To understand A Ghost Story, let’s start by comparing the first scene to the last scene.
- Beginning: M tells C about the notes she would leave whenever she moved. She frames it as leaving a “piece of her waiting”.
- Middle: C, as a ghost, is desperate to get at the note M left before she moved from their house.
- Ending: C finally reads the note and moves on to the after-after life
Everything you need to know is right there.
The Metaphor of A Ghost Story Explained
C, as a ghost, spends years trying to unearth the note M left. After the house is bulldozed, he hangs out for a few more decades (or however long it takes a city to develop) before jumping back in time. Another century passes, until Ghost C watches himself and M live in the house. He then watches his own death, and re-lives M’s grief (even sees himself as a ghost). But he finally gets the note. The moment he reads what’s on the paper, he passes to the next life (probably into the world through the door of light he saw back at the hospital).
Ghost Story’s making a point about progress. Remember the whole stretch where M was grieving C’s death? What’s the last thing we see her do before she literally moves on? She listens to the final song C made. Having that piece of him is something she can carry with her as she goes forward. It gives her the strength to do so.
M’s story is the literal version of events. While C’s is the more fantastic, defamiliarized version that romanticizes the idea that ghosts have “unfinished business”. In the sense they want to take something with them from the human world into the spirit world.
The two characters parallel each other and their arcs say the same thing: moving forward is scary, and we find bravery in the past. That’s as true on the individual level as it is on the broader social level. That’s why we get the flashback to those first settlers who die where the house will be. It was a tragic beginning, but it was a beginning. Eventually, others come to that same place and survive, which leads to a community, to a town, to the city that arises. Loss and progress are forever entwined.
It will be the same for M. She and C were about to start this life together. Until tragedy occurs. It was an ending, but it wasn’t the end. Her life will go on, built on the memories of her time with C.
Did C’s song matter to the world? No. Did it win awards? No. Will it be remembered by more than one person? No. But to that single person, it’s one of the most important songs to ever exist. It’s the same for M’s note. Would it have made a difference to anyone else that she left that? Absolutely not. But leaving that piece of her brings comfort to the ghost of C. For him, it’s the only thing that mattered.
How We Deal With Mortality
So A Ghost Story is a plea to both leave your mark on the world. Small or large. To put yourself out there. Whether it’s for yourself, for your partner, your children, God, ghosts, or some stranger who might stumble upon what you left behind long after you’re gone. It may not seem important, but it is.
That’s the point of the other ghost C meets, the one nextdoor. It’s waiting and waiting for someone to return. But the person is never returning. When the neighbor ghost “moves on”, the moment doesn’t feel cathartic. The tone is this heartbreaking surrender to oblivion. The ghost gives up.
How do we apply that more realistically? There’s a world in which C never made music (or any artistic equivalent). So when M loses him, she would have nothing from him. It’s not like she’d never move on. She still probably, eventually, packs up the house and leaves. But it’s probably without the same closure the song provided her. There’s a bit more ache. A hauntedness.
What’s the epigraph at the beginning? “Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.” (Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House). Life is full of loss. How we cope with that loss, with our own mortality, is through not only what we leave behind but what we carry forward from others.
That’s the point of M’s opening speech.
M: When I was little and we used to move all the time, I’d write these notes, and I would fold them up really small, and I would hide them in different places, so that if I ever wanted to go back, there’d be a piece of me waiting. [Did you ever go back?] No. ‘Cause I didn’t need to. [What’d they say?] They were just, like, old rhymes and poems. Things I wanted to remember about living in that house or what I liked about it. [Why’d you leave? Why’d you leave all those houses?] ‘Cause I didn’t have a choice.
If M didn’t have anything from C, it would have been harder for her to start over. She would have kept needing to “go back” (not physically, but emotionally, mentally). We see the opposite of that with C. He can’t access what M left and stays stuck because of it.
The other big item there is her final line about not having a choice in leaving the other houses. What she means is that she was a kid and her parents made the choices. But it applies to life. In life, we have to accept that we lose things, we leave things. We can’t bring everything with us. To move on means to let go. Nothing is permanent. And that can be a lot to accept but is quite freeing once you come to terms with it.
