Dark & Twisty

“The Dummy” is a short story found in the anthology The New Uncanny.  The premise of this anthology was to find out what modern authors felt was uncanny by today’s standards.  They used Freud’s treatise on the subject as their jumping off point.  The short story “The Dummy” takes into account what Freud called an inanimate object either being considered alive or in actuality and unknown to the main character, being alive.

In the case of this story, a traffic dummy, which serves to warn drivers about construction on a highway in Belgium, is the uncanny subject.  The story contains e narration of this dummy’s point of view.  In Victorian and Edwardian times when Freud would have formulated and written his treatise, this particular dummy would be considered an automaton.  By today’s standards moving dummies aren’t too uncommon.  Mannequins in stores move, and holiday displays often feature moving Santa’s and elves.  So the story serves at trying to update the idea by making this a robotic flagger at a construction site the uncanny object of the story.  The second narrator of the story is the human character. He admits that he has never seen a dummy like this.  He sees it as so human that he mistakes it for a man lying in the road when he comes upon the dummy again.  The dummy at one point even seems to have a pulse and heart beat.  This takes into account the Freudian idea of the uncanny that a dummy may be alive without human knowledge.

What the story attempts to do is make us feel like the mannequins and dummies of the world are watching us and commenting on our every move.  It attempts to play on the modern paranoia that we are never alone by making even the human-like dummies of the world watching us.  The strange thing is police forces started using this idea in the 1990’s.  They park a cruiser in the median of a busy highway with a mannequin dressed in a deputy’s uniform in it.  This causes drivers to slow down and be more cautious because they think a police officer is there.  The problem with this story is the unnerving sense of dread it tries to instill isn’t there.  Part of the uncanny according to Freud is the sense of unease we get from the object of the uncanny.  In the case of “The Dummy”, we are supposed to be unnerved that this road mannequin is commenting and watching the narrator’s every move.  The author, however, gave the narrator a more unnerving story than the dummy watching us.  We find out that the narrator is a bit on the edge of sociopathic intent.  He plans on killing his children.  The dummy makes a vague comment on this like he has seen it before, but still the unease comes from fact that the narrator plans of killing his children and has kidnapped them, not that the dummy is commenting on this.  In that way, “The Dummy” fails to bring the unease of the uncanny to play.