Death… It's A Living

When I was a child, my favorite song was the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”. I think it appealed to me most because it was one of the longer songs in the Beatles catalog, certainly the longest of their well-known hits, and more time spent with the Beatles was time well spent. I still believe this, having not too long ago found myself completely riveted by all 6 hours and more of Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

As an adult listener, I still love “Hey Jude”, even if I find it almost too popular for my liking. It has always been hard for me to truly love something that I didn’t find special or unique in some way. The fact that its ‘na na na na’ coda is played before nearly every English sporting event contributes to a level of overfamiliarity that dulls my appreciation of what I am hearing.

Although I’m very interested in the fine line between the familiarity = liking and overfamiliarity = boredom, today, I wanted to write about a specific moment in “Hey Jude” (or “movement” as McCartney might sing the song) that still transfixes me every time I hear it. Or maybe I mean every time I don’t hear it.

As most people reading will know, “Hey Jude” is a song in two parts: the first, a relatively standard Paul McCartney piano ballad (though in fairness, “standard ballad” and “McCartney” should still suggest a monumental artifact of the 20^th century); and the second, a wall-of-sound rocker. Separately, they would both make the top 50% of all Beatles songs (which I suppose means the top 5% of all popular music), but together, they make something truly special. That said, neither the first nor the second parts contain my favorite moment.

My favorite moment is the split-second gap between the two parts. McCartney lets us know the change is about to happen by repeating the word “better” six times before screaming twice. The first scream (let’s call it “wow” or “the pretty scream”) is the last bit of the first part; the second scream (we’ll refer to that as “yeah” or “the animalistic scream”) is the first moment of the second part. I love both screams—there should be more screaming in music—but what I really love is the gap between the two. It’s so brief it’s almost not even there. I’d guess that I’m writing about maybe 200 milliseconds in a 7+ minute song. I’m not entirely certain how much of this “moment” was even intended by the artists and how much is a creation of the time it takes for McCartney to breathe and the rest of the band to change finger positions. But it is crucial to the song and elevates it into the stratosphere. The Beatles were, perhaps you are aware, quite popular. Nearly any single they released was destined to hit #1. But it was “Hey Jude” that stayed at #1 for the longest of all of their songs in dozens of countries, years after Beatlemania had already ended.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why my favorite moment in a piece of music is literally its least musical moment. I believe my answer is both personally specific to me but also captures something universal. And my answer is: it’s uncanny.

Freud and the Uncanny

What is uncanny? The most well-known definition comes from the most well-known psychologist of all time, Herr Doctor Sigmund Freud. In his German-language essay “The Uncanny”, Freud writes of a psychological state—both cognitive and emotional—that occurs when one perceives something that is both heimlich (literally, of the home) and unheimlich (not of the home). Scholarly readers usually interpret these words into English as “familiar” and “unfamiliar”, respectively. When these seemingly opposites collide, perceivers can be expected to feel sensations—to varying degrees of strength—of eeriness. Things are usually this, that, or the other; the unheimlich or uncanny is experienced when they are none of the above.

For Freud, sensations of the uncanny were necessarily unpleasant. His essay was in large part inspired by his own sensation of the uncanny experienced while watching a performance of Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, a play in which—among other strange and creepy occurrences—an automaton comes to life. Here, the experience of the uncanny was the co-occurrence of two opposites: life and lifelessness.

Much about the uncanny is, for lack of a better word, creepy. And Freud does provide a great example of something that many people find creepy; if you’ve even been to a wax museum, you’ll recognize the strange anxiety associated with the observation of the not-quite-alive.

For Freud this anxiety necessarily indicated repressed desires for sexuality and violence that conflicted with societal norms. I disagree with the good doctor. Although Freud was a brilliant theoretician and writer and deserves his place among the great thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, he was not an experimentalist. He was not, and I write this as politely as I can, burdened by the need to provide evidence. Thus, it is often best to think of Freud in the same way that many Christians think about the Book of Genesis: Just because it says God created the world in 6 days, that does not literally mean 6 days. Likewise, we can provide a simpler, more modern take on Freud’s concept of the unconscious through the lens of terror management theory. As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, much of the story of our species’ evolution tells the story of the avoidance of death. Because humans are exquisitely sensitive to threat/death cues, a strong feeling of anxiety should be evoked when a perceiver cannot quickly ascertain whether their perceptions represent a threat. Thus, the uncanny may represent an uncomfortable reminder of our own mortality.

