The Ghost Writer (2010): A Political Ghost Story

(This essay contains spoilers.)

"Unfinished Business
The primary reason for ghosts to be sticking around. They want revenge, their story to be told, or simply to be informed once and for all that they are, in fact, dead. To get rid of the ghosts, the hero or heroine will have to either do extensive research in old newspaper articles or communicate somehow with the ghosts. Once their business is finished, they vanish in a flash of light."(1)

But what if the ghost and the hero are unwittingly the same person? The first ten shots of The Ghost Writer show a vehicle deprived of a driver aboard a ferry, then a man's body, deprived of life, lying in the surf on a beach. Over the final shot in the series, a long shot of the body, Ewan McGregor's voice begins, "You realize I"--cut to him eating lunch with his agent--"know nothing about politics." By the eleventh shot Polanski has already let us know that this character (who never gets a name of his own) is the ghost of the body in the waves. He's not literally a ghost, of course; but in effect his raison d'etre in the film's world is to settle the unfinished business of that body and he will haunt all the places, from room to vehicle, that body has occupied during life until the business is finished.

The body on the beach is a long-time aide of former prime minister of the UK Adam Lang and ghost writer of his memoirs. McGregor's character, "The Ghost", a soft-spoken Englishman, is hired to ghost-write the memoirs into more marketable material than McAra had left them. He's taken to an island off the coast of New York where he has a month to get the book ready under the watch of Lang's wife, Ruth, and political aide and mistress Amelia Bly. As political controversy explodes around Lang when it's discovered he had authorized the torture of four terrorist suspects, all British citizens, McGregor begins finding traces of McAra's research that lead into a conspiracy way over McGregor's head and sends him running for refuge with the very man heading the investigation into Lang's war crimes. McGregor believes Lang had been recruited by the CIA, but his questioning is cut short when Lang is assassinated. During the opening gala for the memoirs McGregor has successfully ghost-written, he gets the last hint and discovers the wife, Ruth, is the CIA agent and Lang had been her puppet, and thus the puppet of the United States, all along. McGregor is then unceremoniously killed off-screen by a mysterious black car.


The reason McGregor can be killed so unceremoniously is that he's a ghost. Once he's discovered that Ruth is the CIA agent and informed her of his knowledge, he has finished the business for which he exists and ceases to be. Polanski prepares this progress carefully. When McGregor is first given the job as ghost writer, he's shown leaving the publishing house headquarters and hailing a taxi. When McGregor exposes Ruth (only to us, alas), he's shown, fittingly in the film's final shot, leaving the same building and hailing a taxi in the same spot; this time, however, the taxi ignores him and he exits the frame, where a car speeds after him and, well, into him. So, Polanski actually rhymes the moment the ghost is given his 'unfinished business' and the moment after he finishes it. By having the story come full circle to the publishing house a fatalistic sense is imparted, suggesting that the moment McGregor accepted the role of ghost he had signed his doom.

Between these moments a dialectic reminiscent of Polanski's The Tenant (1976) begins. The Tenant is about a man assuming the apartment of a woman who committed suicide and becoming increasingly paranoid that the other tenants are trying to transform him into the suicidal previous tenant. The Ghost Writer, similarly, has McGregor resisting assuming McAra's life, resisting, as it were, haunting. He refuses to use the BMW he's offered because the groundskeeper tells him McAra loved it. He resists taking over McAra's room on the island and, once in the room, is disgusted to find the man's clothing left behind. Upon removing the clothing, however, he uncovers McAra's secret research taped to the bottom of a drawer. This is the moment he assents to being McAra's ghost. He then sleeps with Lang's wife, as it's very possible McAra did, and finally takes the BMW. Furthering the ghost motif, he finds McAra's directions still programmed into the vehicle's GPS. He decides to follow them, further ghosting McAra, just as ghosts are said to perform functions and frequent places they used to do while alive. He then calls the telephone number on the back of a photograph in McAra's research and finds himself in contact with Lang's enemy Rycart, betraying Lang just as McAra had done.

