Karsh is on a blind date with Myrna Shovlin --- their dentist says their teeth are compatible --- and she asks to see the graveyard where his cutting-edge Shroud technology has been put to use. The 'Shovlin' name is an obvious homonymic joke. They're in the graveyard, and the scene functions as bare-faced exposition. Myrna's understanding of death and grief is that you bury the past, whereas Karsh's Shroud technology works to keep it exposed in perpetuity. She leaves, not because this is all so morbid, but because he's still infatuated. The world disappears for Karsh as he gazes at his wife Becca's corpse, attuning himself to the way it decays in real-time, which is the time he inhabits.
The next pun comes shortly after, in the same scene: a shot of Becca's headstone reveals her surname to be Relikh. This second homonym toys with the ambiguity of the word and function of the relic: it's derived from the Latin noun 'reliquiae' meaning 'remains', adjective 'reliquus' meaning 'surviving', and verb 'relinquere' meaning to 'leave behind or abandon'. Becca's relic is at once her bones lying in the ground (the Shroud as her reliquary), and the dual sense of the verb: she has abandoned her bones so that they can remain here, and she has abandoned Karsh in death. The function of the relic is that it invites remembrance so that the bereaved can learn to forget.
The Shrouds nervously mines this duality, as it tries to figure out exactly how its Shrouds work in mourning, and to what effect within a film narrative. Anyone wanting something outwardly somber will find it frustrating that it puts itself in humorous tangles over this, and probes the theme of mourning through a preoccupation with paranoia and conspiracy. What's important though is that it deliberately stages the gradual collapse of its own conspiratorial machinations, so as to reveal the work of grieving as a necessary, and necessarily hapless, attempt to get over something that will never go away.
In watching The Shrouds grappling with, and failing to, make sense of its own central idea, I was reminded of Freud's routine struggle to provide his own materialist account of death. In fact, Karsh's contradictory statements on grief and the function of the Shroud mirror Freud's works fairly closely, and (I assume) intentionally. He first tells Myrna that at the funeral he felt a pull "neither emotional nor intellectual" to jump into the coffin with Becca, gesturing to Freud's Thanatos, or the ineradicable will of all organic life to return to the inanimate state it can't consciously remember, but which it feels. Then shortly after, in an attempt to appear more rational to Terry, he says the Shroud allows him to see that he is only really looking at bones, and not a person after all. She sees through it and smirks, "Is that a grieving strategy?" Of course it is, and of course it's inadequate. It's probably a line that he used to console people before he had experienced loss himself.
At a distance the Shrouds function as augmented reality sepulchres for private mourning within the public space of the cemetery. Over the course of the film Karsh finds that he regularly talks to the sepulchre, and that it answers him back in turn, unsettling his ideas of death and grief. Freud too designed a sepulchre that answered back. He likened his office to one both architecturally, and conceptually, as a sealed-off space playing an active role in his clinical work. Like Karsh, his work in the sepulchre actively dismantled his established beliefs. In 1915's On Transience, the psychoanalyst embraces the transience of life, and in 1917's Mourning and Melancholia he insists on the need to accept the reality of lost people, places, and ideas, lest this lead to a pathological contempt for life itself. (The bones are really just bones, and life is here, above ground). Freud consoles his reader that even the most immovable grief will burn itself out with time, and this even goes for those who've forgotten what they were grieving in the first place. Readers of the 1917 essay might find it hard to believe that consciously grasping the absence of a person is sufficient to move on, and indeed one passage near the end of his essay seems to suggest the lost person endures not in conscious thought, but in traces:
The quick and easy answer is that 'the unconscious (thing-) presentation of the object has been abandoned by the libido'. In reality, however, this presentation is made up of innumerable single impressions (or unconscious traces of them), and this withdrawal of libido is not a process that can be accomplished in a moment, but must certainly, as in mourning, be one in which progress is long-drawn-out and gradual
I read these unconscious traces as things that endure in the body of the living, which is why they override conscious acceptance. This is something Cronenberg has spent his career exploring, and that Freud comes to a few years later with the death of his daughter Sophie. In a letter to Ludwig Binswanger he writes:
Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And, actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish
There it is again: Becca Relikh. Her remains survive to perpetuate the love he cannot relinquish.
