In
a post written earlier this month, I briefly touched on my feelings about Steven Soderbergh's
Presence, but that hasn't ended my thinking about the movie, especially as I've listened to it discussed on podcasts and edited my own writer's review.
Before I go any further, let me get this out of the way:
Spoilers for Presence to follow.
Before I'd had any of these experiences with others engaging with the movie, though, I had this pressing question:
Just why, oh why, was a dead girl's ghost haunting a house her friend did not yet live in?
You shouldn't have read this far if you haven't seen the movie, so I also shouldn't need to refresh you on the plot, but let's just say you've already forgotten Presence. (I might argue that it is not as memorable as it should be.)
The film opens with a camera flitting through an empty house -- up stairs, down stairs, around corners, through vacant rooms. Before any actors appear on screen, we get the idea that this is the POV of a ghost, moving quietly through the space as if walking on ballet slippers. And, I'm sorry to say, this was as scared as the film ever made me, just putting myself in the shoes -- or whatever footwear it was -- of this ghost.
Soon afterward, we see a real estate agent arrive to show the house to -- and this part I really do forget -- either just a couple of adults, played by Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, or also to their teenage children, played by Callina Liang and Eddy Maday. Whether or not the teenagers are present for this showing (no pun intended), we meet them soon enough, because the family does buy the house and move in. And all the while we continue to see the ghost watching them at the middle distance of about ten feet away, sometimes closer, sometimes running quickly to another part of the house entirely.
As the story goes on, we learn that not only can the teenage girl detect some sort of presence in the house, but that this presence is actually the ghost of her friend who died recently, supposedly of an overdose, but, we learn later on, actually because she was murdered. How she knows this ghost is her friend is not important, because we suspend disbelief in a movie like this -- on some things. We know, from the beginnings of the traditions of oral storytelling down through the ages to the moving image, that there are certain people who have a sort of spiritual communion with the dead, and they just "know things."
The next thing, I would argue, is the thing we cannot accept.
If we are to accept that the girl, Chloe by name, believes this spirit is that of her dead friend, we also have to accept that Chloe is correct, even though we never get any proof that it's actually her friend.
So again, I ask:
Just why, oh why, was a dead girl's ghost haunting a house her friend did not yet live in?
For someone whose scripts are as tight as those of Steven Soderbergh, who rarely asks questions he does not answer, this seems like quite the oversight indeed.
I thought for a moment this house was empty because it was where Chloe's friend had lived, so when she died, the distraught family had to move elsewhere to start again. Too many bad memories.
But if that were the case, then surely Chloe would know that her friend used to live there, and it would have been commented on. (And, of course, way too weird to actually go through with the purchase.)
Plus, it seems rather unlikely, though not impossible, that a family would move into a house in the town where they already lived; presumably they'd have to live close by if the two teenage girls had been friends. And then of course, if they lived in the same town, there would be no way not to know this was the house where a girl had just died of a drug overdose (or so they think at the time).
Then there is the possibility that the ghost followed Chloe there, but the sequence of events is wrong for this.
So if you are looking for an explanation beyond something lame like coincidence or randomness, the only thing I could come up with was the idea that the ghost's perception of time is not linear. Either that means the ghost could predict the future, that her friend was going to live there, which seems like an unlikely skill for a ghost, or it was just that the ghost could see all times simultaneously, and placed herself in this house in order to communicate with the girl who would soon live there. If pressed on the question himself, Soderbergh might offer some explanation along these lines.
The thing is, there is no real evidence of this in Presence. All the events we see in the film are portrayed chronologically (maybe more on that in a minute), and only knowing a source of obvious inspiration for this film -- David Lowery's A Ghost Story -- would we even be tempted to offer up such an explanation.
