Visibly Invisible: The Digital Ghosts of Personal Shopper (2016)

By Matthew Chan, Edited by Vrinda Das and Zachariah Steele

In Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016), Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is caught within a liminal period of her life. As a medium she fruitlessly hopes to communicate with her recently deceased brother’s ghost to gain the closure she needs to leave Paris, however, in her day job as a personal shopper for supermodel Kyra Gellman (Nora Waldstätten) she may as well be a ghost herself. Like many in the gig economy, Maureen’s job is to be discreet, inconspicuous and above all invisible, she is paid to perform the labor that Kyra is too busy for, providing a service that feels frictionless for the consumer. It is perhaps for similar reasons that Maureen is glued to her phone throughout the film, being attracted to the same promise of frictionless convenience digital technology provides through instant access to information and, more nebulously, instant connection to others. It is this exact quality of digital media that Wendy Chun draws attention to in her essay On “Sourcery”, Or Code as Fetish which highlights how the instantaneous nature of real time interaction with digital interfaces obscures our understanding of how computation actually works, as “real time makes it appear as though only outside events—user mouse clicks, streaming video—cause the computer actions,” (Chun 318). It is precisely because of this sense of convenience that we perceive the internet as akin to the spirit world, a seemingly incorporeal void one throws their desires into Moreover, just as Maureen seeks to commune with spirits as a medium, Chun sees code “As a medium, [that] channels the ghost that we imagine runs the machine”. (Chun 310) The collective mystification with code and how it functions is what fuels its fetishization and causes us to perceive the digital as spectral, even if we hold the implicit faith that there is a real person on the other end. What Assayas’ film posits is what if this faith was broken and what if the digital truly became a portal to the unknown, where our understanding of a solid reality was fully suspended and all you were left with was uncertainty.

Throughout the film Maureen is seen communicating with others primarily through her phone, necessitated by her job and the number of clients she needs to juggle, but one that nonetheless makes it so that she is depicted constantly alone, even if we know that there is someone out of frame sending her a text or calling on the other end. The certainty that you are actually communicating with someone through digital technology stems from the nature of real time interactions, which “always points elsewhere—to “real-world” events, to user’s actions”, there is the acknowledgement that direct action and speech instantly translates to another party, (Chun 316). At various points within the film Maureen talks to her estranged boyfriend Gary over Skype, who, even thousands of miles away in Oman, is able to listen and respond to her as if they are in the same room, even if his presence is mediated by a low quality image (17:28). When taken out of context this interaction can seem as otherworldly as Maureen’s interactions with ghosts, as a direct intrusion on one’s immediate reality, collapsing locations and time zones together. Furthermore, without an understanding of how Skype’s code works there is no certain indication that who you are talking to is a real, living person, having an entirely ephemeral presence within your computer screen. What grounds the interaction entirely is, thus, faith in the concept of real time that “whether or not digital images are supposed to be “real,” real time posits the existence of a source—coded or not—that renders our computers transparent,” (Chun 316). A peculiar effect of this faith in real time is how it warps our visual perception of reality. In no way would an image produced on Skype ever fully feel real, between the various visual markers like low image resolution, fickle light processing and lag, but because of the real time’s “quick reactions to user’s inputs,” “grainy moving images have become a marker of the real,” (Chun 316). All of this suggests that despite how spectral digital technology may appear to be, the instant response of real time interactions makes it feel rational and more importantly, tangible. 