Of course, McGregor is hired to be Lang's ghost, not McAra's. Where McGregor is a ghost who struggles unsuccessfully to have identity of his own--throughout the film he only introduces himself as a 'ghost' and we never learn his name--Lang's problem is that he's all identity without any real soul of his own. He has too many ghosts. Everything is decided for him. In one scene McGregor is asked to draft a statement to send to the press. In the following sequence McGregor returns to his hotel and sees a member of the press on television quoting his words as Lang's. Innocence is lost then; we realize a prime minister is not so much a person as a team, the minister himself or herself a silver-tongued figurehead at best. So Lang has been. The first paragraph of the manuscript McAra has written states that 'Lang' is from an Old English word meaning 'tool.' Lang has been a tool manipulated throughout his whole career. He himself is strangely empty, void of content. Rycart confesses not understanding the man after working with him for fifteen years. Just as a shot-by-shot analysis of Plan 9 from Outer Space would prove mystifying, Lang is mystifying if only because there's nothing to puzzle out. He was a skirt-chasing, handsome actor not the least bit interested in politics and in him the CIA found something malleable. He has been a face used by the United States, through his CIA agent wife.

That is rather abstract, however. Lang is, of course, a human being with as much a mind and personality as anyone else. It is as a political entity that he is empty. As a person, he is a fascinating character insofar as he may be the only entirely honest character in the film. When Lang tells McGregor that he entered politics because he fell in love with Ruth, Polanski gives us no reason to doubt him. He's wrong, but he seems to believe it. In some sense perhaps it is still true; we don't, after all, know the depth and extent of Ruth's manipulation: did she ever love him? When confronted by McGregor, Lang asserts that he has never taken orders once in his career. That's very likely as well; that is to say, it's likely he believes this.

What McGregor and Lang have in common is the way they are easily manipulated by others under the guise that they have free will. In a key sequence early in the film, McGregor's first conversation with Ruth, she states two important points: McGregor's presence is her idea and she doesn't like Adam being out of her presence because, she implies, he's incapable of thinking for himself. Both men are joined in how they fall under her will. McGregor, like Lang, is chosen for his position for how easily he can be controlled.

If Lang did indeed enter politics out of love for Ruth, one could easily wonder what happened. Throughout the film, Ruth is one of the most bitter, vindictive, acerbic characters in recent cinematic history. Scarcely a line she utters isn't barbed and venomous. What makes The Ghost Writer such a great film is how so little is given to us directly, yet all the information is there, much as the threatening information is indirectly present in McAra's manuscript. Ruth is clearly much more intelligent than her husband and had always been the more politically motivated of the two. Her faustian agreement with the CIA, represented by the Mephisto-esque Paul Emmett, has led her down a road of unfulfillment as merely a footnote in the political career of her inferior husband. When asked if she never wanted to be a politician in her own right, she snaps back to McGregor, "Didn't you want to be a proper writer?" Even her apology to him is dripping with vindictive sarcasm, "I've hurt your feelings." In her unfulfillment she's become increasingly bitter, leading her husband to stray to Amelia Bly (an older woman) and, as she confesses, to stop taking her (i.e. the CIA's) advice.



Throughout the film, Bly is associated with light and Ruth with rain and darkness. Lang even tells us that he first met Ruth in the rain. The obvious effect is to make us feel gloom and depression when she's in frame; Polanski lets her affect us much as she affects Lang. The presence of rain also tends to suggest the malign, conspiratorial influence. The first shots of the film, when the BMW is discovered empty, are in rain. The final shot of the film, when McGregor is killed, is in rain. When Ruth learns an old man knows McAra's body was planted on the beach, she suddenly rushes out into the rain. Amelia (a name meaning "better") offers Lang freedom and Ruth, as always, has been a manipulative presence. After arguing with Ruth, we see Lang against the window like a fly in a jar. He's attempting to have a will of his own. McGregor's death comes as a result of leaving Amelia to send a note to Ruth informing her what he knows. Ruth and the clandestine political machinations she stands for consistently brings misery and death.

