactful flashes testifies to the immediacy of disgust and its perceptive foundation. Although only minor sections of the videos, these moments in Rubber Johnny and

30 Carl Platinga, Moving Viewers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 210.

31 Ibid. 22

Sheena is a Parasite of disintegrating flesh are the most viscerally troubling, likely due to their instigation of the emotion of disgust in the viewer. Why though, do these images of bodily malfunction trouble us so greatly? ‘Shaviro characterizes disgust at touching and being touched as a matter of contagion. If proximity and contact with another body can bring us warmth and comfort, they can also bring moisture, clamminess, germs, and disease.’32 According to this statement, it is not merely the grotesque nature of the image that affects one with disgust, the proximity and tactility of these images is also an important factor in determining the source of the revulsion. In Sheena is a Parasite and Rubber Johnny, the way these images reach out to the viewer is also a factor in the causing of revulsion in the viewer. In Rubber Johnny, Johnny smashes his disintegrating face against the screen leaving greasy smears on the surface, imparting directly in the viewer a sense of aggressive uncleanliness. Again, in Sheena is a Parasite, the aggressive sense of, as the titles suggests, parasitic infection, works by lunging toward the screen, threatening to penetrate the skin of the film and infect the viewer. It can be said that this is both an important factor in the rendering of and a consequence of the visceral qualities of the videos, by affecting the viewer in an immediate and troubling way through means of disgust.

It can therefore be said that the viscerality of Cunningham’s work comes from a variety of bodily sources. It comes firstly from the body of the work itself. The analogue filmic source of the material brings with it an innate physicality, however, typical of Cunningham’s paradoxical theme of biotechnology, ideas and techniques of the digital remain. Whether this is through a digital morphing of analogue material, or a nostalgia for the physical immediacy of obsolete analogue equipment, achieved through the digital recreation of analogue hallmarks, Cunningham mixes the two bodily opposed forms of information. Analogue is tangible and immediate, whereas digital is ethereal and born of the database. Digital video artists, as observed by Marks, mimic the stuttering glitch aesthetic of electronic musicians and this is never more the case than in Cunningham’s music videos. His videos have the image jump to meet the sounds demands. The often- chaotic music is met with suitably intense visuals. These images use a complexity of editing and stuttering in a temporal sense, but they also

32 Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 47. 23

distort light and the human form itself. Light bends to attune the video to the music, as does human flesh, breaking apart and distorting in a notably visceral way that seems to invite the touch of the viewer. There are also very immediately visceral aspects of the images themselves, as can be seen through the physical disgust these images provoke, which is exacerbated due to their proximity to the screen and, in turn, the viewer.

24

Bibliography

Altman, Rick. 1992. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. London: Routledge. Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beugnet, Martine. 2013. Cinema And Sensation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, Steven. 2017. "Sounding Out Film". Stevenconnor.com. http://www.stevenconnor.com/soundingout/. Cunningham, Chris. 2003. The Work Of Director Chris Cunningham. DVD (Booklet). Sheffield: Warp.

Laine, Tarja. 2006. "Cinema As Second Skin". New Review Of Film And Television Studies 4 (2): 93-106. doi:10.1080/17400300600768414. Leggott, James. 2016. "Come To Daddy? Claiming Chris Cunningham For British Art Cinema". In The Journal Of British Cinema And Television 13 (2): 243-261. doi:10.3366/jbctv.2016.0311. Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Plantinga, Carl R. 2009. Moving Viewers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

25

The Uncanny and The Sublime

One way in which Cunningham’s videography functions as a disturbing experience is through emotional phenomena such as; the uncanny and the sublime, as well as the absorbing nature of the nightmarish tone of this work. However it is more than just the presence of such phenomena in his work that are intriguing, it is equally if not more fascinating to determine how, through the filmic language of Cunningham’s videography, such phenomena are constructed and how these elements contribute to the troubling and unique experience of viewing films from Cunningham’s videography. But before one can delve deeply into the affective nature of Cunningham’s work, it is useful to first examine the artistic and aesthetic contexts in which his work exists and the overarching thematic style that can be attributes to him as an auteur. Also to be observed in this section, will be an investigation into not only the uncanny, but also its older aesthetic relative, the sublime. The sublime was characterised by Longinus as that which gives ‘an unconquerable passion for all that is great and for all that is more divine than ourselves’33, and was previously attributed to the divine power of nature, however, in modern times, the sublime has become more technological in its foundations, instead being gleamed from our desire to control nature, that has in itself leaped beyond our grasp. 34We see this in Cunningham’s work, particularly in his video for Bjork’s All is Full of Love, in which human creation seems to have become dominant over, or replaced, the human completely.

Perhaps the most defining feature of Cunningham’s work is the visual reoccurrence of bodies being destroyed, mutated and reformed and the conflict between such organic bodies and technology. Body horror can be ‘characterized by the manipulation and warping of the normal state of bodily form and function.’35 It is then, a reasonable course of logic to examine his aesthetic through the lens of the body

33 Jos de Mul, “The (Bio)Technological Sublime” Diogenes 59, no.1-2 (2012): 35.

34 Ibid. 35 Ronald Allan Lopez Cruz, “Mutations And Metamorphoses: Body Horror Is Biological Horror” Journal Of Popular Film And Television 40, no. 4 (2012): 161. 26

horror subgenre, as its disturbing depictions of grotesque bodies and organisms bare much in common with this aspect of Cunningham’s oeuvre. Cunningham has stated himself that he makes ‘films about bodies’, however, the argument can be made that it is this very depiction of the body as something that is intimately disturbing or uncanny, that makes his work so visceral and effective. Because of this, the claim can be made that the body-horror subgenre was not purely a cultural response to the cosmetic obsessions of the 1980s, as some have claimed, as, were that the case, the films would lose their uniquely disturbing qualities as cultural anxieties shifted. The contrary is the case, however, and the grotesque mutations of the genre remain as disturbing as ever. This suggests that it is qualities hidden within both the aesthetic and the viewer that causes such imagery to remain disturbing.

Cunningham cut his teeth in the industry after been headhunted by Stanley Kubrick to design and supervise animatronic tests on the child character in A.I (2001), following his work on the 1995 Judge Dredd. This consisted of work in model-making, prosthetic make- up and concept illustrations for filmmakers such as Clive Barker and David Fincher, on Alien 3 (1992). Having worked on films such as these, it is reasonable to assume that Cunningham was more than aware of the body horror aesthetic, and the importance that prosthetic creations have in the development of the horrific imagery in the films. It is also reasonable to claim that this formed a bodily focus in the aesthetic of his work that has continued throughout his videography as a director. The body horror aesthetic, prominently featuring grotesque mutations, dismemberments and disintegrations of bodies, is the most visceral form of horror cinema. The likelihood of Cunningham having been inspired by this subgenre can go some way to accounting for the visceral nature of his films, however there are more intriguing elements at play under the surface of this body horror aesthetic.

27

Fig 8, The Windowlickers 1, H. R. Giger (1999) Fig 9, Windowlicker, Chris Cunningham (1999)

Cunningham’s links to the Alien franchise and the body-horror aesthetic are not limited to his direct involvement in Alien 3. The striking visual design in the alien franchise was thanks to the involvement of Swiss artist H.R. Giger and it is, arguably, Giger’s conceptual and visual contributions to the film series that cemented the films iconic legacy in cinema. His art, like Cunningham’s, features the cold interconnections between machines and organisms through the nightmarish lens of dark surrealism. Given the striking resemblance between Giger’s sketch (Fig 1,) and Cunningham’s Windowlicker, as well as the close dates of conception and production, have produced speculations that Giger was indeed also involved in the origins of Cunningham’s 1999 music video for Aphex Twin. However, whatever the nature of the relationship, professional or artistic, their creations tap into a similarly intangible aspect of human thought and feeling. As Ridley Scott, esteemed director of the original Alien (1979) and its later prequel, Prometheus (2012), has said of Giger’s work: ‘At its essence, Giger’s art digs down into our psyches and touches our very deepest primal instincts and fears’36. As will be argued and investigated throughout this writing, Cunningham’s work can be said to function in a similar way. They both, for reasons that will hopefully be made clear, elicit feelings of discomfort, unease and disgust within the viewer through their visceral and nightmarish aesthetics. One way in which both artists establish such feelings is through their

36 "Beyond Alien: The Disturbing Psychedelic Artwork Of HR Giger". The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/nov/02/hr-giger-psychedelic-art-alien. 2017.) 28

development of the sense of the uncanny within the viewers of their work.

The uncanny is the phenomenon experienced when one feels unease at something that is familiar, yet at the same time unfamiliar. It is an experience often noted as being associated with corpses, automata, or other things that resemble a human closely, but not exactly.37It is this feeling of unease that Cunningham’s work captures deftly, through the bodily distortions depicted. ‘The uncanny may be manipulated to enhance the fear factor for antagonist characters, intended to scare and disturb the audience. Antipathetic characters featured in the horror genre in games and films* are designed with the intention to deliberately gratify the pleasure we can seek in frightening ourselves.’38 It would seem that this is what Cunningham does through his films, deliberately employing feelings of the uncanny within the viewer in order to provoke unease, discomfort and a sense of the unreal.

