The Women in Waiting: Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper and Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story

Abstract

The article analyses Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016) and Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story (2017) as post-horrors. Post-horror, sometimes called slow, quiet, or ambient horror, focuses on creating atmospheres rather than chains of events. Its themes of family and loss are often focalised through a single, female character. Sound design becomes key in creating auras of suspension as the films tend to omit dramatic events and focus on their aftermaths, showing the characters struggling to re-establish their daily routines. Assayas’ Personal Shopper begins after Maureen (Kristen Stewart) has lost her twin brother and Polanski’s Based on a True Story – after the suicidal death of Delphine’s (Emmanuelle Seigner) mother. In both films the loss is not followed by mourning but by what both characters verbalise as waiting. The films foreground the scenes of waiting: from the most mundane of waiting at the train station to the most sophisticated of waiting for the spectre. Spectres are waited on and appear, manifesting the fluidity between life and death rather than the linearity and the acceptance of loss typical for mourning. Waiting for the spectre is the main trope in Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, where he imagines it as an ethics of responsibility towards that which does not exist according to traditional western ontology. He argues for a relational ethics that takes seriously the agency of such absent others, suggesting that ethics should reach beyond the immediate and the present. The figure of the spectre, through its hauntings, is both present and absent and, according to Derrida, tele-technologies like cinema were invented to explore such disturbances in time and space. The two films emphasise sound as a way to communicate with spectres, playing with Gothic and Victorian motifs of female mediumism, as they present the women’s waiting as transcending the personal (and interpersonal) and reaching towards a cosmic awe or terror that can be analysed through a combination of what Bauman called the ‘cosmic fear’ of negative globalisation and Lovecraft – cosmic indifference.

Keywords:

• Olivier Assayas
• Roman Polanski
• post-horror
• hauntology
• globalisation

Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story (2017), adapted from Delphine de Vigan’s novel (2015) and co-written with Olivier Assayas, premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival where, a year earlier, Assayas presented his own Personal Shopper (2016). The characters of both films lead what could be called globalised lives, even though only some of them traverse the globe in person. Polanski’s Delphine (Emmanuelle Seigner) barely leaves Paris, yet she needs to cope with her partner François (Vincent Perez) travelling around the world as a literary journalist and her children studying abroad. Her own impact is also global as her novels are translated all around the world and she receives constant emails from fans and publishers. Assayas’ Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is an American in Paris where she works as a titular personal shopper for Kyra (Nora Waldstätten) – a celebrity who travels and is photographed globally wearing clothes chosen and delivered by her assistant.

The films’ focus on movement in a globalised world brings to mind Zygmunt Bauman’s assertion that in a globalised world one option that ‘we are not free to choose is to stop moving ‘(2004, 70). Thence, when the two main heroines, Assayas’ Maureen and Polanski’s Delphine, decide to stop moving their partners have troubles understanding their choices as anything but laziness and hesitation. ‘I know you, you just hesitate’ – François says to Delphine, touching on the two things marked by Jacques Derrida: ontologisation and semanticisation or the need to feel that we know the other. In ‘Specters of Marx’ (1994) Derrida combines this critique of ontology with the critique of conventional mourning. Mourning, he argues, ‘consists in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead (all ontologization, all semanticization). One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge [Il faut le savoir]’ (2006, 9). Referring to Derrida, Mark Fisher argues that a twenty-first century culture is marked by anachronism and inertia created, sustained and ‘buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of “newness,” of perpetual movement’ (2014, 6). The ethical challenge of hauntology, Derrida argues, is to wait for the spectres or with them. To make them present or to impose on them the binary opposition of presence and absence is, according to him, equal to violence.

The figure of the spectre, through its hauntings, is both present and absent and, according to Derrida, tele-technologies like cinema were invented to explore such disturbances in time and space. He describes the spectre as ‘distinct from ghost’ because the spectre ‘speaks of the spectacle’ (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 115). Its visibility stems from frequenting a place and this visibility ‘is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility’ (ibid.) Maureen’s partner, Gary (Ty Olwin) also resides on the other side of the globe from her, in the Middle East, and the couple uses Skype to stay in touch. Digital media and forms of communication play a large role in both films as they enable contact between people scattered around the globe and, gradually, between entities that seem more cosmic and otherworldly in their scope.

I analyse both films as post-horrors and situate the sub-genre in the context of what Bauman calls ‘cosmic fear’ and H.P. Lovecraft – ‘cosmic horror.’ Post-horror (Bridges 2018) is known for focusing on lingering, eerie sounds and plots emphasising exhaustion in the face of overwhelming fear of no clear origin, what can be compared to H.P. Lovecraft’s stories populated by creatures hidden in the dark or too vast (and constantly growing) to be appreciated in their entirety. For example, in ‘From beyond’ there is the shocking realization that ‘strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows’, not just alongside but within our own (Lovecraft, 2004, 87). Similar permeability of borders and formless vastness on the political level is noticed by Bauman as typical for what he calls the liquid modernity with its main symptoms of chronic anxiety and ‘cosmic fear.’ ‘The frightened, wan and transient human being is faced with the enormity of the everlasting universe’ argues Bauman (2004, 71). This type of pre-modern ‘cosmic fear’ as the horror of ‘awesome, impenetrably mysterious, intractable Nature’ is in our times, according to the sociologist, turned by politicians and religious leaders into ‘official fear’, which ‘unlike its “cosmic” original, is not however natural, “inborn,” instinctual or intuitive’ (Bauman in Haugaard 2008, 120). ‘It needs to be artificially produced’, he explains, ‘by the powers that be and (…) rulers need to produce and intensify an “official fear” while presenting themselves as the (possibly the sole) salvation’ (ibid.).

The ‘cosmic fear’ and its modern reincarnation - an ‘official fear’ - work as fears of the unknown and through the terror of uncertainty, causing feelings of helplessness in front of something that ‘transcends our powers of comprehension, communication and action’ (Bauman 2004, 72).

Ambient and Global Horrors

Post-horror, sometimes called slow, quiet, or ambient horror, focuses on creating atmospheres rather than on structuring chains of events. David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) set in post-industrial Detroit is often considered the first and one of the most important examples of this new horror wave. The sub-genre’s characteristic themes of family and loss are often focalised through a single, female character and the films emphasise sound and its lack of ontological certainty rather than the visuals. In this article I argue that the sub-genre has resources for dramatizing and mediating fears, which can be both psychic and social similarly to those mentioned by Bauman above.