Ultimately Lang's, and Ruth's, salvation is in assassination. Stripped of a physical existence, Lang becomes pure image, as he was always expected to be; he is now a total tool, and more powerful than he had ever been in life. During the gala, as McGregor discovers the truth about Ruth, Lang's face is everywhere, watching, from the covers of the book McGregor wrote, the "voice from beyond the grave." If Lang has become a sort of ghost himself, he casts off his treacherous ghost writer and gets his revenge. Lang's face, as you can see above, peers out from behind a building, presiding over the murder of McGregor. With both "the ghost" and McAra dead, his legacy is secure. Even Rycart has to bow to the power assassination grants and call the 'war criminal' a patriot. Thus ends the ghost story, a victory of a political ghost over an ethical ghost.

Politically the film's target is clearly America on the one hand, and a very uninformed populace on the other. Lang's assassin kills him because he holds Lang responsible for the death of his son in Iraq. Lang's responsibility for that death is negligible. Lang is not even responsible for the war crimes of which he's accused. Nor is his wife. The importance of a figurehead like Lang is to absorb the accusations, to be the figure of blame. When contemplating getting mugged for a decoy manuscript given him by Lang's lawyer, McGregor calls himself a 'tethered goat'; at the same time, a news flash is running about Lang's involvement in the torture of the four terrorism suspects, thus linking McGregor's incident as a decoy with Lang's investigation as a war criminal. Lang is, similarly, a tethered goat, then. If people knew that the political world is a world of ghosts, wills working without being seen, they'd know how ridiculous it is to hold Lang responsible for what a whole system--ultimately the national security agencies of the United States, the supreme ghost in the film--moves him to do. But as McGregor confesses in his first line, we "know nothing about politics."

America is, however, more of a symbol than a target. The film's real theme is the identities, emotions, and energies of individuals that get swallowed by a political machine beyond any individual's control. Ruth, for various reasons--being a woman and her admittedly poor public speaking skills--couldn't become the politician she desired to be, but accepted being relegated to a politician's wife. Lang, a real person who enjoyed acting, is transformed into a political figurehead, or, as McGregor puts it, 'a craze.' McGregor, the ghost, the common man, doesn't even have an identity in this system. The moment these people start asserting their own wills and emotional needs against the system, they are put in danger of being destroyed. In the cases of McAra, McGregor, and Lang, this danger is realized.







Another of the film's themes is the essentially dubious nature of second-, third-, fourth-, nth-hand information. The film's climax is a tracking shot of McGregor's note passing hand after hand on its way to Ruth. The information in the note has been encoded in the manuscript McAra wrote. But whence did McAra get this information? Research and Google, perhaps? Is it even correct? We don't know. The nature of a ghost-writer is to convey information as though written by someone else; it's an inherently deceptive role. The information McGregor finds himself given is itself sometimes deceptive, such as the dates Lang confuses. McGregor's own words are, as I noted, reported on television as Lang's. We live in a world where we're inundated with information--Google, books, television screens in bars, airports, hotels--but rarely have any idea where it really comes from. Some of it is trustworthy, based on painstaking research; some of it is mere surmise; some of it is mistaken; some of it outright deceit. McGregor's position in The Ghost Writer is attempting to sort out to which of these categories the information he's given belongs and we needn't believe his sorting is necessarily correct.

In many ways The Ghost Writer, though from source material not original to Polanski, is a summa of Polanski's film career. The island location reminds one of Cul-de-Sac. The investigation into overwhelming intrigue and the failure of the protagonist to be a hero recalls Chinatown. The political conspiracy recalls Frantic. The paranoia over loss of one's identity recalls The Tenant. McGregor's character also reminds one of a softened and British Dean Corso of The Ninth Gate, which also dealt with books. Lang and his relationship with his wife recalls, indeed, MacBeth.

