Umwelt is one of those helpful German words that we probably should use more often, but really, who wants to be the person who casually inserts Teutonic vocabulary into conversations?
Though it lacks a direct English correlative, umwelt often gets translated at the intersection of perceptual worldview and environmental umbrella. Coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, the term denotes the observation that different animals in a single ecosystem experience utterly distinct realities within that ecosystem. Neuroscientist David M. Eagleman used specific examples from nature to characterize the term:
In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knife-fish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it’s air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung.169
Umwelt evinces the disquieting realization that we perceive only a small fraction of our ecological niche. Cognitive scientists have adopted the term to describe how our knowledge is completely dependent on our senses and surroundings—our sensorium.
Umwelt is the tautological realization that we know only what we know. Anaïs Nin had a good way of saying it: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” (It sounds cooler if you say it like Werner Herzog.)
SEE ALSO: THE DRESS; MIMICRY; RORSCHACH TEST; SIMULISM
By the time DreamWorks had begun animating the adorable green ogre in Shrek (2001), computer graphics technology had come a long way. An enterprising CGI designer could now render characters with incredible realism, so the studio decided to give it a try—vivid verisimilitude would be implemented in the movie’s female lead, Princess Fiona. The studio expected moviegoers to appreciate the graphic fidelity and naturalness, but when the film was tested on audiences, children started to cry at scenes with the princess. The poor kids had just fallen into the uncanny valley.
The uncanny valley is the unsettling aversion one feels toward human replicas that appear nearly (but not quite) human. The aesthetic theory was proposed by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, who noticed a disturbing creepiness that envelops robots as they accrue humanistic features like supple skin tissue and nimble facial expressions. On the safe side of the uncanny spectrum, a safari of stylized characters—Mario, Smurfette, and all the Pixar creatures—frolic with other lovable fauna only superficially similar to humans. But as you descend into the valley, toward mimesis, the canyon fills with creepy hyperrealistic critters like CGI Tom Hanks in Polar Express, REAL-DOLL, and the robots in Spielberg’s A.I. They are all too human, yet not human enough.
Due to failed experiments like the Shrek princess, the film industry became existentially fearful of the chasm between almost-real and super-real. As supporting evidence, movie producers would cite the clearest case of an uncanny valley disaster: the CGI-intense Final Fantasy. Released the same year as Shrek, the photorealistic film was praised as a technical masterpiece by many critics, including Roger Ebert, but it was box office disaster. Final Fantasy bombed so badly that it destroyed the studio that created it.
Burnt by these attempts at exacting realism, film-makers at first hid on the safe side of the valley, frolicking in a cartoony land of Ratatouilles and Kung Fu Pandas. This fiscal myopia initially blinded studios to the rich verisimilitude sprouting on the other side of the chasm, especially those new hyperrealistic golems rendered by video games. But soon enough, like exploratory ships crossing the Atlantic, a new ecology was spotted on the horizon—the CGI super-hero. This new creature seemed a normal humanoid but its superpower was eternal life in the form of franchises, sequels, and cinematic universes. The ecstasy of the uncanny valley changed instantly, from creating new virtual characters to rejuvenating old ones.
And just like that, we crossed the yawning void of uncanny valley by granting eternal youth. Soon after a de-aged Carrie Fisher appeared in Rogue One (2016), a wide cast of actors—Johnny Depp, Sean Young, Robert Downey Jr., Kurt Russell—became computer-youthified versions of themselves in movie franchises. Like Ponce de León discovering the Fountain of Youth, CGI reincarnation became the tool of choice for Hollywood, a magical fantasyland already obsessed with innocence and nostalgia. Movies are now set on a path toward sequel-filled universes populated with long-gone actors. It seems inevitable: Just as some jackass will one day try to clone Kanye, Marlon Brando will be virtually reincarnated for On the Waterfront II: Jersey Shore.
As an aesthetic theory, the uncanny has its origins in Freud, who pondered the eeriness of something foreign yet familiar.170 Since the 1970s, when Mori coined the term, the uncanny valley has been applied to the chasm of dissimilarity between robots and humans. But as computer simulation technology spreads, that once vast canyon has narrowed. Freud’s eeriness no longer describes the unfamiliarity of men and machines, but the closing gap between past and present, life and death.