While M’s opening story is the executive summary of the film, the entire thesis is delivered by the guy at the party. His whole speech is David Lowery speaking directly to the audience and it captures everything he hopes people take away from the movie. Yes, it’s pointless to do any of the things we do, because, ultimately, the universe will end. But it’s also the most important thing, because if no one made anything, strived for anything, felt a compulsion for legacy or posterity, then humanity as we know it would cease to exist. Civilization is a continuation of what’s come before. Knowledge, art, kindness, compassion, government, etc.
As pessimistic as the guy at the party may seem, he actually makes an impassioned case for art for the sake of art. The whole thing kicks off because the one friend is giving up on some artistic endeavor because she doesn’t believe there’s a point if it’s never going to be as good as she wants it to be and never going to make any money. His diatribe is a reaction to the friend reducing art to quality and financial success.
I’ll leave you with the speech. Hopefully reading everything you’ve read so far, you’ll see how the speech reinforces all the topics we’ve discussed (and elaborates on them).
And those are your two polarities? Priorities or whatever. Money’s just money. You gotta take that out of the equation. Now what? No, no, you can find a reason, and I want to find out what happens, too. So, no money. And what have you got left? You’ve got…other people. You got Clara, you’ve got time. Time’s a big one. But you’ve got about as much as anyone else, give or take. What about God? Maybe you’ve got God. Do you? [No.] Okay. Well, here’s how I break it down.
A writer writes a novel. A songwriter writes a song. A symphonist writes a symphony, which is maybe the best example, because all the best ones were written for God. So, tell me what happens if Beethoven’s writing his “Ninth Symphony” and suddenly wakes up one day and realizes that God doesn’t exist. So, suddenly all of these notes and chords and harmonies that were intended to, you know, supersede the flesh, you realize, “Oh, that’s just physics.” So Beethoven says, “Shoot, God doesn’t exist, so I guess I’m writing this for other people. It’s just nuts and bolts now.” He didn’t have any children, that I can recall, but if he did… [He had a nephew]. Okay, great. So he writes it for him. [Or an immortal beloved]. Yes. Or for whoever that was. But let’s leave love out of this. And let’s wrap this all up under the blanket of someone thinking, “This is something that they’ll remember me for.” And they did. And we do. And, sure enough, we do what we can to endure.
We build our legacy piece by piece, and maybe the whole world will remember you, or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you’re still around after you’re gone. And so we’re still reading this book, we’re still singing this song, kids remember their parents and their grandparents, and everyone’s got their family tree, and Beethoven’s got his symphony, and we’ve got it, too. And everyone will keep listening to it for the foreseeable future. But that’s where things start breaking down.
Because your kids…Wait, who here has kids? You? Your kids are gonna die. Yours too. Yours too. Hey, just sayin’. They’re all gonna die. And their kids will die, and so on, and so on. And then there’s gonna be one big tectonic shift. Yosemite will blow and the Western plates will shift, and the oceans will rise, the mountains will fall, and 90 percent of humanity will be gone. One fell swoop. This is just science. Whoever’s left will go to higher ground and social order will fall away, and we will revert to scavengers and hunters and gatherers, but maybe there’s someone who one day hums a melody they used to know. And it gives everyone a little bit of hope. Mankind’s on the verge of being wiped out, but it keeps going a little bit longer because someone hears someone else hum a melody in a cave and the physics of it in their ear makes them feel something other than fear or hunger or hate, and mankind carries on and civilization gets back on track.
And now you’re thinking you’re gonna finish that book. But it won’t last. ‘Cause by and by, the planet’s gonna die. In a few billion years the sun will become a red giant and it’ll eventually swallow Earth whole. This is a fact. Now, maybe by that point, we’ll have set up shop on some completely different planet. Good for us. Maybe we’ve figured out a way of carrying with us all these things that matter. They’ve got a photocopy of the Mona Lisa out there, someone sees it, mixes a little bit of alien dirt with some spit, paints something new—the whole thing keeps going.
