Premonition (2007) and Louis Althusser

Sandra Bullock’s recent movie Premonition is a really interesting case to examine in light of Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology (as expressed in his article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses“). I’m going to start giving a rough outline of the overall meaning I take from the movie using Althusser’s theory of ideology. I will then attempt to explain some of the inconsistencies I saw in the movie.I’m not going to give an outline of the movie, but for the basic plot structure you can go here.

The film begins with a scene set before the time of the rest of the movie. There is an obvious film-in-miniature aspect of this scene: Jim (Bullock’s husband, played by Nip/Tuck’s Julian McMahon) closes (blinds) Linda’s (Bullock’s character) eyes, causing her to be surprised by what ends up occurring (mirroring her blindness in the climax of the film and, at least in the beginning, to Jim’s attempted affair – although Linda catches on to that very quickly).

Quickly, then, the movie gets started as Linda finds out Jim had died. I want to focus on a few of the scenes before that. The first is that the two daughters need to wake the mother up. This doesn’t fit with the common role of housewives (the subject position which Linda seems to be occupying). The second is that when she drops the children off, we see them leave through a back window of the car that is foggy. My contention is that the fog represents the distorted lens from which the audience views Linda: we are incorrectly seeing her, here, in the role of housewife, but she doesn’t quite fit. Thus, from the beginning (even earlier, of course, since she had a hard time believing/understanding that Jim got the house for her), the audience sees her occupying a subject position that she does not quite fit into (using Robert Cover’s terminology, a nomos she doesn’t quite belong to). Now, there are potentially two ways to interpret this distortion. 1) It could be that this is just the distortion which underlies all ideology. The ideology of the perfect housewife is the “imaginary relation of those individuals [housewives, or housewife] to the real relations in which they live” (Althusser, 111). Linda might understand herself to be occupying the position of housewife, which constitutes a distortion from which she might understand reality (distorted, of course, since the two shots I discussed show that she does not actually fit into the position of housewife perfectly). In support of this view, she does in fact perform the tasks of the housewife. (Even if she didn’t initially believe in her role as housewife, the Pascalian idea that Althusser advances in his article – kneeling down induces belief – clearly applies). 2) It could be that she is in fact struggling to come to terms with a different subject position, that she is occupying a position that she does not truly fit into. This has in its favor that Jim takes the kids to work on the day of his death. (It would then become necessary to show, as I hope to do, the acts of resistance that would have prevented Pascal’s theorem from taking effect – at least completely). I will attempt to argue for both views (although they are, perhaps, incompatible).

Now, the main reason why I found it appealing to use Althusser’s theory in examining the movie is that Linda slowly interpellates herself into the necessary subject position to bring about the future that she knows to be true. She does so, at least initially and finally, in an unconscious way that I think is supposed to be reminiscent of Oedipus (and I most certainly do not have the required knowledge to do that justice). She does so in a way that I think underlines a fundamentally unfree perspective on ideology.

Althusser argues that ideology comes about through the freedom of consciousness (113). Of course, he is not contending that subject’s are free and governed solely by their consciousness. He is only arguing that people believe and behave as if they had freely chosen to adopt their ideology. This is, I think, implicitly challenged by the movie in some parts. This is most obvious when Linda goes to the priest, confessing a complete lack of faith, and a general agnosticism. If she were completely lacking in belief, then it would seem that she is an individual who isn’t a subject. Of course, that is implausible: if she truly were not a subject then she would have had no reason to go to the priest; instead she would abandon ideology and continue existence in an absolutely incomprehensible manner that did not involve the imaginary. She only seeks out the priest because she is a subject, and while she may be having a crisis, she is at least minimally placing faith in the religious ideology to go to the priest in the first place.

However, I think that this scene does challenge the idea that ideology is free from the subject’s position: I do not think that at this point she freely chooses to adopt the religious ideology. Instead, I would argue that she is left without choice when faced with the absolute lack of conscious freedom: fate has imposed itself on her, and at this point she is at least beginning to realize that she might not be able to fight it (thus the stories the priest tells, both of people who try to fight what will be and end up failing). [Footnote: This is not a completely correct interpretation: it actually ends up worse for the person who tells the town of her dream, since she dies. But, that could be seen as a punishment for trying to avoid fate – as, obviously, could the fate of the father who kills his kids who were not actually going to die of disease. Thus, the more correct interpretation is that trying to fight fate does change it, but for the worse. However, I do not actually think that corresponds well to the movie, and so I am fudging a little bit to make sense of the stories from within the perspective of the movie.] Also, by this point she has already had the moment of recognition when she throws the paper into the trash bin and realizes that she is inadvertently leading herself to the very bleak future of being put into a psychiatric ward and having her children taken from her.

