We Can’t Save The Victims: Hauntology in Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu

“To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept” 

– (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New international, Jacques Derrida¹)

“Is she alive or is she dead?”
“Look: life, like time and space, is a local phenomenon”. 

– (Déjà Vu, Tony Scott, 2006)

The first excerpt, from a text by the French postmodernist philosopher Jacques Derrida, serves as an introduction to the theory of hauntology- Derrida’s advancement of the concept of ontology. In deliberating upon the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent state of socioeconomic freefall entered into by the nations formed from the fragments of the Soviet Union, Derrida posited that the existence of these states suggested an inability to isolate the “new” from that which precedes it, which would therefore imply that what existed in the aftermath of Soviet dissolution was something that existed on the foundation of absence. However, this dynamic was not restricted to the context of the Soviet Union. According to critic-theorist Mark Fisher, who resurrected the concept of hauntology in contemporary cultural discourse, the collapse of socialism (and hence what Francis Fukuyama prematurely termed “the end of history”) led to the assertion of a dominant political discourse- that capitalism had grown to become, in the minds of many, the only feasible economic system. The latter concept, which Fisher termed “capitalist realism”, essentially referred to the inability of Spiritus Mundi to imagine a world without capitalism. The persistence of capitalism is hence predicated upon the ghost of socialism, justifying its existence less along the lines of reason and instead “repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to formulas, like any animistic magic” (Specters of Marx). The non-existence of socialism, ostensibly located in the future, hence becomes reanimated in order to propel the persistence of capitalism.

The aforementioned discourse on hauntology, as defined by Derrida, is applied onto contemporary art by Fisher in his seminal text Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Much like Baudrillard’s conception of simulacra as a reflection of an “original” that eventually becomes divorced from its source as a new being altogether, Fisher’s conception of the hauntological body creates a dynamic between the new and old as inseparably connected by the former’s parasitism of the latter. The crackle of vinyl or the whirr of a VCR, for instance, act as “sonic signatures”² of hauntology, recalling an archaic, analog past. One need only observe the box offices across the globe to see the ways in which the ghosts of “dead” art haunt the living, with virtually every blockbuster release cannibalizing the corpse of either once-dormant intellectual property or the corpses of real people to sustain their existence. In a world governed by capitalist realism, Fisher suggests, we are unable to relinquish ourselves from ghosts of dead futures, branches of time we chose not to take. This concept, much like capitalism itself, dangles in front of us what we desire so deeply but can never have, guiding us through streams of capital in a desperate quest to obtain some sense of satisfaction with a world we know, somehow, is fundamentally wrong. What makes the hauntological spirit such a persistent one is that it presents the material architecture for the accomplishing of the world we desire, and yet it is held back from fruition by social, political and economic conditions that seem all but impossible to alter. The desire to undo the past whilst still residing in the comfort of its ruins is intrinsically human, and it is what guides so much of postmodern art. What follows is a discussion of an example of this sort of postmodern art, Tony Scott’s 2006 time-travel thriller Déjà Vu, and its position in the context of hauntology.

In many ways, Tony Scott’s career represents something obscured by vagaries of critical respectability but which remains fundamentally respectable- a long run of sturdy workmanship, sturdy relationships and sturdy box-office gross. Though much of his 80s-early 90s career followed the archetype of the melodramatic, hypermasculine thriller, Scott’s tendencies evolved, becoming detached from the analogue materiality that his films were known for, introducing elements of non-narrative cinema via increasingly frenetic editing and the manifestation of emotional currents via physical gestures. Though Scott worked with a wide range of thespians across his career, many of whom were often the singular focus of his work, none were more closely associated with him than Denzel Washington, who first collaborated with Scott in Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995). Like Scott’s approach to shooting action sequences, Denzel’s identity in that film rested upon the bedrock of stone-cold competency, whilst at the same time engaged in a conflict of warring masculinities with Gene Hackman. Though he shared the gaze of Scott’s lens with Hackman, Washington would become Scott’s muse less than a decade later. On reuniting with Scott in Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 1995), Denzel’s absolute embodiment of his characters as a performer transmuted to accommodate the evolution in Scott’s formal construction. 