But even that doesn’t matter. Because even if some form of mankind carries some recording of Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” all the way into the future, the future’s gonna hit a brick wall. The universe will keep expanding, and it will eventually take all matter with it. Everything you’ve ever strived for, everything that you and some stranger on the other side of the planet share with some future stranger on some entirely different planet without even knowing it, everything that ever made you feel big or stand up tall, it’ll all go. Every atom in this dimension will be pulled apart by force as simple as [throws can to demonstrate gravity]. And then all these shredded particles will contract again and the universe is gonna suck itself back into a speck too small for any of us to see.
So, you can write a book, but the pages will burn. You can sing a song and pass it down. You can write a play and hope that folks will remember it, keep performing it. You can build your dream house, but ultimately none of that matters any more than digging your fingers into the ground to bury a fence post. Or fucking. Which I guess is just about the same thing.
In The Words Of David Lowery
Some people really don’t trust explanations unless they come from the filmmaker directly. I don’t think that’s necessary, but it can be helpful and a nice supplement. So here are some quotes from David Lowery.
From an interview with The Guardian:
The trigger, he says, was a Pulitzer-prize winning article by Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker about an earthquake that scientists believe will take out a sizeable chunk of northwest America. “It freaked me out,” he says. “I started piling on other fears: the political situation in the US and all over the world. I was not feeling optimistic about the future of mankind. I felt the world was on its way to ending. The film became my way of dealing with those issues.”
In an interview with Vox, he explains the second ghost:
It’s a grandmother who passed away in her home, and is waiting for her grandchildren to come visit. So when she says she’s waiting for someone and can’t remember who, that’s who it is. She realizes they’re never coming, and it’s horribly sad. But that’s what that was meant to be.
More from the Vox interview (which I highly recommend reading in full. Alissa Wilkinson is a great interviewer and critic):
I am married and am deeply in love with my wife, and spend way too much time thinking about one of us dying before the other. That is a thought that is never far from my mind, because I don’t want to lose her. And I don’t want her to lose me. Me not wanting her to lose me is largely an extension of my own ego, and my not wanting to lose her is a fear of being alone, but nonetheless those are circumstances which I spend far too much time pondering.
The ideas that are implicit to ghost stories are a source of comfort when you’re thinking about losing someone or being gone from someone you love. [“In what way?’] In that you could still communicate; that that communion can still exist between the two of you. I don’t know why I’m doing this right now, but I’m gonna paraphrase Anne Hathaway in Interstellar, where she said something like, “Love is the one thing in this universe that can transcend time and space.”
That was the dorkiest quote in that movie, but nonetheless, it’s such a comforting thought. It’s such a source of ease when you are finding yourself worrying about losing someone or being pulled out of someone else’s life.
…But I do feel like realizing and embracing the concept of letting go of the physical, letting go of the immediate temporal realities around us, is an important thing. Not to be all the time — just be aware. Just to be able to take that step back and say, “These things will pass, and I need to be okay with that.”
….All of the things he’s hanging on to keep getting pulled out from under him, removed and then taken away. Even this brief connection with the ghost next door goes away. The brief moment when he feels like he might have a connection with this little girl humming a song that sounds familiar to him is taken away from him as well. Everything keeps being pulled from him because he needs to understand, as a character he needs to understand, and we need to understand with him that those things are all impermanent. It’s important to let go of them.
….The cyclical nature of it was my attempt to instill an understanding that we aren’t defined solely by this life. Like the song, for example. He writes the song that is his, and he’s gonna have this piece of art that potentially will outlast him. And when he winds up somewhere in a distant past and realizes that someone else was humming that same melody, hundreds of years away — that sense of authorship falls away at that point, because the song is no longer just his.
And nothing is. Nothing is just his. The land that those settlers settle on is not their land, either. No one is ever able in this movie to lay claim to any one thing. It always gets pulled away from them, because nothing truly is ours. The cyclical nature of history consistently reveals that. Things keep getting built up and then falling apart because nothing is permanent.
The Cast Of A Ghost Story
- C – Casey Affleck
- M – Rooney Mara
- Linda – Liz Cardenas Franke
- Maria – Sonia Acevedo
- Prognosticator – Will Oldham
- Written by – David Lowery
- Directed by – David Lowery
