wither the ghosts

by Michael Templeton

From about the age of 17 to around 21, I went to the movies obsessively. I almost always went by myself, and I would watch just about anything. I did not discriminate. These were the years 1980 to 1984, and some of the movies I saw are now considered milestones. Movies like Bladerunner and Alien are classics now. Other things like Porky’s have faded into obscurity for a bunch of good reasons. Being a Midwestern suburban American kid, I rarely saw movies from outside the U.S. and Hollywood. Foreign films would enter my imaginary via cable tv, which (as it happened) came out around this time, but I had no access to it at the time. That kind of fancy frivolity was for rich folks who did not know what to do with their money. My interest in film was also very simple. I knew nothing of psychoanalysis, of “Film Theory,” of the movement-image question, or any such complexities. I knew Excaliber was a kickass version of the King Arthur story that also included a pretty solid amount of nudity. I knew The Jerk was pretty funny stuff. I knew John Carpenter’s The Thing scared me so bad I had to buy a ticket to see Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid to get the images out of my mind. And finally, I knew Jamie Lee Curtis was the most gorgeous woman on earth, and I was cursed to a life of lonely unrequited love because I also knew she would never know of my existence. This was the long and the short of my knowledge of film. Movies, film, cinema—whatever we choose to call it—all of it created ways of believing things that became strikingly real for me if only for an hour and a half. I think this is why I always went alone. I never wanted anyone to intrude on my delusion. It was my time with worlds, people, things, and ideas that I knew were impossible, but needed for reasons I do not care to know. At 17, the world was becoming increasingly real, and I did not like anything about it. Movies sustained an unreality that I could experience as real.

All these years later, I find a real sense of connection with none other than Jacques Derrida who explains that his experience of film is mostly not all that intellectual. While his contemporaries, notably Deleuze, had written intense philosophical studies of film, Derrida said in an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma that “I am not at all a cinephile in the classical sense of the term. Instead, I’m a pathological case. During periods when I go to the movies a lot, particularly when I’m abroad in the United States, where I spend my time in movie theaters, a constant repression erases the memory of these images that nonetheless fascinate me” (“Cinema and its Ghosts.” 23). Derrida’s approach to film was largely as a wide-eyed kid who just goes to the movies. Yet, he was Jacques Derrida after all, and this conversation quickly takes a turn into the depths he is so well-known for, and he makes an observation that struck the older me with just as much force. The problem of belief is one that has been with me for most of my life. I even wrote a book about how belief is played out in contemporary life, and along with the escapism of film that Derrida claims, he also isolates belief as at least one key area that would have been worth his intellectual efforts: “If I were to write about film, what would interest me above all is its mode and system of belief. There is an altogether singular mode of believing in cinema: a century ago, an unprecedented experience of belief was invented” (27). That film creates brief spells of schizophrenic experience for just about anyone is a given. That film alters the function and place of belief as a mode of human experience is something more far reaching. Derrida continues to explain that, “At the movies, you believe without believing, but this believing without believing remains a believing. On the screen, whether silent or not, one is dealing with apparitions that, as in Plato’s cave, the spectator believes, apparitions that are sometimes idolized. Because the spectral dimension is that of neither the living nor the dead, of neither hallucination nor perception, the modality of believing that relates to it must be analyzed in an absolutely original manner. This particular phenomenology was not possible before the movie camera because this experience of believing is linked to a particular technique, that of cinema” (27). What film provides in that space and time of disconnection, and ironically, disconnection from belief, is a frame of belief itself that persists even after the film is over. What we undergo in film is an experience in which the suspension of disbelief is linked to a spectral form of belief and the very conditions of belief are in some ways permanently altered. We are in states of complete identification with characters, places, and scenes; we are swept away with feelings of love, lust, beauty, terror, mortal fear, etc. It all engulfs us in ways that are, as Derrida says, neither hallucination nor perception, and therefore a form of the real that is neither. Thus, long after we leave the film, even a dumb one, there is a shift in the way we perceive the world.

Although it was officially released in 1979, I did not see Apocalypse Now until some time in 1980. This was at the beginning of my movie hermitage. Apocalypse Now made a huge impact on my 17-year old imagination. At that age, I had met numerous Vietnam veterans, men who fascinated me because even within my naïve suburban bonehead sense of the world, I knew they were different. These guys had endured something very different than, say, my uncle Paul who had been in World War II. These guys had seen something evil, and the movie Apocalypse Now revealed that evil for me in some measure. I did not watch that film as a war movie in the conventional sense; I watched it as a horrifying condemnation of my own country and the nightmare it created in that small nation far away. That movie ripped open the veil that was always placed over things we were not supposed to talk about. That our country subjected people to unimaginable horrors that had fucked them up for life, for instance. Walking out of the theater after watching Apocalypse Now, I was dead silent. I had nothing to say because I really did not have anything to think. I had been overcome. It is difficult to understand this now, in a time in which the horrors of war are on our phone screens constantly, to the point that they become meaningless images. Apocalypse Now was historical, but it was also immediate in a way I cannot quite explain.

