Ghostly Psychology

When I began this scribbling on Ghosts and poltergeists, it became clear that there was far too much to 'mine' from the topic in one sitting. Like Vampires and Werewolves, ghosts are flexible in their symbolic value. They are messengers and also motivators. They are benign takers and also malevolent bringers of death and carnage. Ghosts express events we don't want to discuss, issues we can't avoid, futures possible only through influence on the present. Ghosts and poltergeists are a feast of information, and we are a famished audience. Let's consume this banquet one bite at a time.

Isn't it curious how often ghosts are supposedly malevolent and hostile? They're dead! They don't have any hormones, no adrenalin, no brain with which to consider their disembodied actions. They have no physical way to interact with the world. They remain desperately unaware of how much typing I do on their behalf, and they are unable to tell us why they are angry.

Once again we are forced to look at the cultural narrative, the dialogue. We in North America are probably among the very few who can't see the ghostly messages- without a big screen that is. The Japanese, I feel certain, along with most every culture besides western, would tell us that our dismissal of dead ancestors reveals a lack of regard toward tradition and traditional values. But is the malevolence an exaggeration from Hollywood, or is Hollywood just mirroring what can be seen readily anywhere? Is our society really that hostile? Because really, when the Japanese speak of the ancestors being angry, there is no sense of houses imploding, or exploding, or people being possessed and killing everyone. What is it?

Like everyone and everything else, death eventually takes people, good or bad, and the living move past it. That is death: a reassuring promise that the bad guy, or perhaps a big bad problem we faced, is finished for good. So when we come to fear- even if only in a mythological Hollywood movie sense- that some horrible bad guy will come back from the dead, it can only be a symbol of some unresolved anger or grief, or perhaps of an issue that is blocked and creating tension. They are saying that they can't be ignored. They have not gone away.

Certainly it could be argued that I am being overly dramatic, yet it seems evident that audiences respond to themes and action and events that resonate with them personally. If zombie movies were not “speaking” to the masses, they would not be popular. It is no stretch therefore to suggest that the money raked in by movies is a barometer of the strength of the themes brought up by them. The money is an indicator of how pervasive the feelings are.

IS there a paranoia out there in the ether about the dead coming back to life? Could there be any reality supporting the statement? The answer is not exactly, not specifically, not really. There is an intense hype in global media about demons and possession and the “end of times” and other such apocalyptic themes, but at most there could only be uneducated, staunchly religious segments who are far too open to the possibility. The truth is simply that there is support for a larger segment's unusual consideration of the possibility of life after death, the return of the dead, gods, demons and other harbingers of bad tidings. This quasi-anxious “peering into the dark” is only supported by hype, and the relative silence of “experts” as they cash in on the nervous energy of the masses.

That angle, of our preoccupation with death, has been explored in great detail by philosophers for hundreds of years now. There is no need to go into it here.

On a more psychological level, the question is Why the gore? It's one thing to be worried about the afterlife, but how did we get to such a blase spattering of blood and brains and guts? How did the dead become so, so totally blood-mad? It seems obvious that they are not: We are. We simply levy the harsh feelings onto them in a weak attempt to alleviate the pressure. Theatre, in that sense, is performing its function as a pressure valve, and succeeding beautifully.

However this aspect of hostility is less about past events than it is about how we are feeling today. We are not angry about World War II, or the Freedom Riders incident of the 50's. We are angry about aspects of our own lives in the here and now. We are responding to movies about intense conflict because that intensity feels representative to us personally today.

Wouldn't it be reassuring to just name those things we are angry about? Sure it would. We could deal with it and lay it all to rest. However, I've covered it before, and it is complicated. We are living in the mistakes of past generations, and muddling through them with the inadequate skills and insight taught to us by those inadequate people. We are living in a vast dump too big for any individual to see in totality, piled on the actual “city”, and laboring under the pretense that it's a shiny “Reclamation Facility”. Even the analogy is over worked. The shiny city we live in is buried in the refuse of our past mistakes. That is what the ghosts are angry about.

At least a part of the alert is the notion that our actions have repercussions we can't escape. Not as individuals, nor as a society. We have our choice of themes and events to discuss because the 20th century and our present are filled with momentous and catastrophic and terrifying events. They are filled with disturbing actions of people harming others. They are filled with unresolved racial hostility and political issues we seem determined to ignore. Most of our cherished popular movies explore such dynamics on our behalf. Let me pick a movie at random and work through it: Poltergeist.

A nice urban family moves into a new neighborhood filled with a progressive look. And then baleful spirits invade the home and steal the youngest daughter. Why? Because the daughter has a special gift for seeing and understanding “spirits”. It turns out that the neighborhood was built on an old cemetery. These spirits are not able to rest. Even more, they want to keep the daughter, preventing her from doing her thing on earth.

