Sympathy For the Dead: (G)hosts, Hostilities and Mediums in Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and Postmortem Photography

1. Misrecognitions

Somewhere in the second half of Amenábar's 2001 film The Others, a scene occurs wherein the protagonist, Grace, enters the marital bedroom to talk to her traumatized husband, Charles, returned from the war. We see a brief shot of Charles sitting on the right-hand side of the bed (from the camera's point of view), and then one of Grace entering the room, closing the door, and walking a couple of paces to a mirrored wardrobe next to the door. She opens the wardrobe door; we glimpse a rapid pan of the room through the mirror as the door turns, before the door comes to a standstill, its surface showing the right-hand side of the bed (again, from the camera's point of view). Grace and Charles continue their conversation. But no one is sitting on the bed. An absent space occupies the place where Charles ought to sit.

So far, so conventionally Gothic: ghosts, after all—and as we all know for sure—can't be represented in mirrors. But in fact, there is both more and less to this moment then at first meets the eye. Less, because what we think we see is not really what we see at all. We think we see an absence in the mirror which points to the presence of a ghost, absence being the paradoxical evidence of the ghost's existence, the deictic indication of its presence—you, the ghost, are there because you are not "there" in the way that I am; I am sure that you are there because I do not see you where I ought to see you, and where I am sure to see myself. But in fact that is not what we see at all. We see a reflection of the bed on which Grace's husband is sitting, which, being a reflection, reverses the bed. We see the empty side of the bed simply because Grace's husband is sitting on the other side of it. That is it; that is all we see. We thought we saw an absence—but we didn't.

The absence that we think we see is thus not really there at all: the moment of critical reflection on this shot/ reverse shot exchange exposes, as it were, an absence of an absence. This is "less" with a vengeance. But there is "more" to this moment, too, for if in it we are confused, wrong-footed, because what we think is a sign of a ghostly presence turns out not to be one, in this respect the moment is emblematic of the whole film.² The denouement of The Others turns on the misrecognition of the ghostly, as does this moment here: what we thought were the signs of ghostly presences turn out to be merely the banal and mundane manifestations of everyday life, as banal as someone sitting on the other side of the bed, as mundane as new householders changing the curtains. In fact, this aspect of The Others reverses (very neatly) the trajectory Freud describes when he speaks of the way the everyday moves towards the uncanny. "Heimlich," he observes, "is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich" ("The Uncanny" 30); here in this moment of the film the apparently uncanny—the ghost that is not in the mirror, or that makes unexplained noises in an upstairs room—finally coincides with the everyday: just someone sitting on the wrong side of the bed, just a new householder taking down the curtains (and what could be more homely than that?). And yet, of course, not "finally": that is not the end of the story, and actually, we were right all along. Grace's husband is a ghost; we were right to think that there were inhabitants of this house whom we had not seen before moving about within it unseen as we watched; most of all, we were right, in the terms of...