[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]
On quick
AmericanStudies lessons from three films about contact with the afterlife.
1)
Ghost (1990): I bet
you could stump a lot of movie buffs with the fact that the Patrick Swayze-Demi
Moore-Whoopi Goldberg romantic thriller was the highest-grossing film of 1990,
and indeed if we adjust for inflation is in the top 100 highest-grossing
American films of all time. Box office isn’t a measure of quality or
enduring importance, of course, but it does at least indicate a film that both
reflected and influenced the cultural zeitgeist. And
while that much-parodied pottery scene has lingered the most, I would argue
that it’s the casting of Goldberg that’s particularly significant—Swayze and
Moore as romantic leads was quite expected, but in many ways the film belongs
to Goldberg’s
psychic/medium character, which fundamentally shifted perceptions of the
largely comic actress and won her a Best Supporting Actress
Oscar. Of course the character could be located in the long and problematic
tradition of the “magical
negro” trope (in cinema
and otherwise), but I would argue that Goldberg brings enough depth and
dimension to the role to make her a meaningful and indeed central character in
her own right.
2)
The Sixth Sense
(1999; SPOILERS in what follows): The ghostly medium at the heart of M. Night
Shyamalan’s smash hit (itself the second-highest grossing film of its year and
I would argue even more of a zeitgeist-changer than Ghost) couldn’t be more distinct from
Goldberg’s character. Played by the preternaturally (supernaturally?) talented
young Haley Joel Osment, just eleven years old when
the film was released, Sixth’s Cole
Sear is a profoundly troubled and sad young boy who, with the help of Bruce
Willis’ equally sad and troubled child psychological Malcolm Crowe, finds a way
to make peace with his ability to see and communicate with the dead. While
Cole’s character is thus partly in conversation with the kinds of troubled
and possessed children long featured in texts like Monday’s focus The Turn of the Screw, he’s actually
revealed to be far more proactive and powerful than them, not subject to the
film’s horrors so much as a hero who can respond to and even conquer them. One
of many ways that Shyamalan’s wonderful film changed cultural narratives and
images.
3)
The Gift (2000): This
supernatural thriller might have the best pedigree of all these films: directed
by horror legend Sam Raimi, written by Billy Bob Thornton (and supposedly based
on his mother’s own
supernatural abilities), and starring an all-star cast including Cate
Blanchett, Hilary Swank, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear, and Katie Holmes (as a
murdered girl into whose death Blanchett’s psychic protagonist begins to gain
unwanted but crucial insight). Yet it thoroughly flopped (making only $12
million at the US box office, against a $10 million budget), and so has largely
disappeared from our collective cultural memory. I’m not here to rehabilitate
the film, which I saw once on home video and which left virtually no
impression. But I will say that in its Georgia swampland setting, The Gift does represent a minor but
interesting contribution to the larger genre
of Southern Gothic, and Blanchett’s tortured widow Annie Wilson is defined
at least as much through her relationships and roles within that rural Southern
community and society as by her titular abilities to see and communicate with
the dead.
Last
GhostStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?
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