by Steve Johnson

....Henry Jaglom doesn't make movies so much as haunted houses. Even when their situations involve a simple gathering of friends or a war vet transporting a comrade's body home, there's always the sense in his stories of characters detached from the contemporary, physical world and left to inhabit a parallel plane (all taking place in such isolated locations as a commune, abandoned theater, or resort town), where they must search for some missing part of themselves or the resolution of some missed opportunity before they may find their final peace and rest. From the distracted beauty of his first feature, A Safe Place, who yearns to fly, and the accountant type who falls under her spell, to the gaggle of second-string Hollywood players and European luminaries whose careers have long since arc'ed in his most recent, Festival in Cannes, what brings all these apparitions together is a shared quality of need, a desire to locate his or her own authentic self, or "spirit." And the medium by which these spirits are invoked is, of course, film itself, which can not only give form to our most spectral imaginings but also preserve such images long after the deterioration and death of their earthly progenitors. (Not surprisingly, the logo for his production company, Rainbow Films, features his longtime friend Orson Welles pulling a rainbow out of a magic box, about as suitable a metaphor for what Jaglom means to do with his camera as any.) Their removal from the everyday, material realm then allows their greater meaning, or "truth," to be revealed.
If we are to believe the portrait of him in H. Alex Rubin and Jeremy Workman's documentary Who Is Henry Jaglom?, which has the feel, sometimes, of a put-on, or stunt, Jaglom has conducted practically his entire life behind or in front of the camera, making of himself a ghost in both worlds. A favorite of many women, his films embrace qualities or dynamics traditionally equated with femininity: a disinterest in the masculine "thrust" of Hollywood narrative in exchange for a looser, more freely associative "flow" following on the give and take of character interaction, their situations driven more by a desire to relate than to instruct. Playing like what used to be called "happenings" - organized events not unlike performance art intended to provoke a response in the spectator - they are an at times uneasy coalition of verité, improvisation, deliberate scripting and direction, and that magical fifth quality, poetry.
They are demanding films, requiring a viewer to shift gears with them without notice, be patient when they seem not content to end when you want them to or where you think that they should, even to endure their characters when they veer into the self-indulgent or precious, as they frequently do. You must be willing, while watching them, to do what their characters themselves eventually realize they must do with each other: to let them be free to follow their own course, even when that path leads very far away, and your reward, most times, will be finding yourself somewhere down a road you might never have expected taking, yourself. What Jaglom expects from the movies he nurtures and creates is the same we might ask of our lovers - or a seance: a transformative experience, an epiphany, via a similar encounter with an often unanticipated Other. As a result, many times what may start out as a thoroughly realistic drama will conclude in a moment of either sublimity or the outright uncanny: the disappearance of lead characters from A Safe Place, Someone to Love, and Venice/Venice (the latter film resolving in the recognition that the movie they've been making all along is the movie we've just watched) or the unlikely coming together of opposites for a roadside dance in Cannes. A good Jaglom film can provide the same out-of-body experience for the viewer, as well, transporting one to greater worlds of possibility than this often incongruous and contentious sphere.
How Jaglom gets us there is by this very collision of opposing points of view, combining disparate elements until they yield the stuff of transcendence. While hailing from an avant garde tradition c/o John Cassavetes and remaining far from the mainstream throughout his career (his films all produced without studio backing, employing students, devotees and his artist and celebrity friends and acquaintances playing sometimes thinly veiled versions of themselves for minimum pay; few of his works to date have cost more than a million dollars), Jaglom is yet a romantic when it comes to influences and origins, paying tribute to the past in story structure - the Vietnam war by way of Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" in Tracks, Chekhov via Renoir's Rules of the Game in Last Summer in the Hamptons - as well as in his soundtrack selections - "I'm Old Fashioned" from the still very modern Safe Place, and the title Bulgarelli song from Someone. Though an avowed atheist, as well, his films often display a straightforward mystical sense through such warpings of the reality he so ardently records. In fact, it is through this emphasis on natural physical and material expression free of the glamour of Hollywood that the revelations his characters reach gain their sizable spiritual import: without bringing God or the supernatural into the argument, the feelings his characters touch off are all the more fundamentally human, thus true.
