The budget for Jerry Zucker’s 1990 classic, Ghost, was 505.7 million dollars. The budget for David Lowery’s A Ghost Story was 100,000 dollars. When watching the two, a stronger emotional reaction is evinced from the latter, “cheaper” one. This isn’t to say that Ghost isn’t filled with its share of tear-jerking moments, which most definitely doesn’t include the famed pottery scene that put ceramics back in the “hobby” game (though in the early 90s in SoHo, it was a legitimate profession) and the Righteous Brothers back on music’s radar. But it does speak to something larger about the nature of A Ghost Story. That devotion in love is best conveyed via supernatural simplicity, as opposed to the bombastic special effects that filmmakers tended to relish for their novelty in the 80s and 90s.
In contrast to these big budget special effects, C (Casey Affleck, more talked about for choosing not to present at the Oscars this year than anything else at the moment, least of all this most recent performance) is merely the manifestation of what we so often see as “the Halloween costume” ghost–all single white sheet and two eyehole cutouts. The origin of C’s appearance in the sheet offers one of the most clever–and obvious–reasons for why we have this archetypal notion of how a ghost is supposed to look in its non-stylized form. That is to say, it comes from waking up in this new incarnation in a morgue, where a sheet has been placed over your now dead body and spiritual remains. That C dies within the twelfth minute of the narrative mirrors the structure of Ghost, with Sam’s mugging/shooting occurring within the twentieth minute.
Both films are also extremely heavy on the foreshadowing of their male protagonists’ death, with sinister music playing at the outset of Ghost as shots of Sam (Patrick Swayze) and Molly’s (Demi Moore) as-of-yet-unrenovated loft look like a long-abandoned haunted house before they start tearing down the ceilings for more space. A haunted house… incidentally, the name of the short story by Virginia Woolf referenced in the title card of the introduction to A Ghost Story. Lowery chooses the quote, “Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting,” as a means to ingratiate his viewer to this perception that while a door might figuratively close on a couple’s connection–especially when they’ve lived together in the same space–it never really fades upon one party’s death.
And, in the same way, when one moves from one house to another, the connection remains if we choose to hold onto it, as M does in her explanation to C, “When I was little and we used to move all the time, I would write these notes and I would fold them up really small, and I would hide them in different places so if I ever wanted to go back there’d be a piece of me there waiting.”
This, of course, becomes integral to the plot later, which is why C asks her what it is she generally writes on the slips of paper. She shrugs, “They were just little rhymes and poems. Things I wanted to remember about living in that house, what I liked about it.” Although lovingly entwined together on the couch as she says this, it’s clear that there is a strain on M and C’s relationship, resulting from a combination of being together for a while, C’s lack of success as a musician and his inability to adjust to the idea of change–which is precisely why he’s dug his heels in about moving to a different house, insisting, “We have history here.” M retorts, “Not as much as you think.” This dig is yet another precursor to the barrage of visual accents on how ephemeral we are in the grand scope, even when we think we’ve carved out at least a somewhat affecting legacy through our romantic closeness with another human being.
On that note, Lowery shows us the intimate monotony of a couple behind closed doors, scenes of C working on his music while M trolls for new housing options on Craig’s List in the Dallas area (5826 Goodwin Avenue, to be exact–not really “555” in its anonymity). In a likenable fashion, Zucker shows Sam and Molly in their own apartmental cocoon of intimacy, one scene in particular of them in bed together especially hitting us over the head with what’s to come, as a news clip of a plane crash prompts Sam to muse, “It’s amazing. Just like that [snapping his fingers]. Blackout.” Because we have, in movie minutes, significantly more time to learn about Sam’s character–his fears and insecurities about always losing something good once things are going too well–there seems to be something more arcane and bittersweet about C. As though maybe he could have done more with his life had he spent his minutes more prudently. Even his death comes across as quotidian in comparison to Sam’s, who is shot by a not so coincidental mugger, whereupon a portal to the afterlife also opens for him on the street the way it does for C in the hospital. Likewise, it’s one he chooses to ignore in favor of staying in the same place as his beloved.
