Review of Presence
I knew I wanted to write a review of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence when I walked out of the theater and a man in front of me exclaimed to a woman by his side, "That was dogshit!"
While its marketing and the press have made Presence out to be a horror movie, it’s really a melodrama: a genre that has mostly been forgotten by Hollywood, and when it is deployed, must be trotted out in the dress of other genres. This is a shame because melodrama is a fairly ideal form for cinema. Melodramas play in the realm of familiar archetypes, salacious subject matter and self-dissolving feelings (love, hate, and grief), and for the runtimes of movies, which do not really allow for the elaboration of characters but are conducive for projective-identification, this is good material to work with.
Presence is about a family that moves into a haunted house. The daughter, Chloe, recently experienced the death of her best friend and seems to have some kind of ability to notice the film’s ghost; the mother, Rebecca, is obsessed with her son and is in some kind of legal trouble for fraud; the son, Tyler, is an arrogant and shallow high school swimmer with a sadistic streak; the father, Chris, is trying to keep his family together during a rough time.
From the first shot, it’s established that the placement of the camera and where we’re looking will act as the eponymous “presence” haunting the house. This presence, according to a medium trotted out in the middle of the film, doesn’t know why it’s there, doesn’t know when in time it is, and is trying to piece it all together. Its relation to the characters is ambivalent and its sympathy fluctuates based on judgement cast upon their actions. This presence is nothing but the audience of the cinema itself.
The ghost’s first explicit sympathetic response is evoked from a picture of Chloe with her dead best friend, Nadia, in the printed photos that Chloe keeps on her wall. This elicits the ghost’s first interaction with the world: putting away Chloe’s cluttered school books and supplies. Chloe calls herself old fashioned because she prints out her photos, notably pictures of herself with this dead friend. Film and photos are the profane medium by which we see and commune with the dead. The picture remains what it is and this is what shocks us. The dead are trapped in time — really they are trapped in us, in remembrance. The images found in film and photography are alienated memories, symptoms of an atrophied ability to remember.
Presence is a film about film (is there any other kind of film?). A realtor played with sociological accuracy by Julia Fox earmarks an antique silver nitrate mirror in the home’s living room when the family tours the house. Early black and white film was printed on silver nitrate before being replaced by safety film due to silver nitrate’s propensity to combust. Throughout Presence, not only does this silver nitrate mirror become a means by which characters occasionally feel (or in the final instance, see) the film’s ghost, it becomes a model for film itself.
Film is indexical but also projective — we identify and counter-identify with what’s on screen. We see ourselves in film. Movies are haunted by the audience — they are a mass form. Projection-identification is not an individual experience but the activation of the atomised individual's authoritarian imagination, envisioning how others might be projecting onto the film. This conditions mass reactions in a theater setting. When someone wants to laugh at a moment in a movie, but feels that moment is inappropriate to laugh at, they often repress this laughter. When they feel as though they should laugh, they often do, even if they don’t find something as funny as that laughter indicates. This is why cinema viewing at home can feel untrue to the form. It is not merely the size of the screen and the volume of the speakers. The experience of a film is conditioned by the simultaneous presence of others. [1]
By means of the film's “gimmick,” in Presence we strangely find ourselves identifying with the film’s formal decisions. They nakedly become the choices of the presence — really, the director, or at least the productive process that decides where the camera needs to be, what the audience needs to see and hear. We become aware of the film’s dictatorial power over us by identifying with it. This is cinema's “on-rails” quality. As the film’s absurd rapist-murderer antagonist laments, “I have no control.”
Presence is not a scary movie, but moments in which characters look into the camera are unsettling. Projection games are happening. We’re projecting onto the ghost that the film’s vision stands in for, but also the character we see. When a character looks at us, we look at ourselves looking at us. The self-distraction that cinema as an art form facilitates is shattered for a brief second, before slipping away as their vision turns somewhere else, or the ghost evades from view. The gimmick of the camera-as-ghost is a reversal of the horror film. Horror plays upon the fear of the unknown. Here, the audience becomes the unknown. Do you, cinema-goer, know yourself? Or are we too distracted by the unfolding of images on screen?
Characters too, project onto the ghost/viewer. Chloe believes the presence is her dead friend. We imagine ourselves being watched by those who have left us here. As the film’s medium says, when someone experiences a traumatic event, a door opens in them. When people die, their loved ones turn inward, becoming more attentive to themselves. Obviously this is a ghost film — within the film, this door is one to the afterlife — but the question is what type of imagination is this objectifying? We're really watching ourselves — observing ourselves observing. Tyler, too, has a sense the ghost is watching him later in the film, but the ending reveals this ghost is his own. He’s recognizing himself in an alienated way. For us who have been severed from the religious and spiritual world, haunting is self-haunting. The cosmology we experience is that of our own subjectivity.
