"Everyone here sucks"

the astrological analysis of Ghosts of Girlfriends past

The holidays are here. Mercury retrograde is here. Tis the season for visits from ghosts—family, friends, memories—good, bad, horrific, fun, and goofy. I’ve had some of those dreams lately.

So, it’s also an excellent time to listen to our quick and dirty analysis of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a movie wherein a pre-rebirth Matthew McConaughey gets visited thrice by present, past, and future exes. Here is the episode:

And here is the film’s birth chart, followed by my somewhat wacky “astrological analysis”—-

Sun in Taurus: animal attractiveness and materiality. Sun in the sign of the beautiful bull—strong and hot. The movie is teeming with money, food, mansions, and “hotties.”

Moon in Gemini: Gemini re-peats, twins, mocks, gossips, quick-talks. This is a re-make or a hot take on Scrooged (1988). And, Scrooged is a better mercurial copy of a Christmas Carol than this. The movie fails, as we talk about in the episode, but it wants to fail and flail—to crash and burn while managing to hate women, men, the single life, and marriage. It sucks. Nevertheless, it’s pretty fun.

I liked some of the scenery. The east coast snow, the mansion owned by a former player and playboy. The giant cake. There’s something low-key scrumptious about it, perhaps reflected by that Taurus sun.

Gemini moon injects air into Taurus—correcting and messing up its literality and obsession with what we can see, hear, taste, and smell with tricks, poetry, mockery, hypotheticals, and odd gossip.

Venus and Mars—a war of the sexes—happens at the very top of this chart. Venus and Mars are holding hands in the sign of Aries. They are in the springtime, adolescent, don’t-hate-the-player-hate-the-game—mansion of Mars. Mars! god of war and desire—fast, angry, and bound to get visited by so many ghosts. Mars is playing host to Venus. Venus cucks him and yells at him. In this movie, Jennifer Garner’s character does both quite a bit.

There are no good men in this movie. They can’t figure out how to have a male OR female character exist without being a winy, cucked b*tch, an uptight scold, or a shallow yet hot horrorshow. How to be masculine or feminine, then, without abusing or bending to what the mystic and philosopher Simone Weil calls force?

Force. Here’s Simone Weil (an Aquarius—and Aquarius figures heavily in this chart, it’s the wintry and mental enviro of its 8th house, which I’ll speak to in a minute—): “The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection. Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly.”

Room for reflection!

In this movie, to quote our episode, “everyone sucks.”

But, romcoms good and bad are excellent rooms for reflection.

Gemini, twinning—seeing oneself in the ghost, for the first—maybe—time.

The 8th house, in the chart I pulled above, is stacked. The 8th house is all about other people’s stuff—energy, karmic loads, money—and how we carry that stuff. Also: sex and death. What we get from relationships and what/who we owe. Here: the freaky and heavy air of the past. Life’s bittersweet golden hour. The main character in Ghosts of GFs Past is damaged, in part, we learn, because his playboy uncle, whom he idolizes, taught him from a tender young age that women are objects to be acquired then discarded. He taught him to protect his heart via playing the field. Tale as old as time.

Jupiter in the 8th: unexpected meaning, depth, notions of order inside 8th house hardships and thrilling experiences. This is how we made sense of this movie. It’s a lovely chart—-earth, fire, air—-a chart with a penchant for the taboo, a philosophy of the taboo and the underworld—-a cosmos made and unmade of how it carries and discards people, experiences, and ghosts. A chart of ambivalence and tricks. Groovy. But a groovy chart, a groovy moment in time, does not necessarily make a groovy movie.

How do we live with the horrors-joys of our pasts (ghosts, boyfriends, girlfriends, family dramas and traumas) without discarding them entirely? How to face the most difficult, magnetic, repellent beings and pieces of ourselves? How to repent?

Who and how to forgive—as we walk into the end of the year—through the daze of the holidays—-the strange dreams of things we cannot take back or simply can no longer take?

To paraphrase Simone Weil (I keep mentioning her because I’m deep in research mode for a weekend class called SUPERNATURAL KNOWLEDGE at the end of this year)—-the destruction of the past is the only criminal act.

The holidays (holy daze)—-

room for reflection.

The past comes back.

Repetition—Gemini—-

Repetition and first time.

Then we arrive, tired, at the center of the twinkling labyrinth where we meet with the beautiful bull, see him anew.

And for a musical and glistening moment, no one—-nothing….sucks.

xxE