Air Doll video
Reading my RSS feeds this morning and came across a link to Greta Christina’s review of the Japanese film “Air Doll” (Bae Du-na): “Adult Toy Story: Romance vs Reality in Air Doll” on Carnal Nation.
I recently blogged about The Making of Real Dolls Video in which I talked briefly about how dolls and sex dolls fascinate me because they are so uncanny.
“The Uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time… often creat[ing] a cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time…”
“The state [was] first identified by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny [who] defines the Uncanny as: ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate.'”
“Jentsch identifies German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann as a writer who utilizes uncanny effects in his work, focusing specifically on Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann”), which features a life-like doll, Olimpia.”–Uncanny, Wikipedia
Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-ada makes use of the uncanny in his film “Air Doll” which is a modern day twist on the Pygmalion story, in which a sex doll gains a soul and comes alive, a film which Christina says is about “intimacy”.
“What makes intimacy possible? What gets in its way? How much of our intimate connection with others is really connection… and how much is our own internal narrative, made up in our heads and projected onto other people? Yes, this story is about objectification and passivity—but it’s about how objectification and passivity are, essentially, failures of intimacy.”– Carnal Nation
Sounds and looks like a great film. You can watch the trailer here with a brief look at the scene in which her lover blows air in her after she is punctured, an act which Christina refers to as: “obvious echoes of cunnilingus, he puts his mouth on her belly, and breathes life back into her. Her response is visceral, and intensely erotic. Her awakening back into life is clearly an awakening into sexuality.”– Carnal Nation
