In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny

Abstract

Freud’s concept of the uncanny is used in this article to interpret Hopper’s paintings and to explain why they appear to have a double valence – at once nostalgic and threatening. The famous House by the Railroad (1925), for example, is often thought to depict a forlorn remnant of an outmoded America, yet it also served as the model for the Old Bates House in Hitchcock’s Psycho. First, several modalities of the uncanny – doubles, traumatic encounters with death, life-like dolls and haunted houses – are explored in relation to Hopper’s characteristic motifs. But this attention to subject matter is later supplemented by an inquiry into the formal uncanniness of Hopper’s compositions. Here the notion of the ‘blind field’, a concept borrowed from film theory, is proposed. Both film stills and Hopper’s paintings suggest that the centre of gravity is invisible, outside the frame, either spatially or temporally. The blind field incites our desire to see, animates the picture, and makes the old house look back at us. The ambivalence of the uncanny object, both familiar and unfamiliar, was recently demonstrated by Rachel Whiteread’s House. It was perceived both as a monument to some mythical homogeneous East End community and, especially in view of the controversy it sparked, as a ghostly reminder of the area’s bitter history of racial hatred. While nostalgia assumes that the past is safely lost, the uncanny shows how it can erupt unbidden in the present.