Karsh's dentist tells him his grief has manifested in his teeth. Karsh ignores him because he knows this, and the teeth themselves are the least of his worries. He felt, again, something pulling him into Becca's grave as it was being lowered. The source of the thing was not conscious, nor was it emotional, nor was it a death drive, for it was both personal and unconscious: it was his body's memory of Becca. The pull he felt was the materiality of grief. According to the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we are all bodies, striving to synchronise ourselves with the world. Through repeated interactions with the world, we establish a world-body relationship that no longer requires deliberate thought. Our way of being becomes habitual, precognitive. The issue with this is that our conscious thought remains conscious, and able to reflect on our automatic bodily processes. These bodies of ours have an intimate relationship with the world our consciousness cannot, and the world in turn has an intimate relationship with our bodies that we cannot cognitively access. Our bodies become alien to us, an "alien flesh" as he so evocatively puts it.
The alien flesh is perhaps no more alarmingly perceived than when it continues to remember something our consciousness has tried to forget. Merleau-Ponty's famous example of this is in the case of the phantom limb: the individual may be aware of their amputation, but their body continues to work to "retain the practical field (...) enjoyed before mutilation." If they can adjust to this mutilation, and incorporate it into the body, a world-body relationship is established that recognises this meaningful change. If they cannot, and they cling to the world that no longer recognises them, they have stumbled into a "phantom world." The Shrouds documents Karsh's efforts to exit the phantom world by recognising the mutation precipitated by the amputation of Becca. Running through Merleau-Ponty's accounts of bodies striving to be made whole through contact with the world, and of the horrifying estrangement of our alien flesh, is the sense that our material being is predicated on, and responds to, an internal lack: a lack of coherence between body and subject, self and world. It's characterised by its forever striving to close this gap. Karsh mourns Becca not only emotionally and intellectually, but bodily, because the two completed one another as a coherent organism. It's the rolling over and adjusting the elbow or the hip or the knee ever so slightly, it's the anticipation of warmth in a cold bed. He came to know his body through hers and vice versa, and with her amputation he became the insect, clinging to the world that has now been made phantom. From this phantom world he laments "I lived in Becca's body (...) Her body was the world."
Karsh explains to Myrna that the Shroud allowed him to bury Becca in a way that befit her faith: she could not be cremated, because in Jewish thought the body must be buried. He clarifies that he is a nonbeliever, but his elaboration is no different from the phenomenologist's view above: the soul has only known the world through the body, and it needs the time to leave it behind. Clearly the bereaved is the 'soul', as they have only known the world through their love for the other, and now need time to mourn. They also store the memories of the other body, now only bones, and endure with this great mnemonic burden, clawing at the only world they've ever known: the body of the deceased. Being Cronenberg, grief and the existence of the soul are rendered as a bodily wound, a phantom limb, not emotional or intellectual but base habit and memory encoded in matter. The Shroud allows the bereaved to do their work as the souls of the dead.
Early in the film Karsh's dentist offers him Becca's dental records (as jpegs). He turns the dentist down, and returns to the Shroud. Karsh pinches the screen and zooms into Becca's corpse, playing with the skewed 3D render, following the contours of the skull to her teeth. He might've turned down the radiograph jpegs because he has the HD version right here. Or he might've turned them down because they present an image of Becca frozen in time. What makes the Shroud such a revolutionary technology is that it records the real-time dissolution of the body. In its relationship to time and the body, it performs the opposite function to the photographic record. Karsh, in other words, keeps the Shroud as proof of death.
