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caseysunessay391 · 7 years ago

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The Eyes Have It

Where “It” is a Perception of Reality, not a Penis

I’m hung up on Freud. It’s astounding how he can make a legitimate point, and then completely derail me as a reader because suddenly, this point is now about penises. Or the uterus. Either way, it’s about genitalia. Freud’s writing definitely deserves any jokes made about his work.

His theory on the uncanny makes decent headway up until the point where he uses this theory to justify his theory on castration anxiety. Freud decides to cock a gun and shoot himself in the foot. He defines the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Which is a great definition, even despite the fact that Freud narrows his focus to the “old and long familiar” being either “infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived” or “when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” to justify points of his own psychoanalytic theory on castration anxiety. But really, what’s “old and long familiar” is subjective to each individual. The wording of his definition allows for different interpretations from his original intentions to make a definition with accuracy.

Freud’s work in the modern day never exists within a vacuum. It’s notorious. “Freudian slip” is a common phrase for a reason, and it’s often used to make what someone just accidentally said the butt-end of a joke. Freud might make a good point with part of his essay, but that point is overshadowed by the fact that I can only think “of course he’s making this about penises, it always comes back to penises” as I read his example of “The Sand-Man” and its relationship to the uncanny and to castration anxiety.

I just can’t believe he honestly tried to claim that “anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated” because of “the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies.” I don’t have a penis; I can’t account for the dreams of people who do. The study of myths is the interpretation of pieces of work from cultures long dead and that are only understood by studying what shreds of those cultures remain today. However, when you look at modern narratives, and here I focus on modern horror pieces, eyes don’t have shit to do with penises. Eyes, when relevant to the themes of a story, usually relate to how we see reality.

In Dead Space 2, the player knows from the start that it is questionable to trust the protagonist Isaac Clarke’s sight as the opening scene features him hallucinating his dead girlfriend Nicole. This is a trend throughout the game. Isaac’s hallucinations call everything in the game into question as we know he isn’t seeing reality clearly. In one of the game’s earlier segments, Isaac hallucinates Nicole attempting to stab him through the eye with a needle.

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What is uncanny about this scene is that it’s a quicktime event, and the player must mash a button to prevent the needle from stabbing Isaac. The player knows Nicole is not real, but they still have to treat her as such and take action. Once the event is over, it’s revealed that Isaac was attacking himself. What is truly great about this effect is how the feelings from it resurface later in the game, when the player becomes the one with the needle in their hand, and in a small segment must successfully stab Isaac in the pupil without killing him, or it’s game over.

Untrustworthy sight isn’t the only way sight can be used to alter reality. The “Phase I Clinical Trials” tape from the V/H/S/2 short film anthology explores the idea of sight becoming too good. The protagonist, Herman, receives an implant to repair the sight he lost in one eye following an accident. Herman gains his sight back, but also gains the ability to see ghosts. The implant itself is an uncanny valley device, as Herman’s regular eye is noticeable against his technologically modified eye. However, what is more important is that the concept of the short is uncanny as a whole. The short states that the reality which is “old and long familiar” isn’t the whole view of the reality we live in. Herman comes to see reality as the short states it is - where ghosts are real and the normal person just can’t see them. Not only is he terrified by this shift in reality, he also ends up dead because of it.

In the game Prey, the links between eyes, sight, and reality is more complicated. A focus on eyes is introduced straight from the character select scene where the player selects the gender of the main character Morgan Yu. The importance of eyes continues throughout the game because they are the injection site for neuromods,

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which allows Morgan to genetically alter theirself. Prey is a first-person shooter action horror game with an emphasis on story, and the importance of choices the player makes within the story adds a roleplaying element to the game. Though there are multiple uncanny elements throughout the game, one of the greatest uncanny moments happens during the post-credits scene. From the early scenes of the game the player-character is forced to question what and who is trustworthy. Multiple characters ask you to trust them over others. There’s no clear answer to who is trustworthy. Morgan starts the game in a simulation, and at first, believes it is real. Not even Morgan’s own sight is not trustworthy. And yet, trust of sight is an important game mechanic because the player must watch for enemies called Mimics that take shape of everyday objects to hide, lest they be attacked by a coffee cup. Trustworthy sight is truly called into question in the post-credit scene, where it’s revealed that the whole game was the player-character within a simulation. This moment is not only uncanny because you realize it’s a double layer of simulation (as video games are a form of simulation), but also because you realize you’ve never truly known your character, and the story you’ve constructed for them is not their own. The character is not Morgan Yu, but an alien-human hybrid that was put into a reconstruction (that’s most likely not fully accurate) of Morgan Yu’s memories to test if the hybrid contains any semblance of humanity. The character you’ve been this whole time is suddenly very unfamiliar.

I could list more examples, and if Freud was still alive I’d like to see him try to push castration anxiety onto any of them. I could see him giving a good shot at Dead Space 2 since he would take the fact that the hallucinations are a dead girlfriend and run away with it, but really, these stories don’t relate their themes to a frickin’ penis. That’s Silent Hills 2’s job.

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