Liminality and Redemption in The Phantom Carriage

by Isabelle Holloway

There seems to be a philosophical confirmation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion when considering human fatality: that in as much as we desire to hush the inevitability of our own death, there is an equally substantial counterforce of philosophies, myths, and religions which we have conjured in order to seek to explain and give substance to death. Often, these explanations seem to center around how we can make use of our innate gifts and capacities in order to find a purpose and meaning for being (or, rather, what we, ourselves, can bring to life), and accordingly fulfill some communal and personal ‘mission’.

Yet, what happens when we have not fulfilled such a ‘mission’? Can we really be supposedly redeemed in death (a process which may be said to be ‘redeeming’ in, perhaps, the way it could bring us into unconscious bliss, or into a kind of sinful absolution which transports us into a joyous afterlife, to name just two potential explanations) if ignorance and vice have clouded over our perceptions of a purpose?

In Victor Sjöström’s 1921 silent film The Phantom Carriage, ‘death and redemption’, rather, becomes ‘liminality and redemption’. When David Holm, a drunkard who has neglected his family, and life more generally, unwittingly falls victim to a curse which maintains that the one to die on the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve is to drive a ‘Phantom Carriage’ and collect the late souls for the next year, he is naturally panic-struck: for as his soul rises from the grave, he realizes that his life has collapsed beyond redemption in its debauchery, and so he is unable to depend on death as a redeeming force - rather, he will be compelled to redeem himself within the liminal sphere, as he failed to strive toward his better self in his physical reality. This liminality, which could be expressed as a necessity in order to resurrect one from mortal sin, is portrayed in The Phantom Carriage through a variety of motifs and cinematographic effects.

The predecessor of the ‘Phantom Carriage’ which comes to greet David in the shaded graveyard is none other than former friend, Georges, who was largely responsible for leading David into his downward spiral with alcohol. In a moment which recalls the apparition of Jacob Marley warning Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol against meeting his same chain-enrattled doom, Georges, exhausted by his year-long operation (which impressed each day with the weight of 100 years), invokes a kind of ‘life review’ phenomenon and escorts David through his memories and choices in the hope that he will become a reformed man through shame-induced repentance.

Time feels warped and surreal in The Phantom Carriage. From the dragged-on shifts of the carriage-driver, to the supernatural associations with midnight, clocks, as means of temporal measurement, play pivotal roles in maintaining the air of liminality in a way that seeps into the material world. In the same scene which features David and his friends drinking in the graveyard, a clock, not yet at midnight, appears to hover mid-sky above all below like a menacing, regal moon face, or like a beacon of light akin to, perhaps, a lighthouse. Although, upon closer inspection, this clock is attached to the top of a tower, the darkness is faded so effectively toward the clock face that it gives such a lunar illusion. As David points out Time in reference to the legend, it seems that Time casts down her authority and foreboding retribution in the form of ticking minutes - particularly, upon the gravestones and men themselves - and upon a blue toned world, creating a ghostly mood. As the screen zooms further into the clock, and the clock strikes twelve, the alarming nature of its message rings clearer than before, as it does so fading away and becoming ultimately swallowed into the darkness of the night as it ushers in the new ‘sub’-reality of its sinner victims. Time and clocks in The Phantom Carriage become a spooky and unceasingly mechanical echo of David’s spiritual expectation and responsibility.

Victor David Sjöström, *The Phantom Carriage*, [image still], 1921, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzOk7hkDUew

One of the tactics Georges uses to convince David of his guilt is by offering a view of what he could have been, had he not been swept away by the drinking habits of his social circle. In a literally rose-tinted view, Georges shows David an idyllic picnic scene - one featuring himself, his two children, his wife, and his brother. They appear quietly content, enjoying such simplicities of life as food and company among a flower-dotted background. In the next frame, however, this idyllic vision is subverted by a more darkly-clad trio featuring David and his two friends. Their expressions are more chaotic as they become immersed with their drinking and the artificial, temporary cheer accompanying it. The field behind them is noticeably less adorned with flowers, alluding to the vital deprivations of alcohol as it detaches one from reality and duty, and transporting one instead, as it were, to a liminal world.

The very destruction of David’s legacy now brings him, in fact, to a prison, where he is to spend a short time serving for drunkenness. There is a kind of unreal, purgatorial sense to the prison. As David is sat down for confrontation, his face is slightly cocked as if to embrace a warm and redeeming light from beyond the prison walls; indeed, the shadow cast behind him seems disproportionately larger, as if to literally foreshadow the exorcism of his great sins, and surrounds him with a kind of ‘halo’.