SEE ALSO: CYBORG; MIKU, HATSUNE; REALDOLL; TOYETIC; TROMPE L’OEIL; TUPAC HOLOGRAM
Your parents lied to you about SANTA CLAUS, your friends fibbed about liking your new haircut, your teachers exaggerated the meritocracy, your government conspired about WMDs—and now your favorite literary characters seem intent to cozen you, too.
Unreliable narrators are fictional characters who tell stories (often in first person, through flashback or some other framing device) whose credibility has reason for serious doubt. These prevaricating rascals—like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye or Humbert Humbert in Lolita—give distorted views of narrative events. Though the term was not coined until the 1960s by literary critic Wayne C. Booth, unreliable narrators can be found as far back as Aristophanes. But they didn’t become widespread characters until nineteenth-century novels (The Turn of the Screw, Wuthering Heights, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and 1990s cinema (Fight Club, Forrest Gump, The Usual Suspects).
Unreliable narrators appearing in fiction tend to create a vibe of unstable truth. The trope inevitably creates a mirror with reality: Just as no narrator should be blindly trusted with their account, no author should be naively revered as truthteller. Unless, of course, that author has earned your faith by exposing misinformation, in which case, you should trust them unquestioningly on all matters.
SEE ALSO: ESQUIVALIENCE; THE FOURTH WALL; IF I DID IT; A MILLION LITTLE PIECES; LEROY, JT; RASHOMON EFFECT; RETCONNING
Utopias do not exist. For starters, the word itself literally means “no place,” and in practice, no group of humans has ever, so far, reached a sustained accord on which conditions would birth a communal earthly paradise. In all likelihood, your utopian nirvana would be my apocalyptic hellscape.171
Today’s utopias are the by-product of idealized social philosophies stretching toward legitimacy—abstract theories manifested as concrete communes. But the first utopia was probably a literary gag. In 1516, an English social philosopher, Sir Thomas More, imagineered an idyllic island off the coast of South America. The agrarian paradise, described in his book Utopia, resembled a medieval monastery plopped onto a futuristic communist farm.172 The island of Utopia was bucolic but boring. The government dictated all distribution of goods, and private property was forbidden. Professions were lifelong: If you trained as a blacksmith, you died a blacksmith. And when you finally crawled into the grave, mourning from friends and family was prohibited, perhaps because your humdrum life was too weary for grief. “No wine-taverns, no alehouses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction” were among the prohibitions. Women were subordinate, the eldest male ran the household, and slavery persisted, though mostly as a means to punish adulterers. But the island was pretty!
After More invented Utopia,173 idealized civilizations spilled like tacks across the fictional map. We now have libertarian utopias, progressive utopias, feminist utopias, ecological utopias, technological utopias, communal utopias, religious utopias, and a vast array of hobbyhorse utopias for every stripe of single-issue voter. Now considered an offshoot of science fiction, the Utopian Literature Complex has become the surest method for projecting a contemporary pathology, or as George Orwell said,
Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having tooth-ache. . . . Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.174
Modern scholars are still unsure how to interpret the original Utopia, penned by More. Is it canny political satire or insidious social engineering? It’s difficult to say for certain, because the book is rife with contradictions. The author was a devout Catholic, yet Utopia had euthanasia and priests could marry. And it was first published in Latin, hardly the language of rowdy farce at the time. But in his political life, More seemed determined to buck the system, even refusing to acknowledge the king, Henry VIII, as the sovereign ruler of the Church of England. Annoyed by his subversion of authority, Henry VIII had More beheaded.
Hell, Sir Thomas More learned, is other people’s utopias.
SEE ALSO: ALT-HISTORY; ESPERANTO; NOBLE LIE; POTEMKIN VILLAGE
169 Eagleman was answering the 2011 “Annual Question” from Edge.org: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s scientific toolkit?”
170 Sigmund Freud, “Das Unheimliche” (1919). At the time, it was a paradoxical discovery, that the closer we get toward familiarity and realism, the more frightening a creature becomes.
171 Especially if your utopia includes “the beach.”
172 More’s book was set in the present, not the future. Science fiction didn’t exist yet; nor, for that matter, did communism. But the two became historically intertwined, when communists would later praise Utopia.
173 Plato’s Republic was literature’s first utopia, but More gets the coinage credit.
174 “Why Socialists Don’t Believe in Fun” (1943).