Presence Explained For Cinephiles | Tyler In The Mirror

If you want to understand Presence, then listen to the Michael Jackson song “Man in the Mirror”. 

• I’m starting with the man in the mirror
• I’m asking him to change his ways
• And no message could have been any clearer
• If you wanna make the world a better place
• Take a look at yourself and then make a chance

Everything you need to know to get Presence is right there. But if you want me to explain further, keep on reading.

Tyler In The Mirror

Even though the film primarily follows Chloe, the perspective character is, we come to find out, Tyler. He’s the man in the mirror. This creates two important dynamics. 

First, it means the story is about Tyler’s character growth. We’re supposed to contrast who he was while alive versus who he is as a ghost. Remember what his dad says? The mic drop line? Quote: There is an excellent man inside of you, Tyler. I would love to see him soon.

While alive, Tyler’s character is primarily a jerk in relation to his sister and other girls in his school. He tells that incredibly horrific story about having the one girl send a lewd photo, “not” leaking it, then embarrassing her by making her think she’s going to meet some guy only for it to be the group of people who pranked her. He makes it sound like it was this awesome, hilarious thing, something the girl “had coming”. While his dad, sister, and, hopefully, the audience just gawks at how terrible he is.

That explains the second dynamic: Tyler’s growth as a person is tied to how he views his sister. While alive, he was cruel to her and dismissed her mental health struggles. As a ghost, a presence, he relives those months in that house, but outside of himself, observing her. He comes to better understand her grief, his behavior, everything. That’s why, when he hears himself tell the story of the prank, he, as the presence, trashes his own room. It’s a moment of self-disgust brought on by the time he’s had to reflect. 

When Tyler The Presence wakes up the living Tyler to go save Chloe, it’s part of the larger metaphor. In that moment, the “excellence” in him finally showed itself. Which is why the movie ends with his reflection in the mirror. The dad, the entire family, finally gets to “see” that side of Tyler. 

Isn’t That A Bleak Metaphor? The Point Of Presence

The movie isn’t trying to say “be a good person, do the right thing, and it will cost you your life.” If you take it that way, that’s doing a disservice to the film and your own reading comprehension. 

The point of Presence is to demonstrate the importance of getting outside of yourself and thinking about the people around you. Tyler was so self-interested, he had no idea what his mom was going through, what his dad was going through, what his sister was going through. Everything was about him. 

His growth only comes in the afterlife because he’s finally able to see other people and pay attention to what they’re thinking, feeling, and struggling with. 

While it was too late for Tyler to actually change his ways, it’s not too late for anyone who watches the movie to be better. Do better. Grow. You don’t have to leave your body to empathize with others and pay more attention to them. You can learn and improve and have better relationships because of it. That’s especially true of young men and how they think of and treat women.

The Power Of Movies

I think there’s a subtle commentary on the act of voyeurism that’s at the core of watching movies. The thing that makes storytelling so powerful is that it allows us to be a spectator in a way you usually can’t be in real life. For example, in a novel, you’re often in the minds of the characters you read about. Movies mostly lack that same interiority (unless there’s a voice over, but even that’s limited), but they allow you to be in places and situations you wouldn’t normally get to be. 

That’s why horror movies are so popular. More than any other genre, horror movies lean into the voyeuristic act. Like when the camera follows Michael Myers as he lurks outside a house, walks up the stairs, opens the back door, enters a house, and creeps through to where a couple sits on a couch. There’s part of you that experiences being there, doing that. 

When the camera sits in a room with a married couple having a huge argument that ends in divorce, you’re privy to the event because you’re merely a “presence” in the room that’s unseen and unheard, viewing everything through the camera lens. 

Tyler’s observations of his family changes how he understands his family. The same is true for people who watch a lot of movies. That’s the power of narrative. You read enough books, watch enough shows and movies, and you gain in empathy and what’s called “theory of mind”. 

The Substance is a great example of this. As a late-30s male who isn’t in showbusiness, I haven’t experienced the physical pressures Demi Moore’s character has. But by watching her story, being a presence that follows her through the lowest moments of her life, I have a deeper appreciation for the societal pressure that women face to look a certain way, how that affects them, and how society turns its praise and attention into a drug that’s addictive and destructive. It’s not like I was unaware of that before watching The Substance, it’s just the movie gave it a renewed visceral edge. 

Presence is about that power of observation and the growth that comes from not only really seeing others but really seeing yourself. And movies can be a great way of accomplishing that. 

Why Didn’t The Ghost Just Stop Ryan?

Not to change this explanation into a review, but this is what bothered me the most. I think there were attempts to show the ghost couldn’t actually touch people, which is why we got those weird moments where it would kind of “push” at people and nothing would happen. But that doesn’t quite make sense to me, given the evidence in other scenes. The ghost can pick up books, close them, stack them, move them from the bed to the desk. It can pull down a shelf in the closet. It can trash Tyler’s room. It blows on Chloe’s face. Like…we see that it can physically interact with the world. So what’s actually stopping it from forcefully stopping Ryan? 

