AN UNDEAD SYLLABUS: GHOSTS
THE MEDIUMSHIP IS THE MESSAGE
COSMIC VALLEY GIRLS:
THE MEDIUMSHIP IS THE MESSAGE
SEASON 1: GHOSTS
A SYLLABUS
INTRO TO (Y)OUR GHOSTS
What, where, who…are our ghosts? This season, we dive into seven films that portray varieties of ghosts and hauntings, aiming to excavate the conscious and unconscious inspirations and influences—the ghosts–of these cinematic moments. Ghost and geist share a root (spirit, breath….) and the ghosts of a particular pop cultural moment act as cool, freaky, and revealing guides to a zeitgeist. We shine digital and metaphysical light on our specters as we drop names, make associations, and think about routes into further areas of study. Here’s a heady and hardworking (undead, living, haunted…) syllabus for your ghosts and ours: past, present, and future….
We’ll keep adding to and editing this document. Enter wherever you’d like.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Ghost (1990)
Rebecca (1940, 2020)
Caspar (1995)
The Gift (2001)
Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Hamlet (2000)
EPISODE 1: GHOST
>haunted by the dead husband/true love
“I’ll be coming home, wait for me….” – The Righteous Brothers, “Unchained Melody”
Like so many films about the spirit world busting into our world, Ghost (1990) is a flick about unfinished business and missing pieces. A Wall Street yuppie-turned-ghost haunts his artist girlfriend because he has to relay info about some shady business dealings and the truth behind his death. The movie was written in the 1980s, an era which married art and commerce, and made art into a slick and highly lucrative business. Mary Boone, the gallerist who represented Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and other art stars was dubbed “the new queen of the art scene” by New York Magazine in 1982. Ghost premiered around the time the art market crashed in 1990. And remember the famously steamy pottery scene, gritty shots of pre-sleek downtown Manhattan, and Whoopi Goldberg’s unforgettable performance as a mercury/messenger/channel who is both a divine bullshit artist and a real medium?
Listen:
“Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers
Watch:
Ghostbusters (1984)
Wall Street (1987)
Basquiat (1996)
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
News from Home (1976)
Read:
“The Meaning of the Eighties” by Kathy Acker
Mysterium Coniunctionis by Carl Jung
Carl Jung on Mercurius and Alchemy
The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard
Picture Cycle by Masha Tupitsyn
Artless: Stories 2019-2023 by Natasha Stagg
Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife by Tom Ruffles
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes
EPISODE 2: REBECCA
>haunted by the other woman, the dead wife
“A beautiful home . . . A first wife . . . A wreck, perhaps at sea . . . A terrible secret . . . Jealousy... ..very roughly the book will be about the influence of a first wife on a second . . . she is dead before the book opens. Little by little I want to build up the character of the first in the mind of the second . . . until wife 2 is haunted day and night . . . a tragedy is looming very close and crash! bang! something happens . . . it’s not a ghost story.” – from Daphne du Maurier’s notebook
Rebecca, as decadent as it is berserk, is Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 masterwork. Two years later, her gothic novel was made into a brilliantly deranging film by Alfred Hitchcock. Though the writer claimed it was not a ghost story, the epic house and the unnamed narrator are haunted day and night by the first wife: yes, Rebecca. The house, a labyrinthine estate called Manderlay, is as alive/dead as any of the characters. Old fashioned/Victorian and contemporary vibes abound.
Listen:
Theme from Rebecca (1940)
Watch:
Gone Girl (2014)
Daphne du Maurier: Documentary
What Lies Beneath (2000)
Behind Her Eyes (2021)
Crimson Peak (2015)
Malina (1991)
Single White Female (1992)
Read:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud
Vivienne by Emmalea Russo
Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin
The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis by Barbara Creed
EPISODE 3: CASPAR
>haunted by (lost) youth
“Everything that disappears
disappears as if returning somewhere.”
– Tracy K. Smith, “The Universe: Motion Picture Soundtrack”
In this 1990s classic, a father and daughter move into an old and dramatic haunted house along the Maine coast in hopes of getting the ghosts out of there. The dad, played by Bill Pullman, is a famous and cooky therapist to the dead (sweet job). The daughter is a precocious adolescent played by Christina Ricci. When they move in, they meet Caspar, the friendly child ghost, and questions about love, death, adolescence, resurrection, and healing emerge. How can the living and the dead help each other heal? Where do we go when we disappear? Can we come back, changed, and freer? Can communing with the dead be a form of escapism and failed mourning? How can we go on after tragedy befalls? This movie is flush with hormones, Victorian high weirdness, 1990s fashion, and surprisingly deep questions about relationships between the living and the dead—-and what it means to truly live.
Look:
Joseph Cornell’s boxes
Paintings of the resurrection of Lazarus
Watch:
Now and Then (1995)
Lost Highway (1997)
Poltergeist (1982)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Read:
“Mourning and Melancholia” by Sigmund Freud
Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida
The Phaedo by Plato
The Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel
“Cosmologies of Ghosting” by Emmalea Russo
"American Berserk: Bill Pullman’s Face” by Greil Marcus
”Gothic Materialism” by Mark Fisher
EPISODE 4: THE GIFT
>haunted by one’s psychic abilities
“…who will have the vision capable of distinguishing the visionaries?” — Giorgia Agamben, Profanations
A small southern town. Supernatural powers. A murder. The beauties, dangers and weights of psychic gifts. The supernatural and ordinary evil colliding and facing off. Generational trauma. Feeling both empowered and ostracized by one’s visions. This is what The Gift wheels and deals in. This very vibey and high intensity movie is filled with Oscar winners. Made by Billy Bob Thornton and based on his own mother’s gifts and the particular Zener tarot deck she used to give readings, this movie, in which Cate Blanchett plays a small town psychic, has managed to fly under the radar.
