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The film also gives a fairly accurate picture of our culture’s modern move toward the supernatural. As people are abandoning organized religion, they’re not becoming secular, but embracing “new age spirituality” — with beliefs in some kind of God and/or spirits and various occult or folk methods of connecting with them.
This is particularly true of young women. Belief in ghosts, haunted houses and the supernatural have always been more typical of women than men. This is because women trust their intuitions more than men do. Belief in the supernatural tends to correlate with those who “test low in cognitive reflection”, which is another way of saying, people who trust their gut instead of running what their gut tells them by their analytical reasoning before they believe it.
The movie reflects this. The people who are most open to the ghost are the ones who are emotional and intuitive: The daughter and the father. The ones who are most skeptical are the ones who are most “masculine” — the mom and son — and most ambitious, rational and practical. When they get a spiritual medium to come help them, it’s a woman, with her husband assisting her and explaining what she does.
The movie sides with the intuitive and the spiritual over the analytical and the rational. The daughter is the spiritual medium who tries to warn her family of what’s coming. But the mom and the son are convinced she’s a quack and so chase her away, not following her warnings. This leads to dire and tragic results.
On one hand, this movie puts the supernatural all in the same bucket: Whether from organized religion or individual spirituality, it exists in the realm of the unknown and should therefore be embraced by the intellectually humble. The dad talks to his daughter about the fact that his mother was very religious, which was a major barrier between them for years. But toward the end of his life, he was softer toward her because, he says, “What do I know? Maybe she was right?” It’s for this reason he decides to believe his daughter. But in a sense, it’s because he loves her and wants her to feel loved and heard.
In a greater sense, the film privileges individual spirituality over organized religion. When the psychic comes, she and her husband explain that some people are able to experience what exists on the other side of death. People who meet God are able to experience it a little, while individual people — like the psychic — are able to experience it fully.
This means the movie privileges a spirituality that is becoming increasingly gendered toward single women. Increasingly, men are rejoining organized religion while single women abandon it en masse. Men are joining the church because they see it as rational and focused on doctrine, tradition and structure. But while women are traditionally more religious than men, more and more women are seeing religion as a barrier toward their intuitive spirituality.
Religions demand their own kind of “cognitive reflection” where you check what your spiritual intuition says against the church’s doctrine — some of which is seen as misogynistic and oppressive. This is why women are abandoning religion for new age or occult practices that make their own gut the only guide for spiritual realities.
It wouldn’t surprise me if — down the line — a movie like “Presence” would portray the masculine characters as religious rather than secular. While this film treats belief in God and belief in psychics or trusting your intuitive spirituality as on the same side, in the future the people who believe in these things will be in completely different camps.
“Presence” isn’t perfect, but it’s is an excellent example of how one can use the film medium to tell moving stories in clever new ways. It’s also a really good example of modern trends in spirituality. Whether you think those trends are good or not depends on how much time you spend cognitively reflecting on it.
“Presence” is in theaters now.