Uncanny Adaptation and The Watchmen

One of the unique concepts I broach in The Popular Uncanny is the notion of doublement — a term I employ to refer to the uncanny regress that occurs when a textual double (such as a remake or other adaptation) foregrounds the capacity for media to reproduce or “double” itself. In a recent entry on The Watchmen over at the Graphic Engine blog, new media critic Bob Rehak captures the uncanny spirit of this concept, and what is at stake in reproduction, remarkably well:

…here’s where the real uncanniness resides. We’re often hoodwinked into thinking that the visual (indeed, existential) crisis of our times is the rapidly closing gap between profilmic truth and what’s been simulated with computer graphics. But CG is merely the latest offspring of a vast heritage of manipulation, a tradition of trickery indistinguishable from cinema itself. Watchmen is uncanny not because of its visual effects, but because it comes precariously close to convincing us that we are seeing Moore’s and Gibbons’s graphic novel preserved intact, when, after all, it is only a copy — and a lossy one at that. In flashes, the film fools us into forgetting that another version exists; but then the knowledge of an original, an other, comes crashing back in to sour the experience. It is not reality and its digital double whose narrowing difference freaks us out, but the aesthetic convergence between two media, threatening to collapse into each other through the use of ever more elaborate production tools and knowing appeals to fannish competencies. At stake: the very grounds of authenticity — the epistemic rules by which we recognize our originals. — Bob Rehak, “Watchmen: Stuck in the Uncanny Valley” (3.9.09)

Brilliant. Moreover, this is not only the case with Computer Graphic enhanced cinema or graphic novels adapted to screen like the very popular Watchmen; I would argue that all remakes raise these very same stakes, because they engage in a tension with their “originals” that threatens to destabilize boundaries, which is felt by us as uncanny. In the introduction to my book, I make the case that Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho — which is nearly identical to Hitchcock’s — is perhaps the purest form of this destabilization, by virtue of being so nearly identical that the differences between the two are psychologically overdetermined by the spectator, rendering the text “uncannily” similar-yet-different.