Troncanny

This may feel like an insubstantial post, for which I offer no real defense, but after seeing a trailer for Tron Legacy in front of Faster (a trailer that, strangely, followed True Grit), I was overcome with an uncanny feeling from staring at the digitally young-ified Jeff Bridges as CLU. Before I go any further, it might be best to show you what I'm talking about:


It's Jeff Bridges... but it isn't. Something is "off": his skin is a little too smooth, his features seem to be painted on. Which they are. Jeff Bridges - as he appears in Tron Legacy (as Flynn) - has roughly the same features from the nose upward, but graying hair and a beard, better defined wrinkles on his forehead, accurately replicating what Bridges looks like now. This is what he looked like in Tron:


So on a cognitive level, I understand that the effects crew on Tron Legacy couldn't make Jeff Bridges look like he did almost thirty years ago. I get that, and I understand that effects can accomplish the de-aging process (see the X-Men 3 or Wolverine), but it doesn't prevent me from having the visceral reaction of a Bridges that is simultaneously real and unreal (which is the case considering that he filmed the CLU performance). How do I reconcile this cognitive dissonance?

Okay, if you aren't interested in reading Freud's entire essay breaking down "the uncanny," the working definition that most people know is a sensation of something familiar and yet unfamiliar simultaneously, creating unease that is often difficult to describe. Following the first Tron Legacy trailer to show the completely de-aged Flynn, I had such a sensation and failed to articulate it in a way that registered beyond "weird."

I had a similar reaction to Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but for no particular reasons I never connected the waxy, slightly unrealistic yet hyper-realistic digital versions of actors with the uncanny situation I studied (and, in fact, lectured on during a class about German literature). Other than feeling a bit embarrassed to let a bit of scholarly knowledge fall by the wayside, my reaction is to feel a bit more comfortable in reacting to faux-Bridges and reconciling what I know and my visceral response to seeing something so familiar and yet so alien on TV and projected in theatres.

Whether this affects my ability to watch Tron Legacy remains to be seen, because knowing the root cause of this uncanny reaction doesn't necessarily diminish its impact. I'm working on that, but it's tricky.