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Thinks... SATURDAY 22ND FEB. Last night the film Ghost was on television after the News, and I decided to watch it, although I'd seen it before, with Martin - or rather I watched it because I had seen it before with Martin. It was a surprise hit when it first came out and everybody was talking about it. We enjoyed it, I recalled, even as we rather despised its slick exploitation of the supernatural. I remembered only the bare bones of the plot: a young man is murdered in the street walking home with his girl, and tries to protect her from the conspirators who killed him, though as a ghost he is invisible and can only communicate with her through a medium. The few details of the movie that had lodged in my memory were the special effects when characters died: for instance, the hero gets up from the ground apparently unscathed and only realizes that he's dead when he sees his distraught girlfriend calling his own lifeless body in her arms; and when the baddies die they are immediately set upon by dark gibbering shapes that drag them screaming off to hell (surprisingly satisfying, that). And I remembered that Whoopi Goldberg had been very funny in the role of the fraudulent medium who is disconcerted to find herself genuinely in touch with the spirit world. These things were just as effective the second time around. What I wasn't prepared for was the way the love story would overwhelm me. Demi Moore, whom I've always considered a rather wooden actress, seemed incredibly moving as a bereaved heroine. When her eyes filled with tears, mine brimmed over. In fact I spent most of the movie weeping, laughing at Whoopi Goldberg through my tears. I knew in my head that the movie was cheap, sentimental, manipulative rubbish, but it didn't make any difference. I was helpless to resist, I didn't want to resist. I just wanted to be swamped by the extraordinary flood of emotion it released. When the ghostly hero reminds the sceptical heroine, through the Whoopie Goldberg character, of intimate and homely details of their life together that nobody else could possibly know, and it dawns on Demi Moore that her dead lover really is communicating with her, my skin prickled with goosepimples. When the hero (I've already forgotten his name, and that of the actor who played him) acquires the powers of a poltergeist and uses them to terrify the thug threatening Demi Moore, I crowed and clapped my hands in glee. And when, in a subliminally silly scene towards the end, Whoopi Goldberg allows him to inhabit her body so that he can dance cheek to cheek with Demi Moore to the smoochy tune they made love to at the beginning.well, I almost swooned with vicarious pleasure and longing. Afterwards I had a long hot bath and sipped a glass of wine as I replayed favourite scenes from the film in my head, and before I went to sleep I masturbated , something I haven't done since I was a teenager, imagining that Martin's ghost hand had inhabited mine and that he was making love to me. When I woke in the small hours I felt depressed, as usual, but not ashamed. In a curious way it was a cathartic experience. Thinks... was a pick right out of New York Times recommended books. I waited for this weird book for many many weeks and when I finally received it, I couldn't understand why it had been so popular. Then I got to the middle of the book and it got more interesting. The bits about cognitive science and the human brain, consciousness were interesting and the characters were quirky but stayed with me long after I finished the novel.

©2005 karenika.com