If It Ain't Got That Swing...
Electro-swing is a genre of music that frequently incorporates samples of 1930s music and takes its cues from the music of that era but escalates up to a frenzied, electrified pace. It is not uncommon for electro-swing to also incorporate the grain or texture of old swing recordings into its melange, acting as a kind of additional instrument. Some of the notable artists in this space include Caravan Palace, Parov Stelar and Yolanda Be Cool.
It's perhaps worth noting how I was drawn back to electro-swing. I had started to go down a rabbit hole of research on old computers, particularly those historical dead-ends: the branches of the tree that never got the chance to develop. This took me back to the pre-transistor era, and soon I was listening to the crackling static between the stilted and ghostly recordings of 1950s-era technology. And perhaps a certain nostalgia for that sound - the message imparted by the very materiality of the technology of the time - lead me back to electro-swing. Previously that big band sound has meant for me images of synchronized costumed dancers and Art Deco. But now when I listened to it something else came to my mind - cartoons. Specifically 1930s cartoons: those noodle-y, elastic forms whose very movements seem to be animated by jazz, as though it were the jazz that brought the images to life.
In many ways, these cartoons represent a golden era of cartooning, of pushing the technological limits of the time and exhibiting an ambition that is frankly lacking from almost all subsequent mainstream animation. But I am not concerned with the technical accomplishments here, rather I wish to focus on a particularly special cartoon from that time, and to do so through a particular lens. The cartoon is Fleischer Studios' Swing You Sinners! from 1930, and I will examine it through the aspects of the weird and the eerie as articulated by the late Mark Fisher in his book of the same name.
Beyond the Uncanny
For Freud, the uncanny is "that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar." (Freud, 1919, pp. 1-2) It is not something new to us, but rather that which comes back to us after a process of estrangement resulting from repression (Freud, 1919). Repetition and doubling seem to be central to all of the uncanny phenomena that Freud identifies. Ultimately though, Freud tends to find the fear of the unheimlich1 as tied up with castration anxiety. The reduction of the unheimlich to something familiar and sexual is ultimately disappointing to Mark Fisher who develops his concept of the weird and the eerie to get beyond it (Fisher, 2016).
To Fisher, the allure of the weird and the eerie is in the fascination for the outside, in the way that it enables us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside, to grasp, if only fleetingly, the forces that surround and enclose us (Fisher, 2016).
The weird is that which opens up an egress between this world and others, with the in-between as crucial to the simultaneous compulsion/repulsion of the weird. The weird is a kind of presence, something that should not be there. The weird "de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside." (Fisher, 2016) The eerie is a form of absence, actually a failure of absence or failure of presence. The eerie involves the unknown and mystery, it turns on the problem of agency, when agency is concealed from us or not available to our sensory perceptions (Fisher, 2016).
Examples of the weird include the grotesque - unnatural intermingling of human, animal, and vegetable - strange loops, such as those encountered in time travel stories and those involving ontological confusion (e.g. the author of the story appearing in the story), motifs of veiling and concealment such as curtains and ingresses or egresses to uncertain places, and techniques that are used to invoke a sense of instability, which cause us to question the hierarchies in our world (Fisher, 2016). The weird tends to start with the familiar and the quotidian and then confuse it, we become estranged to that with which we ought to know.
The eerie is more heavily associated with a sense of place or landscape. Ruins for which there is no explanation take on an eerie quality as do large industrial operations for which human agency appears far removed and concealed. The eerie also accompanies behaviour which appears agentic but to which we would not normally ascribe human agency. Animals or machines behaving in ways that seem "all-too-human" become eerie. Also connected to the eerie are disappearances and amnesia. The negative hallucination - not seeing what is there - is both more common and eerier than the positive hallucination (Fisher, 2016).
What is powerful about the weird and the eerie is their ability to shake us out of the structures and patterns we have come to take for granted; their ability to expose as artifice our accepted reality. Far from being about personal concerns of repressed sexuality, Fisher sees in the weird and the eerie the potential to awaken us to the invisible but ever-present forces that rule our lives. Fisher sees in the weird and the eerie particular relevance as concerns the global forces of capitalist domination that control us, but we may understand them to provide insight into the forces of control in any time or place.
Swing You Sinners!
Transformations recur throughout the short. A mouth forms out of the gate to the cemetery to swallow the key, another mouth forms out of the ground, resembling a bear trap ready to ensnare Bimbo, the protagonist. Such fluid identities are a frequent motif within cartoons of the era and in the early parts of the film their usage is not atypical. However, once Bimbo enters the cemetery, these transformations begin to contribute to an unsettling quality. Bimbo's terror and the glee of the ghouls in the graveyard indicate that this is not simply the normal rules of the cartoon world and we start to question whether what we are seeing is meant to be a dream, vision, or hallucination.
While Bimbo is to face punishment for his past crimes, the delight of the ghouls in exclaiming his impending doom indicates that they are not interested in justice. Bimbo's protests of no longer committing his offending sins (an extremely mild list of stealing chickens, playing craps, and chasing girls) fall on deaf ears.
The stone wall around the cemetery then encircles Bimbo and begins closing in on him, becoming smaller and smaller until Bimbo is completely trapped within its chimney-sized opening. The wall seems to be tightening around Bimbo's neck when he manages to slip away. Bimbo is then blown into a barn, an eerie place, and things start to get weird.