It can be said that all of the characters are inward-looking except for the father. The daughter goes into herself following her friend’s death, the son is inward-looking out of self-obsession, and the mother notices the ghost while grieving the loss of her son at the end of the film. Meanwhile, the father has primarily invested his energy into the well-being of his family. He also never notices the presence. After the presence explicitly reveals itself to the family through tearing Tyler’s room apart, there’s a moment where the family gather on their patio and discuss what to do. The father stands in the foreground smoking a cigarette and looks past the camera, into the house, presumably trying to figure out what to do. The shot is similar to previous ones in which the daughter notices the presence, suggesting the father might take notice, too. But he continues to look forward, through the screen door and not at the screen itself, never directing his gaze towards the camera/ghost. While he might be in thought, it’s thought directed outward. There’s a correspondence in the movie between attunement to the afterlife and inwardness. Those who are directing their energy outwards have no time for the otherworldly. It’s no coincidence that the modern haunted house story came from a bourgeoisie with a surplus of leisure time.
The emotional core of the movie revolves around the family romance of the four characters: daughter paired with father, and son with mother. This dynamic acts as a parental division of labor. But the relationship between son and mother is particularly imbalanced. Rebecca desires an Oedipal relationship with Tyler that he in fact doesn’t reciprocate. He only plays with her when he gets to enact his own narcissism. When Tyler recounts a story where he pulled a sadistic prank on a classmate out of revenge, she eggs on his narcissism so he reciprocates her romance. Chloe and Chris look on in disgust. Tyler himself is really indifferent to his mother, and in some ways, this is more shocking than his mother’s psychological overinvestment in him: he seems more vacuous by comparison.
Presence is rather fatalistic about the status of Tyler, who the ghost turns out to be, and thus is identified with the audience. The ghost from the future acts upon his past self to cause the actions that kill himself in the first place: a nasty infinity. Earlier in the film, the father asks Tyler, "Would it kill you to stand up for your sister for once?" It turns out that it does. Saving his sister leads to his death. The elliptical character of the film makes it all appear as a kind of parable, a fairy tale. Seigfried Kracauer described fairy tales as “the miraculous advent of justice.” Here, justice is served, but only through self-annihilation. It's the imagination that the best that the damaged psychology of Zoomers can accomplish is self-sacrifice. Perhaps so. The question is what the character of this sacrifice would be.
Many Zoomers seem to already believe it’s their lot in life to sacrifice themselves — e.g., Luigi Mangione. But this is self-defeating nihilism. It’s not really a sacrifice at all, but self-destruction for nothing. The task would be to make good on nihilism. At the moment, the nihilism of the Zoomers seems only to reflect the nihilism of Nature, not the nihilism of Reason. Engels: “All that exists deserves to perish.” Deserves: as then it becomes an act of Reason, rather than resignation at the dull dying away of Nature, which ever-perishes for all time, as the dead. “If something is falling, give it a push.” Tyler gave his sister’s would-be murderer a push out the window, killing him and himself in the process. But why must Tyler die? Hansel and Gretel didn’t feel the need to throw themselves in the oven along with the witch. Self-sacrifice gives meaning to Tyler’s life, which while full of “achievement,” is really just emptiness. The purpose of his life is to save his sister. The finality of death enshrines this purpose for all time. However, when the family finally leaves the house, the audience is nudged with a reminder that the survivors must continue to live their lives…
This is all perhaps the Gen X imagination of Gen Z, two generations both dealt bad hands by the previous generations’ political failures. The Gen X parents and filmmakers are posed alongside their Gen Z children and audience. That Gen X wishes that Gen Z would do something worthwhile with their lives — “a great man is inside you, I’d like to see it one day” says the father to his son — this really is just the wish that they themselves did something with their lives. Is a meaningful death the best Gen Z can hope for? That Chloe survives her attempted murder allows for some openness that she might live a meaningful life.