In collaborating with Washington in Man on Fire, tendencies of Scott’s that were maximized in Domino (Tony Scott, 2005) were reined in, but something remained constant: the utilization of the frame as a palette instead of a series of disparate components. This palette, however, was not in the vein of the palette of a film as painterly as Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975), which drew heavily from the Rococo period (particularly Boucher). Instead, it draws from something closer to the work of Rothko, amplifying the intensity with which the lens shifted focus or scenes cut and using the external movement as a way to blend disparate sheens and shades together. This is also where the layering of images upon images would be refined as a key tool of Scott’s until his last film; this technique will be crucial in discussing Déjà Vu. The violence of these cuts complemented the lens’ focus on Denzel as an avenging angel clad in green, but unlike Domino, these cuts also rendered moments of stillness and anguish all the more affecting. In directing Man on Fire, Scott situated the detached brutality of cartel wars and CIA interventionism in the landscape of nigh-ancient, Biblical cycles of retribution. This blending of past and present cultural influences as one would continue in his next feature: Déjà Vu.

To identify Déjà Vu as a key hauntological text, it is crucial to situate it in its temporal context. On October 26th, 2001, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (Patriot) Act went into effect. Expanding existing surveillance abilities of law enforcement under the pretense of the War on Terror, the act enabled the NSA to harvest millions of email and instant messaging contact lists, search through contents of emails, map cellphone locations, break encryption measures and pay tech companies for clandestine access to communication networks.³ In the same year as much of the original clauses constituting the Patriot Act were due to expire, 1800 people were killed and countless more displaced by Hurricane Katrina from 23 August to 31 August, incurring $125 billion in damage in Louisiana. Whilst the US military was preoccupied by imperialist operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the levees constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to prevent the outcome they had been designed to prevent.⁴ 

Less than a year later, in February 2006, Déjà Vu began principal photography in New Orleans, becoming the first Hollywood film to start production in the city since Katrina. Opening the film is a montage of what Bazin might have referred to as an affirmation of the cinematic medium as an invention of scientific innovation. In The Ontology of The Photographic Image, Bazin asserts that the desire of mankind to see the surface of the world faithfully copied in art was formalized through the invention of the film camera.⁵ The nigh-documentarian nature of Déjà Vu’s opening validates this hypothesis- in a matter of minutes, we witness a group of sailors and cadets saying goodbye to their sweethearts, a schoolteacher guiding a group of children and a young girl conversing with her doll. The ferry that serves as the conduit for these exchanges of love is therefore resident to occupants of civilian and non-civilian, infant and adult, native and tourist categories. The universality of experience uniting the people on this ferry is reflective of the universality of saying goodbye to a loved one-in essence, the imprinting of any number of warm memories of the viewer is allowed for. As the camera positively swoons at this sanguine image, the ferry departs. At the same time as the horn signaling its departure sounds, the doll slips out of the embrace of the young girl, crashing into the water below and acting as a microcosm of what is yet to come. The Beach Boys’ Don’t Worry Baby plays as diegetic sound, signalling the crescendo of serenity before it is violently interrupted. An explosion tears through the ferry, splitting it into fragments of wreckage and violently expulsing its occupants. The bodies tear through the epidermis of the river, drifting aimlessly through its currents. The orange glow of burning wreckage contrasts with the teal luminescence of water illuminated by sunlight, framing the scene in almost painterly terms. The doll, ostensibly an imitation approximated to the appearance of a human child, befalls the same fate as its owner- the image and the original, owned and owner both wind up as something pulled out of the river by emergency responders in the very next scene.

A doll trapped in time.

