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Creepiness

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Their own little world

Creepy main characters have historically been almost unknown on television, and even today they remain a relatively rare phenomenon. Yet creepiness has often been close at hand in the form of the creepy neighbor. Even in television's most conservative era, the figure seemed to be irresistible, as shown in Leave It to Beaver's slimy Eddie Haskell, a manipulative schemer who appears to have sexual designs on Mrs Cleaver. Over time, there was a marked tendency for creepy side characters to take over the show. This is arguably what happened on Happy Days, where "the Fonz" — a grown man who spends all his time hanging out with teenagers and repeatedly refers to a public restroom as his "office" — quickly became the main draw of an otherwise standard family sitcom.

An even clearer example is the strange case of Family Matters. The show seems to have begun as a variation on The Cosby Show, focusing on a working-class African-American couple and their upwardly mobile, college-bound children. The true star, however, is the nerdy next-door neighbor, Steve Urkel, an accident-prone mad scientist with an obsessive love of the family's oldest daughter, Laura. Originally intended as a onetime guest star and so initially more a sight-gag than a genuine character, Urkel talks in a whiny, nasal voice and wears excessively tight clothing. Most alarmingly, he always walks pelvisfirst, the rest of his gangly body struggling to keep up.

At least until the advent of The King, Urkel was perhaps the single clearest example of televised creepiness. He is invasive, constantly dropping in on his neighbors unannounced. His desire is both enigmatic and excessive: exactly what is it that he likes about Laura, and why does he persist after literally a decade of constant rejection? Perhaps creepiest of all, it gradually becomes clear that his apparent attraction for Laura is actually a displaced expression of his desire to be part of his neighbors' loving family. Ultimately, the most impassioned relationship of the show is not that between Urkel and his juvenile crush, but the bromance avant la lettre between Urkel and his neighbor Carl Winslow, a middle-aged police officer and father of three.

As the show wears on, Urkel collects additional creepy baggage, including an ability to transmute into a suave seducer named Stefane Urquelle through self-administered genetic alterations. Perhaps creepiest of all, however, was the growing gap between the age of the actor — who was in his early teens when the show started and his early twenties by the end — and the perpetual adolescence of his character.

Family Matters began as a spin-off of Perfect Strangers, where the mother from the former show had first appeared as a sassy elevator operator. A variation on the Odd Couple premise, Perfect Strangers is centered on the conflicts between Larry Appleton, a mild-mannered Chicago reporter, and his cousin Balki Bartokomous, a recent immigrant from the remote island of Mypos. A strange amalgam of Eastern European and Mediterranean stereotypes, Balki speaks with a thick accent, mangles American cultural norms, and frequently celebrates his good fortune with an elaborate and embarrassing "dance of joy." The theme of the show is essentially what happens when the creepy neighbor moves in with you — and as it turns out, it's not so bad, as the otherwise unimpressive Cousin Larry receives a major boost to his social life and embarks on a wide range of improbable adventures.

What's particularly interesting to me, however, is the way in which Balki's overwhelming presence distracts from the fact that Larry himself is a perfect candidate for a creepy neighbor. As a docile bachelor who has difficulty expressing his emotions, he has a marked predilection for dating women who live in his own apartment building. Ultimately he and Balki wind up pairing off with two attractive roommates, but it is easy to imagine a show told from the two women's perspective, in which Larry is the sad-sack neighbor who's always looking for an excuse to knock on their door and leer at them. In an uncanny foreshadowing of the current creepiness trend, it appears that the only way to defuse creepiness is to redouble it.

Both Family Matters and Perfect Strangers were staples of the ABC network's long-running programming block TGIF, a series of family-oriented sitcoms that ran on Friday nights. For my family as for many in the late 1980s and early 90s, TGIF was "appointment television." We watched it religiously, even when the shows were in reruns, and we marked the occasion by indulging in the special treat of ordering pizza or getting fast food.

Looking back, Family Matters and Perfect Strangers were hardly the only TGIF series to be defined by creepiness. Surely the worst offender was Full House, the story of Danny Tanner, a widower and father of three girls, who does Cousin Larry one better by inviting two creepy neighbors to move in with him and "help out" with things. Uncle Jesse, a wannabe rock star who goes through a series of unfortunate haircuts, is at least Danny's brother-in-law, but Uncle Joey, a struggling stand-up comic, isn't even related to Danny or his daughters. In later seasons, the creepiness is compounded when Uncle Jesse marries and the couple continue to live with the unconventional family while making thinly-veiled jokes about their active sex life in front of the children.

