Ghost – 1990
Ghost was a romantic supernatural thriller. It was the highest grossing movie of 1990. Whoopie Goldberg’s fantastic performance won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The film spawned a Japanese remake in 2010, and a 2011 Broadway musical. The pottery scene was so iconic that it has been parodied over and over again by more than 17 major television shows and movies. This was a good and very enjoyable movie, but I have to say, it really has a messed-up version of the cosmic justice system.
To explain that, here is a brief synopsis. Sam, played by Patrick Swayze, and Molly, played by Demi Moore, are a young couple who are in love. Their friend Carl, played by Tony Goldwyn, is secretly a money laundering criminal who hires Willie, a lowlife thug played by Rick Aviles, to steal Sam’s address book to help him in his fraudulent plans. Willie accidentally murders Sam who does not go into the spectral heavenly light, but instead becomes a ghost. Using his new ghost powers, Sam investigates his own murder and protects Molly from Carl and Willie. To do this, Sam gets the help of Oda Mae Brown, a psychic medium played by Whoopie Goldberg.
That’s basically it. But what this film says about the afterlife is… a little harsh. You are either good or bad. If you are good, you go to heaven. If you are bad, you go to hell. It is really a system of absolutes, using the concept of personal karma to judge a person. If you do bad things in your life, you are doomed, so you better be good so you can go to heaven. There is no ambiguity, no gray area.
I know I am oversimplifying the movie, but it is hard not to. For example, what if Oda Mae’s character had died in the movie? She was a con artist with a criminal record. She didn’t want to help Sam and Molly, but Sam badgered her until she had no choice. In the end, though, it became clear that she wanted to help Molly. So if she had died, where would her soul go? I know the film implies that she was actually a good woman, but what about all the people she had spent years swindling?
And what about Carl, who did die. If you think about it, he was just a money launderer. He never meant for Sam to get murdered. And the only time he threatened Molly’s life was after Sam and Oda Mae had really put the screws to him by stealing 4 million dollars from him, putting him in a position in which his criminal partners would hunt him down and kill him. He was desperate. His financial crime scheme had spun out of control, and so he is doomed to hell? Think about it critically. Were his crimes any worse than Oda Mae’s?
Anyway, I have to take a step back and recognize that the cosmic justice system was, by no stretch of the imagination, the focus of the movie. It was a romance, and the romance between Sam and Molly was well played. The two had a good on-screen chemistry. It was a thriller, and there was plenty of great suspense scenes, like the one in which Willie sneaks into Molly’s home, or when we see Willie trying to kill Oda Mae.
And it was most certainly supernatural. When a good person died, the pure light that showed up to carry their souls to heaven was like an idealized version of unearthly glory. But when a bad person died, shadow demons arrived to viciously attack the poor soul and drag him off, screaming, to eternal torment. It was pretty horrifying.
And while the ending of the movie was consistently sappy and romantic, it actually made very little sense. So Willie and Carl die, Molly and Oda Mae are safe. But then, as the heavenly light comes for Sam again, Molly and Oda Mae are able to see Sam’s ghost. He says a last tearful goodbye to Molly and the two women see him walk off into heaven. On the screen, we can see a line of luminous people who are waiting for Sam to join them. Molly and Oda Mae are now first person eye witnesses into the afterlife. And knowing that Sam is waiting for her in heaven, how could Molly ever fall in love with another man? It would have made more sense to me if only Oda Mae had seen into the afterlife. After all, it was already established that she had the supernatural power to communicate with the dead. Molly did not. But I think it was implied that because Sam was such a good guy, heaven was giving him and Molly a special gift.