Has our once-fearless writer Joe Queenan finally watched one too many-ghost stories, or is he really being haunted by the freakish ghouls from What Lies Beneath, Stir of Echoes, The Sixth Sense, Sleepy Hollow and The Haunting. We're not sure, but we know he won't be taking any more pot shots at Patrick Swayze.
______________________________________
Not long ago, an English magazine asked me to write a story about the spare of ghost movies that have appeared in the past year and a half. I did not actually write the story, because the money was insulting, but I did spend roughly 15 minutes thinking about the subject. In the end, I realized that What Lies Beneath, The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, Sleepy Hollow, The Haunting and a number of lesser films all had one thing in common: each dealt with the exploits of recalcitrant dead people who could not possibly go to their eternal resting place until they had tied up all the loose ends here on planet Earth.
Whether it was the drowned coed prompting Michelle Pfeiffer to avenge her murder in What Lies Beneath, or the Headless Horseman hoping to be reunited with his severed noggin in Sleepy Hollow, or the dead girl with proof of who poisoned her in The Sixth Sense, or the dead children in The Haunting struggling to get Liam Neeson to stop looking at Catherine Zeta-Jones's butt long enough to avenge them, or the raped, suffocated teen in Kevin Bacon's house seeking to bring her killers to justice in Stir of Echoes, all these movies were animated by the same thesis--redemption was only possible through retribution. The circle had to be closed.
In each of these cases, the filmmaker sought to depict a world where life was invested with some larger meaning and death was not random, demeaning, pointless, or, for that matter, final. It struck me as odd that anyone living and working in Los Angeles could possibly subscribe to such an Anne of Green Gablesian philosophy, particularly after the untimely, capricious, undignified demises of River Phoenix, Nicole Brown Simpson and Sonny Bono--not to mention the Holocaust, the rape of Bosnia and the recent mass murders in Rwanda--but I wrote nothing about it at the time because, as I have already indicated, the money was just not there.
Moreover, I did not find the subject especially interesting. Ultimately, it seemed to me that the psychocultural underpinnings of these movies were all exactly the same: Baby Boomers, now turning 50 in droves, simply could not accept the fact that death was, for most people, a meaningless event. So, to make themselves feel better about the Grim Reaper's impending arrival. Boomers were demanding movies describing a world where nobody went to his final resting place until all the scores were settled. In short, a world where nobody just up and died the way they did in the old days, because that would be such a... bummer.
The preceding should make clear that while I do believe in Catherine Zeta-Jones I do not believe in ghosts. I do not believe in ghosts because I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and although Catholics believe in angels, archangels, demons, succubi, witches, wraiths, sorcerers and all manner of wolves in sheep's clothing, we do not believe in ghosts. Ghosts are a bone we threw to the Protestants. But late one night, while I was sitting in the family room watching ESPN, the door inexplicably burst open, the lights shut off and the room turned extremely cold. Pulling myself up to shut the door, I happened to catch a fleeting glimpse of a vaguely human figure in the mirror. At first I thought it must be my daughter, but my daughter does not have blue skin and revolting, Medusa-like hair. Besides, she was sleeping at a friend's. When the gruesome specter did not reap-pear, I decided it was probably an optical illusion brought on by watching too many reruns of "Behind the Musk," so I went to bed.
The next day, I woke up to find the bathtub filled to overflowing. No sooner had I turned off the faucet than I heard the sound of the glass from a treasured family photograph smashing to pieces in the bedroom. Then the computer in the den suddenly started switching on and off again and lights all over the house began flickering. These bizarre events, coupled with the unsettling spectral appearance of the previous evening, were, of course, remarkably like the weird experiences Michelle Pfeiffer had undergone in What Lies Beneath.
I reacted by doing something Michelle Pfeiffer does not do in What Lies Beneath--I began to spend huge amounts of time out of the house. As long as I was not actually in the house itself, I did not see the macabre apparition. But eventually I had to go back to mop up all the water that had spilled out of the bathtub. And then I began to see the hideous creature again for a fraction of a second at a time. Sadly, I never really got a very good look at it, but from time to time, I could hear the creature whisper something barely audible, and what it seemed to be whispering was the word "ghost."
Because I do not believe in ghosts, I was reluctant to accept the possibility that my nocturnal visitor could actually be a spirit from beyond the grave. I preferred to think that she was a figment of my imagination, possibly induced by experiences going way back in the '60s which we do not need to go into here. Finally, when it all became too much to bear, I broached the subject to a friend, who listened patiently, and then offered this analysis: For whatever reason, Michelle Pfeiffer's riveting performance in What Lies Beneath had made such a huge impression on me that it had literally seized control of my personality, and I had now developed a deep desire to become Pfeiffer's doppelganger, her secret sharer, her psychic cousin, perhaps even her alter ego.