So it makes a certain sort of sense that his most traditionally "movie" movie should also be his least realistic, the one least seemingly "Jaglom" the one which paradoxically brings the spectral undercurrents of all his films to the surface - the putative supernatural romance, Déjà Vu.
Written, as were Hamptons and Babyfever, with his wife and co-star Victoria Foyt and released in 1998, Déjà Vu carries much of the ambience of its pre-millennial era, a vaguely mystical air of expectation grounded in an inchoate sense of dissatisfaction. Its opening in a marketplace hints at the source of this disquiet, confirmed by its resolution in the opposite of such a location, a work of art. The path its lost-soul main character follows from beginning to end and the discoveries this leads her to reflect the film's own efforts to realize itself through the improvisatory efforts of its cast, the romance facilitating both journeys a metaphor for the transformative effects of any erotic relationship, whether between individuals, an artist and his or her medium (as the film artist and his or her collaborators, or the constituent parts of his or her own personality), finally that between the spectator and the finished work.
Déjà Vu proceeds like an odyssey taking its fashion-storeowner heroine Dana Howard from Jerusalem to Paris by way of Dover, London and California, spurred by a chance encounter with a serene older woman at a café who, inadvertently or otherwise, leads her to abandon her slightly daffy aspiring hotelier fiancé Alex for seemingly levelheaded, married artist Sean Elias. Somewhere in the middle she ends up where else but in a Jaglom film, in the form of an impromptu gathering at the London home of a friend of her father's peopled by dotty older residents the Stoners, their architect Sean and his wife Claire, Alex, John Stoner's flighty, self-possessed sister Skelly and her companion Konstantine, and her and John's mother, Colette. Here the various characters mingle in everything from offhand vignettes to fully developed set pieces as Dana and Sean wrestle with their seemingly fated attraction and the several complications this arouses, she experiencing along the way a series of revelations that leave her with no choice but to go with not only her heart but with all the signals she believes herself to be receiving from the finite physical as well as eternal "other" realms. When it turns out that the mystery woman of the opening could not have been in that location at that time, the spiritual nature of their meeting comes clear even as it throws into a deeper relief the seemingly mundane exchanges that follow.
This concept of "meeting," as Irene Claremont de Castillejo puts it in her book KNOWING WOMAN: A Feminine Psychology (1997 Shambhala Books, Boston and London), is of signal importance to Jaglom. In true meeting, ego and artifice are transcended in order to forge a more resonant spiritual connection, abetted by an indefinable third party - "a something else." "You may call it Love, or the Holy Spirit," she writes; "Jungians would say it is the spirit of the Self" (p.12). It's the method by which Jaglom derives his own brand of epiphany as well, the alchemy between actors letting down their guard producing that quality of truth that can't be attained by a single ego fashioning its own private reality with no medium or intercessor between.
So it's fitting that the meeting which sets Dana's journey in motion involves a being who already inhabits this numinous realm, the woman Dana discovers later to have died fifteen years before - the mother of Sean and, most amazingly, the great love of her father's life. For Dana, she is the senex, or Wise Woman aspect neglected in her life of commerce, and for Jaglom, many of whose films involve such similar outdoor encounters (suggestive of his public "meetings" with his audience in the greater world of the movie theater), the "medium" of film itself. (The scene of their encounter, in fact, takes place in a real-life setting above the Israeli Cinematheque.) Through this medium, he finds that place where men and women - as well as self and other - meet and transcend their otherness, where they find their mutual "spirit" of humanity.
If Dana herself has a mother, she is neither seen nor referred to throughout the picture. Given this, the woman at the café then would figure as a literal Spectral Mother, as Madelon Sprengnether has termed her in her 1990 book of the same name (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London; tellingly, no one else at the restaurant sees or notices her), a figment of Dana's yearning for completion called forth to spirit her toward the next step in her character development. Tranquil, and with an empathic gaze that sees into Dana - because she is a part of Dana - she insists that the younger woman take a lapel pin to which she ascribes great sentimental value, and tells the story behind it. (The 1980 film Somewhere in Time employs a similar setup, in which a ghost-figure proffers another talisman conveying the romantic lead back in time; it's also a function of Jean Rollin's poetic 1975 Levres de sang.) One half of a pair, it was given her as an engagement present by a young American in Paris at the end of World War II, "when everything was possible again" and she was young and poor. He returned to the 'States to break up with his girl back home but succeeded in marrying her instead, later sending back a photo of himself and his new daughter. The narrator then married, herself, and moved to Israel. (Compare this scenario with that of 1951's short film "Return to Glennascaul," featuring Welles, wherein a similar wartime romance is recounted by a woman who later turns out to have been long gone.)
