Coraline

For those who haven't seen it, I strongly recommend Coraline, the stop action film based on Neil Gaiman's novel. Ostensibly this is "for kids" but in no way is this a limitation; it's more like Coraline exceeds the division of a "child" aesthetic and an "adult" aesthetic. The device that allows this encompassing movement is its supreme creepiness.

When this movie came out I had to do a lot of driving for work, so I wound up hearing an interview with the maker about three times on NPR. Two things stuck with me: his insistence on doing this movie with stop-action figures rather than CGI, and his belief that what is most terrifying is age-indiscriminate. His instincts were right, because Coraline is very effective and I don't think too intense for kids. Maybe some kids. Why is it effective?

The materiality of the figures is part of it--a small part, in comparison with the amazing directing and effects--but it is this part that creates the atmosphere of the uncanny (E. T. A. Hoffman's The Sandman is more than a passingly similar text, especially since Gaiman made his name with his own Sandman series. Here is a short film version). The animation is done superbly, but it has inevitable gliches or discontinuities almost too small to see. In an extremely subtle way, the movie reminds of us our own materiality and mortality. But the division within the movie between the "real" world and a seductive simulacrum in which everyone has buttons sewn over their eyes hinges on the idea of being a doll or being real. Yet we know that the "real" world is also made of dolls. The chain of signification establishes a dualism between real and false (and this is total division: ontology and ethics are synonymous) but then shows that this same division connects the screen-world to the viewer-world. Since materiality is the means by which the image reveals its construction, that the viewer-world possesses "the most" materiality makes it the most frightening. Things speak, have worlds: and, as in the flickering gaps of the claymation, the mode in which things reveal their other lives is by a minor absence. The imperfect fluidity of the figures does not break down narrative or meaning or affect; one could count it out entirely, or not even perceive it. This is what is terrifying: that the alterity of things can go unnoticed by the modes of perception and meaning most dear to modern humans. We like to think that anomalies will hail our attention and direct our colonization of all possible worlds. But there may be a profound indifference in the world, one that can take or leave our participation. Coraline is a kind of Spinozism for kids and it rightly shows that this is both marvelous and profoundly disturbing for humans, "awful" in the old sense.