At the very least, the movie clearly shows that there are certain things which “reality” [Footnote: I use the word tentatively, because I am not sure that it needs to be reality, I am not sure what that word really means in all of its technical sophistication, I do not want to imply that there is a way of understanding the nature of it outside of ideology, and there is a clear lack of certain rules that would commonly be attributed to reality in the movie’s imposition of “reality” into ideology.] can impose upon the free conscious choosing of ideology. (Let me say that I am not certain where Althusser stands on this point in his overall theory, but I am sure that it contradicts the more local point that ideology is chosen with free consciousness).

Back to the main point: Linda is clearly interpellating herself, at least partially unfreely, into the subject position required to bring about her husband’s death (and, of course, the psychiatric intervention, which should inspire a Foucaultian interpretation of the film). It is an extremely interesting affirmation of the always-already nature of ideology in that, since we know her husband died, she was always-already going to do the things that she did to bring about that death. (I will forego the chicken and the egg question, although I think that implicit in my last comment is my general standpoint on it.) There is a very clear hailing as “the widow” when the police officer comes in to inform her of her husband’s death. This is a re-hailing when she sees her husband’s body. There are also clear hailings as “the wife” after and in the middle of the hailings as a widow. Most obviously are all of her interactions with her husband. There is a clear line that needs to be crossed to get from the one hailing to the other. Without that, Linda is forced into the “inconsistent (‘no one is willingly evil’) or cynical, or perverse” subject position (114). [Footnote: Linda flirts with the idea of being willingly evil by allowing/sending her husband to die. However, that is probably using a different definition of evil then Althusser's.] Thus, her search [Footnote: And here is where I think that I might be able to affirm the ideological distortion as both an element of her housewife subject position and as a dissonance that indicates that she is in fact occupying a different subject position, which I will now clarify as the widow position; the actions that prevent Pascal’s theorem from being entirely adopted come from her sleeping too late, flirting with the idea of killing her husband, growing gradually more distant from her husband – and again, this may be a case where her husband’s reality is imposing itself on her housewife ideology and forcing it to change, etc.] is characterized by a need to become consistent. [Footnote: It is arguable that my modification of Althusser’s theory based upon the intervention of “reality” might prevent the need for acts that prevent Pascal’s theorem from coming about. It might be that Pascal is completely right, but that sometimes “reality” obstructs the previous acceptance of the ideology.] That can only come about through killing her husband, because without causing his death, without witnessing it, she can never be certain that he is dead (even seeing his dead body is insufficient, as he is later seen quite alive – importantly the audience never sees his dead body, although I think that might have further implications besides as a hailing that forces the climax). So, she is forced into the subject position of causing her husband’s death, and there is no other way to become consistent. Interestingly, a perverse “reality” is necessary to expiate her from a perverse ideology (since her ideology at the time of his death is clearly not in line with killing him; I would like to stick to the possibly controversial position that she kills him, since without hailing him, he would never have been run over). Additionally, “reality’s” imposition is the only way to correct for the damage wrought by “reality’s” imposition.

These ideas ground my first facile explanation for what I took to be some of the inconsistencies in the movie. First I will list some of the inconsistencies (I would make no claim that the list is complete). Her daughter initially (the day they find out Jim dies) has no scars, although she received the scars on her face before her father died. She put up the bees on what probably should have been a shattered window. She does not seem to go to the psychiatric ward, despite not changing in any relevant way what would have happened. [Footnote: Only the first fact is a blatant contradiction.] I do not think that this easy explanation actually does a great job of proving that there needed to be inconsistencies in “reality”. However it is interesting, and I am unwilling to simply give up on this movie since I cannot think that the author did not see what I am pointing out. [Footnote: By the way, the theory offered here also justifies the probably horrible happy ending where the widow is pregnant again: the pregnancy merges the two subject positions of perfect wife and widow allowing some harmony in her ideological life. Although, again, I am not completely satisfied with the ending based upon this explanation; or with the insertion of a priest and the - potentially obligatory - religious scene.]