The Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley

William Thornton

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 William Thornton

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For James Herbert Thornton

December 30, 1929- May 31, 2008

The truth shall set you free.

and

Betty Sue Ponder Thornton

September 16, 1932 – July 25, 2009

We have all the time in the world.

Coined in 1970 by roboticist Masahiro Mori, the Uncanny Valley thesis says that as an object gets more lifelike, people feel more empathetic and warm toward it. For example, people are more likely to feel comfortable with a stuffed animal than with a rock. But according to the thesis, familiarity turns to revulsion. A robot that looks almost human but not quite right seems more like a zombie or a corpse than a lovable friend. That dip in familiarity creates the Uncanny Valley.

-A Star Is Reborn by Dorothy Pomerantz

Forbes Magazine

March 15, 2010

Men cry from the grave while they still live

And now I am this dead man’s voice,

Stammering, a little in the earth.

I take up

The nourishment of his pale green eyes,

Out of which I shall prevent

Flowers from growing, your flowers.

- Frank O’Hara

And millions and millions of people who only knew him by way of the silver screen (will mourn him), and they remember with gratitude that in the darkened theater he never embarrassed them in front of their children.

Ronald Reagan, eulogizing Robert Taylor

June 11, 1969

Part One – I Will Not Let Thee Go, Except Thou Bless Me

Chapter 1.

The legend of Buck Trapp supposedly began this way:

He was twenty years old and performing a bit part in a church drama. He was the Roman soldier who thrust the spear into the side of Jesus on the cross. It was Easter Sunday, and he was performing in a lemon grove in Persephone, a small town in California. He was leaner than the figure that would adorn countless posters in matinee lobbies. He still looked like a young man who by necessity has skipped a few meals and saved a few dollars. His hands were already rough from labor, as he was earning an uneven living picking in the groves and farms. The voice that would be copied by comedians and impersonators for decades to come was recognizable but still a bit reedy with youth. He was a diamond in the rough, but he wasn’t yet Buck Trapp.

Actually, his name, as everyone would know later, was Bacchus. He wasn’t named after the Roman god of wine so much as his great-grandfather, an owner of vineyards until he lost them due to a market panic and his own carelessness. By the time his namesake came to hold a spear in a Passion play, the Great Depression had already wiped memories of his ancestor’s wealth clean from the family memory. That was good, his mother would observe. The boy’s faith then was unshakeable, because he had never been distracted by money.

As he stood there, holding his spear and waiting for his cue in the clear spring air of that morning, Buck Trapp was born in the mind of one of the spectators. In the audience of worshippers was Achilles Papadimitriou, a Hollywood agent. Achilles - balding, overweight and afflicted with a smoker’s cough that made listeners catch their breath, had seen better days in the era of the silent picture. The Depression, too, had wiped him out, along with the coming of sound. He represented a stable of B-movie bit part players and would-bes who never would. Anyone who knew him might have wondered if his lack of recent success had forced him to seek religion at this play. Instead, he was scouting for a new meal ticket and saw one in the Roman soldier who only had two lines of dialogue before his retractable spear went into the side of the actor Christ.

Bacchus took the part because he was anxious to do something for the church. It was the Congregation of the Name, a nondenominational gathering that had only had about seventy-five committed members. Bacchus had attended for most of his life and was hoping to join, but the church required its members to pass a strict test in Biblical literacy and ethical conduct. He was still preparing himself, remembering the origin of the word Leviticus and struggling to memorize the 23rd Psalm. So he stood there, waiting his turn in the play, exuding a quiet confidence, people remembered. To the amateur actors and devout volunteers, he just seemed like he knew what he was doing.

After the Roman commander told Bacchus’ soldier to make sure the man on the cross was dead, Bacchus grabbed the spear. Then he paused for a second and looked at his hands. It was a simple gesture, nothing that he had done before in rehearsal, but he instinctively knew this simple soldier needed somehow to acknowledge to the audience the import of what he was about to do. If anyone had thought to ask him later why he had done it, Bacchus probably wouldn’t have been able to answer.

Achilles remembered the soldier’s words many years into his career. I must take it upon myself, Bacchus said, speaking the lines of melodrama the play provided. He looked around amongst the other soldiers, who suddenly seemed more busy with trifles than they had before.

