Below, I am going to link to a video of such gut-churning horror that you should make sure you are comfortably seated in a safe place before you watch it.
You good? OK. Please click play.
“Talking Robot Mouth Mimics Human Speech” is an impressively clinical description of this video: imagine the photographs of pre-20th century Chinese torture method lingchi, which so captivated French writer Georges Bataille with their ecstatic violence, being called something as blasé as “Man Punished By Military.”
Bataille, being the sort of guy who would go into wide-eyed philosophical reverie over a photo of a drugged-up victim being slowly diced to state-sanctioned pieces, said of the photos: “What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish—but which at the same time delivered me from it—was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.”
This is exactly how I feel about this goddamn disgusting robot mouth, which sounds uncannily like Thom Yorke singing “Kid A” and looks like a Fleshlight adapted for military purposes.
1. Look at it
2. Why?
3. Is the tongue necessary?
This repulsive meat flute was created in 2011, mind you. Can you imagine what horrors this team of Godless fucking maniacs have wrought in the five years since? Five years is a long, long time! I have some theories.
It will never die and yet it will never live
First and foremost, it reminds me of the ending of Eraserhead (1977), where David Lynch’s famously mysterious and disgusting “baby” creation suddenly grows room-sized and begins to torment our puffy-haired protagonist. Note that I can only find this scene in a YouTube video with Tool’s “Jimmy” playing over the top. The baby’s bovine, idiot mouth set half-open is a dead ringer for the Talking Robot Mouth which now consumes most of my waking hours into its toothless flapping maw.
Do you think they ever tried to give the Talking Robot Mouth teeth? I think they did, or they have, by now. I’m sure they grew a full set of teeth right there in the lab and set them into the flaccid gaping tubeworm they saw fit to create. And when they activated the Talking Robot Mouth, it gnashed its new strong teeth together until they cracked and shattered into terribly white shards, piling up on its flicking tongue and piercing its senseless lips as its reedy voice continued to recite the Japanese alphabet through ceaseless clacking.
The close-up of the Talking Robot Mouth’s tongue moving inside of its mouth touches a place inside of me that I am deeply ashamed of, that I would not bare to another human being if they went digging in me with a spoon. I can barely put it clearly to myself. I watch the tongue wiggle gently behind those chapped, fraying silicone lips and I think thoughts that should remand me straight to Hell, and yet, here I still sit, imprisoned within my own fetid desire.
In the intervening five years since this unholy document of abject wrongness and today, I think something very peculiar happened with the Talking Robot Mouth. I think that maybe four years ago, maybe three, a technician noticed a strange nodule at the base of the fleshy cylinder. In the weeks that followed the nodule grew and grew, like someone poking their finger through a plastic bag. Only it wasn’t a finger; it was bigger, like a whole fist, and then one day it split, the silicone parting to reveal the wicked curve of a human spine. It was around this time that the project was called off, and the Talking Robot Mouth was left to fester and secrete and slowly knit itself muscle fiber-by-muscle fiber, artery-by-artery, from the throat backwards into a crude weeping homunculus.
It will never die and yet it will never live, either. It will simply scratch and grasp at its bruised throat, emitting the garbled idiot speech of the accursed until the end of time.