In his conversation with Myrna they discuss the Shroud of Turin --- the burial shroud that miraculously bears the imprint of Jesus of Nazareth. Whereas the Shroud is almost certainly a fake, Karsh says, his Shrouds are the real thing. It's observed that the image of the corpse from the Shroud is "quite beautiful, like it's floating in outer space." I find its despatialised intimacy eerily akin to Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, only thrown into a crude, rotating 3D viewer. Like Holbein's painting, this is an image of death without any suggestion of transcendence, without architectural support, with only the corpse abandoned and alone. The 3D view, where every object is suspended in the callous antispace of the database, affirms Holbein's strategy of death without pathos or excitement. And because the image is not frozen in time but shows the bare fact of bones disintegrating into the centuries, it answers Holbein's effort to "give form and color to (...) the nonrepresentable conceived of as the dissipation of means of representation on the threshold of their extinction in death" (Kristeva). As a durational medium the Shroud can, in other words, record the body turned to bones turned to nothing. Also like Holbein's painting, the sense of the body's abandonment transforms the viewer into its custodian, its private mourner, who is tasked with keeping the body company in its peaceful agony. The Shroud establishes the sepulchre, accessible only by Karsh, in which Becca can be kept safe from the eyes of the world.
This obsession with privacy and proof of death is a curious thing for Cronenberg, whose work has always celebrated novel physical aberrations as proof of life. An interesting reversal happens when Karsh puts on the Shroud, appearing for a moment like the cloaked Saul in 2022's Crimes of the Future. Where in that film Saul externalises his new organs for the public in a performance of life as becoming, here Karsh produces encrypted images of his insides, caught in the unidirectional flow of time toward death and disintegration. He needs to know that when he goes, he's not coming back, and there will be no future images. The spectre of mutation-as-life persists when Karsh notices what appear to be novel bone growths on Becca's skeleton. On the face of it this disturbs him because it suggests the traumatic return of the abnormal cell growth that ended her life. He raises it with Becca's radiologist who assures him, "Cancer is an invented phenomenon, we see novel growths all the time." But of course novel growths require living matter, and Becca's bones are supposed to be dead. The threat of life in Becca's bones worries Karsh because it would mean the end of his sepulchre --- his private mourning --- and her second, public life, that is not his and only his to possess.
I hope this essay so far has not painted The Shrouds as a work devoted to melancholia. Again, the viewer with this expectation will find themselves frustrated with its humour, and its screwy compulsion to conspiracy thinking. It's both manic and dry, as though its mania is the most obvious and sensible thing in the world. In Freud's 1913 Totem and Taboo he speculates that a belief in spirits once eased the shock of death, and that without them we are left talking back to bones and memories, neurotically rebuking ourselves for not adhering to the outcome of the reality test, which is There's nothing there. Neurosis assumes the place of the spirit, mania, reverence.
Karsh in The Shrouds finds himself at a crossroads between mourning and paranoia. He has tried to stay on the path of the former, but the novel bone growths show a breach in the sepulchre of private grief. Becca is becoming an entity whose time on earth is continuing to affect things now that she is supposed to be gone; she is proving to be less a phantom limb for Karsh, than a phantom in her own right. Parts of Freud's 1913 text concern the fear that the dead may have a 'second life' when not properly buried. He identifies a tension between the practice of invoking the dead in mourning (which seems to be a personal exercise in preserving their memory), and the complex burial rites that ensure the dead don't actually return as spirits. The latter fear, he reasons, stems from the guilt of survivors who feel as though their unconscious hostilities toward the deceased (when alive) were either responsible for their death, or have found satisfaction in their death. Instead of acknowledging these hostile feelings, the survivor projects them onto the deceased as things they must themselves have possessed. This allows the survivor to mourn the dead without hostility, but it also leads to the generation of demons and vengeful spirits that reflect this ejected negativity.
