Abstract
The subject of this essay was the sleeper success of the 1990 film season, the year’s number-one box-office draw in the United States, and a similar hit in Britain, winning Oscars for its screenwriter and supporting actress, and bringing its theme song, the Righteous Brothers’ 1965 ‘Unchained Melody’ back into the charts. Like its supernatural successor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with its slogan ‘Love Never Dies’, this film was marketed as a ‘date movie’ — a ‘date movie’, we should note, in which the hero is posthumously penetrated, the heroine exhibits an enormous phallus, and the two of them engage in a climactic act of inter-racial troilism with Whoopi Goldberg. Furthermore, this is a film whose theme of untimely death was sometimes read as an AIDS allegory, and one which subsequently attracted the attention of lesbian critics for what Terry Castle has described as its ‘peculiarly homoerotic effect’.1 I am, of course, referring to the yuppie elegy, Ghost (written by Bruce Joel Rubin, directed by Jerry Zucker).
Man has often made man himself, under the form of slaves, serve as the primitive material of money.
Karl Marx, Capital
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 241, fn.6: ‘When Sam indeed begins “speaking through” Oda Mae, professing his love, the effect is peculiarly homoerotic: as if Oda Mae were speaking for herself instead of the ghost. The fiction of ghostly return, in other words, somehow licenses an uncanny “bodying forth” — onscreen — of female-female eroticism.’
Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 149–50.
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 138–9: ‘Through slavery and imperialism, black people have been the social group most clearly identified by and exploited for their bodily labour. Blacks thus became the most vivid reminders of the human body as labour in a society busily denying it.’
See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 9. But ‘Whoopi’, as her profiles often note, also suggests the joke cushion and its simulated flatulence, an emission which is racialized in Ghost when ‘Rita Miller’ tries to cover a fluffed line in the bank scene by explaining that she’s got ‘gas’.
Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 131–3.
Joseba Gabilondo, Cinematic Hyperspace: New Hollywood Cinema and Science Fiction Film — Image Commodification in Late Capitalism, PhD Dissertation in Comparative Literature, University of California, San Diego, 1991, p. 204.
Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
Geoffrey O’Brien, The Phantom Empire (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993).
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 10: ‘Let us call it a hauntology. This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being…. It would harbor within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves.’
Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (London: British Film Institute, 1994), p. 18, argues that ‘filmmakers started offering their customers short interludes, often titled A Kiss in the Tunnel, to splice into the over-familiar phantom rides’.
See also Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 39, for a commentary on this film.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Library, 1904), p. 168.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Meaning of the Phallus’, in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 74–85, p. 82.
Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Numismatics’, Symbolic Economies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 9–63, p. 24.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1974), p. 77.
See Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 495–7.
Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 229.
See Kaja Silverman, Masculinity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ghostwriting’, Diacritics 25:2 (Summer 1995) 65–84, p. 78, fn.25, denounces Freudo-Marxian ‘psychoanalytic radical chic’ analogies, singling out the simile ‘money is like the phallus’. In reply, I submit this Ghost.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Merck, M. (1999). The Medium of Exchange. In: Buse, P., Stott, A. (eds) Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-71144-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37481-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)