In observing the aftermath of this event, it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the context of Katrina from the images of tents, circling helicopters and rows of body bags onscreen. A government official later on in the film emphasizes the severity of this incident due to its proximity to Katrina, thereby situating the ferry bombing in the realm of the real. Katrina echoes throughout the film’s environments- an apprehension sequence later on takes place on the ruins of flattened houses. It is the response to this catastrophe that serves as the film’s ideological centre, and whether it could have been prevented in the first place. Acting as a vehicle for this exploration of reconstruction and reversal is ATF agent Doug Carlin, a New Orleans resident who arrives to inspect the scene of the incident instead of his partner. Once again, Washington plays the consummate professional, equipped with nigh-preternatural senses and unwavering commitment to his profession. Tics, such as his wide smile upon facing bureaucratic resistance in trying to do his job, act as a defense mechanism against any potential dis-anchoring of surety. Soon, however, this façade of competency is disrupted via being reminded that the contents of the body bags lying in front of him are and were people with families and dreams; as he walks along the pier on which these bags are scattered, the ring of a cellphone sounds. Sifting through his pockets, he attempts to find the source of the sound, only to realise that it is coming from one of the bags. This sonic signature of loss fits into Fisher’s framework of the hauntological as an embodied feeling. We are walked through a survey of the blast zone, with Carlin collecting traces of explosive material and dust for further inspection. Soon, he is contacted to help identify and inspect a body-the only body-recovered from the scene of the incident. 

During the sequence of inspecting the body, the roots of reversal are sown. As Carlin’s eyes scan over the corpse in the purple glow of UV lighting, he identifies the link between cause and effect- the scarring across one side of the corpse’s face can be explained by the signs of flammable liquid found near the scene. This corpse is given a name: Claire Kuchever. He is then plunged headfirst into the life of this woman upon arriving at her house. As Washington treads across this space, the camera scans over photos on the wall, used glasses and pages of diaries with sentences never to be completed. These signs of who she was are juxtaposed with she is now– bloodied cotton swabs and shattered glass, which signify an intrusion. With every sign of death, Carlin’s face hardens, as the weight of responsibility crashes down upon him. Before this afternoon, he knew nothing about this woman- now, he knows almost everything. Her father, sitting wistfully on the porch, provides Carlin with information about Claire’s closest confidants, and subsequently performs one of the many key gestures upholding the film. The camera slows down to a halt, reining in kineticism in favour of observation. Claire’s father hands a set of photographs to Carlin, each one of which captures Claire in a state of joy and serenity. He then utters:

“You see, Agent Carlin, I know how these things go…and I need her to matter to you”

In this single sentence lies both the persistent spectre of Katrina and the spectre of its response. The FEMA response to Katrina, or virtually any response of law enforcement to human suffering, is characterized as one of negligence and resignation. Claire’s father is all too aware that his daughter is just one of many victims of the ferry bombing, and in an attempt to do anything at all to alter the most likely outcome, he imposes the weight of an entire life, from the cradle to the grave, on Carlin. In Wolfreys’ Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature, which deliberates at length upon the position of hauntology as a key literary concern, he suggests that the concept of the spectre “makes possible reproduction even as it also fragments reproduction and ruins the very possibility of reproduction’s apparent guarantee to represent that which is no longer there fully”.⁶ The images that Carlin receives and carries with him throughout the film are therefore physical imprints that remind him of Claire’s joviality in life as much as they remind him of what ended it. Similarly, the hauntological entity that is Katrina seeps into the corners of the frame, constantly suggesting the possibility that Claire’s death will be shoved into a file cabinet and forgotten in much the same way. The spatiotemporal positioning of the ferry bombing is as precise as it is because it is incorporating not only the hauntology of Katrina but of 9/11; an observation of how a conventional image of American leisure is violently disrupted by an explosion coming out of nowhere validates this hypothesis. The question of how it could have been prevented and why it wasn’t prevented hangs over the air at all times, and it is this question that initially guides Carlin into the film’s central conceit: time travel.