The historical dimension of the film is only one part of the experience, and Derrida explains that film plunges us, through that unspecifiable mix of experience that is neither perception nor hallucination, into something that is located in history but with something else attached: “It is historical through and through, with that supplementary aura, that particular memory that lets us project ourselves into films of the past. That is why the experience of seeing a film is so rich. It lets one see new specters appear while remembering (and then projecting them in turn onto the screen) the ghosts haunting films already seen” (27). The ghosts in the film, the ghosts in all the other films that haunt us even at the level of the most distant unconscious of experience, and the ghosts attached to what lingers after the lights come back up. There is a supplementary aura that is always there, whether we are aware of it or not, that infuses film with something that language seems unable to capture. Perhaps this is why Derrida did not feel drawn to writing about film and cinema. The great scholar of writing and the written word withdrew from those things that elude the written word and are not necessarily completely contained inside the text. But it is Derrida who identifies the ghosts of history, our individual history and the places in history in which our lives unfold. Some of these ghosts haunt those things that the official history cannot contain. Those things that haunt the official history like the demon of conscience. What I saw in watching Apocalypse Now, as a young man, was a reflection of the haunted looks in the eyes of men who had been in the war, ghosts of all the things no one would tell me when I was a child. Why, as a boy, not a single adult could ever give me a sound reason for why we were fighting that war. This lingering void came back as a ghost that haunted that film—the collective spirit of the men who fought the war and persisted alongside the official history that would not go away. Belief in something as stable as “America” was coming undone, and powerful people were not going to stop that.

Jean-Jacques Abrahams was made famous by Deleuze and Guattari after Abrahams staged a sneak attack on psychoanalysis. After his years in psychiatric hospitals, he escaped. Sartre also made him famous, but what is most interesting for our purposes is his short essay entitled “Fuck the Talkies” (Collected in Schizo-Culture: the Book edited by Sylvere Lotringer). Abrahams makes the case that it was the introduction of the talkies in 1929 that set so much of the western world into a ruinous avalanche that would culminate in the Great Depression, Nazi Germany, and World War II. Maybe Abrahams’s historical links are questionable, but his confusion of correlation and causation is impeccable and really convincing. Abrahams explains that the early years if cinema, led by the Lumiere brothers, were a celebration of light, as it is captured in their very name and in the place of their birth: Paris, the City of Light. Cinema was light. It kept us in a play of light, and it held us in a thrall that was almost prelapsarian. Then came “the Talkie!” written with all the emphasis of derision. Abrahams tells us that “it was nothing more than the first talking film that set off the Crash on Wall Street, that incredible event for which we have never found an explanation” (180). The facts of what led to the stock market crash of 1929 are not at issue. Abrahams is not a historian, and I do not give a shit about the facts. What matters is that Abrahams felt—perceived the ghosts of that world-historical event in the intrusion of sound into cinema. It was a cataclysmic moment, and Abrahams has his reasons. He explains that the intrusion of sound into film “reintroduced sin, guilt, religious moralizing (the talkie remade the fortune of religions, the myth of the ‘father’ and other gibberish like this!) brings back St. Thomas’ complex, an unheard of uneasiness because the voice has as its impact the bringing into doubt of credulity, whence the crisis of credibility and its crumbling” (180). This doubt and crisis of credibility made people doubt the validity of Wall Street, of capitalism as it existed at that moment, and this ultimately brought everything crashing down in a cataclysmic fall. Derrida’s ghosts that haunt film and cinema are quite real, and once they are unleashed, the damage can be terrifying. That there are complex historical forces that led to the collapse of the global financial system of 1929 is not at issue. What Abrahams demonstrates is that there is a continuity of historical experience contained in cinema as it was, and the introduction of the voice, of the soundtrack, had unforeseeable consequences which were devastating. I do not think he is wrong, and his theory, no matter how insane it may seem, is completely consistent with Derrida’s idea of the ghosts which haunt cinema, ghosts which I saw myself in 1980 when that horrible war came back to us in its ghostly and cinematic form, the same ghosts I had seen in the eyes of men who lost parts of themselves, physically and spiritually, in that horrible war.

