I'm sure by now, most are familiar with the idea that, in the uncanny words of Emily Dickinson
'One need not be a chamber to be haunted' – that a person can be haunted
without the need for a ghost, even if we're given the suggestion of one.
A person can be haunted by their own experiences, their own thoughts, their past
and even when the danger should have past, its influence can remain.
And while this image of the 'haunted house' can often act as a spatial double for the
mind, and the idea of the familiar rendered unfamiliar, of not quite being at home with yourself,
what about when we move away from the personal towards the haunting of
collective space, a space in between public and private.
In cinema, these hauntings seem to manifest differently, and in a way that more directly
parallels Dickinson's poem.
Here we are not terrorised by ghosts, even if they may be present in one way or another,
but rather, so it would seem, by the building itself and who we might become inside it.
These buildings are old, isolated, empty where we expect crowds of people or perhaps where
there once were – but these spaces aren't haunted by the ghostly figures we might associate
with the word, even if this image might still present itself.
In fact I'd say it's not that the building is haunted but that we're haunted by the building itself,
and there are few buildings more menacing than The Overlook Hotel
in Stephen King's 'The Shining', particularly as it appears in Stanley Kubrick's cinematic adaptation
it's impossible labyrinth-like structure seemingly watching, even pursuing.
And while the idea of ghosts is certainly conjured, the visions that dwell here seem
to exist between physical and metaphysical space, traces of past events that might
linger in the present.
[audio: The Shining] "When something happens it can leave a trace of itself behind."
"Say, like, if someone burns toast."
"Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind."
"I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel, and not all of them is good."
And what better place to explore such an ephemeral conception of haunting than a hotel,
a place that is itself defined by a kind of ephemeral existence, where people pass through,
a space that we occupy, that we live in, but only briefly.
This idea of the ephemeral is then frequently paired with that of duality – doubles, mirrors,
reflections that create a trace of the present. One that, like the visions projected by
The Overlook, is reliant on and responsive to the observer.
But the mirror also functions in a more uncanny manner, being, as Foucault describes:
And so, through this double, like a ghost, we are both here and somewhere else,
physical and projected, the self and the other.
It is this other that is often portrayed as the true self, the reflection revealing what
the physical body is able to hide.
It's in this space that identity can begin to break down.
The film 'Last Year at Marienbad' takes place in a similarly serpentine hotel, and
uses mirrors to simultaneously fracture identity and physical space, drawing a connection between
the characters' consciousness and the hotel's infrastructure.
Here intangible space breaks free of the mirror, and the conversation continues as past, present,
reality and memory merge together:
The shifting architecture of the vast hotel provides a visual echo of the characters'
confused and competing memories – where one says they've met before and the other
denies it.
And just as we can't be sure of space and time, we can't be sure of which character to believe,
and it seems, neither can they, and without being able to trust our own
memory, our identity increasingly fractures until we become unavoidably lost.
The hotel provides the perfect parameters for this fracturing, not only in its capacity
for expansive hallways, but also its position between public and private.
In addition to yet another prevalent use of mirrors and its own type of haunting, Alfred
Hitchcock's 'Psycho' makes both a clear distinction between these public and private
spaces – the private, shadowed house that looms over the public and, now, notorious,
Bates Motel – and complicates this distinction with its voyeuristic themes and cinematography,
and it's only a matter of time before the dark, undisclosed 'private' space
violently collides with the 'public'.
Unlike 'The Shining', the 'ghosts' here are not fleeting visions
but rather hide in plain sight.
Images of taxidermy, a grotesque kind of resurrection and preservation,
where the dead won't stay dead.
[audio: Psycho] "I won't have you bringing strange young girls in for supper!"
"My mother there?"
"But she's harmless."
"She's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds."
But here the past is shown to be anything but harmless.
Despite moving ever further from it, the past still has a hold on the present.
It influences our actions, our surroundings, and there are visual reminders all around us.
So, if this past lingers in the present through the physical space it shares, then this gives
rise to another fear – a fear cultivated in the wake of merging dichotomies, past-present,
public-private, self-other, – that as we become a part of this space, it is now a part of us.
[audio: Session 9] "already an itty bitty piece of this shit may have gotten into your lungs, man.
"It incubates in your lungs, and tissue begins to grow around it like a... like a pearl."
"Like a timebomb."
The 2001 horror film 'Session 9' isn't set in a hotel, but the abandoned psychiatric
hospital entered by a small asbestos removal team is certainly comparable to the grand
exteriors of The Overlook or the hotel in Marienbad – and it's the most overt in
its suggestion that these sprawling corridors and rows of empty rooms reflect how we too
might not be so singular.
[audio: Session 9] "Billy, where does the princess live?
"In the tongue … because she's always talking, sir."
These taped sessions of a patient with dissociative identity disorder, with three alters, provide
an explicit parallel to the fractured identity we see in the characters of these films,
a fracturing that somehow seems almost inevitable in the shadow of such vast, oppressive, foreboding
architecture.
[audio: Session 9] "And where do you live, Billy?
"I live in the eyes."
"Because I see everything, sir."
There's a fear that we could be consumed by this space and its history
that we could lose our hold on our own identity in the way that the unnamed characters in 'Last
Year at Marienbad' never really get a hold of theirs – even credited at the end as
only A, X, and M.
Early in Session 9, a character jokes about
how the only side effect of a lobotomy is a black eye, easily treated with sunglasses
but the reality reveals the violence of that which at first might seem invisible
engraving the effect of trauma onto the surface.
The haunted house is the classic model for the familiar rendered unfamiliar
but the act of occupying a space in between public and private is trying to force to unfamiliar
to be familiar – trying to claim a space as our own, a claim that's far more tenuous,
a space that's far more outside our control.
{audio: Session 9] "Hello, doc." "Simon?"
And this fear of empty spaces that seem as
though they should be occupied, really arises from the sense that these spaces are not empty
at all, for, as film critic Kathleen Murphy puts it, 'these empty spaces are heavy with old air'.
Traces of the past linger here as they do in us. The past will not stay dead and
this ghostly force threatens to appear on the surface at any moment and take over
not as a ghost, but as something inside us,
inside everyone.
[audio: Session 9] "And where do you live, Simon?"
"I live in the weak and the wounded, doc."
Hey everyone, thanks for watching.
This one was a bit different as I usually just focus on one film,
but this was a lot of fun to do and probably about time I, you know, mix things up a bit as I've
been doing this for nearly a year now.
So let me know what you thought and I hope I'll see you next time.
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