Giving Up the Ghost: Spirits, Ghosts, and Angels in Mainstream Comedy Films

Front Cover
Wayne State University Press, 1998 - Body, Mind & Spirit - 202 pages
Giving 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
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1998)

Katherine A Fowkes is an assistant professor of media studies at High Point University.

Bibliographic information