Denial: in its own shadow

‘…a falsifier of history’

I came away from watching Denial with a disturbing sense of having experienced something uncanny. The more I thought about the film the more this feeling grew. Phrases like haunting, mirroring and perverse doublings came to mind. I began wondering if denial was not only the title of the film but was unconsciously embedded in the film's process, thus leaving me in some state of discomfort and confusion. Inevitably, the phenomenon and power of denial and the human impulse to avoid what is dark and disturbing became central to this review.

Denial is a familiar phenomenon in the clinical encounter, where it is usually an unconscious process reflecting a patient's needed defence against psychic pain. Denial, however, is concerned with another aspect, to do with conscious intentionality: specifically the deliberate refusal by a public figure to accept what historical evidence has revealed about a major political episode. Yet Denial itself does some strange contortions with the truth. This leaves an unsettling feeling of something strangely parallel to the film's own subject threading through it, present but unrecognised. The effect of a story apparently straightforward but which conceals, which is conscious yet unconscious, there but not-there, is closely connected to Freud's idea of the uncanny.

Freud's essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) has been described in Haughton's introduction to the most recent English translation (2003) as a ‘weird’ exploration of the ‘power of strangeness’1 (p. xliii). Freud saw the uncanny as a psychically-intertwined relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar, a relationship semantically registered in translation by the fact that the English ‘uncanny’ signifies what in German means both ‘das Heimlich’ (what is known, familiar, belonging to home) and ‘das Unheimlich’ (what is alien, unfamiliar and not understood as belonging).