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.