In Cunningham’s most visceral work this process functions beneath the surface, like the phenomena of the uncanny itself, somewhat obscured within the images. The most recognisable instances of this are within the music videos of electronic musician Richard D James, AKA Aphex Twin, Come to Daddy (1997) and Windowlicker (1999). Both of these videos are rendered iconic by the use of Richard D James’ leering grin, which is superimposed onto both children and female dancers in Come to Daddy and Windowlicker, respectively. The immediate impact of this image is indisputable. It is not horrific in an overt sense, but it seems to catch the shadow of such a feeling, diminished in impact and almost illusive. Peter David Mathews, for example, in his article titled ’Music in His Own Image’ stated that; ‘the unsettling characteristic of this smile is how the lips are stretched to the point of exaggeration. The initial impression of a broad, cheerful smile is quickly replaced by a feeling of incipient unease.’39 Mathews here describes one way in which this image serves to illicit feelings of the uncanny, the exaggeration of the facial expression. Platinga explains that ‘body language, including the use of

37 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. (London: Penguin Books, 1899).

38 Angela Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley In Games & Animation (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2015). 47.

39 Peter David Mathews, “Music In His Own Image: The Aphex Twin Face” Nebula 1, no. 1 (2004): 65. 29

facial expression, posture, and gesture, is one of the primary means of communicating emotion both in social reality and in the motion pictures.’40Due to our human nature, our psychological wiring as a result of us being social creatures, the minute micro expressions of the face form a language of their own, giving us an innate ability to detect malfunctions in the language of expression, perhaps providing an explanation as to why this image resonates with such potency. Furthermore, this has become the most widely recognised image of Cunningham’s work and has made the videos iconic to the extent of being almost inseparable from the musician himself.

Beyond the face of Richard James, Cunningham also makes use of the uncanny effect within more overtly nightmarish imagery. This more horrific use of the uncanny can be seen in Come to Daddy in the form of the Thin Man, in the Portishead video for Only You (1998), in the Leftfield video for Afrika Shox (1999) and his Aphex Twin accompanied video installation, Monkey Drummer (2001). Cunningham has stated that a source of inspiration for his work is dreams; ‘Sometimes a sound in the music will provoke a memory or a dream, which starts the ball rolling.’41 This shows that the use of dream imagery in the formation of Cunningham’s work is something of a significant presence, and can provide an explanation for the often highly nightmarish quality of his work. The climactic sequences of Come to Daddy are notable, primarily, for the arrival of the grotesque Thin Man. Spawned from a television in an image that resembles some of more surreal elements of body-horror classic Videodrome (1983), the Thin Man is a human-like emaciated figure with the paper thin, gray skin of a corpse and a demonic face. The appearance of this figure, as well as triggering feelings of the uncanny, creates a surreal and nightmarish tone, which, along with the abrasive music, makes for disturbing viewing. This nightmarish sense of the uncanny is also exhibited in Afrika Shox and Only You. In the creation of the visual aspects of Only You Cunningham explains his aesthetic choices; ‘I knew that shooting underwater would eliminate highlights in the eyes, the texture of skin becomes very muted and it makes you look quite deathly.’42 Here it can be seen that Cunningham is deliberately seeking to create an uncanny, corpselike appearance in the figures he is shooting. To eliminate the highlights in the eyes and to dull the

40 Carl Platinga, Moving Viewers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 122. 41 Chris Cunningham, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (Sheffield: Warp, 2003).

42 Ibid. 30

texture of the skin is to take one step to the left of a person’s humanity, placing them firmly in the uncanny valley. Not only this, but the overall effect of having these uncanny figures, the muted pallet, and unusual physics of being underwater create a wholly dreamlike feel which is only compounded by the hypnotic and haunting nature of the accompanying music. If we extend these ideas to the Leftfield video for Afrika Shox, we can see similar devices in effect. The subject of the video is a zombielike man who staggers around the busy streets of New York, slowly having his limbs crack and smash like ceramic as he falls. Like the video for Only You the human figure is made to look deathly. His eyes are white and his movement is like that of a zombie or a person who is very nearly dead. This, however, is not the only cause for the uncanny nature of the clip. The streets themselves are portrayed as hostile and otherworldly with hulking, snarling trucks and a public who are indifferent to the plight of this dying man. This, combined with Cunningham’s deft use of the uncanny, gives his films the nightmarish quality that seems to exude from the majority of his work.

Rubber Johnny, along with Come to Daddy, is the most overtly frightening and visceral of Cunningham’s videography. It is also the video that can be said to have borrowed the most, again, along with Come to Daddy, from the horror genre. This can be seen in the video’s employment of a night-vision camera. The eeriness and unsettling effect of this works in two ways that may contribute to the sense of the uncanny in the video. The first is that it is a visual aesthetic that, in the context of the 2000’s cultural awareness of horror tropes, connotes threat through its resemblance to films of the found footage genre. ‘Since 2006 found footage has grown in popularity to the extent that it can be considered the most definitive trend in post-millennial horror.’43 This can be seen in the breakthrough success of films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). It can be said that, like the found footage horror films, there is ‘the implication that the filmic world is the same as the audience’s.’44 This seems to be particularly pertinent when Cunningham’s work is placed in the context of online platforms such as YouTube. The abundancy of amateur footage and the decontextualized state of the video re- affirms the potential reality and validity of the images, which

43 Neil McRobert, “Mimesis Of Media: Found Footage Cinema And The Horror Of The Real” Gothic Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 140.

44 Ibid., 138. 31

embellishes the disturbing content of the video by suggesting a certain plausibility to the implausible content of the video. As, ‘whilst the viewer may be detached from the threat geographically and temporally, they are ontologically commensurate with the events depicted.’45 Furthermore, the night-vision/found footage image works in a more visual way to develop a sense of the uncanny. The figures are given a certain ghostly quality, and the eyes in particular are embellished by having the light reflected off them obscure the finer details of the their visual representation. This visual obstruction and distortion of the already deformed figure in the video serves to heighten any sense of the uncanny and further develop the video’s unsettling atmosphere.

Another interesting aspect of Chris Cunningham’s use of the uncanny can be seen in his video installation Monkey Drummer. Monkey Drummer depicts a robotic form with the of a head monkey playing the drums with limbs that are superimposed from a human. This Machine plays along to a particularly energetic track by Aphex Twin from his album Drukqs (2001), titled Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount. This video installation is notable in terms of Cunningham’s productions of the uncanny, as, unlike Come to Daddy and Windowlicker, the uncanny effects of Monkey Drummer are a result of the movement of the mechanical figure rather than any particular facial abnormality. Tinwell has noted the uncanny effect in terms of movement, stating that ‘a perceived mismatch in the character’s appearance and behaviour exaggerates the uncanny.’46 The form is obviously robotic rather than organic and as a result of this, the viewer expects it to behave as such with the jerky and artificial movements of a machine. However, the machine is fluid in the movements of its appendages, as provided by Sigtryggur Baldursson, founding member of Icelandic rock band The Sugarcubes, whose torso was removed in post-production. This achieves the mismatch of appearance and behaviour Tinwell was referring to by circumventing the viewer’s expectations on the behaviour of the form in question. Tinwell also uses the lack of the contingent interaction of a handshake as a further prompt towards the uncanny; ‘When contingent interaction is lacking and there is a perceived incongruence in the gesture and timing of an android’s movements or an inappropriate response from the android to others and external events, then this has

45 Ibid., 139. 46 Angela Tinwell, The Uncanny Valley In Games & Animation (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2015). 29. 32

been found to exaggerate viewer perception of the uncanny (Ho et al., 2008; Minato et al., 2004; MacDorman and Ishiguro, 2006; MacDorman et al., 2010).’47 Here, Tinwell explains the role that an individual’s expectations play in the development of the uncanny. Incongruence and inappropriateness of movement are key factors, both of which can be seen in the uncanny nature of the Monkey Drummer installation.

When a close look is taken at these videos, further ways in which Cunningham establishes the atmosphere of the uncanny reveal themselves. In Come to Daddy we see a distortion of the artist, Richard D. James’ AKA Aphex Twin’s face. This is manifested in four different ways; the image on the television, the children, the satanic ringleader and the Thin Man. These all develop the atmosphere of the uncanny in Come to Daddy in diverse ways. As stated previously, the face is vital in the communicative social interaction between humans, and, as a result, colours the way in which we perceive and respond to images of bodies emotionally. The first manifestation of James follows the introduction to the music video and begins along with the musical accompaniment. A dog urinates on a television discarded amongst rubbish in the brutalist housing estate, this causes the television to spark into life with static televisual distortion. The image that appears is the face of Richard James, bent and distorted by the malfunctioning television. The distortion of the face is key here; it bends into his trademark leer, forcing his expression into one of sneering anger. The face is given the broad and exaggerated grin that is characteristic of the musician’s collaborations with Cunningham. This bend in the face however also causes his brow to bend inwards in a manner that connotes a feeling of anger. It is in this way that the faces develops the sense of the uncanny; it is both twisted and distorted by the television to the point that it appears to show the expression of two contrasting emotions, happiness and anger. This, along with the distorted ritualistic chant of ‘I will eat your soul’, firmly establishes the video as uncomfortable, unfamiliar and an example of a disruption of normal emotional interaction through the conflicted messages of the facial expression. It is, perhaps, also important to note that this is clearly an integral part of Cunningham’s overall aesthetic, as again through this televisual distortion of the musician’s face we see the struggle and contrast of the juxtaposing forces, technology and biology.

