Politics, the human condition and a discourse on semiotics: not what you’d expect from a Mathew McConaughey film. But then again, when dealing with ghost films, what you expect is never what you get.
Loveable beach-bum Mathew McConaughey plays loveable suburban-bum Mathew McConahow, a 30-something bachelor who is still reeling from the loss of first (and up until now, only) girlfriend, Janet Walkin (played by Megan Fox). The film begins with McConahow and Walkin’s last date. They eat a nice Thai dinner, go out dancing, and go on a carriage ride. But the sweet moment turns sour when Walkin collapses into a vomit-induced coma. McConahow wakes in a cold sweat and we see how truly haunted our protagonist is.
“I wanted McConahow to be really traumatized, he is my allegory for our traumatized nation,” admits writer/director Steven Soderbergh as he sipped on his macchiato. “McConahow is our voice, one that howls in the night.”
McConahow deals with his loss by visiting Dr Lisa Madow (played by Jennifer Garner), together they work through the trauma and slowly form a romantic bond. Just as McConahow has found love again, we see Walkin’s ghastly image appear in a background mirror.
“It’s an argument against teleological history, you know,” chuckles McConaughey, also billed as executive producer. “Most horror films are cheap thrills, but we wanted to shake the foundation of American education. Janet represents a crisis, a human ‘death instinct’ if we’re going to go from the Freud angle, and she doesn’t appear in one point in history. She reoccurs, she is a continuous struggle. It’s pretty chill.”
Walkin doesn’t just return to peer menacingly, she is out to exact vengeance. After the usual floating vases and broken windows, Walkin reaches out from the mist and posses the body of Dr. Madow.
“It’s all about Lacan,” laughs Garner. “It’s about discovering past trauma and limit in a ‘big’ other, the other that Lacan puts a bar through. Lacan ascribes the bar through the other because for him it does not exist. We are not dealing with syntax and semiotics so instead of placing a bar through the other, we put a ghost in her.”
McConahow must make the ultimate decision that every love-struck bachelor must make at some point: keep the animated body of their lover despite his ex-girlfriend feeding off of her soul or banish both body and souls into the hellmouth.
“You think you know what’s coming but you don’t,” smiles Fox. “It’s very Foucault, in the sense of sentence syntax. You don’t know what the sentence’s context and content is until you get to the end. What’s the argument, what’s the meaning? You read ‘This Is Not A Pipe’? Well, this is not a horror film.”
A Haunting of Ex-Girlfriends is to premier in art-house cinemas around the nation in July.
“I’d d some reading before you see this film”, again chuckles McConaughey, “it’s gonna blow your dome.”
No comments:
Post a Comment