But if this film is like A Ghost Story, it violates one cardinal rule of that film, also a cardinal rule of real estate: location, location, location. As you know if you saw that film, Casey Affleck's roaming ghost -- really just a sheet with eye holes -- can roam no further than the borders of the property, and roams more metaphorically across the eons, on the same plot of land (a la Robert Zemeckis' Here), in the past, present and future.
The spirit in Presence, on the other hand, seems at least once to have been able to move from one location to another, and that's just too many skills to have if she, like the aliens in Arrival, can also see all times at once. There's no satisfying explanation for why she came here rather than staying in her own house, unless it was, indeed, just to save her friend from the romantic interest who seduced her with the intention of murdering her.
So I don't really like any of these explanations.
But then I got another explanation.
When I got the review from my writer, I finally asked him about this apparent quandary, because I didn't want to ask him before then for fear of biasing his writing. (He loved the film, giving it a 9/10 on our rating scale.)
His response:
"I think the ghost was her brother!"
Well, duh. Forehead slap.
I knew the ghost at the end was her brother, but my apparently really dumb and surface-level reading of what happened was that the first ghost, having accomplished her goal of waking up the brother in time for him to save his sister from getting murder and go out the window with the murderer, had moved on to the next plane of existence. And that she had been replaced by the ghost of the brother, just deceased. Just because we are getting the movie from the perspective of the ghost, it doesn't mean it has to be the same ghost the whole time.
But that's just what Steven Soderbergh wanted me to think, because I am viewing events chronologically, and because I am naturally inclined to believe the impressions of a person sensitive to paranormal activity, because years of watching movies have told me I should believe them.
My critic reminded me that the psychic character had told the family that a ghost could even be haunting the house "from the future," a detail I conveniently forgot or possibly waved off at the time, like "Yeah that's one of those things psychics say."
So I guess in this line of thinking, it was the brother all along, trying to alter events in his own past. It also gives a second meaning to the title ("Present(s)"?) and it also explains why the ghost is in a house with which it would not otherwise have a connection.
I still have questions though.
Now, you can never fully disentangle the cause and effect of time travel, though many films have tried. If the brother is indeed haunting the home from the future after his own death, he would know that he had, indeed, succeeded in going out the window with the murderer. When the spirit urgently runs down the stairs to awaken the previously alive version of himself, so he can carry out saving his sister, it's basically just acting out a preordained series of events, which is not as satisfying as him making the conscious choice. I guess at some point he did make the conscious choice, though you could argue, he only made it because his future dead self forced his undead self to do it. Which is still a choice, but it's only a choice that's possible from the choice already having been made.
Then I thought about how it would really be interesting if, in some iteration of events, the brother had not saved his sister, meaning she was dead and he was alive. Then it could only be her spirit that was in the house, going back and trying to change events so that she lives and he dies. If that's the case, though, it's extremely problematic from the prospective of audience sympathy. Any character who goes about trying to save their own skin and sacrificing someone else, especially a loved one, in the process, is an asshole, and beyond redemption. So even though that's sort of a cool from a "multiple timelines, cause and effect" perspective, it is almost certainly not what was intended.
Another thing I didn't properly interpret was what the final shot meant, where we see the spirit ascending from the house into the sky, and go to credits. Because I was fixated on the idea that the brother's spirit had only just become the occupant of the house, I didn't think the camera ascending in the sky could be his perspective, because his sacrifice would have to continue by staying in the house if he had just exchanged places with the spirit who had been haunting the house, which I had continued to think was the dead friend. So if anything, it would be the dead friend ascending to the heavens here, though I have to admit this explanation was lost on me as well. I kind of just thought it was a cool way to end the movie.
So I guess this means the house will no longer be haunted for its next occupant ... but how soon will that be? Now an actual dramatic death has occurred in this house -- out the window of this house -- so the next buyer might be slow to buy it.
