Friday, March 7, 2008

Creepy Dolls and an Entirely Unrelated Story of a Stuffed Bunny

We were recently in a local toy store here in North Bend when we came upon the doll section. It made me reminisce about being a little girl and pretending to mother various stuffed animals, namely BunBun (a rabbit) and Tigor (a tiger). Once, I lost BunBun in our apartment complex and went so far as to post "Lost Bunny" signs all over the place. I was determined. Amazingly, we got a call back. A little girl close to my age found him in the playground. I remember going to her house to pick BunBun up and she had placed him dotingly in a basket and put a bonnet upon his head. I abruptly took him from the basket and removed the bonnet. No one was going to dress my bunny.

This led me to realize that I have no memory of any particular dolls I had as a child. Not because I didn't have any but because I think I really found them creepy. Much like these (see photo). I just can't picture some little girl seeing these and saying to her mother, "Mommy, pleeeeeease can I have the dolls with the plastic bags over their heads? Pleeeease?!"

I find the choice in packaging morbidly hilarious. I snickered as I approached them to get a closer look. I had so many questions. Why are there two of them? Are they twins? Is the fact that one has its mouth open supposed to illustrate the aftermath of what having a bag on your head might look like? What might that lesson sound like? Okay, kids, now this one is a normal baby (referring to the closed-mouth doll). And this one is a baby after a plastic bag has been on its head for a period of time (ahem, referring to the, uh, open-mouthed doll). And I find it eerily coincidental that their attire is blue. Is it a subliminally macabre reference to asphyxia? I will never know. The wheels keep turning. While they do, I am going to try and forget the images these creepy little dolls invoke. Maybe I should go cuddle with BunBun...

1 comment:

Michelle Glauser said...

Have you read Freud's article about heimlich/unheimlich? Creepy.