Listen:
“Wastin’ Time” by Waylon Jennings
”Pretty Girls” by Neko Case
Look/consider:
Hilma Af Klint’s paintings
The 8th house in astrology
Zener cards
Watch:
Resurrection (1980)
Sling Blade (1996)
The Skeleton Key (2005)
The Shining (1980)
The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)
Carrie (1976)
Read:
The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
The Gift by Marcel Mauss
A General Theory of Magic by Marcel Mauss
Fatal Strategies by Jean Baudrillard
The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena by Jean Baudrillard
Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting by W. Scott Poole
After Life by Eugene Thacker
In Praise of Risk by Anne Dufourmantelle
On Divination and Synchronicity by Marie-Louise Von Franz
Synchronicity by Carl Jung
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
EPISODE 5: GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST
>haunted by (real) love, commitment, sex….
“Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.” – Michelangelo Antonioni
The night before his brother’s wedding, Connor (an infamous womanizing photographer played by Matthew McConaughey pre-McConaissance) is visited by three ghosts who take him through his relationship history and show him what’s coming if he stays on this empty path. C’s a player, but he hasn’t always been that way. In this rom-com spin on A Christmas Carol, we watch as this dude reckons with past, present, and future versions of himself. Although fluffy, vapid, and not very funny, the movie nonetheless manages to raise questions about relationship “ghosts,” sexual politics, guilt, love, desire, and all the ways we try to outrun ourselves.
Watch:
A Christmas Carol (1947)
Scrooged (1988)
Read:
Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas
Seduction by Jean Baudrillard
Tales of Love by Julia Kristeva
Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai
The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. by Barry Keith Grant
”Green Scene” by Masha Tupitsyn
Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess by Linda Williams
The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han
Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia
Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson
Diary of a Seducer by Kierkegaard
Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty by Gilles Deleuze
Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung
Disorganization and Sex by Jamieson Webster
EPISODE 6: THE SIXTH SENSE
>haunted by the dead (self)
“There are no longer any haunted houses, but there are haunted beings.” — Fighting Theory, Avital Ronell and Anne Dufourmantelle
Set in autumnal Philadelphia, The Sixth Sense is an overwhelmingly gray movie—-monochrome, quiet, creaky. The veil is thin. In Chroma, his book on color, the filmmaker Derek Jarman writes, “The detuned television flickers grey, waiting to be flooded with colour, waiting for the image. Grey has no image, is a shrinking violet, shy and indecisive, caught in the shadows almost unnoticed.” Gray makes for liminal spaces—-hauntings, almost-visions, memories. Anything can happen inside his kind of eerily quiet arena. The little boy who famously “sees dead people” in this movie is very haunted. It’s only when he listens to the ghosts that he realizes they are not trying to hurt him. Rather, they are trying to communicate with him. Ultimately, he becomes a kind of therapist for the dead, helping them on their journey toward peace and release.
Listen:
Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom by The Caretaker
Look/consider:
The Nightmare (1781)
The 12th house in astrology
Watch:
Psycho (1960)
Shutter Island (2010)
Secret Window (2004)
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Read:
Chroma by Derek Jarman
Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva
The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher
The Philosophy of Horror by Noel Carroll
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia by Julia Kristeva
Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of the Gothic by Mark Edmundson
Psychocinema by Helen Rollins
Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions by Stephen Frosh
EPISODE 7: HAMLET (2000)
>haunted by revenge, haunted by the (image of the) self, haunted by the machine
“Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost?” – Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
Without the tools of science, Carl Sagan says in an episode of Cosmos, the machinery of life would be invisible. Totally: machines are perfect vessels for specters. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s ghostly classic, and Hamlet (2000) is a contemporary remix of that timeless tale of revenge, dead dads, the problem of language, and ghosts. Set in midtown Manhattan at the turn of a different century, in the era of videotapes, Hamlet (2000) is all about being haunted by images, including one’s own, in a world of slippery screens, selfies, and recording devices.
Listen:
Ghost Hardware by Burial
Look:
Twittering Machine by Paul Klee (1922)
Moon is the Oldest TV (TV Moon) by Nam June Paik (2001)
Watch:
Her (2013)
The Net (1995)
Ex Machina (2015)
Correspondence (2016)
Cosmos (1980)
Blade Runner (1982)
Sex and the City (1998-2004)
Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Pam and Tommy (2022)
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
Read:
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster
The Scent of Time by Byung-Chul Han
Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern by Anne Friedberg
“Hamlet’s Cameras” by Emmalea Russo
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
The Nick of Time by Elizabeth Grosz
Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson
Phaedrus by Plato
Transmitting Culture by Regis Debray
“The Decay of Cinema” by Susan Sontag
In the Swarm: Digital Prospects by Byung-Chul Han