He then walked to the cross and, just as he had been ordered, thrust the spear into the side of the actor above him, who had only groaned a moment before that his mission on the earth had been accomplished. The specially-prepared spear did nothing to harm the actor, and Bacchus pulled it back down. He had been nervous about this, sleepless one night that he might accidentally kill the man if the spear stayed rigid. He then turned to the audience. Truly this man was the Son of God, he said, registering the appropriate awe with just enough force to be heard by the spectators in the back of the crowd. As he spoke, the spring breeze blew a shower of cherry tree petals through the air, even as the dying Christ’s head bobbed for the last time on the Cross.

When the play was over, the actors retreated inside the church to change out of their costumes. The male company occupied the pews, with the women huddled in a parlor behind the sanctuary reserved for choir practice. As he removed his fake armor and greasepaint, Bacchus Trapp saw a little man with a bush of what looked like fake graying hair approaching him.

Achilles had perceived something about the boy from his vantage point. Nothing he could put his finger on. He just wanted to see the kid up close. Might be worth leaving his card.

Hey, bud, what’s your name?

Bacchus told him, with an embarrassed nod of the head because of his Roman namesake. Then he thought the agent was kidding when he answered that he himself was called Achilles.

How would you like to be in the movie business? Anybody ever told you you could?

Bacchus wasn’t paying attention to the question. A black dog, a mutt, was jumping at his legs. The dog was probably his, Achilles thought. During the play, while the rest of the cast enacted the crucifixion, this dog kept jumping at the soldier boy’s legs just as he was now. The boy had seemed embarrassed but kept going on with the play. It was one of the things that had impressed Achilles.

Cut it out, Smut. Stop it. Heel.

Cute dog.

He’s a mess. Don’t know how he got in here.

So what about it?

About what?

How would you like to be in the movie business? Achilles was annoyed to repeat the question. He usually didn’t have to.

No. The boy was honest. Achilles could see that at a glance. He didn’t hesitate with his answers. His voice was good and strong. He moved well, with confidence. Good looks, obviously. He had to be young, and maybe a last-minute addition to the play. His armor didn’t fit.

You ever acted before?

Some, but nothing like this. Out of the corner of his eye, he waved at the actor who had played Jesus. The man gave back a friendly palm in reply, smeared in stage blood.

What? School plays and stuff?

Just a few. I never finished high school, mister. The boy said this as though he had revealed it many times, trying to get a job, understanding it would be foolish to hide such a thing.

You work, right?

Yeah. Farms. Groves. Picking.

Think you could act?

Yeah, probably, Bacchus said.

Achilles smiled. The kid was like that. No guile. He just answered. It was like he had asked the kid if he could drive a truck.

You think so. You like the movies?

The boy smiled bashfully. Yeah. But my Momma doesn’t like for me to go sometimes. She says people in the movies tend to have low morals.

Yeah, I heard that too, Achilles said. Don’t think she’d get mad at me if I made you a big star?

Probably not, the boy said. Now he was joshing. The smile was too big to just be casual nonchalance. He didn’t expect to become a star any more than he expected to grow horns and a tail. Achilles felt excited for him, the rush of adrenaline reminding him of why he stayed with this job. Discovering someone like this boy gave him at least a little hope that he wasn’t wasting his life in meetings, lunches, and deals with suited, soulless picture people.

Might have to change your name though. Your first name. You think you could stand that?

Long as it’s better.

You’a pretty sure fella, ain’t ya?

The boy ducked his head and looked elsewhere. Then he finally picked up the insistent dog with a look of exasperation. I apologize, mister. I don’t mean any disrespect. I’m just not used to talking about myself. He struggled with the pup, trying to keep it from licking his face.

Don’t bother, sonny. I been talked at by worse types than you, Achilles said, laughing at the boy’s embarrassment. Listen. Lemme ask you. What makes you think you can act?

Like they say in this here church. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

That’s nice, the agent said, indifference in both syllables. Listen, here’s my card. I’ll set something up for you. I think you’ve got something.

What?

I ain’t sure, but I think it’s worth a second look. Hollywood too far a drive for you?