There are so many layers to the woman's story that the more information Dana receives about it and her, rather than clearing things up, the more complicated its inferences become. Besides being a partial retelling of the myth of the androgynes, creatures legendarily split into two bodies but destined to reunite, as the history of a figure out of Dana's imagination as well as familial experience the tale suggests also a personal mythology, a description of some spiritual truth which has brought her to this meeting in this place at this point in her life. The woman represents for her some lost or unknown character it is now necessary to reclaim, the romantic, pre-materialistic Origin to which we all aspire in a consumer culture. When her relation to Dana's father is revealed toward the ending, the histoire also becomes a fable of the daughter's displaced love for her own dad come back to her, the leaf pin a symbol of her own incompleteness after the mystical separation from him which had left her, in fact, a ghost in her own life. In standard Electric fashion, the film's elision of the birth mother then leaves room for the daughter to take her place in the father's affections, which is what happens when she accepts the totem (symbolic also of her turning "a new leaf" in life) from the "true," spiritual, intermediary, Spectral Mother. When this woman abruptly leaves and is never seen thereafter, she echoes the real mother similarly disappeared from the daughter's experience, the hotel she claims to live in having burned to the ground twenty years previously the unrecoverable old life lost at Dana's approximate adolescent turning-point.
For the father, the woman's story is an allegory of his postwar reunion with the anima, or the complementary creative, feminine side to his own recently abandoned warrior-self, and of the subsequent, inexplicable loss and partial regeneration of this figure "back home" (within: the pun in the "United States" to which he returns) in the form of his daughter. Left with this facsimile, he has spent his life in mourning for the real thing, which has migrated now to a figurative Holy Land in his heart and will eventually hearken back to him through his daughter at a similar emergency-point in his life - the event of his "heart" attack, whose function as a climax to the film suggests the drama as ultimately his own, a crisis in the soul of a mostly absent or unseen father-God at the putative turn of a century (…by the Christian calendar, at any rate).
When it is revealed much later that not only was Dana's father the soldier in the story but that the narrator herself was the mother of the artist with which Dana becomes enamored, another set of implications ensue. For the father, Sean represents the creative masculine self also regenerated via the encounter with the anima, unseen and unknown all these years and introduced to him courtesy of his daughter's exploration within the cultural heartlands. For Sean, who is, when he meets Dana, painting a portrait of some woman he knows not whom but who, as his knowledge of this new love deepens and progresses, ultimately turns out to be his mother, finding Dana fulfills his own oedipal desire to know that inchoate, similarly lost mother-figure whose absence in his life has left him wed to earthly matters and concerns in the form of his architectural day job and wife, herself a director of TV commercials. Meeting Dana and learning of her experience reconnects him to the lost "spirit" of his own life's work, resulting in the concluding transfiguration of both lovers in the painting he gives her on their first meeting.
Ethel S. Person, in her book on DREAMS OF LOVE AND FATEFUL ENCOUNTERS [biblio], emphasizes all these notions, stressing "love as restoration, the end point of a lifelong quest to gain restitution for what was lost long ago - in personal history, or in the history of our species - as the result of prior separations" (p.92). For Jewish-born Jaglom the importance of separation, reunion and restitution is central, the history of his people as well as own family replete with exiles, Holocausts and exterminations, making the postwar origin of this romance even more resonant. His Ukrainian family's wealth and prominence kept the devil from the door for a period of time, until leaving much of this behind became necessary as the 1919 pogroms swept through their hometown of Proskurov (memorialized in Last Summer's eponymous theatrical company). His father later relocated to London, where Jaglom was born and where Déjà Vu settles in for its longest stretch and greater improvisational explorations. The culmination of much of this history was, then, the establishment of Israel in 1947, where, again, this film - as Dana's journey - begins.