Post-horror’s focus on sound and on the aftermaths of events rather than on the events themselves enables the films’ hinting at the violence hidden within everyday life, even within apparent caring acts, whenever they are founded on what Derrida calls semanticisation – the need to know and to impose knowledge on the other.

The genre’s characteristic exploration of the institution of family and loss often leads toward discovering the violence intrinsic to mourning and the mourner’s necessary submission to the finality of loss as well as to the violence hidden in the institution of family itself. The films tend to begin after traumatic or life-changing events and focus on the character struggling to re-establish her daily routine and the sense of self. These characters experience everyday life with difficulty, making the viewers also experience it differently, perhaps. Since ‘to become insomniac, love-struck or bulimic is to enter into another everydayness’ – observed Henri Lefebvre (2004, 22).

Assayas’ and Polanski’s films create the atmospheres in which the lack of centre and the lack of grounding are almost palpable. The characters have several homes, none of which feels like an intimate home space described by Bachelard as radiating with ‘initimate immensity’ and a sense of protection (1994, 201–220). The ‘shift from narrative to atmosphere’ is typical for post-horror according to Church (2021, 23), who argues that ‘ambient horror uses sound to intensify and make present something without visualising it.’ Assayas describes his film as a kind of mash-up showcasing cinema as a permeable medium, able to unite other arts and elicit physical reactions from viewers that would ‘echo’ within their whole bodies (Assayas in Kasman 2016). Polanski also often quotes atmosphere while describing his films, saying: ‘Very early on I was fascinated by the moods and atmospheres which emanate from places and people. People in certain situations in moments of terror, for example especially interest me. They live more intensely’ (Polanski quoted in Cronin 2005, 59). ‘The atmosphere of a film’, the director explained, ‘is the most important thing’ and ‘a good film has to be an object that can almost be physically touched, like a sculpture perhaps’ (ibid., 59).

The appreciation of atmosphere as something haptic and experienced bodily one can also find in Lovecraft’s stories and in his theoretical writings where the author argues that atmosphere, unlike plots, enables the writer to make the reader feel ‘a sense of expansion’, often terrifying ‘feeling of magnification in the cosmos’ and ‘our inevitable insignificance’ and therefore hopelessness (1971, 300). ‘Strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown’ (1973, 25), he argued, and based on this assertion theorized his understanding of cosmic fear that transcends the internal horrors of madness as well as the external horror of the ‘mundanely gruesome’ (1973, 27). In an often quoted definition Lovecraft describes cosmic fear as ‘a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces’, which is followed by no more than ‘a hint’ of ‘suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos’ (1973, 28). From Lovecraft’s perspective, cosmic fear reaches beyond the individual but one cannot tell towards what, thence there can be only a ‘hint’ that it relates to Nature, but no one can know for sure. Lovecraft also compared this dreading fear of the unknown to ‘a subtle attitude of awed listening’ (ibid.) to formless darkness and vastness with no boundaries, which spreads and grows, overwhelms and overtakes.

Similarly formless are liquid phenomena identified by Bauman as typical for what he calls the negative globalisation. Globalisation for him is the most important change in human history (Bauman 2013) and what he calls the negative, unregulated globalisation, is unchecked by any political entities because, he argues, they remain operating on the local or state levels, leaving the global to the businesses and corporations. ‘Ours’, he writes, ‘is a wholly negative globalization: unchecked, unsupplemented and uncompensated for by a “positive’” counterpart which is still a distant prospect at best, though according to some prognoses already a forlorn chance’(Bauman, 2006, 96). The liquid phenomena do not easily, or for long, hold their shape. They are not fixed in either space or time. Most importantly, liquids tend to dissolve obstacles in their path. Thus, the myriad liquid phenomena associated with negative globalisation, like the liquid power, are hard-pressed to maintain any particular form. This liquidity, combined with global vastness, creates, according to Bauman, official fear, which he relates to Michail Bakhtin’s vision of the ‘cosmic fear’ - a type of the pre-­modern horror of the impenetrable Nature.

Waiting, Not Mourning

Assayas’ Personal Shopper begins after Maureen has lost her twin brother and Polanski’s Based on a True Story – after the suicidal death of Delphine’s mother. In both films the loss is not followed by mourning but by what both characters verbalise as waiting. The films foreground the scenes of waiting: from the most mundane of waiting at the train station to the most sophisticated of waiting for the spectre. Spectres are waited on and appear, manifesting the layering and fluidity of life and death rather than the linearity and the acceptance of loss typical for mourning. Waiting for the spectre is the main trope in Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, where he describes it as simultaneously the remembrance of the past and the imagining of the future, since the spectre as a revenant stands for both a legacy or an inheritance and a promise. The spectre and its typical mode of being in space (haunting) are created through returning. Spectral presence is then performative as it exists only in movement and repetition. ‘To haunt’ in old French and English used to mean: to frequent, to inhabit or to cohabit with, suggesting that haunting was not considered supernatural but mundane, although its meaning always seemed to exceed the ontological oppositions between absence and presence, the visible and the invisible. Appearance through haunting constitutes the concept of the presence of that which is absent, which then, Derrida argues, can be related to other concepts as ‘to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. (…) beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology’ (2006, 161).

Spectres in Fisher’s version of sonic hauntology come to signify the processes of being haunted by the future that was expected yet cancelled in the past. In his writings Fisher points out the suspension of the motherhood represented in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) as a metaphor for the neoliberal culture suspended in the eternal present, not able to imagine any alternative ways of governing and often not even conscious of this inertia. The future has been, as he puts, ‘slowly cancelled’ (Fisher 2009, 22). This ‘disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live’ (Fisher, 2012, 16).