47 Ibid. 33

The second manifestation of the musician is on the faces of the children in the video. Here again we see the face being used as an important tool to unsettle the viewer. Cunningham created masks of James’ trademark leer, as will also appear in his later video for Windowlicker, and gave them to a mix of child and small adult actors. This functions on several levels. First of all, it gives the face of a fully- grown man to supposed children, more specifically, young girls. This is obvious in its play with facial expectations, and in an overt sense, develops an unsettling image. However this also functions in a more effective way that lies beneath the surface of this simple transferal of faces. Because this is achieved through the use of masks rather than computer superimposition, the expression is unchanging. This fixed grin is extremely troubling, only exacerbated by the violent and anti- social behaviour of the children, creating a contradiction between emotion and behaviour as well as face and physicality. Along with the fixed nature of the expression, another effect that these masks have in achieving a sense of the uncanny is through the eyes. The eyes are one of the most important feature in terms of social interaction.48 What the use of the masks achieves is incongruence between the eyes and the face. The eyes do not match the expression of the face, nor do they even belong to the face. What this does is communicate to the viewer a sense of off-ness that is characteristic of the phenomena of the uncanny.

Furthermore, the behaviour of these children, who bear the face of the musician, is notable for its shocking break in behavioural norms and expectations. Their behaviour does not in any way conform to how children normally behave; they are violent, anarchic and crudely sexual in their gestures and actions. The children, obviously, function in a different space to regular children given their alien appearance, a grown man’s face, however, their socially disruptive behaviour nevertheless contributes to the atmosphere of the uncanny due to the incongruity of their actions and those of ‘normal’ children. Aspects of this mode of representation can also be considered to predate the trend of ‘hoodie horror’ films that emerged in the late 2000’s, characterised by films such as Eden Lake 2008 and Citadel 2010. These films played on the stereotyped image of the British working class, and youths in particular, as violent, animalistic and without morals. The

48 N.I. Emery, “The Eyes Have It: The Neuroethology, Function And Evolution Of Social Gaze” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 24, no. 6 (2000). 34

genre often features the working class antagonists terrorising the more educated, middle class protagonists. Linn Lönroth discusses the perceived realism of such depictions, stating that ‘Some viewers even perceive films like F and Eden Lake as direct parables of British society and the degeneration that they claim is taking place.‘49 However, it should be pointed out that it would be difficult to gleam such a sense of realism from Come to Daddy, given the films surrealist tendencies. However, having said that, the representation does occupy a similar space as those found in ‘hoodie horror’. Lönroth then goes on to describe the council estates ‘beginning to be imagined as ‘abject border zones’ or ‘antisocial spaces’, Tyler argues, in which this dysfunctional underclass was supposedly breeding (2013, 160). “[T]he moral panic about the council estates unleashed pervasive forms of irrational stigmatization […] a revolting class discourse that was inscribed upon the bodies of those who lived in the abject zones”’50 Cunningham’s use of the council estate setting can be validly considered as drawing on similar aspects of the hoodie horror genre, however, it can also be viewed as more a part of his thematic interests. The urban brutalism of the council estate environment that serves as the setting for the video can be seen as being an expression of Cunningham’s in industrial images as can also be seen in the video for Afrika Shox. In a similar manner to Afrika Shox, the environment can be seen as a way in which Cunningham enhances the nightmarish aspects of the video, using big imposing structures and machines against his body-horror aesthetic.

This setting can also be seen as an example of the sublime in Cunningham’s work, more specifically, the ‘technological sublime’.51 The sublime is characterised by an overwhelming sense of awe and beauty and a feeling of insignificance when faced with something greater than oneself. This has, historically been attributed to the power of nature and its relation to the divine, however in modern times can be more aptly attributed to our own creations. ‘The admiration of the natural sublime, as it might be experienced in the

49 Linn Lönroth, Hoodie Horror: The New Monster In Contemporary British Horror Film. (Copenhagen: Tidsskrift, 2017). 11.

50 Linn Lönroth, Hoodie Horror: The New Monster In Contemporary British Horror Film. (Copenhagen: Tidsskrift, 2017). 12.

51 Jos de Mul, “The (Bio)Technological Sublime” Diogenes 59, no.1-2 (2012). 35

Grand Canyon, was replaced by the sublimity of the factory, the sublimity of the skyscraper and the metropolis, the sublimity of aviation and auto-mobility, and the sublimity of war machinery.’52 We can see this Cunningham’s video for Afrika Shox. The powerful, imposing structures of the financial heart of New York City dwarf the human subject in a way that would have, in previous expressions of the sublime, been achieved through the power of nature, through vast mountain ranges and violent kinetic weather such as lightning. The opening shot of the video immediately imparts us with this sense of the technological sublime; a modern black skyscraper shot from below extends into the clouds above. This not only gives a sense of the grandiosity of the urban environment, but also from the low angle of the shot, makes the viewer feel insignificant in comparison. A similar opening shot is used in Cunningham’s horror inspired Come to Daddy. The video is set on a housing estate around the now demolished Tavy Bridge shopping centre and opens with a similar shot of the brutalist tower block, pointing up from a low angle. Also giving this sense of threat and power is the commanding status of the vehicles in the video. They seem to depict an uncontrollable force that is comparable to that of nature. Lorries, vans and police cars stampede down the busy streets and give one the impression that they would not stop, they are treated with such a power that one would not be surprised if they simply ploughed through any pedestrians obstructing their way. This has an interesting effect, being juxtaposed with uncanny and often very disturbing imagery. In these two examples, it frames the videos in a sublime environment, which both reinforces Cunningham’s technological/industrial motifs whilst also putting the viewer in a position of vulnerability through the imposing nature of the images.

The final embodiment of the musician is perhaps the most overtly horrific. He appears as the ringleader of the children who possess his face. He is wearing only white underwear; his body is thin and emaciated and he has long fingers with talon-like nails. It is unambiguous as to why this embodiment is disturbing; it is satanic in appearance, conforming to decade old horror conventions. This fits the ritualistic undertones of the video, the chant of ‘I want your soul’, the summoning of the demon, it all builds the horrific associations of the video, by subtly placing the visual and sonic imagery in the realm of an urban folk or gothic horror. The stroboscopic editing that follows the introduction of the satanic Richard D. James enhances this by

52 Ibid., 36. 36

introducing a visual chaos and energy that directly mirrors that of a horror film.

What Cunningham achieves by introducing the embodied image of the artist, Aphex Twin, as a recurring motif is that he creates the very antithesis of the archetype of the ‘star’ as is conventionally represented in the music video. His very appearance is used as the method through which the disturbing atmosphere of his music videos are developed; far the wholesome image or attractive sex appeal of the pop star, the image of the artist is used as a means of making the viewer feels disturbed. Come to Daddy is not beautiful it is disturbing. The same can be said for Cunningham’s later video for Aphex Twin, Windowlicker in which he subverts the misogynistic sexualisation of female bodies in the music video in a very explicit and disturbing way, maintaining the image of the artist as the grotesque disruption of the viewer’s expectations.

Windowlicker is, obviously, a subversion of the highly sexualised content of music videos and the often-misogynistic attitudes portrayed in such videos. This can be seen in the profanity laden introduction to the video, the word ‘fuck’ used a total of 53 times and the word ‘nigger’ used 54 times, in which two men attempt to aggressively seduce two women from their car. The video is set in L.A, a city synonymous with the glamour and gloss of both the music and film industries. This setting plays a role in the music video aesthetic that Cunningham distorts by suggesting to the viewer that the content of Windowlicker will also conform to the conventions of the pop-video, expectations that will no doubt be proved inappropriate by the strange and disturbing nature of both the music and its visual accompaniment. This introduction develops the expectations of the audience, leading them to expect that this video fits into the general umbrella of pop videos, featuring beautiful women, dancing and lavish displays of wealth. Windowlicker does include all these things, however Cunningham twists them in order to create an atmosphere of discomfort and feeling of the uncanny.

The video begins with two men driving around looking for women to have sex with, they come across two young women who continually mock them and reject their advances. Following this, rather than transitioning into the male fantasy led, sexually provocative video, it transforms into something that is at once sexually suggestive and disturbing. A stretched limousine crashes into the back of the car, 37

making it clear that it is excessively sized as it continues to pass through the frame. This plays with the gratuitous displays of wealth that are common in the form, taking the idea of a stretched limousine to its extreme. It also uses this as a distinctively phallic image, seemingly emasculating the men whose car was crushed, and setting up the course of the video. The window slides down, the music begins, and it is the Aphex Twin, Richard D. James grinning with his trademark fixed leer.

The women are then transformed, much like the children in Come to Daddy, into disciples of the Aphex Twin. They gain his face and, as well as participating in his choreographed dance routines, behave around him as if he fits the archetype of the desirable star, which he evidently does not. Visually this develops a sense of the uncanny through the presentation of familiar music video archetypes; the star, beautiful women, choreographed dance routines and lavish displays of wealth, all of which are made unfamiliar through a variety of ways. The image of the star and the female dancers around him are rendered to be uncanny in a similar way to that which is seen in Come to Daddy. The prosthetic mask of Richard D. James’ exaggerated grin is worn by the female dancers and works in the same way as in Come to Daddy. This counters the sexualised and misogynistic portrayal of the women by giving them the bearded face of James, a strange visual subversion of objectification. This functions similarly in terms of providing contradictory facial expressions, bodies and behaviour, providing to the viewer a familiar image in the context of the music video, which is made unfamiliar due to the jarring presence of the artist’s face. The audience’s expectations are also disrupted through the choreographed dance routine performed by the Aphex Twin figure in the video. It resembles that of 1950s musical films such as Singing in the Rain, however is much more vulgar in nature. By doing this Cunningham again takes familiar images from the cultural landscape of musical cinema and music video traditions, and twists them into a darker, more uncomfortable space.

