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Ghost at 30: the shock romantic blockbuster that tried to do it all
Jul 13, 2020
A merican cinema has never had a star quite like Patrick Swayze , who now seems like a bridge between eras, redefining masculinity after an 80s dominated by brute-force heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and, to a much lesser extent, Chuck Norris. Jean-Claude Van Damme had some of his velvet-hammer appeal – the romantic coupling in Bloodsport was about showing off his body, not his girlfriend’s – but Swayze’s gentle, zen-like self-assurance was much rangier, unlimited to any one genre. It was not just the Catskills that were scandalized by his sexuality in Dirty Dancing, but the culture at large, and it kept slipping through even in male-oriented, adrenalized action fare like Roadhouse and Point Break.
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The notion of a star like Swayze paying attention to women and serving their fantasies is more radical than it seemed, especially at the time of his ascendence, but it does a lot to account for the success of Ghost, which barreled through mostly dismissive reviews to become the biggest hit of 1990. The money scene of a shirtless Swayze sidling up to Demi Moore at the pottery wheel, shaping wet clay from vase to phallus as the Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody plays in the background, was perhaps something only he could pull off. Director Jerry Zucker, better known at the time as one-third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof squad behind Airplane! , was aware enough that he was pushing the edge of parody; in fact, only a year later, “the brother of the director of Ghost”, David Zucker, referenced the scene in The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear.
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