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The Uncanny is seen in Netflix series Stranger Things. The reality of this world is reflected in a dark version of this time and space. The uncanny is seen as the dark world is a reflection of Earth. It is uncanny because it is a represtnation of something that is almost known, like a familiar stranger. The show Stranger Things represents a phantasmagoria which is a "a confusing or strange scene that is like a dream because it is always changing in an odd way". This other world and it's characters make everyone uneasy, especially when the dark world adds elements of the real world.

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Jules is a robot which very much resembles a human, his eyes, his facial expressions, the way he smiles are very lifelike. However, when he speaks he has the voice of a robot, very rigid sentences, but the things that he says are what may give you a strange sense of unease. When he is about to be turned off, he asks "will I dream when I'm turned off?" which to me is something very uncanny, a robot asking if he will have more of these lifelike features that go beyond the physical aspect. He also has very strong emotions, and says that he loves his creators and will miss them once he is shipped off to another place, creepy!
-Diana Ramirez

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Freud is wrong about fairy tales and dolls coming to life...by Jesse Holt

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Freud is wrong about fairy tales and dolls coming to life...by Jesse Holt

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Freud refers to uncanny aspects of fairy tales but claims no one can perceive them as uncanny or disquieting but I disagree with his opinion. As a child, I thought frequently about the horrific possibility of my dolls coming to life or worse secretly being alive the entire time and just acting inanimate in the company of humans! The Velveteen Rabbit was a rather alarming book to me. Snow White coming back to life felt off and strange to me. Sleeping Beauty raised a number of questions about aging, deterioration of physical structures, etc. In particular, I have never been able to enjoy the ballet performances of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker even though I adore the music. I can't get past the nightmare of the dolls coming to life, being life size, and dancing around. I just don't trust them, they seem unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

It's interesting how the uncanny varies between individuals and how quickly uncanny feelings and apprehension can morph into terror. What defense do we even have against rogue dolls which are animated? They have no heart, no brain, no circulatory system, they are unkillable and just too scary for me to be able to enjoy their dancing.

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Tchaikovsky - The Nutcracker, Ballet in two acts | Mariinsky Theatre (HD 1080p)

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The 2004 Will Smith film IRobot has uncanny elements on many different levels. The first, and most obvious of which being the uncanny resemblance between the humans and the robots in the film. Created to serve humans, the robots are supposed to facilitate daily human life. The main character, played by Will Smith, has a more involved role with these robots as a police officer. Smith is asked to work with a new level Robot, one that is capable of feeling human emotions and making decisions, purposed to serve alongside humans as a police force. This introduces the another level to the uncanny. Baring a perfect resemblance to other robots, this new trial robot is inseparable from the thousands of bots roaming the streets. As the plot continues, the people are introduced with a reason to terminate the new robot. Fighting for his life, the robot hides himself through the sea of other robots in the streets. Each time the viewer is shown a regular robot, a uncanny feeling is created, and viewers are left to question whether or not the robot shown is the advanced bot or another regular, and dangerous bot. This film is most uncanny in the ways in blurrs the lines between a natural human, and a created human. Holding many of the same features as humans, these robots are too similar to a real human, creating a psychological unease in the audience.

~Elyse M. Massone

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A movie that makes me think of the definition uncanny by Freud would be Pan's Labyrinth. The reason that this movie sticks out the most when dealing with uncanny is because the characters in this movie are scary and creepy but the resemble humans or animals, things that we see from day to day. Even those these creatures are something we haven't seen before, we have seen some of the characteristics that these creatures have. For examples you see horns in this movie, these horns aren't meant to be on something that can speak but they are in this movie. These horns seem as though they come from animal like a big horned sheep. Also there is a fairy in the movie. This may not be scary or unsettling but this fairy is not cute like most. This fairy could be unsettling to some but it's still familiar because it's something we've heard before with fairytale and such.

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To me something that is uncanny is something that is disturbing, strange and mysterious in an unsettling way. So, when this word comes to mind I think of clowns. To me clowns represent the uncanny because they have an unsettling appearance. The way their make up is makes them scary looking. People are able to create scary stories with clowns as well as nation wide alerts for clowns trying to get little kids. I think the way people make them out to be create an uncanny fell and when you see them it is unsettling and not something that you want to see other than on halloween.
-Danica Evans

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This is a picture of one of the characters of the first Borderlands video game, which is animated using cel shading; the effect cel shading gives the characters and their environment, especially in motion, is very uncanny to me. Typically, 3D graphics in games pursue as realistic a depiction as possible, as has been discussed in the course, but the sketched effect combined with realistic efforts in shape, lighting, and movement, provokes a very odd sensation. One moment, it all seems almost realistic, but in the next, the drawn effect seems out of place and gives the world and the people a sense of distortion. It’s as if it is animated in two different directions; using 3D animation, but being rendered in a way that reintroduces a flat two dimensional feel plays an interesting game with your perception.
- T. Young

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Often when I set out to do these Padlet assignments, I will type the relevant term and the word "Jewish" into Google and then flip to the images to see what strikes me. I was leery, this time, of doing so, for fear of running into Holocaust images, because very little has so much of the uncanny for me as images of the prisoners being released from the camps. They look like skeletons, but they're alive. When I connect it to the family that I lost, it doubles the anxiety and discomfort I feel.

Fortunately, what I discovered was not images of prisoners, but an entire school of architecture I wasn't aware of: the architectural uncanny. Anthony Vidler's The Architectural Uncanny discusses the uncanny as a metaphor for the "unhomely" condition of modernity (Google Books description). I haven't had time to read the book yet (but I'm fascinated, so I will), but what I did find with a little more research was an...well... an uncanny example.

The image below is known as The Cloud Towers. It's an artistic vision of a proposed building in what was to be Korea's Yongsan's Dreamhub--a vertical version of the American live, work, play hubs (that, frankly, have always struck me as sort of Stepford and uncanny). Because the towers were meant to be some of the tallest in the world, the idea was to represent that with the placement of a cloudlike structure, as though they pierced the clouds. After it was proposed, the idea quickly received criticism for the fairly obvious reason that: oh hey, it looks like the Twin Towers seconds before they started collapsing.

It doesn't seem to have been the artist's intention, but I can think of nothing more unheimlich for most Americans than the Towers falling. We had seen such things before, but never on our soil. We had seen the Towers, many of us, but never in the process of falling. We had seen planes crash, heard of hijackings, etc. It was all familiar, but this was our home. Whether the artist intended it or not, their representation of The Cloud Towers, perhaps subconsciously, translates the fear, uncertainty, lack of security that encapsulates a world on the brink of war, into an architectural structure. Because it's both familiar to anyone who has seen footage of the towers falling, but unfamiliar, as it's clearly supposed to represent the epitome of architectural grace, the image and the idea are uncanny. - A.M. Schreibman

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Marissa Osmundson

Mirrors and Mirrors 2 are two horror movies which represent the uncanny element of "the double" that Freud discusses. In this movie people look at their reflection in the mirror and then something on the inside of the mirror keeps their reflection as it was when the leave the mirror. Whatever spirit or thing that is on the other side of the mirror contorts the reflection essentially killing it and whatever happens to the reflection happens to the actual person whos reflection it was. This is uncanny because it is not explainable and gives you the unsettling feeling that the uncanny produces. It is the double because first the person creates the reflection of themself which then the reflection kills the person. So it is a double that goes both ways.

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I feel that the film, Ex Machina, is a great example of the uncanny valley. The plot of this film revolves around Caleb, a computer programmer, who is sent to stay with Nathan, essentially a mad scientist when it comes to computers and robots, to participate in an experience involving artificial intelligence. As soon as Caleb arrives to Nathan's secluded home, you can tell that something is just not right. Nathan introduces Caleb to his house servant, a beautiful girl named Kyoko, who so conveniently "doesn't speak english." Kyoko looks 100% human, but something is off about her, which gives us a feeling of uncanny. She follows Nathan's every command, but she does it so efficiently that she seems less human, and more robotic. There is this one scene where her and Nathan perform this little dance and her moves are spot on with Nathan's, and at this moment we get this awful feeling in our stomachs that something is up with this servant girl.

Nathan also introduces Caleb to his latest invention, Ava, who is beautiful and acts so human-like that she even ends up manipulating Caleb into setting her free. We see the element of uncanny in her too because her human like features and personality, make it so that you almost forget she is a robot, which freaks you out. Both Ava and Kyoko share the element of the uncanny since they are so familiar and look so human, but you always have this sense of uncomfortability when watching them, or a sense that something just isn't right. The element of the uncanny is important in this film because it allows for the female robots to manipulate Caleb, for he thinks they have real feelings like humans, and they end up killing Nathan and leaving Caleb stranded in the house to die.  This movie instills a sense of fear and suspense in the viewer because it is a scenario that could very well happen to us in the future. As our abilities in artificial intelligence advance, we become closer and closer to robots taking over the world.
-Jamie Boone

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Gore Verbinski directed one of the most memorable psychological horror films to date. The Ring is a remake of a Japanese film about a mysterious videotape that causes the death of anyone who watches it within 7 days. The suspense, horror, and intense fear viewers experience during this film is what makes the Ring such a unique story. This supernatural movie differs from other horror films because of the vital role the uncanny plays in creating this feeling of dread and superstitious fear. We know what happens when the phone rings and someone says 7 days and then hangs up. This ritual becomes familiar to us and yet we are still washed over by this wave of uncertainty and unease when someone else dies a horrific death. We are once again startled by the chain of events and become afraid of what comes next. The audience is curious to find out more about the girl in the well and the reason behind the murders. Not to mention, the bizarre image of a girl crawling out of a television is etched into the minds of every single person who stuck around to see the last 30 seconds of the movie.
~Nivetha M.

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The movie Dead Silence is an excellent example of "the uncanny." The movie consists of a ventriloquist doll slowly showing more signs of life until it starts moving freely in front of the people who own it. The doll is later learned to be possessed by the woman who owned it (and other ventriloquist dolls) and it has the power to take out the tongues of anyone who screams when they see the ghost of the woman. This movie is the epitome of the uncanny element of dolls and how they are too similar to people to be comfortable. The fact that the dolls can move and are a threat to the people who own them make them even more frightening, and blur the line between object and human even more.
-Kaitlin Mulligan

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"Talky Tina, a doll that does everything, a lifelike creation of plastic and springs and painted smile. To Erich Streator, she is the most unwelcome addition to his household—but without her, he'd never enter the Twilight Zone." " The Living Doll" episode of The Twilight Zone aired in 1963 and is observed to be extremely exemplary of the uncanny. The episode tells the story of a mother who buys her daughter a doll, Talky Tina, and of a step-father who very much disagrees with this expense. As the story continues and the father becomes increasingly resentful, Talky Tina takes on a life of her own. As a wind-up doll, she has two sayings: "My name is Talky Tina," and "I love you." When the step-father picks her up, however, her message changes and she states that she doesn't like him. By the end of the episode, she makes him fall down the stairs. While he lives, he gets the message the you reap what you sow. The doll gives us a feeling of the uncanny in that not only is it human-like in it's general appearance, but she talks as well. Even as a child, having dolls around my room and seeing that as I went to sleep always gave me this feeling of despair. While dolls are inanimate objects, they look too human for comfort at times. The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis that claims that objects that appear to be human replicas, but are not quite the same, elicit a feeling or eeriness. Talky Tina is a perfect example of this hypothesis.
.- Paola Kuhn Berejuk

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The Elephant Man or Joseph Merrick is one the most famous grotesque humans ever. Merrick was born fairly normal, but developed his deformities in his childhood. He was rejected by his father and stepmother forcing his to work in the workhouse. Merrick contacted a traveling show and propositioned that he be in the freak show. He was welcomed as the Elephant Man. He became the famous freak of London. He died at 27.
Merrick is human, but warped, disfigured from disease. He has human qualities but still grotesquely ugly. Its not that he has any added or animalistic traits, its simply that he doesn't look completely human that sets him as horrific.