We can see this in the sexual aspects of the music video, which are also portrayed through the musical track itself. The aural moans that feature heavily throughout the song are distorted and made strange and alien. This works alongside the distorted and sexualised imagery to develop an uncomfortable aura around the video. The female vocal is often a key component of dance music tracks, particularly within the music of more mainstream acts around that era 38

(1990s-2000’s). Furthermore ‘auto tune’ and vocoding effects are often used to ‘enhance’ the voice and singing capabilities of the vocals performers in such tracks. What we have in this track by Aphex Twin, however, is a typically leftfield and strange musical creation. As stated by Platinga, ‘humans have a built-in affective connection to the voices of other humans that is similar to the expressive and contagious effects of the human face’53, so, it can be said that Aphex Twin’s distortion of the human voice, like Cunningham’s facial morphs, contribute to the uncanny in his work. The vocoding and auto-tune effects on the vocal track work not to enhance the vocals in a traditional sense, but instead work to make the voice ethereal and otherworldly. Also, as is typical from the post rave ‘IDM’ genre of which Aphex Twin’s music belongs, the percussive elements of the song are occasionally complex and irregular in its rhythm. Norms of music video culture are subverted by having the video edited in such a way as to match with the irregular beats of the music. Along with the uncomfortable sexual imagery, this further creates a somewhat nightmarish, or at least dreamlike feel to the video, as well as developing a sense of the uncanny through the simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar nature of the track.

However far from his disturbing and unsettling work with Aphex Twin, Cunningham’s video for Bjork’s All is Full of Love (1999), is much more ethereal and much less provocative. What is interesting about this award winning music video is that it employs many of the same themes and motifs as the rest of Cunningham’s oeuvre; the marriage of biology and technology, his use of the artist’s face, the dreamlike atmosphere and the attunement to electronic music, yet seems to provide a very different viewing experience from the disturbing atmosphere of the uncanny that is produced by much of his work. Although not building on the phenomena of the uncanny, All is Full of Love does seem to be an extremely emotionally affective video. Perhaps the reasons for this can be explained, not by the uncanny, but by the much older sublime. The term is believed to have been first consecrated by Longinus in his essay, ‘On the Sublime’54, written sometime in the 1st Century AD. The uncanny and the sublime can, to an extent, be considered to be related in that they both describe aesthetic phenomena that are somewhat intangible and elusive. The

53 Carl Platinga, Moving Viewers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 123. 54 Longinus. Poetics. Longinus: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style. Translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1995. 39

uncanny describes the feeling of unease when confronted with certain unfamiliar familiar stimuli, a feeling that is less tangible than the concrete emotion of fear. The sublime, on the other hand, deals not with something definite such as happiness, but instead describes the complex feelings of beauty, awe, insignificance, and to an extent, fear, when confronted with something greater than oneself, such as nature. ‘Kant describes the sublime as something existing beyond the physical world, split between the sensible and supersensible, dwarfing humanity and thwarting our reason and understanding’55. Perhaps, the dreamlike and otherworldly temporal frame of the video helps to introduce these feelings of the sublime.

The dreamlike framing of the video can be considered to create the conditions for a certain sense of the sublime. This can be seen from the very opening of the video. The camera pans upwards to the subject of the video, a porcelain robot with the face of the artist, Bjork, superimposed. The room is plain and clinical. This room functions as the stage on which the subjects exist, and the initial and final movements of the camera towards and away from this space portray it as somewhere separate and isolated. This camera movement functions in the same way that one would expect from a film directed by surrealist auteur David Lynch, the fade to black enhances the isolated nature of the images within, giving the impression that what is framed is something apart from our own world. Furthermore, much like Lynch’s ‘red room’, in which the stage is used as a setting for the dreamlike visions of his protagonists, this stage can be seen to exist in a similarly separate and ethereal place. Perhaps it is through the somewhat otherworldly sense that Cunningham employs in All is Full of Love that the door is opened to something sublime.

‘It is an otherworldliness, which puts into perspective humanity and gives us brief insight into the possibility of something larger. The sublime is rooted in the unknown, allowing us to momentarily glimpse beyond the limits of the human universe which previously seemed stable and sure.’56

The establishment of aspects of the video being otherworldly can be considered to be the key in terms of opening the door to ‘something

55 Annalise Baird, The Abject, The Uncanny, And The Sublime: A Destabilization Of Boundaries. (Rochester: University of Rochester, 2013). 11.

56 Ibid., 40

larger’ and the ability to glimpse something ‘beyond the limits of the human universe’.

In Come to Daddy and Windowlicker we see in the use of the double a well-recognised example of the uncanny. However, Annalise Baird, makes the claim that ‘the sublime is, then, another form of doubling, since we perceive that we are both here and beyond here in a single moment of sublimation.’ The doubling of the viewer that Baird refers to, references the viewer’s ability to simultaneously glimpse something of another world whilst remaining present in his or her own. Perhaps it is through this doubling that the otherworldly framing of All is Full of Love establishes its value, in its ability to help develop the images’ relation to something greater than oneself. The ability to disassociate the viewer, to make them feel that they are glimpsing another world can be considered to be helpful in regards to the development of the sublime atmosphere of the video. It is not dissimilar to the fascination and respect towards the cinematic medium that was held by the surrealists; for them, cinemas ability to represent a world other than our own was vital in the unification of the real and dream worlds. This unification was named by Breton to be a world of ’surreality’ and it would seem that a similar unification, of the real and the super-real, is helpful in the production of the sublime in Cunningham’s video.

In All is Full of Love, and indeed the majority of Cunningham’s work, his thematic focus on the biological and technological is central. This takes several forms, through the pairing of his visuals with electronic music, the use of digital and analogue equipment and the imagery itself. This focus on technological and biological motifs suggests that Cunningham’s sense of the sublime differs to the traditional, in that nature is no longer the instigator of such feelings. Jos de Mul makes the claim that ‘If the concept of the sublime had previously been used to articulate the inadequacy that the human subject felt upon trying to represent Nature, the postmodern condition – in which Nature itself has been effaced – has produced a sense of the sublime in which humans find themselves up against their own creations.’57 For the romantic artists of the 19t h century the sublime can be simplified to the process in which ‘physical grandeur {becomes} transformed into spiritual grandeur.’58 For them the idea of

57 Jos de Mul, “The (Bio)Technological Sublime” Diogenes 59, no.1-2 (2012): 32 58 Klaus P Mortensen, The Time Of Unrememberable Being. (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1998). 41

‘physical grandeur’ was rooted in nature. We can see this in the paintings of the time;

fig 10, The Great Day of His Wrath, John Martin (1853)

the awe inspiring landscape, the kinetic and volatile nature, and the spirituality this brings with it was for them the purest expression of the sublime. How then, does this apply to Cunningham’s video?

Both of these subjects are dealt with in similarly awe inspiring and epic ways. However, rather than focus on nature and landscape, Cunningham uses the imagery of industry and creation to reach the sublime. Like the extreme weather depicted in Martin’s painting, Cunningham’s video is fraught with kinetic energy, which, although artificial and manmade, is treated with the splendour of the elements themselves. The machines work on the Bjork-robots automatically as sparks cascade downwards, much like the crashing of lightning in Martin’s painting. The glow from the sparks create iridescent rays of light that shine downwards, mimicking the biblical grandeur and import of the wrath of god as seen in Martin’s painting, albeit in a more post-humanist and futurist sense. The automation of the factory machine mirrors the uncontrollability of nature, as does the way in which these forces work behind the movement of the two humanoid 42

figures. The lights also flicker on and off, seemingly indifferent to the pacing of the video and the actions of its subjects. This simultaneously reinforces the significance of the autonomy of the robotic characters and the environment’s indifference towards them, illustrating that our technological control over nature has replaced nature itself as a sublime force. ‘The power of divine nature has been transferred to the power of human technology.’59

Working alongside this is Bjork’s musical composition. All is Full of Love, like the rest of Bjork’s critically applauded 1997 album, Homogenic, shares the thematic concerns of Chris Cunningham and Aphex Twin, namely their interest in blending the natural with the technological. All is Full of Love achieves this by using complex electronic beats and rhythms to mimic the volcanic nature of her native Iceland. In the song, traditional analog instruments such as violins, cellos, harps and glass harmonicas are offset by the more futurist bass and drum sequences. This works as a thematic bridge between Cunningham’s visual aesthetic of a clean automated industry, the natural splendour of the sublime and the very human emotion of love. The different aesthetic elements of Cunningham’s video seem to culminate in a similarly epic and indeed, sublime, atmosphere as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The clean futuristic aesthetic, commands a similar connotation of beauty as Kubrick’s space station ballet. It features the same juxtaposition of classical orchestral instrumentation set to the pure efficiency of technology; in this we see a similar aesthetic dominance of technology over nature.