Assayas’ Maureen associates the idea of the future with her twin brother who died. ‘He really considered his future’, she describes Lewis to her doctor, explaining that the brother was about to set up his own carpenter’s workshop, get married and move into a big country house. It is implied that after his death she lost a confidence in any sort of planning as she explains to the doctor that she cannot commit to a visit every six months because she does not know where she is going to be in six months. At the moment, she is in Paris to conjure the spirit of Lewis by visiting what was supposed to be his family house and remains empty and run-down. The ruinous house – not yet a ruin and not a home either, represents the limbo state of the film as it embodies the specific hauntological temporality of nostalgia for the future as it was planned and envisioned in the past. The house was about to become a heart of the family business and now serves only as a reminder of the future in the past.For Delphine to imagine the future is equally difficult after her mother’s suicidal death as it is suggested that the writer also experiences suicidal thoughts and contemplates her mother’s future (or the lack of thereof) as what might awaits her. Delphine is drawn to a newly-met Elle (Eva Green) because the latter is childless and single while her own children moved out, leaving her with an unclear sense of how to relate to oneself if not through them. Delphine sees Elle as someone free and unrestrained, as if a parallel-world version of herself. Elle is not tied down by any commitments and therefore not in danger of any ‘abandonment’ as she jokingly describes her own situation. Elle is a perfect embodiment of Bauman’s liquidity: she never stops working, never misses a deadline, is in constant motion, can live out of a suitcase and – most importantly – has no attachments (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Co-Habitating: Elle (Eva Green) and Delphine (Emmanuelle Seigner).

Vanessa Dickerson (1996, 33) suggests that women were drawn to the Gothic form because ‘the ghost corresponded more particularly to the Victorian woman’s visibility and invisibility, her power and powerlessness, the contradictions and extremes that shaped female culture.’ In the nineteenth century spiritual séances spirits manifested their presence via acoustic effects like table-rapping and female mediums communicated with them often surrounded by neighbours and, subsequently, by larger crowds. These sounds, crossing the boundaries between private and public spaces, helped change the public perception of feminine passivity (sitting at home) into appreciation of feminine sensitivity to otherworldly sounds and of feminine body as what Steven Connor calls ‘the sonorous body’ (Connor 1999, 211). The movements of spirits that produced various acoustic effects changed the social perception of the medium’s inaction into an active physical presence. It also changed the perception of domestic space of order into the space for the interaction of women and spectres which was often touched by anarchy and sexual desire (Hamdan 2015). Hearing in the nineteenth-century spiritualist context, argues Hamdan (2015, 349), ‘represents a powerful feminist mechanism of social subversion.’

Post-horrors tend to remain ambiguous towards sound, which they present as both powerful and terrifying. For example, in A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II (2018, 2020, dir. J. Krasinski) sounds literally lead to annihilation as the film depicts rare human survivors, who hide from the blind but gifted with the superior sense of hearing extra-­terrestrials killing those they can hear. Sound equals death in the film, yet it also becomes a possibility of survival when it is discovered that ultra-high frequencies turned out to be deadly for the extra-terrestrials. Sound acts then both as a poison and a cure. The sub-genre often presents sounds as dangerous, pointing to their ephemeral, formless and therefore infectious nature. One cannot close one’s ears as easy as one’s eyes and sounds can detach from their sources and float in the air. The sonorous bodies in post-horror can therefore also be seen as infected, uncanny, formless or otherwise abject like Charlie (Milly Shapiro) in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), whose aural trademark, a characteristic clicking sound she makes with her tongue, can be heard even after she dies in a manifestation of haunting.

Modern Servants and Modern Spectres

Assayas’ Maureen is a titular personal shopper of Kyra, while Elle works as a ghostwriter when she meets a famous author Delphine and gradually gains her trust, becomes her friend, an unpaid personal assistant and a roommate, as well as the subject of Delphine’s new novel. Both personal shopping and ghostwriting are popular professions among creative workers, yet the people performing them remain mostly out of spotlight, unlike the well-known personas for whom they work. Maureen is forbidden from trying on Kyra’s clothes while she picks and chooses them. The two women barely ever meet in person. Kyra leaves Maureen cash in an envelope and Maureen places clothes in the wardrobe letting herself in and out, often several times a day. Most of the time they communicate on the phone. Even when they do happen to be at the flat at the same time, Maureen tries to remain largely invisible. Assayas shows her standing on the threshold to Kyra’s bedroom, attempting to gently attract the celebrity’s attention from there.

Figure 2. Absent presences: Maureen (Kristen Stewart) alone at Kyra’s flat.

Derrida’s spectre is ‘an uneasy model of subjectivity that comes about as a function of haunting’ (Derrida 2006, 136). ‘It is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood’, he argues (Derrida and Stiegler 2002, 34). The philosopher relates the figure to spectacle what makes Assayas’ Kyra – a celebrity, who hardly ever graces the screen with her presence, one of the possible spectres in Personal Shopper. The presence of her absence is key during Maureen’s visits to Kyra’s flat where she drops expensive clothes picked up in various places around Paris and London. Most of the time Kyra is not there but there are signs of her just being there: a handwritten note to Maureen, which is read out by, what the viewers can only assume by then, Kyra’s voice. The celebrity’s clothes are scattered around the bathroom and photos of her hung on the walls.

It is useful in this context to remember that the spectre whom Maureen conjures instead of her brother’s spirit is a female, whom she describes as ‘very violent.’ The scene of the conjuring happens before Kyra dies, murdered by her lover, and before Maureen finds her bloodied body, yet this going against the linear chronology would also be something that Derrida describes as typical for spectres who tend to ‘come by coming back’ (ibid.). Kyra’s presence throughout the film is manifested mostly through mentioning by other characters and through the photos that Maureen finds online and on which the celebrity wears the clothes picked up by the personal shopper earlier. Assayas withholds Kyra’s presence apart from the two short scenes and offers teasing gestures and spectral traces instead, like the left-out clothes or the note she leaves for Maureen. Hauntology holds ontology at bay and traces stand in for the figure herself. These traces touch upon what is withheld, point towards that which cannot be seen or grasped but remains felt and also heard as in the read-out note and the subsequent eerie noises that start to fill the spaces of both films.

Figure 3. ‘Transparent’ and breathless: Delphine freezes with fear in front of her laptop.

In the nineteenth century Gothic novels Maureen and Elle would be classed as servants, now they can be classed as precarious workers as their contracts are short-term or non-existent (in Maureen’s case) and they do not receive any social recognition for their work. Elle is forbidden from revealing and enjoying the profits of her work in public.’Confidentiality agreements are longer than the contracts themselves’ as she explains to Delphine. Hardt and Negri define precarious workers as ‘those without stable employment’, who ‘are often conceived as excluded, but really, though subordinated, they are completely within the global rhythms of bio- political production’ (2009, xi). Both Maureen and Elle embody what Bauman calls ‘the liquid-modern conditions of chronic precariousness and uncertainty’ (Bauman in Haugaard 2008, 112). However, seemingly more powerful characters of Kyra and Delphine also lack the sense of being able to control their lives, what is most shockingly staged by Assayas in the scene when Maureen finds her boss murdered with Kyra’s blood splattered around the white bed sheet and luxurious bathroom.