Opening in such a spiritual location also suggests a removal from one's natural state - a separation from the ego, as from waking life. It is in just such a place one opens oneself up to love, as to the greater transcendence of self, as Person also relates: Free of one's traditional borders and boundaries, one becomes more permeable to outside influences and persuasions. So it is that so much Jaglom unravels in places of remove, from the eponymous festivals of Venice and Cannes to the Tracks train, Summer enclave, Someone theater, and Safe Place commune, and why so many of these features are dramas of psychological dissolution. It is the creation also of a dream-space, a similar location of blurred or imprecise boundaries where self and other can phase in and out of definition, like the interaction of lovers or of the filmmaker and his actors, set, and material. It is where Jaglom breathes most freely. His material is reality, as it is with the unconscious, but his object is the hyper-phenomenal.
The fact that the hotel in which the woman says she lives has burned down also resonates. It suggests first of all that a former transient state is over and that the soul must now find new lodgings. That this happened long ago indicates that it has taken Dana some time to acknowledge this change, for which the woman had served as an emissary, an intuition, as Skelly intimates later when speaking of illusions as "the scent of something real coming near." The larger implication is that the enterprise Dana and Alex are about to embark on (synonymous with their upcoming nuptials, suggesting the marriage as more akin to a business partnership than a union of souls), of renovating a similar hotel back in the 'States, is already passé in her heart, and he with it. That the ground had been built over since the hotel's razing demonstrates that there is a new occupant in that heart, another presentiment, soon to acquire features and independent emotions. All these suggestions come together at the Stoners' house, an impromptu hotel where all the characters gather to bicker, kid, and share stories and advice with one another. It's all a grand, kinetic metaphor for the vacillations within the similarly many-chambered mind of the film's dreamer, leading to its transcendent resolution and restoration.
Before Dana can get there, however, she has to dislocate herself from her present situation and focus on a separate pursuit from that of material wares. So it is that while in Paris validating the pin she glimpses a man's face beyond the jeweler's window and leaves the item behind to follow him down unfamiliar streets. He turns out, of course, to be Sean, but when next they meet he denies having been there, suggesting her experience as another intuition and dream-pursuit, her own creative next-self - that accustomed to gazing into and beyond the surfaces to which her buyer's eye has until recently been attuned - seeing the jewel within and subsequently leading her to follow instead the erotic allure of risk and uncertainty. There is also the possibility that Sean has in some sense projected himself there without knowing it, the scene exemplary of his unconscious search for that "jewel" in the city of romance which would find its way to him and offer the possibility of another life, the fulfillment of the love his own mother symbolized as childhood romantic ideal.
Dana's intuition is guided by her overhearing a woman on her train to Alex humming "The White Cliffs of Dover," similarly to the way the main character of Someone is inspired to convene a gathering of peers on hearing his girlfriend singing snippets of the title song, the half-heard melody in both cases functioning as a voice within akin to Skelly's "scent." Likewise the manner in which music appears in all of Jaglom, the pop standards lacing their soundtracks arising as more than just accent or commentary but as resonances from the self as well as milieu, spiritual choruses to and catalysts for both the inner and outer flow of the characters' lives as well as the course of their films, "invoked," again, as by a spiritualist. Following these voices brings Dana to those very cliffs, where she finds her elusive man from Paris painting, their encounter on the Olympic heights suggesting the immensity of their longing and the mightiness of their calling, a condition of which only she seems aware at first.
The couple's identity as children plays into the following sequence of events as Sean invites Dana up to his studio, which serves as a womb for their germinal romance and reinvention. It's a creative space, his unfinished portrait of an as-yet unidentified woman the indefinite Dana herself, who will be given new life through the agency of the Spectral Mother whose eventual materialization on the canvas affirms the development of Dana's own mature self-image on finding the artistic Love of Her Life. Here, he gifts her with another picture, of a postwar couple regarding the Eiffel Tower, suggestive of his mother and her lover but also conveying "Dover's" message of possibility, the phallic gate representative of the same regenerative principle that gave the children themselves life following such massive devastation, made meaningful anew to these two childless early-middle-agers only now finding their true source of eros. From this space Dana finally flees to the arms of her fiancé, without her purse - separated from both materialism and her old i.d. - and seemingly falling apart, her breakdown in order to rebuild similar to the destruction and reconstruction of the spirit's hotel and the remodeling job she and Alex are at present undertaking.