Not satisfied with the inherent creepiness of the show's premise, the Full House writers threw in a creepy neighbor. In an interesting variation on the theme, this time the creepy neighbor is a girl named Kimmy Gibbler, who is the best friend of the oldest daughter, DJ. She shares Steve Urkel's invasiveness and desire to join her neighbor's family, but whereas Urkel had one obsessive love, Kimmy's interests are more diffuse and promiscuous. With a self-assurance far beyond her years, she draws attention to herself through her garish dress and frequently propositions men, most notably Uncle Jesse.

Kimmy is presented as unattractive — on both a visual and an olfactory level, as her horrendous foot odor is a running gag — and personally obnoxious, and hence her sexual desire is treated as inherently excessive and out of place, even aside from her age. Perhaps the creepiest episode to feature Kimmy, however, is one in which the men of the house envision their future. In the fantasy scenario, Kimmy, whose future is irrelevant to the plot and whose appearance in the episode is thus totally gratuitous, is played by a sexy adult actress in a slinky black dress. Emphasizing this sexualization of their teenage neighbor, when Danny asks the group what they've learned from their glimpse into the future, Uncle Joey responds that he has learned he should be nicer to Kimmy Gibbler. In another episode, Uncle Jesse has a nightmare about his pathetic future in which he is married to Kimmy, who appears dressed like the overly sexualized Peg Bundy of Married ... With Children.

The show thus presents both uncles sexualizing Kimmy — and in both scenarios, what is strangely overlooked is that she is the same age as the young woman whom both men treat as a daughter. Here the timeless tropes of the creepy neighbor and the creepy uncle are seamlessly intertwined, in one of the most successful family sitcoms in history. The question that haunts me now is whether we loved these shows despite their creepiness, or — as now seems more likely — because of it.

What does a creepy neighbor want?

The creepy neighbor is usually played up for laughs, but when the writers begin to explore the characters on their own terms, they inevitably wind up in very dark places. This is clearest in the case of Steve Urkel, whose parents are neglectful and even abusive toward their son. One particularly vivid example is an episode that portrays him spending Christmas in his cold basement laboratory with his parents nowhere to be found, but many episodes make it clear that the Urkels are ashamed of their oddball son and are not afraid to let him know. Things are less disturbing in the case of Kimmy Gibbler, but her parents make it clear that she is unwelcome in her own home, in one case punishing her by grounding her — to the Tanners' house.

It might initially seem strange that the writers would feel a need to explain why a teenager would be spending a lot of time away from home. Adolescence is the time of life when building connections to one's peers is the most important priority, whether that be strong friendships or romantic relationships. It is thus possible to imagine a best friend character, or a boyfriend or girlfriend, whose omnipresence is simply taken for granted, without any need for a back-story or explanation. This seems to be the case with the best friend character on The Wonder Years, for instance.

Yet neither Urkel nor Kimmy fits this pattern. Though Kimmy is DJ's best friend, she also takes a strong interest in the adult family members, which is not normally the case for teenagers. And Urkel, of course, is constantly rebuffed in his romantic advances, so that he's less a boyfriend than a stalker. Instead of trying to find their place within the peer group apart from their family, both characters are trying to form surrogate family relationships, albeit not with the same level of urgency. It's as though their initial family somehow didn't "take."

In Freudian theory, this kind of failure of the familial bond is what gives rise to psychosis. This is because, for Freud, what is at stake in our initial social bonds is more than a matter of physical survival — our earliest relationships structure our very relationship with reality. It is in the context of our family that we develop a sense of our own identity, and the family serves as a kind of "home base" for our developing relationship with the broader social world. (Freud strongly emphasized the mother's role in the former task and believed that the father had a special part to play in providing a kind of conduit between the family milieu and society at large. However, for our contemporary context, I would emphasize the importance of the actual developmental steps themselves rather than the gender of the person who is primarily responsible for them.)

In short, if one's initial family doesn't "take," one's relationship with reality doesn't "take" either. Deprived of a real gut-level relationship with our shared social world, psychotic subjects create "their own little world," which often bears a close enough resemblance to the real world to allow them to function on a day to day basis. Even in the most successful cases, however, the psychotic's desires and motivations will always appear to be somehow "off," somehow askew relative to what is recognized as normal behavior. What's more, there is generally no way to make the psychotic person understand where they are misfiring — within the coordinates of their own private world, their actions make perfect sense. As in Freud's essay on the uncanny, there is an agency at work here, but it is an unrecognizable form of agency that doesn't take account of us. Hence the creepiness of the psychotic character, whose enigmatic desire seems to invade our world from elsewhere.

It is in this context that we can understand the often delusional behavior of the creepy neighbor. Given that Steve Urkel's family alienation is most intense, it makes sense that his behavior is strangest. Even after a decade of rejection, he believes that he is making progress in his courtship of Laura, frequently claiming, "I'm wearing you down!" Though he is incredibly clumsy, he seems unaware of the fact, responding to the often catastrophic effects of his mishaps with his characteristic catchphrase: "Did I do that?"