Ain’t sure. Where is it?

Achilles smiled again. The kid wasn’t acting, but he was a character. As he looked at Bacchus Trapp, he saw himself swimming in a sea of loot. All Bacchus probably saw was some old joker with an unconvincing toupee, Achilles thought. That was fine by him. Achilles wondered if the boy had any idea what was ahead of him.

******

Half a century later, when Newman Self was a boy, his father took him to the movies.

By this time, theaters were multi-screened palaces where each new picture showed every hour on the hour its first weekend. Movies had spaceships and booming sound effects and words that Newman’s dad would not let him repeat, along with scenes that made the father cover the boy’s eyes. Newman, looking blankly at his father’s fingers in the darkness, understood from the sounds that either someone was dying bloodily or a man and a woman were doing something besides kissing.

The movies were everywhere. Months after a trip to the theater, as if by magic, you could go to a place like a library that would loan you a plastic brick. You could take it home and put it into a machine and it would make one of those movies appear on your television. You could watch it as many times as you wanted. Newman would watch and rewatch the movies while his father was busy around the house, sometimes talking to the characters on the screen if they did something amusing, or warning them if they were in danger, or scolding them if they were bad.

In the lobby of the Orpheum, as he and his father walked to find the screen where their movie was playing, they passed an array of pen and ink drawings of movie stars. That was the first time Newman Self saw Buck Trapp.

Who are those people? Newman asked his father.

That’s Humphrey Bogart, his father replied, pointing to the picture. And that’s Marilyn Monroe.

One likeness was a older man with what looked like a weary expression wearing a felt hat drawn almost over his eyes. Another was a beautiful woman with a wide mouth and immaculate teeth who looked artificial and too happy to actually be happy.

And that’s Moses? the boy said, pointing to another.

No, that’s Charlton Heston. But he played Moses in a movie. You’re right. Newman’s father remembered that earlier that year, he had needed to explain to his son that the British actor Robert Powell was portraying Jesus in a television movie. No matter how convincing the performance was, that didn’t mean he was the Lord.

Is that Hitler? the boy asked, pointing to one figure.

No, that’s Charlie Chaplin, the father replied with a repressed grin, impressed that his son could recognize a man with a stubby mustache as looking like Hitler. He wasn’t even aware the boy knew who Hitler was, unless it was from a war picture.

He looks funny, Newman said.

Who, Hitler or Charlie Chaplin?

The boy pointed to the face on the wall.

Yes, he was funny.

What about him? Newman asked, pointing to another.

That’s Buck Trapp, the father said. He was in ‘The Uncanny Valley.’ I’ll rent that for you sometime.

Is it good?

"No. It’s a great movie."

Dad, can we go to Hollywood one day and see all these people? the boy asked.

No, Newman. Most of them are dead.

Why?

Because they died. They were alive a long time ago, but they died.

Him?

Charlie Chaplin was a movie star a very long time ago, when movies were just starting. He died as an old man, many years ago. On Christmas Day.

Her?

Marilyn Monroe died when she was a young woman a long time ago. She was unhappy and something happened.

Newman was silently proud that he had been right about the woman, though he was not happy that his suspicion had been correct. What about him?

Buck Trapp? Oh, he was shot to death.

The boy was shocked and sad at the same time. Why?

He made another man angry.

Why? For some reason, he felt there was something that his father was not telling him that made him even more curious about the figure on the wall.

Well, he was in love with another man’s wife.

Was he an old man?

You mean Buck Trapp? No, he was pretty young when it happened. That’s one of the reasons his picture is up there. Everybody was sad when he died. It was like he died too soon.

The boy paused from his questions for a moment, and took in all the faces on the wall. Why are they all dead?

That’s the way life is.

So they put your picture on the wall at the movies when you die?

No, Newman. Just if you were in the movies and famous.

Why?

"Because that’s the only way in this world you get to live forever," the father said.

From that day on, Newman, a sometimes quivering, unsure boy with fears he didn’t dare tell his father, was sure he wanted to be the greatest actor who ever lived.

Chapter 2.

