Ruff in dummy

Circus clowns seem to get more attention, but ventriloquist’s dummies are also deeply horrible and uncanny, the creepy stuff of nightmares. It seems like whatever benign purpose ventriloquism once served has been taken over by more sophisticated technology — the world is full of would-be amiable automatons — and now the superannuated dummies persist in a surreal twilight, foreboding relics of depleted cultural magic. Even still, however, these parody humans can not only symbolize the commodity fetish in a particularly troubling way, but they can threaten us with the idea that one’s animating spirit can be alienated from one’s body and imprisoned in a crude facsimile. They seem like doll-shaped Ouija boards meant to give voice to forbidden secrets, exemplifying the fundamental principle of language’s escapability, its absent presence — the voice is always elsewhere. And of course, there is the generally repulsive idea of one person jamming their hand inside another to operate them like a puppet.