It can be said that Cunningham uses similar techniques in All is Full of Love. The face of the artist is transposed onto a body other than her own, as is done in the uncanny creations of Come to Daddy and Windowlicker. However, as has just been argued, the overall atmosphere of the video touches the viewer not with the uncanny, but the sublime. So in what way does Cunningham’s use of this effect differ in terms of intangible viewer response? Perhaps this lies in the overall aesthetic context in which this technique belongs. It was said earlier that Come to Daddy and Windowlicker stand apart in the music video landscape because they are disturbing as opposed to sexy or beautiful. The video for Bjork’s All is Full of Love is beautiful, not disturbing in the way of Cunningham’s more horror inspired videos,

59 Jos de Mul, “The (Bio)Technological Sublime” Diogenes 59, no.1-2 (2012): 35 43

such as Rubber Johnny. The overall aesthetic and thematic content is less focused on disturbing or disgusting the viewer, it instead dwarfs them with its sense of beauty and sublime, not the unsettling uncanny. Could the actual practical techniques of the video prompt this change in phenomenon? Perhaps, it is due to the technical means of reproducing Bjork’s face with computer-generated superimposition, rather than a physically constructed mask. It was said before, regarding Come to Daddy and Windowlicker, that the mask produces an expression that was immobile and detached from the eyes behind it, as well as the behaviour of the body, and that this produced feelings of the uncanny. If that is the case, one can then make the claim that the nature of the computer generated superimposition of Bjork’s face, limits these elements of uncanny production by using the blend of digital after effects, rather than a jarring mask. This is done by firstly having the face blend into the physical body of the automaton, secondly having the eyes belong to the face they are a part of, and thirdly the physicality being appropriately suited to the face in terms of visuals and behaviour. By doing this, along with the thematic content of the video, Cunningham circumvents the uncanny valley, instead reaching the peaks of the sublime.

Cunningham’s visual aesthetic is one that is effective because of his employment of the uncanny and the sublime. These phenomena disrupt the emotional processing of the images, and create contradictory, spontaneous feelings within the viewer, whether they are feelings of unease (the uncanny) or feelings of insignificance (the sublime). He utilises this in the dark side of his work by playing on the sensation of the uncanny, like the body-horror filmmakers before him and the surrealists before them. The aesthetic forgoes the explicit creation of fear, instead capturing its shadow after it has passed and uses the development of a dreamlike world in order to push buttons in the viewer’s psyche that are hidden from view. Cunningham also, in the case of All is Full of Love, circumvents these dark and disturbing tendencies in order to touch an intangible phenomena related to, but different in nature to the uncanny; the sublime. This instance of the sublime is unique in his videography to All is Full of Love, and is achieved treatment of his industrial futurist aesthetic; it is given the splendour and epic quality of romanticism. As a result of this it can be said that Cunningham delights in the thematic bases of his musical collaborators, utilising their shared aesthetic qualities to create psychologically unsettling videos. 44

Bibliography

Baird, Annalise. 2013. The Abject, The Uncanny, And The Sublime: A Destabilization Of Boundaries. Ebook. Rochester: University of Rochester. http://writing.rochester.edu/celebrating/2013/Baird.pdf. "Beyond Alien: The Disturbing Psychedelic Artwork Of HR Giger". 2017. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/nov/02/hr-giger- psychedelic-art-alien. Cruz, Ronald Allan Lopez. 2012. "Mutations And Metamorphoses: Body Horror Is Biological Horror". Journal Of Popular Film And Television 40 (4): 160-168. Cunningham, Chris. 2003. The Work Of Director Chris Cunningham. DVD. Sheffield: Warp. de Mul, Jos. 2012. "The (Bio)Technological Sublime". Diogenes 59 (1-2): 32-40. Emery, N.J. 2000. "The Eyes Have It: The Neuroethology, Function And Evolution Of Social Gaze". Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 24 (6): 581-604. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 1899.

Lönroth, Linn. 2017. Hoodie Horror: The New Monster In Contemporary British Horror Film. Ebook. Copenhagen: Tidsskrift. https://tidsskrift.dk/index.php/mef- journal/article/viewFile/69398/126980. Mathews, Peter David. 2004. "Music In His Own Image: The Aphex Twin Face". Nebula 1 (1): 65-73. McRobert, Neil. 2015. "Mimesis Of Media: Found Footage Cinema And The Horror Of The Real". Gothic Studies 17 (2): 137-150. Mortensen, Klaus P. 1998. The Time Of Unrememberable Being. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Plantinga, Carl R. 2009. Moving Viewers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tinwell, Angela. 2015. The Uncanny Valley In Games & Animation. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

45

Black Humour and the Absurd

Having discussed the horrific and uncanny elements in Cunningham’s work, as well as the more visceral aspects of his aesthetic, in order to gain further insight into what renders his videos so affective and disturbing, it will now be investigated how elements of humour contribute to these affects. Most notable is how Cunningham’s use of humour offsets the more overtly troubling aspects of his work, to create an odd juxtaposition that blends horrific imagery, disturbing content, an absurdist sense of black humour and a subversive delight in eliciting disgust. Much like other examples of black humour in media culture, including Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969) and Chris Morris’ Jam (2000), Cunningham makes great use of taboo subject matters, disturbing imagery and rebellion against formal convention. Proulx et al (2009) state that there is also, through the logical disruption of absurdism, another route to the sensation of ‘uncanniness’, ‘disequilibrium’, ‘dissonance’ and ‘uncertainty’60, which can in turn be used as starting point for a further investigation into Cunningham’s aesthetic and its disturbing nature, this time in relation to his manipulation of the absurd.

Contradiction also seems to be a defining factor in Cunningham’s video output. The most prominent contradiction is the symbiotic relationship between biology and technology, a theme that seems to permeate the vast majority of the filmmaker’s work, in particular, his work involving electronic music and musicians. However, there are also many more minor contradictions that form the web of his output. These include; the familiar vs. unfamiliar (the uncanny), desire vs. disgust, as seen in Windowlicker, the real and superreal of the sublime. However, an element in Cunningham’s work that can also be seen to account for a strange or troubling tone is his anarchic and morbid use of absurdist black humour. Absurdist humour is commonly found within works of surrealism and is expressed through incongruous words, images, behaviour and ideas. This often, as well as being used to create a sense of surreality or otherworldliness, also has

60 Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “When Is The Unfamiliar The Uncanny? Meaning Affirmation After Exposure To Absurdist Literature, Humor, And Art” Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no.6 (2010): 819. 46

humorous implications. Mark Polizzotti, in his introduction to André Breton’s ‘Anthology of Black Humour’, titled Laughter in the Dark describes the relationship between absurdity and black humour as so; ‘black humor is the opposite of joviality, wit, or sarcasm. Rather, it is a partly macabre, partly ironic, often absurd turn of spirit that constitutes the “mortal enemy of sentimentality,” and beyond that a “superior revolt of the mind.”61 This definition of black humour, and as an extension absurdity, being a ‘superior revolt of the mind’ suggests that the function of this humour is something of a disruption in the narrative and thematic expectations of the viewer.

An apt example of narrative and thematic black humour can be found in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, if we take, for example, ‘The Dirty Fork’ sketch. In this sketch we see precisely the morbidly ironic sensibility that Polizzotti was referring to. The sketch begins normally, a couple are dining in a restaurant, identifying itself to the viewer as nothing unusual, dark or macabre due to its innocuous setting. However, when the man (Graham Chapman) casually requests a clean fork, the true nature of the sketch begins to reveal itself. The waiter apologises profusely before rushing to get the headwaiter, who, disgusted by the fork, demands that all washing-up staff be fired. Becoming increasingly irate, he is dismissed by the manager who begins to apologise in a professional manner, explaining the hardships they have been through, leading to his breaking down in tears. Then enters Mungo, the imposing chef played by John Cleese. He berates the couple for their petty complaint having brought the manager to tears, after all he has been through, before holding his head and twitching from some kind of rage. He then attacks the couple with the meat cleaver before being restrained by the headwaiter. The headwaiter then dies from his war wound and the manager stabs himself in the chest, collapsing to the floor. An onscreen title reads ‘Now for the punchline.’ and Graham Chapmans character states, ‘lucky I didn’t tell them about the dirty knife’ eliciting boo’s from the audience. This sketch can be seen to exemplify the foundations of black humour; it’s excessive awfulness, macabre and morbid nature all develop a sense of the absurd given the relative insignificance of the cause. The audience’s expectations are also repeatedly disturbed. Every time a new member of staff enters they seem reasonable, and suggest that they will calmly resolve the situation, however, this

61 Andre Breton, Mark Polizzotti, Anthology Of Black Humour. (London: Museum Telegram, 2009). vi. 47

resolution is not delivered, with each character instead becoming increasingly unhinged as the scene unfolds.

The ‘superior revolt of the mind’ of black humour could also be interpreted as a certain delight being taken in the anarchistic pleasures of the breaking rules of, taste, morality and the conventions of the form. We see this not only through the intentional disregard for the expectations of the audience in Flying Circus, but also through the morbid subject matter and a willingness to rebel against the conventions of the genre. The source of the humour is developed through the awfulness of the situation. The more hideous and incongruous the reactions of the restaurant staff come to be, the funnier they become. However, part of the pleasure lies in the audience being given a ‘free pass’, as it were, to enjoy finding humour in things that, in regular life, would be considered taboo, or in poor taste. These include in, this sketch, mental illness, suicide, injuries sustained through war, all of which are subjects that would be deemed inappropriate as humorous subjects. Furthermore, the form of the comedic sketch itself is also degraded in a particularly postmodern and meta way by the drawing to attention of the ‘punchline’ of the scene. What this achieves is that it, whilst making itself stand apart from other examples of the sketch comedy format through mockery, brings the audience in on the joke; the comedians and the audience both participate in the joyous breaking of social and formal rules.