The barn is made eerie by its solitary location and by the howling winds which seem to direct everything into it. It also changes the context of the film - no longer does the place feel like a cemetery. The barn carries with it connotations of property and trespassing.
Inside the barn is complete with creaky floorboards and possessed objects. A stack of hay begins singing to Bimbo and a burlap sack and a scythe join in.
Stand up you sinner,
We've got you at last
You can't get away, there's no time to pray
Your finish line will be fast!
Brothers and sisters
Come on get hot
We'll amputate your vo-do-de-o
And tie your bones in a knot!
The chicken from the beginning of the short now reappears in a horrifying form. The chicken is enlarged and appears deranged and possessed. The chicken begins scatting to Bimbo while contorting its body into impossible positions. Indeed just about every frame of the chicken scatting sequence is ridiculous. Bimbo cowers in fear while the shadow of the scatting chicken looms. What was before playful and mischievous now returns in an incomprehensible form. The background of the barn begins to distort in a rhythmic wobble that lends an unnerving, unstable quality to the place.
The barn is both weird and eerie. Its instability clues us in that it is a threshold between worlds - recall that Bimbo was sucked into the barn, it is a kind of ingress. Additionally, the barn is host to a hidden agency - the objects within it are animated by a demonic force that remains hidden. But what is truly weird about the sequence, what serves to de-naturalize, is the combination of the particular content with normally playful cartoons and a lively jazz number. We have been conditioned to expect ominous and portentous music in moments such as these, but Bimbo's fate is not a dour affair, it is something to dance to. This gives us a glimpse into the psyche of the ghouls - punishing is fun! - and unnerves us because of the way it unmasks our world: does not the lynch mob also delight in exacting its punishments2?
From the crazed chicken, the film cuts to two dancing bedsheet ghosts which begins several doublings. A bizarre form, a sort of ball with eyes, legs and feet, begins dancing and then turns, splitting into three identical forms all dancing in unison. A pair of boots stomp down a flight of stairs. The shelves of those same steps then lift and follow the boots down, revealing that within each stair is a bedsheet ghost lying down holding a flower in one hand. The ghosts get up, revealing that they are each two ghosts, and these doubled ghosts begin shuffling their shoulders in unison. Bimbo trembles in fear and his fear produces two shivering ghosts that split off from him which he then has to step inside of to re-absorb into himself. All these doublings and repetitions heighten the sense of the uncanny: for both the ball-leg monster and the stair-ghosts, what we think we know is revealed to be only partial, only half of what was there all along for the stair-ghosts.
Bimbo attempts to escape by running through a door. The knob on the door jumps off and switches to the other side - one of many visual cues that the tables have been turned against Bimbo by forces beyond his control3 - and Bimbo is pushed out by a ghost playing a trombone. Bimbo is then told by another ghost holding a noose that his face is going to be lifted.
When Bimbo emerges from the barn it is not a return to the outside, although it may appear that way, but an opening up into another, even stranger world. Bimbo passes the threshold - the barn - to find himself in an increasingly unhinged environment. The barn grows legs and pursues Bimbo and out of it emerge horrible, vindictive faces.
Where you want your body sent?
Body? Huh! Ain't gonna be no body!
Before the end, there is one more sequence of crazed scatting, this time by a creature that appears to be a frog. The frog-creature slaps and feels itself as it scats, if the prior parts of the short didn't feel like a fever dream, this part certainly does. Unlike with the chicken, the frog-creature seems unconnected to Bimbo and remains inexplicable. |
| The dripping, fluid quality of the hair serves the surreal aesthetic |
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| The house morphs into a dripping stew of laughing faces |
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| Strange creatures emerge, presumably to join in on the fun |
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| The mob |
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| The bizarre frog-thing which can't not touch itself |
We'll stretch you like a giraffe,
Maybe cut you in half,
Just to give us a laugh,
Swing4 you sinner!
Bimbo's head is cut off and he is suddenly swallowed by a giant skull that emerges out of the blackness.
More than anything else, the abrupt and macabre ending, coming after the bewildering scatting of the frog-creature, gives the short its power. The film escalates and escalates, becoming more frenzied and deranged and is then, like Bimbo, cut short. We are not offered any neat or tidy ending or even a sense of a moral. Instead we are likely to be slightly troubled by what we have just seen, and left thinking about what aspects of punishment it might be illuminating. We are left with that strange and uneasy feeling one gets when passing through the weird and the eerie.
Footnotes
1 Unheimlich is the German word from which uncanny derives: it is the opposite of Heimlich; heimisch meaning "familiar", "native", "belonging to the home" (Freud, 1919).↩
2 It also seems to highlight what Nietzsche would term 'vengeful Christianity': an underlying current within Christianity covered over with language of forgiveness.↩
3 While Bimbo is called out for his sins, his tormentors are markedly vengeful and unfair. His sins are merely a pretense for them to have fun with him.↩
4 From the end of a noose.↩
References
Fisher, M. (2016) The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
Freud, S. (1919) The Uncanny. Translated by Strachey, A. Available at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf (Accessed: 12 November 2018). First published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Fünfte Folge.
Swing You Sinners! (1930) Directed by Dave Fleischer [Film]. Hollywood, Calif: Paramount Pictures.
