Gerald’s
Game (2017) and the Shackles of The
Past
Dir. Mike Flanagan
Written
by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard,
based on the 1992 novel by Stephen King
Starring Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Carel Struycken, Henry
Thomas, Chiara Aurelia
GERALD’S
GAME may well boast the simplest premise of Stephen King’s entire career (and
that’s saying a lot for a guy who once made a movie about killer big rig
trucks*). Basically, the entire thing can be summarized in a single sentence: A
woman named Jessie (Carla Gugino, SPY KIDS) finds her sanity unravelling after her
husband Gerald’s (Bruce Greenwood, DISTURBING BEHAVIOR) sudden death during a
sex game that leaves her handcuffed to the bed in an isolated house with no
means of escape. OK I guess that’s kind of a wordy, meandering sentence that
would be better served as two shorter sentences, but I said it could be done
and now I’ve done it. I’ve now described the entire movie. That’s it, that’s
essentially all that happens. There are a few wrinkles, and a winding flashback
subplot, but for most of the 103 minute runtime, the action stays in a single
bedroom, with only two people. It’s not entirely uneventful, but it’s not
really a film which is motivated by events, either. It’s a film entirely about
the mind of the protagonist, as she gradually drifts from shock to horror to
despair to something more complicated, as she begins to consider the life that
brought her to this sorry state of affairs.
It
is, then, a simple premise which results in anything but a simple movie.
Obviously, the hook here is the squirm-inducing basic conceit of being trapped
in a vulnerable position with a dead body. That was how the book was described
to me by some asshole kid on the bus when I was in middle school, and that
premise alone was enough to remain vivid in my mind all these years later. In fact,
I went into this assuming that was all there was to it, and consequently
assumed it was based on a King short story. But no, it was a full
332-page novel; not an especially lengthy one, by Stephen King standards, but
rich with psychological possibility, and, especially, rich with potential for
King to impart his particular array of artistic idiosyncrasies upon it.
Indeed,
it has to be about as distinctively and recognizably Stephen King as you
can get. No other writer would ever have written this story this way (if they
wrote this story at all!), and although I’ve only read a tiny percentage of King’s
vast output, it feels to me like this is surely one of the most densely
distilled versions of his particular artistic ethos. I’ve often quoted his line
from Danse Macabre on this site: “I recognize terror as the finest
emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot
terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go
for the gross-out.” His phrasing suggests those goals are mutually exclusive, but
here, rather handily, they’re actually interwoven with surprising
effectiveness. In fact, it almost seems like he worked backwards with the
intent of building each layer in: the scenario itself is so inherently lurid
and nauseating that “the gross-out” is never far from the surface, but on top
of that, he adds two sharp jabs of quintessentially Stephen King “horror”: a very
bad dog who wanders in and starts eating Gerald’s corpse (they even refer to
him as “Cujo,” so no points if you were thinking the same thing) and a
mysterious ghoul who may or may not be imaginary (muthafuckin’ Carel Struycken,
aka “hey, it’s the Giant from Twin Peaks!” wearing prosthetics to amplify
his already unusual frame) who –this being Stephen King— of course comes
with his own goofy nickname (“The Moonlight Man”**), distinct MO (he collects
bones and trinkets from his victims, which he carries in a tackle bag) and
vaguely mythological backstory (he may be the physical personification of
death, checking in to see if Jessie is ready to give up yet).
That
handily takes care of the “gross-out” and “horror” camps, but the movie’s real
heart lies with King’s highest category –he calls it “terror,” though I think
“horror” would be a better word choice—something more ineffable, something that
haunts, formless and therefore all-consuming. In this case, something which has
been with Jessie, haunting her, since she was a child. A memory which she has,
if not repressed, at least actively avoided confronting. I guess it’s maybe
a kind of SPOILER to tell you what it is, but aw hell, you’ve already guessed
it, or at least you will when the movie flashes back to an idyllic day with a
12-year-old Jessie (Chiara Aurelia, BIG SKY, BACK ROADS) and her father (Henry
Thomas, LEGENDS OF THE FALL, DEAD BIRDS), alone in an isolated lakeside house
very much like the one she’s now trapped in. And just in case you otherwise
couldn’t relate to having your childhood tainted due to an unforgivable
betrayal by someone you trusted, please note that the creepy dad is played by
Henry Thomas – that’s right, Elliot from E.T.
