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virtuale, soprattutto nel momento in cui lo scontro ha luogo e carne e metallo si fondono in una
perversa celebrazione dionisiaca. Non è difficile riscontrare una somiglianza tra questa forma di
esaltazione e quella che emerge dalle pagine del Manifesto futurista e dal contemporaneo romanzo
di Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Mafarka le futuriste (1909) 335 . Un altro caso di fusione tra organico e
inorganico è quello di High-Rise, anche se in senso figurato. Lo smisurato condominio è come una
gigantesca creatura i cui abitanti sono gli agenti delle sue funzioni. In quest’ottica la vicenda può
essere letta come un caso di malattia che si aggrava sempre più, fino alla morte dell’edificioorganismo
336 .
Secondo lo studio condotto da Masahiro Mori nel 1970, ”Uncanny valley” (Bukimi No
Tani), pubblicato dalla rivista Energy, la sensazione di familiarità e di piacevolezza generata in un
campione di persone da robot e automi antropomorfi aumenta al crescere della loro somiglianza con
la figura umana, per poi calare all’improvviso all’apice del realismo rappresentativo, destando
sensazioni spiacevoli come repulsione e inquietudine paragonabili al perturbamento di carattere
freudiano 337 . Come osserva Dominika Oramus, il perturbante è elemento centrale del genere horror:
In “The Uncanny” he [Freud] tries to identify the origins of human fears and his conclusion is that
the feeling of horror is born when we face an embodiment of contradiction: for example our own double or a
walking dead. The uncertainty as to whether a given object belongs to the realm of life or death is the
essence of all horror stories (about ingenious dolls coming to life, wax figures, zombies, ghosts, etc.). […]
As another critic of fantasy literature, Sam Francis, puts it, «the indistinction between animate and
inanimate, real and imaginary, is uncanny because it evokes repressed memories of a stage of individual or
cultural development at which these distinctions were not made» (Francis 2006: 77) 338 .
Questo grafico esemplifica i risultati dello studio di Mori:
335 «Programmatically technophilic, Marinetti’s writing aligns modernity’s newness with the engine’s dynamism,
uniting them in a celebration of movement visible in the typography of the page no less than in the energised rhetoric. A
masculinist dream of self-creation and self-overcoming through a fusion of the organic with the inorganic presides over
this perturbation, finding its clearest expression in Mafarka the Futurist (1909), in which the Daedalian protagonist
seeks to forge his son as a mechanised body capable of embracing the stars and mastering space.» A. Gasiorek, op. cit.,
p. 81.
336 «[...] in a variation on the old nurture/nature theme High-Rise envisages a symbiosis between the building and its
inhabitants, figuring the edifice as a living mechanism tenanted by standardised cybernetic organisms. Through a series
of anthropomorphising images, the tower-block is portrayed as conscious, whereas the people it houses are depicted as
replicable automata incapable of communal life.» Ivi, p. 123.
337 «Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept
expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is
that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a
sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human look; but then a deep
chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where
resemblance to humanity is complete. This chasm, the uncanny valley of Doctor Mori’s thesis, represents the point at
which a person observing the creature or object in question sees something that is nearly human but just enough offkilter
to seem eerie or disquieting. The first peak, moreover, is where that same individual would see something that is
human enough to arouse some empathy yet at the same time is clearly enough non-human to avoid the sense of
wrongness. The slope leading up to this first peak is a province of relative emotional detachment: affection, perhaps, but
rarely more than that.» ”Uncanny valley”, Hafta Magazine, June 2006 (http://www.haftamag.com/2006/07/31/uncannyvalley)
[Ultima visita 10/09/2010].
338 D. Oramus, op. cit., p. 55.
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