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nathanielhughes00's review
4.0
Reading the term ‘uncanny’ had initially conjured images of disturbing, lifeless-looking animatronics mimicking human facial expressions and movements, creating the commonly penned ‘uncanny valley’ effect within my subconscious. This fear, while irrational, stems from the fact that I cannot begin to understand the mechanics of artificial intelligence and robotics. By placing the ‘uncanny’ within the Gothic context, this ‘fear’ expands to the discomfort of otherness and the mysterious workings of the supernatural.
In Isabella Van Elferen’s book Gothic Music: The Sounds of The Uncanny, Gothic music is demonstrated as something conscious yet ghostly ‘made by bodiless beings’: a phantom language with unknown and discomforting intentions for the listener. Just as artificial intelligence becomes frightening through its dissimilaritiesfrom humanity, Elferen’s expert account of music in a variety of Gothic media is given significant agency that unnerves our understanding of reality and time. She structures her book with six chapters, exploring five areas of popular culture (literature, film, television, video games and Goth subculture) and how each invokes the Freudian term ‘uncanny’, relating to concepts of differing realities, alternating timelines and the giving of voices to silent spectres. In the first chapter, Elferen reads Gothic literature through a Freudian lens and considers its ability to reflect the often intangible, portraying music’s important role of evocating ‘uncanny atmospheres and ghostliness’ through literary techniques. Elferen writes, using the example of the vampiric Carmilla’s rejection of liturgical funeral music in Le Fanu’s novella, that ‘listening to music […] means becoming part of the music’ and to give into musicality and its uncanny nature is like that of a religious consummation. The exploitation of the Gothic and its tropes allows one to completely give in to the experience and its subsequent transgressions. In studies of the philosophies of music, such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s book ‘Listening’, the experience of listening to music is stated to transcendently produce its own space and time that represents the uncannily transgressive qualities of Gothic music.
This view is expanded upon in the second chapter (focusing on Gothic film music and sounds) as Elferen elaborates that film music ‘initiates meta-cinematic dialogues between movies and their spectators’, allowing the spectators to self-reflect on how the film’s reality intersects with their own. One of the main strengths of Elferen’s book is her varied choices of other studies in the academic field as well as her chosen examples to argue the power of musicality within the Gothic, however, some parts of the book suffer from an overabundance of exemplar to support her case. To demonstrate her interpretation of non-diegetic music in film as a bridge between the spectator and the characters’ psyche (blurring the lines between reality and fantasy), Elferen uses the infamous prom scene from Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976). In the spotlighted scene, the titular character loses her sanity and begins to hear a ‘pastiche of laughter, screams [and her] mothers and teacher’s voices’. Despite being a carefully selected scene that translates Elferen’s thoughts on the power of diegesis and non-diegesis well, her account of it is riddled with inaccuracies. She writes that the ‘bucket of pigs blood [drops] on the heads of prom queen and king Carrie and Chris’ and Carrie’s collapsing sanity is expressed through ‘a prism-shaped split screen showing six screaming Carries’, though in actuality the name of the crowned King is Tommy Ross (the perpetrator of the blood dump being Chris) and the ‘prism-shaped split screen’ showcases the laughing onlookers and not Carrie herself.
In the following two chapters, Elferen recalls Freud’s observation in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) of the terms German translation ‘Unheimlich’ (meaning ‘unhomely) and connects it to the forms of media we consume within the comforts of our homes, elaborating on how these can infiltrate our reality and make our homes ‘unhomely’ or uncanny. These chapters successfully drive the idea of an invasion of domesticity with the uncomfortable nature of the uncanny, using examples of both television and video game music. The avatars in games are used as an exemplar by her, suggesting their ‘uncanny presence upon the private home [is] much more terrifying than the televisual colleagues, as audiences literally get to meet and greet them’. Acceptance of another reality is inherent in games, in order to immerse one’s self in the reality of the video game and its avatar, we must give it the same suspension of disbelief as the aforementioned older, more traditional mediums. Like television and film, Elferen notes upon the crucial nature of sound in video games, stating ‘that immersion through music often verges on dependence on music’. In addition to this, Elferen highlights the agency that video game music procures due to the constantly changing actions of the player subsequently heightening their fear of these digital spectres haunting the player’s avatar.
The final chapter studies Goth culture, in particular its music, performativity, clothing, and dancing, considering how individuals express themselves using typical Gothic tropes. People who identify themselves as part of this culture are stated to ‘embody the ghosts that appear in such liminal spaces’ of literary and cinematic Gothic, therefore participating in this ‘obsession with the past’ as well as its aesthetics. In this sense, Elferen argues that individuals immerse themselves in music and like ghosts, become discombobulated aspects of the past: time is no longer tangible and the past is slipping between the cracks of the present and finding itself in modern culture. This scholarly work is enriched by Elferen’s focus on immersion and materiality in relation to music with references to Victorian styles such as corsets and finds itself relating back to the Freudian ‘uncanny presence in philosophy’ that, like the timelessness of the Gothic, ‘will always return and produce unease’. Elferen brilliantly observes the sounds formed in these mediums and how they create fear of the uncanny like a thick fog which often lingers in Gothic media, blurring one’s grip of the familiar and tangible, leaving our conceptions and emotions as alien as when we first entered this realm of fictitious uncertainty.
