![]() ![]() He didn’t give me nightmares as a child, but he reminded me, very strongly, of the nightmares I had a child.īut people have been telling me for years that Max Headroom was good, actually. ![]() Memento Masahiro Mori ! If I might get pretentious for a second, and let’s be real, I always do, he’s also close to Freud’s idea of the uncanny, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Max Headroom felt familiar. He’s human, but he’s not his existence mocks ours. He is from the Uncanny Valley like I am from the San Fernando Valley. Anything Uncanny Valley has always terrified me, as we’ve previously discussed, and Max Headroom is its apotheosis. He was supposed to be funny, but the road to hell is paved with things people thought would be funny.Īs soon as I watched a Max Headroom video, I never wanted to see one again. He was played by a human being, but was meant to look like a CG creation, and his recorded segments were deliberately glitchy, sped up or slowed down, to make him seem unreal. I didn’t know what or who that was, but it felt familiar, in a horrifying way.įor those of you born after me, Max Headroom was a talking head character from the ‘80s that was just that, a talking head. One of the people involved had been wearing a Max Headroom mask. What was it, then, that I found so upsetting? I think it was the mask. I know these kinds of things happen, and I know how they happen. I’ve heard all kinds of stories about bored, disgruntled technicians pulling pranks on news anchors who treated them badly, or radio DJs disrupting each others’ broadcasts. It shouldn’t have unsettled me as much as it did: I grew up with an engineer father who worked for L.A. ![]() I watched the video at eighteen or nineteen, and something about it made my skin crawl. ![]()
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