Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films. - Review - book review

Style, Summer, 2000 by Matthew P. Brown

Katherine A. Fowkes. Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. 202 pp. $24.95 paper.

One section of Todd Haynes's brilliant film triptych Poison concerns an angel-child whose patricide becomes the stuff of banal TV documentary. Switching between talking-head images of adults and perspectival shots of the boy witnessing the primal scene, the story evokes a bewildering mix of chilly parody and deep pathos. The child, whom we never see, has saved his mother from abuse, after both mother and son have suffered. Listening to the mother's interview footage, viewers sense that the boy visits this world with a mission--and then leaves it, in an extraordinary final image, a point-of-view shot that dollies back and through a window, all the while looking at the mother in the window as the camera ascends through the sky.

Haynes treats with avant-garde melancholy what Katherine Fowkes finds, in a lighter vein, to be the subtext of an entire genre of recent Hollywood escapist film: the ghost comedy. The genre includes over twenty films since 1978, everything from the profound (Truly, Madly, Deeply) to the execrable (Hearts and Souls), with 1990's Ghost the genre's centerpiece. Ghost comedies feature central characters who have returned from the dead and whose return is motivated generally by the moral functions of the narrative (righting wrongs or doing good deeds). Intangibility often enables the ghost, angel, or spirit, freeing the figure to move through or fly above the world's materiality and to inhabit other bodies. Yet the ghost's moral and transformational imperatives are critically undermined by the thwarted agency of the figure. Ghosts enter the world of the living, but do not fully effect change; the films foreground their impotence within the narrative. And, crucially, these ghosts are men. The ghost films tend towa rd romantic scenarios and comedic resolutions, which distinguish them from the feeling of tenor in the horror film and from the pathos of loss in the melodrama.

In a sophisticated blend of theory and criticism, Fowkes detects in the genre a deeper psychic structure that Haynes's Poison makes manifest. The absent presence of a spirit, the experience of suffering, the flow of primal fantasy, the struggles with gendered identity, the centrality of the mother to the telling of the boy's story--all figure in Fowkes's account of the genre's psychoanalytic dimensions. Unlike Haynes's figure, comedy ghosts return from the dead as adults and are defined by inaction. Yet like the experience of the angel-child, the adults act within fantasy scenarios that revisit childhood subject-formation, fantasies that also explain the pleasures and pains of film spectatorship. At the heart of Fowkes's analysis is a masochistic aesthetic: this aesthetic "sheds light on the returning ghost, which appears to be a character or a device that delays the (improper) ending of the narrative and reinstitutes a kind of gap where transformation and gender play can unfold" (33).

Chapter 1 calls on theories of narrative, sadism, and fantasy in order to explain the ghost device in the comedies and to rethink psychoanalytic film criticism's conception of mainstream cinema. A male-centered narrative of ambition, with a goal-oriented protagonist achieving fulfillment, is replaced, in the ghost comedy, by a male "hero" who ineffectually observes action and who often switches gender identities. The passive, feminized male ghost also complicates Laura Mulvey's famous dictum about Hollywood cinema: instead of sadism demanding a story--with pleasure managed through masculinist action and the male gaze--Fowkes's narratives represent the male ghost as subject to gender flux, and as either agent of an ineffectual gaze or object of the viewer/character gaze. Through a discussion of fantasy, Fowkes analyzes the relationship of the ghost comedy to mainstream genres such as horror and melodrama. While sharing horror's character type and melodrama's mourning affect, the ghost comedy features narrativ e dynamics that also clearly differentiate it. Rather than the epistemological uncertainties of horror's fantastic ghost, most ghost comedies conform to the narrative logic of Todorovian "fantasy": the general acceptance by viewers and characters of the ghost's reality. And rather than the "melodramatic too-late"--an irreversible narrative temporality the structures the loss felt over the death of a central character--ghost comedies stress the reversibility of time, the ability of the dead to return to the world and "redirect the narrative trajectory" (29).

Ghost comedies thus propose a different mode of pleasure for Hollywood moviegoing, a masochistic aesthetic central to this mainstream genre and to the author's revisionism. In chapter 2, Fowkes builds on Gaylyn Studlar's notion that masochism provides the experiential pleasures in avant-garde film narrative, a theory that complements the sadism Mulvey finds in Hollywood storytelling. Yoking Studlar's theory to Mulvey's subject matter, Fowkes invigorates the study of the ghost-comedy genre. In the genre, masochism contracts a story, as it were. Viewers and characters undergo movements of delay and repetition, movements that define pleasure in terms of an agreed-upon frustration, movements that generate narrative, yet ones that avoid normative catharsis and fulfillment. Insofar as masochistic pleasure calls on internally driven fantasies of the pre-Oedipal union with and threat of the Mother (rather than on an externally dependent victimization by sadists), such pleasure is determined by the masochist's abilit y to set the terms of the pain. Ghost figures mirror this theory of the masochistic contract, as Fowkes demonstrates that "male ghosts return from death for the purpose of causing their lovers to reject them" and that, more essentially, the narratives require "the ghost [to return] only under certain conditions" (36). Furthermore, the films often center on the male ghost's dilemma, his inability to communicate his message, another emblem of the masochistic contract whereby an alliance is formed but ineffectually advanced. The masochistic operates at the level of film spectatorship as well, with Fowkes insightfully critiquing voyeuristic theories of detachment and control: indeed, spectators "watch from a distance and cannot control events. Film viewers are more like ineffectual ghosts than invisible sadists [...]" (48). The author gestures as well to return viewings by actual spectators as a pattern of repetition, an audience haunting of the ghost comedies as expressions of the masochistic desire for delay an d frustration (rather than the Sadean desire for an ending).