A house, like a burial, starts with a hole. You dig until there’s room enough for the body that the earth will hold. And then you fill it up, variably with the living and the dead.
The first onscreen death to occur in Here—Robert Zemeckis’s film adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel by the same name—happens less than three minutes into the runtime. Roughly 65 million years before the present day, a dinosaur pushes against the egg that encases it. Just when the egg’s surface cracks and the dark shape of a body is half-visible under it, a Tyrannosaurus’ foot clamps down from out of frame, ending the hatchling’s life at the three second mark. There’s not much time to mourn, as seconds later, the prehistoric jungle glows red and then combusts into open flames. A meteor crashes down from the offscreen space, throttling the frame into a momentary apocalypse.
In effect, it’s the perfect moment to introduce the film’s confusing spiritual calculus: against the grand stakes of extinction and eternity, individual lives are simultaneously precious and inconsequential. It is the exact negative of McGuire’s book, a cultural object that forgoes arguing about the relative worth of our existence at all. Here the comic creates a structure capable of representing the passage of time itself, a force necessarily exempt from spiritual, ethical, or human judgments. From a controlled experimental structure, McGuire hangs the eternal. Commuting that structural gambit to a narrative fiction film full of digital alchemy and bafflingly inhuman moments, Zemeckis creates something like a coffin vibrating through its wood, a time capsule full of unliving stuff.
Here, it should be said, makes good sense as a source text for Zemeckis, who has essentially been involved in pranking language with technology and vice versa for the last 20 years. Even with its ease at illustrating essence, McGuire’s comic fundamentally depends upon responding to an experimental control. A single ocular perspective is recreated nonlinearly across a multiplicity of moments in a timeline that spans millions of years. The bulk of events take place across the 1900s and 2000s. The perspective is principally the corner of a living room. To this frame, McGuire adds additional rectangles—frames in frames, as it were—that window into other moments in time in the same physical space. So: in 1573, “here” is snow-encrusted wilderness, with a small frame in 1989 showing four adults sharing a couch and a smaller frame in 1763 showing a man hacking an axe at a tree. “All comics and graphic novels turn space into time,” Stephanie Burt writes in her review of McGuire’s book. Here goes one step further, showing a reader how, via art or faith, a space holds multiple times simultaneously.
There is no filmmaker working today whose instincts fuse more directly at the intersection of mad science and medically-induced emotionality quite like Bob Zemeckis. To admire his filmmaking—to admire Here (2024)—is to be a student in the bowl of an Operation Theatre, squinting down at an older surgeon holding two hearts aloft. “Here is the one we have just removed from the patient,” he says, “and here is the one I have created. And here is how we make it pump!”
What does Robert Zemeckis look like? A man from Chicago wearing glasses. What does he look like as a single perspective scrutinized across time?
It is 1978 and a fist bangs on a door bearing the words “STEVEN SPIELBERG,” hustles a Student Oscar into the vaunted director’s hands. It is 1980 and posters for I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars portal across frame, “Produced By Steven Spielberg” credits stamped across their bottom portions—additional rectangles betray their meager box office returns. It is 1952 and a baby is born screaming on the South Side and it is 1960 and a little boy sits too close to the TV glow and it is 2004 and a Hollywood hitmaker is quoted in Blockbuster saying, “We weren’t interested in the French New Wave. We were interested in Clint Eastwood and James Bond and Walt Disney, because that’s how we grew up.” It is 1982 and he is less gray-haired, milling about a video rental store parking lot and writing screenplays everyone seems to think are “pretty good” and that no one wants to make into movies. It is 2003 and he is explaining the specifics of motion capture animation to a bewildered crew of actors and the specifics of motion capture animation do not exist yet. It is 1982 and Michael Douglas makes a phone call to offer the director’s chair to this unemployable maverick saddled with the worst curse a baseball prospect can have, which is to say, “promise.” And it is 1985, 1989, 1990, 1997, 1999, and 2000 all at once, and greedy audience hands pass dollar bills across box office countertops for tickets to three Back to the Futures, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Contact, Cast Away. It is 1995 and he is holding a (regular, not student) Oscar, saying “I would like to thank motion picture audiences all around the world. In historic numbers you have embraced a film that at its heart offers a human, life-affirming, hopeful story,” and it is 2024 and he has directed Here, a largely-unembraced film that offers a human, life-affirming, hopeful story to the tune of The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the end of time.
The Caretaker’s six-stage ambient music project subjects the material reality to formal experimentation. “Stages have all been artistic reflections of specific symptoms which can be common with the progression and advancement of the different forms of Alzheimer’s,” he wrote of the work. Everywhere at the end of time necessarily maintains formal control over its thesis question: how might you represent dementia in sound? Though obviously horrified (in part by itself), it is a fundamentally sentimental cultural object, one that forsakes the irony of un-attachment to engage openly with human sadness, grief, and nostalgia.