The first reports of Buck Trapp’s death on the clear, moonlit night of October 13, 1955 were almost all untrue. He was dead; that part was correct. But the first news was that he had been accidentally shot to death. This was the story the police gave to the first reporters who dashed to the scene, acting on tips from neighbors. Nobody knew anything. The scribblers who arrived first were rewarded with what seemed later like a neatly constructed lie.

Authorities were called to the Los Feliz, Calif. home of Dr. Hiram Lester shortly after 1 a.m. When they arrived, they found a man lying in a fresh pool of blood in the master bed upstairs, a fresh hole at the base of his skull, stone dead. He lay with his face down in a pillow and one arm draped off the end of the mattress, like a man who had just come home from a hard day of work and collapsed into the waiting arms of Morpheus.

Dr. Lester told the police he had just returned by plane from a medical conference in Chicago that evening, to find the man in his bedroom, lying asleep. Thinking he was a burglar, Lester shot the man before he could awaken. When police asked him why he didn’t merely let the man sleep and call the police, Lester was noted as saying, I didn’t want to take any chances. Besides, he shouldn’t have been there.

It was a little later, after pictures and evidence were taken, that they discovered the man’s identity. Investigators pulled the body from the bed and laid it onto a waiting stretcher when one of the officers watching immediately gasped, That’s Buck Trapp! No one else believed it until someone fished his wallet out of his pants. The wallet dropped carelessly to the carpeted floor just after the cop found his driver’s license. Dr. Lester protested at first that he didn’t know Buck Trapp personally, or even who the man was.

And so the story that made the front pages was that Buck Trapp, whose most famous role was that of detective Richard Vanderveer in The Uncanny Valley, had been shot to death in an appalling case of drunken confusion and mistaken identity. Trapp had obviously driven himself home from a bar after a night of heavy drinking, walked into the wrong house thinking it was his own, and gone to bed. He was then mistaken for a burglar when the real owner arrived and shot him.

It was only later when investigators talked to Mrs. Lester that things got clearer, and murkier. Dr. Lester originally told police that his wife Bettie was back in Chicago and wouldn’t know anything about this. But only a few hours after the shooting she turned up at the house, claiming she had come on the next flight from Midway Airport when she learned what her husband had done. When police checked, they found Dr. Lester had traveled to and from Chicago alone. They also discovered that there had been no flight from Chicago since Dr. Lester had returned.

After some prodding, Bettie told police she did, in fact, know Buck Trapp. That part was hardly a secret. She had even accompanied Mr. Trapp on several occasions to restaurants in the Los Angeles area. She had to admit this. Chauffeurs, maitre’ds and waiters in most of the city’s restaurants could have easily identified her as having been in the star’s company. She told police that Buck was a good friend and patient of Dr. Lester’s.

Bettie was a prized redhead with a laugh that was much too loud. She had been a would-be starlet when she came west. She was something of a curiosity. She was no orphan or plumber’s daughter but a college-educated debutante from a wealthy family. She was discovered waiting tables and selling cigarettes in a hotel bar not by an agent, but by her eventual husband, who fished her out of the legions of untalented castoffs from the picture profession littering Hollywood. She was still dreaming of calls that never came when he proposed, and presumably had made her peace with her new role as the lady of his house.

She seemed more embarrassed about her failure in the movie business than about the fact that she had been home when her husband shot Mr. Trapp. She had had no idea Mr. Trapp had been there, she said. She had been downstairs until her husband came home. And how did Mr. Trapp get into the house without her knowing it? She had given him a key, she said. Did her husband know this? I don’t keep things from my husband, she said.

So, was Dr. Lester a good friend of the late Buck Trapp? Questioning him again, the doctor admitted that, yes, he did know Mr. Trapp, though not as well as his wife, apparently. He had indeed given that key to Mr. Trapp, to give him a place to sleep sometimes when he came home late from the studio. He was offended by the insinuation that there was anything untoward about his wife’s friendship with the movie star.

So, if he had been staying there on occasion, the police asked, why did you not recognize him when you came home and found him in your bedroom?

He never slept in there, Dr. Lester said. Yes, he had lied earlier about not knowing Mr. Trapp, but that was due to his fear. After all, he had pulled the trigger. He couldn’t deny that. He just didn’t want the police to suspect him of anything other than poor eyesight and a snap decision.