Figure 4. Lewis’ spirit is visible behind Maureen.

Promises, Promises

The spectres haunting Maureen and Delphine return to remind them about the promises they made in the past and are part of what Derrida called ‘a difficult inheritance’, which one needs to sift through and wait on. ‘If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent’, he argues, ‘we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause’ (2006, 18).

In Assayas’s Personal Shopper Maureen has an obvious difficulty in speaking with people close to her emotionally (though not geographically), like her boyfriend whose calls she avoids and finishes quickly. However, in a fashion confirming Bauman’s diagnosis of the liquid modernity as making brief, chance encounters somehow more imaginable than long-term relationships, she finds herself in a long conversation with a stranger Ingo (Lars Eidinger) when they both happen to be stuck at Kyra’s apartment, forced to wait for the celebrity to finish her conference phone call. Ingo starts the conversation simply asking what is she doing in Paris, to which Maureen answers with a set of short sentences that change the character of the would be small-talk situation: ‘My brother died in Paris. My twin brother.’ ‘So you’re staying here to mourn’ – assumes Ingo but Maureen disagrees, repeating that she does not mourn but waits to which the man, confused, asks: ‘what are you waiting for?’ ‘So we made this oath’, she describes, that ‘whoever died first would send the other a sign.’

Delphine also made a promise, according to Elle, who keeps reminding her about an interview she gave to ‘Le Monde des Livres’, promising the readers to write what she described as ‘the phantom book’: the book that would be even more personal and autobiographical than her last bestseller inspired by her mother. Elle argues that this is a promise that demands to be kept and that Delphine keeps making mistakes by delaying writing what she ‘must (dois) write’ and focusing on projects that ‘have nothing to do’ with her. ‘Only I know who you are and what you are able to write’ argues Elle, demanding a book that would be so profound in its scope, so personal and truthful that it would nullify the boundary between life and fiction. Interestingly, to blur these boundaries is a task of ghostwriters like Elle, who describes her profession, saying ‘I write for others’ but quickly corrects herself: ‘I write the lives of others.’ De Vigan’s novel is a story of a cohabitation of the intra-diegetic narrator and her subject, only, in agreement with Bauman’s liquidity, the who’s who keeps changing. Sometimes, it seems that it is Elle who is the narrator, at other times – Delphine. It would be impossible to directly translate this situation onto screen and therefore instead of that Polanski refers to a similar story of spectral cohabitation – Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in which Scottie (James Stewart) acts as a ghostwriter of Judy’s silenced subjectivity. Hauntings in both Vertigo and Based on a True Story are perhaps less supernatural and related more to the old meaning of the term which denotes cohabitation as both films deal with ‘disappearing, doubled, and remade women characters’ (Gottlieb 2005, 5). This type of haunting which turns a couple into a threesome is represented through Scottie’s attempts to re-model Judy (Kim Novak) into his lost love Madelaine (Kim Novak), without knowing that Madelaine existed only as a spectral, haunting presence manufactured and performed by Judy. In Based on a True Story this is how Delphine describes herself in the one argument she manages to have with Elle, shouting that she will not write anything autobiographical and secretive because she has ‘no secrets, no treasures’ and is ‘transparent.’ Her experience of herself as a well-known writer, loved and admired by readers makes her feel like a doubled woman, whose public image multiplied on posters and in books infringes on her sense of self. Polanski’s film keeps offering orange accents in an obvious reference to the famous orange sequences of spiralling camera in Hitchcock’s film and it mimics this type of camera movement while filming Delphine in order to give out the author’s sense of vertigo at seeing her image multiplied.

Figure 5. Sonically doubled: Maureen speaks while her internal-body sounds fill the room.

Maureen’s and Delphine’s inability to mourn and waiting instead suggests that they perceive their losses as their existential doubles and this haunting inheritance becomes scarier than the spectres themselves. Maureen’s brother Lewis, apart from sharing a genetic heart malformation with her sister, was also a medium and left her with this double inheritance. ‘Does it scare you?’ – asks Ingo, meaning the genetic malformation. ‘No, it didn’t scare him’ – answers Maureen, manifesting that she still thinks of herself through Lewis as she answers as if for him rather than for herself and the way she pronounces the ‘it’ verges on the ‘I’ as if she was saying: ‘I didn’t scare him.’

Based on a True Story begins at the book fair where Delphine signs her bestselling novel inspired by her mother. The photo of the mother is featured on the book’s cover, which is the first image that opens the film and can also be seen multiplied behind the writer’s chair. She will encounter the same image unexpectedly later on, at the gallery where the shot’s trajectory structures an exchange of gazes between the mother and the daughter in which the mother seems to be looking from above even though the photo is hanged in front of and not above Delphine. The scene after this Delphine has a dream in which the black-­and-white photo of her mother comes to life and the mother throws her laptop out the window as if to forbid her from writing and indeed she soon stops any writing, even answering her emails. The two characters do not mourn their dead also because they do not seem to be fully living themselves, they speak in the manner of a ventriloquist for their spectres, exemplifying spectrality as a two-fold which they develop primarily with themselves.

Waiting for the Spectre

The opening scenes of both films present the two main heroines: Maureen and Delphine sitting and waiting, waiting for the spectre. The spectre ‘resonates like an old repetition’ writes Derrida (2006, 15), suggesting that waiting for it is to be already anticipating and co-creating it. I would argue that Derrida’s spectre, remaining in-between the subjective and the objective, can be related to Henri Lefebvre’s conception of rhythm as something experienced ‘in one sense [as] what is most personal, most internal. And (…) most external’ since the rhythms which organise everyday life are ‘acquired’ but also performed daily and bodily and, as such, they are ‘simultaneously internal and social’ (2004, 22). Rhythm is potentially everywhere but not everyone is attuned to it. In Assayas’ Personal Shopper Maureen explains mediumship to Ingo as an ability to sense ‘invisible presences.’ ‘There are invisible presences around us. Always’ – she explains to him. Maureen’s description of mediumship correlates with recent studies on silence and ‘the sound inside the silence’ (Street 2019), which explore sensing rather than listening, and remain on vibratory rather than on audible level. Indeed, Street (2019, 11) almost repeats Maureen’s words when he invites his readers to ‘listen to the room in which you find yourself and you become conscious of objects and forces that are always there.’ Similarly, Solomos (2019,114) calls for ‘immersion and envelopment’ as well as ‘sinking into the abyss’ of sound through amplification and ‘the microphone acting as a microscope.’