Even if we accept it can’t touch people, there’s no reason it couldn’t start trashing Chloe’s room. Why not knock the drink out of her hand? Or throw a table right when Ryan handed her the glass? Why not trash the entire room just like before? It obviously has the ability to surge the electronics and wake Tyler up, so why not even try something similar to stop Ryan and scare him away? 

Usually I have some kind of answer for questions like this. But I think the sudden inability to do anything was poorly set-up and executed. Granted, that’s a nitpick and many viewers won’t care. I’m guilty of telling people they’re caring too much about a small detail and missing the larger point. At the risk of being a hypocrite, this was something that really took me out of the moment and the movie.  

Presence Explained By David Koepp And Steven Soderbergh

I like to write my analysis and then read interviews to see if it matches up with what the filmmaker has said about the movie. I never go back and change my explanation. That wouldn’t be fun. If I’m “right”, great. If I’m “wrong”, then it’s a learning opportunity. So let’s see what I can find on Presence. 

In an interview with Variety, screenwriter David Koeep had some great quotes. 

• 1: The Presence is there to help them, not harm them. It’s there to save his sister. I have this theory that every time you make a new ghost story, you have to come up with a reason why the people can see ghosts. One of those ways is through trauma. The times in my life when I’ve experienced something traumatic, I’m more open to the world and people around me than I am otherwise. If you’re suffering yourself, you notice the suffering of others more acutely.
• 2: When I first saw a cut of the film, I was struck by the voyeuristic concept and how it makes it feel more real. You’re really a fly on the wall. You’re eavesdropping. You’re looking at things you shouldn’t be and you’re listening to things you have no business with. It gave it a much higher level of reality than I expected.
• 3:
  • Variety: How do you write a screenplay accounting for this formal premise?
  • Koepp: I just used “we” in the screenplay all the time. “People start shouting at each other. We get anxious. We back away from them.”… The character of the ghost in this film is played by [director] Steven Soderbergh: his camera. 

In an interview with The Wrap, Koepp elaborated on the ghost’s behavior:

• The identity of the ghost was something that Koepp always knew while writing, “which is why he doesn’t want to watch his sister having sex and when the brother talks about that horrible prank he played at school, the presence goes upstairs and trashes the brother’s room because it’s self-loathing. That all made sense to me as I was doing it,” Koepp said.

Interview with Mashable.

• “The ghost is the Trojan horse for a portrait of a family struggling,” Soderbergh explained, “And that has an incredible blind spot in the center of it.” 

Soderbergh’s interview with Filmmaker Magazine.

• 1: I wrote about 10 pages that basically just had a series of shots, over time, in the house, from what you sensed was some point of view, but which wasn’t clear yet. Then some people start to show up in the house. I had the idea that it’s a four-person family unit and there’s something going on, and that it [the presence] is attracted to the daughter, but we don’t know why. And the family seems dysfunctional. That was 10 pages. I sent them to David Koepp and said, “Does this spark anything?” And he said, “I know what to do with this.”
• 2: One of the reasons that I wanted to shoot in chronological order—and, except for two scenes, was able to do that—was that I wanted you to see [the presence] learn how to be. The only way to do that is to really block the scenes in sequence and then start thinking about what it knows so far, what it’s interested in, what it’s trying to extract. As the film goes on, you can see the shots get more — I don’t know if elaborate is the right word, but they get more directed. Like, it knows more about where it should be if it’s trying to pick up information. And that was a really fun thing. There would be takes where I would yell, “I don’t know, I panned, I anticipated something, but I need to be slightly behind.” And as it starts to learn, it can anticipate, and it’s not lagging as much as it does at the beginning. All that was really fun to play with.
• 3: But what was really pleasurable was this whole idea of directorial presence. It’s what the whole thing is built on. It was organic. And the question you have to ask 10,000 times a minute about everything that’s happening when you’re making a movie is, “Is that better? Is that better?” And ultimately, there’s no better way to approach this than assuming that position. If you shot this conventionally, it’s not interesting. People would go, “I don’t know why he made that.”

How Did We Do?

So there’s a lot about the relationship between the camera and filmmaking itself and the act of voyeurism that’s at the center of the movie. There were many many more quotes I didn’t include that all kind of said the same thing. But none of the quotes focused on growth through observation. And none of the quotes really focused on Tyler’s journey. They talked about the family being in a bad way and wanting to show that and using the ghost to explore that. But never about Tyler’s journey, specifically. 

The quote from Koepp in the interview with The Wrap is what stands out to me. Specifically: when the brother talks about that horrible prank he played at school, the presence goes upstairs and trashes the brother’s room because it’s self-loathing. That’s exactly what I described. I like to think that since I landed that portion of Tyler’s journey, and picked up on the POV’s connection to filmmaking itself, that I’m on the mark with my conclusions as well. The intentionality seems clear to me and nothing in the interviews I read goes against that. 

Cast

• Chloe – Callina Liang
• Tyler – Eddy Maday
• Chris – Chris Sullivan
• Rebecca – Lucy Liu
• Ryan – West Mulholland
• Cece – Julia Fox
• Lisa – Natalie Woolams-Torres
• Carl – Lucas Papaelias
• Written by – David Koepp
• Directed by – Steven Soderbergh

Relevant Explanations

• A Ghost Story
• Am I OK?
• Vanilla Sky