Yet, David is told that his punishment is inadequate, as considering that he was the one to influence his brother, who sits in a neighboring cell, into the drinking which stupefied him enough to commit homicide, the prison master feels that it is more fitting, rather, for David to take on his brother’s much longer sentence. David’s face is one of absolute despair and self-realization - with his eyebrows furrowed, eyes widened, and mouth held open in frozen suspension, David, still maintaining a hidden aura of hope by the halo formed by the doorway, gazes at his brother with fear and trepidation.

The commands of the prison master and his assistant, both at the door and in attending David along a bleakly barren and harshly contoured hall in order to bring David to serve his longer sentence, elicit the labyrinthine, unending, and even dream-like ‘justice’ system featured in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where David, like Josef K, feels trapped and defeated in proceeding back and forth between the caprices of authority and of a sentence which, ultimately, is not his (even if, by way of the butterfly effect, the sentence really has stemmed from his own sinful root). As the barred window of the second image below reflects upon David as a light-shadow effect in the third image, David’s prison sentence is beginning to transmute from a physical sentence to a mental one, effectually sparking his inner reflection and conversion.

Perhaps the most conspicuous effect of The Phantom Carriage, an effect which was pioneering for its time, is that of double-exposure. This double-exposure is particularly successful in conveying the hazy, liminal appearances of the unliving, including David, Georges, and the carriage itself.

Upon falling dead on the stroke of twelve, David is commanded: “Captive, come forth from thy prison!” The soul of David rises from his physical form, which is now sprawled out across the grimy, stone-cold surface of a grave. Thoroughly dazed, David looks out across the moonlit (or time-lit?) graveyard, cold and empty, and turns his head suspensefully to greet the labor-wearied, equally incredulous face of his fellow friend, Georges. The second frame below provides a visual trinity, as both the body and spirit of David, together with Georges who hangs above David with a scythe in hand, create triangular symmetry in order to amplify the shock and recognition which they feel.

In a final scene, Georges takes David to his home, where is forced to bear witness to what has become of his family: that is, of the decision of his wife to poison herself and their two children in order to escape from their dire situation. When neither her husband, a raging drunkard, nor her socioeconomic means, now scarce, are found to be dependable, she resolves to flee her and her children by means of death - a moment similar to how Sethe, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, decided to kill her own child as she did not want her to endure the trauma of slavery.

Taking witness to this scene, David, hovering in mid-air as he is trapped by his liminal conditions, is filled with horror. His astonished expression juxtaposes with the desensitised, hood-cloaked expression of Georges, who merely points his scythe at the imminent doom of David’s family. In the second frame, David is stooped upon the ground in defeated deference, tensing his hands into fists and crying for relief from the scene. He understands, now, that he must return in order to save his family. The physical detachment of himself from his home as a spectre-witness is more than he can bear. Motivated to return and redeem himself, David is granted the opportunity to change his abandoned status quo and to free himself from the restrictive qualities of liminality.

David and Georges, by the enhancing cinematographic motifs and effects relating to liminality, as through clocks, lost potential through flashbacks, the prison, or double exposure, and through the monochromatic quality of silent film, leave viewers with a spectral, forward-looking message that one’s fate is not pre-determined: that one always has room for change. Ultimately, David is able to redeem himself, refostering his relationship with his family and reassessing his priorities. Out of the depths of his sin and suffering, David is able to reemerge and perhaps even more strongly understand that life is a gift not to be wasted. Such a theme of the sinner-redeemed is one expressed, likewise, in stories such as the aforementioned Charles’s Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but also in others such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, or in films like Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Each of these stories, in addition to The Phantom Carriage, share commonality in that they preach it is possible for one to escape their depravity - whether in, say, a father escaping their drunkenness, a citizen escaping their greed, or a nihilist escaping their desire to give up - in order to facilitate one’s higher potential and positive development.

The command for the dead throughout the film to “come forth from thy prison!” can allude to physical life in the material world as a superficially limiting experience which, when escaped from spiritually (as in meditation) can provide a clearer definition of life. Only by confronting and resolving the suffering in one’s life, an aspect referred to by David’s wife in the end when she states, in her flood of tears at receiving David, “I won’t be truly happy until all my sorrow is drained,” can one come out the other end in order to feel the most authentic joy and meaning that there really is attached to life. Although suffering is inevitable and everyone is dealt with their own cards, doing our best, at least, to do with what we have in order to add meaning to life and mentally conquer ourselves, seems to be, ultimately, the moralistic approach urged on by The Phantom Carriage and other similar stories which we can take upon ourselves to then apply in our own lives.

Liminality and Redemption in The Phantom Carriage

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