Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy FilmsGiving Up the Ghost provides an in-depth analysis of comedy and romantic ghost films. Using post-Freudian, Lacanian and feminist approaches, Giving Up the Ghost examines a range of popular movies, including Heaven Can Wait (1978), Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) and Ghost (1990). Katherine A. Fowkes outlines startling similarities among recent ghost films and films from the late 1930s and 1940s, speculating on the significance of ghosts and angels as subjects of film narrative. Giving Up the Ghost explores gender blurring to achieve an alternate conception of voyeurism and visual distance in cinema, linking films as diverse as the melodramatic Always (1986) and the comedy Ghost Dad (1990). |
Contents
Preface | 9 |
The Ghost in the Machine | 17 |
The Masochistic Contract | 31 |
Accessing the FeminineMaternal | 54 |
Seeing and Speaking | 78 |
Gender Switching | 103 |
Giving Up the Ghost | 124 |
Speculating about Specters | 136 |
Notes | 165 |
Bibliography | 191 |
Common terms and phrases
Acoustic Mirror angels associated audience becomes Beetlejuice body castration child Classical Hollywood Classical Hollywood Cinema comedy films comedy ghost films comic cultural dead death delay desire destiny device diegesis diegetic dilemma discussion disembodied voice Doane Dorinda emotion example fact fantasy scenarios father female feminine Feminism film ghosts film viewer Freud fulfillment gender roles gender switching genre ghost comedies Ghost Dad ghost fantasies ghostly haunting Heaven Can Wait Hollywood films horror films Ibid invisible Jamie Kiss Me Goodbye lack linked Lucy Madly mainstream films male ghost masculine masochism masochistic aesthetic masochistic fantasy masochistic scenario melodrama Mike Molly mother movie Nina notion object Oda Mae Oedipal original passive Patrick Swayze Pete play pleasure position pre-Oedipal primal fantasy problem provides psychoanalytic reverse Robert Corrigan romantic Routledge sadistic scene sexual difference Silverman story subjecthood Teresa de Lauretis tion too-late University Press visual woman women York
References to this book
Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence Mark Pizzato No preview available - 2004 |
Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium Kirsten Moana Thompson Limited preview - 2012 |