The Women in Waiting: Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper and Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story

Abstract

The article analyses Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016) and Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story (2017) as post-horrors. Post-horror, sometimes called slow, quiet, or ambient horror, focuses on creating atmospheres rather than chains of events. Its themes of family and loss are often focalised through a single, female character. Sound design becomes key in creating auras of suspension as the films tend to omit dramatic events and focus on their aftermaths, showing the characters struggling to re-establish their daily routines. Assayas’ Personal Shopper begins after Maureen (Kristen Stewart) has lost her twin brother and Polanski’s Based on a True Story – after the suicidal death of Delphine’s (Emmanuelle Seigner) mother. In both films the loss is not followed by mourning but by what both characters verbalise as waiting. The films foreground the scenes of waiting: from the most mundane of waiting at the train station to the most sophisticated of waiting for the spectre. Spectres are waited on and appear, manifesting the fluidity between life and death rather than the linearity and the acceptance of loss typical for mourning. Waiting for the spectre is the main trope in Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’, where he imagines it as an ethics of responsibility towards that which does not exist according to traditional western ontology. He argues for a relational ethics that takes seriously the agency of such absent others, suggesting that ethics should reach beyond the immediate and the present. The figure of the spectre, through its hauntings, is both present and absent and, according to Derrida, tele-technologies like cinema were invented to explore such disturbances in time and space. The two films emphasise sound as a way to communicate with spectres, playing with Gothic and Victorian motifs of female mediumism, as they present the women’s waiting as transcending the personal (and interpersonal) and reaching towards a cosmic awe or terror that can be analysed through a combination of what Bauman called the ‘cosmic fear’ of negative globalisation and Lovecraft – cosmic indifference.