However, just as Assayas suggests a rationality to digital communication, he also shows how the introduction of the unknown and the paranormal can just as easily make this faith in real time tenuous and the digital once more spectral. The film’s centerpiece is an extended sequence where Maureen texts an unknown number during a trip to and from London. Maureen receives various invasive messages while passing through the uncanny liminal spaces of train carriages, lounges and security checkpoints, (39:00-52:39). It is implied that she is potentially talking to a ghost while working as a ghost for Kyra. It is important to note that in the scene immediately preceding this one, we see  Maureen definitively have a supernatural encounter with a violent ghost inside her brother's old home. This suggests a shift in mindset, with the direct encounter with the paranormal casting doubt on her perception of her immediate reality(36:53-38:11). Her loss of faith in the visible, as such, extends to a loss of faith in the digital. Chun states that “Real time operating systems create an “abstraction layer” that hides the hardware details of the processor from application software,” and it is the lack of transparency within text messaging systems as to where and how messages are sent that causes the entire interaction to adopt a haunting quality, (Chun 316). Unlike a Skype call there is no direct visual element to texting, with a complete lack of human presence or image, which casts further doubt on the concept of real time. As though Maureen can proceed with the understanding that the act of texting creates an instant intuitive response on her phone there is no longer any certainty that there is a real human being on the opposite end. It is almost as if the messages she receives are being conjured out of thin air. When contextualized through the lens of her supernatural encounter it makes sense that Maureen’s first instinct is to question whether the number is human, texting in quick succession: “R u real?”, “R u alive or dead?”, “Alive or dead??”, “Lewis?”, suggesting that she is finally making contact with the ghost of her brother (41:27). In this instant, without the certainty in a real human presence on the other end, the real time sensation of texting becomes a performative and highly individualized act of communication, it becomes purely “the illusion— the feel or sensation—of liveness, rather than the fact of liveness,” (Chun 316). Maureen is no longer texting with the goal of simulating a conversation with another person but is merely engaged in the act in an effort to see if her conversation is even real. Thus, without an understanding of how the phone's software functions and without faith in real time, the digital device transforms into a seemingly magical object, a way to connect with worlds beyond our own and beyond human sensory experience, whether that of the digital or the paranormal.

As much as we want to believe that there is something spectral about digital technology, what Chun ultimately emphasizes is the more banal reality that the ghostly dimensions of digital interfaces are simply a tradeoff for convenience, a “magical erasure of the gap between source and execution, an erasure of execution itself,” (Chun 312). It is this same reality that Assayas loops back around to by revealing that the ghost in Maureen’s phone was actually Kyra’s boyfriend Ingo, denying the presence of the paranormal. However, the scene in which this is revealed posits two parallel realities, one of the supernatural that Maureen wishes to believe in and one of the tangible reality that more likely occurred. Following Maureen’s return to the hotel room that the unknown number guides her to,  we fade into an eerie tracking shot as the camera moves through the hotels hallways and out the lobby, with an invisible figure triggering sensors that would typically require a human presence, with elevator doors remaining open and the automatic glass doors of the lobby exit sliding open on command, (1:24:35-1:25:19). In effect what we are seeing is what Maureen believed her unknown contact to be, a malevolent spirit moving through our world, but perhaps more appropriately, what we are seeing is a visual representation of how we think digital technologies function. The frictionless nature of real time interaction has all but erased our understanding of computation, to the extent that we perceive there to be invisible forces, like the ones triggering the sliding doors, to be powering our devices. But what Chun and Assayas both point to is the fact that there always is something there. Just as the scene of the invisible figure wraps we are immediately treated to the exact same scene with the camera moving through the hallways and out the lobby, expect this time with Ingo in person triggering the automated sensors. (1:25:20-1:26:22) This is in effect a firm denunciation of the paranormal within the digital, an acknowledgement that even if we do not directly perceive it there is “the constant regeneration, the difference between the textual representation of a program, a compiled program, a program stored on the hard drive, and the program read-in instruction by instruction into the processor” being processed within our devices. There is always a presence, a code or a command causing the doors to slide open, (Chun 318).

Though we may perceive our devices as ephemeral, we need to acknowledge that this is entirely by design -  as a way to emphasize a sense of convenience. It is, thus, no wonder that we believe there to be something haunting about digital devices, just as we believe there is something haunting about the unknown. Perhaps the ultimate tradeoff we make for frictionless, instant connection is that digital communication can still feel frustratingly solitary. Even though we use our devices to communicate with others the act of communication itself is almost entirely done alone. Without a reactive human presence no matter how much you give of yourself emotionally the interaction will always feel ephemeral. It is to the extent that within the experience of digital communication it may not even matter if you are talking to a real person, a ghost or an algorithm, because it is hard to perceive anything directly outside of yourself. As Maureen hauntingly remarks in the film's closing scene “Or is it just me?” (1:40:55). 

Works Cited 

Assayas, Olivier, director. Personal Shopper. CG Cinéma, Vortex Sutra Detailfilm, Sirena Film, Arte France Cinéma, Arte Deutschland/WDR, Canal+, Ciné+, 2016. 

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “On “Sourcery”, Or Code as Fetish.” Configurations, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008, pp. 299-324.