So begins the vacillation between attraction and trepidation the couple will experience for much of the rest of the picture. With both characters missing a parent, neither has been able to fully see him- or herself through to an integrated self-image of harmonious contrasts; it is perhaps this mutual need, then, which brings both to the home of surrogate parents the Stoners, friends of Dana's father who have engaged Sean to do some remodeling work on their house. They meet in the Edenic courtyard, where the initially aloof architect is flummoxed into recognition that larger forces are at work in their lives. But, as if to reinforce the connections tentatively established in the last womb they shared, this womb begins acquiring even more personalities, in the form of free-spirited Skelly and Konstantine (his name a punning indication as to the constancy of his devotion to her despite her mercurial quality) and later Colette, like a mind also accumulating facets or viewpoints it will variously pair off and convene in order to examine the problem in a Cubist form of colloquy resulting in, finally, the self-determination of its main constituents.
With everybody gathered around a hearth one afternoon, Fern Stoner and Skelly tell stories about unconsummated romance. Fern's story, attributed to Katherine Hepburn, is the classic Citizen Kane vignette about an infatuation with someone barely glimpsed but never forgotten and hints at Dana's sighting Sean through the jeweler's window, but Skelly's tale goes deeper into the emotional situation. While hospitalized as a child during the war, she shared a room with a Cockney girl who taught her "The White Cliffs of Dover," which she then shared with a wounded airman obscured beyond a partition behind her who is abruptly spirited away by a nurse when they make physical contact, never to be properly seen. It's a compelling tale, sensitively told by real-life participant Vanessa Redgrave, bearing on both Dana and all women's experience and carrying with it the power of a dream.
Read accordingly, then, the Cockney suggests a lower part of Skelly psychologically, an "earthier," less socialized or repressed aspect offering her similar hope to that expressed in the song and providing her with a connection to another, even less familiar and accessible part of herself, the mysterious man behind the curtain. He is the animus within all women, the characteristically masculine image of agency and ascendance downed at a pivotal moment in her development. For Dana, he first appears in the similarly prophylactic form of Sean behind the glass, who is himself dealing with the complementarily feminine anima in his own makeup as signaled by the indistinct female portrait in his studio, as private mind. A ghostly presence in all women's lives as is the anima for males, Skelly has spent a lifetime trying to reclaim this figure psychologically through her own "flightiness" as well as physically via her short-cropped hair. The purpose of her story - as of the entire gathering, like a séance - is to induce both potential lovers to recognize the living face of this spirit in their lives - in that room - and to not let the social barriers of their marriage and engagement (the nurse of her story an agent of similar Institution) to keep them from realizing the force of this acknowledgment and leaving them, like her, eternally longing for what was once within reach.
For Jaglom, this "screen" between lovers represents the movie screen itself, which he attempts to tear away via his actors' improvisations as well as his own, the film, not atypically, initiated with a beginning and an end in mind but without a map as to how it would get from one to the other. In Who Is Henry Jaglom?, the director tells of his frustration with sticking to a script - another, similar impediment - on his first film and how he resolved to not even bother thereafter, yet his works themselves indicate a longstanding tension to reconcile this breach with the past (those vintage ballads) with his own need to explore in real life, in real time. Though he posits Skelly here as devil's advocate between the otherwise engaged couple, encouraging them to go with their instincts and "Jump into life," he also provides a scene played with Redgrave's own mother, actress Rachel Kempson, in which Skelly wriggles out of responsibility for her mother's well-being and leaves it at the door of her more grounded brother, John. Similarly, he draws the characters of estranged wife Claire and fiancé Alex sympathetically enough that the damage done by following Skelly's imperatives - as their own - is indelibly acknowledged.