Those who watched the case from a distance noted how Bettie Lester had the bearing of a widow upon Buck Trapp’s death, even though her husband was still alive. She stood by the doctor while at the same time vouching for the dead movie star’s character to reporters. Asked at a hasty press conference in her home what she and the late Mr. Trapp did together, she said, He used to read to me from the Psalms.

By the time of the coroner’s inquest, there was enough evidence to support Dr. Lester’s assertion. He had shot a sleeping man whom he thought was a burglar in his own house. He had lied to cover over the fact that his wife was home, but it was only because he didn’t want people to draw the wrong conclusions. He had known Buck Trapp and greatly admired him. He deeply regretted having shot the movie star, and in such a deliberate fashion, but he had believed at the time it was necessary to protect his wife. He would never shirk that responsibility, he said.

The perceived truth, embarrassing and persistent, would be whispered out in the months and years to come, like the hints of parents to their children about the true nature of Santa Claus. The collective consciousness of Hollywood - and scores of biographers and amateur detectives - guessed that Dr. Lester had come home early from the east to find his wife with another man. Perhaps he had suspected something and suspended his trip. The story that rang most true, and there were many versions, was that the two had been sleeping when the doctor entered the bedroom. The bullet in the star’s head was Buck Trapp’s reward for not even having the decency to awaken when a wronged husband discovered him in bed with the other man’s wife. This story ignored one fact that the police could not - Buck Trapp was fully clothed when he was shot. The story persisted though that he had been found naked.

And then, there was the matter of Mrs. Trapp - Olivia Marks, the woman who starred with Buck Trapp in The Uncanny Valley. Her silence upon her husband’s death was telling. Her only statement was a curtly worded one to deny that she and her husband were separated at the time of his murder. This malicious gossip, she said, was utterly unfounded. That is, if one didn’t count the divorce decree which some said was scheduled, before Buck’s death, to have been filed in a few weeks upon the opening of his next picture.

The death, however, was an opportunity. Even as crowds of mourning fans began massing outside the studio the morning his death was announced, the studio heads quickly settled on a strategy of using the funeral of Buck Trapp as advance publicity for his final picture. Buck had only just days before finished principal photography on what would prove to be his final picture, an adventure to be called You’ll Never Take Me Alive. Instead, the studio settled on the grander but less portentous Yesterday, Today and Forever. No one was sure how it would all work. James Dean was only two weeks in his own grave. Actors began to joke that the studios might begin killing them off to secure good box office.

Buck Trapp, still thought by the public to be a man cut down in his prime by a terrible fate, was reborn as a misunderstood genius who reflected the emotions of a misunderstood generation. If he was doomed, it was only because his audience understood they were as well. Though he was denied a long, glorious career, his legend rested on the few roles he had, and they were celebrated as only hinting at the depth of his talent. In this way, he would cheat death. Stories began running in newspapers and magazines about the sensitive small-town boy who had been changed by Hollywood into something else. Unfortunately, he had been murdered, but life was like that for misunderstood geniuses. They are easily disposed of. Instead, he would be forever young, and the leering face that stared back at teenagers for decades to come from posters and T-shirts would become a symbol of a man marked equally for distinction and an early end.

Dr. and Mrs. Lester continued to live in Los Feliz late into the seventies, in the same house where the movie star met his accidental end, in spite of the parade of tour buses that rolled past each day. Friends said they never spoke of the past, though neighbors heard frequent shouting matches coming from the house, especially on nights when a Buck Trapp movie played on some television station.

******

Newman Self was not the greatest actor who ever lived, at least not by his twenty-ninth birthday. He was a married father of one daughter and still in search of his first starring role in anything other than a commercial, which is what occupied him the day Morris Blomfield approached him.

Newman had been on location for about six hours, and the director was not pleased with something. Directors never were pleased, in Newman’s limited experience.

For the shoot, the cast and crew were in a large green field. Tall stalks of grass bobbed in the breeze against everyone’s knees. Newman was sitting at a counter in the middle of the field with a yellow golf shirt on, the word ASURENZ in black block letters decorating the left side. Behind him was a larger logo with that same word on a standup wall, and other actors stood around holding prop