ABSTRACT
Ventriloquism has had its day. Even when revivals of ventriloquism occur, as in the recent success of David Strassman, it takes a necromantic form. In his performances, Strassman plays both with the magical and the technological prehistory of ventriloquism. His demonic ‘Chuck Wood’ character is made consciously to refer to the history of mesmerism and possession – his eyes glow and he becomes possessed by an evil spirit at one point, causing him to rotate his head through 360 degrees, like the victim of possession in The Exorcist. But this history is a history mediated through twentieth-century media, especially films like Dead of Night, Devil Doll, Magic and The Exorcist. Animatronic technology allows Strassman to break the physical link between performer and dummy that has always been so important in ventriloquial performance. The ventriloquist and dummy have a traditional argument about who needs whom most, which leads Strassman to stalk off the stage in a huff, telling Chuck Wood to do the act himself if he thinks he can. After a couple of minutes slumped on his seat, Chuck rolls his eyes, lifts his head and asks ‘Is he gone?’ But even this is a conscious recall of a scene from Devil Doll in which the highlight of the sinister Great Vorelli’s show is when his dummy (another Hugo) gets up and walks on his own.32 The violence which erupts in ventriloquist films allows in what I have elsewhere called the sense of the ‘vocalic uncanny’,33 as the corporeal ventriloquism of an earlier period, and in particular an earlier period of ‘live’ entertainment history, is incorporated within the fundamentally ventriloquial medium of cinema. These films haggle at the sensory wound that seemed to have been neatly sutured by Singin’ in the Rain. The temporal indeterminacy of these films, which run together the familiar power that the sound film has to separate voice from the body, with dreads and delights of a much more ancient vintage, is intensified in Strassman’s anachronistic revival of them in his performances.