These calls for immersing oneself in the abyss of sound contrast with the post-horror’s more cautious treatment of sound as well as with Lefebvre’s dialectic understanding of rhythm as something nor entirely inner or outer. He reminds that even our inside organs possess a certain sonorousness as they pulsate inside the body and interact with other rhythms, although we are hardly ever conscious of it (2004, 22). Rhythm, according to Lefebvre, is a system of organising our movements and the image we hold of ourselves within everyday life. To perceive everyday occurrences as rhythmisised is to anticipate and integrate with them, since the body itself produces movements that parallel the successive vibrations. However, on a daily basis we are not conscious of this process because, as Lefebvre notes, ‘we are only conscious of most of our rhythms, when we begin to suffer from some irregularity’ (2004, 22). Lefebvre’s assertion that rhythm is something simultaneously most external and most internal also points to its double function as it leads both to questioning one’s sense of wholeness and to connection with other people and spaces.

In Personal Shopper Maureen goes to an old country house which was bought by her brother and his fiancée, Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz) before he died leaving it as a symbol of the future that is now in the past. She is determined to conjure his spirit as she has been already living in Paris and waiting to get a sign from him for almost three months. Derrida notes that Shakespearian ‘Hamlet’ taught us that even more important than the apparition of a spectre is the waiting for it. Waiting and anticipation have a performative and creative power of willing the spectre to appear. As it is in the anticipation, ‘at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated’, from which we learn the most and experience the most through uncertainty and disorientation (2006, 3). Accordingly, in the first scene of Assayas’ film the viewers also have to wait as they watch Maureen waiting, her walking around the house and then sitting immobile in the dark after the night falls. The wait is rewarded when the spectre unexpectedly appears as a CGI black-and-white shape floating through the air. Nevertheless, a closer inspection of the scene, especially its sound design, suggests that the scene might contain multiplicity of various spectres, only one of which becomes materialised and the rest remains as Derrida describes them: ‘not identifiable’ as in the presence of the spectre ‘one cannot decide between hallucination and perception’ (2006, 170). There is, for example, a moment when Maureen seems to be able to sense or smell her brother, rather than to hear or to see his ghostly apparition, as she, as if instinctively, lowers her head and closes her eyes slightly as if embracing or leaning on someone in a gesture that seems very familiar to her, thence she does it without thinking or noticing. This gesture is repeated towards the end of the film when she stays at Lara’s home and the viewers can see Lewis’ apparition behind her while Maureen can, again, only feel his presence without realising it fully.

Unlike some horror films featuring haunted houses, perhaps most famously The Shining (1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick) Assayas never actually shows the house. The long sequence presents Maureen opening the big gate leading to the house, then opening its many inside doors while the sunset approaches and walking around empty rooms to finally sit motionlessly and wait in a near-pitch black darkness. An establishing shot that would offer a full and objective view of the house is not there. Instead, a sense of place must be drawn through site-specific environmental sounds and the ambience, or the sonic picture of the house gathered from the sounds of its many squeaking doors, creaking floorboards and especially the plumbing which seems to go on and off on its own. The temporal and visual boundlessness of the scene seems to go in an opposition to seeing all and at once as we are used to in cinema and especially in a film featuring a haunted house. Assayas’ sonic way of searching the vast darkness brings to mind the séance room as the corporeal system of communication where bodies are subject to the penetration of voices, sounds, noises or knocks.

However, Maureen seems so focused and desperate to ‘make contact’ as she puts it in the conversation with Lara, that she ‘switches off’ from experiencing the sounds as anything else than a possible sign from Lewis. Especially during her second trip to the house, she filters them out instead of experiencing them and becomes more and more angry at the incomprehensibility of what is happening at the house with the water suddenly flowing from the pipes but without any explanation or the confirmation that this is the sign she has been waiting for. Instead of rhythmic, the noise becomes chaotic for her and finally – terrifying. Surrounded by this maze of sound, she seems to lose her sense of orientation and security and curls down on the floor, almost in a fetal position and at the first sound which seems familiar (barking of a dog) she storms out of the house in its direction.

Polanski’s Based on a True Story begins with a black screen and the sounds and murmurs which keep progressing in volume but remain unintelligible. The scene unfolds slowly making the viewers wait and perhaps preparing them for the importance the sound will have in the film. Finally, the black screen is replaced with a very bright image of a white table with a book on it, and the source of the chatter is revealed as the book fair crowd. The fans queue to get Delphine’s autograph and we are plunged right into the middle of it; disoriented, as we do not see the author but the queueing faces from her point of view. Unlike the opening of Personal Shopper, here the space is modern and brightly lit, full of people’s faces and voices, which feel close, almost oppressively so. Both the sounds and the images represent Delphine’s perspective, her sitting place from which she can observe people’s passing, taking it all in, while remaining largely static herself.

The scene is structured as the defilade of the fans’ faces in front of the author with an occasional close-up of Delphine’s face or her hands. It introduces waiting as something ambiguous and liminal as it is emphasised that Delphine is in the space after finishing her last book, which she promotes at the fair, and before the current one, which she still researches. She also remains in-between two sets of audiences. The one behind her is us: the film’s viewers, and the one in front of her is the book fair crowd. Turner (2017) explains liminality as the transitory stage between two social positions, between two stages of life or when people feel caught in a position of betwixt and between structures. This scene also adds liminality to waiting, which is presented as liquid in a sense that both the crowd and Delphine are waiting and remain kept in line through waiting. To be kept waiting ‘is to be the subject of an assertion that one’s own time (and therefore, one’s social worth) is less valuable than the time and worth of the one who imposes the wait’, argues Schwartz (1974, 856). However, as the situation of Delphine at the book fair shows, it is not always easy to decide who is waiting and imposing on whom.

The scene also underscores what, after Schaeffer (2012, 82), can be called the ‘microphone effect’ as it magnifies ‘a whisper, a heartbeat, the ticking of a watch’ and makes it all equally audible and at times unintelligible like at the beginning of the scene when it was impossible to guess the origin of the noise. Delphine seems tired of the constant noise and people’s voices also gradually lose any legibility for her and merge into an ambient, immersive sound.