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Once Upon a Time's Evil Queen and the Grotesque Body 

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Once Upon a Time's Evil Queen and the Grotesque Body 

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I've probably written about Once Upon a Time before in Padlet, but since I didn't end up writing about Regina Mills for the comparative paper, I want to now.

The picture below is Once Upon a Time's version of Snow White's Evil Queen, Regina Mills. Because it's a Disney-affiliate, ABC capitalizes on the look of the animated EQ and other characters for economy in visual characterization; however, because we see the EQ many times, she can't always wear the same outfit. Instead, they establish the EQ as a vamp (not vampire) early, dressing her in darkly sexy clothes and giving her tall hair to enhance the connection with the animated version's height and angularity. The last two aspects in particular, align her with masculinity in a way that marks her monstrous.

Robbins' discussion of the anti-grotesque is apropos in looking at this character as well. In the picture below, for example, the costuming and makeup focuses attention on Regina's painted, and open mouth. It also calls the gaze to pronounced, displayed cleavage. Additionally, she has pierced ears (which draws attention to them). Here, as elsewhere, Regina's body is an ensemble of orifices and convexities. She is no airbrushed, plastic princess, but a mature, embodied, and therefore grotesque queen.

But the show does not only deploy the grotesque body to signify Regina's capital E evil, rather, it invokes Bakhtin's more positive grotesque body. When she is Mayor Regina Mills, in her own created world, the EQ dresses the part of a buttoned up businesswoman, cold and closed-off. Here, she looks the part of an (uncanny) Barbie-doll, symbolic of her attempt to create a world in which she is perfection (because that is all she can imagine of happiness), a return in some ways to when she was the princess and not the queen. As the story progresses, the show creates empathy and sympathy for Regina by using the grotesque body as a means of humanizing her. Where for many of the other female characters, sex is long in coming, mostly off-screen, Regina has a lover from the outset and she is shown in bed with him. Later, when she falls in love with Robin Hood, their sex-play is almost soft-core in showing his hands on her rear end or the curve of her breast, her legs and arms surrounding him, her tucking in clothes all connect her with reproductive/generative lower strata and motherhood. There's a wonderful scene where Snow White calls her out for forgetting to button up her blouse, in amused and friendly fashion, just before she goes upstairs in Snow's home to visit her (Regina's) son, which serves to bring Regina back into the social circle of women/mothers. While Regina's grotesque, bodily sexuality marks her as different (and still somewhat monstrous in troubling ways), it also takes on positive aspects that humanize and socialize her.

Sexuality is not the only aspect of the grotesque body that functions in this way. When Regina believes she has lost everything she built, she is shown broken down into ugly, open-mouth, wrinkle-faced, sloppy, pillow-clutching sobs of anguish. When she believes she has lost Robin for good, she again sobs, curled into an almost fetal ball against the door to her home on the ground, thus connecting her with the earth (we watch it happen in a marvelous moment of her sliding down the door), and open and secreting. We also see her feeding her son, eating and drinking, growing an apple tree, baking...all things of the grotesque (lower-class) body and the more often we see it, the more of a person and the less of an icon of evil she becomes.

- A. M. Schreibman

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Whenever a monster is brought up, most people think of Frankenstein's monster. And rightly so. But Frankenstein didn't make the only monster. H.G. Wells book The Island of Dr. Moreau also looks at a brilliant doctor that tests the boundaries of god and science. Both Frankenstein and Moreau pushed the lines of life to create monsters.
Frankenstein's creature is grotesque in his body. He has pale skim that is shot through with veins of scars only finished off by bright yellow eyes. The creature is brute by nature, a representation of the violent energy that brought him to life. His first reaction and emotion is shame from the disgust of his creator. The creature runs to the wild, learning how to be human from the inhumane. He learns the idea of love and, like any living person, craves it for the sentimentality of loneliness. William Shakespeare's quote from Richard II "Cry woe, destruction, ruin and decay: The worst is death, and death will have his day" is a perfect quote for the creatures life. He is a monster only because his life was monstrous.
The Island of Doctor Moreau doesn't deal with the creation of life, but the manipulation of other lives. The creatures than come from Moreau are a mix between man and beast. Moreau wanted to create the next evolutionary superior beings and be their god and ruler. Moreau is originally incarcerated to his island because of his dark experiments with vivisection which is the the  surgical process of cutting open a living thing to analyze it. The creatures fear Dr. Moreau because of the pain he causes. The hybrids are also punished for breaking the law which includes eating meat, running on all fours, and drink water bent down. The creatures end up rebelling and killing the doctor.
The real monsters here though are the doctors. Both Moreau and Frankenstein preform horrible acts that define them as more mentally grotesque than any monster they created. There are dreams of gods and monsters and Frankenstein and Moreau are the nightmares of both.

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Fairytales have always been everyone's magically imaginative explanation. For the longest time, fairytales were told around campfires or to a bedside at night. With new technology, fairytales are becoming shaped into reality. Cinderella is one the the most redone movies recently. The original 1950's film features the happily ever after the everyone knows from Disney. In 2015, the movie was redone as a live action. This film finally gives Cinderella a personality and the more believable love story. The grotesque part in the 2015 version and the 1950's is the magically part. It's bizzare to have rats turn into horses and pumpkins transform into coaches. Both of these still don't quite have the horror in the original Cinderella. A Cinderella spin off film Into the Woods finally references the Grimm tale. The step sisters chop off their heels to try to fit into the glass slipper. When Cinderella in the 2014 feature gets her happily ever after, the stepsisters eyes are pecked out by crows where they are left to wander as blind and disfigured.

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Uglies by Scott Westerfeld is a series of books that follows the life of 16 year old Tally Youngblood. The society that Tally lives in condones anything that's ugly. At 16, each member of the society goes through an intense series of surgeries to become a Pretty. These surgeries are done to abolish jealousy, envy, and individualism. Each person is made generally the same with large lips, round eyes, perfect skin, and a toned body. Anyone who is Ugly is simply born as they are with flaws and all. Tally is ready to go through the process but finds herself with a group of rogue Uglies who show her that life is more than just being Pretty. The abnormal applies here because the abnormal for the reader is the idea of getting so cut up for a society standard while the reality in the book is the fear of being Ugly. I think this is very grotesque because this is becoming a bit of a reality. The Uglies series looks at beauty as the only form of fame and accomplishment. This is seen today with reality TV stars like the Kardashian's who warp their bodies to a point that is not found in nature making them abnormal to the reality of the human figure.

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Marissa Osmundson

I used Maleficent in a precious post, but I think she is a great example of the grotesque body as well. She is a good example of the grotesque body becasu

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Ghouls in the Fallout universe offer up grotesque bodies and a chance to see how they are perceived in this fictional post-apocalyptic world. Fallout takes place 300 years after WW3 erupts and nuclear fallout destroys the globe in 2077. Ghouls are people who have been so irradiated that their skin is rough, ragged, and gone from parts of their face or bodies. Some ghouls are feral, so far gone and damaged by so much radiation that they no longer exhibit human traits. They make guttural cries, attack and run after you; some even have glowing body parts that emit green toxic radiation. Ghouls that are not feral are still humans. They can still talk, unlike the feral ghouls, but often have very gravelly voices. Some people in the Fallout universe show the ghouls a lot of prejudice because of their appearance, forcing some ghouls to form their own camps, villages, cities, etc of ghouls only. Otherwise, most other ghouls live among humans as they would normally, despite being disfigured from radiation. The upside to being this irradiated is that they can withstand lots of radiation. For gameplay this has its advantages in picking ghoul partners to fight alongside you, they can withstand the radiation.

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Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, I'm not sure why it didn't get very good reviews so I recently rewatched this movie. Now, I'm a fan of Tim Burton, Danny Elfman, and many of the actors as well as sci-fi in general, so I really enjoyed it! But I started wondering, is the physical grotesque "otherness" of the Apes what makes this such an effective and timelessly popular concept? People treat other people horribly every day: bullying, hate crimes, domestic violence, child abuse, rape, pedophilia, war, sex trafficking, child soldiers, the list goes on. No one is making and remaking popular horror movies about these actual horrors. Do we turn a blind eye because we are helpless and it's easy to ignore things that are not in one's immediate vicinity, affecting one personally? Is the grotesque aspect of this Planet of the Apes concept based on the enslavement of and brutality towards humans? Or is it because the species dominating the planet are apes with big, hairy, non-human therefore abnormal bodies? I suspect the latter. While still spooky, alien movies are just not as popular or effective when the aliens really look like us and do not have "grotesque/other" bodies. Sure there are a few pod people style movies but compared to the volume of grotesque bodied alien movies, there's almost no comparison.

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A pop-culture touchstone, a nearly all-purpose metaphor and one of the most beloved sci-fi franchises of the Seventies and beyond, the Planet of the Apes films do what all good what-if fantasies should do: hold up a mirror to humanity and reflect our own conflicts, issues and failings back to us through a wildly outrageous premise. The original 1968 movie mixes satire, social commentary, action and suspense, capped by a first-rate twist at the end. ("Damn you, damn you all to hell!")
'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes' and the Rest of Our 'Fierce' Summer-Film Preview
Subsequent sequels dealt with the arms race ( Beneath the Planet of the Apes), animal cruelty ( Escape from the Planet of the Apes) and race war ( Conquest of the Planet of the Apes), while the movies were innovative in other ways: they advanced the art of film make-up, became one of the first film series to tell a single complete story over several installments, and (for better or worse) changed the way in which film-related products and merchandise were marketed.

Above it all, however, they're great fun and, even at their weirdest, incredibly entertaining (well, maybe not Tim Burton's 2001 remake so much). The newly rebooted saga, which began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and continues this month with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, has captured the spirit and thrill of the original films. The history of the series is a colorful one, and in honor of Dawn's arrival, we've constructed a brief timeline of the Apes saga...with some key events from the movies' alternate future thrown in as well.

1965 - 1966: Serling's script goes through several drafts and makes significant alterations to the novel as Jacobs enlists Charlton Heston to star as the astronaut Thomas (later renamed Taylor). Despite having a star, a script and concept art, Jacobs gets shown the door at every studio he brings the project to.

March 1966: Jacobs convinces 20th Century Fox chief Richard Zanuck to let him do a screen test with Heston and Edward G. Robinson as Dr. Zaius to prove that the movie can work. Although the test is a success, Zanuck still says no - until September of that year, when the grosses of another sci-fi picture, Fantastic Voyage, convince him there's an audience for these kinds of movies.

February 1968: Planet of the Apes, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Heston, Roddy McDowall as Cornelius, Kim Hunter as Zira, Maurice Evans as Zaius and Linda Harrison as Nova, opens in theaters. It is a box office smash, earning $32 million (big bucks in those days), while also being acclaimed as one of the best films of the year.

