(First published on personal blog https://vincent.xyz/posts/movie_review/a_ghost_story/ )
After the death of a person, the ghost is not scattered, because there is still something to worry about in the human world.
"Ghostbusters" and "Dream Travel" depict death from two perspectives.
The theme of "Dream Hunting Travels" is that our eternal life comes from the memory of the world, and when the memory dissipates, we even die completely from this world. That is to say, this kind of "life" still depends on external conditions to continue, rather than being controlled by the dead.
The world of the undead also has life and death, and the real death is the moment forgotten by the world.
Then there is a question, if I write my own story into a book and bury it somewhere in the world. Decades later, I am dead, so are those who missed me, and so are my dead souls. But after thousands of years, someone found this work and pieced together my story, so will I be resurrected? Or this memory is not mine, but his imagination.
If so, the undead country is just a transfer station between life and death.
"Ghosts and Ghosts" is different. After death, people rely on a stream of vitality to support the white sheets. This power comes from the self, from the memory of a relationship, and the memory and reluctance to part with the world. When this power dissipates and the vitality dissipates, the white bed sheet will finally fall to the ground.
The ghost in the flowered sheet said, "I don't think they'll come back again" and disappeared. What force continues to support the ghosts in white sheets to stay in the world?
After watching the film, the puzzle is how the shuttle between the future and the past is completed.
My understanding is this: we live in a time dimension, in time, we can only move forward but not backward, in this time axis, the world of physical world space unfolds to us. We are at the same time in a space where there is an abundance of three-dimensional structures.
The post-death soul presented in the film lives in a spatial dimension, and he has always been in the place where obsession brought him back. Then everything that happens in that space at different times is projected onto this space, which also allows the soul to create the conditions for traveling through time.
For a undead after death, the plot related to him has been completed, he can sit quietly in front of the window and watch the whole movie, and can know the ending "in advance", because this ending is destined to have nothing to do with him.
"Ghostbusters" is about life and death, love, literature and philosophy. Woolf's novels flash in the film, Nietzsche is on the bookshelf, and Love in the Time of Cholera is read by the heroine.
What was written on the last piece of paper? Not important anymore.
The important thing is whether this soul chooses to leave completely, perhaps in the end, it is because the external world still provides a reason for him to stay. In this sense, "Ghosts and Ghosts" and "Dream Hunting" should be the same destination.
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