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3 - Dead Letters: Epistolary Hauntology and the Speed of Light in Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2023

Catherine Fowler
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
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Summary

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways that ‘letterness’ and its accompanying features affect communications in the digital age. Forms of communication that rely on a system of discarnate forms such as the text message, email, and video conferencing assume an embodied corporeal subject ‘out there’. Through an analysis of modes of communication in the 2016 film Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016), this chapter takes a close look at the delivery device, questioning how the delivery mechanism of the epistle rather than the medium literally embodies the object of our anxieties in an age where the delivery system and the subject are now virtually indistinguishable.

Keywords: epistolary hauntology; text messages; delay; Olivier Assayas; Personal Shopper

It struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Standing alone in her small Parisian apartment, Maureen continues to watch a video. She had begun watching it on her iPhone while on the train, the wires of her earbuds snaking up from under her sweater into her ears. Now the video continues on the laptop propped open on her bed, sound emerging from the laptop speaker. The transition of the film from one device to another as Maureen moves not only from one location to the other, but also viewing part of it as she is in the process of moving from one place to the next, is so quotidian a part of contemporary life that these transitions go unnoted. The sound, previously transmitted to her ears only because of the earbuds, is now audible throughout her apartment, but still heard by her alone. In both cases, sound is transmitted to the film's viewers in exactly the same way, through the film that we are watching, wherever we are and however we are experiencing it.

Maureen is wearing a dress that is not her own, a dress that she is supposed to return to the Chanel showroom for her employer, a socialite named Kyra, who also does not own the dress, and whose main occupation is to be photographed in clothes borrowed from luxury brands in a mutually sustaining form of advertising.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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