So yeah, I’m afraid there’s no way around it,
this charming little slice of imaginative situational sadism is also saddled
with some pretty heavy shit. I’ve never read the book, so I can’t speak to the
sensitivity with which 1992 Stephen King treated this difficult subject, but
the film’s screenplay, by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard, does an almost
unbelievably graceful job of threading this potentially ruinous material into
the pulpy whole. And they do this in a way which is superficially simple, but devilishly
tricky to pull off: they simply take the character and her emotions seriously.
Despite the luridness of the scenario, the film’s focus says firmly on Jessie’s
inner life, and trusts that this close psychological examination under high
stress is in itself a sufficient raison d'être for a horror movie.
Caring
that much about character psychology is an unusual trait for a horror director
–maybe even a genre director in general, since genre films tend to be motivated
by incident rather than character. But it’s a trait that Flanagan has demonstrated
since his first film, the terrific ABSENTIA, and it’s one he
shares with King, who must surely be the most sentimental and soft-hearted
horror author of all time. Flanagan –following King’s lead, I imagine, as the
synopses of the two GERALD’S GAMEs look virtually identical—is able to handle
the weight of Jessie’s backstory because his movie doesn’t just view her as a
piece of meat to be tormented for our genre amusement, but as a distinct and
complicated character, full of contradictions and surprises. Her trauma could
easily be a mechanically expository plot point, but the movie pushes beyond
simply asserting that she’s intrinsically fucked-up because she was abused,
probing, in its most emotionally harrowing scene, specifically what was so
insidious and disempowering about what happened to her. This helps us to not only
understand the source of her pain, but also the complex system of coping
mechanisms she has created to combat the pain. It shows us both wound and
–maybe even more importantly-- scar tissue. Her childhood abuse is part of her,
but it’s not all of her. It is not, as movie flashbacks so frequently
are, a pat, simplistic missing puzzle piece that explains all her subsequent
behavior. But once we understand it –and once she begins to confront it for the
first time in her adult life—we can also see how it has lingered in the
background, a huge unseen black hole quietly warping the orbit of her life in
ways not always immediately obvious.
It
certainly has something to do with her anxiety over Gerald’s S&M game, with
its uncomfortably skewed power dynamic… but did it also have something to do
with why she married Gerald in the first place? Did she subconsciously marry
another man who would selfishly hurt her for his own sexual gratification,
because her father so thoroughly twisted her idea of relationships in general? Or
is that just reading trauma into something more mundane, projecting false
meaning on a perfectly common dysfunctional relationship with poor sexual
communication? And for that matter, who was the now-deceased Gerald,
anyway? How well does anyone really know their partner? Was the S&M
game a rare glimpse of Gerald’s monstrous true self, or was it just a normal
bit of kink that he thought might add spice to their very normal lackluster sex
life?
The
fact that the movie is willing to let the character ask these questions, and treat
them every bit as seriously as it treats its more genre-friendly ghoul, is at
the heart of its strength. And the fact that it isn’t willing to produce pat, neatly-resolved
answers gives the actors a real chance to shine. And it is actors,
plural, because Gerald quickly shows up again after his death, not as a ghost,
but as an avatar for Jessie’s inner doubts and anxieties, goading her to give
up, and engaged in a constant debate with a stronger, more confident side of
herself (portrayed by Gugino) who urges her to find a strength and canniness she
also knows, on some level, that she’s capable of. Greenwood and Gugino, then, are
both playing aspects of the captive Jessie’s psyche, with the poor woman on the
bed torn between them. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict
myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Limiting
the conversation to only these two actors keeps the feeling deeply intimate
(King’s novel has Jessie keeping court with a larger group of other characters
who never appear in the film), and both do splendid work. Greenwood (who looks
fucking great at 61, by the way, and spends virtually the entire film in
his underwear***) makes a very tricky performance --portraying a character who
could be read a number of different ways, and then a slippery, shifting memory
of that character, and also even sometimes a straight-up projection of a different
character-- look easy and intuitive, offering an abundance of, wonderful subtle
character work for the audience to chew on. But as good as he is, it’s Gugino’s
movie, and she is hardly short of spectacular as the movie’s narrative and emotional
anchor. She crafts a character who is genuinely complicated, capable of many
contradictions: both fragile and resilient, canny and obtuse, disturbed and rational.
