A Ghost Story, or…When Enough Would Be Too Much

For those of you who haven’t, but think you might want to see this film, beware, spoilers ahead; if you’re the type who’ll like this film, the spoilers won’t matter, but if you’re the type who won’t like this film the spoilers are likely to put you off, and in the end you won’t think you’ve missed anything, a shame really, because like it or not, you should see A Ghost Story. It’s an emotional exercise in creative viewing.

Those of you who’ve already seen the film probably felt for a while as did the naive ghost, bewildered, untethered from what you imagined to be your world — and his, wondering about your reality.

And in making you feel adrift, the director accomplished his goal.

By saying almost nothing and showing us little more, less than enough to understand what’s going on inside our ghost’s mind, David Lowery sucks us into the world we see on the screen, but instead of leaving us to wonder what it all means and wait for him to give us answers, by giving us less than enough, he forces us to write our own story and our own answers.

As living Rooney Mara is about to leave him, she pauses and asks still living Casey Affleck why he insists on staying in their modest house. Affleck replies “We have history here,” and he means it. He is emotionally rooted to the place. If he’s lost his creativity, his drive, if he’s lost his everything else, including her presence, as long as he’s in that house, he’ll have something, he’ll have their “history”.

And so, not much later, soon after he dies, she silently identifies his body, then leaves him in the morgue. He lies motionless for a time, then rises, clad in the sheet that covered him, and leaves the cold, impersonal sterility of the morgue, and returns to the place to which he’s emotionally tethered, their house, the house he shared with her.

He watches for unknown days or weeks or months as she grieves and deals first mechanically, then methodically, boxing up their past, and her present. We try to read her nearly inscrutable face for hints of emotion as she cleans and paints over their old house, and old lives. Does she miss him or hate him, does she feel anything? Lowery and Mara conspire carefully to give us nothing, not a hint. Finally, she packs and sends what remains of that life away in a U-Haul; something that in most films coincides with the start of something exciting, a new individual part of our great collective adventure.

But not this time. Because this isn’t the U-Haul’s or Mara’s story.

This is the ghost’s story.

In fact, as the U-Haul turns real and literary corners, Mara turns an emotional one. She leaves the house and the past — and us. We wonder, for a beat where she’s going and what will become of her? But only for a beat.

Because we’re not wondering alone.

Standing in the window with us, the ghost watches her leave, and since his ghostly costume leaves nothing of Affleck to be seen, Lowery doesn’t just allow us to supply the ghost with our emotion of choice, confusion, love, fear, regret, he forces us to supply the ghost with an emotion, with an expression, to fill the blank sheet.

Lowery forces us to write the ghost.

Most films attempt to make us identify with the protagonist, to feel what he feels. Not this one. By leaving so much unsaid and unexpressed he leaves us unsettled. What are we to be feeling? What are we to be thinking? By leaving us untethered, Lowery doesn’t just allow us to impute our emotions to the ghost, he forces us to do it, or remain adrift in a story he refuses to tell in a world he refuses to explain.

He doesn’t turn us into the ghost, he tricks us into turning the ghost into us. At the end of a few beats, with Mara gone, we’re no longer wondering what will happen to her; we’re wondering what will happen to the ghost, to us.

And from then on, scene by scene, whatever happens, the ghost feels what we feel, so when he sees another sheet clad ghost in the house next door, he looks at it curiously and wonders what it’s doing — because we do.

The ghosts share a few cryptic subtitles, nothing more. Lowery could have allowed them to commune and commiserate and interact, but had he done so he’d have defined at least something of his ghostly universe, and at least something of our ghosts. He doesn’t, and he won’t.

He reserves the role of Creator for us.

So, when a new family moves into his house, the ghost watches with our curiosity, and when things go too swimmingly, he acts, at our compulsion. We force him to move the story along. He frightens the children, and the young boy fires a toy ray gun at him. Did he intend to frighten them, or just to interact with living souls? We know adults can’t see him, at least these adults, but do children? Can these two see him? Lowery leaves it up to us.

