Ghosts and Shades and Place: Empathetic Hauntology in Gravity, Lars and the Real Girl, and Hiroshima Mon Amour

Abstract

This chapter distinguishes the dramatic tools of Ghosts from that of Shades, comparing these two very different dramatic manifestations of the dead. Ghosts are essentially characters with desires and memories who haunt a place or person and possess unworldly powers, and usually we see their faces. Shades, however, have a hauntological force and presence and their faces are usually not seen clearly in the narrative: instead they hold the power to make the living see the world in a certain way. They are Spatial presences of negative emotional loss informing us of the point of view of a character with a Dantean moment involving the loss of someone. Three films that possess shades are now examined. Gravity and Lars and the Real Girl are contrasted with Hiroshima Mon Amour where the grief-stricken main character wanders desperately through her Dantean Space while her Japanese lover is haunted in Dramatic space.