I have been watching a TV show on Netflix called Weeds. Apparently it is in its 8th season. I have been watching all seasons, marathon style. It airs on Showtime which I don’t get so once I exhaust the episodes available online, I’m done. This makes me happy because it is exhausting. It is about a woman named Nancy. Her husband dies and she starts selling drugs in order to support her two sons. This leads to all kinds of trouble. One thing after the other. Unbelievable, stupid, crazy problems that build up to bigger and bigger problems. It is ridiculous and yet totally addictive. What will happen to this woman next? What crazy thing is this woman going to do that she hasn’t already done?
I was thinking about this and wondering what draws me to it. I don’t particularly like it. But I can’t stop watching it. It is uncanny.
Uncanny: A Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar.
In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. — Sigmund Freud
Ah, yes, our old friend Sigmund. That explains it.
So this all reminds me of the classic soap opera and how people have been addicted to them for years. Remember Luke and Laura?? Haha… Probably not… but… the longest running American soap opera, General Hospital, is about to start its 49th season. Uncanny!!
Photo courtesy of ABC