For all his formal inclinations towards sap and goo, Zemeckis maintains a confidence—in interview and image—that makes it difficult to decipher when the line between the sent-up and the heartfelt is violated. “When I read Richard McGuire’s graphic novel for the first time, I was immediately impressed by it and saw what was very close to the movie I made. I could see clearly how this could translate,” Zemeckis told Simon Thompson. The poetry of translation means that a text is transformed by its intermediary. For Zemeckis, an American born in 1952 and for whom cinema is a technology—which is to say, a practical strategy for addressing the business of being alive—this means finding the spine of boomerism in Here and building a digital skeleton off of it. While there is a recognizable set of characters in McGuire’s book, even the artist’s style renders faces half-recognizable and blurry; this is not a story about recognizing the faces. Zemeckis’s film, in turn, levies the bulk of its narrative sympathy at two generations of Americans: the one starting a nuclear family just post-WWII and, especially (and autobiographically) the fruits of their baby boom. Cast in these roles are movie stars, whose faces are melted, molded, and de-aged via a generative AI tool from the VFX studio Metaphysic until Tom Hanks and Robin Wright look like Tom Hanks and Robin Wright circa 1994, circa Forrest Gump. What does a future look like if it can reproduce a past?
McGuire uses the familiarity of an unchanging physical perspective to speculate on possible futures. In 2213, sci-fi-suited humans learn about their past (our present) from guided hologram tours. In 2313, humans wear hazmat suits amid sick-lime green nuclear fallout. And in 22,175, an alien ecology full of unhomely creatures stares right back at the reader. This last example is an essential gracenote, one that touches Malick: time isn’t a unidirectional thing that moves from prehistoric pasts to human-dominated modernities—it exists outside of the human paradigm. The farthest along in history Zemeckis’s film can imagine is the early 2020’s, of which their central irony is, from a baby boomer’s perspective, that COVID is the unfair friction interrupting the epoch of owed retirement after a lifetime of dreaming the American Dream.
Another difference of form: for McGuire, the prospect of an open book abandons the mandate of tempo and linearity. A reader can linger, and a reader can flip in both directions. Because Zemeckis works in narrative films, such autonomy is ceded to him. Outside of certain expanded exceptions—gallery work, slide shows, and, of course, portions of the internet—even the experimental moving image possesses narrative terminality. Zemeckis’s Here always moves towards its end. It is sentiment breathed plasticine, inscrutable and unsatisfying. It occurs to me that this is a far more honest mode for American studio filmmaking in 2024 to take, all false promises of art abandoned for something slighter, weirder, more gremlin.
An obvious companion is The Irishman (2019), a film in which Scorsese speculates that a certain utterance of the American Dream means simply having the liberty to buy your own coffin. The Irishman also re-materializes firmament stars via digital de-aging, twisting (then) near-octogenarians De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci into youths like fresh fungi. But where Scorsese lobs this haunted cudgel at the various systems rotting the country—busted unions, vampire corporations, pools of capital—Zemeckis’s film presents time loosed from history. It waves at American colonialism, including a love-struck Indigenous couple (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) from McGuire’s book; that their character’s credited names in Here (2024) are ‘Indigenous Man’ and ‘Indigenous Woman’ indicates the lengths to which they figure in the narrative. And Devon (Nicholas Andre Pinnock) and Helen Harris (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a Black couple in the 21st century, must explain to their teenage son how to act when pulled over by the police. It’s not that these moments don’t matter in the film, but that they matter most as proxies by which Here makes sense of the white boomer would-be artist, Richard Young (Hanks), who has his own love and child. It’s neoliberal multiculturalism instead of historical consciousness (let alone materialism). Scorsese’s film moves like elegy for a kind of life. With it comes all the advantages and limitations of the grand statement, the summation, the eulogy. With its eruptions of dead-eyed fatalism costumed in weepiness, Zemeckis’s film plays like literal memento mori.
The reality Zemeckis is most interested in warping is human flesh—aren’t the stakes of Back to the Future essentially that the body could fade into the film frame at any time? That the most tragic thing is having so minute an impact that you don’t exist at all? His focus on individual bodies means that his films often focus on the ways in which cultural myths impact individual actors rather than larger structures, a Gump-ian theory of history-telling. In Here, he fungalizes the Forrest avatar altogether, introducing the teeth of time to those myths most precious to boomer consciousness: exceptional individualism, the nuclear family, a sense of steadily escalating posterity. In Zemeckis’s Here, boomerism reveals itself as the most outdated technology of all, not by virtue of an elegant thesis and well-collated evidence, but simply because it executes the exact same experiment over and over again.
McGuire’s Here attempts to express time and space devoid of human consciousness. The Zemeckis version imagines the consciousness of time and space afflicted by that most age-appropriate generational malady: memory loss. I don’t suggest this diagnosis to be an exploitative metaphoric lens, just a matter of the text. It’s implied insistently, though never outright stated that Margaret (Wright)—one half of Here’s central til-death-do-us-part couple—suffers from some form of dementia. The film ends by filling the folding chairs that Richard, now an old man, sets up near its opening. He brings Margaret into the room, even as we know that they’ve separated and divorced because of how trapped she’s felt by this haunted house, even as we know Richard has finally sold it. “This was our home,” he tells her. “We lived here. You lived here.”
