Memory, Introspection, & Grief: A Ghost Story
These days, I feel like a ghost—bound, alone, to my home, moving restlessly from room to room, looking for something that I’ve lost. Its shape, its name, skitters at the edge of my vision, but it always vanishes just as fast. It feels like there is a hole where my future used to be. But in this extended pause to life and everything the way I—and the rest of the world—know it, there is something other than the ash of scorched futures drifting through the air: There is the deep, magnetic draw of self-reflection, manifesting through unexpected moments of meditation and memory. And though I would first and foremost consider A Ghost Story (written and directed by David Lowery) an unblinking, compassionate look at grief, there are also beautiful moments of introspection through the lens of memory.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
A Ghost Story opens with a single quote:
“Whatever hour you woke, there was a door shutting.”
–Virginia Woolf, “A Haunted House”
The first scene unfolds on a golden-lit, cozy shot of a husband and wife. There are a few moments of marital bliss present before the wife, M (Rooney Mara), voices her fear about something left unspecified. The husband, C (Casey Affleck), encouragingly tells her to not be scared.
As the conversation flows on, M details how she would leave notes places, “so if I ever wanted to go back, there would be a piece of me waiting.” There is some part of us that longs to assert its existence in a space—if not establish a substantial pause, a sliver of frozen time within it—by leaving these kinds of marks. Like carving your initials in the trunk of a tree. I was here. But our ownership of time and space is only ever fleeting at most, something that can never truly come to full fruition despite all of our fighting to the contrary. Soon enough, these moments, too, become memory.
The clincher, here, though, is that she never feels the compulsion to go back for those paper pieces of her past. The notes were mostly old rhymes or poems, or things she liked about living in a certain house, or what she wanted to remember about it, as a way to hang on to the good times. In a strange moment, her husband asks her, “Why did you leave all those houses?” She responds: “’Cause I didn’t have a choice.”
“We see that even when someone has died, our relationship with and memories of that person do not stop. ”
These moments, constantly in a state of flux of one into another, highlight that even though we may attempt to build material bastions against this passing away, time itself is perpetually eroding these attempts, leaving only memory. But in this, there is a kind of mercy and interior eternality: Though the moment may be gone, the memory lives on in you.
The opening scene of A Ghost Story highlights the critical ache of all that goes unsaid and issues left unresolved, how haunted we are by the fractures in our own relationships. The two of them are preparing to move—itself, again, a time of transition—and at no point do we see the husband offering to help or doing his part. M asks C about finding movers for a piano; he is distracted and barely listening, dismissing her question with the idea that they can just get a new one. She drags a heavy piece of garbage to the curb alone, something that is clearly a two-person job. To make matters worse, the sidewalk runs out before it reaches the road. She is left to hoof it over the grass to the edge of the road. The sidewalk—a support for safe walking that we always assume to be present, that we don’t even think about—cuts out while she must continue carrying the load.
Later, an abrupt, unexpected sound from the piano indicates that the two of them are not alone. She is frightened, but he hesitates to offer her comfort, though he is eventually up to the task.
The scene shifts to the early dawn light and a glimpse of smoke. The presence of a ghost? No. The aftermath of a car crash that has killed C—a tragic event made all the worse by the fact that it occurs right outside of their own driveway. We are just a few moments away from being present for the accident.
It is around this time that for me, the film aspect ratio, color palette, and the shots that linger on certain moments for seemingly far too long, are thrown into stark relief. Everything about the composition is reminiscent of looking at old Polaroids, or watching an old family movie. With a boxy frame and rounded edges, along with colors that seem to evoke a sense of pictures from the ’70s or so, it becomes clear that the viewer is a kind of ghost themselves, haunting someone else’s story, someone else’s memories.
The nuance of distance soon becomes felt as the story continues to unfold. In the cold, sterile light of a hospital room, the camera remains at a respectful distance as M must go through the process of identifying her husband’s body. We cannot make out the details for the most part, but the distance itself is evocative of being the one stuck at the threshold of a room, caught in stasis between maintaining a respectful distance to offer one’s support, while also waiting anxiously to see what happens next. The moment passes on and she leaves. But the camera does not follow M; it remains fixed on the white-enshrouded body of C on the gurney. He sits up, draped in the sheet, a ghost in an almost cartoonish, playful sense of the word. He is soon ambulatory and encounters a galactic door—a way out from this—but does not pass through. The door closes. He walks home as if nothing has changed.