And of course, this cannot be construed as a happy ending for the family, who has now lost their son, and whose daughter -- even if she looks sort of upbeat in the end -- has further trauma piled on top of losing her friend. (Was she friends with both of the murdered girls? I think she only references one of them.) Surely her mental state cannot actually be better after the death of her brother on top of that? Unless she was somehow privy to this time loop conundrum involving how her dead brother's ghost woke up her living brother and prompted him to save her from her prospective killer?
And then this killer's fate doesn't sit well with me, not any better than his mere existence as a plot device, which I actually think is the most troubling aspect of Presence (though I suppose necessary for the story Soderbergh wants to tell). I guess the idea is that Chloe was conscious enough, in the moments after he had drugged her but before he had fallen asleep, to hear his various serial killer rantings and ravings, enough to tell police after the fact that he had confessed to the other murders. But then she's just a single person testifying -- a single, potentially depressed person who is recovering from the death of her own friend and brother and might not be the most trustworthy source. I guess we have to think that some evidence somewhere will back up her claim, as it seems like this teenage killer was getting careless, considering that his plan seems to have been to leave the brother alive, and the brother could just tell everyone that he'd had a drink with the guy just before he inexplicably went to sleep and woke up to find his sister dead. Sloppy, even for a teenager.
Then there's one more wild theory that isn't supported by the text but I did consider for a moment. What if the brother was dead the whole time? That would explain the mother's fixation on him prior to that, effectively her own sort of depressed mental break, talking to him when he isn't there. Maybe this whole thing is somehow her own fantasy, or the fantasy of the father, who always wanted the son to be a better man?
I thought the end result of my journey into the potential interpretations of Presence might result in a retroactive elevation of the three stars out of five I gave the movie on Letterboxd. I don't actually change my initial star rating once I've entered it, but a film can change in my mind, and that change can inform how I rank it in my upcoming year-end list (upcoming in 11 months) or on Flickchart. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a recent -- well, relatively recent -- example of that, as I initially didn't care for it, awarding in only two stars on Letterboxd, until it became a four-star movie for me on my second viewing.
But I'm not sure it has done that with Presence. Any new interpretation I get has a disappointing downside to it, once you start to pick away at the rest of what's there.
I guess it's a subjective thing how much you care about these cause and effect questions, given that if a time travel movie -- you're a lot more likely to encounter them there than in a ghost story -- works for you, you basically disregard them entirely. So in the end, maybe Presence didn't really work for me all that well, even though I absolutely loved and was enthralled by the technique for most of it.
Or maybe it's just that it's always going to pale in comparison -- pun intended -- to my #1 of 2017, A Ghost Story.
It is, ultimately, disappointing to me that only the most literal interpretation of the movie was available to me at the time I saw it, so much so that a week later, once my writer had written his review, I was still pregnant with the burning question I posed twice at the start of this piece about the friend haunting a house where she never lived and where her friend did not yet live. If this theory could so easily have holes poked in it, how could it possibly by the most likely narrative explanation for a filmmaker who has always had a fairly stringent approach to storytelling, which manifests itself in movies that are likelier to run 85 to 95 minutes than 120 to 130?
The good news, though, is that I do regularly have deeper interpretations of other films. I don't always go for the "sucker's explanation," the most obvious interpretation of the text that points you to the most shallow but least satisfying explanation. I think it has to do with how much the movie engages you in the first place, and I think by the end, I had already turned on Presence a bit.
Because there are certain things that ultimately feel like failures of the script, no matter how you interpret the larger story and where it ends up. For example, there's the whole bit where the father is considering leaving the mother because he doesn't want to be an unwitting co-conspirator in whatever financial chicanery she's involved in with her work. We never end up learning what this chicanery is, nor do we see the father take the next step toward leaving the mother. So that thread just never pays off, and it seems like someone like Soderbergh should have recognized that.
Well, Presence has caused me to write nearly 3,000 words about it on my blog, so that's proof of it doing what a movie should do: engage me. And who knows, maybe this is only the beginning of my relationship with the movie, and there's a lot more interpreting still to do.