Carlin’s recruitment by Val Kilmer’s jaded Agent Pryzwarra, the lead investigator in the ferry bombing case, signifies the beginning of the dissolution between past and present within the film. As Carlin is led into their base of operations, it is difficult to separate post-Snowden viscera of mass surveillance from what the film presents as an investigative tactic: a sophisticated computer system called Snow White, which uses NSA satellites to create uncannily realistic composites of physical environments in the past. In painting these digital reconstructions, Scott employed LIDAR imaging technology,⁷ which maps environments via the scattering of light. Through repurposing technology used by the military and intelligence agencies for reconstructing environments in Déjà Vu, Scott establishes one of the film’s key concerns before a single line of explanatory dialogue is uttered: the failure of bureaucratic institutions to save the lives that they are designed to save, and the question of whether their instruments can be used to save lives whilst circumventing their constraints. In these sequences of digital reconstruction, the camera glides through Claire’s home as the virtual environments comes into being. Through this, the film defies depth-of-field and dimension- Carlin and his newfound colleagues gaze at a 2-dimensional screen as if observing CCTV footage, and yet the fact that these images are a real recollection of Claire’s life just days before her death render them convincingly 3-dimensional. In Specters of Marx, Derrida notes that hauntology is reliant upon the dead being “conjured away”, in much the same manner as Claire is (to the comfort of the agents observing her) sequestered away behind layers of video, wireframe and thermal imaging. Yet, Derrida also notes that “there are those who refused to allow the body to be interred, just as there is a danger of (over)killing something to such an extent that it becomes a spectre, a pure virtuality”. Therefore, being enclosed within layers of technical approximations renders Claire suspended in time: she is at once alive and dead, doomed to remain a spectre casting an eternal gloom over those who loved her whilst not being provided the finality of being forgotten. As Carlin discovers, however, this dual state of being is not merely figurative;, as I will deliberate upon below, his being convinced of her status as someone at least partially alive will precede being presented with fact.

Disasters past and present

What follows this divulging of covert surveillance technology is perhaps the most transcendent moment in a film full of transcendence. After scanning the scene of the ferry bombing four days prior to the incident, Snow White shifts to a representation of Claire’s home. It tracks her through her everyday life, as she converses with her ex on the phone. Washington moulds to this observation admirably, temporarily shedding his shell of unwavering confidence to unveil a raw, beating heart. As the camera zooms in on Claire’s face, Carlin slowly walks towards the screen. He is dwarfed by the image of Claire’s face, gazing towards a team of observers whose presence she is entirely unaware of. It then cuts to the translucent layer of the screen suspended over Carlin, as he gazes at a ghost. Gregson-Williams’ electronic score decreases in intensity, slowing down into something elegiac and almost operatic. The screen, Carlin’s colleagues reassure him, is simply a unidirectional observation tool, and yet this moment of layering shatters the temporal and indeed, constitutional, barrier separating them. The longitudinal space separating Carlin and Claire is transformed into something lateral, where time exists not as a hierarchy of past-present-future but as layers existing across multiple surfaces at the same time. The utilization of shot-reverse shot within the same line of sight, as opposed to the rapid cutting that characterizes much of the film, brings Carlin and Claire into the same ontological sphere. This moment of transcendence is interrupted by Snow White shifting its focus, tracking Claire as she walks around her home, a place that Carlin only knows as a veritable mortuary. The images sifting across his face from the glow of the screen, not unlike that of a film projector, suggest a degree of sensuality to the otherwise ethereal staging of the scene. Beyond its mise-en-scène and compositional clarity, the textures of this interaction are paramount to rendering it as moving as it is, with the graininess of Carlin’s face melting into the golden light spilling across it. In Deleuze’s Cinema II, he often refers to Bergsonian theory of memory as foundational to his theory of the crystal image.⁸ Bergson distinguishes between two types of memory: spontaneous (representational and entirely virtual, like your first time on a plane) and habitual (mechanical and based on automatic recollection, like learning to drive a car).⁹ Through, using the Snow White system as a conduit to piece together his knowledge of what happened on the ferry with what happened to Claire, and hence reconciling the image of Claire, the living, with Claire, the dead, Carlin (and hence Scott, since the former is occupying the role of the director in this situation) employs both spontaneous and habitual memory. Through Bergson’s schema, it can be understood that Déjà Vu is a contemporary analogue to Hitchcock’s Vertigo through its combination of movement of past and present images which, like Vertigo, also blends together virtuality of memory and materiality of physical space.

