The Projector #81: Some Thoughts on Watching GHOST Thirty Years After Everyone Else Watched It (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

Hey, have you guys seen Ghost? Somehow, I never had until last week, and I’m not sure why. I’ve made it a point to see most cultural touchstone movies released in my lifetime whether they looked appealing or not, but I’d somehow missed this one, even though it came out at a time when my high school friend group saw virtually every movie that came out, either in theaters or later, since we mostly rented movies and watched around each others’ houses for much of our leisure time. (We were, as you might guess, the cool kids. If you ever want to talk to someone who saw She’s Out of Control on opening night, I’m your man.) But not Ghost. Looking at its release date, I can kind of piece together why. It came out in the summer of 1990 but didn’t make it to home video until March of the following year, my senior year in high school. By that point our group had started to fracture a bit, thanks to our imminent departure for college (and probably some other drama). So Ghost just kind of sat there unwatched.

I recently pitched a piece that would require me to think about who won and who was nominated for Oscars at the beginning of each decade, from 1990 through the present. Looking at the list of nominees, there aren’t many I hadn’t seen apart from Ghost, for which Whoopi Goldberg took home Best Supporting Actress prize. So I watched it. A few thoughts.

Mostly, I’m glad I didn’t watch this at 17, when it probably would have struck me as unbearably corny. It is corny, but bearably corny. I think my corn tolerance has increased over the years. I won’t make any claims to Ghost being a great movie, but it’s an effective one, and it worked on me as fortysomething man with a family and a stronger idea of my own mortality than it would have as a teenager with nothing to lose and a vague notion that I’d live forever.

The sense of loss at the center of the movie is compounded now by the death of Patrick Swayze, even if he's not the strongest element of the film. I like Swayze, but the film asks for an emotional range he can’t quite span. But he had real presence and a dancer’s command of physicality. (Witness the scene where he effortlessly swings out the window to aid the delivery of a wooden sculpture to the ridiculously spacious apartment his character shares with Demi Moore’s.) And who knows how he might have developed as an actor with age? He’s memorable in Donnie Darko and his last project, the TV series The Beast, suggested he might have a more suitable home in the prestige TV era after a decade of mostly low-profile movie roles.

The Brat Pack needed a reason for people to keep thinking of them as the ’80s turned into the ’90s. Few of them got a role like Moore’s in this movie, a real movie star part that asks her to be vulnerable and tragically beautiful. She nails it. I think Moore has limitations, too, but this is exactly in her zone and clearly the movie that kept her viable for the decade that followed in a way that the movies leading up to it — The Seventh Sign, We’re No Angels — never could. (It doesn't hurt that both she and Swayze both look beautiful and can cry convincingly as lush music swells behind them.)

Jerry Zucker knew this was his one chance to climb out of the comedy niche he’d gotten into thanks to his work with the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker team, and he really goes for it. It’s an impressive feat of direction, especially in the early scenes, but it also never makes you forget  it’s an impressive feat of direction. Zucker also smartly brought in great collaborators. DP Adam Greenberg gives it the same hazy, dreamy look he’d soon bring to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. (When I think of what George H.W. Bush-era films looks like, they tend to look like this.) And Walter Murch edited it. ‘Nuff said. Zucker borrowed heavily, including for a final shot that’s essentially the final shot from E.T. But, hey, Spielberg borrowed heavily too. Ghost was such a huge hit that, in retrospect, it now looks odd that Zucker didn’t get more chances. First Knight was a flop in 1995 (it’s also bad). Then it was back to comedy for Rat Race and then…??? At least he’s not making right-wing ads like his brother .

Goldberg’s pretty terrific in ways that aren’t necessarily in the script. When she accepted the Oscar she talked about how she loved acting and wanted to keep on acting. But the movie business didn’t always love her back. Goldberg studied under Uta Hagen and vaulted to stardom via a one-woman show in which she played an array of characters (which was later turned into an HBO special). Apart from an ensemble role in a 1982 indie film, she made her film debut with The Color Purple, a demanding part that won her a Best Actress nomination. But she found her most gainful employment offering variations on a wisecracking persona that played like an extension of the Goldberg who would show up for talk show appearances (and later as a talk show host). It worked until it didn't. By 1995 she was starring opposite an anthropomorphic dinosaur in Theodore Rex.

I’m on record defending special effects that don’t live up to contemporary expectation of special effects but this one, um, pushes my faith to its limit. There are some pretty janky otherworldly spirits in this movie and the shots of Swayze not being able to interact with the material world look a little off. (The primitive CGI of the moment where he walks through a human body and sees what’s inside is especially bracing.) Nonetheless, my belief holds: You don’t watch a film from 1990 expecting to see fashions or hear songs from 2021. Why should effects be any different?

I miss Vincent Schiavelli. Is there a modern equivalent of Schiavelli? They had faces then. (Weird, expressive faces.)

Did Tony Goldwyn ever play a good guy again after this? I’m not going to look it up. I’m just going to assume I’m right and he didn’t. (Okay, I looked it up and was reminded he was the voice of Tarzan. But in a broader sense I think I’m right.)

That, I believe, wraps up my thoughts on Ghost. No wait. There’s one more: If you have similar blank spots, I recommend trying to fill them no matter how much time has passed. The years can make the experience stranger and more compelling. 

My apologies for going two weeks without writing one of these. I was on vacation and I believe my co-hosts were so eager to write one of these newsletters that they couldn’t stop arguing over who would fill in for me and thus nothing got written. We did, however, keep churning out episodes, including our latest pairing of revenge movies: The Limey and (coming next week) Nobody. (And, as predicted, though the latter debuted in theaters it’s now available to rent through the usual services).

No reading links this week, but we’ll make sure the next newsletter is supersized with pieces to read.