Personal Shopper and Gothic Tensions (Patreon)

Defining the Gothic is difficult when it comes to literature, and near impossible when we approach film. The Gothic is an ephemeral form. At once solidified into a concrete and traceable history and diffused through artistic modes as disparate as architecture and music, genres as diverse as romance and horror. Pinning down the Gothic in cinema is a task as fleeting as the flickering frames that flash upon the screen.

Centrally, this difficulty is in the lack of use for a marketable “Gothic” genre for film. Horror, Action, Romance, and other filmic genres function less to tell us about the content of the film, and more about which category on Netflix we should click to find it. Hellraiser and Monster Squad are both “horror” movies, after all. 

This is the space we find Personal Shopper in. The film is decidedly Gothic, but far less horror than other Gothic films like the overtly goth Crimson Peak. Still, it is a movie about ghosts, mediums, and the frailty we mistake for stability. 

Personal Shopper is the story of Maureen (Kristen Stewart), a personal shopper on the outskirts of wealth who is also a powerful medium. After the death of her brother, she is compelled to search for signs of his spirit. While the movie remains skeptical of her brother’s contact from beyond the grave, it is decidedly, and refreshingly, open about ghosts actually existing within the text. We see cups levitate and even a focused, non-terminal, repeating phantasm or a class-five full-roaming vapor. 

Even though we, the audience, and Maureen are witness to immutable proof of the afterlife, it isn’t enough. 

The Gothic is a genre concerned with tensions. The tensions of identity, gender, monstrosity, taboo, and mortality scaffold the genre. Damsels roam subterranean labyrinths to evade patriarchs, vampires explore the fluid nature of sexuality, and a personal shopper in France withers her own life looking for a sign from a deceased sibling. Personal Shopper is more Goth for its melancholy and liminal tension than for it’s ghosts—though they do help. 

Maureen is so diaphanous as to be nearly a universal insert character. It may not seem like it at first, but her character occupies the same space we all do. She’s uncertain and haunted not just by literal ghosts, which we can take metaphorically for ourselves if we please, but also by class uncertainties. Maureen spends a good chunk of the film on the edges of wealth; trying on expensive clothes and living a somewhat luxurious lifestyle, but not having real access to those status symbols. This is despite the fact that Maureen isn't for want of basic material needs. Similarly, as a medium she has access to the answers of life and death, but is drawn by the tensions of those answers being not enough. 

As a medium, Maureen’s existence plays on a deeper liminal space. The history of mediums is loaded with frauds. Extending out of the early American Spiritualist movement, mediums have faked their contact with the dead for decades. Stage Magician Harry Houdini even made a large part of his career out of debunking mediums. But, there’s still a reality here. In Maureen’s world, this is all real and, indeed, this makes reality itself is liminal.  As in our world where we find mediums knocking tables decidedly fake, but belief, moment, and wonder much more real.

Maureen knows ghosts exist, she knows the afterlife is a certain thing. This astounding knowledge isn’t enough. She needs the specific contact with her dead twin to find her own peace. Throughout the film, ghosts toy with her. They, effectively, are trolling her with half answers to the questions she asks. As if to hint that the questions themselves are poorly formed. Maureen can certainly speak with the dead, but she can’t hear what they have to say. 

Also, while I'm here, Kristin Stewart can act and I will die on that hill and my ghost will continue to argue from beyond.