So, as with many Polanski films, but perhaps with The Ghost Writer more than any other, what you see and think you know upon first viewing becomes questionable upon rewatching. So little is given to us as direct information, so much has to be surmised both by McGregor and by us viewing the events through McGregor's perspective, that our surmising could be completely mistaken. McAra's death could have just been an accident. According to Ruth, he did indeed like spirits. The vehicle's path to Paul Emmet's house could have been Ruth's, as Emmet was her tutor and thus an old friend. McAra's belief that Emmet recruited Ruth could be totally erroneous, a mistake grounded upon a google search. (Most of the information on conspiracy websites is rubbish.) Neither Rycart nor Lang had heard Emmet is with the CIA, even though it's the second or third result on a google search for his name. Are they stupid or do they just not believe every foolish conspiracy theory? Is Lang the puppet he seems to be? And finally, although I maintain the car's path seems too deliberate, it's been pointed out to me that McGregor could just have been hit by a car accidentally. He was, after all, standing in the road. What does remain is that in the order of the film's universe, the Ghost is discarded once the business is finished: both Lang's business and McAra's business, and perhaps the audience's business.

(1) http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfinishedBusiness, 14/09/2010.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009)

Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) has murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) and barricaded himself inside her house with two hostages. The film's tagline tells us, "The Mystery Isn't Who. But Why." My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? "Inspired by a true story" of a man who killed his mother with a sword after over-identifying with a character he was playing in The Eumenides, Orestes, who also kills his mother. Herzog doesn't accept such a simple explanation as "over-identifying." The whole film is constructed around answering the 'Why?'. However, contrary to the tagline, understanding the 'Who?' is the key to understanding the 'Why?'. Most of the film is comprised of a series of flashbacks triggered by Detective Hank Havenhurst's (Willem Defoe) questioning of Brad's fiancee, Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny), the play director, Lee Meyers (Udo Kier) and the neighbours, Mrs. and Miss Roberts. The flashbacks reveal to us the strange life and behaviour of Brad in the time leading up to the murder. We learn there are two major events that precipated Brad's crime: he visited Peru for a rafting trip and came back hearing the voice of God; and he starred in The Eumenides. In other words, no explanation at all.

There are two very important shots that reveal more about Brad than Ingrid and Meyers do, each in one of the two flashbacks to Peru. In the first, we see Brad standing before the river, splitting the frame in half: one half is the green land, the other half is the white rapids. Gazing toward the river, Brad yells at his meditating companion that the river is reality. So in this shot, Brad is still facing reality. In the second flashback to Peru, the group has moved down river some. Now Brad is sitting on the rocks, facing the opposite direction of the river. One companion tells him he's behaving strangely and he says, "I'm just looking at the river," which is patently false. Brad is now no longer facing reality. Ingrid and Mrs. Roberts tell us Brad changed after his trip to Peru, but they can't explain why. Ingrid thinks it's the death of Brad's travelling companions, but the flashback clearly shows Brad's madness setting in prior to their deaths. Temporally, we can't see what happened in between the flashbacks to suddenly trigger his madness.

However, Herzog gives us one flashback--which occurs suddenly, without trigger, and is not told by or to anyone--between the two Peru flashbacks. It's a quiet shot of Brad's mother poking a piano key, then walking over (the camera follows her) to Brad, who sits at a drum set. She complains that Brad never plays his piano or his drums. We can also see a guitar at the bottom of the frame when she's at the piano. Brad tells her that she's the one who "tried to persuade" him to want the drums. We have no idea when exactly this moment occurred in Brad's life, but Herzog plants it between the two Peru flashbacks for a reason: in between facing reality and not facing reality is Brad's lack of direction in life, his inability to commit himself seriously to any vocation. As the film goes on we learn he used to play basketball, was into New Age thought (along with his fellow rafters), briefly got the notion to go whitewater rafting, decides to become a Muslim and ditches out of the rafting, decides to become a stage actor, and even, as he's being taken away by the cops, announces "I have taken a new vocation as a righteous merchant." He's a dilettante: he wants to do everything but will commit to nothing. He wants to continually remake himself according to each new fantasy and, in doing so, withdraws further from reality until fantasy and spontaneous self-reinvention takes over.