After the signing stops and the writer, exhausted, hides her face in her hands, a voice asking for another autograph ‘for Elle’ can be heard clearly. The appearance is stressed in an image of a close-up of Eva Green and the exchanges of gazes between her and Emmanuelle Seigner, but the reality or externality of this exchange is questioned by the eerie silence in which it resounds. The people’s chatter is suddenly vacuumed off, and the first musical phrase of the film: a simple piano chord sounds and lingers in the air as the women look at each other and Delphine refuses the autograph, arguing that it would not be fair towards those whom she refused already.

‘What counts in the image’, argues Derrida discussing cinema, ‘is not merely what is immediately visible, but also the words that inhabit the images’ (…) interruption, ellipsis, the whole zone of invisibility that presses on visibility. And the technique of interruption’ (Derrida in de Baecque 2015, 36). The piano note, on its most basic, creates a sense of pause and suspension in an action through its emphasised lingering in silence. It also acts as an additional layer that colours the whole situation with doubt and suspicion as much as with a sense of strange awe and calmness. By sonically enlarging the sound, letting it linger, another, more inner side of this sound appears within it and through it – another space or dimension of space, which seems more vertical rather than horizontal and progressive. The extra-diegetic music, like the piano note, is considered an ‘invisible’ music as it is not justifiable by any source present within the film’s diegesis. However, audiences accept it as an integral part of cinema and do not think of it as spectral or special.

This single musical phrase returns throughout the film, each time whenever the situation seems ontologically dubious, less than real or, to use Derridean term, spectral. This piano chord functions as a note infecting the reality with a sense of discord, which here is personified by Elle but will subsequently appear in the film as a stand-alone sound. Each time it reappears, it recalls the uncanniness of this encounter between the women, the moment of reverie which acts like a jolt out of the repetitive linearity into non-linear and layered time created by the sense of returning. The spectre is a revenant and as such is being anticipated. Therefore, the figure introduces a kind of rhythmicity into one’s thinking and one’s consciousness. The spectral visitation is based on apperception and seen retrospectively. This is how it is described in Delphine de Vigan’s novel, where Elle is introduced as a kind of palimpsest, the result of a several situations, half-remembered impressions and sightings of people layered on each other. As the narrator describes snippets of similar, repetitive, and haunting situations in which she would refuse someone an autograph or was rude towards a fan, concluding: ‘I’m almost certain that if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have met L. L. wouldn’t have found in me something that was so fragile, so shifting, so liable to crumble’ (de Vigan 2017, 20). The sentence links the feeling of anticipation of Elle with the feelings of guilt and vulnerability. This half-conscious realisation that Elle is not real or singular but rather an imaginary palimpsest of layers of several people and affects, which we can find in the novel, is translated into the sound in the book signing scene as the piano note becomes superimposed onto the scene of the women’s encounter. The rhythm, as Lefebvre argues, begins at the moment when it is perceived and anticipated as a recurrence (2004, 2) and therefore it is always double similarly to Elle’s apparition as described in the novel and represented by the sound in the film. Elle’s coming is returning in a sense of being created by Delphine’s already waiting for her return with a sense of guilt, terror and awe.

Post-Horror as Sonic Horror

For many researchers sound have always had spectral qualities because ‘we can also (and generally do) experience sounds without experiencing their sources’ (Cox 2018, 32). Therefore, ‘sound is a sinister resonance’, argues Toop, and listening is ‘a specimen of mediumship’as, while listening, we engage with ‘what lies beyond the world of forms’ (Toop, 2010, VII). Already in 1923, Rudolf Steiner, a philosopher and a spiritualist quoted at length in Assayas’ film, argued that in the future we will be able ‘to understand sound in its spiritual depth’ and ‘to go from the naturalist element to the spiritual’ (Steiner 1923 quoted in Harvey 1984, 85).Recent research on noise and immersion (Dyson 2009) often refers to Steiner or to the nineteenth century spiritualists (Solomos 2019) arguing that we should no longer recognise the individual sound but apprehend them in their depth (Toop 2010).

Post-horror can be seen in the wider context of an ‘acoustic turn’ in visual arts – a ‘shift away from the privilege of the visible towards an overlooked acoustic dimension’ (Meyer 2008, 18). The scene when Assayas’ Maureen undergoes an ultrasound is a good example of it. The scene itself starts with a reference to the photography as it is preceded by the photo shoot at which Maureen stands-in for Kyra and a series of black-and-white snapshots of her fill the screen and are replaced by the colour image of Maureen’s half-naked body lying on the settee while the doctor examines her, and the sounds of her blood stream fill the room.

The sense of anxiety, intrusion or dread in Based on a True Story and Personal Shopper often occurs through the interstices between the aural and the haptic rather than through the visuals. Within the systems of representation in Western culture, Luce Irigaray argues ‘women are nowhere, touching everything, but never in touch with each other, lost in the air, like ghosts ‘ (Irigaray 1991, 74). The dominance of immaterial labour in contemporary capitalism also relates predominantly to women, who form the majority of care workers as noted by Hardt and Negri (2009, 122) and Mazierska (2015). Women are therefore again made invisible not unlike pre-modern servants of Gothic novels.

Ultrasound also has this tactile dimension and can be considered a modern version of the nineteenth century image-based technique of X-ray, which was invented, together with cinema, in 1895. Ultrasound, as the technique for our liquid times, is sonic and relies on echo as its official name – an echocardiogram (‘echo’ in short) – emphasises. Echocardiogram uses ultrasounds – high-frequency sound waves, not audible to the human ear. They ‘echo’ against the structures of one’s heart and a microphone-like probe (called a transducer) picks up these reflections and captures them as live audio and images.

Maureen goes to have a heart ultrasound as she has the same heart malformation as her brother and, like him, needs to get regular check-ups. During the visit, while she lies down with her chest naked and the scan is performed on her, the swishing sounds of the pumping action of her heart fill the room. The black-and-white image of the organ itself is visible only for a second at the beginning of the screen while the camera already moves away from the machine’s screen and to Maureen’s body which looks very white, almost translucent. One kind of expects that the camera will not stop but penetrate her body further, but then the sound is already performing just that by sonically decomposing the organs and flesh, removing the barriers and leaving Maureen’s fragile-looking body even more transient as its inner sounds fill the room.