What strikes me about this is that hauntings are so often defined by being connected to one place. In haunted house movies, the home is usually the site of a grisly murder that must be avenged, or some other equally horrid trauma that must be laid to rest. But C is seemingly allowed to move, and is still naturally drawn to home. This is not so much the return of the repressed, but more the return of a lonely spirit seeking the familiar in a new state of being. In only leaving my home for essential activities, my own emotional orientation points—seeing my mother, my friends—are now far distant from me, hidden by an inexpressible, invisible veil of mortality.
Later, his wife is on the floor of their kitchen, eating a pie her sister left her with an abandon that echoes the void that has been blown in the middle of her life. This single shot lasts for several minutes—a distinct focus on what real, true grief looks like. Not what you see at the funeral, or in front of friends or family. The length of time this shot is focused on M seemingly elbows its way past the tasteful; some part of me wants to look away to give this woman the time to grieve in private. But no: The shot holds the viewer, almost in thrall, to bear witness to this grief. To be present, aware, and open. This extended, uncomfortable encounter with grief is a nonjudgmental, filmic moment of meditation.
At one point, while she is still grieving, he attempts to touch her as a gesture of kindness. Instead of being comforted, she winds up crying.
In the story, following hot on the heels of the characteristics of ghost stories, time starts to slip out of joint for C. In one shot, he stands in the living room, watching his wife seemingly stuck in a cycle of repeatedly leaving day after day after day. There is no time between these departures. Winter moves on to spring. For the first time, he sees a ghost in the house next door. Greetings are shared. “I’m waiting for someone,” the other ghost says. C asks who. The other spirit cannot remember. A spirit without memory—completely decontextualized—is a terribly sad thing.
M’s life moves on, as it must. She brings someone new home. The reason for C’s emotional restraint in the face of her previous tears suddenly becomes clear: His expression of anger makes the lights flicker and books fall from the shelves. The scene flashes back to a serious discussion that, again, goes unresolved due to his unwillingness to communicate further. Instead, he has her listen to a song he has been working on.
Ghostly wailing echoes through the song: “Did she die in the night, leave you alone?” Time slips back to his wife, now, listening to the song. Music seems to collapse the time between these two points, a memory almost becoming something of a repeated event. But this itself is the mark of an end; from here, she continues sorting her affairs in order to prepare for the move, leaving a note folded in a crack in a door frame. He does not follow her to continue the haunting. He stays behind, scratching at where she left the note—one last piece of memory.
The wheel of time in the house continues to turn. A family moves in and is subsequently frightened away by his flinging of dishes and slamming of cupboards. He is outraged by a picture of the family happy together. Time slips into focus at a party, where one attendee monologues at length that certain parts of the past will continue to linger in human memory, even past civilization’s eventual end. According to him, in the end, the Big Crunch will eventually bring everything back to a singular point. There will literally be nothing left. Hauntings focused around repetition can be classified as a form of memory, of the past repeating itself—an act that is largely benign if somewhat unnerving at times. But here, with anger that tinges this haunting more of a return of the repressed, C makes the lights flicker. The past will not be forgotten.
In the end, he runs through the entire wheel of time itself, to an ultra-futuristic high-tech city, back to the beginning of things all over again. A young pioneer girl leaves her own notes behind. Her family ends up being massacred, left to molder back into the grass. He is the only one left to remember. And sure enough, the wheel turns back around again: He sees the two of them looking at the house, interested in moving in. Time has folded back in on itself; he is haunting his old hauntings. Eventually, he can access the note. Once he reads the words we cannot see, he vanishes, a beautiful underscoring of the presence of absence to be found in ghost stories. When we pivot this perspective, we see that even when someone has died, our relationship with and memories of that person do not stop. Our relationship with the dead changes with the passage of time.
A Ghost Story beautifully demonstrates both the gift and curse of time: What we love most is in a constant state of passing away, but we still have the time be present in this moment, to focus on our loved ones, to say what needs to be said. Like the sidewalk that vanishes before it reaches the road, the support—the clear way forward we always assumed would be there—suddenly turns into rough, weedy ground. We may not remember the transition, but now we are keenly aware that something is missing.
Being wholly present provides deep roots for memory, which, in turn, can be a place of solace and comfort for all your days to come. Being in the present moment—attending to what its front of you right now, wholeheartedly—is a form of meditation. The present is all that exists, and the future is just a ghost.
As teacher Ram Dass said: “Remember, be here now.”
Article written by Laura Kemmerer
Laura tuned into horror with an interest in what these movies and books can tell us about ourselves and what societies fear. She is most interested in horror focused around the supernatural, folklore, the occult, Gothic themes, haunted media, landscape as a character, and hauntology (focusing on lost or broken futures).
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