Late 1968: 20th Century Fox requests a sequel to Planet of the Apes. Scripts by Rod Serling and Pierre Boulle himself are submitted - and discarded. Eventually Jacobs hires Goldfinger co-writer Paul Dehn to fashion a screenplay for what will eventually become Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

February 1969: Production begins on Beneath. Halfway through, Zanuck is fired as head of Fox and, perhaps thinking he'll take the studio's new franchise down with him, suggests to director Ted Post that the movie end with Heston blowing up the world. Heston is more than happy to go along with the idea; he does not want to be dragged back for another sequel.

May 1970: Beneath the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franciscus (as astronaut Brent), Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Gregory (in a role turned down by Orson Welles) and Heston is released; to everyone's surprise, it's also a huge hit. Critics are less enamored of its lunatic plot involving a war between the apes and telepathic human mutants that ends with Earth's destruction. Shortly after it opens, Paul Dehn gets a telegram that reads: "Apes exist. Sequel required."

May 1971: The third and most comedic of the original Apes movies, Escape from the Planet of the Apes has Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira (Kim Hunter) and Milo (Sal Mineo) salvage Taylor's ship and blast into space just as the Earth is destroyed at the end of Beneath, with the shock wave sending them back to our time. Cheaply made (only three actors in ape make-up) and shot in L.A., Escape does well enough at the box office - although not as well as the first two.

January 1972: Production begins on the fourth film in the series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. Shooting takes place in the newly constructed shopping and business complex Century City, a collection of high-rises built on the former Fox back lot that serve in the film as a city of the future.

February 1972: A spaceship containing a four-person crew led by Colonel George Taylor is launched into space. Mission control quickly loses all contact with it.

March 1972: A search-and-rescue spacecraft bearing two astronauts, including John Brent, takes off in pursuit of Taylor's ship - and similarly vanishes.

June 1972: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is released, directed by J. Lee Thompson ( The Guns of Navarone) and starring Roddy McDowall as Caesar, the intelligent offspring of Cornelius and Zira who survived his parents' murder in Escape. Now an adult in a totalitarian North America where apes are slaves, Caesar leads his people in a revolt against their human masters. Conquest is the only movie in the series to be rated PG (the rest were all rated G!), due to the film's violent scenes of rebellion - which were influenced by footage of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles.

April 1973: The spaceship originally piloted by Colonel Taylor returns, crashing in the ocean off the coast of Southern California. It bears three intelligent chimpanzees - Cornelius, Zira and Dr. Milo.

May 1973: A presidential commission, convened in secret, orders that Zira's pregnancy be terminated. She and Cornelius do not survive - but ironically, their baby does.

September 1974: A Planet of the Apes TV series starring - you guessed it - Roddy McDowall as a chimp named Galen and Ron Harper and James Naughton as astronauts Virdon and Burke, set 900 years before the first film, debuts on CBS-TV. It is no competition for the combined one-two punch of Sanford & Son and Chico and the Man in the same primetime slot at NBC, and lasts just 14 episodes.

February 1983: A virus brought back from space leads to the deaths of all cats and dogs on Earth.

July 1983: Distraught over the loss of their pets, humans begin adopting apes to replace them.

November 1984: A critical U.S election during a time of increased international tensions leads to a complete change in the American system of government, with the United States becoming a totalitarian state (we're not sure if this is totally fictional, actually).

1984 - 1991: Apes begin taking on domestic tasks - at first simple household chores, and then more complex manual-labor duties, eventually becoming slaves to homo sapiens.
Read Our 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' Film Review
July 1991: The child of Cornelius and Zira, now named Caesar, arrives in an unnamed city and, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up becoming the leader of an ape revolution.

January 1992: As the ape revolution spreads across the world, someone has the bright idea that nuclear weapons may stop it, so a worldwide nuclear war is launched. Caesar leads a group of humans and apes to safety in a rural area far outside the population centers.

Late 1995 - Mid-1998: The parade of directors and scripts continues as Fox keeps trying to relaunch the Apes franchise. Chris Columbus, James Cameron, Peter Jackson again, Michael Bay (ugh) and Roland Emmerich all take their turns at bat.

February 2000: Tim Burton is hired to direct the new version of Planet of the Apes.

July 2001: Burton's film, starring Mark Wahlberg as astronaut Leo Davidson and Tim Roth, Helena Bonham-Carter and Paul Giamatti as apes, opens in theaters. It grosses $362 million worldwide despite a silly, somewhat dull script that includes perhaps the most nonsensical ending in the entire franchise.

July 2016: The third entry in the new Apes series is scheduled to come out, with Reeves once again directing and Serkis playing Caesar for a third go-round.

61 Reasons to Love 2014
November 3954: Taylor's ship crash-lands into the sea. He and his surviving crewmates are captured by gorillas.

January 3955: Taylor is put on trial by the apes, but Cornelius and Zira help him escape. In the Forbidden Zone, he discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty and realizes he's been home the entire time. You maniacs! You blew it up!

February 3955: Astronaut Brent shows up and eventually discovers that Taylor has been taken prisoner by the telepathic mutants living underground in New York City. Mortally wounded in the ensuing battle between apes and mutants, Taylor basically says "fuck it" and presses the button that blows up the world, ensuring that no more Apes movies will be made. Little did he know....

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Human See, Human Do: A Complete History of 'Planet of the Apes'

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A pop-culture touchstone, a nearly all-purpose metaphor and one of the most beloved sci-fi franchises of the Seventies and beyond, the Planet of the Apes films do what all good what-if fantasies should do: hold up a mirror to humanity and reflect our own conflicts, issues and failings back to us through a wildly outrageous premise.

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All X-men can be described as having a grotesque body. As humans with supernatural abilities, the x-men have taken the human form and gone beyond the boarders of normalcy. My personal favorite of the x-men series, Angel, is a seemingly normal man, with giant white wings stemming from his back. The supernatural abilities that each character has sparks imagination within the viewers, forcing new perspectives on a standard world. Often times, the grotesque body paints a negative image; one that is scary or creepy. This series is an example of a grotesque body that creates a positive reaction. As a viewer it's easy to fall into the fantasy world that super hero's live in. Films like these help people to imagine the limits of the human body in a positive light.

Elyse M. Massone

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While reading Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, I couldn't help but be reminded of the circus season of American Horror Story -Freak Show. Every season of American Horror Story is packed with horrific, and images of the grotesque body. The season Freak Show, to me, was among the most grotesque of them all. Every character with a deformity of some sort; a man with lobster hands, a clown without a jaw, siamese twins, dwarfs, and a man with tiny arms that resemble chicken wings. The use of the grotesque body in this season frighten viewers, yet make it so they don't want to look away. Similar to Geek Love, the grotesque body causes greed and power between characters within this season of American Horror Story. We see normal people trying to use and even kill these circus freaks just because they see that their deformities can bring them closer to wealth. Overall, the use of the grotesque body makes a huge impact in literature, art, and movies, and allows for the message of the story to stick with you long after you've finished reading the book or watching the movie/show.
-Jamie Boone

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I wanted to find something that represented the abnormal and grotesque in a way that might help explicate Geek Love. This picture from Fallout III has no real meaning to me as I don’t play the game but I found it elicited the same response in me that the Binewsdi’s story did. I find it revolting, and its human features aggressively reinforce the feeling, similar to the pseudo-humanity found in the book.  The Binewski’s reflected the nuclear family in a horrific funhouse mirror kind of way. Through the distortion, you could see just enough humanity to strengthen and expound your shock and repugnance.
- T. Young

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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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Dorian Gray is a handsome young man that becomes corrupted and commits monstrous act that tear away his humanity. He had a portrait made by a friend, and every time that he acts in a sinful way the portrait deteriorates, reflecting his monstrous self while he remains forever young and beautiful. I think this is a good example of how internal monstrosity is also very important to reflect a personality. The portrait in the end becomes an unrecognizable version of the man, showing his true inner self.
-Diana Ramirez

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Face-off is a tv show that deals people competing with make-up and costume. Each episode they are given a certain theme that they have to turn human models into. One week it could be ocean creatures and the next week it could be desert. Either way they have to transform a model into something grotesque. The reason this made me think of grotesque body is because they have to transform a human body into a grotesque creature. These models still have human bodies and features but some parts of their bodies will be exaggerated or made to disgust people. This show is a really fun show to watch and I encourage anyone to watch it. If you like make-up, costumes, or just oddities this show is worth the watch.

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Riccio, an Italian sculptor, designed a sculpture of a satyr during the Renaissance period. This statue is an example of the grotesque body because it embodies both human and animalistic features (half human, half goat). For example, the horns and goat hooves are distinct in this bronze representation of the satyr (audience may be drawn to the grotesque elements first). It's interesting how several mythological creatures possess bestial and inhuman behavioral qualities as well. This goes  back to Bakhtin's article on how society, in general, finds creatures like satyrs to be repulsive. Their grotesque bodily elements provoke negative emotions of discomfort, fear, or horror in some cases. The satyr's physical abnormalities are perceived to be monstrous because it goes against the natural order of how humans should be (hybrids are unnatural beings).  Furthermore, satyrs in the medieval age represented lust and evil due to their undesirable qualities.
~Nivetha Murugan

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I found a few of Francesco Albano's sculptures when looking more into the concept of the grotesque body. He focuses on "the effect of societal pressures and psychological violence on the human body." His sculptures are both disturbing and fascinating and look almost boneless, as if the skin of the bodies was melting. These sculptures reminded me of Bakhtin's mention of the grotesque body being positive. Even though Francesco's sculptures are meant to evoke thought in regards to subjects that aren't necessarily positive, the use of the bodies brings about realizations that can be seen as positive. They aren't censored or made to look beautiful, and in turn, are relatable to everyone.
-Kaitlin Mulligan

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To me this image shows the grotesque body. Here we have fingers and toes that are all piled on top of each other. They are all coming out of this weird object. To me this represents the grotesque body because it is an abnormally of the human body. It is not usual that human toes and fingers are all piled on top of each other while coming out of some weird gross object. We see the grotesque body in many art sculptures just like this one and they have unrealistic images of the human body which is why this relates to the grotesque body.
-Danica Evans

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Ganon is the main villain of the video game series The Legend of Zelda by Nintendo. He takes on many different forms over the course of nineteen games. The main theme of games is always how Link will use the triforce-the ultimate power given to people by the gods-to destroy all of the evil in the world. Evil takes its main form through Ganon who appears as sometimes a man, but usually transforms into a beast. The game always ends with good triumphing over evil, but not before Ganon swears his anger and evil will come back again to destroy the land. Ganon in beast form is usually monstrously large and has horns, tusks, a tail, and pig features such as ears, hooves, or snout. Throughout the games, if Ganon himself does not appear, a sorcerer is usually trying to resurrect Ganon, and thus bringing about destruction once more. Ganon will always be monstrous to me because he is pure evil in that he always wants to destroy everything. He can transform with enough power from a man into his giant beast form, but in some games he can also call upon other smaller monsters to attack.

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Marissa Osmundson

The dementors in Harry Potter are the epitome of how I think of monsters. These are terrifying to me and sort of remind me of the monster in the documentary. The are these black shadows that steal your soul, which is essentially what people say the devil does, therefore these monsters are scary. These shadows represent something mysterious and something that the wizards at Hogwarts are afraid of and do their best to get rid of every time they appear throughout the series.

