Generic hesitation itself can produce the uncanny in a film

Evidence

What makes A History of Violence unsettling to the last is its uneasy relationship to genre: is it a thriller, a family drama, a bleak comedy, or a trans-generic allegory (“the Bush administration’s foreign policy based upon a Western”)? This generic hesitation means that it is a film suffused with the uncanny. Even when the standard motions of the thriller or the family drama are gone through, there is something awry, so that A History of Violence views like a thriller assembled by a psychotic, someone who has learned the conventions of the genre off by heart but who can’t make them work. Perversely, but appropriately for a Cronenberg picture, it is this “not quite working” that makes the film so gripping. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 439

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes Fisher’s chapter-long concern with genre as fantasy structure and with ‘capitalist realism’ aesthetics of failed coherence. — connects to: Seeing a body part detached from its whole produces an uncanny horror response; The fantastic is defined by hesitation between uncanny and marvellous. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 521; The uncanny quality of mass-produced objects springs from repeating the unrepeatable — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 126

Broader Connections

• The fantastic is defined by hesitation between uncanny and marvellous. #qualifies (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 521
• The uncanny quality of mass-produced objects springs from repeating the unrepeatable #expands (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 126
• Seeing a body part detached from its whole produces an uncanny horror response #complicates (0.70)