Palimpsest of Unheimlich in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976)

Authors : Işıl Tombul

Pages : 1-19

Doi:10.31122/sinefilozofi.1475618

View : 158 | Download : 107

Publication Date : 2025-06-26

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Polanski\\\'s cinema is important in reflecting the values and identity paradigms of the modern period. Since Polanski combines identity experiences with the socio-political, The Tenant (1976), the last film of the Apartment Trilogy, which was shot in the atmosphere of the counterculture movements of the 1960s-1970s, offers to analyze in the context of Freudian unheimliche phenomenology. Unheimlich explains how the alienation humanity experiences in the modern period triggers the fears it brings from the primitive period. For this reason, those who are undefined and in-between, who do not fit the identity paradigms of the modern period - in Kristevaian perspective, those who are abject - are seen as threatening the order and are marginalized. Unheimlich marks the place where ideology operates. In the film, Trelkovsky, as an abject immigrant character torn between religion, ethnicity, gender, and nationality, loses his mental health in Kafkaesque absurdism. Unheimlich was analyzed phenomenologically with three thematic components: otherized identity, the idea of double (doppelgänger), and body-mind division. Polanski has enabled us to read human anxieties and their ideological formation, from individual to social, from primitive to modern, like a palimpsest, the rewritten parchment of history.
Keywords : Freud, uncanny, abject, Polanski, The Tenant (1976)

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