Why are mannequins scary

This is still our general sense of the uncanny. This threat of going blind is often, for Freud at least, a substitute for the dread of being metaphorically castrated; the eye is a substitute or stand-in for the male organ. The uncanny feels and works the way it does because of the nature of fetishes. Thus the fetish — the doll, the mannequin, the body part, etc.

The painting and sketches by Oskar Kokoschka included in the exhibition make this point well: they are of a doll he had commissioned from a dress maker to look like his former lover, Alma Mahler, but, over time, he seems to have developed an attachment to the doll itself. In identifying the shift from the mannequin as a tool to an icon, muse, or fetish, Silent Partner locates the historical point in the modern period at which the status of the mere object is elevated to that of a powerful material thing.

Here, the mannequin is a symptom of our modern fixation on inanimate human forms, and their intrinsic animating potentialities. And as the mannequin makes clearer as a fetish, a thing, a commodity, a possession, and an obsession, so it highlights how its magic might act upon us, how it might become for us an object for adoration and devotion, and even one of desire, lust, and sex.

This new understanding of mannequins, of inanimate human forms more generally, confirms a need to attend to our own obsessions with, devotion to, and desire for things. The mannequin, like the uncanny itself, leaves us with feelings of uncertainty. The reason for this is because of a profound quandary: as we idolise things so we objectify ourselves.

Taken as a whole, this particular shift from mannequins as tools to mannequins as icon, muse, and fetish identifies a more general shift in the relations between persons and things: persons become things and things become persons. In anthropomorphising things, in making them more human-like, we in turn make ourselves more thing-like. We see it every day in our frenzied consumer culture, evidenced endlessly in our own intimate relations with things, and especially in our encounters with one another.

Before we begin to sound like ventriloquised versions of our more familiar selves, repeating the same thing endlessly until we ourselves sound more and more like stuck records. The more a robot or doll resembles a realistic human, the more positive we feel towards it. That is, up to a point.

There is a significant dip in the comfort we feel around life-like objects when they become too real. Owing to this effect, mannequins are often far creepier than they ought to be. These images have been haunting my dreams—and now they can haunt yours. Happy Halloween! I have an iPhone, but only to send texts. I don't like that if someone is phoning me, I will be disturbed. I cannot do two things at one time. I have no iPod I'm too distracted.

Now, images are everywhere and I love it, but there are almost too many images. When I watch TV, I can just keep zapping all the time!

But I don't want to be that excited.