At the moment I write this, July 1, 2025, seven out of ten of the top ten films in the United States are remakes, sequels, or parts of a franchise sequence. That means only three of the top grossing films in America are in some sense new. I wonder if we can still speak of Derrida’s ghosts in the context of a form of cinema that is nothing but endlessly regurgitated content, and I choose that word quite deliberately. Content is just the fodder for websites and online image generation systems designed to funnel commercial web traffic. An artist paints pictures, a poet writes poems, musicians write songs and perform them. Content is generated by code. There is nothing to it. Content is some OnlyFans account filled with digital images of someone’s asshole, and the movies that occupy the theater and home screens now are just content. There is nothing more to them than any other content that drives commercial web traffic. I am not so naïve, or filled with nostalgia, to suggest the movies of yesteryear were not money-making ventures. I know they were, and I know Hollywood has always been a stew of capitalist filth. The difference is that even the most base and scurrilous capitalist had to put crayon to paper, spool a reel of film, and point a camera at an object to make a film. Now, all you need is computer access and a few cheap AI tools, and you have all it takes to make a major Hollywood movie. At the same time, the proliferation of digital tools has made it possible for artists to make films that would never have had the resources in prior ages. There is a trade-off. The real question is, do the ghosts persist in contemporary film, in contemporary cinema, if we are to continue using that term? I am not sure about the answer.

If seven out of ten movies are really just versions of the same movies, if we are continuously watching the same movies over and over again, are we tapped into the history Derrida speaks of that makes it possible for these ghosts to emerge? Because we need to remember that Derrida says that the issue is historical, that it is that particular aura that allows us to project ourselves into the past and into the films of the past; therefore, if the films are always some version of the same film, there are no films of the past. If the historical dimension is always the same shoddy past made of the pulped mush of all pasts projected into a present that is itself produced from this same pulp and mush, then all of this forecloses the possibility of a future, and the past is simply whatever is on the internet. There is no past; our present is an empty experience of digitized experiences for us to enact—our “experience” nothing more than a prescribed moment shared in total isolation, and the future is nothing but a potential disturbance that has been eliminated by security systems designed to keep us all safe.

At the end of the interview, Derrida is asked if “the image is an inscription of memory or a confiscation of memory?” He answers that it is both. He explains that in a film in which he made an appearance, [Derrida’s Elsewhere], “I evoke the past. There is both the moment in which I am speaking and the moment of which I am speaking. This already makes for two memories implicated in each other.” His point is that in the film, as in his research, and perhaps in life, there is an appropriation of the past, and an appropriation of an image of the past. These things overlap, they align over each other like a double exposure. Derrida readily concedes that these things are a matter of deliberate choice, and that the choice is always a matter of exclusion. But what matters is that there is the moment in the past, the moment in which one is speaking of the past, and the image of both the past and the one who speaks. All of this is layered in ways that are both deliberate and accidental. The net result is a mixture of deliberate images and unforeseen effects, a supplementary aura, a spectral consequence that is not fully accessible to words, to language. Our current world is constructed entirely out of linguistic and mathematical elements. Code is linguistic, and it can only correspond to more code. To generate meaning means to generate code. To express oneself means to access code. If we are not forming images and ideas that are amenable to code, we are silent. We do not exist. There are no ghosts. There is no history, and this is not the “end of history” that Francis Fukuyama announced. This is the end of history in the sense that there is nothing at all. When we stopped making movies, we stopped existing. Jean-Jacques Abrahams is more prescient that anyone. It was Abrahams who said that the movies died when we turned them over to private American financiers, the same fat cats who run the digital world now and who are poisoning even the most elemental forms of human communication. It all becomes some version of “Cain-Abel paranoid style information,” and nothing more. Just meaningless images like everything else we scroll through on our phones.

Maybe we lose more than good movies when we let the movies go the way of content. Looking back all these years at my indiscriminate forays into the movies that I would one day refer to as “cinema” (how my old friends would laugh at me even today). Maybe I am just being sentimental. Or maybe there is something profoundly wrong with a world that cannot make room for a simple ghost at the movies, and in abandoning that ghost, maybe we have abandoned ourselves. 

Works Cited:

Abrahams, Jean-Jacques. “Fuck the Talkies.” From Schizo-Culture: The Book. Edited by Sylvère

Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent Series. Vol III, number 2. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013.

de Baecque, Antoine and Thierry Jousse. “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques

Derrida.” Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Discourse, 37.1–2, Winter/Spring 2015, pp. 22–39.

*Stay tuned for Michael Templeton’s next monthly installment in August.