Brad is a model of this generation's malaise. We live in a wonderful time when so many options and opportunities are open to everyone. I decide I want to be a film critic, so I start this website. If I want to be a filmmaker, I can easily pick up a camera and put out a casting notice. So many options are open to us, as they are to Brad, that in this generation we have difficulty choosing just one or at least having the discipline to stick with one for a reasonable length of time. Brad's mother has made every opportunity available to him. He seems to have no job, yet he travels to Peru and Tijuana, owns a car, spends all day doing whatever he wants. He does nothing, ultimately. The answer to the titular question, "What have ye done?" could well be "Nothing." Brad is a disappointment.

So in the two shots that illustrate Brad's turn from reality, we can say that he has turned from reality because he doesn't have the ability to face it. To face reality would be to accept that he must commit himself to a vocation, a career, certain people in order to exist in the human world. One must limit oneself in order to be oneself. To be everything is just to be nothing. Brad isn't the only character unable to face reality. The companions with whom he goes rafting are equally unequipped to face reality. Brad correctly tells them the rapids are too dangerous during the rainy season, yet one continues meditating and the other only says, without much thought, that the challenge is why they've come. They know nothing about whitewater rafting, they're not athletic at all. When Brad later tells them he's not interested in their herbal teas and talking to 'Indians' in sweat lodges, we gather that they're New Agers. What could be a better summation of flakey dilettante lifestyle than New Agers, who grasp onto every new self-centered fad until the next one comes along? So they're pampered Californians with lots of time for flakey New Age thought thinking they can just master the rapids. They face the river, which, as Brad noted, is reality; and they die. They leap into a reality they're unequipped to face. Brad, at least, knows he's not equipped to face it and avoids it via retreat into fantasy.

One would think, given some of Brad's more erratic behaviour, that someone would have tried to get Brad help at some point. Yet none in his life are willing or able to face that reality. Brad's mother clearly lives for Brad. One particularly awkward scene shows her bringing drinks into Brad's room for he and Ingrid; she stands in the doorway for what feels like three minutes (it's around fifteen seconds, actually), until Ingrid at last thanks her. She lives to serve Brad and asks for gratitude only. She also still sees Brad as a child, to the point that of attempting to spoon-feed him. In that particular dinner scene, Herzog frames the shot so the window opens behind Brad and Ingrid, but the curtain covers the outside behind Brad's mother. If Brad has a whole world of opportunity for himself and is unable to commit, his mother has stripped herself of the world through her obsessive devotion to Brad. Their madnesses mutually feed off each other.

If Brad is a crude but accurate caricature of my generation, a generation of people unequipped to face reality, Brad's mother is equally a caricature of the problem, parents who live for their children and give them endless opportunities but no direction, no demands. (And those parents, in turn, are a product of a whole history of Western, materialist culture, which Lee Meyers might call our "Tantalate House.") Direction is what Brad lacks, his energies considerable but uncontrollable. Hence the importance Brad puts in the play The Eumenides. Lee Meyers, the play's director, is literally giving Brad direction. Meyers is the only character in Brad's life who has any sort of control over him. Meyers's relationship with Brad is vaguely fatherly as well: he's affectionate and spends more time with him than his job requires. Although Meyers actually kicks Brad out of the play for being disruptive, Brad calls only Meyers and Ingrid before committing the murder. Clearly they have mutual respect. Unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality now, the direction of the play becomes his direction in life. He has a sense of destiny, killing his mother an act of necessity and fate. After killing her, he casually tells a detective who is unaware he's the suspect, "Razzle them, dazzle them, razzle dazzle them." Life and performance, reality and fantasy, have been conflated. He claims to hear the voice of God, which warned him of the danger in Peru; but as soon as he's barricaded in his home, and immediately--in the film's time--before the key flashback, he tosses "God" (a container of Quaker oats) out of the house saying he no longer needs God. As soon as his 'performance' is over, he's again without direction.