She’s likeable enough to comfortably command our sympathy, but also not afraid to
occasionally come across as a little prickly and abrasive, never allowing her complicating
victimhood to transform into dull sainthood. It’s a performance which paints a deeply
specific character, and, impressively, it’s matched by an equally vivid
physical performance, which does a magnificent job of letting us feel the mounting
discomfort of being confined in such a position as the hours stretch into days.
Flanagan,
for his part, frames the film entirely from Jessie’s perspective, literalizing her
mental projections because that’s simply how she’s perceiving things (Greenwood
and Gugino don’t appear as blue ghosts or anything, though the editing engages
in some thrilling continuity-breaking to illustrate their inherent
subjectivity). Meanwhile, the traumatic flashbacks (our only escape from the
bedroom) have a vivid, slightly unreal quality which blooms into full
surreality during the worst moments of abuse, and follows her back to the
present in the personification of “The Moonlight Man,” whose eyes mimic the
blood-red eclipse she associates with that abuse. Like most of Flanagan’s films,
it’s handsomely constructed in a mostly unshowy way, with clean, crisp
photography (maybe a little too clean and crisp; it sometimes has an
unpleasant digital sheen that makes one long for the days of genuine film
stock) and bedrock-solid staging and editing which expertly lays out the precise
geography of the bedroom-prison where every minute detail may offer some new
challenge or aid.
The
result of the excellent acting and fine filmmaking is a 103-minute essentially
single-location psychological study that just flies by, packing in
terror, horror, gross-out, and a bruising human sympathy, and doing it so
neatly and pervasively that it frankly left me exhausted, albeit in the most wonderfully
satisfying cinematic way. I’m pleased to see, too, that this appears to be the
general consensus, which is never a sure thing for a somewhat unusual film like
this. The ending seems to be a little more divisive, and that’s understandable;
apparently faithful to the book, the film concludes with a surprisingly lengthy
epilogue which chronicles the aftermath of these events. This strikes me as
characteristic of King again; he can end up loving his characters so much that
he can’t part with them until he’s resolved all their concerns, even at the
cost of efficient storytelling. Still, this is a rare case where we’ve been so
intimate with the protagonist, and she’s suffered so much, that a victory lap
feels earned and meaningful, if not strictly necessary. Besides, it’s worth
suffering through for the final shot, where a tangent that seemed rather
clumsily on-the-nose and unnecessary suddenly takes an odd dreamlike bent, running
into the credits with a sort of triumphant mysteriousness that feels very
appropriate for this material. Like the movie, it’s a strange, maybe even
unique, note… but a satisfying and resonant one.
END OF PART I. Keep scrolling past the checklist for the thrilling
second half!
*Quipped one local card, “Cocaine
had long been Stephen King’s co-writer, and MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE was its attempt
at a solo career.”
** In the novel, the even goofier
“Space Cowboy.” Guess the filmmakers figured movie audiences aren’t that
familiar with Steve Miller Band? Or possibly they just decided that “Space
Cowboy” is a little much, even for Stephen King.
*** Ladies, never say ol’ Mike
Flanagan never did nothin’ for ya.
CHAINSAWNUKAH
2019 CHECKLIST!
For Richer or Horror
TAGLINE
|
Some Games You Play.
Some You Survive.
|
TITLE ACCURACY
|
Accurate.
|
LITERARY ADAPTATION?
|
Yes, from the 1993
novel by Stephen King
|
SEQUEL?
|
None
|
REMAKE?
|
No
|
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
|
USA
|
HORROR SUB-GENRE
|
Survival horror?
Psychological horror?
|
SLUMMING A-LISTER?
|
None, but it’s nice
they could get Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood for this.
|
BELOVED HORROR ICON?
|
Stephen King, and I’m
about ready to anoint Mike Flanagan as well
|
NUDITY?
|
No actual nudity, but a
lot of underwear.
|
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
|
Yup
|
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
|
Yes
|
GHOST/ ZOMBIE /
HAUNTED BUILDING?
|
No
|
POSSESSION?
|
No
|
CREEPY DOLLS?
|
None
|
EVIL CULT?
|
None
|
MADNESS?
|
Oh yeah
|
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
|
None
|
VOYEURISM?
|
None
|
MORAL OF THE STORY
|
Don’t marry anyone
named “Gerald,” for God’s sake.