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Diana Ramirez

Medusa, created by the Italian architect and sculptor, Bernini is one of my favorites and demonstrates a good example of the representations of monsters. In this sculpture we see the head of a woman but what gives it the monstrosity is that she has living snakes instead of hair. It is this combination of human characteristics with animal forms that create this grotesque image, I think that having these two elements combined enhances the magnitude of the terror the monster can inflict since it is easier to identify with something that has this human like form.

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Another combination of monsters and viruses causing problems for humanity! Like many people, I am enthralled by the TV series "The Walking Dead." Similar to "The Host" this storyline has devoted a great deal of time and effort into character development. Unlike the host, this virus is real and has wiped out most of civilization. I was just theorizing the contrast of the remaining population from a random virus (genetic variable) versus the remaining virus from a zombie apocalypse scenario. The former would likely be a random mix of personalities with a tendency toward emotional/psychological resilience (i.e. they have not committed suicide even after a a massive extinction event). The latter would have needed to employ violence as means of survival, thus the survivors would be those who were more inclined toward or skilled at violence. The survivors of the zombie scenario would have a stronger inclination or even just a more permissive view of violence as both a tool and a solution. This is evidenced in various plot lines of "The Walking Dead." While the zombies are an ongoing threat, often the more insidious threat is other humans who would benefit by stealing another person's belongings or enslaving someone and forcing them into manual labor or worse. Again and again, the monstrous grotesque seems to illustrate that the monster is not just the hideous creature who appears outwardly abnormal, it is also our innate human tendencies and the horrific things we will do to enable our own survival and livelihood.

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Watch The Walking Dead Online | Stream New Full Episodes | AMC

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Watch The Walking Dead online. Stream the latest full episodes for free online with your TV provider.

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While watching this movie for the first time, my thoughts on who the monster was took a complete 180 by the end of the film. Initially, the viewer is led to think that the main character, John Goodman's, traps people in the bomb shelter against their will, convincing them that he is saving their lives from a widespread virus or air attack. Watching this, I was convinced that John Goodman was just a psychotic man, since he had violent outbursts, and it seemed that his story about what was going on up on the surface was a big lie. Even though John Goodman does turn out to be a "monster" in this, since he was kidnapping people and torturing them, we come to find out that there is an actual true monster lurking above the surface as well. As the main character escapes from Goodman's villainous bomb shelter, she soon realizes that the air on the surface is fine, but the city has indeed been under attack by aliens, and a giant worm type creature is after her. In this film, we are faced with two monsters, a physical and visual one (the alien), and a psychological and human monster (John Goodman).
-Jamie Boone

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10 Cloverfield Lane Official Trailer #1 (2016) -  Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman Movie HD

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This terrifying film tells a story of an alien found in a scientific research facility in Antartica. Capable of impersonating any character or creature, causing tension and mistrust between the characters. The creature inhabits these men one by one, until finally only a few are left. The scariest part of this monster is that the alien can inhabit a person without that person becoming aware, and then attack from the inside. Not only do people fear each other, they also fear themselves. This film highlights the intricacies of human nature through the use a monster. Most people already have mistrust of others in certain ways. This film intensifies that feeling, and makes it life threatening.

Elyse M. Massone

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Monsters Inc is a movie that many kids love to watch. It is about reversed roles of the monsters and humans. The monsters are afraid of the humans. I think adds an effect to the monsters because they are the main focus of the movie is the monsters and how when they scare the kids they get points. Its brings the kids to feel scared and feel like they have monsters in the closet because thats what the whole movie is about. Even though the monsters are animated they are still the main characters and have a monstrous effect on the viewers.
Danica Evans

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The movie Cloverfield is just like every other monster movie except for it's filmed a litter differently. This typical monster movie is filmed in first person. This movie is filmed in New York. A monster appears and starts raging. What most people don't realize about this monster is that this huge raging creature is actually a baby. The reason it's raging and causing havoc is because the monster is trying to find its mother. The main characters in this movie are all friends having a going away party for Rob who is taking a job in Tokyo. This movie has all the regular monster movie aspects with someone needing help and the group of friends having to go save them, to someone they cared about dying and so on. This movie is such a great monster movie. What makes it so unique is it being filmed in first person. Another thing that makes this monster movie a little different than the typical monster movie is that this monster has other little monsters that fall off of it and help create chaos. It could give you a headache because of how shaking it is, but it's definitely worth the watch.

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This picture from Claymore (by Norihiro Yagi) shows a Claymore fighting an awakened being. Claymore is an very popular manga and anime. In it, an organization creates a hybrid human and Yoma (monster.) The Yoma feed on humans and are powerful demonic beings. The hybrid Claymores or “Silver-eyed Witches” draw on that demonic power to defeat the Yoma. However, when they draw too much demonic energy they ‘awaken’ or become Yoma of extraordinary strength. The organization which created the Claymores lie and say that those who have awakened are simply very old Yoma. This lie hides the extreme downside of their human experiment. The theme of monsters and untrustworthy government seems to fit into our segment on The Host.
- T. Young

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When I first began reading Batman comics and watching Batman films, I didn't understand the Joker as anything other than a killer clown. Killer clowns are grotesque monsters on an easy to identify level: they combine the humorous and the horrifying, the makeup-as-mask hides the truth/or reveals it, they are a hybrid of human who delights in entertaining and killer who hides in shadows. It is as though the carnival has turned in on itself and become vicious.

It wasn't until later that I began to understand Joker as the bright shadow to Batman's shadowed light. Yes, the Joker is a killer clown, but Batman is a saving bat. They are both monsters, in their way. Joker's "mask" is his true face, that's why it's either a cosmetic, which is a thin veneer used to *enhance* the face, or in some iterations, his actual skin as a result of an accident (that like Jekyll and Hyde transformed him into his shadow Other). Batman's mask is an actual mask that makes a man into a part-animal, especially when combined with the rest of his gear that lets him do inhuman things.

A monster shows the line between human and inhuman, with the grotesque showing the evil/inner corruption of the being. That's Joker, to a T. The grotesque shows where the boundaries between human and the not-human blur. That's Batman (who is almost an embodiment of the Panopticon, incidentally) who has taken the human need for justice to the extreme. - Allie

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Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" is a tale as old as time about a prince who transforms into a hideous Beast. The only way to break the curse and return back to his human form is to learn to love and be loved in return. The Beast is viewed as a monster for his animalistic qualities. His grotesque body resembles a chimera with horns, a lion mane, tusks, and a body of a bear. Also, the Beast is a great example of a hybrid with both human and animal features. For instance, he's able to communicate and speak with Belle. Monsters from the medieval times represent alienation as the Beast is isolated from society. Gaston, out of ignorance, convinces the others that the monster must die because he's a threat to humans. The monster is therefore feared by all and that's why they attack the Prince's castle. This tale has always been one of my favorites because it's different from other fairy tales. The real monster in this story isn't the Beast. He's more human than Gaston and the rest of the villagers. This is why the audience is more likely to empathize with the Beast's situation of being alienated and misunderstood by everyone because of his physical grotesqueness. The Beast is willing to change and grow as a person, something real monsters are incapable of. His decision to risk his own life in order to save Belle shows his heroic nature. He learns the true meaning behind love and beauty in the world.
~Nivetha M.

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10 Cloverfield Lane is such an interesting movie because it hints at being a monster movie, without the "monsters" even making an appearance until about the last 10 minutes of the film. I think that the monsters or possibility of monsters in this movie absolutely embody fear of the unknown, as even the possibility of their existence dictates everything that the three characters in the bunker do. It isn't until the monstrous characteristics of the humans within the bunker become unbearable that the other characters even consider stepping outside.
The movie also focuses heavily on the ability to overcome the monstrous if working as a group. When one of the bunker mates is deemed dangerous, the other two work together to devise a plan to escape and survive outside of the bunker. The end of the movie also points to the importance of banding together, as the final survivor in the final scene is seen speeding off in the direction of a radio broadcast asking for help for survivors.
-Kaitlin Mulligan

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The Babadook is a psychological horror film that addresses the many stages of grief. Amelia Vanek is a widow who brings up her 6 year-old son (Sam) on her own. Her husband passed away on the drive to the hospital before she gives birth. One night, Sam asks her to read him a bedtime story and together, they read The Babadook. Suddenly, the Babadook begins to make appearances in their lives, first slowly, then suddenly. The more that the Babadook appears, the further we see Amelia sink into a state of psychosis. At the end of the film, we can interpret that the monster is really Amelia. The Babadook is the grief and depression that she buries within herself over the death of her husband.
-Paola Kuhn Berejuk

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-Marissa Osmundson

I have always watched Disney and Pixar films growing up and still to this day!  I have watched the oldest versions of all of the classic fairy tales to the newest ones like Finding Dory. As a young girl I was obsessed with Sleeping Beauty, so naturally I just had to see Maleficent a few years back since it gives somewhat of a back story on why Sleeping beauty fell under the curse of sleep. Maleficent is a fairy who gets her wings cut off by the prince who wants to follow the king. Maleficent then curses his first born daughter who is sleeping beauty.

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Growing up, I was a Disney fiend. I was infatuated with every princess, and every fairy tale...except for one. I was never that crazy about The Little Mermaid, it could have been because I really don't like the ocean, or maybe for a bigger reason. That reason being that I never responded well to Ariel. She always came off a little too rebellious and even ungrateful at times. She's naive and runs away for a Prince she has never met. But as soon as I read the Hans Christian Anderson version of the story, the message was much more powerful and made me like the fairy tale a lot more. Andersens version is about the mermaid's love for the Prince that is so strong, she literally gives up her life for him to be happy. She also goes through an extreme amount of torture to become close to him, and in the end he chooses someone else. Which to me, is heart-wrenching and grim, but somewhat of a beautiful story as well. Overall, I feel that since Anderson put so many grotesque and sad details into the story, that the moral of the story changed, making it more powerful and memorable.
-jamie boone

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Alice appears to be looking at her own reflection in water rather than a mirror, but below the water is the White Rabbit in Wonderland. I really enjoyed the idea that perhaps everything we see is just a reflection of who we are. Yet underneath our own reflective universe lies another one that is totally different. Which one is reality? Our own ideas and beliefs, like a shimmering stream of water, prevent us from seeing other beliefs and ideas. The grotesque makes us question what is real and what is normal, and even if it should be normal. This picture perfectly illustrates the illusory and changing perspective we have of reality and truth.
- T. Young

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I love fairy tales, as I child I devoured offerings from Disney, the Grimm's, Hans Christian Anderson, and more. Now as an adult, I'm fascinated by new tellings of old tales and especially the newly conceived stories. "The Huntsman: Winter's War" is a fascinating exploration of the going's on before and after the famous story Snow White. Pre-Snow, Maleficent lives in a castle, her sister Freya lives there too and only Maleficent has magic powers. Freya falls in love but he is betrothed to another, yet she is pregnant and hopeful he will honor his word to her. Jump forward, unbeknownst to Freya, Maleficent casts a spell that causes this man betray Freya, lure her outside and then kill the baby while it sleeps in the nursery. Reacting in horror, outrage, and grief, Freya releases her own magic which is to freeze things. She then leaves Maleficent's castle and travels north to build her own kingdom. Key to this kingdom are her child armies. She kidnaps all the children in the land and turns them into soldiers, they never see their families again. Her entire kingdom is based on child abduction and abuse! The central plot of the film revolves around the normalization of child abuse, seriously grotesque. Considering that in our modern world, actual children are still being abducted and forced into armies or prostituion or slave labor, it's not surprising this movie got poor reviews even though it was quite a good movie. Perhaps, subconsciously or consciously, the critics just couldn't bring themselves to support violence against children. This gave me the idea to look at child abuse in the context of fairy tales and in particular, "Hansel and Gretel" and a Scottish variation, "Mollly Whuppie."

