The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [65]
These challenges to naturalized notions of and associations with time work to defamiliarize our experience of time, introducing an element of the uncanny. I would argue that Majora’s Mask operates with an uncanny temporality, one that not only introduces alternative time structures but makes the idea of time unfamiliar (yet familiar), strange, and frightening. Sigmund Freud, in his essay “Das Unheimlich (The Uncanny)” notes the link between the uncanny and what is unfamiliar: “the German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.”41 Freud goes on to complicate the argument beyond this semantic analysis, claiming that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and long-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (p. 217).
In their discussion of the uncanny, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle argue that the uncanny “has to do with a troubling of definitions” and with “making things uncertain: it has to do with the sense that things are not as they have come to appear through habit and familiarity, that they may challenge all rationality and logic.”42
In the opening sequence of Majora’s Mask, the representations of time used throughout the game (for example, the clock that appears at the bottom of the screen) have not yet appeared. The sense of urgency and the “moving forward” of time are directed by Link’s chasing after the Skull Kid, who has just pilfered his Ocarina. The uncanny moment comes in where the Skull Kid transforms Link into a Deku Scrub. The aesthetics of the scene are pervaded with hauntings and notions of the uncanny: darkness, the multiplicity of other Deku Scrubs surrounding Link, and a reflection of Link’s new Deku face. Although the Deku Scrub is clearly an unfamiliar bodily form for our hero, Link simultaneously maintains familiar parts of his appearance, such as the green cap. Shortly thereafter, the Skull Kid taunts Link by saying, “You’ll stay looking that way forever.” The Skull Kid’s remark uncannily plays on the double senses of “looking,” as both Link’s personal appearance and the act of looking or gazing upon an object.
The Skull Kid also makes reference to time here—this transformation of the body will last forever, and it has a quality of permanence that transcends time itself. At this moment a few different forms of the uncanny converge. Link’s bodily transformation is connected to his anxiety over a loss of identity as well as the temporal dimension of this loss. There seems to be no possibility of recovering Link’s identity because of the permanence linked with “looking that way forever.” When Deku Link later approaches the Happy Mask Shop owner, the owner says, “I know of a way to return you to your former self. If you can get back the precious item that was stolen from you, I will return you to normal.” Link’s identity is once again connected to time here; his anxiety over his new form is addressed through the idea of returning, of going back, to a self of the past.
The way Link is introduced to the idea of controlling the flow of time is also marked by the uncanny. The scarecrow Pierre addresses Link by saying, “Yo! Hey, baby! I’m a stylin’ scarecrow wandering in search of pleasant music. Time will pass in the blink of an eye if you dance with me. If you like, baby, we can forget the time and dance ’til dawn!” There’s a double loss present in this scenario: the loss of time as it is collapsed into a single moment, and the loss of awareness as one “forgets the time,” or even