This allegory is straight forward and obvious. The foolish developers assumed that our dead are meaningless and paved over them with dollar signs in their eyes, leaving the average family to deal with the fallout. A real Jungian analysis would dwell far more on the child herself, because she is a rather important symbol of transformation. She probably symbolizes our collective desire to become a more powerfully cohesive entity. I mean, who knows? I'll leave that up to the reader to fathom. In our less Jungian abilities, this movie is about how silly it is to assume that our past is actually in the past.

Is it reasonable to assume that whatever happened in the past is now dead and buried? Is the assumption so practical as people would claim? It's not clear, simply because of all of the secondary assumptions that must be made to support the first. We must assume that psychological aspects are meaningless or insignificant. We must assume that a person's culture is insignificant, or at least determined by money and economics. We must assume that past events have no present repercussions. We must assume that what happens today is isolated to today. We must assume that meaning means little, that families and children are expendable, that money trumps all other considerations, that ultimately people don't need other people. We build up this list of assumptions to carry another assumption and why? For nothing more important than money. At the very least, this movie is suggesting that our assumptions on these matters are foolish. And the reality is that we have no traditions supporting that damaged logic; quite the opposite.

In the sequel of the movie the evil influence turns out to be the ghost of Jim Jones, who killed his own congregation by convincing them that the rapture was coming. It's an interesting twist on the theme, because we might be tempted to say that it was religion that kept these spirits from their rest. But Jones was not a religious man at all. He was if anything an iconoclastic narcissist, the very kind of person who would build a new neighborhood over someone's cemetery and convince others that it was righteous. He was the kind of person who would literally feed off of the good energy of the people around him and turn it into hate and spite for his own satisfaction. He's pretty close to an accurate definition of evil.

The foolish developers in the movie would just be the hapless followers who drank Jones' Kool-Aid, and built over our past even though they could sense it was a bad idea. They would mutter all of those assumptions above even though they could sense it was a crumbling foundation supporting a self-serving activity. And, in argument, they would own up to their complete lack of direction or intelligence by demanding, “Well what? What do you want us to do: get together and sing kumbaya?” They would suggest that the only alternative to making money is some naive hipster sentimentalism to cover their willful ignorance.

I would have to reply, “No, You just have to take five minutes and settle a few issues.” Five minutes, speaking metaphorically, of course. These hapless followers still won't know what to do, so someone else would have to step in. Someone, or a group of someone's, in the real world, represented in the movie by the youngest daughter of the family. Someone who can sense this kind of issue and help lay it to rest. Someone who is sensitive to cultural and societal issues and not just pathologically manipulative. Someone who is not devoid of belief and substituting money as some kind of venal religion. The truth is that we have such people in abundance.

Our popular movies have an element of explosive hostility, and grotesque, over the top bloody massacre. On the one hand, such gore is obviously Hollywood doing what it does best and, who doesn't like to see things get blown up? Even so, it is a big leap- nigh unto a pole vault- to think that our dead are as blood-thirsty as they are in the movies. The movie “Paranormal Activity” displays this admirably. The ghost that possesses the woman takes his anger issues to a whole new level by disposing of multiple families. He is pursuing a ghostly agenda, something to do with a special child (there's that Jungian thing again). and apparently just enjoys throwing his ghostly weight around.

That trend is not an obvious addition. It seems to have crept into movies in the mid 20th century. Before that, ghosts were messengers and benign spirits, only occasionally hostile. It seems that it was in the 80's that ghosts became gruesomely violent. That's when Freddy showed up, no doubt competing with Jason, but no matter the blockbuster element there is still a team of people scheming up the gore and still a huge response from the audience. Freddy could even be symbolic of that gory dynamic.

And it makes sense that the 80's audience, children of the Beat Generation's children, would respond so to Freddy. He doesn't really break out of that ghostly oeuvre as a messenger- he's just not benign. And why would he be? He's a harbinger of truly ghastly mistakes on the part of previous generations. Is it just some spiritual “thing” that he returns to prey on our youth? No, that's just Hollywood snatching profits where it can, but it's also the same old message: Our ‘baggage’ doesn't go away just because the parents got old. It gets re-gifted to the next generations. More than that, though, the children of the 80's were holding on to some pretty serious anger, and that is the source of Freddy's over-the top murderous hostility.

We are angry. Some of us are really angry, and convinced, however unconsciously, that the problems stem from the mistakes of people who aren't alive to answer for them. Jung would also inform us that we are convinced of our potential to deal with and rise above this ghostly doom. We know deep down that we are able to transform this bad energy into a positive outcome. That is the meaning of the ghosts continually snatching children for a hundred years in the movies. The “ghosts” are working hard to prevent “the child” from reaching it's potential.

Hollywood ghosts are telling us that we have a voracious appetite for exploring our issues. The gore and the money we spend seeking it in the theatres is a measure of our passion for it.