This can be seen within Cunningham’s work, also. Absurdity and black humour are aspects of his work that are given less consideration than the more overtly troubling elements, in Come to Daddy, for example. It can be argued that Cunningham’s use of dark and absurd humour is instrumental in establishing the strange, uncanny aspects of his work, due to their juxtaposition with the horrific elements of his films, as well as creating a conventional break from the normal content of the music video form. To an extent, it can be said that much of this anarchic black humour stems from the enjoyment Cunningham takes in provoking disgust and outrage. In an interview published in the accompanying booklet to the DVD release of The Work of Director Chris Cunningham, he recounts an encounter with the on- set security during the shooting of Come to Daddy; ‘I remember standing next to our on-set security guard and he said, “oh this is sick., like what sick fuck is responsible for this?”, and he quit, he left. I remember just thinking, blimey, it’s just some kids wearing some 48

rubber masks… he can’t get out much.’62 This anecdote suggests that moral outrage is taken against Cunningham’s imagery. What Cunningham sees as a humorous subversion and something not to be taken overly seriously is, for this man, deeply offensive. Perhaps this is indicative of the contradictory tone at play, as his videos are often horrific but also somewhat humorous. Were the disturbing imagery treated with utmost seriousness like, for example, in the context of a horror film, would the security guard have still quit in disgust? Perhaps. But it is a reasonable claim to make that what this man objected to was, in fact, the gleeful and tongue-in-cheek way in which these disturbing images are dealt with. In this case, it was the macabre and perverted black humour that invoked disgust.

In the first chapter, on the visceral aspects of Cunningham’s films, it was mentioned that, disgust, ‘the most visceral of emotions’, could be divided into two categories, physical disgust and sociomoral disgust. As was determined in the first chapter, ‘conventional physical disgust may be elicited by any number of bodily deformities, mutilations, and injuries; by body piercings or tattoos; and by the mixing of genders.’63 Many of which appear in Cunningham’s videos in some form or another. However in regards to the security guard who quit during the shooting of Come to Daddy, we see a clear illustration of sociomoral disgust. Although not viscerally repulsed by the content of the video, he was morally disgusted. Platinga described the tendency for sociomoral disgust to be treated with the same language as physical disgust claiming that ‘in many cultures, physical and sociomoral disgust are linked metaphorically.’64 This can be seen in the language used by the security guard to express his outrage; ‘this is sick’, which uses the language of physical disgust; vomit, to illustrate his feelings of sociomoral disgust. This shows the metaphorical link between the two forms of disgust, physical and sociomoral and also shows that both forms can be said to be important concepts in the spectatorship of Cunningham’s work.

Platinga, then, goes on to detail what he terms ‘ironic disgust’. This seems more applicable to sensibility of Cunningham’s work as it details a certain degree of delight in the provocation of moral disgust. Using the object of John Waters’ Polyester, Platinga describes the director’s suspected motivations in his disgusting aesthetic focus; ‘The

62 Chris Cunningham, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (Sheffield: Warp, 2003). 63 Carl Platinga, Moving Viewers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 212. 64 Ibid., 206. 49

director seems to relish the ways he makes Francine the object of exaggerated disgust.’65 The same can be said of Chris Cunningham and his imagery; the disturbing and subversive imagery seems to encourage a response akin to disgust both physically and morally due to its visceral nature and dark subject matter. He goes on to state that ‘Waters asks his audience to laugh at themselves being disgusted (and thus to ironically dispel the force of the disgust).’66 Cunningham, also, can be considered to make such a request from the viewers of his work. To be disgusted by such work is to be the subject of the joke; a joke for those that are in on it; for those who embrace and surrender themselves to the subversive material.

However, a closer look at how this wicked sense of black, absurdist humour is manifested within the videos themselves can lead us towards a greater understanding of how this functions towards the overall aesthetic in Cunningham’s work. In regards to Cunningham’s anecdote about the outraged security guard, who quit during the making of Come to Daddy. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the video can be an interesting route through which to examine both what the source of the humour is and how this can be objectionable to an individual. Cunningham’s expression of humour seems to work on a number of levels in the video. Firstly, there is a vulgar sensibility in his Come to Daddy. It begins with a woman being led around a council estate by her dog. This dog then proceeds to urinate on an abandoned television set that lays discarded on the estate. The television to flickers into life with the distorted face of the Richard d. James is, as the dog urinates on it. Here we have an animal effectively urinating on the face of the musician, a tongue-in-cheek and somewhat anarchic statement of rebellion. We also see examples of Cunningham’s vulgar sense of humour later in the video. Childlike figures perform various obscene gestures, such as thrusting their hips, which is troublingly absurd given their juvenile appearance.

Humour is also manifested in Come to Daddy through the excessively horrific and disturbing content of the video. This effect occurs multiple times throughout Cunningham’s videography, and is a very intriguing mechanic in the overall viewing experience. As is the case in many of Cunningham’s other films, the humorous elements are offset by the more disturbing content. However, the disturbing content also works to produce its own sense of challenging humour.

65 Ibid., 215. 66 Carl Platinga, Moving Viewers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 217 50

The horrific elements of his video, such as; the emaciated Thin Man who emerges out of the television, the satanic image of Richard James, and the distorted leer that appears on the television screen, because of their excessively disturbing nature, bring about sense of absurdity when in the context of the music video. This is due to the thematic conventions of the music video that Cunningham gleeful fights against, such as the image of the ‘star’ as a role model or a figure with a certain degree of sex appeal. Instead, he imbues his videos with disturbing imagery to such an extent that it can be seen as an absurd break from the conventions of the form.

A similarly provocative and transgressive use of humour can be seen in the projects associated with writer and director Chris Morris. The revulsion that Cunningham’s security felt towards the project he was unwittingly assisting, was replicated on a mass scale following Morris’ Brass Eye ‘Paedogeddon!’ episode. Following the controversial episode, airing in 2001, Around 3,000 complaints were received concerning "Paedogeddon!", making it reportedly the most objected-to episode in British television history at the time.67 ‘Unspeakably sick’ was the headline in The Sun’s coverage of the story, taking a similar line of disgust towards the disturbing comedy special. Both Morris’ and Cunningham’s outputs operate on the very extreme of black humour to such an extent that they seem skirt around the very boundaries of taste, with an irony so macabre in nature that it is overshadowed by the disturbing weight of the subject, making for some the blackest of humour. This controversial and disturbing comedic sensibility is not the only comparison that can be made between Morris’ work and Cunningham’s films. Both are associated with the Warp label and Warp Films division, With Cunningham making videos for several Warp artists and Morris releasing his debut feature length film, Four Lions (2010) as a part of the production company’s output. The two also have a fondness for electronic and ambient musicians such as Aphex Twin, with Morris often using the musician’s compositions as backing for selected scenes. But perhaps the greatest thing we see in common with these two filmmakers is their ability to use their humour in conjunction with ambient music, disturbing imagery and themes to create a wholly uncanny atmosphere.

67 "The Brass Neck Of Brass Eye". Mail Online. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-71158/The-brass- neck-Brass-Eye.html.) 51

In terms of creating an atmosphere of strange, dreamlike discomfort, the most comparable of Morris’ oeuvre to that of Chris Cunningham’s is in his television series, Jam. Based on Morris’ BBC radio one show, Blue Jam, Jam was an experimental and very dark surreal comedy sketch show. In his essay, ‘Lost in Techno Trance: Dance culture, Drugs and the Digital image in Jam’, Jamie Saxton also places Morris’ disturbing dreamlike series in the context of the uncanny, going on to say that:

‘Both radio and television versions were not only dark in tone but also sometimes sickly uncomfortable; many of the sketches felt as though they were informed as much by the genre of horror as they were by traditions of comedy, while the sonic qualities of the show – featuring extensive use of ambient music, spoken dialogue which was often quiet and detached, and frequent use of manipulated voices – created a distanced and uneasy atmosphere.’ 68

When we compare this with Come to Daddy, we can see a similar use of distortion in the song itself with the repetitive chant of “I want your soul, I will eat your soul.’ Richard D. James has admitted to the tongue in cheek aspect of the songs creation: ‘Come to Daddy came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge.’69 This reinforces the idea of black comedy, as well as the inclusion of horror elements to the song. This distorted and otherworldly voice develops the ‘distanced and uneasy atmosphere’ of the piece, albeit with a more frantic tempo. Saxton links this merging of ambient sounds and horrific elements to the traditions of surrealism:

‘This enmeshing of grotesque material within an ambient idiom is an unusual juxtaposition of form/content which can be connected to the surrealists, who stressed the importance of juxtaposing disparate materials, believing they were capable of producing a ‘spark’ that

68 James Leggott, Jamie Sexton, No Known Cure. (Basingstoke: Published by Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2013). 142.