I politely told my friend that he was an imbecile. Although I had always admired Michelle Pfeiffer's work, if my personality were ever going to be seized by a movie character, it would be Val Kilmer in Tombstone or Martin Short in Three Amigos!
That night, at three o'clock in the morning, I found myself standing at my front door in my pajamas, summoned from my slumber by the dark forces of the Unseen World. Like Pfeiffer, I was all set to dive into the lake not far from my house and start looking for clues to how that blue-skinned girl became a rotting corpse. Suddenly, the lights went out, the room turned impossibly cold and the specter of an extremely dead young woman appeared before my very eyes. This time, I could see her features quite clearly.
She looked exactly like the dead babe in What Lies Beneath.
"Ghost," she croaked.
"Yeah, I know you're a ghost," I replied bravely. "And I know you were murdered, and you want me to sic the police on the guy who did it. But I've got to explain something to you, honey--that was only a movie."
The hideous young woman shook her head then slowly vanished into the ether. But as she disappeared into the void, I distinctly heard her make one final remark: "Ghost."
I stopped using the computer, stopped taking baths and stopped going anywhere near the lakes in my neighborhood. It worked for a while. A few days later, though, I missed my stop in Tarrytown, New York and had to get off at the next station: picturesque Sleepy Hollow. As it was a very pleasant evening, I decided to walk home. Between the station, perched on the banks of the Hudson, and my house, perched on a hill above the Hudson (a location I could never have afforded if I relied on English magazines for a living), is the bridge on which the Headless Horseman is said to have terrified the hapless Ichabod Crane. Now, four years ago this village was still known as North Tarrytown. Then, in a craven attempt to boost real estate prices, the more affluent members of the community banded together and held a plebiscite seeking to change the village's name to the twee, lamentable Sleepy Hollow, in honor of 19th century author Washington Irving, who had conferred that name on this very village in his famous legend. The referendum was an overwhelming success, not unlike Hitler's mid-1950s rearmament referendum. Ever since the name change, I had gone out of my way to ridicule the people of Sleepy Hollow whenever the opportunity presented itself. Hence, I was not terribly popular with them.
These thoughts were much with me as I crossed the bridge that night, chuckling once again at the fathomless hokiness of the upwardly vulgar. Suddenly, a figure reared up in front of me. It appeared to be a horse carrying a headless man.
"Ghost!" hissed the thing, which sounded vaguely like Christopher Walken. Seeing that there was no point in trying to outrun a mounted demon, I attempted to make small talk.
"If this has anything to do with finding your missing head..."
"Ghost!" cackled the apparition.
"Or if you're upset about all those wisecracks I've been making about the town's new name..."
Again, the creature cackled "Ghost." Then be was gone.
From that point on, things went downhill. I couldn't go near the upstairs bathtub without having the dead girl appear at my side. Then I began experiencing an insatiable thirst for orange juice, combined with an urge to dig holes in my basement, just like Kevin Bacon in Stir of Echoes. Meanwhile, it was impossible to sleep at night because of the bloodcurdling keening of tiny children that always seemed to be emanating from the walls between my room and my daughter's. The voices sounded exactly like those that torment Lili Taylor throughout The Haunting, the voices of butchered children who cannot go to their eternal resting place until their killer is destroyed.
A rational man, I tried to come up with a plausible explanation for all these disturbing phenomena. The appearance of the Headless Horseman might have been a hallucination triggered by guilt about incessantly ridiculing my neighbors in Sleepy Hollow, The sudden door openings could be the result of shoddy hinge work by the builders. My unprecedented appetite for orange juice could be the result of a latent vitamin deficiency. And the whiny little voices coming through the walls could have been the Backstreet Boys.
Still, the constant apparitions were starting to take their toll on me. It was hard to work, hard to think. Seeking a respite, I decided to take a short trip to Philadelphia to visit my mother. I was standing on the platform at New York's Penn Station when I suddenly remembered that The Sixth Sense is set in Philadelphia. When I'd first seen the film, I'd been confused by Bruce Willis's reaction when the little boy told him that he kept seeing dead people; it seemed to me that it was Willis's duty to tell the kid that those "dead" people were not in fact ghosts, but Philadelphians. Now I suspected that if I went to Philadelphia, all those ghosts would be there to haunt me as well, so I decided to gun it out at home.