According to Cartwright (1995, 108) X-ray and ‘X-ray mania’ happening at the beginning of the twentieth century captured ‘the threat of corporeal annihilation’, which was both feared and revered. The ghostly images of people’s skeletal system were perceived as linking the fear of death with sexual pleasure as illustrated in Thomas Mann’s 1927 novel ‘The Magic Mountain’ set in a tuberculosis sanatorium where Thomas Castorp becomes the more enchanted with his fellow patient Madame Clawdia Chauchat, the more she frails and starts to resemble her X-ray scan. Castorp fantasises about having her scan as a keepsake and, when he looks or imagines looking at Chauchat’s body, he becomes most sexually enticed by her protruding bones – the visible signs of her insides.

The ultrasound performed on Maureen, even though less invasive and physically harmful than X-ray, controls her body according to the similar standards of dissection and what Derrida calls semanticisation of making the private inside visible, known and manageable. The ultrasound scene goes against beliefs that an ephemeral, time-based and non-visual medium of sound could be automatically understood as the ‘other’ of the ontology of being and of the visual regime criticised in ‘Specters of Marx’ as we can see that, although sonic, it is still used to impose the presence by the doctor. Ironically, the attempts to ontologise the insides of Maureen’s body performed by him, make her body seem even more transient and spectral as she seems to be doubly present: through an amplified sound of her insides and her ‘normal’ voice when she speaks and compares herself to her brother. Additional doubleness in the scene comes from the doctor, who also makes similar comparisons. For example, he tells her that it is very unlikely that she would die but then also mentions that ‘what happened to Lewis was very exceptional’, making the whole procedure and the diagnosis looking quite pointless. X-ray offers a ‘penetrating vision’ notes Cartwright (1995, 112), while echocardiogram with its extremely amplified listening and the doctor’s diagnosis make Maureen’s body into what Cazdyn (2012) calls the new chronic – still alive, but already infected and sustained in this in-between space between death and life through medication. Cazdyn argues that just as contemporary medicine uses targeted drug therapies and biotechnology to manage rather than cure diseases, since this long-term process is obviously more lucrative than cure, global capitalism aims not for resolution but rather for a continual state of crisis management that perpetuates the iniquities of the status quo. Circular nature of this perpetual chronic – in which one symptom is managed while another creeps up – may be a reflection of capital’s tendency to reproduce itself. It is also worth pointing out that ultrasounds are primarily used to see an unborn baby inside a pregnant mother and in the case of Maureen they are supposed to foresee (in a sense of premonition) whether she will die like her brother. This absence of the baby and the possible absence of the future for Maureen also correlate with the suspension of the motherhood identified by Fisher as the lens through which one can see the ordinarily invisible lack of cultural progress in neoliberalism and the ‘normalization of crisis’ (Fisher 2014, 1).

Hollowing out

Gothic writings foreground the house as ambiguous in terms of its dialectical relationship with the subject as ‘it fluctuates between a protective haven and a hostile space threatening her existence’ (Hock and Ng 2015, 2). Already through the spiritual séances set inside the houses from the early nineteenth century onwards, the traditional understanding of the family house as a place of refuge, comfort, and rest becomes questioned, while the affinity between the subject and space, between inhabiting one’s body and one’s house – strengthens. Bachelard speaks of the inhabiting comparing it to a shell, which functions as ‘the non-I protecting the I’ but also as enabling ‘the dialectical game of the I and the non-I’ (1994, 53–4). Outside the occupied house there is cosmos or ‘the vastness’, he argues, but the house, through its verticality becomes also the centre of this cosmos. However, the dialectic of the I and the non-I can grow more flexible and, depending on one’s inheritance or one’s memories the outside spaces can become the harbours of the I and the inside of one’s house can turn into external and inhospitable spaces of the non-I as Bachelard (1994, 217) describes:

I feel that fields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us. But forests reign in the past. I know, for instance, that my grandfather got lost in a certain wood. I was told this, and I have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I was born. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred years old, or perhaps a bit more. This, then, is my ancestral forest. And all the rest is fiction.

The philosopher blends the personal with the historical through the space to imprint something abstract onto an everyday haunt, which not undermines the individual and his sense of self but works to envelop it in more layers and senses of belonging (‘with me, in the with-me, with-us’). In Polanski’s Based on a True Story we encounter an opposite situation of hollowing out, removing layers of the shell and senses of protection through the house that starts to feel uncanny after Delphine’s children moved out of it.

In ‘The Poetics of Space’ Bachelard draws a dialectic of intimate and hostile spaces, arguing that exterior space is not exclusively negatively valorised as the interior can also gain the negative values of anxiety and fear, of a cold and musty place (1994, 24). What makes the space hostile, he argues, is ‘the loss of centre’ in our ‘imagined universe’ (ibid.). The sense of protection offered by a house is not the same as security, he reminds.

After coming back from the country house to her Parisian flat Delphine receives first of the anonymous letters in which someone, claiming to be her family member, accuses her of making money out of their family secrets by writing her last novel. Delphine reads the letter while climbing up the stairs from her mailbox on the ground floor to her apartment on the fourth floor. There is no lift, as Elle will notice with disappointment a few scenes later, and Delphine has a habit of browsing through her mail while slowly ascending. The voice reading out the letter off-screen belongs to Emmanuelle Seigner but not to the character of Delphine as we see her in the scene. Delphine does not move her lips and, although one might assume that she reads it in her mind, the aural expressiveness of the voice and the woman’s facial expression do not match. While Delphine’s body stops and pauses with a visible astonishment and sadness at what she reads, the voice never stops but ravels in ironic rhetorical questions (‘family sagas sell best, right?’) or assumes a threatening tone saying: ‘you think you’ll get away with it by changing few names and calling your book a novel?’ Apart from providing information ‘the voice is the atmospheric presence of something or someone’ argues Böhme (2017, 141). Delphine’s usual tone of voice, similarly to Maureen’s, sounds like a rasp or a whisper as both women seem too exhausted to communicate. They speak little and when they do speak it is in a very low tone, on the verge of audibility. However, the voice we hear on the stairs is strong, aggressive, and sarcastic.