69 Meredith Danluck "Richard D, James". Index. (http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/aphex_twin.shtml. 2001) 52

could jolt one out of ‘familiar reality’ and liberate us from ‘routinised thought’’ 70

This is precisely what we see in the work of Chris Cunningham; a juxtaposition of disparate materials, organic, robotic, real, unreal, humorous, horrific, familiar, unfamiliar, living, dead, all these disparate aspects work towards creating an atmosphere that brings together the world of dreams into a (not-quite) reality. Cunningham can be said to employ a post-modern pastiche of the horror genre to the ends of not horrifying the viewer, but rather, to unsettle them with the juxtaposition of the horrific and the comedic. Jameson defines the postmodern term pastiche as ‘the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.’ 71Cunningham’s use of horrific elements is not necessarily parodic in nature; rather, it seeks to use the tropes of the genre as a building block for his unique and unsettling atmosphere.

Although less rooted in the horror genre than Come to Daddy, Windowlicker, presents a similarly obscene sense of humour coupled with disturbing imagery. The disturbing imagery of the music video, as stated in the previous chapter, is generated from the viewer’s feelings of the uncanny, generated via the unfamiliar familiarity of the video’s strange aesthetic combinations. Taking the form of nonsensical images, such as, the excessively stretched limo, the transformation of the female characters faces to match the musician’s, as well as a potentially shocking amount of profanity and vulgarity, the video is undoubtedly provocative. However, it is the way that humour within the video plays off these more disturbing elements that develops the eerie feeling of the uncanny.

Windowlicker, in a similar way to Come to Daddy’s sideways pastiche of the horror genre, parodies pre-existing tropes and clichés. Windowlicker is however, perhaps more explicit and eclectic in its

70 James Leggott, Jamie Sexton, No Known Cure. (Basingstoke: Published by Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2013). 144. 71 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism. (Durhum: Duke University Press, 1991). 16. 53

parody. Parody is, like pastiche, ‘the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style’72, however, it employs this towards more satirical ends. Firstly, it is important to mention the setting of the video; the hazy Los Angeles environment sets up the video for its parody of hip- hop/RnB music video culture. This is developed further by having the two male characters, driving an open top sports car, attempt to convince two women on the street to join them for sex. The visual language of the two men, one of African American origin and one of Latino origin and the fact that they are driving an expensive car down an L.A. street mirrors that of many rap videos. Many videos of this genre depict the musicians cruising down the streets of L.A. in expensive custom cars that display their vast wealth. In this way, the video has set up its pastiche of the genre. The humour of this lies in the following emasculation of the two men, who displayed such misogynistic attitudes towards the women. They are belittled when compared to success of the Aphex Twin to seduce his female companions (who now have his own face). The phallic image of the excessively long stretched limo compounds this in a particularly absurd manner. We then see the Aphex Twin being driven in the limo with the two women, and later on dancing with them as part of a choreographed number, before spraying them with champagne in another hedonistic display of wealth.

The other music video genre parody, or rather, musical cinema parody is expressed through the choreographed dance routines that make up the latter half of the video. Cunningham had choreographer Vincent Patterson prepare a dance routine that resembles those from classical musical cinema, Singing in the Rain (1952) in particular, which is altered to include obscene and vulgar movements and gestures. It can be said that this plays a distinct role in the absurdity and anarchic humour of the film, which is achieved through the mockery of two dominant genres in the musical visual arts. This is due to the juxtaposition of disparate imagery and themes. The bravado of gangster rap and the spontaneous, celebratory aspects of the Hollywood musical, have little in common aesthetically, save for the setting of Los Angeles. As a result of this it can be said that these two contrasting genres, being parodied through the lens of Cunningham’s uncanny aesthetic, is the source of much of the absurdity that the

72 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism. (Durhum: Duke University Press, 1991). 16. 54

music video produces. Cunningham, in Windowlicker, again transgresses the form and the expectations of the viewer.

For the purposes of examining Cunningham’s dark use of humour, it is important to examine his most disturbing work, the 2005 short film and music video, Rubber Johnny. This video is Cunningham’s most visceral as well as, along with Come to Daddy, being the film that is most informed by the horror genre. The visceral and affective nature of this work especially, along with others, has been discussed in the first chapter. However, having already examined the generic elements of horror that are imbued within the video, it will benefit the investigation into the overall experience of viewing Cunningham’s videography to examine how Cunningham’s sense of humour is developed in Rubber Johnny, and how this is played off the horrific elements, as well as the effect this combination has on the viewer. Firstly, amid the found-footage night-vision aesthetic, the setting of the asylum and the deformed bodies depicted, there is a deadpan delivery that produces a sense of absurdity, cutting through the disturbing, uncanny elements of the video. The doctor figure talks to the strange, supposed patient, with a deadpan tone that seems to exhibit a reassuring and calming air, ignorant of the horrific atmosphere that the video’s aesthetic portrays. Saying things like ‘Don’t breathe like that, it’ll make you feel really strange’ and ‘Would you mind if I gave you a little injection? Or something like that, to make you calm? Shall we try doing that? It won’t hurt you at all. Just like a little bee sting. And then you’ll be calm.’ This develops, yet again, a sense of the absurd; the visual aesthetic jars with the sympathetic yet deadpan delivery of the doctor figure. This bringing together of disparate elements, again, works in Cunningham’s films as a vague form of humour, a slight tongue in cheek edge to his otherwise disturbing videos. It should be clarified however that this in no way diminishes the uncanny atmosphere of his work; rather, it seems to exacerbate it.

This genre of humour shares the spirit of the work of provocative writer and director Chris Morris’, particularly his experimental television series Jam. Jam has an undoubtedly disturbing and uncomfortable tone that is developed through the darkness of his particularly macabre and surreal brand of absurdist humour. For both filmmakers, as stated previously in regards to Cunningham’s willingness to provoke disgust, it would seem the joke is at the expense of the viewer. It can also be said that the tone of Jam is more 55

akin to a horror film than that of a sketch comedy. Its subject matter, which tends to focus on the characters’ descents into madness, bereavement and sexual perversions which, far from the light-hearted nature of many comedies, is provocative to the point of being difficult to stomach. Morris’ collaborator on Jam and writer of successful sitcoms Father Ted and The I.T. Crowd, Graham Linehan has reflected on the nature of the Morris’ comedy in Jam:

‘Its mood was so grim that I just found it difficult to join in. I think that Chris [Morris] was just interested in tying people in moral knots – giving them a moral problem and then just twisting it so they have to do something awful to get out of the first moral problem. Although this is a secondary impulse for him, he’s also interested in pushing buttons that haven’t been pushed in comedy in people; making them laugh in a way that they’re not used to.’73

It can be said that much of the way in which Linehan describes Morris can also be attributed to the work and directorial impulses of Cunningham. It would seem that Cunningham shows a similar desire in his work to ‘push buttons’ in the viewer, albeit less by ‘tying people in moral knots’ and more through the immediate impact of his themes and imagery and the subtle comedic flourishes that twist and force the viewer to be conflicted in their response to the contradictory tone as can be seen in Rubber Johnny, Come to Daddy and Windowlicker, amongst others.

Proulx et al have investigated the precise effect that absurdism has on the process of thought of the individual, which may provide a valuable insight into how Cunningham’s subtle use of absurdist humour contributes to the overall viewing experience. Proulx et al use the meaning maintenance model as a theoretical framework, which ‘claims that people are motivated to organize their thoughts and experiences into meaning frameworks, which are their mental representations of expected associations.’ 74 The study hypothesises that ‘when people experience an event that violates mental representations of expected relations, they often experience an aversive, general arousal state that has been called the feeling of the

73 Martin Anderson "The Den Of Geek Interview: Graham Linehan ". Den Of Geek. (http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/19450/the-den-of-geek-interview-graham-linehan. 2008)

74 Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “When Is The Unfamiliar The Uncanny? Meaning Affirmation After Exposure To Absurdist Literature, Humor, And Art” Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no.6 (2010): 818. 56

absurd (Camus, 1955), angst (Heidegger, 1953/1996), uncanniness (Freud, 1919/1990), disequilibrium (Piaget, 1937/1954), dissonance (Festinger, 1957), and uncertainty (e.g., Hogg & Mullin, 1999; McGregor et al., 2001; Van den Bos, 2001).’75 Three experiments were conducted as a part of this study; the first was regarding Kafka’s violation of the western reader’s expectations within literature to be presented with a parable, ‘an ideal for living or a note of encouragement.’ 76It was found that participants more strongly affirmed their cultural identity after reading Kafka’s absurd parable and that Kafka was successful in provoking a ‘meaning threat’ in the reader. This shows that the notion of the absurd can indeed be instrumental in the production of uncanny feelings, which causes the subject to compensate for this meaning threat by affirming a viable meaning framework made available to them. In the context of Cunningham’s films, this shows how psychologically disruptive the violation of the viewers preconceived expectations can be, producing feelings of the uncanny through the very process of meaning, or lack of, rather than merely through haunting imagery. This is particularly the case in Cunningham’s subversive use of absurdist humour; far from putting the viewer at ease, it serves to disrupt their process of understanding, bringing about feelings of the uncanny rather than a disarming joviality.

