Curator's Note
Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016) exposes the affective complexities of self-mediation, showing how one’s felt experience exceeds the image one presents to the camera. This process of repression is specifically exposed in one crucial sequence. Maureen (Kristen Stewart) who is waiting in Paris for a sign from her recently deceased twin brother Lewis’ ghost, spends the majority of the film engaged in a text conversation with an anonymous caller. It is suggested (but ultimately never proven) that Maureen is texting with Ingo (Lars Eidinger), the former lover of her employer, the actress Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten), in an attempt to frame her for her murder. In one of their text exchanges, Maureen has been lured to a hotel for what she thinks will be her first face-to-face meeting with her unknown interlocutor. Instead, Ingo fails to materialize and their text exchange continues. Immediately after her arrival in the hotel room, Maureen receives a text asking her to send a picture. Dressed in a sequined Chanel dress stolen from Kyra, Maureen proceeds to take a mirrored selfie.
Here, importantly, the film undercuts and interrogates the assumptions that surround the selfie as a format that can authentically exchange for the self. As we see Maureen in the finished product of the selfie photograph, she appears confident and well-polished. Set in dialectical tension with her selfie, however, this pivotal scene captures what Deleuze calls an affection-image, as a look of self-doubt and insecurity sweeps over Maureen’s face immediately preceding her confession of shame and self-alienation as she texts back: “I feel ridiculous. It’s not me. I’m ashamed of myself. I don’t know why I came." In juxtaposition to the apparent truth of the photograph, Assayas’ film reveals to us Maureen’s affective response to it. Rather than sustain or confirm the illusion that the selfie presents oneself, instead the film suggests its suppressive nature, which at best cannot reveal and at worst explicitly contradicts the affective scenario of its production.
Comments
great work, Jenny
great work, Jenny - there is something darkly funny and a little unnerving about a spiritualistic medium misleading and miscommunicating through digital media. is Maureen being manipulated by mysterious external forces, or is the protagonist deceiving herself in a manner made all the more convincing by contemporary technologies?
Thanks for your comment Joe.
Thanks for your comment Joe. In my longer dissertation chapter on Personal Shopper, I come down on the fact that the film ulitmately has faith in the specter but that Maureen is constantly missing its presence because of the (narcissistic) distraction of digital media, particularly the smartphone. But I also think Assayas is interested in the legacy of spiritualism and how it emerged around the birth of all these new technologies in the nineteenth century including cinema. This is something Dewey's post I think will touch on later in the week but I think Assayas is interested in how digital mediation makes anything being irretrievable seem impossible, so Maureen has trouble accepting both her brother's death and her inability to find him again, but she is looking in all the wrong places!!
The specter and the selfie
I was struck by your post, Jenny, in that it sounds like Maureen takes a selfie after essentially being catfished by the spectral presence on the other end of her text exchange. Your description of this scene provides perhaps an interesting commentary on the expectant moment of meeting up after connecting through dating apps, a thoroughly mobile-phone-era affective moment. The immersion in the textual exchange doesn't reduce the anxiety over whether one's bodily presence and self will match the crafted profile one presents through an app's interface. In this case, Maureen's catfishing by the specter draws her into an emotional state of unease and distrust of the "reality" of her selfie image. I'm interested in this scene in which the self-image becomes "surplus," an uncontainable, excessive image.
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