Mark Dery recently underwent dental surgery and extracted a thought-provoking rant from the experience about a possible subconscious fear of teeth:
“Certainly, the mouth, as the biggest breach in the body’s integrity, holds its own terrors (What’s this big hole in the middle of my face?! What if something falls out? What if something falls in?). Not for nothing has the face of mythic horror been a slavering maw (Alien), a toothy portal welcoming you to the afterworld (Jaws).Teeth are scarier still. TV dramas such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and police-procedural fiction such as Patricia Cornwell’s novels about the forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta have forged an ubreakable link, in the mass imagination, between teeth and death. In such narratives, teeth and dental records are often all that remain of the murdered; mute witnesses to their owner’s last moments, they testify to the victim’s identity and, ultimately, help finger the perp.
Teeth are by definition uncanny, the point at which the skull beneath the skin erupts through the body’s surface. It’s the Return of the Repressed (© Sigmund Freud; all rights reserved)—in this case, the death we do our best to forget while we’re busy living. A bony reminder that mortality is the subtext lurking just beneath the human comedy, teeth are the skeleton’s insistence that it, too, is ready for its close-up.”
