The Ghost Behind is Caroline Rumley’s poignant, yet frustratingly evasive portrait of her older brother Jim, his life, his struggle with alcoholism, and his death. Jim Rumley was a struggling rock drummer, and the film chronicles his life, as he plays in a series of almost-made-it bands, until he finally dies in a hotel room.
We watch nostalgically slowed-down, sepia-toned footage of the band in its various incarnations. A chime plays 4 tones over and over throughout the movie, gradually getting slower and slower, a generic representation of the idea of dissipating energy. A visual leitmotif, seen periodically throughout the film, is a shot of a man pushing off from the shore in a small sailboat, setting an uncertain course on the sea of life. Rumley’s spare narration outlines her brother’s story, giving us only the bare bones of what happened.
Jim Rumley was defiantly non-conformist, and he loved the rebellious spirit of alt rock music. He refused to fit into the job-and-family lifestyle of North Carolina. Rumley doesn’t spell out what part drugs or alcohol played in her brother’s disintegrating artistic life and his death, but she implies that it plays a part, both as symptom and cause of Jim’s dysfunction.
Rumley tells the story with poetic restraint, leaving out her emotional reactions and interpretations of events. She clearly wants to avoid reducing her brother’s life, art, struggles, and death to a set of pat conclusions or moralizing lessons. Perhaps, by reducing the story to a bare outline, she hopes to universalize it. We don’t find out whether she, the younger sister, watched her older brother’s rebellious, boundary-pushing antics with admiration, reprobation, or a mixture of both.
This austere approach gives the film a distinct air of suppression and avoidance, and the heavy weight of all that is being left unsaid. The complete absence of Jim’s feelings, her own feelings, and any explanatory history or context gives the impression that the underlying truth of his tragic life terrifies her. In her effort to refrain from all judgement and analysis, she ends up leaving out much of the substance of his life and her own feelings about him. So much is left carefully unstated that the film sometimes left me wondering who on earth Jim Rumley was.
At one point, she cites sociologist Aaron Antonovsky and his concept that mental well-being depends on life being comprehensible and predictable, an idea which is surely diametrically opposed to the worldview of artists. Poignantly, as we hear her describe Antonovsky’s notion of a life narrative “veering off course,” we see a repetition of the shot of the man in his sailboat, but the film’s sprocket holes aren’t lined up properly, and we see the footage jumping around in the frame. She cites this bit of sociology as if it explains what happened to her brother, without examining either Antonovsky’s ideas or their relevance to Jim Rumley’s life. Because elsewhere she carefully avoided explaining or interpreting Jim’s story, the validating sociologist reference seems out of place.
The same day that she sees a spectacular display of rainbows in the sky, she learns of Jim’s death in a hotel room, which she described as “like a rock star, maybe.” This observation accompanies a shot of a single, unplayed cymbal, which in this case is made to serve as a symbol. As a minor member of several legendary but largely unknown bands, he was not a rock star, and her conclusion highlights her own reluctance to examine closely who or what he actually was.
When people’s lives fall apart from addiction, it’s the result of quite specific, often starkly traumatic circumstances, possibly combined with genetic and environmental factors. A person might find themselves unable to cope with life’s challenges due to multiple, overlapping causes, but it doesn’t happen for no reason at all. Caroline Rumley’s lack of interest in probing into what happened to her brother is startling, as is her lack of interest in her own lack of interest. Her fatalistic attitude, “addiction and death is something that just kind of happened to him,” mirrors precisely her brother’s attitude towards his own life. If you’ve ever cared about someone struggling with substance abuse, then you know that there isn’t anything you can do to save the person if they don’t want to be saved, and so the sense of hopeless doom which pervades the film is indeed evocative of the dilemma of friends and family members who watch, horrified and helpless, as their loved ones are blown further and further off course.
The Ghost Behind uses both home movies and found footage to evoke Jim’s absence. It is indeed a kind of a ghost story, haunted by film’s power to bring the dead back to life. Rumley’s experience of watching her brother implode in slow motion seems to leave her drained and wraithlike in her role as helpless witness. The brother may be gone, but the ghost is the one who is behind the camera.
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