The next morning, the weirdness invaded my office. When I entered my work space, it was apparent that things had been moved around during the night. Lights had been switched on, furniture rearranged. Books were not where they were supposed to be. Some dark force had been there the previous evening, wreaking havoc. This could not be the work of the Backstreet Boys.
Desperate for relaxation, I loaded up the compact disc player with a bunch of frothy records that had been popular back in the '60s-- Paul Revere & the Raiders, the Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits. Then I pulled out a pen and paper and started writing down every-thing I had experienced recently. But as soon as I did the paper slipped right off the table, as if yanked by an unseen hand. Simultaneously, the CD player stopped playing the Dave Clark Five's "Bits and Pieces" and switched to Hermans Hermits' "I'm Henry the VIII, I Am." It was a song I had once loved back in the day, but had stopped listening to in recent years because of unpleasant pop cultural associations. I am referring, of course, to the scene where Patrick Swayze drives Whoopi Goldberg completely around the bend by repeatedly singing the song in...
Ghost.
As this single syllable entered, my brain, the CD player clicked dead and two words appeared on my computer screen: "Get it?"
Recalling that in Ghost the ghost could actually hear what was being said, I spoke out loud. "Yeah, sort of," I rasped. As I said this, I tried to put together all the pieces of this puzzle. When the apparitions had specifically uttered the word "Ghost" in previous visits, I'd found the remark self-serving and redundant. Now I understood: They were referring not to themselves, entities of ambiguous extraterrestrial provenance, but to the 1990 movie Ghost, but why hadn't the ghost from Ghost just visited me himself in the first place instead of sending ghosts from other films?
My question was anticipated. "Just messing with you," said the words that appeared on my screen.
"Are you really the ghost from Ghost?" I asked.
"I am the ghost of the character Patrick Swayze plays in Ghost," said the computer screen.
"A very fine movie indeed!" I lied. "Nice ensemble work by Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg and a particularly compelling performance by Mr. Patrick Swayze in the thankless role of..."
"Can it," typed the ghost. "You hated the movie. You wrote in Playboy that the sight of two Patrick Swayzes in Ghost was the single greatest argument against cloning that mankind had ever devised."
"Harmless joshing," I fibbed.
"You used the same joke again in a Movielines story," were the next words I saw on my screen. "And you used it again in your book My Goodness. And you used it in a column for some business magazine I never even heard of, and in an op-ed piece for some obscure newspaper and..."
"OK, OK," I sighed. "I admit it: I recycle some of my material."
"As long as you keep telling jokes about me," wrote the ghost from Ghost, "I'll be stuck between this world and the next. You have to let me go."
The metaphysical implications of all this were incredible. What the ghost of the character played by Patrick Swayze in Ghost seemed to be suggesting was that fictional characters played by actors in movies had real souls, independent of the actors who played them. This effectively resolved a philosophical question about form, matter and essence that had raged since the time of Plato, Aristotle, Thales and Empedocles. But I didn't care about any of that. I was concerned about my career.
"Do I have to stop making jokes about Patrick Swayze altogether?"
"Yes," wrote the ghost.
"Forever?" I asked.
"Forever."
"Not even little quips?"
"Not even little quips."
This was a tall order. Although I like to think of myself as a gifted satirist with an incomparably fecund imagination, in my heart of hearts I know that I am a big fat nothing without Patrick Swayze and Geraldo jokes to fall back on. What the ghost of Patrick Swayze in Ghost was asking me to do was to voluntarily sequester myself from one of the richest treasure troves of prefab comedic material since the Golden Age of Sammy Davis Jr. "I'm going to have to think this one over," I told the ghost.
"No, you're not," the screen read, and suddenly the lights started switching on and off and the blue chick from What Lies Beneath appeared before me dripping wet.
"All right, you win!" I wailed. "No more Patrick Swayze jokes!"
In the twinkling of an eye, the lights came back on, the wet creature vaporized and the computer switched off. My ordeal was over.
That was three weeks ago, and I haven't made a joke about Patrick Swayze since. Mind you, Patrick Swayze is no longer the star he once never actually was, so the opportunity to make Patrick Swayze jokes does not come along as often as it once did. Still, that never stopped me in the past. But ever since then I have had no ghostly visitors. All in all, it seems like a sensible trade-off. Moreover, I try to look on the bright side of things. It's not like a bunch of ghosts showed up one night and demanded that I stop making jokes about Mickey Rourke or Jean-Claude Van Damme or Barbra Streisand or Cher or Andrea Bocelli or Riverdance. The ghost of Patrick Swayze treated me better than just about any other person, living or dead, that I've ever met. Frankly, I kind of miss him,
______________________________________
Joe Queenan wrote about the feng che craze for the April issue of Movieline.