|
******************************
If the ending of GERALD'S GAME feels arguably overfaithful to the book, perhaps to its detriment, it's appropriate for the movie to be somewhat constrained by its
source material, because of course that’s exactly the subject of the movie: the
way that the past informs and, to a certain degree, controls the
present. GERALD’S GAME is, if nothing else, a surprisingly in-depth and nuanced
examination of that rather disquieting fact, allowing its protagonist to both
face the pernicious –yet obscure—influence of past trauma manifesting in the
present, and to question the degree of that influence. I think you could
legitimately read Jessie’s ultimate understanding of her life as either a
chronicle of inevitability (ie, she wound up handcuffed to this bed as the
direct and inevitable result of events set in motion in her childhood) or
as a repudiation of this kind of simplistic fatalism (ie, it’s her anxiety and
self-doubt, not her rationality, which links two mostly-unrelated events into a
false narrative of eternal victimhood), whichever interpretation you were most
philosophically inclined towards (for the record, the movie seems to posit
something closer to a middle ground).
I’ve
always been fascinated by the delicate dance between past and present – you’ll
notice my posts, especially about older movies, often devolve into history
lessons—but it never really occurred to me until I watched GERALD’S GAME and
IT: CHAPTER 2 back-to-back how intrinsically relevant to the horror genre this
relationship is. Which in turn made me think OH SHIT MUTHAFUCKA IT’S OCTOBER
AND THAT MEANS IT’S GODDAM CHAINSAWNUKAH SEASON AGAIN and as per usual, I like
to take the opening shot as an opportunity to ruminate a bit on one specific
aspect of the horror genre. Previously, we’ve looked at the psychological necessity of horror, and the role of transformation, voyeurism, repression, childhood, and paranoia. Now, though, we must confront the past.
And
that word “confront” seems especially apt here, because the more I think about
it, the more I see horror as a perfect means to examine our fraught
relationship with the past. At the most basic level, a huge percentage of
horror, maybe even the majority, is about literally doing just that: modern
humans in the present coming into violent conflict with the angry echos of
their forebearers, in the form of ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, and more
or less any “undead” antagonist you can dream up.
The
idea of our ancestors as active, influential parts of daily life appears to be
about as ancient as any single element of human culture except perhaps veneration
of fertility. Ancestor veneration, with the specific goal of producing positive
intervention from the dead on behalf of the living, has roots in Africa, Asia,
Europe, and Oceania that go back at least to the stone age (the Ancient
Egyptians notably practiced it, and evidence of the practice in China dates back
to at least 6000 BCE). Of course, if forebearers can intercede in our lives to
our advantage if properly appeased, it stands to reason they could also act
more malignly if they so chose. This does not mean, however, that all spirits of the undead are intrinsically or symbolically linked to the past; although traditions of ancestor-worship revolve around the
dead, they don’t necessarily revolve around the past per se; if
anything, ancestor veneration has more to do with calling on supernatural
personalities to help shape the present, virtually indistinguishable from any
kind of supernatural prayer belief. Likewise, many ghosts in folklore have motives
and desires not necessarily linked to their past lives, and might appear to
have more in common with other supernatural figures than with undead human intelligence.*
Nevertheless,
at least in modern times, ghost stories tend to be intrinsically linked to
history. The Headless Horseman in Washington Irving’s 1820 The Legend Of
Sleepy Hollow, for example, is portrayed as the ghost of a human tied inexorably
to the circumstances of his death, forever seeking his lost head and consequently
unable to “pass on.” Charles Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol, as well as
his 1865 A Trial For Murder and several other stories, also prominently
feature ghosts who are trapped by the circumstances of their life or death, and
intervene in human affairs in order to address some injustice related to their
lives.** And those are just three examples plucked from the beginning of the
late modern period. Today, we almost take for granted that modern ghost stories
are, essentially, mysteries; the troublesome spirit had “unfinished business”
on Earth that the human protagonist must uncover and resolve before the ghost can “pass
on.” THE UNINVITED, THE CHANGELING, THE LADY IN WHITE, GHOST, THE SIXTH SENSE, THE
DEVIL’S BACKBONE, THE RING, the recent WINCHESTER, even fucking CASPER THE FRIENDLY
GHOST, are just a handful of textbook-perfect examples of this trope that
immediately spring to mind.
The
language we use here is very telling of how deeply rooted in metaphor this is; after
all, what living person doesn’t harbor some psychological trauma: regrets about
things done or left undone, the unhealed scars of emotional pain, nostalgic ache for comforts left behind. “Unfinished
business” trapped in the amber of the past, just as thoroughly outside our
ability to change as it would be for the dead. Just like the dead, we have moved
on to another place, beyond the original setting of our pain, and yet we are unable to let
go, to “pass on” into the future. We remain trapped in the past, desperate for
some way out of the cycle of our pain, guilt, and regret.
