Visibly Invisible: The Digital Ghosts of Personal Shopper (2016)

Moreover, just as Maureen seeks to commune with spirits as a medium, Chun sees code “As a medium, [that] channels the ghost that we imagine runs the machine”. (Chun 310) The collective mystification with code and how it functions is what fuels its fetishization and causes us to perceive the digital as spectral, even if we hold the implicit faith that there is a real person on the other end. What Assayas’ film posits is what if this faith was broken and what if the digital truly became a portal to the unknown, where our understanding of a solid reality was fully suspended and all you were left with was uncertainty.