Later, when we push the ghost to go further, to frighten the children’s mother, we know she sees only the breaking crockery, but the boy stares straight at besheeted Affleck. Can he see our ghost? Why this boy? What is their bond? Lowery lets us decide whether this child or all children can see the ghosts we adults can’t, or don’t, or won’t.

Lowery doesn’t just force us to write his characters, he forces us to write the rules of his ghostly universe too.

And so we do, we write our rules, we decide whether the children can see the ghost, decide how much of the ghost is corporeal and how much is not. We toss out our own anchors rather than remain adrift in the story he refuses to tell and the world he refuses to define.

When the house next door is demolished and the neighboring ghost disappears we each confer on his disappearance whatever meanings fit the universes we’ve constructed, and when our house is demolished and we don’t disappear, we explain it and adjust our universes to fit the facts as Lowery has presented them.

What adjustment are we to make when our ghost jumps from an upper floor of the skyscraper that’s replaced the demolished house? For the living, suicide is a capitulation to death. To what can the dead capitulate? They’re dead…

In Lowery’s universe the dead are tethered to places that hold their emotional roots. They cannot die and cannot leave, so when our ghost capitulates, the only thing he can alter is time.

Our ghost watches, a century or more earlier, as a settler stakes the corners of what will someday become the house we’ve already seen demolished, then enjoys dinner by the campfire with his young family. Are these our ghost’s ancestors?

No, they aren’t, they can’t be his ancestors, because they die, all of them, and in each of our film universes death is still final.

When the Indians kill the pioneer family, we’re forced to rewrite our ghostly universe, and we realize he’s returned to the place to which he’s tethered, but in an earlier time.

Was this his intention? Time passes and our ghost remains tethered to the place until, one day an agent opens the door and we see them, younger and happier Rooney Mara and and Casey Affleck, as they enter what’s to become their home, and the scene of our ghost’s story.

And after watching for more than a century, in what must seem to him to be the blink of a ghostly eye, a familiar scene confronts our specter, one familiar to us too, the one in which we both watched his sad widow redecorate and pack up and leave the house forever.

But the scene is different this time. This time we’re no longer the naive ghost, this time we’re the ghost that has capitulated and moved back in time, and this time we hang back in the room and watch our old selves, the not yet capitulated ghost, as he watches Rooney Mara again.

And this time he pays careful attention to something we both noticed before, but to which we gave too little attention. He watches her plant a small fragment of paper in a door frame, and entomb it with the paint she carefully brushes on. She’s as expressionless as can be, as we can imagine her being. What is the paper fragment, and why did she leave it? Because she knows, or suspects?

Is it a hopeful or hopeless message, as in a bottle, but this time in the house?

The ghost redoubles his efforts, and we realize we willed ourselves back in time to have this second chance, to find out what she left for us.

And we adjust our universes to make his presence just corporeal enough to scratch away the paint and pull the slip of paper from the door frame, and open it, and read it—

— and disappear.

As do we, again adjusting our individual movie universes to explain what the mysterious message said and why it allowed us, or induced us, or forced us into the ultimate capitulation, into heaven or hell, or rebirth, or wherever ghosts go in our custom universes — or to nothing.

Lowery’s film isn’t for those who want canned answers. He makes us supply our answers. What message did Rooney Mara leave for Casey Affleck? Did it release him from his tether and allow him to wander the earth in or out of his sheet, searching until he found her, or did it release him from his tether into another world, an afterlife, whatever afterlife there may be?

The film gives us no answers. We supply the answers. That’s the point.

It’s work, and some won’t like it, but if you accept the burden of writing your own story you’re left with the same feeling of being afloat in the wonderful unknown with which “Lost in Translation” left us.

As long as we didn’t know what Bill Murray said in that wonderful final scene, the story ended in any way we wished; he and Scarlett connected and completed each other in a way their mates didn’t; or they parted ways and never saw each other again, but his fatherly advice helped her find her way in life; or they both spent their lives wondering what if, or — he simply told her the punchline of his favorite joke.

Coppola left it up to us to supply the ending.

And so has Lowery. He hasn’t given us enough to know how his story ends.

And that’s good, because if he had, it would have been too much.