Ghost
stories are the most symbolically telling horror trope which explores the subtle
(or sometimes not-so-subtle) threads of the past which remain tied to the
present, but they are hardly the only one. We see more direct psychological portraits too, most obviously in
slasher movies, which often explicitly root their antagonists’ behavior in past
(often childhood) psychological trauma (often of a sexual nature). Look, for
example, to any of the endless number of slasher films which eventually reveal
that the killer’s psychosis is the result of watching his mom have sex with a
sailor or something (most stereotypically, perhaps, in 1980’s MANIAC). The killer's particular murderous gimmick is often directly related to that original psychic trauma, essentially dooming them to perpetually re-enact the circumstances which have left them so broken, externalizing the way they are trapped by their past. We
certainly see the seeds for this kind of "mad killer" sewn during the 1940’s and 50s, as Freudian
ideas about the subconscious and emotional repression percolated through the
culture; Hitchcock, with SPELLBOUND, MARNIE, and –especially—PSYCHO to his name
is an inescapable touchstone here, though I would argue the disturbed
protagonist from PEEPING TOM, sitting alone in the dark, endlessly re-watching the
literal images of his traumatic childhood on film, makes for the most iconic model. Like
the ghost of folklore and fiction, the titular Peeping Tom is no longer
physically affected by his past, but he has not “passed on” from it, as the
endlessly repeating film loops demonstrate.
And
of course, slashers are hardly the only horror genre to find their protagonists
doomed to relive past traumas; IT PART 2, THE BABADOOK, THE RITUAL, DREAM HOUSE, THE INVITATION, and about a million
other horror movies all deal with protagonists who are equally scarred by the
past, and who, even if they do not go on to become masked gimmick slashers, can
find themselves trapped in cycles of horror. Their past continues to manifest itself, as in the intermittent visions of a previous traumatic episode that the protagonist of THE RITUAL envisions as he is subjected to an entirely unrelated stress, or in the full-scale fantasy world which the protagonist of DREAM HOUSE retreats to. These characters escaped from their trauma, only to find it somehow in front of them again, to be endlessly re-lived. This is even literalized in the slew of time-loop horror films which were, for some
reason, fucking inescapable for the last fifteen years or so, including (SPOILERS
for most of these films, since it’s usually a twist ending) DEAD END and MINE
GAMES and THE REEDS and THE ABANDONED, TRIANGLE, LET’S BE EVIL, THE HOUSE AT
THE END OF TIME, YELLOWBRICKROAD, TIME CRIMES, SALVAGE, DARK COUNTRY, THE DEVIL’S PASS, THE DIABOLICAL, BLOOD PUNCH, BASKIN, HAPPY DEATH DAY and arguably to a certain
extent THE SHINING. There’s a queasy fatalism to these movies which rescinds
even the faint bit of hope most horror characters –even the undead ones!—have at
escaping their endless cycle of torment and “passing on.” In a time loop, you
never had a chance, never had a choice; past and future are an unbroken circle
that feed inevitably into one another.
Of
course, there is also a strand of horror fiction wherein the focus on the past
is less personal and more universal, or at least on a vast scale. Consider, for
example, the Lovecraftian branch of horror, where danger bubbles up from the
unimaginably distant past, and learning ancient truths which are best forgotten
is liable to drive one mad (The Whisperer In Darkness, At The Mountains Of Madness, or see the "little people" stories of Arthur Machen which greatly influenced Lovecraft, for example The Shining Pyramid and The Novel Of The Black Seal). Even if we have forgotten the past, it has not forgotten
us, and by the time it comes for us, learning the things we have forgotten will
not necessarily save us. This too can be personal (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, where the sins of the parents are personified and visited upon their children), or universal (one might read THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or the recent US as metaphors for the cost of long-term bigotry, willfully forgotten but still seething under the surface, or look to almost
any given Mummy film for a anxious sense of the inevitable penance that must come from centuries of colonial arrogance). Or, most potently and most elusively, see THESHINING, with it’s inscrutable implication that Jack has always been the
caretaker of the Overlook hotel, itself a symbol of genocidal colonialist psychosis
so blatant that we’re told it was built on an actual Indian Burial ground. There
are, it seems, some things we are all guilty of, and however
uncomfortable it might make us, however much we might want to forget, it was
the past that gave birth to the present, and we will never be entirely free of
it.
