The medium of exchange

Mandy Merck

pp. 163-178

in: Peter Buse, Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

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).