What you find unsettling is fear

On texting, ghosts, and cinema

I had the great pleasure of watching Olivier Assayas’ film Personal Shopper (2016) again a few weeks ago. These are some of my reflections on the function of technology and on the power of the spectral in the film—especially how these two elements seem contradictory, but in fact work together to reframe our understanding of reality as well as redefine relation. I would love to hear your thoughts so please comment below if you have a moment!

In Olivier Assayas’ film, Personal Shopper, ghosts not only turn on faucets, make loud thumping sounds, and scratch furniture, they also seem to communicate via text message, haunting Maureen, a self-professed medium, as she attempts to make contact with her recently deceased twin brother.

Technology is everywhere in the film, it’s routine, it’s every day. But, Personal Shopper is a movie about relation when technology becomes magical. We usually assume technology to be something that is opposed to magic and the supernatural, something that demythologizes the world and renders it knowable, but in this movie, technology becomes inhabited by the spectral.

Whereas technology usually operates as a tool that would assert dominion over the other, in this film, it makes visible how the other resists mastery. Technology is a way of expelling the unknown—it is usually an answer to something, a solution, a shortcut—but in Personal Shopper it is a mechanism for making visible how selfhood is constituted by the other, and how knowledge is constituted in relation to the unknown. In other words, technology makes relation visible.

Let’s rewind. Personal Shopper tells the story of Maureen who is in Paris, working as a personal shopper for Kyra, a celebrity, and awaiting a sign from her dead brother. At one point she describes herself as a medium in the spiritualist sense of the word, someone who acts as an intermediary between the living and dead. But throughout the film the figure of the medium is explored in other ways. As a personal shopper she is a medium of another kind, transforming herself into a vessel for her employer’s self-fashioning via haute couture. But this then works upon on Maureen: by acting as a stand-in for her employer’s body, she ends up internalizing this other self-image that she carries around, leading to a fascinating scene where she lies in her employer’s bed, wearing her employer’s newly acquired dress, and spends the night.

In any event, this figure of the medium takes on a further dimension when the plot of making contact with the dead becomes channeled through the modern technology of mobile text messaging. Early on in the movie, in order to make contact with her brother, Maureen visits his old house, where she happens, instead, upon an angry spirit. After making contact with this spirit, she begins to receive text messages from an unknown source, who she thinks might be her brother. Maureen is aboard the Eurostar to London to run an errand for Kyra, when she begins to receive a series of mysterious text messages.

This is the second scene of haunting in the film. The first one, as I mentioned earlier, happens in a house, a country house in fact, and it bears many recognizable conventions of gothic horror. There in the empty haunted house, Maureen keeping vigil at night, and the unmistakable apparition of a spirit from another world.

The train where she receives these ghostly text messages is a completely different kind of setting than the creaky country house of the first ghostly encounter. Here the ghostly presence in the film invades the everyday framing of the scene, and the camera shows how much Maureen is disturbed by this otherworldly contact. Interestingly, the first scene of haunting does not provoke her in the same way. Actually throughout the movie her affect is surprisingly flat, but on the train she is moved to tears. I think that this is because of how the ghost—or what she believes to be a ghost—is making itself manifest: not just in the real world but within that part of the real world that is constituted by virtual communication technology.

What do I mean by this? Text messaging, an electronic form of communication sent and received by mobile phones, occurs over a network that is, in effect, virtual. Virtual communication is defined as the use of technology to communicate with people who are not physically present. In a number of ways, the virtual can be understood as offering a simulation of reality, negating itself when positioned against reality.

Donna Haraway remarks that this very negation may, however, be the illusion. In other words, it is the virtual’s relation to reality that marks its difference and in this, it becomes defined as “not real.”

But this already complicated relationship between real and virtual becomes more complex when the ghost story from Personal Shopper is added to the mix. The virtual is a way of asserting control over the “not real”: it is a name for the not real as real. But in Assayas’s film, it is as this point that technology takes on the unreality it is trying to master by rendering it virtual. I believe this shift is what is being registered in Maureen’s visceral reaction to the messages from the unknown caller. 

Throughout the movie, Maureen participates in relationships that are asymmetrical, uneven—Maureen seems powerless as she waits on a sign from her brother, runs around Paris at the whim of her employer, and is even powerless to her own body, as she is diagnosed with the same congenital heart defect as her brother, a condition that threatens to take her life at any moment. But these relationships are visible and knowable, Maureen believes her brother will reach out because they’d agreed on this before his death; Maureen chose to work for her employer, they’d agreed together on what the job would entail, etc. The parameters of these relations are established from the outset, and as such, Maureen can comfortably position herself as subservient to them.

The text messaging encounter operates differently. It introduces a relation to which Maureen has not agreed, an asymmetrical power relationship that in its virtuality, its present absence, requires that Maureen take action to determine her own positionality vis-à-vis the unknown other. In other words, the ghost story forces Maureen to confront the different ways in which she had always already been rendered virtual, had been made a medium for someone or something else, but had not realized it.

This image encapsulates much of what I’ve written in this essay. Here, Maureen is embodying another by wearing her employer’s clothes and capturing herself in an image that is reflected in the mirror and framed by the phone, she is taking a selfie to send to her unknown interlocutor, we don’t know yet if this is a ghost or not. 

In the image above, Maureen is captured in a number of ways. We see her reflected in the mirror, as an inverted double. She sees herself framed by the phone, not herself, but the double that is projected by the mirror. The selfie offers a fruitful way of thinking about how the self is defined in this relationship that is not only mediated by technology, but constituted through it.

Here, technology is shown to be a tool that does not only bind relation, but what fashions it, defining and articulating relation, and as a consequence, the self.

The text messaging scene that I have explored offers a breakdown of technology, showing a stuttering, a pause, a hesitation in what is known, and it is in this unknown, that the mechanism of what constitute and define relation is made visible.

[Note: In reference to hauntology, Derrida suggests that what the spectral can do has nothing to do with belief or knowledge of what is and is not real, but instead, has everything to do with questioning or re-envisioning the borderlines of what we imagine to be real.]