Since a few Broadsheet readers have repeatedly and adamantly expressed their distaste for our frequent use of the word "creepy," I was going to put on my thinking cap and come up with another word to describe this video, in which a still photograph of Sylvia Plath is animated to make it look as though she's reading a poem. But you know where I found it? At a New York Times blog. And you know what the New York Freakin' Times called it (albeit indirectly)? "Creepy." So stow it, "creepy"-haters. Sometimes, that really is le mot juste.
Well, that and "fascinating," which the "Ideas" blog also indirectly called it. At times, Jim Clark's animation is so effective, you can actually sort of believe this is a video of Plath speaking, even as you wonder why it looks like an olde tyme movie. At other times, however, her mouth becomes a gaping black hole, her eyes go all squinty, and the overall effect suggests nothing so much as Chucky. And that, my friends, is the c-word, pure and simple. Don't even try to tell me otherwise.
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