The film concludes with the victory of reality. The first shot of the film is a train driving through a field, on its way to San Diego. The train's motion is rhymed with that of the river. The final shot is of San Diego traffic flowing by behind a basketball in a tree (so placed by Brad). The flowing traffic is like the flowing river and the flowing train: reality rushing on. Inability to face reality doesn't make it go away. The police surrounding Brad's house are a part of that reality, impinging upon Brad's existence in his mother's uterine, pink house whether he likes it or not. Brad has no choice but to eventually meet the reality they represent in some form.

Of course, the film shouldn't be over-intellectualized. Much of it is felt and not quite understandable, much as Brad is not quite understandable and the murder is not quite understandable. The inability to rationalize is a part of encountering the film. The music, for instance, is sombre, sorrowful, and seemingly out of place with the images, producing uncomfortable dissonance. Herzog's decision to make his actors sometimes freeze also produces discomfort as we wonder why they've stopped, yet are clearly blinking. Sometimes they even look directly into the camera. Much of the film's oddness seems present primarily to keep us in a state of confusion, Herzog's use of film form complementing the content so that the mystery of human behaviour and the problem of knowing becomes characterized in the very style. Herzog's camera movements are hypnotic, always moving slowly and gracefully in steadicam, reminding one of some shots in Touch of Evil (the detectives are named Vargas and Hank, coincidentally). So hypnotic are the movements, that I've become drowsy each time I've seen the film. These soporific qualities, the confusing weirdness, leave us as lost as Ingrid and Hank (who are not privy, as we've seen, to the film's key flashback) and all the more disarmed for the jarring moments when Brad explodes. This is only skimming the surface, a brief brainstorming session: Herzog's style in this film could and should be investigated in much more depth.

That Brad McCullum would be a monster for Herzog is no surprise. Considering Herzog's films are famed for their depictions of monomaniacal men, who are quasi-heroes of Herzog's films, a man unable to devote himself to anything as Brad McCullum is monstrous. Herzog focuses on one brief obsession in McCullum's existence, but its brevity and the ease with which it's forgotten make him a model of what Herzog doubtless despises. That Brad is a monster for us has more to do with his unpredictability. As there is no explanation, no good reason, for Brad's behaviour, predicting it is impossible. This keeps not just other characters like Ingrid and Lee on edge, but also the viewers. Though we already know his crime, Michael Shannon's intensity and conviction in every insane line and gesture makes McCullum frightening to behold. Shannon has shown himself to be one of the best actors in America with his performance in Bug, able to put total conviction in the silliest lines, deep menace in the most banal lines. In My Son, he is not nearly so histrionic, his performance more subtle, but the more frightening for it.

I've seen My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? four times now and it's only improved in my estimation each time. Yet, strangely, my perception of it changes with each viewing. The horror of the film struck me the first time. The second time, the comedy of it. Much of what happens in the film could just as easily be humourous as disturbing, or both at once. The last time I was struck with sadness, the film's title encapsulating it. The title is the final words Brad's mother utters when she's stabbed, words gently chastising, yet overwhelmingly sad: this woman who has lived her life for her son and is moved to tears by his gratitude has her life taken away for no good reason. The film's mysteries remain, perhaps magnified, and so does my obsession with it; I think I'll watch it another four times.