Most alarming of all are the Stefane Urquelle episodes, which appear to involve some kind of psychotic break. But while onemight initially see this persona as evidence of multiple personality disorder, in reality it is simply an intensification of what Urkel is trying to convince himself is already happening — he's found a shortcut to winning Laura's heart, but he would have won her over eventually in any case. And it cannot be an accident that the transformation comes from Urkel's genetic self-manipulation, the most aggressive and literal way of disavowing his family heritage and replacing it with another.

Other creepy neighbors fit this pattern as well, to varying degrees. They may have their own elaborate system of responding to social situations, such as Balki's reliance on the cultural mores of the made-up nation of Mypos. They may develop elaborate moral codes that do not match up with the realities of their setting, like the Fonz. Or they may simply be radically self-assured in the absence of any socially recognized justification for their confidence, as in the case of Kimmy Gibbler.

As I said in the introduction, falling into a certain diagnostic category in Freud's schema does not mean that one is nonfunctional. Every psychological structure is ultimately an elaborate coping strategy, and though some may seem to be more inherently robust than others, each one provides the subject with at least some chance at a livable life. For the more light-hearted psychotic neighbors on television, part of that coping strategy is to find supplemental emotional support to make up for the initial lack in their family bonds.

Returning to the question of whether my family was attracted to the TGIF line-up despite or because of its creepiness, it might be helpful to reflect on the paradoxical narrative role of the creepy neighbor. On the one hand, the writers are constantly asking us to scapegoat and deride the creepy neighbor's unattractive characteristics and inappropriate behavior. On the other hand, though, doesn't the creepy neighbor serve as a point of identification? After all, the viewer is always implicitly intruding into the private space of this fictional family's home, and the characters are traditionally presented as an idealized family that everyone might want to be part of. In other words: we viewers are the ultimate creepy neighbors — hence the special fascination of creepy neighbors, which often allows them to take over the show entirely. And what better setting for a creepy neighbor than a house that turns out to be full of creeps?

Creepy, scary, spooky

Depictions of creepy neighbors frequently distinguish a subset who do not avail themselves of this intrusive strategy, choosing instead to be quiet and keep to themselves. I am speaking, of course, of the very creepiest of creepy neighbors: serial killers. Instead of investing their libidinal energy in attempting to establish some kind of relationship with the broader world, they opt for a destructive rejection of that world.

In Why We Love Sociopaths, I talked at length about the example of Dexter, who was deeply traumatized when he witnessed the horrendous death of his mother. When his adoptive father realized Dexter was unable to control the resulting violent impulses, he embarked on an ambitious twopronged solution to the problem. On the one hand, he developed a series of rules known as The Code that made sure Dexter would only murder people who deserved to die but had escaped legal judgment based on some kind of technicality. On the other hand, he trained Dexter to project an image of bland conformity so that he would never draw attention to himself. In reality, all pop culture serial killers arrive at a similar approach to their destructive drives, developing a highly ritualized code for who they kill and what they do with the bodies and otherwise remaining beneath the radar as much as possible. What makes Dexter unique is only the "moral" nature of his Code and the explicitness with which it was imparted to him.

The serial killer can help us get at the difference between the closely related concepts of creepiness and scariness. To put it briefly, what makes the serial killer scary is that he is going to kill you — but what makes him creepy is that he is not really killing you at all. The person caught up in the serial killer's ritual is playing a role in the serial killer's world that bears no necessary relation to the victim's own identity in the social world most of us share.

We might say that scariness is about physical threats, whether real or imagined, whereas creepiness is threatening at a more diffuse level of abstract desire. The two can often go together, as in the exemplary case of the serial killer, and that's because the possibility of being scared by a purely imagined threat makes it ultimately impossible to draw a firm line between them.

It is in the overlap between the scary and the creepy that we find the spooky. Ghosts are by definition invasive, intruding into the realm of the living where they don't belong. Further, like the creepy neighbor, they most often invade precisely the realm of the home. The classic ghosts who have unfinished business are not exactly psychotic, given that they are deeply invested in a particular social world and the obligations it lays upon them — but it is still "their own little world" insofar as it is a world that has passed and that thus has no bearing on the shared experiences of the living. In addition to being invasive and displaced, the ghost's desire is excessive in that it grants an eternal significance to events and circumstances that for the living person would often seem to be fairly commonplace and insignificant — and of course the ghost is enigmatic, with the narrative thrust of ghost stories usually centering on deciphering what it is that the phantom wants.

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Excerpted from Creepiness by Adam Kotsko. Copyright © 2014 Adam Kotsko. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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