The scene manifests the split between the body and the voice, performed through an unusual case of what Chion defines as acousmatic: ‘a sound that is heard without its cause or source being seen’ (1999, 18). In the scene we do see the actress whose voice we hear but we do not see the character. It is then not what Chion describes as embodiment as real embodiment comes only with the simultaneous presentation of the visible body with the audible voice, a way for the body to swear ‘this is my voice’ and for the voice to swear ‘this is my body’ (1999, 144). We must therefore hear the voice emerging from the resonant body for it to be fully embodied. The scene also emphasises the situation of coming back to oneself as double since the writer needs to go in and go up and this doubleness makes the centrality of the spiral staircase leading towards Delphine’s flat and what we could call Delphine’s image of herself blurred and as if co-inhabited with someone else.

Bachelard (2011, 92–93) described the house as the structure mirroring and correlating with the structure of the human body and with which one can engage at a bodily level. Vertically organised spaces (basement on the bottom and attic on the top), he argued in his ‘house-body’ metaphor, correspond to similarly vertically organised parts of the human body as in Michel Leiris’ passage: ‘That staircase is not a vertical passageway with steps arranged in a spiral. It is your viscera themselves; it is your digestive tract that joins together your mouth, in which you take pride, and your anus, of which you are ashamed’ (Leiris quoted in Bachelard 2011, 93). However, in case of Delphine’s building this vertical structure is complemented by what Lefebvre calls ‘a metonymic logic of a continual to-and-fro movement’ (Lefebvre, 1981, 398), as the writer’s main habit is taking a daily walk for which, however, she needs to get out and then get in. This habit is then imprinted on the way she sees her body as something governed by a ‘logic of a continual to-and-fro movement’, which leaves the space for the voice to leave the body. The to-and-fro architectural structure of Delphine’s building, which she walks daily until she breaks her knee, represents her sense of self crumbling. The situation of receiving the anonymous letters and the effect they have on Delphine’s sense of self is translated onto the situation of being sonically inhabit by the unknown voice. Throughout the film Delphine emphasises feeling tired or even ‘dead’ in a sense of losing one’s sense of self. After the book fair when her agent insists she attends an afterparty Delphine tries to protest, saying: ‘But I’m dead’, yet she hears: ‘You’ll rest later.’ After the party she enters the empty house and falls on the bed only to be called by François who is to take them to the country house. ‘I’m emptied out’ (‘Je suis vidée’) she says to him but agrees to go. In both instances her apartment is discussed as space, which she uses to maintain the sense of self and which finally gives way to her becoming a different self or a self for which the horizontal schema of coming and going is no longer enough as a self-image. These comings and goings establish a schema of coming outside and returning inside to one’s self and to the protected space – the schema, which seems not enough in a global, liquid world of insides expanding vertically and therefore the horizontality of this structure is complemented by the verticality of the sound.

Chion notes that since the late 1980s there can be spotted a ‘quiet revolution’ in cinematic sound design as sound technology becomes more suited to capture micro-sounds and intimate soundings, which he calls ‘the hum of the world’ (1991, 70). ‘The hum of the world’ cannot be taken in at first sight or at once, it needs to linger and vibrate. The polyphony of sound, its multi-track, multi-modulatory way of conveying sounds will, argues Chion, replace the linear thread of the story (1991, 79). He depicts situations in which noises are used to render the physical impact of the blow or the speed of the movement, however this type of multi-track sound can also manifest removal or hollowing out of layers and subtle vocal alterations that suggest intimate changes to the character as in the scene of Delphine climbing the staircase.

Conclusion: The Sounds of Waiting

Post-horrors use sounds to enhance moments of invisibility and eerie silence. Through these sounds they point to what I call after Bauman and Lovecraft – cosmic fear understood as the fear and awe of the unknown and the unseen, which the former links with globalisation and the latter with the indifference of the world. The article argues for considering post-horror’s using sound as a primary, formless danger in relation to cosmic fear and cosmic horror and in contrast to the acoustic turn encouraging focus on the immersion and the inside of sound. Unlike some sound studies researchers praising the ‘sonic abyss’ or ‘a gentle annihilation’ (Solomos 2019, 123), post-horrors point to sound as dangerous, haunting and infectious and as most liquid, to use Baumanian term, way to experience fear and dread of globalisation, lack of boundaries and the vastness of the world.The article refers to the figure of the spectre understood here as a critique of traditional, Freudian (Freud 2005) mourning, which Derrida performs in ‘Spectres of Marx’, encouraging us to wait for and with spectres instead. Hauntology introduced by him offers more everyday version of haunting understood as anything that threatens notions of stability in our understanding of existence. Especially significant for my analysis of Assayas’ Personal Shopper and Polanski’s Based on a True Story is the role of the sound in conveying this spectral sense of self and the state of waiting for the spectre.Haunting, understood in this context concerns the other or the monsters ‘in us’ as well as the unseen, formless monsters, which also unsettles our ordinary ways of speaking, sensing, and conceiving our bodies and spaces.

Personal Shopper’s Maureen and Based on a True Story’s Delphine are often portrayed sitting, arrested by sounds which seem to deepen in force as the camera zooms in on their apparent stillness as if to capture the inner, invisible rhythms of their amplified, immersive listening. However, the trajectory of both heroines is different as each of them experiences different type of haunting. Polanski’s Delphine, a successful author, feels ‘transparent’ and devoid of any depth of secrets while she sits in front of her laptop or meets the fans, who claim knowing her best. Assayas’ Maureen, on the other hand, feels insecure and hollowed-out after the death of her twin brother towards whom she looked up to.

The endings of the two films, although featuring similar close-ups of the two women, suggest different outcomes happening for each of them. Maureen looks into the camera calling out her brother’s spirit for which she does not get a certain answer until she changes the question and asks: ‘is it just me?’ after which the tapping suggesting ‘yes’ resounds and she changes her posture and looks into the camera, manifesting a newly-found ability to respond for herself only. The ending of Polanski’s film, like its beginning, finds Delphine at a book fair where she again meets Elle. Yet, unlike the book fair opening the film, this encounter does not cause her any sense of guilt, on the opposite: she sees Elle in every reader that comes to her for the autograph and she meets their gaze with a sense of recognition and gratitude. In this ending Polanski seems to suggest that Delphine found a way to cope with being multiplied on posters and in people’s opinions on her and accepts this multiplicity as her image of both a writer and a ghostwriter.

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This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Żaneta Jamrozik

Żaneta Jamrozik is a Ph.D. student at The University of Central Lancashire in Preston. She is ­working on Eminem’s music videos.