macksting

Full disclosure, this is gonna be fairly stream-of-consciousness, and is directly reposted from a rant I said in a venting channel. I genuinely don't think any of these takes are dogshit, but am prepared to be called out for dogshit takes from this because I in fact did not carefully think this through. There are also spoilers for RoboCop (1987) and Us (2019), which I can't figure out how to conceal except by warning you now.

 

ID: Scene from RoboCop. Murphy as RoboCop holds a drill. Looking away from Lewis as he prepares to remove his damaged exterior armor, he says to her, "You may not like what you're about to see."

Compared to everything else on my mind, it's really very minor, but I suppose after a rough day like today, it's no surprise I'd be thinking about it:

If it weren't so difficult, I don't think semantically I'd bother saying I'm not human. My feelings of kinship with machines, with robots and automata, including with unintelligent machines, wouldn't be so strong if I weren't going through some shit all my life.

It's kind of incredible to me, when I think about it, that there are folks who look at me as if I were unreal, even inhuman, just for having not grown up in the socio-economic situation they did.

It's a minor point, really, compared to all the other ways people are defined or described as inhuman, but that's kind of my point. The concept of human that most folks have is weirdly tight, just this small, rigid archetype with countless exceptions that are, to them, off-model.
It's kind of weird for me to be going on about this, in a way, but like... the question of what is human, with the answer being "more than you think, and yet easily taken away unjustly," comes up a lot in the media I'm fond of. I'm rewatching RoboCop, as I am wont to do, and a making-of I saw pointed out that something that Weller did for the character, demanded for the character in fact, was moving with a dancer's precision. If RoboCop, if Murphy the robocop, moved like most folks do, he wouldn't be uncanny.

That's it, isn't it. There's human, and then there's uncanny.

That comes up in Us, too. Red, Adelaide's double, is a dancer, and uses those same motions, standing on point, pivoting, isolations, etc., beautifully. And it is so beautiful. But she is so uncanny. And it's for the same purpose. Us is in fact incredibly direct about it. Both are, in a way. These are dehumanized characters, and the narrative is sympathetic whether it casts them as protagonist or antagonist.

(Shoutout to Lupita Nyong'o, whose acting in the roles of Adelaide and Red was absolutely captivating, and whose casting was absolutely perfect. All the actors in that film were amazing, the direction and writing were enthralling, and the visual metaphors and implicit historical references are not talked about enough. Folks are sleeping on this entire movie.)

I'm human, but I'm uncanny, so I am often dehumanized.

Well... I actually tend not to call myself human. It's not worth the trouble.

(At this point I would like to bring up a fascinating term, "Voidpunk." To quote a reddit community's description of voidpunk,

Voidpunk is a subculture for those who have been dehumanized to reclaim their dehumanization. Many are told that all humans experience romantic and/or sexual attraction, are binary cisgender, are neurotypical, are white etc. This subculture is for those who don't match that criteria of humanity and don't want to match it.
This may not be helpful or necessary for everyone, but I've had a few folks thank me for bringing the concept to their attention, and it seems relevant here.)

Semantically it is a very personal thing, I don't expect anyone else to adhere to it. If I call myself inhuman, it's to breathe a sigh of relief, y'know? It's to worry less. It's to give myself permission not to meet expectations.

Maybe that's part of why I get bone-deep chills when I encounter antisemitism. It's not about me, but dehumanization is something I directly experience, so it doesn't take much imagination to see how it plays out, how it applies. And, of course, if it happens to me (not antisemitism but dehumanization), generally it's not that big a deal; it's what happens to others that hurts most.

I've thought about that sometimes, that unhealthy traumatized mindset that I sum up by saying, "if someone else falls down the stairs, it's a tragedy. If I do, it's a comedy." I think part of it is, I live with me. I live inside me. So I know what I can handle, and also know that if I can't handle it, that's okay too. Other people, I cannot know how they feel, I cannot know their limits. To me their pain is limitless, their durability unclear and potentially nil. There's no sense of relief, of "it's okay, I'm still here," because I do not know what they can handle. I have heard it said that laughter is a relief, a sign that everything's actually fine; that it often comes from a moment's distress or wrongness, that is responded to with the knowledge that no harm will come of it. A fellow monkey falls out of a tree. We worry. The monkey gets up and walks it off; we laugh because they're okay. (Sometimes, it is that we laugh because they aren't okay, but it happened to someone else, so it'll be okay for us. That's kind of horrible, but demonstrates the concept nevertheless.)

The last time I watched Us with somebody, I had to hold my tongue when they, not knowing the big reveals of the story, began theorizing that the Tethered weren't human, including Red herself. That Red is simply Tethered by circumstance rather than birth is the point. It's why there's that incredibly raw exchange: "What are you people?" "We're Americans." (Which is a whole fascinating conversation all its own; that's not liberation. It's a good point about rights unjustly denied, but -- I'm getting off the subject here.)

It's shocking how little it takes to be uncanny.

Me, performing humanity:

[ID: Scene from RoboCop. Murphy as RoboCop holds a drill. Looking away from Lewis as he prepares to remove his damaged exterior armor, he says to her, "You may not like what you're about to see." /end ID]

It's extremely significant to me that, as we are sold that these uncanny characters are in fact human, and deserving of human dignities that they are denied unjustly, they do not stop moving like dancers. They continue to isolate, to pivot, to move beautifully. When RoboCop realizes he is Murphy, even though he cannot remember who Murphy was, he does not suddenly, magically begin to move fluidly like Lewis and other humans do. He still moves with a dancer's grace, even after much of his armor is removed and his tightly stretched human face becomes the face people see.

Likewise, Red never exactly stops moving with a dancer's grace. It's far more deliberate on her part, not the result of her body being a prosthesis but rather because she is an artist, so it comes and goes, but she never stops being uncanny.

It would have really undermined the rehumanization of these characters if, upon their repatriation to humanity in the viewer's eyes, they suddenly became reliably fluid, no longer uncanny, no longer strange. In the end, they still move like dancers, with uncanny precision and isolation of motion, one voluntarily and one involuntarily.

I don't exactly know where I'm going with this. It's entirely possible I've gone out of my lane, which would not be ideal nor would it be my intention.

There's a whole unwritten chapter of this about Amalthea the unicorn in The Last Unicorn, by the way, about how her uncanniness gave her away to King Haggard and captivated Prince Lir, and how she became less uncanny as she lost more of herself to the enchantment of a human seeming. Or to the voices we put on when working at call centers, to warp ourselves into something acceptable to people on the other end of the phone line, a phenomenon apparently with overlap with White Voice, and played with to create a distressing, uncanny effect in Sorry To Bother You. I'm white, and I still had to warp my way of speaking in strange ways in that job, and that kind of masking makes me feel genuinely nauseous, as does when I see alienation that produces a self-hatred of one's natural body or of harmless distinctions, like when a friend of mine talked about their mother getting rhinoplasty decades ago to make her Persian nose more white because it was fashionable and considered desirable at the time.

A lot of Sorry To Bother You made me nauseous, actually. The second half was almost a relief, as it brought the satire around to its natural absurd conclusions.

(By the way, don't spare me such things; I can't fight what I can't see, and I can tank a little nausea if it helps me identify what needs destroyed.)

Honestly, other than encouraging everyone to read The Murderbot Diaries, particularly the first (and sufficiently standalone) novella "All Systems Red," I think I've said more than I should on this subject, so I'll close here by saying that my lovely wife took ballet when she was younger, and watching her in a boffer fight pivoting and gracefully flowingly dodging and parrying was always such a joy. She remains the light of my life, and always shall be.