Zemeckis hedges his entire film adaptation on this final line. It is moving, unsurprising, and not unwelcome—what other filmmaker releasing American studio films in the 21st Century is this garishly fixated on alchemizing an emotional reaction from the ether? It’s easy to overlook the Hanks performance here, too, to read it simply as Hanks the actor invoking a cloud of Hanks tools, his charm and warmth, his preternatural ability to genuinely communicate across layers of artifice. But Richard Young, the character Here can’t help but fixate around, is the opposite of Tom Hanks. A thwarted artist who opts to settle for a stunted career selling insurance, he holds everyone in his life accountable for what he perceives as the sacrifice he made for them, for Margaret, for his kids, for his parents. He is a frankly unremarkable artist, resentful and unable to communicate the totalizing fear that weds him—where else?—here, in the ancestral house that becomes his tomb. It’s a carefully tuned and tense performance, descended from the one being given by Paul Bettany as Richard’s father, Al. Bettany is broad, uncalibrated, a panoply of acting styles occupying the same moment. In turn, he embodies the late-era Zemeckis tradition of melodrama captured but unallowed to echo. In other films, this near-total disregard for actual and actually fleshy humanity feels misanthropic. Here, in Here, it’s text.
Here’s screenplay, penned by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is full of wooden, inhuman-sounding moments. It frequently asks Hanks and Bettany and Wright and Kelly Reilly to simply lash out at the words, delivering wonky exposition-laden moments that don’t register in any way as moving or realistic. There’s an elegance to the rubber words here—people act unnaturally all the time, especially when they’re terrified that their life is slipping through their wrinkling fingers. Hanks’ performance, his very visage, is haunted by the character he isn’t playing. To witness him attempt an inch of Mr. Rogers at the film’s end (“Do you…remember my mom and my dad? Rose…and Al?”) doesn’t feel like catharsis at all, just a silent scream punctuating empty language.
With Richard feeding her memories like film through a projector, Margaret finally remembers the blue ribbon that their daughter Vanessa lost all those years ago, the way she found it, the feeling of relief such a finding promises. The camera zooms in as Wright delivers her attestation, slowly breaking the singular rule the experimenter designed. It’s unclear to this viewer whether the camera moves because Margaret remembers or if Margaret remembers because the camera moves. The former is a human reaction, pushing in on joy breaking through. It speaks to the way the mechanical camera eye is encoded with our own limited jelly ones; we want to see and re-see until we get something like understanding, something like connection. The latter is something colder, more clinical. It suggests that memory loss, either metaphorical or biological, exists merely as a byproduct of the artist’s will and the spectator’s response. It means that the pain of living is fodder for stories that don’t necessarily care whether we live, die, or remember.
In truth, I suspect Zemeckis moves the camera at this moment because of an instinct attuned equally to classical Hollywood form and the rigidly radical streak he’s tended since the start. It makes the spectator move towards Wright gradually, which imbues her speech with greater emotional resonance and makes us more apt to feel her acted emotions in our bodies. In a film that never forces us to lean in unless we want to, this movement manipulates us more fully. It’s sung like a happy ending—with Alan Silvestri’s score soaring like a CG bird as the camera wheels around Margaret and Richard—but implies a premature burial: at the very moment Margaret finally clicks back into her consciousness, it’s more impossible than ever for her to leave. The camera abandons her right where it found her, all of her moments happening forever, but never not here.
Certain reductionists have painted Zemeckis’s film as an echo-rendition of Disney’s Carousel of Progress. First realized by Walt himself at the 1964 World’s Fair as a tidy bit of fortuitous General Electric product placement, the Carousel is an audio-animatronic stage show that rotates audiences—carousel-style—around four proscenium stages. As the time changes and the place (sort of) remains the same, an audience watches, as per the show’s opening narration, “the American family go through the 20th century, experiencing all new wonders as they came.” Asked about the Carousel as a potential precedent for his Here, Zemeckis offered a thoughtful parry: “The thing that you can’t do in Carousel of Progress, and the thing you can’t do in any theatrical proscenium, is have actors walk into a close-up. That’s only something you can do in cinema.”
On its face, this comment is Zemeckis in toto, obvious and clinically cutting—but it belies what makes his adaptation of Here a genuinely haunted curiosity, the most turbulent and troubling cultural object to emerge in the American mainstream in years. Asked how a virulently reactionary theme park conception of American history compares to his film, Zemeckis makes an observation about the possibilities exploding from limitations of the film frame. Invited to expound on America, he says something and nothing about the still-undisclosed techno-essence of a camera witnessing a human face. Asked about the illusory line bad actors call “progress,” he makes an observation about blocking. It was never meant to suggest some truth about the eternal. It’s just an experiment in time and space for a bit. And then it ends.