The Uncanny Part II!

Professor Fisher's post about the Westboro Church made me think of my favorite clip from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive which deals directly with the uncanny. I think I might have mentioned it in class, but here it is in real life! I dare you guys to not be somewhat unnerved by this scene. I apologize for the crappy quality and Portuguese subtitles, but I had to take what I could get!

Enjoy!

Mulholland Drive: Winkie's Diner Scene

I'm normally not this shameless

but this brief article seems relevant to the whole uncanny thing.

Stream of Consciousness

Id, ego, and superego. The three words most associated with Sigmund Freud and his theories on human nature and human psychology. Although the reading does not include specific works on this theory, it is always something a reader thinks of when speaking of Freud.
Why is it we can't ever read something for what it is without taking knowledge of the outside world and putting it into the thought process? Why is it that some people are incapable of making decisions that are good for all, rather than just themselves? Why is it that some people appear to disregard human emotions when choosing one path over another? The reading barely touches on Freud's theories of the id, ego, and superego, yet my thoughts, when reading those two sentences in "Fetishism" got my mind wandering to what his other works spoke of and how they are being implied in this one.
I invite members and readers of this blog to take the following quiz. It isn't scientific, obviously, but it appears to have a good grasp of what it means to be "ruled" more by your id, ego, or superego and how that affects your decision making. The answer that appears, what do you think? Do you agree? Tying it back to this blog, how do you think the more dominant part of you affects your critical analysis of readings? Does being more in tune with your superego make you more of a structuralist critical reader or does being more in tune with you id make you disregard the authors intentions and replace them with your own?

The Theme

As you all know by now, Freud never looks just at the surface. For him, everything stems from something else or has a deeper meaning. Freud believed that dreams could not be directly translated but that their meaning was buried beneath what we remember. Our mind censors everything so our unconscious must warp and distort the meaning of information to allow us to “view” it in a dream. Because of this, Freud argues we must dig deep and try to extract the meaning underneath the obvious.

Freud also believes that everything stems from our past, our roots. You are who you are today because of how your parents raised you.

The question I pose to you is, do you agree with Freud on this? Are dreams our subconscious fulfilling desires or are they just random bursts of stimuli that our brain weaves into a story? Are we who we are today because of what our parents did, or did we shape our own destiny?