Still,
even if the scars of the past persist, life does --usually-- manage to go on,
unless you encounter masked gimmick slashers, mummies, dummies, mutants, vampires, sexy vampires, metaphorical vampires,
space vampires, cyborg vampires, mutant vampires, daywalkers, nightwalkers, slow
zombies, fast zombies, voodoo zombies, Rob Zombies, critters, ghoulies, CHUDS,
Chuckys, Klaus Kinskis, extra-dimensional intelligences, Xtros, Bigfoots, or
what have you. And that means that just like poor Jessie way back up there in
what was once a review of GERALD’S GAME, all we can do is take stock of the
past, own it, and try to work our way out of the mess we’ve made, into a better
future. Lord knows, I’ve been trying to do that for a lot of years now. It’s a
hard road, and even as we try to escape the past, it can be frightening to never
really know what the future holds. But at least one thing is certain: it’s
another year, and that means another CHAINSAWNUKAH! Join me, friends, as I
plunge once again into the endless depths of B-or-lower-grade horror movies, and
let us all welcome
CHAINSAWNUKAH VIII:
2019: FOR RICHER OR HORROR
* Belief in ghosts, though
culturally ubiquitous, seems to have historically been more focused on the
continued existence of consciousness than “unfinished business” from the past;
ancestor veneration typically consists of offerings of material comfort to a spirit currently residing in another form of existence, rather than action specific to the life
and actions of the departed. Consequently, the dead appear in, for example, The
Odyssey, as residents of an underworld, sometimes visible or perceptible to
living humans, but in general merely continuing a sentient existence in another
world. They are not, generally, tethered to the living world by any particular
element of their past lives, they simply continue on existing in another state,
one which brings a new set of concerns that do not necessarily have anything to
do with their history as flesh-and-blood beings. Long traditions of ghosts
summoned by mediums, or as harbingers of prophetic wisdom, are similarly yoked
to the future, rather than the past.
Still, the idea of a ghost with
“unfinished business” is not of exclusively recent vintage. A striking early
example in Western literature is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose purpose in
appearing, unbidden, to his son, is more specific and rooted in the past: he
wants Hamlet to address the injustice of his murder. Notably, while some
scholars consider Hamlet’s father to be drawn from the template of a 12th-century
Jutish chieftain whose unjust death at the hands of his brother is chronicled
in two medieval Danish histories, neither story mentions his return as a
vengeful ghost, tying that particular element of folklore to a later period. In fact,
a fairly lengthy online survey of medieval ghost stories and legends finds no
shortage of subjects, but few which utilizes a ghost in the same way Hamlet
does. Instead, ghosts are portrayed more in the manner we would associate with
supernatural spirits; sentient creatures with their own supernatural
motivations and desires relating to their current state of life, rather than
their past, mortal existence (the exception, of course, is found in the large
number of spirits who require religious absolution they did not receive in
life, a slightly different though arguably linked phenomenon more rooted in
contemporary religious belief in purgatory than the ghost’s specific sins).
M.R. James, the great font of Victorian ghost stories, and himself a scholar of
medieval spirit tales (he wrote a 1922 paper entitled 12 Medieval Ghost
Stories, which drew from a series of 15th-century accounts
chronicled by an English monk) followed suit; the vast majority of his tales
feature “ghosts” of a decidedly inhuman character, who, if they were ever
“alive” in the traditional sense to begin with, have little interest in
revisiting their Earthly existence.
Consequently, I think it’s fair
to say that while ghost tales have been part of human culture since time
immemorial, the idea of the ghost with “unfinished business,” often of a
revengeful nature, has become ubiquitous only in modern times.
** The ghost I refer to in A
Christmas Carol is, of course, Scrooge’s former partner, Jacob Marley, who
returns bearing heavy chains representing the weight of his sins in life. The
other “ghosts” in the story, though, also have a curious relationship to time:
though not human spirits, they represent and apparently embody time itself, as
the past, present, and future. Ghosts as prophets of the future were, I think, a
much more common trope in the past than they are now (see, for example, the doom
prophesied by the grouchy ghost of Samuel in the Old Testament), but it is in
a certain sense a logical extension of the basic metaphor that ghosts –representing
our past— have a better vantage point to see the future than us simpletons
trapped in the present.