After ignoring the portal because C instinctively can’t depart without M, he does not float back to their home, but walks–lumbers, through the greenery of Dallas-Fort Worth’s nature to return to the only place he knows as home. His afterlife activities are very specific to this plot of land. Sam, contrarily, goes wherever his unfinished business requires him to. Sometimes that means staying in the apartment with Molly, others it means taking an impromptu subway ride to the Myrtle-Broadway stop.
Sam also endures the sight of his own funeral, an ordeal C does not take part in as his only innate desire is to be back at the house he lived in with M–the house that is his only legacy. As the priest at Sam’s funeral echoes the sentiment of the “Prognosticator” (Will Oldham) in A Ghost Story–one of the sole deliverers of seemingly more than a single sentence in the film–he reminds the attendees, “All that we treasure–our loved ones, our friends, our body, our mind–are but on loan to us. We must surrender them all. We are all travelers on the same road. Which leads to the same end. Let us remember that love, too, is eternal.”
Demi Moore, who actually looks a lot like Rooney Mara in the role of Molly is equally as disaffected after the funeral. But rather than going to town on an entire pie (one of the most disturbing and memorable scenes in A Ghost Story) and then yakking it up, Molly’s unexpected affliction is that can’t create pottery the same way. Crying to herself, “It’s like I can still feel you,” Sam crouches down next to her and realizes he can scare the cat with his presence. M, on the other hand, appears to have no awareness of C’s spiritual lurking. And unlike Sam, C doesn’t seem to want M to move on (this much is made evident when he enragedly tosses some books–specifically that Woolf one referenced at the beginning–on the ground after seeing her get dropped off at their door by a new man somewhere down the line). Sam appears more encouraging of the idea of Molly making peace with his absence, at one point getting vexed when Molly sentimentally holds on to some tickets to a concert they hated and a pack of opened Rolaids as she goes through some of his things with his so-called friend, Carl (Tony Goldwyn).
Then again, maybe C remains as attached to M as he does because he doesn’t have the luxury of being heard by anyone else the way Sam does with formerly phony psychic Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg). That, and there’s no sense of him ever being willing and/or expected to move on into the next realm the way Sam is. To Oda Mae, however, it feels as though he’s been lingering on Earth forever as she snaps, “Why don’t you find a house to haunt?” and “You’re holding onto a life that doesn’t want you anymore–give up the ghost!” Sam eventually does, but C refuses. Not without his love.
To boot, Ghost‘s focus on the karmic justice of the afterlife isn’t present in A Ghost Story (there’s much emphasis on both Willy Lopez and Carl being taken to the depths of hell with some special effects goons to play up the whole cosmic retribution element). Instead, it’s about the infinite elasticity of time in a post-death existence, an entity that was never available in life, when you actually needed it. Like Prognosticator says at the party, “So no money, then what have you got left? You’ve got…other people… You’ve got time.” But that time is finite. The afterlife in A Ghost Story makes time eternal and therefore seemingly more torturous. Because, unlike Sam, you can’t even jump into a medium’s body for some light play to the Righteous Brothers. Prognosticator also waxes on about the human need for legacy, noting, “You do what you can to make sure you’re still around after you’re gone.” For most people, like C and Sam, rather ordinary men, that means staying alive post-mortem as a result of their love. And the love that was in turn reciprocated (“ditto”) by their girlfriends.
What makes A Ghost Story so much more impactful than Ghost (forever iconic though it may be) is its experimental boldness. The opening credits tout: A Scared Sheetless Production. That it was. For Lowery felt, throughout the filming of A Ghost Story, “very aware of falling flat on [his] face. It was such a high-wire concept. [He] went into it thinking it would be fun, a liberating bout of creative experimentation. But it was terrifying.” Almost as terrifying as the prospect of watching the person you love grieve without being able to comfort them the way Sam eventually can thanks to a little bodily possession and then, finally, materializing in front of Molly just as the portal opens back up for him. C, on the other hand, knows no other form of existence or alternative than to leave this realm with M in tow. And he’ll wait through however many tenants and incarnations of the house it takes for her to return to him. That, in effect, is far more powerful–more telling of bona fide devotion–than any spectral besito.