The second experiment that Proulx et al conducted as a part of this study into meaning affirmation, following exposure to absurdist art, focused on exposure to the ‘disgusting and sadistic’ Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Flying Circus employs a similarly black humour to Cunningham and Morris’ darkly macabre sensibility and can be considered to have been influential in the history of black and absurdist humour as a whole. It is then, interesting that Proulx et al used exposure to Flying Circus as the basis for one of their experiments. This provides potential for the findings of said experiment to be applied to audience’s response to absurdism in Cunningham’s films. Proulx et al proposed that feelings of the uncanny are developed when ones expectations of a traditional punchline or joke are diverted, and meaning is not clearly established: ‘If one is expecting no incongruities but incongruities are presented, and there is no resolution that renders the incongruities sensible, then this

75 Ibid., 819. 76 Ibid 57

unfamiliar familiar experience should constitute the uncanny.’77 The results of the study conformed to this hypothesis, showing that participants who were not prepared for the incongruities of the sketch experienced it as a meaning threat. Proulx et al also concluded from this that ‘expectations played a crucial role in determining’ whether participants experienced the sketch as a meaning threat. This shows that incongruities in the content of a piece of art, especially when forcing a break in the expectations of the viewer, contribute to the development of the uncanny. It can therefore be said that, according to the meaning maintenance model and the finding of Proulx et al’s study that the absurd, surreal and incongruous use of humour in Cunningham’s work does indeed contribute to the uncanny nature of the viewing experience.

Cunningham’s music video for Squarepusher’s Come on my Selector is another case of his use of Surreal and absurdist humour, which is offset by other elements of the video’s aesthetic. In Come on my Selector, we see a similar, although admittedly less horrific setting of the institution, the ‘Osaka home for mentally disturbed children’. This setting is used within the horror genre due to the uncanny nature of madness, the idea that a person can look ‘normal’ yet their mind can function in an unfamiliar and mysterious way. This video seems to draw more from J-horror than the found footage we see in Rubber Johnny; it is set in Japan, with dubbed Japanese language, which is then subtitled in English. The humour however is more prevalent in this video than in Rubber Johnny, Come to Daddy, and Windowlicker. It would seem that a theme is emerging throughout the more disturbing examples within Cunningham’s videography, which sees a certain figure or figures of ridicule that fall victim to the weirdness that Cunningham unleashes. In Windowlicker we see this in the Latino and African American males who are emasculated by the Aphex Twin. In Come on my Selector we see the hospital porter, who is terrorised by the telepathic girl and her dog, have his brain swapped with the dog’s.

Cunningham disrupts the logical systems of the viewer’s expectations through his use of absurdism. He also plays this off against his horrific visual aesthetic, in order to develop a sense of the uncanny through black humour. The darkness of tone borrowed from, amongst other things, the horror genre, when coupled with slight

77 Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “When Is The Unfamiliar The Uncanny? Meaning Affirmation After Exposure To Absurdist Literature, Humor, And Art” Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no.6 (2010): 821. 58

comedic undertones, breaks the audience’s expectations through the provocative nature of black comedy. Working alongside this, incongruous images make for an absurd sensibility that break the meaning framework of the viewer, as an extension, also producing an atmosphere of the uncanny. Through these humorous elements, Cunningham also takes an anarchistic delight in the breaking of social and formal rules. He encourages sociomoral disgust via his subversive imagery, dark tone and crude humour. This can be seen in reactions to his work, which uses the language of physical disgust to categorise it as ‘sick’, placing it alongside other proponents of black humour, such as Monty Python and Chris Morris.

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Bibliography

Anderson, Martin. 2008. "The Den Of Geek Interview: Graham Linehan". Den Of Geek. http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/19450/the-den-of-geek-interview-graham-linehan. Breton, André, and Mark Polizzotti. 2009. Anthology Of Black Humour. London: Telegram. Conlan, Tara. "The Brass Neck Of Brass Eye". Mail Online. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-71158/The-brass-neck-Brass-Eye.html. Cunningham, Chris. 2003. The Work Of Director Chris Cunningham. DVD. Sheffield: Warp. Danluck, Meredith. 2001. "Richard D. James". Indexmagazine.Com. http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/aphex_twin.shtml. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism. Durhum: Duke University Press. Leggott, James, and Jamie Sexton. 2013. No Known Cure. Basingstoke: Published by Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute. Milgram, Stanley. 2010. Obedience To Authority. London: Pinter & Martin. Plantinga, Carl R. 2009. Moving Viewers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Proulx, Travis, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs. 2010. "When Is The Unfamiliar The Uncanny? Meaning Affirmation After Exposure To Absurdist Literature, Humor, And Art". Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin 36 (6): 817-829.

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Conclusion

The impact of Cunningham’s films is undeniable; his work is remembered by many for its deeply psychologically disturbing qualities. One viewer commented on a YouTube video upload for Come to Daddy stating ‘its 2016 and this is still the scariest music video i ever seen’. This sentiment is not unique to this just this individual viewer. If one visits any of the online uploads of Cunningham’s videos, they can expect to find hundreds of people expressing the same beliefs, joking about the psychologically damaging effects that his videos had on them at the time of original broadcast and testifying to the persistent power to disturb. This essay has aimed to determine what it is about the aesthetic Cunningham has employed, and the way this affects the viewer, that renders his work so disturbing almost two decades after some were created. The three key elements into which have broken down his aesthetic content have been the visceral, the uncanny and the sublime and black humour. All of these three elements, forego the contextual theories of mass cultural fears and anxieties as outlined by authors such as Phillips78, instead finding interest in the innate and universal ability of the images, sound and thematic content to affect the viewer on a more immediate level.

The first of these to be explored was the way in which Cunningham’s work maintains a quality of viscerality. This is perhaps the most immediate level on which the audience is affected by Cunningham’s aesthetic. It relates to the deeply sensorial aspects in the viewing experience of his films, which can be broken down further in regards to the embodiment of his work. The somewhat paradoxical nature of the digital and analogue body is overcome through the highly sensorial content of his videos, particularly those set to the music of electronic artists, in which editing and rhythm play an important part in the symbiosis of sound and images. The other way the visceral is achieved is via the tactile nature of his images. Especially in Rubber Johnny and Sheena is a Parasite, the image of the body is graphic and tangible. A sense of texture is given by the wetness of the image, as well as the qualities of the skin, hair, flesh and disintegrated form of the bodies in these videos. This relates directly to Platinga’s research into the effect of physical disgust, ‘the

78 Kendall Phillips, Projected Fears. (Westport: Praeger, 2014). 61

most visceral of emotions’79 in terms of film spectatorship. The very bodily nature of these images emphasises the emotion of disgust, which is exacerbated further by the proximity these images have to viewer, with these disgusting bodies often lunging towards the screen.

Second it was the emotional and aesthetic phenomena of the uncanny and the sublime that were explored in regards to Cunningham’s work. Also noteworthy, was Cunningham’s employment of tropes and themes from various horror sub-genres, such as body horror, hoodie horror and found footage horror, to create videos that are not explicitly horrific in nature, but in fact work towards the more intangible feeling of the uncanny. The uncanny is exhibited through many aspects of Cunningham’s visual, sonic and thematic content and is perhaps the most important contributor to the disturbing quality of much of his work. This is utilised through his use of the distorted human form, most notably in the face of the musician Aphex Twin, which is morphed and recontextualised to elicit the Familiar unfamiliarality of the uncanny. The other aesthetic phenomena utilised in Cunningham’s work is the sublime, or, more specifically, the technological sublime. This brings to the viewer a sense of beauty, awe, insignificance and fear through the imposing power of human structure and technology that is formed from our control over nature, becoming a threatening force in itself.

Finally, Black humour, in which absurdity plays a role, was investigated in terms of its contribution to Cunningham’s aesthetic. Cunningham’s work has a strange element of humour that underlies his work. This, particularly with the horrific elements, creates a jarring and unsettling tone as a result of the juxtaposition of the two opposing feelings of humour and horror. This humour does not disarm the disturbing nature of his work; instead it exacerbates it through the tongue in frivolous, tongue-in-cheek way in which the frightening content is dealt with. Much like in Chris Morris’ Jam, this complexity of tone contributes to a somewhat dreamlike and undoubtedly troubling experience. Furthermore, the absurd aspects of black humour are also present in much of Cunningham’s work. As in the sketches of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, incongruous events and behaviours break the expectations of the viewer, which, as Proulx et al discovered is, in itself, another gateway to the uncanny.

79 Carl Platinga, Moving Viewers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 210. 62

These elements all contribute to the uniquely nightmarish aesthetic of Chris Cunningham’s videography. Although these are broken down into singular parts in this essay, it is important to point out that it is how they work together to form a whole that is responsible for the lasting legacy of Cunningham’s directorial work. The visceral and sensorial elements of his films are the most immediate, quickly declaring the works as confrontational and invasive. Then it is through the images, sound and content that the uncanny and the sublime unsettle and belittle the viewer, respectively, through the image of the human and their environment. After the immediate, explicit visceral affects and more subliminal, emotional phenomena have worked on the viewer, the logical disruption of the absurd and the provocative, sociomoral challenges of black humour are presented to the viewer. Functioning within the viewer, almost as quickly as the images play out before them, these categories of his aesthetic make us experience a wide array of complex feelings, from the bodily, to the emotional, then onwards to the sociomoral. It is for these reasons that Cunningham’s work maintains its power in spite of its re-contextualisation into the digital age, and will continue to shock and disturb people for much time to come, due to the way it deeply affects the individual.

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Bibliography

Plantinga, Carl R. 2009. Moving Viewers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Phillips, Kendall R. 2014. Projected Fears. Westport: Praeger.