Falling in love with a ghost.

Disrupting this moment of transcendence is Carlin’s realization, and external affirmation confirming, that Snow White is not simply a reconstruction of the past; the images projected in front of Carlin have not been conjured from composites of satellite imaging, and are instead the product of a window into the past, formed through the folding of spacetime itself. The transportive power of the cinematic image is therefore literalized, suggesting that Carlin has not simply fallen in love with an image but with the past itself. This realization thrusts the film into untouched and dangerous grounds, since the ability to see into the past also presents a tantalizing possibility: if spacetime can be folded so as to peer into the past, can it also allow for transference between the past and the present? What was seemingly confirmed via the layering of images is swiftly refuted by the bureaucrats working alongside Carlin: any attempt to defy the window’s unidirectional status will result in imminent disintegration, with no knowledge of what the implications of interfering in the past could be. Here, there is a clear assertion of the hauntological as a cautionary parable- the future that could have been has already been destroyed, and so, logically, any attempt to redirect the continuum of time towards this lost future will result in either a repeat of the same outcome or something potentially even more disastrous.

The key sequence of Déjà Vu’s that distinguishes it from fully becoming sublimated into the naivety embodied by that of the similar trajectory of Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, 2017) however, is a demonstration of how the futility of chasing ghosts lies in the fact that they are assumed to represent the failures of the past as a whole, when in fact they may simply be singular actors trapped in a wider framework of decisions that they are separated from. This is exemplified in a sequence where Carlin, having discovered the identity of Claire’s killer, his partner’s killer and the ferry bomber as one and the same (Carroll Oerstadt), attempts to track him down with the use of an apparatus called a goggle rig. This apparatus resembles contemporary forms of augmented reality, except that instead of imposing virtual elements onto the real world, it projects the past onto the present. What ensues is a pursuit of both everything and nothing; through one eye, Carlin wildly navigates through traffic in stark daylight, whilst in the other, he chases down Oerstadt on an empty nocturnal road four days before the bombing. Though the chase represents something far more profound than simply hunting down a criminal, it follows the procedural framework of the car chase as strictly sequential and divided into rigidly structured objectives, a duality espoused by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.¹⁰ Deleuze and Guattari suggest that temporality in the pre-modern era (synchronic) revolved around singular points in time, such as religious deities, whilst contemporary capitalist time (diachronic) is characterized by linearity and the occurrence of sequences of events towards an “open infinite”.¹¹ The car chase in Déjà Vu hence represents a blurring between conceptualizations of synchronic and diachronic time, in that it is largely linear in how it is structured to hone in on Oerstadt’s arrest as a goal, and is divided into moments where Carlin’s understanding of temporality is advanced via learning to use the goggle rig. At the same time, however, the hauntological looms large in how the chase revolves around the ferry bombing in a feeble attempt to somehow compensate for failing to prevent it- Carlin’s dissatisfaction even after Oerstadt is arrested is reflective of this.

Time as lateral, not longitudinal.

What distinguishes Déjà Vu from either nihilistic configurations of time travel as a destructive instrument or a miraculous equalizer, however, is its simultaneous acceptance of both determinism and free will as integral to any conception of time travel. As Carlin walks away from the holding cell after a futile interrogation of Oerstadt, he is approached by Pryzwarra, who attempts to dissuade him from pondering any further on the ferry bombing. In attempting to convince Carlin that their endeavor has not been for naught, he resurrects an all-too-familiar, almost memetic statement to absolve themselves of responsibility: “We can’t save the victims”. Though the statement is simply one of many components of Pryzwarra’s refutation of culpability, it recalls the very same hauntological implications of Carlin’s visit to Claire’s home. The juxtaposition of past and present as two separate, impenetrable planes is once again apparent- those on the ferry are either six feet under, in mortuaries or too disfigured to even recognize. By denoting those on the ferry as victims, Pryzwarra utilizes precisely the form of bureaucratic obfuscation to shut down the investigation that Claire’s father feared. Yet, Pryzwarra’s objectivism is at odds with the subjectivity embodied by Carlin- though they may both have observed Claire through the time window, in the same room and at the same time, they do not regard Claire nor the rest of Oerstadt’s victims the same way. For Carlin, Claire is a ghost that won’t stop haunting him-indeed, as he ventures to her home for one last glance before a resignation to failure, her fate has been intertwined with his to an inseparable degree. 