Becca appears to Karsh when he's lying in bed --- in the doorway, like an apparition. "Am I asleep? Are you still alive?" he asks. "I don't know," she replies. She's always naked, always responsive yet aloof, as if to say we are still communicating telepathically, and the words you insist on using are underplaying our unbreakable psychical unity. She also appears to him daily as Hunny, Karsh's AI assistant. The conversations Karsh has with the apparition later feed into Hunny, and Hunny appears to influence the apparition in turn. In this way they operate in tandem, working in and out of Karsh's digital and dreaming unconscious respectively, and feeding this information back to a server where the assistant is trained. As a consequence, conversations become less conciliatory as they go on, and more provocative of his anxieties regarding Becca.
After an episode of grave desecration, Karsh suspects that a competing firm may be trying to steal his Shroud tech. That night however the apparition arrives: "My bones are very valuable," she says, "It makes me feel so alive, those pieces, they're still part of me. I haven't lost them." After this Karsh suspects Becca's ex Jerry Eckler of stealing her bones, his jealousy pours out: "He had her body before I did (...) and then he had her body as she was dying, as her doctor." Then when his team reports that the Shroud database ('the Shroud Mesh') has been breached, he fears he's lost private access to her virtual record as well. They're "uploading Becca… all of her. Taking her away from you." Hunny and the Becca apparition combine to become the demon he fears. They raise his hidden regrets and resentments, and all he can do is monitor the Shroud view, to make sure she hasn't actually come back. Of course the Shroud view is always already compromised. The view of Hunny in Karsh's phone and tablet mirrors the screen-mediated view of Becca's corpse, making her ontologically indistinguishable from the actual deceased who can now only be known virtually.
This leaves the third Becca in Terry, her twin sister. Curiously, the more paranoid Karsh becomes, the more attractive he becomes to others. It's as if a paranoid Karsh is one that sees himself in the world, and the world as a network of danger. He tries to map where Japanese designs and Chinese fit outs intersect, where the Hungarian government demands secrecy and Russian interference impedes on this, which global manufacturers are responsible for the systems that keep getting flagged as clandestine surveillance operations, and whether it's actually just someone in his own team. At a point he asks Terry if he's not becoming like the paranoid Maury, and she assures him that Maury is a "resentful, paranoid schmuck," indicating there are degrees of paranoia and resentment that may be more or less healthy. In healthy doses, then, conspiracy marks a strange rebirth; a reentry into the social order that channels the need to communicate with others outside of individual, pathological grief.
It's important that all of The Shrouds' conspiratorial mapping fails. Karsh follows them to the point they position China as the root of all discord, and then Russia, whereupon the thing reveals itself as a copy of the antisemitic conspiracy theories he laughs off at the beginning of the film: "There is no Russian operation, it's just a fucking coincidence!" The only thing that remains true is that Becca is gone, only now Karsh has stepped into the world, to find it different. The phantom world is vanquished. Sort of.
It's impossible to extract the conspiratorial threads from The Shrouds to better see the grief at its core, because the film is a work of grief channelled into paranoia and conspiracy. This ad hoc conspiracy stands for any and all artistic creation in the wake of death. It follows a line of thought, and then another, and then another, until everything falls apart and the narrative is gone and it never left square one. It's a failed detour from the subject of its concern, but failure here doesn't render something pointless. The work of art in the wake of death must in a sense fail, just as the work of 'overcoming' death must return the bereaved to their mourning. It's the trying that counts, that activation of textual colours and shapes and sounds and rhythms, that restore, however momentarily, a sense of joy. Then by failing to provide an image of 'getting over,' the film reflects both the artist's and reader's inability to do the same.
There's something else here too, however. Something personal. As Karsh steps onto the plane to Budapest with Soo-Min, he does so as a man who has successfully mourned, who has relinquished the attachment that had transformed all of this into a phantom world. When he looks over, however, he sees this new woman with Becca's surgeries, and with the pain that comes from touch. "You have me now. And together, we'll be in Gravetech Budapest" she says, reminding us that any claim of new life is only ever a claim to the same eternity, the same need to find final rest through the body of another, it's always Becca, no matter what. A love letter then: I will never get over this.
26 April 2025