Wes Anderson and The Uncanny Valley

By Jonny Walls


Wes Anderson's movies are the "Uncanny Valley" of film.

 The Uncanny Valley

I first encountered the concept of the Uncanny Valley  in 2006, when I was exposed to the following video game tech demo for the upcoming game, Heavy Rain. You needn't watch the whole thing, just watch from the 00:30 mark to the 00:45 mark (though you should watch the whole thing. It's pretty awesome.)

When I watched this video in 2006, I didn't experience anything unnerving. All I saw was a fantastic looking tech demo, which showed great future potential for narrative in video games. Many people, however, found (and still find) this, and animation like it, unsettling. These people are under the soul-squelching oppression of the Uncanny Valley.

The basic theory states that the closer animated human replicas come to reality, the more negative people's reactions will be. And as any good scientists would have done, the people studying these reactions made a graph to track them. The dip in the charts that represents these negative reactions is the Uncanny Valley.

It's counter-intuitive to think that the closer something comes to its source (ourselves), the more it unsettles. Instinctively, we believe that familiarity cultivates comfort, which is true for genuine familiarity (actual people) or shades of familiarity (Pixar characters or the Simpsons, which are comfortably stylized and removed from reality). But with the Uncanny Valley, it's close, very close, but not the real thing. Like a lifelike baby doll with blue eyes or that eerily realistic painting of your great-grandfather hanging in your grandmother's living room over the couch where you are trying to sleep, it's terrifying.

The Uncanny Valley doesn't seem to affect me, but I get it. I can see it.

It's in the eyes.

I'm not sure why I don't organically experience the Uncanny Valley, but I have one theory: I've grown up with, and in close proximity to, video games. While video games haven't been the only medium pushing the bounds of the Valley (consider Robert Zemeckis' animated films like The Polar Express) they have certainly been leading the charge, at least in popular culture. I think my gradual exposure has somewhat desensitized me to the phenomenon.

Wes Anderson

My first Wes Anderson film was The Royal Tenenbaums. I saw it in 2002, shortly after it came out on DVD, and though I didn't realize it at the time, I experienced something not unlike the Uncanny Valley.

I knew I had witnessed something good, possibly even great, but it unsettled me. I didn't like it per se, but I appreciated it (on some level). I remember telling my friend, "I'm glad I saw it, but I don't  ever want to watch it again." In short, I didn't get it.

It wasn't until two or three years later that I went back and watched Rushmore, one of Anderson's older films, and unexpectedly, I genuinely enjoyed it.

Thinking that perhaps I had missed something on my first viewing of Tenenbaums,  I decided the time was ripe for a re-viewing, and it floored me. I loved it. I felt like a different person watching a similar film. It's not that I had forgotten and rediscovered Tenenbaum's taste, it just fell on a wholly new palette.

What I discovered was that I hadn't even begun to truly appreciate Tenenbaums the first time around. My mind, for whatever reason, wasn't in the right place at that time. This happens all the time in the quest for art appreciation (which I wrote about at length here), and I think the reason for it, in this particular instance, was because Wes Anderson deals in his own Uncanny Valley.

Unlike the official Uncanny Valley, I didn't have years of training to desensitize and prepare me for his special brand of off-kilter pseudo-reality, and thus found myself wrong footed.

The Uncanny Wesley

Photoshop art by Graham Richardson

The brilliance of Anderson's films is the universe he has created. It's not quite reality, but it's not fantasy. Every line, every reaction, every outfit, every lavish set, every leopard shark is one shade off from the real world. Where real people in real life would deflect a harsh remark with an eye roll or a scoff, Anderson's characters will under-react and ingest them like Houdini absorbing a blow to the gut, and just when we think they're about to fall asleep, they spout off half comic, half desperate actions, like starved cats in an affluent back-alley.

I remember failing to understand the Tenenbaum children's understated reactions (particularly Margot's) to the madness taking place all around them. Why, I wondered, did everyone seem so lifeless, almost dead behind the eyes?

The answer is that there was life behind their eyes, but it was that off-brand Anderson flavor I had not yet acquired. It's a suppressed madness, a desperate spark in disguise.

Watching hyper-realistic films like Dazed and Confused or 21 Grams is like looking at yourself in the mirror, but only at your most vulnerable, eloquent, or poignant moments. Watching hyper-abstract films like Mulholland Drive or A Scanner Darkly is like watching yourself in your untamed dreams. Watching an Anderson film, contrastingly, is like taking in your reflection on a rippling pond, or staring down a computer-generated android of yourself.

If you've seen any of his films (past his debut Bottlerocket, in which his burgeoning universe had yet to take full shape), then you've seen the plush yellow hotel rooms and matching red family jumpsuits, the J.L.W. luggage and the red stocking caps. In short, you've seen the unorthodox touches that put Anderson's train just a hair off the track, one wheel squarely in the middle and the other just to the left, but moving in the same direction as the world around it.

The question is, have you ever considered that you may be looking at yourself in a slightly different universe?

The Big Difference

The big difference between Anderson's Valley and the actual Valley, is that the actual one bids to capture reality, to lock it down, and it's in its shortcomings that we are repelled. Anderson, quite oppositely, strives to break through the veil of our everyday world and take one step beyond. It feels bizarre at first, but he helps us realize that sometimes, the only way to gain a good look at ourselves is to take a step back.

Enjoy the view.

By Jonny Walls