A Critical Review

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

How failure to use the 9 Ingredients properly causes box office failure every time

The filmmakers had high hopes for Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.  Unfortunately the writers and the director did not know of the power – the unmitigated power – of the 9 Ingredients absolutely vital to making a hit film.  Nor did they know of a profound psychological truth that makes this film so distasteful to audiences when they thought it would be the dream of every adolescent male. 

The basic flaw of Ghosts – and there are many – is that though it purports to be a Love Story, it is anything but a Love Story, principally because the filmmakers do not know the difference between sex and Eros – a difference very few adults even understand.

And there is another reason, an even deeper reason.  While the filmmakers thought they were making a film about the adolescent male’s sexual fantasy, they failed to understand a far deeper psychological truth – that the man who is a Don Juan, a male whose emotional life centers on his being able to sexual conquer every good looking female he sees – the male who would go to bed with the fire hydrant if it tipped its cap – is actually, underneath his Persona of being a great sexual athlete, is his deep-seeded fear that he’s secretly a homosexual.

Consciously he pretends to be a super-potent, sexually charged man-among-men - but what he fails to see is his need to constantly conquer new women is a desperate attempt to prove to himself that he is not impotent, that he is a sexual failure, and even more important that he’s incapable of Eros – very different from sex – of forming a lasting, powerful, stable relationship with a female because of his own fear of the femininity within him that he’s trying desperately to conquer.

Like the religious zealot who has to convert everyone he sees because in his unconscious he really doubts what his conscious Persona is saying and believes, and therefore has to project out his doubt – unknowingly – onto the convert, and if he can convince the convert that his religious belief is valid, he can heave a big sigh of relief, say “Whew!,” and be temporarily assuaged that his religion and belief are real.

So, too, the man who has an obsessive compulsive need to sexually conquer woman after woman is projecting – again, unknowingly – his fear of the feminine in himself onto the new conquest, and if he can conquer her, and getting in bed with her is the ultimate conquest in his mind, then he can also heave a sigh of relief, say “Whew!,” and temporarily believe he is masculine, that he is sexually potent. 

What makes this man have homosexual tendencies in his unconscious?  His fear of the feminine in himself, which he projects out onto every new girl conquest, and temporarily believes he’s more powerful than the female within whom he is terrified of.  (This female is called the Anima, and I write extensively about it and the role it plays in determining everything in a man’s life by the development of his anima and the way the man relates to it, how the Anima determines every relationship he will have, especially to all the women in his life - his lover, his wife, his sisters, his daughters – everyone.) 

When the feminine is more powerful than a male’s fragile ego, he desperately seeks help against her and one of the ways he does that is to try to find the masculinity he lacks in other men, sometimes as going as far as needing a homosexual relationship to satisfy his deep-seeded feelings of inferiority of being a real man.  (This is of course different from the role biochemicals or genetics plays in homosexuality.)  

None of this knowledge of the psyche would the filmmakers be expected to know about, just as they would not know about the difference between sex and Eros.  Unless they were a sophisticated psychological professional, they couldn’t possibly know how this adolescent sexual fantasy of a film would either turn people off, or at the least, leave them totally uninterested – except for the males who at whatever age have this adolescent sexual fantasy alive in them (because of their fear of being impotent underneath).

But there is another major failure the filmmakers made in producing this film.

They seriously violated or left out many of the major 9 Ingredients – the 9 reasons people go to one movie and not another.  There is no Undeserved Misfortune which gives us anyone in the film to identify with.  There is a tiny flicker of Curiosity, and some presence of Superior Position because it’s a very poor remake of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but unfortunately every time we undergo Superior Position in the film, we don’t learn anything new about the character.  All we see is him philandering in another phase in his life, or learning how to philander, all of which was disgusting to anyone who’s gone beyond the adolescent sexual fantasy stage. 

The only time we learn anything from Superior Position is when McConaughey discovers no one comes to his funeral, the knowledge of which activates his deep-seeded Rejection Complex – his fear of being rejected, especially by women – and causes some change in his character that causes him to come to some consciousness about the way he is living his life.  But at this stage it is very trite and is nothing more than a falsetto note in the narrative. 

Two other fatal flaws that marred the picture. 

The first is the picture has no Hero – no one where anyone’s ego to identify with, except the sexually disturbed adolescent male.  The man who is supposed to be our Hero is just simply despicable – in every way.  While Matthew McConaughey is the perfect choice to play this unbelievably narcissistic egocentric man in love with himself because McConaughey is that man in real life, down to his affected manner of speaking in which he puts on a phony southern accent, such an in-love-with-himself character is not a Hero. 

A principle of the 9 Ingredients is that the Hero can never be stupid, or disgusting, or despicable, or the purveyor of evil in some form or another.  McConaughey’s character in  this film is all of that, which deprives the film of having any real Hero.  (Jennifer Garner’s character, even with her serious faults, come the closest to the film having a Hero of any kind.)

Even worse, the character who is supposed to be our Hero to right the wrong and defend the weak and the oppressed against the Visible Villain, is himself the Visible Villain.  His lack of even simple human decency, his egregious conceit, and his even greater love of himself at a cost of everyone around him makes him despicable, disgusting and a clear Visible Villain of the picture.

Equally despicable is Michael Douglas’ character who tries to raise the sexual need to conquer women to some sort of noble craft or art form.  Even though he’s dead, what reveals this underlying psychological despicable attitude of the picture is even more clearly seen in Douglas’ character at the end of the film where even though he has passed over to the other side where according to every religion you become whole, you become fulfilled and live in peace and harmony, Douglas’ character is still tormented by his fear he’s not really a man and is forced to live out eternity still desperate in trying to prove his manhood. 

The Love Story is a gigantic falsetto in the film.  It is as phony as McConaughey’s charming personality is phony. 

First of all, Jennifer Garner’s character is presented as a healthy integrated human being, a woman of intelligence, substance and character - a highly skilled professional who’s got it all together.  So it is absurd beyond absurd that she could possibly find anything whatsoever to love in this very weak and cowardly man.  That she once had a great roll in the hay with him and thought she was in love with him would have disappeared long ago in a woman of her character and psychological substance, not to mention her moral and spiritual substance.  The ending is so contrived, so manufactured whole cloth out of nothing that has preceded it in the film, it doesn’t come organically out of the film that is essential for every true love story.  As one woman two rows behind me said out loud as the ending took place:  “Blah!  That’s ridiculous.”

Several viewers expressed anger over the poster advertising the picture because they said it led them to believe that Ghosts of Girlfriends Past was a romantic comedy just like Pretty Woman (poster is exactly the same), and it was light years away from being anything remotely close to Pretty Woman. 

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is another classic example of how the filmmakers’ failure to correctly apply the 9 essential Ingredients in a film condemns the film to either do poorly at the box office or be a total failure.