As the wailing of bereaved families standing around a candlelit memorial fades into another sonic elegy, we observe Carlin walking through Claire’s home, an even more desolate space now that its windows have been boarded up and yellow “DO NOT CROSS” tape spans across its empty rooms. On a fridge, there lies a set of magnetic letters spelling out not “U MUST” or “U WILL” but “U CAN SAVE HER”. Though this may appear to be a contrived deus ex machina, it is less a convenient reminder than it is another material signifier of past, present and future as a unified entity. It suggests not an imperative or affirmation that Claire can be saved, but a possibility. It is, in other words, a ghost of what could have been, suggesting the residue of past attempts to save Claire manifesting in the present. Once again, the fruitless prolonging of the procedural as a never-ending mission to achieve some hollow semblance of justice is alluded to- after all, the victims can’t be saved. Yet, the seeds of revival that were sown in Carlin’s first meeting with Claire as merely a corpse are reaped here as a resignation to both inevitability and unpredictability: by undergoing a process of spatial transference to the morning of the ferry bombing, Carlin accepts the constant of death, since any step of the process of time travel could result in the destabilization of his very atoms, to say nothing of what trying to avert the ferry bombing could result in. The authoritarian determinism that precedes this is therefore channeled into stochastic action, where Carlin ventures into the past as an avenging angel (not unlike his role in Man on Fire); yet, much of his actions in changing the past are in direct conflict with not only the notion of minimal interference that guides contemporary configurations of time travel, but with his very role as a supposed arbiter of law and order. The position of the bureaucrat working for law enforcement necessitates a conscious detachment from the object of study- yet, Carlin’s divulging of his seemingly preternatural knowledge of the ferry bombing to Claire creates an emotional conduit that is diametrically opposed to the aforementioned ethos of detachment. Regardless of whether he succeeds in his goal to avert the bombing, he embeds himself in Claire’s life so irrevocably by simply allowing her to trust him that he becomes a figurative ghost, in much the same way as the ghost of Claire drives Carlin to change the past. The hauntological parable is therefore embraced in the climax of Déjà Vu, rather than being cast over the film’s characters as a warning- in averting the ferry bombing, Carlin sacrifices himself by taking the place of the countless men, women and children who are slaughtered in the film’s opening, effectively creating a closed loop of action. Though the past has been changed, the textures of tragedy persist, suggesting that the emotional residue, if not the material, of the past will always linger. 

Yet, by sacrificing himself, Carlin also reaches a degree of absolution that unburdens him of the innumerable ghosts plaguing him. This is encapsulated in the repetition of the film’s opening in its final moments, with another version of Carlin once again descending upon the scene of the bombing that another timeline’s Carlin prevented by rendering himself its sole victim. Though Claire becomes the bereaved in witnessing Carlin’s sacrifice in much the same way as Carlin felt responsible for her death, the arrival of an ATF agent named Doug Carlin births the possibility of an alternative future. As Carlin brings a shaken Claire into his car to take her home, a moment resembling epiphany sparks across his face, as he remarks upon how familiar Claire seems. Once again, the hauntological spirit is resurrected in the form of Don’t Worry Baby playing on the radio, recontextualized as an elegy to rebirth instead of death (as in the beginning of the film). The universality of tragedy across all possible timelines means that Doug could only ever love an image, and his death means that Claire, too, could only ever love an image. The final shot, a freeze frame of both of them laughing as they drive off, represents not the unification of the image with the real, but an assertion that they are one and the same. Neither of them, as they exist at the beginning of the film, are the same physical entities that exist at its end, and yet Scott’s evident and unerring nigh-religious faith in the medium of cinema to mould reality itself permeates the frame, suggesting that a single image of reconciliation is enough.

Endnotes