The cinema viewer, themself, however, is identified with death. The dead past (or in this case, future) is watching the present. Presence is shot on a small compact mirrorless camera. Something distinct about cameras like these (and to speak in more familiar terms, phone cameras), is that the axis of camera movement and the sensor are compressed onto the same plane. Typically, the axis of movement lies behind the sensor or film plane, which gives the movement a different quality. Here, when the camera pans, it feels like the whole world is getting pulled around the axis of the frame, like our face is pressed up against the inside of a snow globe. As the ghost, we feel ourselves trapped by a kind of screen in which, while we can see the world, we cannot pierce through and touch it. Yet the presence does occasionally act on the present in a kind of psychic voluntarism. This seems to violate the principle of the viewer as a camera/ghost. The cinema-goer really is helpless to affect the events of the film, but the imagination of the cinema-goer plays on wishes/fears of things happening. The ghost acting on the world is a kind of paranoid wish fulfillment.
When the ghost wakes up the brother to save the sister’s life, it is really waking itself up. The nightmare in which you scream silently to yourself: “Wake up!” Maybe all of us are sleepwalking through the world. Tyler being forced awake after being dosed with Ambien by his psychopathic friend might just be a literalization. As every degenerate knows, forcing yourself to stay awake on Ambien reveals hallucinogenic phantasmagoria.
The film’s ending and the antagonist are what transform the film from a drama to a melodrama. The antagonist, Ryan, is friends with Tyler and then develops a sexual relationship with Chloe. The audience/ghost knows not to trust him early on when he tries to dose Chloe with a date rape drug. In the finale, it’s revealed after he succeeds in dosing Chloe, that he himself murdered Chloe’s friend and made it appear as an overdose.
We might be repulsed by our insane antagonist. Some might even find the actor’s performance strange. When Ryan is speaking in his more psychopathic tenor, talking in circles about having no control of his life, he seems like he’s speaking in a different kind of language than the other actors in the film. But his psychopathy is the language of melodrama, of heightened inwardness exploding outward. It’s eerie, but it’s also our language — language which fails to communicate with others. When he speaks in this way for the first time to Chloe, she doesn’t even register it, proceeding through the conversation.
In some ways, he’s a heightened version of other characters in the film, who, stuck in themselves, relate to the world as in a fishbowl, as how the viewer/ghost in Presence sees the world. After all, it seems the reason Chloe doesn’t register how disturbed Ryan is, is from how lost she is in herself. Like the cinema viewer, Ryan has a sadomasochistic relationship to the world, fluctuating rapidly between love and hate. As he sticks and then removes cellophane to Chloe’s mouth and nose: “I give control, I take it back, I give control, I take it back.” From how he tricked Chloe into drinking Ambien to put her to sleep, his character might be read as just a manipulator, but manipulators must first manipulate themselves. His confession of love to Chloe was no lie, just as his attempt to murder her was not.
Sadomasochism and self-manipulation are the basis on which film functions. It presumes a bad subjectivity. While film is not a popular form for Zoomers, it also seems suitable for a generation which is becoming identified with sadomasochistic lashing out at reality. As the Boomers — perhaps the last generation who understood film due to their need to reinvent it — die away, might film’s ill-equipped custodians, Gen X, still have something to teach those who are not interested to hear? Can we transform our own self-destructive impulses into something productive? After all, the film sets it up so we don’t know if the ghost is Ryan or Tyler until the very end. This is really the choice between self-annihilation and redemption.
At the film’s end, Rebecca’s shocked breakdown upon seeing her dead son in the silver nitrate mirror is ambiguous, and can only be derived in full by the empathetic projection-identification of the viewer. We cannot really pierce the psyches of movie characters; we only have access to our own. In one way, it seems appropriate for Rebecca that she should see her son when she sees herself in a mirror; her entire self-image is founded upon him. That’s why his death is so cruel. Her overinvestment of love in her son (and disinvestment in herself) means his death eradicates her. But it’s also her realization that he saved her daughter — guilt that she herself loved her daughter insufficiently, and relief that her son redeemed his life. Lastly, the shock is informed by the realization that she’s been haunted by a death that hasn’t happened yet, the empathetic/projective sadness of someone imagining their life go on as their dead loved ones watch. We haunt ourselves, by imagining a presence watch our disappointing lives. But isn’t that what film is all about? After all, the ending is not just Rebecca recognizing her son, but the ghost recognizing itself. Upon self-recognition, the ghost is finally allowed to float away, leaving the house as we, the audience, leave the theater.
The positive moment of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.
— Adorno
Though by this definition, the possibility of experiencing theater at home is not necessarily invalidated. Conformism has penetrated so deeply, that even (perhaps especially?) while home alone, the streaming viewer can still feel themselves swayed by the crowd.