In Isabella Van Elferen’s book Gothic Music: The Sounds of The Uncanny, Gothic music is demonstrated as something conscious yet ghostly ‘made by bodiless beings’: a phantom language with unknown and discomforting intentions for the listener. Just as artificial intelligence becomes frightening through its dissimilaritiesfrom humanity, Elferen’s expert account of music in a variety of Gothic media is given significant agency that unnerves our understanding of reality and time. She structures her book with six chapters, exploring five areas of popular culture (literature, film, television, video games and Goth subculture) and how each invokes the Freudian term ‘uncanny’, relating to concepts of differing realities, alternating timelines and the giving of voices to silent spectres. In the first chapter, Elferen reads Gothic literature through a Freudian lens and considers its ability to reflect the often intangible, portraying music’s important role of evocating ‘uncanny atmospheres and ghostliness’ through literary techniques. Elferen writes, using the example of the vampiric Carmilla’s rejection of liturgical funeral music in Le Fanu’s novella, that ‘listening to music […] means becoming part of the music’ and to give into musicality and its uncanny nature is like that of a religious consummation. The exploitation of the Gothic and its tropes allows one to completely give in to the experience and its subsequent transgressions. In studies of the philosophies of music, such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s book ‘Listening’, the experience of listening to music is stated to transcendently produce its own space and time that represents the uncannily transgressive qualities of Gothic music.
This view is expanded upon in the second chapter (focusing on Gothic film music and sounds) as Elferen elaborates that film music ‘initiates meta-cinematic dialogues between movies and their spectators’, allowing the spectators to self-reflect on how the film’s reality intersects with their own. One of the main strengths of Elferen’s book is her varied choices of other studies in the academic field as well as her chosen examples to argue the power of musicality within the Gothic, however, some parts of the book suffer from an overabundance of exemplar to support her case. To demonstrate her interpretation of non-diegetic music in film as a bridge between the spectator and the characters’ psyche (blurring the lines between reality and fantasy), Elferen uses the infamous prom scene from Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976). In the spotlighted scene, the titular character loses her sanity and begins to hear a ‘pastiche of laughter, screams [and her] mothers and teacher’s voices’. Despite being a carefully selected scene that translates Elferen’s thoughts on the power of diegesis and non-diegesis well, her account of it is riddled with inaccuracies. She writes that the ‘bucket of pigs blood [drops] on the heads of prom queen and king Carrie and Chris’ and Carrie’s collapsing sanity is expressed through ‘a prism-shaped split screen showing six screaming Carries’, though in actuality the name of the crowned King is Tommy Ross (the perpetrator of the blood dump being Chris) and the ‘prism-shaped split screen’ showcases the laughing onlookers and not Carrie herself.
In the following two chapters, Elferen recalls Freud’s observation in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) of the terms German translation ‘Unheimlich’ (meaning ‘unhomely) and connects it to the forms of media we consume within the comforts of our homes, elaborating on how these can infiltrate our reality and make our homes ‘unhomely’ or uncanny. These chapters successfully drive the idea of an invasion of domesticity with the uncomfortable nature of the uncanny, using examples of both television and video game music. The avatars in games are used as an exemplar by her, suggesting their ‘uncanny presence upon the private home [is] much more terrifying than the televisual colleagues, as audiences literally get to meet and greet them’. Acceptance of another reality is inherent in games, in order to immerse one’s self in the reality of the video game and its avatar, we must give it the same suspension of disbelief as the aforementioned older, more traditional mediums. Like television and film, Elferen notes upon the crucial nature of sound in video games, stating ‘that immersion through music often verges on dependence on music’. In addition to this, Elferen highlights the agency that video game music procures due to the constantly changing actions of the player subsequently heightening their fear of these digital spectres haunting the player’s avatar.
The final chapter studies Goth culture, in particular its music, performativity, clothing, and dancing, considering how individuals express themselves using typical Gothic tropes. People who identify themselves as part of this culture are stated to ‘embody the ghosts that appear in such liminal spaces’ of literary and cinematic Gothic, therefore participating in this ‘obsession with the past’ as well as its aesthetics. In this sense, Elferen argues that individuals immerse themselves in music and like ghosts, become discombobulated aspects of the past: time is no longer tangible and the past is slipping between the cracks of the present and finding itself in modern culture. This scholarly work is enriched by Elferen’s focus on immersion and materiality in relation to music with references to Victorian styles such as corsets and finds itself relating back to the Freudian ‘uncanny presence in philosophy’ that, like the timelessness of the Gothic, ‘will always return and produce unease’. Elferen brilliantly observes the sounds formed in these mediums and how they create fear of the uncanny like a thick fog which often lingers in Gothic media, blurring one’s grip of the familiar and tangible, leaving our conceptions and emotions as alien as when we first entered this realm of fictitious uncertainty.
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