September 9–16, 1999

movie shorts

Stir of Echoes

by Cindy Fuchs

“You’re not supposed to mesmerize someone who’s been drinking.” So warns Lisa (Illeana Douglas), when her brother-in-law Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) asks her to hypnotize him. Being hardheaded, a little bored with his working-class life, and full of beer at a neighborhood party, he doesn’t heed the warning. This means that the film, written and directed by David Koepp and based on Richard Matheson’s 1958 novel, can proceed.

Initially intriguing, this proceeding turns increasingly erratic and trite. A regular Joe with a supportive wife named Maggie (Kathryn Erbe, the terrifically manipulative death row inmate on Oz) and a bright kid named Jake (Zachary David Cope), Tom is feeling restless even before his hypnosis. While he assures Maggie that he’s a “happy guy,” he’s also not thrilled with being a lineman. “I never wanted to be famous,” he sighs. “I just didn’t expect to be so ordinary.” Foreboding, don’t you think?

Following his hypnosis, Tom begins to suffer all sorts of traumas, including incapacitating headaches and violently creepy visions. He sees his friend and neighbor (Kevin Dunn) looking guilty. He sees dead people — or at least one of them, a young girl who disappeared without a trace several months ago.

This early part of the film is effectively taut and sketchy: The visions are hard to read, the soundtrack is evocative and Tom’s confusion seems reasonable. The film even calls up previous cinematic images of alienation and mayhem — The Incredible Shrinking Man and Night of the Living Dead — so as to underline its cleverness. Koepp doesn’t give you much room between what Tom sees and what may or may not actually be there, suggesting that he might be going insane.

But of course, you know he’s not. Now that his mind is “open,” he finds himself weighted with a keen sense of moral outrage and an awareness of masculine insensitivity (embodied by football players and malevolent watchers here). But as interesting as this male melodrama might have been, it soon grows tiresome. The ugly past haunting Tom’s neighborhood isn’t so spectacularly nefarious as the one that screwed up Elm Street so many years ago, but Tom is plagued by the notion that it’s up to him to make things right. At first, this reluctant hero tries to escape the responsibility, storming back to Lisa’s apartment and demanding that she “unfuck” his mind. When that fails, he takes up his apparent mission with a vengeance.

Tom’s obsession with ghosts starts to wear on his already-precarious domestic harmony. Maggie doesn’t know quite what to do about his stubborn refusal to leave the living room sofa, the spot where he first espies a ghost; determined to connect with his undead friend, Tom stops shaving, bathing and going to work. He starts gulping orange juice and fish-head blender shakes, and whispering late into the night with Jake, who, it turns out, also has been having undead sightings of late.

Uneasy with this intensely weird father-son bonding, Maggie determines to reclaim and protect her family. Or at least her son, as Tom is looking more and more raggedy, far removed from salvation (and the kid is awfully cute, not so scary as the boy in The Sixth Sense). At first she asks Tom whom he’s seeing on the sofa, and he comes back at her, “You’re jealous of a ghost?!” Tom thinks she’s not getting it, but really, this is the crux of Maggie’s dilemma: The ghost is sucking the air out of her relationships, her husband and her kid. So, she starts investigating on her own. One night she tracks down what looks like a self-help gathering of similarly afflicted people (they call themselves “receivers,” a term uttered only with spooky inflection). This conveniently timed adventure makes Maggie a believer in the ghosts and Tom and Jake’s special powers. She’s left frustrated, without a practical solution (though, to be fair, she’s not left screaming and stuck in some closet with a wire hanger as her only defense).

On one level, the gendered tension in the Witzky household makes predictable metaphorical sense: Tom is the film’s ostensible focus, but as he becomes more lunatic in behavior and appearance, the burden of maintaining audience sympathy shifts to Maggie. Maggie’s a traditional but also relatively cool mom and wife. She keeps one of those walkie-talkie sound monitors with her when she leaves young Jake asleep in his room; she wears tight jeans and a nifty black leather jacket when she goes out. In other words, she’s both sensible and sexy, responsible and fun. But here’s a predicament that exceeds her working-wife-and-mother capacities, and Stir of Echoes keeps her on the outside of the ghost-action, putting her in an awkward position, both understandable to and less informed than the viewer’s.

But this gendering is also annoyingly retro; while the menfolk go zooey, Maggie’s supposed to hold things together. The disruption of the household becomes literal when Tom starts digging up their basement floor with pick-axes and one of those big teeth-knocking pavement drills, in search of a murder victim’s body. Meanwhile, Maggie has to deal with her own dead people, when she’s suddenly called to attend her grandmother’s funeral. This specific plot development — Tom and Maggie’s physical estrangement — brings their paranormal crisis to its expected climax, but the movie never figures out how to negotiate or even contextualize their separate emotional situations.

For all Maggie’s seeming strength and charisma, the central plight and evolution are Tom’s. The point would seem to be his transformation from depressed to enlightened, from passive to self-assertive. In the film’s unimaginative terms, this change entails becoming a man. He does this, disturbingly, over a woman’s corpse. This makes it more than a little ironic that the female characters with more than two lines to speak — Maggie and Lisa — seem more compelling than he does (and that’s not for lack of effort on Bacon’s part: He’s convincing enough as a guy unraveling). Self-doubting and self-critical, as many women are still trained to be, they don’t know they have the power to fix things. It’s only when the men fall apart entirely that they come to their senses, sixth and beyond.