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The Huntsman: Winter's War - Trailer 3 (HD)

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The Huntsman: Winter's War In Theaters - April 22, 2016 http://www.thehuntsmanmovie.com Discover the story that came before Snow White in The Huntsman: Winter's War. Chris Hemsworth and Oscar® winner Charlize Theron return to their roles from Snow White and the Huntsman, joined by Emily Blunt and Jessica Chastain.

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I have always been a huge fan of fairytales and really enjoy reading several versions of a same one. There was one that really caught my attention, a version of Snow White by Angela Carter. It is a very short fairy tale, abrupt and crude which I think is what makes it so grotesque. I think there is a lot of meaning behind it even though it does go straight to the point. For example, Snow White dies in this version when she is pricked by a rose and Carter describes it in very few words, however it is the choice of words that leave you puzzled into wondering what she actually meant by what she wrote.
-Diana Ramirez

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In the movie The Lion King we see grotesque in many forms. First off, Scar Face choses to kill his brother Mufasa who is the king of the land. We find this grotesque in this fairy tale because it is a very sad scene when the brother kills him and we have to see Simba watch his dad die and continue life without him. We find it grotesque when the hyenas torture the bird and  try to kill Simba and Nala for coming to their land. When children watch this movie they think that it is sad when Scar Face kills his brother and they they find it disturbing when Simba has to go off and life on his own because he is sad about his dad dying.
-Danica Evans

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"The Frog Prince," or otherwise known as The Princess and the Frog, is the story of a Prince who is rude to a witch and is turned into a frog. In order for him to become human again, a princess must grant him one wish. After being tricked by a princess, he is finally granted his wish, and in the end they end up happily together. So we've heard.
In 2009, Disney produced The Princess and the Frog (originally a Grimm fairytale). Not to my surprise, the original had a much less romantic ending. In Disney's version, we witness the frog become a Prince when the Princess lays upon him a kiss. In the Grimm story, however, the Princess was so upset at the frog that she threw him against the wall and hence he became a prince. How's that for romance?
-Paola Berejuk

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The Wolf Among Us is a video game by Telltale Games based on the comic book series Fables.  The game is episodic, meaning it was released and is played in parts, or episodes. I haven't read the comic series myself, but I know that the game is a canon prequel to it. You play as Bigby Wolf, the sheriff of Fabletown. The world of Fables is comprised of characters made up of classic fairy tales. The Wolf Among Us features the characters the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, The Woodsman (Red Riding Hood), Mr. Toad, and Ichabod Crane to name some of the main characters. The gameplay is an interactive adventure game style where you make dialogue choices, explore small areas for items, and quick time events which make up the action or combat portions. Gameplay and graphic aesthetics lend itself well to adapting the original comic into this game form.  Fabletown, which is a neighborhood in New York City, was created when the Fables moved from their original homeland, i.e where they were created through myths, legends, and stories. All of the Fables fled the homeland and were forced to hide within New York. As you play the game, you uncover how all of the Fables struggle to get by in the city; the story melds together the authentic fairy tale with new twists. Magical animals such as Mr. Toad and the three pigs have to wear "glamours" which transform them and hide them so they don't appear to be talking animals in front of humans. Glamours are enchantments and are expensive meaning some Fable animals must live in hiding or secret. Bigby, who was the Big Bad Wolf in the homeland, is now a sheriff in Fabletown and the game follows him trying to solve a murder mystery. The game is worth checking out if you like fairy tales being modernized. I've talked a lot in discussion about how some tropes or ideas are really cliche to me, but the story, focus, and characters they use in this game don't feel as cliche as some of the typical ideas when fairy tales are given a modern twist usually.

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From the makers of the 2012 Game of the Year: The Walking Dead, comes a gritty, violent and mature thriller based on the award-winning Fables comic books (DC Comics/Vertigo). As Bigby Wolf - THE big bad wolf - you will discover that a brutal, bloody murder is just a taste of things to come in a game series where your every decision can have enormous consequences.

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This classic fairy tale tells a story of a race between and quiet and humble tortoise and a cocky hare. Of course, this story ends with the tortoise winning the race, showing that a humble and hard working person will surpass a cocky talented person with no work ethic.

The German version of the fairy tale employs more adult components, and uses a hedgehog in place of a tortoise. The two are competing for a bottle of liquor and a gold coin. The hedgehog in this story is not a humble and hard working character, but a liar and a cheater. He uses his wife to wait at the finish line (dressed like him) while he stands at the start - to cheat his way to a win every time. The Hare knows something is wrong, but not what, and calls for a re-run 73 times (losing to the trick each time). Finally on the 74th round, the Hare pops a blood vessel and bleeds profusely on the race track (as a result of his alcoholism). Moral of this story: it pays to be lying and cheating when you outsmart a more talented alcoholic.

Elyse M. Massone

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The Little Mermaid is a classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that had a number of grotesque elements even before Disney's animated version came to dominate our collective imagination. In the Disney version, although the little mermaid, Ariel, is a fusion of fish and woman and therefore traditionally grotesque, she is so perfect and plastic in all other respects (pretty flowing hair, tidy Cupid's bow mouth that produces beautiful songs, etc.) that she's far more anti-grotesque. Especially when she's given legs.

Ursula, on the other hand, is the epitome of the grotesque female body. First, it is an "undisciplined" body: she is overweight, bulging everywhere; instead of a neat, cute fishtail, she has black octopus tentacles; her skin is a pale lavender-grey that is closer to the color of death than life; her mouth is too large and open enough so we can see her tongue. Her voice is raspy, her hair is short, her eyes have blue-purple shadow, and as shown here, she appears to be grasping/groping Ariel. Add to that the fact that Ursula is inspired legendary drag queen Divine, the message seems to be that fat, gay, cross-dressing are both grotesque and wicked.

An alternate reading, one that I prefer, is of Ursula as a hero/ine. Despite the harm she does to Ariel, she does tell her a socially important truth in their world (and ours): you can have a voice or you can have sexy legs and a vagina. To me, the grotesque highlights a critique of patriarchal society. It also highlights the way that Ursula and Ariel are two sides of the same coin. They both want self-determination, the chance to be more than the roles allotted to them. Yes, Ursula is the villainness, but given the contrasts and the way they're developed, it's easy to see how Ariel--oppressed and restricted, given only so much freedom as her father wants her to have--could become an Ursula-figure as she ages. - Allie Schreibman

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Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart--Theresa Ortega

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Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart--Theresa Ortega

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I'm not really sure if this movie is a fairytale or not or maybe it is just a very uncommon one. This movie is about a boy who is born with a heart covered in ice due to his mom walking in ridiculous condition with an infant. His mom drops him off at this ladies house who repairs animal's and people but with odd objects. She repairs Jack with a cuckoo-clock where his heart should be. His mom leaves and says he is better off with someone who knows how to take of him. When Jack gets older and is able to think for himself, he isn't allowed to do certain things because if his clock works to hard he could die. He is finally able to go outside when he's ten and falls in love with a beautiful singer named Miss Acacia. His life starts to crumble after he finds his true love again after she disappeared and he lost her. This movie could be considered grotesque all around just because of how odd it is. The fact that this lady is able to repair people with household items is grotesque. Also what could be grotesque in this movie is how Jack is treated for having a heart not like all the other kids. This movie is just an odd movie but it is definitely worth the watch. I really enjoyed this movie. I haven't seen a lot of fairytales but this one is worth staying awake for.

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In Disney's 1959 tale of Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent made a lasting impression as one of the most notorious villains of all time. Maleficent, an evil fairy, manifests the grotesque and dark nature of many fairy tale villains today. Children perceive Maleficent's character as pure evil when she places a deathly curse on Princess Aurora as a child. Her grotesque behavior and evil characteristics are purposely exaggerated in this film and other fairy tale versions to create a distinct line between good and evil. Moreover, children are traumatized by her physical appearance (her fairy horns, black wings etc.), especially when she transforms into a giant dragon in the climax scene. However, in the modern story of Maleficent played by Angeline Jolie, her true character is revealed. She's not the anti-hero in the story; Maleficent, in fact, is the victim of King Stefan's betrayal when he strips her of her wings. He betrays her trust and makes her lose hope in love and humanity. But, heroes are strong willed and eventually conquer the world's evils. She's able to love again and grows fond of Aurora's pure heart (her motherly instincts take over and she saves her from the curse). Having complex characters that are flawed and not described as all good or all bad in stories makes the tale more relatable to us. Maleficent is no longer described as the evil witch; she' s a kind hearted fairy who's deeply misunderstood by others in prior retellings of the story. It's really interesting to see how the audience empathizes with Maleficent when they learn about her dark past.
~Nivetha M.

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After reading "Yellow Wallpaper" and "Queer," I wanted to bring in other instances of self perception and the abnormal. Van Gogh long struggled with his own ideas of self, and had a lot of mental turmoil throughout his life, to the point that he had cut off his own ear. I wanted to share his self portrait with bandaged ear because it was done shortly after he had his fit, yet his style and expression are just like all of his other self portraits. The way in which he viewed himself didn't always reflect what others might assume following something as "abnormal" as cutting off your own ear.
-Kaitlin Mulligan

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The Bell Jar written by Sylvia Plath is a book that would definitely fit in with abnormal grotesque. This book is about Esther Greenwood who wants to be poet. She deals with a lot of stuff happening in her life like her father dying. Later you find out that Esther is a mental patient. She has something wrong with her, which is where the abnormal of this book kicks in. Esther deals manic-depression which is where you get depressed for huge amounts of time. This depression then leads to her death. All in all this book depicts her life and all the issues she has to deal with. All her abnormalities she has going on all because she has manic-depression going on.

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Something about Stravinsky's music evokes a feeling of strangeness or social isolation. Perhaps it is the unusual instrumentation or the odd combinations of rhythms and sparse melodies. Originally, when he debuted Rite of Spring, the concert hall erupted into a riot because the music was so grotesque unlike any music the audience and ever heard in the past. Certainly music has the ability to be soothing, inspirational, romantic, uplifting, or in this case odd and unsettling. While not all of his works lean into aspects of the grotesque, The Rite of Spring is an especially interesting piece with moments of ineffable beauty interweaved with strange, surreal melodies and instrumentation that summon a range of feelings and the certainty that this music is not normal.

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Stravinsky's - The Rite of Spring (BBC Proms 2013 - François-Xavier Roth conductors)

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Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring François-Xavier Roth Les Siècles Host: Tom Service François-Xavier Roth directs Les Siècles in the first period-instrument performance at the BBC Proms of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, marking the work's centenary.

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Frida Kahlo is known for her peculiar way of portraying intense emotions in her paintings. Much of her artwork refers to her struggles after she suffered a terrible accident, she is very crude in the way that she shows how broken she felt both from the body and the soul . In this particular painting, The Broken Column, she shows the scars of her spinal surgery and it is easy to see the pain and how foreign her body must have felt to herself. It is clear to see that she felt alone, this can be observed in how she painted herself in a deserted landscape. Her expression is emotionless yet there are tears running down her face. I think that her painting are able to convey the pain and suffering that she was undergoing, making the audience feel a wide array of emotions.

