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Article Excerpt
1. Misrecognitions
Somewhere in the second half of Amenabar's 2001 film The Others, a scene occurs wherein the protagonist, Grace, enters the marital bedroom to talk to her traumatized husband, Charles, returned from the war. We see a brief shot of Charles sitting on the right-hand side of the bed (from the camera's point of view), and then one of Grace entering the room, closing the door, and walking a couple of paces to a mirrored wardrobe next to the door. She opens the wardrobe door; we glimpse a rapid pan of the room through the mirror as the door turns, before the door comes to a standstill, its surface showing the right-hand side of the bed (again, from the camera's point of view). Grace and Charles continue their conversation. But no one is sitting on the bed. An absent space occupies the place where Charles ought to sit.
So far, so conventionally Gothic: ghosts, after all--and as we all know for sure--can't be represented in mirrors. But in fact, there is both more and less to this moment then at first meets the eye. Less, because what we think we see is not really what we see at all. We think we see an absence in the mirror which points to the presence of a ghost, absence being the paradoxical evidence of the ghost's existence, the deictic indication of its presence--you, the ghost, are there because you are not "there" in the way that I am; I am sure that you are there because I do not see you where I ought to see you, and where I am sure to see myself. But in fact that is not what we see at all. We see a reflection of the bed on which Grace's husband is sitting, which, being a reflection, reverses the bed. We see the empty side of the bed simply because Grace's husband is sitting on the other side of it. That is it; that is all we see. We thought we saw an absence--but we didn't.
The absence that we think we see is thus not really there at all: the moment of critical reflection on this shot/ reverse shot exchange exposes, as it were, an absence of an absence. This is "less" with a vengeance. But there is "more" to this moment, too, for if in it we are confused, wrong-footed, because what we think is a sign of a ghostly presence turns out not to be one, in this respect the moment is emblematic of the whole film. (2) The denouement of The Others turns on the misrecognition of the ghostly, as does this moment here: what we thought were the signs of ghostly presences turn out to be merely the banal and mundane manifestations of everyday life, as banal as someone sitting on the other side of the bed, as mundane as new householders changing the curtains. In fact, this aspect of The Others reverses (very neatly) the trajectory Freud describes when he speaks of the way the everyday moves towards the uncanny. "Heimlich," he observes, "is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich" ("The Uncanny" 30); here in this moment of the film the apparently uncanny--the ghost that is not in the mirror, or that makes unexplained noises in an upstairs room--finally coincides with the everyday: just someone sitting on the wrong side of the bed, just a new householder taking down the curtains (and what could be more homely than that?). And yet, of course, not "finally": that is not the end of the story, and actually, we were right all along. Grace's husband is a ghost; we were fight to think that there were inhabitants of this house whom we had not seen before moving about within it unseen as we watched; most of all, we were right, in the terms of this movie, to believe in ghosts--we just didn't understand who they were. The ghosts in The Others were there all the time, continuously present to us from the opening scenes of the film, but there are certain things we have to come to terms with before we are ready to see that clearly.
Ghosts appear to have experienced something of a comeback at the turn of the century (3), Amenabar's being one of two movies within the space of a couple of years to summon their uncanny presence into ours. The other was M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999), which treated the supernatural in a remarkably similar way to The Others, sharing not only the same premise (ghosts who do not know that they are dead), but also a similar dramatic manipulation of the viewer's presuppositions, since in both cases, one of the reasons for our failure to recognize the ghosts as ghosts is the depth of our expectation that ghosts should be "other" to us. Neither of these qualities are original to these films; both have appeared before (for example, in Marjorie Bowen's very short, but nonetheless effective ghost story, "The Accident" (4)). What is unusual is the degree to which both films, and especially The Others, deploy these premises and expectations to such serious emotional effect. Ghosts, one might remark, appear to be experiencing not only a comeback, but also some kind of shift or change in what they mean to us: where classically they have scared us (the uncanny being, in Freud's formulation, a "class of the frightening"), we have been encouraged more recently, both in fiction and in theory, to grieve for them instead. And although not everyone may find The Others as moving as I do, even if it were mine alone, it seems to me worth examining my response to the film in order to try to account for it, for it is on the face of it irrational to be moved by a ghost story. Freud famously identified an analogous irrationality when he referred to the man who professed that he did not believe in ghosts and in fact wasn't even scared of them (Freud, "Jokes," 134; also qtd in Buse and Stott 2), but I want here to seek an explanation for my reaction which is other to that of the psychoanalytic. Avery Gordon has recently suggested that there are indeed alternative modes of understanding the uncanny to that which would situate it purely within the bounds of the individual psyche: the ghost, she says, is "a social figure, [...] one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us." It is not so much the ghost, as the haunting, or being haunted, that is important, she argues: haunting makes manifest something that we are in danger of forgetting, or not even noticing, whereas the ghost itself "is just the sign, or the empirical evidence [...] that tells you a haunting is taking place" (8).
Gordon maintains that "haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will [...] into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition" (8). But if the "experience" of a haunting is--certainly--something other than "cold knowledge," what does it transform, and what, precisely, is it that we recognize, sometimes against our will? In the case of Amenabar's movie the haunting is so deeply unsettling because the movie insists on locating the personal traumas it presents us with within the larger upheavals and hostilities of the twentieth century (in this case, the second world war); it refuses, as it were, to allow the uncanny to emanate from, be circumscribed by, or subsist only within the boundaries of the individual self. And as a corollary to its implicit suggestion that the ghost is a "social figure,"...
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