‘Every love story is a ghost story’ : The Spectral Network of Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015)

While it has been described as ‘a paean to a canine friend’ and ‘a meditation on love and loss’, Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2016) can also be understood as a network of ghost stories. Drawing on Anderson’s idiosyncratic multimedia technique (foregrounding technology) and conceptualizing of the future, this chapter explores the ways in which the figures of 9/11, Lou Reed, David Foster Wallace, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Bardo course through Heart of a Dog. Exploring the implications of the juxtaposition of these themes and Anderson’s oeuvre, Williams positions the film in relation to a confluence of network theory and hauntology as a particular rendering of 21st-century subjectivity.