The Uncanny Valley

Many readers will have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of the Uncanny Valley. This construct was coined by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese android scientist over 50 years ago. (Yes, there were android scientists 50 years ago.) In short, Mori had both a worry about, and a warning for, his colleagues. He noted that robots with a somewhat humanoid appearance tended to be perceived with greater positive emotion than those with a less humanoid appearance. For example, people would likely judge C-3PO as more appealing social partner than R2-D2. (Before you got to know them, of course. You might later learn that R2 is very brave and loyal, whereas 3PO is a real killjoy, but these are judgments of their personalities, not their appearances).

Mori hypothesized that the more human-like a robot becomes, the more people will like it. Furthermore, if it was one day possible to make an automaton that was completely indistinguishable from a human, then it would be very well liked. (In fact, if it was completely indistinguishable from a human, then it would arguably be human, but this is a topic for another time.) The problem (or the “valley” in the “Uncanny Valley”) comes just before that moment of perfect humanness: when it is unclear whether we should perceive that two-legged, two-armed conversing individual as human or not human. Mori thought that this (minimal) lack of humanity would remind perceivers of animated corpses and scare the bejeezus out of people.

The Uncanny Valley was mostly theoretical in the 1970s because no one was able to make a very human-like robots. This was still mostly true by the 1990s; however, motion-capture filmmaking, CGI, and videogames were sufficiently sophisticated enough to create human-like characters. I suppose it would be technically correct to say that the results were mixed because they were literal mixtures of human-like and non-human-like characteristics. But they were also almost universally panned when judged upon their aesthetics. In particular, the Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks Christmas movie, The Polar Express, is commonly thought of as unintentionally creepy, providing uncanny examples of living characters with dead eyes.

The Uncanny Need Not be Creepy

Haunted children, disembodied voices, and other horror movie tropes provide some of the best examples of the uncanny, but I’d like to offer a broader definition of the uncanny. Simply put, the uncanny is a psychological state evoked by the simultaneous perception of conflicting categories. It’s not this or that or the other BUT it’s also all of those things. In other words, it’s a perceptual confusion that elicits an emotional response. When the categories that overlap suggest a liminal state between life and death, we experience that as a strong sense of discomfort and creepiness. It is an uncomfortable feeling being unconsciously reminded of the dead while we also perceive something as living.

As my example of the Beatles “Hey Jude” suggests, however, the uncanny can also be thrilling. I don’t really know how to define that milliseconds-long gap between the song’s two parts, but because I view neither the first nor the second part as threatening, I feel something else entirely. Artists of all kinds have used the uncanny—placing something unfamiliar where something familiar should go—to elicit a range of emotions in the observer.

That said, the overlap of distinct perceptual categories necessarily creates a sense of discombobulation. And many of us are not thrilled by the experience of feeling off-kilter. As an adult, my favorite Beatles song is “A Day in the Life”. This song also has two distinct parts (the haunting acoustic guitar John Lennon sections that open and close the song, and the bouncy McCartney piano middle). Unlike “Hey Jude”, however, the transition between these sections includes a 24-bar discordant orchestral swell that, when I was younger, terrified me. In truth, I still find it a bit unnerving. Although musical instruments (played by musicians!) create the crescendo, it is decidedly unmusical. But again, this is why this is my favorite and I might argue best Beatles song. Lennon and McCartney put it there not because it belongs but because it doesn’t belong. Although I must have listened to it dozens upon dozens of times in my life, there still remains something surprising about it. And that’s why it’s art. Because it was created by humans to make other humans feel something (in this case, freaked out).

I’m interested in the uncanny not (only) because it allows me to write about the Beatles, but also because it tells us something about how perception works and how it relies upon expectation. Something that is solely familiar cannot be judged as uncanny (although there are important exceptions). Something that is solely unfamiliar cannot be uncanny. Only when these two combine can this feeling be experienced. And as I’ll argue in future posts this feeling is not only good for us as individuals, but it might be one of the keys in determining whether we will continue to thrive as a species.  

-The Plague Doctor