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This week I happened upon this piece, entitled "Choir" which is really unsettling. The artist is Server Demirtas and you can find more of his work here: http://www.serverdemirtas.com/en/.Demirtas has other kinetic works similar to this that are made up of only eyes or robot bodies. He was born in Istanbul and studied art at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul.  I think it fits into starting discussions about the abnormal and the grotesque, particularly if we bring in robots, technology, and the uncanny. Technology, robots, and AI can be uncanny and I certainly feel it here. The imitation of human movement yet somehow disconnected from reality oozes from this: the oversized features, the lack of eyes or other identifying attributes, the strange noises they make, the way they turn, the sickly pale and lumpy skin. As tech and time moves forward, I think we will find ourselves facing more and more of the abnormalities within humans and be forced to stare them in the face and accept them as we build and create technology and art that tries to recreate what being human is.

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These Disembodied Robot Mouths Licking One Another Will Make You Feel Very Uncomfortable

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These Disembodied Robot Mouths Licking One Another Will Make You Feel Very Uncomfortable

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In the movie The Boy we see abnormal grotesque taking place. This couple think it is normal to treat a doll like it is their son. They have a list of what the nanny should do to the doll and when the nanny doesn't do the correct things, the doll comes to haunt her. We need abnormal grotesque because the doll is not a real person and the doll soon comes to life and creates the grotesque feel when watching the movie.
-Danica Evans

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When I saw this print from 1909, I thought it perfectly illustrated the way the writer in “The Book of the Grotesque” evolved his theory of truth. “It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.” (3) Some of the people collected more than one truth according to their strength. I fancied that this women got so caught up in embracing her truths that they began to possess her and slowly she is overtaken by them until her existence becomes a falsehood and there is nothing left except a cocoon of threads that had once been truths; or, alternative facts, whichever you prefer.
- T. Young

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Thorn Bush Entangling Grotesque Woman Torturous 1909 old vintage color print

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The movie a clockwork orange explores a new new method of rehabilitation to sub out more the more traditional jail or prison systems. The main character, Alex DeLarge, a psychopathic delinquent, is caught and jailed for his violent crimes. Instead of serving his full sentence, Alex volunteers for an experimental aversion therapy. Of course, if all went to plan there would be no plot, and the movie delves into a series of strange events all spurring from the bizarre nature of this mental hospital. I found this movie to be grotesque because it takes a very typical/"normal" situation and explores different events that turn it into the surreal.

Elyse M. Massone

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Although it dates me (and it's considerably older than I am), the words "abnormal" and "grotesque" taken together immediately call to mind Phillip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, the story of mother-obsessed and sex-addicted (or mother-addicted and sex-obsessed) Alexander Portnoy and his crass, coarse, base revelations of his "unacceptable" (Avishai) thoughts, the really "stinky unacceptable" thoughts. That is to say that not only are Alex's thoughts on the wrong side of the normal/abnormal divide, but they're not even decently abnormal, or titillatingly subversive (in a way that's become acceptable). They're way over the line. The author of the article I've linked to suggests that exaggeration is a function of both satire and psychoanalysis, but Roth himself refers to Alex's "grotesque" conception of his life.

Portnoy's Complaint resembles the silly grotesque marginalia in medieval manuscripts that often focuses on the anus, or Tim Burton's work and its consistent engagement with death. It isn't grotesque because it's about sex and sexuality in lurid detail. It's grotesque because its both humorous and horrifying, because it suggests that Alex is at once an abnormal psyche but also somehow emblematic of an age, because it blurs the line between the private confessional space of psychoanalysis and the public exposure of a memoir. It could have been nothing more than a catalog of pornographic confessions, but the story endures because it is shocking, funny, shaming, representative, and as Avishai points out, refuses to present an opposing view of normalcy. Reading it, one always senses that there is something more here, something just beyond the reach of intellect that both appeals and repels. - Allie S.

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The Chronicle Review

Chronicle illustration by Scott Seymour

Most people I have asked remember where they were when they read Portnoy's Complaint, something like when President Kennedy Was Shot-a more cheerful memory, needless to say, but one that sticks for much the same reason. Reading Philip Roth's yellow-clad book felt like the end of innocence, which (for boomers, curiously) had a way of ending again and again. Or was it that we felt unexpectedly discovered?

Who in the history of the world has been least able to deal with a woman's tears? My father. I am second. He says to me, "You heard your mother. Don't eat French fries with Melvin Weiner after school." "Or ever," she pleads.

"Or ever," my father says.

"Or hamburgers out," she pleads.

"Or hamburgers out," he says.

" Hamburgers," she says bitterly, just as she might say Hitler, "where they can put anything in the world in that they want-and he eats them. Jack, make him promise, before he gives himself a terrible tsura, and it's too late."

"I promise!" I scream. "I promise!" and race from the kitchen-to where? Where else.

I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. "Now this time don't flush. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what's in that bowl!" Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wing was all I really had that I could call my own ...

The first I heard of the book, a friend from McGill University immediately began reading me long passages on the phone. I knew students who sat around in coffee shops, student unions, and Hillel houses reading the entire book out loud to one another, a kind of spontaneous, burlesque Bloomsday. A lawyer friend in Boston wrote: "One reason I married Joni was because when she and I first met, we coincidentally were both reading Portnoy's Complaint, found it uproarious, and I knew we were right for each other."

Yet Roth found-how does Joseph Conrad put it?-"the terms of his appeal" not only among people now over 60, and not only among American Jews. By 1975, six years after the book's publication, Portnoy's Complaint had sold nearly half a million copies in hardback in the United States, three and a half million in paperback. The novel was translated into virtually every language in which you did not have to explain the term "neurotic," including Finnish, Hungarian, and Japanese. American librarians still consistently list Portnoy's Complaint among the 20th century's top 100. Search it on Google and you get well over 265,000 hits.

We remember Alex Portnoy impaling with pitiless thrusts invasive mothers, plugged-up fathers, dizzying women in heat. We remember, with sympathetic relief, Portnoy's letting go with an utter version of himself, the way we could only imagine someone erupting on the analyst's couch, as if back then we could really imagine, let alone afford, the analyst's couch. Portnoy spoke of pleasuring himself hungrily, though pleasure hardly seemed the word for it. Let's get this out of the way: You still can get intelligent, graying people to laugh out loud simply by coupling "Alex" with "liver."

For the brothers among us, who did not share Portnoy's belief that standing under a fly ball, knowing you would make the catch, could turn center field into a delusionary metaphor for "life"? As for sisters, who was not thrilled to find confirmation of the sheer power of panties? (Then again, I recently visited a Midwestern campus where I was instructed by a young professor of women's studies that Portnoy's lust-actually, "Roth's misogyny"-is now studied only with the precautions one takes examining any other biological hazard.)

And Portnoy took on-or, more accurately, refused to let off-his American Jewish family. This was immediately assumed to mean Jews in general, which in 1969 seemed especially brazen. It was only 27 years after 1942 and 21 years after 1948. American Jews thought they had earned a kind of moral intermission that Portnoy seemed not to be respecting. It was also just two years after the 1967 war, which had made Diaspora Jews and organized American Zionists inarguably (now, unimaginably) cool. Portnoy's tribal wordplay suggested, prophetically, that if Jews had power and bodies, that only meant they'd be struggling with the world-historical sinfulness they had customarily projected onto Gentiles. You put the id back in Yid, Portnoy instructed, and you come to understand the "oy" in goy.

Portnoy, in other words, spoke so frankly about our arousing parts and sly transgressions-things even Leopold and Molly Bloom mostly insinuated-that it was hard not to feel a kind of shameless release. An elderly Irishman, a retired professor of history, told me recently, "I could not believe what I was reading when I read Portnoy's Complaint. I never thought that I could see such things become literature." We recall Portnoy avidly moving from one exhausted insight to the next, one exhausted fantasy to the next, punch line to punch line, nipple to nipple-brilliant, aggrieved, promiscuous.

Still, the effect that endures from the art has been something of a blur. People remember in flashes characters and vignettes. But few can remember the book's architecture or identify any big ideas. Trying to remember the plot is like trying to remember the composition of a Jackson Pollock canvas. The book doesn't really have a hero, so how to account for its champions? Irving Howe wrote back in 1972 that "the cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice."

But why would anyone have needed to read it twice? For most of us, the moment of reading was what was valuable, then and since, and not simply in the nostalgic sense. "I don't remember much except that Portnoy was funny and bad and vigorous, and that seemed a comfort," a cousin wrote me. That's pretty much how most of us felt. (Howe would eventually change his mind about Portnoy's Complaint, by the way. He told me some years later, in the code of the New York intellectuals, that he had underestimated Roth's "great talent for dialogue.")

This is all puzzling. How could the experience of reading a book evoke such vivid appreciation and leave such a fuzzy imprint? Conrad supposed that great art necessarily grows "less distinct" over the years. Yet Heart of Darkness had, as they say, a takeaway. What was the takeaway from Portnoy's Complaint? Did it have an implication that explains, at least in part, why it traveled through generations of readers? Anyway, the challenge for anyone trying to celebrate the book is to get at what makes it increasingly distinct as we age along with it. The clock is ticking on Roth and on his original readers. If we consider why Portnoy's Complaint has endured in its way, we might well learn something interesting about Roth, ourselves, the uses of fiction, and the country that's made room for us since its publication.

*

Roth has had time and reason to reflect on these questions himself. He was for most of his career a teacher of literature, and the reception of the book fascinated him as a critic, even as it changed his life. It became a subject to work on in later novels, My Life as a Man, Zuckerman Unbound, The Ghost Writer, and others. He and I have spoken many times, in little exchanges, about Portnoy's Complaint since we first got to know each other back in 1974-particularly since the early 1980s, as talk deepened into banter and teasing and friendly counsel. Portnoy's insatiable, lampooning voice has never been very far beneath the surface of our talk; any moment of gloom would be helpless against its timing. ( Bernard! What are you doing in there!)

Perhaps the most considered statement Roth made about his book was in teaching notes he prepared for a class on his work at Bard College, in the fall of 1999. They begin as follows:

A polemic mood.

One is under no constraints with satire.

The grotesque conception of his life and the lives around him is what is being dramatized.

Flies in the face of the normalizing passion.

Caricature? Of course. He holds a grotesque conception of his life and this creates the coarseness of the realism. To criticize R. for not being "balanced" is like criticizing Molière for not being "fair."

Lets the grotesque into the satiric conception of a Jewish family, the son included. The greatest object of the satire is the narrating Portnoy!

Two things jump out, and they seem of a piece. The first is Roth's depiction of Portnoy's narrative-his character's grasp of his recounted life-as "grotesque." This implies a skepticism about Portnoy, and a seriousness of purpose in his creator, that one might not have supposed, given how clever Portnoy seems and how hard he's made us laugh.

Didn't "the narrating Portnoy" simply take the author's own voice to a new level of astringency and allow him to say things with "no constraints"? No, it did not. A novel in the form of a confession is, for God's sake, not a confession in the form of a novel. Roth has stressed the distinction virtually from the time of the publication of Portnoy's Complaint and still felt the need to instruct his Bard students (most of them probably clueless about why he was bothering to tell them this at all) that the author's "balance" was not the point when he invented Portnoy, no more than Molière's "fairness."