Ethel Person describes the tendency amongst illicit lovers to hyperbolize or mythologize their romance, elevating it to the same mystical terms Dana, and later Sean, do, partly in order to hedge the real-life consequences of their actions. Unfortunately, this usually causes a rupture in the denied real world, leaving the habitues of that world to do the mopping up after. When Dana and Alex bicker in an open-air market like the one in which the film began, indicating that time is about to restart for her and that the vague apprehension haunting the solo woman there now has a face and an independent voice, Dana stalks off carrying a vase for which Alex will now have to pay. Their argument is a philosophical one, she pontificating on the history of a picture frame and the many faces that must have passed through it and what they might have meant to each owner, gesturing toward the mutability of truth within a timeless structure and a clue to Alex that her own perspective has undergone a change and that a new object of affection is occupying her frame of reference. He cracks wise about the bacteria also transmitted, betraying his focus on the pragmatic physical plane she so desires to transcend. On abandoning him, Dana runs into Sean at a café - reiterative, again, of her encounter with his mother, suggesting that the "ghost" itself has taken physical form - and makes love with him back at his studio after more talk of the rightness and inevitability of their being together. Naturally, Alex and Claire don't see things that way, and when a call from the 'States regarding Daddy's heart attack interrupts everybody's acting-out, it's as if the emotional center of the movie itself were hemorrhaging and calling for a re-evaluation. (It's also a comment from within on the tension between narrative and improvisation, an indication that the latter element - this similar absorption of the film into itself, outside of the rules of conventional cinema - had gone as far as could be allowed and that an at least temporary return to form and structure were necessary to get the film, as well as lovers, where they are going before alienating the affections of the audience as well.)
The opening Jerusalem location is once again evoked when everything shifts to Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles with the Star of David atop it, taking us to the spiritual heart of Dana and her dilemma. Here, her father talks of the "phantom pains" discomfiting him now - he too beset by ghosts - setting us up for the historical revelation to follow; it's also an invocation of the pull of the comforting past and known for the conflicted Dana as well as a sympathy pang on the part of the elder for his daughter on the verge of a choice he could not make or carry through himself. So powerful is this draw to the familiar that afterward Dana nearly marries Alex - who has accompanied her on the return and whom we see resembles her father superficially, indicating that rather than finding her complement in the world Dana is instead dwelling within a vicarious romance with her own father - and perpetuates this history back home just like her father did. His wedding-day gift of the matching leaf pin, however, leads her to realize, "Oh my God, it was you," and to demand the story behind it.
Her expression carries several suggestions, not the least of which is an acknowledgement of the primacy of her father in her attraction to Alex, as well as the recognition that our search for a soul mate has as much to do with who we are as what we wish to be: We marry what we are already married to. It also comes in answer to Sean's comment on the portrait in his studio, "I'm not sure who it is just yet," which is itself similar to the Jagloms' initial approach to their own sketch of a movie. Dana's realization provides an important step in Sean's development as well, as is confirmed when she returns to him to find the picture completed, symbolizing the resolution of their own love as well as that of their parents.
The elevation of the mother from serendipitous agent of change to pure spiritual force when Sean reveals the fact of her death puts perhaps the final spin on Dana's reaction, the realization that our parents themselves are God. In a monotheistic culture that posits its deity as Love but cannot offer a model of divine union composed of equal parts man and woman, it can be hell trying to formulate a reasonable facsimile of that romantic relationship in life. (We are all children of broken hearts.) It takes a visionary act, therefore, to heal this rift - meaning, a sensitivity to the resonance of everyday experience, and a recognition that our actions create mythology, too: If the gods cannot provide this example for us, then we must provide it for them. So when Dana's plane takes flight for England, it is the ascendance as well of her father's romantic heart returning to its hearth, as if he had truly died there in that hospital bed from which he has dreamed this whole adventure, his soul finally finding its way to heaven on the wings of his daughter's love.
Jaglom concludes his movie with the couple emerging from a subway to unite in front of the Eiffel Tower and dissolve into the painting Sean had given Dana after their first meeting, indicating a resolution of the physical world into the stuff of art and romance. It is for the director a statement on how all art is created as well, through a meeting of those masculine and feminine aspects of the intellect as well as of the real and spiritual-poetic worlds, present and past, narrative and elliptical, scripted and spontaneous, personal and familial, traditional and innovative, egoic and other, audience and object, and the transcendence of each of these in the contemplation of uplifting works. He dedicates his film to an ambiguous "love of my life" - meaning, at once, his wife, muse and collaborator Victoria, but also the medium itself in which he has immersed himself and the romantic drama always at its heart. Finally, it suggests a love for life itself and the divine dimensions it encompasses, which can only be reached, for him, via meaningful exchange. The experience of déjà vu may be no more than a trick of the mind, ghosts in an empty room, but the sensation is real nevertheless and it can make lovers of us all, if, united in our desire to believe (as spectators as well as participants), we can close the seance circle and become one, as Jaglom intends us to do, and free the spirits to speak.