"I was trying to break from my literary conscience," Roth continues in his notes, "as it has been constructed by my reading, my teachers, even my fears. The background I was overthrowing was literary." He was determined to "let the repellent in":

Masturbation, which seems to have made the book famous, was the least of it. It was the aggressive rage, the ingratitude, the hatred that was the most shameful secret.

The notes continue:

One is not here as a writer, or as an artist of any kind, to be loved. This is hard to accept, even for a writer. But that's the sad truth.

I had published three responsible books. Responsible to what? Was not looking for my catharsis as patient, a neurotic, a son. Looking, as one perpetually looks, for my freedom as a writer.

Portnoy was a concoction, you see, a way of exploring the Drang before the Sturm in a young man's life. Portnoy's lewdness, rage, ingratitude, etc., were just a small part of what was wrong with him. Nor, Roth supposed, was making all of this seem natural going to win the author many friends. Portnoy was going to be "the man who is the repository of every socially unacceptable thought," all the more unacceptable for lacking dignity: "They're not even dignified complaints," the notes go on; "They aren't the dignified unacceptable thoughts. They are really the stinky unacceptable thoughts."

Which brings me to the second thing that jumps out from Roth's class notes, the phrase "flies in face of the normalizing passion." Roth does not write "flies in face of the normal," which you'd expect from a satire; satirists usually amuse readers by assuming a desired moral principle, a norm, that's so obviously at odds with some social convention or human foible that satire can ridicule-through humor, irony, and so on-people who fall short. OK, the impulse to conform can itself be amusing. (The hero in Monty Python's Life of Brian, suddenly presumed the messiah, tries to disown his adoring followers: "You are all individuals!" he shouts-to which the crowd answers as one, "Yes, we are all individuals!" One solitary voice pipes up: " I'm not!") But the urge to normalize cannot mean only this fretful kind of conformism. Every satire, like every sentence in a way, is a tribute to the presumption that words aim to set standards-the good to which all things aim, as Aristotle famously put it. I don't mean to get too pedantic here, but "the normalizing passion" suggests an ethical, not just a psychological, impulse. Satirists from Jonathan Swift to George Carlin implicitly projected a new normal. If they did not, how could they shame public figures, or readers, for that matter, into improvement?

But Roth seems to be signaling something intriguing, if not unique, about the book's hero: a voice that gives us no clue to the normal, because it can never seem to impeach other voices without impeaching its own as well. ("'I haven't gained five pounds,' she says, 'since you were born. Feel,' she says, and holds my stiff fingers against the swell of her hips, which aren't bad ... ")

The book, Roth goes on, is distinctive for its apparent "improvisational chaos," which mirrors Portnoy's mania, his unwillingness to be "constrained by his moral conscience": "One is not here as a writer, or as an artist of any kind, to be loved."

Yet for all of Roth's protestations, I bet most of those Bard students, like countless readers before them, have loved Roth for this book. They could not assume that Portnoy's story was simply grotesque. They could not assume that Portnoy's voice was, first and foremost, self-satirizing. Portnoy remained adorable somehow, the consummate stand-up comic, his parents and lovers the justified targets of his petulance, the character through which Roth liberated his voice and his spirit. It has been hard to see Roth's protagonist as a mere literary device. It still is-harder than ever, maybe. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

*

Let me not beat around the bush. Sure, Roth's great book gave "the narrating Portnoy" scope to rail against what was comic, even grotesque, in families-Jewish families, WASP families, immigrant families. We laughed and mocked and blushed. And the sex-ah, the talk of sex-was right there, first alone in the bathroom, then with Portnoy's immortal dreamboat, the Monkey (" Did I eat!"), and finally, in a wave of impotence, in a Tel Aviv hotel.

The writer Nelson Aldrich remembers the "refreshing relief" of being able to think about masturbation especially as a form of cultural insurgency. And Portnoy's Complaint had other firsts, at least for my generation: riffs on pompous clergy, too-righteous-by-half liberals, too-smug-by-three-quarters Israelis. None of these explain the book's iconic status as the 60s' most iconoclastic work.

Rather, Portnoy's Complaint also gave readers the sound of a psychoanalytic room, yet there was no way to judge or sympathize with what we were hearing-no vantage point, no moral pivot, nothing but an eavesdropping on analysand and analyst, both of whom seemed verging on parody. Roth presumed an audience familiar with the rhythms of the psychoanalytic project, or half-mischievously half-presumed it. The rhetorical gambit is what made satire of "the normalizing passion" even conceivable.

Roth picks up this point himself in the teaching notes:

Psychoanalysis provided the vessel for everything. In psychoanal. nothing is too petty, nothing is too grand. The place where you're allowed to say anything. Allows for hatred, aggression, pettiness; nothing censored. If that's the bargain, that's the bargain. Coarse realism. Any type of exaggeration is permissible. It takes the liberties for you.

Roth was determined (so he adds) to take Freud's dark wisdom "as seriously as possible"-to see family relations as dramatic, not only as primary experience, but because they were set off against the backdrop of Freud's mythic theories of evolving personality. Constraints were necessarily gone, not only because satire invited it, but therapy demanded it. So Portnoy's madness seemed true without purporting to make the book's readers sane.

Harold Bloom writes that Portnoy's Complaint left readers pulling for a character whose ambition and self-subversion could never be told apart; that Roth forced us to feel ourselves in a state of anxious futility with Portnoy, like the proverbial Jew who is told: "Sleep faster, we need the pillows."

And the Jewish home was just the right place to find such a character, a place where the superego had gained a 5,000-year head start. This hardly made Roth a Jewish writer. It made Jews useful to an American satirist on the way to becoming a tragedian. ("Jews are members of the human race," Roth penned onto his typed notes; "worse than that I cannot say about them.") Portnoy's push into America was archetypal: relentless, carnal, and doomed. Every journey of ambition was bound to blow up in its own fuel. The synagogue bulletin suggested, too, stories worthy of Sherwood Anderson; a few weeks with the Monkey could leave even a lascivious Jew as restless as Gatsby himself.

One might conclude that the hero of the novel must then be the forbearing Dr. Spielvogel. Certainly it was hard to hear all the kvetching and not sense what Spielvogel must have been thinking, that freedom was not the complaint (or not the only one), that narcissism could become what Christopher Lasch would call "a culture." Alas, the enigma of Portnoy's Complaint is bigger yet. For the novel leaves us with the lingering suspicion that the analyst, too, was a little too prone to extreme inventions; that he represented an orthodoxy that thought it had an explanation for everything, from pleasure to process-that psychoanalysis took "liberties" for Spielvogel, too.

Not coincidentally-so Roth finished his class-every normalizing passion had a way of turning orthodox and thus quite possibly vicious. The key moment in the book, he said, is when Uncle Hymie beats up Cousin Heshie just for entertaining the idea of marrying a shiksa-a show of brutality in the most conventional sense:

The truly repellent, but not on the Dost. scale. Not murder. Not Genet-not theft and sodomy. No, the truly repellent at the local domestic level. That which is brutal and is everywhere.

That which is brutal and is everywhere. Did Portnoy's Complaint, in shaming such brutality, wind up defending the biggest norm of them all, or at least the most Yankee: that we must question everything, taking our liberties where we cannot justify denying them? Is the narrating Portnoy America's classical fool, his vulgarity bringing us to our senses?

*

I confess, as if we need more confessions, that I undertake this writing feeling a bit of a fool myself. You have to be as fresh, or vain, as Portnoy to think you could write about Portnoy's Complaint. Readers like disquisitions on books about as much as they like a cousin's snapshots of Prague.

And they have been on particularly intimate terms with this book. Portnoy's Complaint is about everything that matters, which is to say everything that hurts. You want rapture? There is rapture. You want meaning? Portnoy is a sucker for rapture as meaning, though his most solid experience of it is a hard-on with a farcically short half-life. The book is ostensibly about Portnoy's perverse desire in particular. But once it has done its work, what more is there to say about desire in general? Portnoy's Complaint evokes our most daunting time of life. Dickens lives on because he speaks to the bullied, ambitious child in us. Salinger speaks to a teenager's rejection of phonies. Roth, in contrast, speaks to and through the nervous young person who lives on in us more resiliently; speaks to that hyper-precious moment when the child goes into eclipse, the teen having long before been launched, and adult pleasures (bodies, risk, power) and their surprising allies (dissembling, aggression, moral equivocation) present themselves.

What is to be made of a satire whose target slides under our hands-from family and lover, to analysand, to analyst-and so seems to keep us sliding on? "A wonderful fact to reflect upon," Dickens writes, famously, in A Tale of Two Cities, "that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other." Portnoy's Complaint shows us as few books have how we rely on our capacity to invent fictions about one another to establish our singularity and strive against its loneliness.

Roth told the PBS interviewer Jeffrey Brown in 2004 that the only cause he was ever "advancing" was the cause of literature-"one of the great lost human causes," which America may not be bothering with in the foreseeable future. You "do your bit for fiction," which "doesn't get you any less stupid as you age."

There is a kind of faith here, in "doing your bit," though I am not revealing anything not obvious when I say Roth's attitude toward religious sentimentality is not kind. "Redemption? Isn't that when you bring Green Stamps to the supermarket?," he once mocked me.

Still, Portnoy reveals a mysterious courage in his complaining, and Roth knows it. Portnoy's mix of disappointment, ambition, rage, and recalcitrant desire has "repetition compulsion" written all over it, yet he keeps going. For our part-the readers of Portnoy's Complaint -we read with a courage of our own. We want, and want! and WANT, things to be different for us.

Bernard Avishai is an adjunct professor of business at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College. This essay is adapted from his most recent book, Promiscuous: "Portnoy's Complaint" and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, published last month by Yale University Press.

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The Chronicle Review Most people I have asked remember where they were when they read Portnoy's Complaint, something like when President Kennedy Was Shot-a more cheerful memory, needless to say, but one that sticks for much the same reason.

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Stranger Things, a Netflix original drama series, is the new obsessive show to binge watch this year. The show's riveting plot line, use of humor, and amazing cast makes this a classic story set in the 1980s about a 12 year old boy, Will, who goes missing. The plot incorporates several elements of the abnormal such as alternate dimensions, supernatural powers, and grotesque faceless monsters that live in the Upside Down. Eleven uses her psychokinetic powers to escape the government lab and helps her friends find Will in the Upside Down. This show exemplifies the abnormal grotesque because people think Will's mom is insane for hanging up Christmas lights in order to communicate with her son. People fear the unknown like the aliens in the District 9 film. We'll know more about Eleven's past and hopefully delve deeper into the Upside Down in season 2!
~Nivetha M.

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While reading both Yellow Wallpaper and Queer, I kept thinking of the film Shutter Island. In this thriller, Leonardo DiCaprio plays what is to be believed as a detective with a dark past, but at the end we realize that he is a psych patient with a skewed perception of reality, and of his past. I feel that this reflects the abnormal grotesque, because the audience cannot tell truth from imagination, even at the end. Leo's character is so mentally ill that whatever he thinks up in his mind, ultimately becomes his reality. Similar to the main characters in 'Queer' and 'Yellow Wallpaper.'
-Jamie Boone

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The Abnormal and "Black Swan" -Marissa Osmundson

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The Abnormal and "Black Swan" -Marissa Osmundson

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What I initially think of when I think of the abnormal, I think of the movie "Black Swan." Maybe I thought of this because of the mental disorder presence in "Yellow Wallpaper," but I couldn't say for sure why I thought of this as abnormal. The most grotesque part of the movie which brings about the abnormal is when she thinks she killed the other girl but in the end she is actually bleeding and you finally figure out that it has been her hurting herself the whole time. This is abnormal to me, because it is definitely not a normal way to think. Below is a link to the final scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVO6VGqfWwQ

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Anything Burton is grotesque. Not Just because it's the darker Spongebob that we always wanted or the more rebellious teenage years we all tried to have. Burton is grotesque in his animations. I can always tell that his animated characters are human. Yet, there is something haunting, daunting, and simply creepy about them. They just don's seem human, and not just in the scene that they actually aren't characters. It's that they are wrong. I think that's what makes something the most grotesque, when something is almost human, like trying to see your reflection in a clown mirror. Tim Burton's world is human, but not quite. His characters usually have long, thing appendages, gaunt skin, and the wide eyes. Like every character has seen more than a simple screen. Like those characters are on the other side of the clown mirror and seeing reality and being just as nervous as us when we look at our distorted selves.

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The Frankenstein Novel by Mary Shelley came to mind when thinking about the grotesque. I never knew until I read the book that Frankenstein was the doctor not the monster. The imagery of the monster with the over large figure and boxy head with several scars from being assembled is exactly what I think of when I hear grotesque. I think of it as grotesque because essentially it is abnormal and intriguingly different.

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While reading about the grotesque, what immediately came to mind, was the Carnaval Diabolique from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, an example of the grotesque in marketing.  Certain elements are excluded, but it still captures many of the identifying features. It plays upon the compelling aspects of the grotesque, compulsion usually deemed important in advertising. Concepts that should be repulsive or frightening retain some of that element, but are deliberately depicted in a way that is fascinating and even romanticized. This may be an example of fantastical grotesque. This world has relatable features of our own world but with dark twists. Mechanized humans are familiar but chillingly unpredictable. Are they creatures of pure logic or do they actually retain character points of humanity to match their physical humanity? They draw conflicting emotions. Wulric the Wolfman is one of several characters that blend human and animal; his state is a very classic example, and a staple of freakish curiosity for the gross distortion of humanity. His story blends the morbid and horrific with comedy and charm. He cheerily plays piano with a bowl of viscera on hand for refreshment, he gives humorous accounts of consuming his ex-girlfriends. Kataniya the Clockwork Woman, a combination of human and machine, plays a more serious role. She violently asserts that she is not a possession. She acts upon her rage in ways widely considered to be unacceptable, yet she is appealing and, in a way, relatable.
- T. Young

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I dont ever remember watching Chucky when I was kid because my mom did not allow to, but I remember watching it when I was older. this movie Chucky is a doll that comes to life and is a serial killer. this relates to defining grotesque, because when yo look at this creepy doll, I think people think of it as creepy, scary and even weird. you typically wouldn't look at the doll and say its cute. when you watch the movie, there are times where Chucky is creepy that you scream, and there are also some parts that you don't whether to laugh or cry because it is so unnatural and not a good sight. In this movie Chucky draws your attention to him because he is supposed to be a doll, a lot of people grew up with dolls so in a sense its creepy, and unnatural for dolls to be like that.

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So I finally got around to watching Curse of Chucky, and like most of the reviews said, it was awesome. It was the refreshing return of Chucky as a true figure of horror, as opposed to his comedic spoof portrayals in the two films previous. Chucky was a sinister, malevolent abomination, not only dangerous, but...

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Zappa dedicated a significant portion of his career to incorporating the grotesque into the aural, visual, and lyrical elements of his music. He was also gifted at blending these elements with the mundane. His son Dweezil, who performs his father's music as well as composing and performing his own, leans into that seamless melding of the mundane and grotesque as well. I could probably write a few books examining all the aspects of grotesque in their work. Here, I am only going to reference one song, "Malkovich" by Dweezil Zappa. I feel it is a prime example of that seamless juxtaposition of normal and grotesque, both musically and lyrically. It's the kind of song anyone can listen to and just enjoy the sonic experience. However, the critical listener will pick up on the innovative rhythmic and harmonic aspects (especially in the chorus) as well as some very evocative, strange, and dark lyrics delivered by John Malkovich himself. This is one of my favorite songs from Dweezil's recent album. If you enjoy this song, be sure to check out his other works. Now more than ever, artists need your support. http://www.dweezilzappa.com/users/1963237/songs

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Provided to YouTube by The Orchard Enterprises Malkovich · Dweezil Zappa Via Zammata' ℗ 2015 Dweezil Zappa Released on: 2015-11-27 Auto-generated by YouTube.

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Donnie Darko, a film directed by Richard Kelly, incorporates several elements of the grotesque in its bizarre plot line. The story revolves around Donnie, a strange teenager, who travels to an alternate reality for 28 days in order to prevent an apocalypse. He time travels with Frank, a grotesque bunny, who elicits emotions of fear and horror within the audience throughout the film. Donnie Darko is a psychological thriller that introduces its viewers to an uncanny world of the supernatural. It's not necessarily grotesque in the sense of being repulsive or comedic, but instills a fear of life in this dark reality. Donnie Darko is a memorable film because of its ability to distort reality and surprise us till the very last second when the jet engine from the time portal falls into Donnie's bedroom killing him.
~Nivetha M.

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This relatively new Netflix series is surely grotesque. Every episode is an entirely new story. Some are comical, some creepy, or bizarre, and some are just outright scary. I've seen most episodes, and some multiple times; and every single time I leave with an unsettling feeling. I also always leave deep in thought, which I think is the point of grotesque art. If you haven't watched this series yet, I highly recommend it!

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I don't think that I even watched Beetlejuice until I was a teenager, but I remember this movie somehow giving me nightmares as a kid. I always felt this grimy sleezeball was hiding under my bed or in my closet. Now that I am older and have seen this film several times, I feel that it is a perfect example of something that is Grotesque. It is comedic yet gross and still instills a little bit of fear in all of us. I feel that it also fits into the definition of grotesque, because with time, this film will make you feel differently each time you watch it. This film brings us to the other side of death, and even though Beetlejuice is extremely foul and mischievous, we can't help but be drawn to the guy in some weird way.

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This book series, by Lemony Snicket was my favorite as a kid. I feel that it has a lot of themes that fit with the grotesque. The series follows three children, the Baudelaire Orphans, as they make their way from guardian to guardian after the sudden death of their parents in a fire. All the while they are being followed and tormented by Count Olaf, an evil man who disguises himself in every manner possible to steal their family fortune. Every book follows the orphans sad story as little good happens to them in the face of evil adults who will not listen to them; Snicket himself interjects throughout the series to tell the audience time and time again to not read this sad story. Bizarre and tragic events, as well as Snicket's interjections all work together to make the audience feel sympathetic and uncomfortable as they read through the Baudelaire's lives.
-Jessie L

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I recently saw the movie "Split" and I feel like it fits well with this idea of the grotesque and why we are drawn to it. The main character in the movie suffers from split personality disorder, but for much of the movie he is portrayed in a way that, even though you are scared of him, you are also drawn to him and may even feel empathy for him. At the end of the film, he becomes this half man-half beast with cannibalistic tendencies and again, the viewer is terrified of him but fascinated by his condition and how it has progressed. Horror and suspense films also bring in a comical element, as it is entertaining and almost funny to go out with your friends and intentionally scare yourself.
-Kaitlin Mulligan

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High Tension is a french horror film about two girls named Alex and Maria who travel to Maria's family's home. Turns out one of the girls is in love with the other. Alex is in love with Maria. All is swell until Alex starts having schizophrenic episodes. With going off the definition of grotesque being something that causes fear, I think this film hits spot on. Alex starts seeing things happen to Maria's family. Alex witnesses torture and murder but Alex sees a man doing this. Maria is the only one left alive that knows the truth. Alex needs help. Alex is the person doing all these terrible things to Maria and her family. This movies plays with the mind and causes you to feel fear.

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Bezbozhnik, which translates as The Godless or The Atheists, founded by the League of Militant Atheists, ran from 1922 to 1941. Strongly affiliated with the Communist party, it was, nevertheless, considered not a party mouthpiece. Many of the cover images for The Godless sit at the boundaries between caricature as an element of the grotesque and caricature as a form of political satire. The particular image that leads this blog piece seems to me to step across the line from satire into the grotesque because of the feeling of anxiety or discomfort it provokes. "The Body of Christ" and "The Blood of Christ" are standard phrases in a Catholic mass and traditional understandings of the Eucharist. The association of the Eucharist with cannibalism has been manipulated since the earliest days, and in the medieval period Jews were thought to take the Eucharist wafer and desecrate it, and to have an unholy inversion where they ate little Christian boys. To me, this image plays on everything that is disturbing about the idea of the Eucharist, but also blends it with the profane. It blurs the boundary between metaphor and reality, spirit and body, and does so in a way that is both clever enough to intrigue (I had to identify as many of the figures as I could, for example), and visceral enough to repel.

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The gory and grotesque art of Soviet antireligious propaganda

The images below are from the Soviet anti-religious magazine, Bezbozhnik, which translates to "Atheist" or "The Godless." It ran from 1922 to 1941, and its daily edition, "The Godless at the Workplace," ran from 1923 to 1931. The scathing publication was founded by the League of Militant Atheists, an organization of the Soviet Communist Party members, members of its youth league, workers and veterans, so while it was in many ways a party project, it was not state-sponsored satire.

The Soviet Union adopted a formal position of state-atheism after the revolution but it wasn't a clean break. The expropriation of church property and the murder or persecution of clergy was certainly the most obvious supplantation of power, but the USSR was a giant mass of land, most of it rural and much of it pious, so the cultural crusade against religion was an ongoing campaign for the hearts and minds of citizens who might resist a sudden massive secularization. The monstrous, violent art you see below depicted religion as the enemy of the worker and footman to capitalism. You'll notice a wide array of religions depicted, as the USSR was very religiously diverse.

Depicting the Muhammad, the Christian god, and a Jewish Kabbalist. Despite the ethnic cartoons, the founder and majority of staff were Jewish.

Mocking the "piety" of racist America with the title, "God's country"

The Pope, with Jesus and the Bible astride a cannon, aimed at the 35 million European unemployed

Jesus, dumped like so much industrial waste

Deities getting smooshed by a Five Year Plan

Even Buddha gets his share of hate

God is responsible for plagues

Luring the people to church with music

A soldier literally skewering god. The books under his arm read "Lenin" and "Technology."

Via The Charnel-House

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The gory and grotesque art of Soviet antireligious propaganda

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The images below are from the Soviet anti-religious magazine, Bezbozhnik, which translates to "Atheist" or "The Godless." It ran from 1922 to 1941, and its daily edition, "The Godless at the Workplace," ran from 1923 to 1931.

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Courage the Cowardly dog is a cartoon series that I believe exhibits elements of the grotesque. It does this through caricature representation of normal things as seen through the eyes of a dog with apparent anxiety issues. In the picture below we see Fred, who is the dog's owner's nephew displaying a smile that hints at something insidious while also comical. This dichotomy seems to be commonplace in the works of the grotesque. We also see a distortion of reality that is adjacent to it but one step closer to nightmare.