It was all the way back in October 2009 that I explained the concept of the Ghost Ship Moment. (The idea actually dates back to 2003, when Ghost Ship was brand new and Fenzel and I watched it on DVD.) So why revisit it now?
First off, there are things I said in the original article that I don’t agree with upon further reflection. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the GSM is NOT when Elrond declares “You shall be the Fellowship of the Ring.” That fully explains the title, but so what? The real Ghost Ship Moment, I think, is when Gandalf throws the ring in the fireplace and Frodo sees the words written on it, thus confirming that the ring is a big deal.
Secondly, a concept like this is lends itself really well to video. It was a lot of fun to dig up all these examples (and I assure you that Harry and the Hendersons is still a lot of fun).
So whether or not you’ve heard us talk about GSMs before, we hope you enjoy this explanation. We hope to produce more videos about the core OTI ideas, so let us know what you’d like us to tackle next!
I’d nominate the chest-burster scene as the Ghost Ship Moment in Alien. I think it especially effective because, although we know from the title and tag line that we’ll be meeting a nasty alien, the GSM is a big horrific surprise. (I don’t think that the initial introduction of the face-hugger counts as the GSM because it’s not really the eponymous character.)
That’s a really interesting one. My first impulse is to argue with you and say that finding the facehugger is the GSM. But now I think you might be right. Level 1 movie information is enough for us to know that the facehugger is just the beginning. Something else is coming. We probably don’t expect the chestburster, but we expect SOMETHING, and the characters all think everything is fine.
I’m quite sure that my favourite Ghost Ship Moment comes from a non-movie source, namely, a Neil Gaimans short story called “How To Talk To Girls At Parties”. I’m not sure whether it technically counts because it doesn’t have a poster or a tagline and the name doesn’t give away the big reveal, but as soon as you have read through the first few pages, you know it. The story is about two teenaged boys who are going to a party to meet girls. The cooler one tells the more awkward protagonist that “They are just girls. They don’t come from another planet.” And of course they do.
As soon the protagonist starts talking to the girls, the fact that the girls at the party are space aliens becomes blatantly obvious to the reader, as the girls are not exactly hiding it from anybody. They talk about bathing in sunfire with space whales and meeting insectoid-like people like themselves. All of this flies over the protagonists head, he manages to respond to smalltalk like “The home planet of our species died and we had to become a people of sound to survive” with “Uh, do you like Pernod?” It’s sort of adorable. The protagonist gets almost to the end of story before he has an experience that makes him get the fact. And this is great. The fact that the GSM is so late is what makes the story and its humour. It’s what it is built on.
This raises a fascinating possibility: could there be a movie where the Ghost Ship Moment never comes because the main character never figures out what’s going on? The closest I can think of would be any episode of Inspector Gadget, where Gadget will be convinced that the criminal mastermind is actually a kindly innkeeper, and be totally oblivious to his efforts to murder him. But even those DO have GSMs: at the end of the episode, the Chief always shows up to congratulate him:
“Well done Gadget! You’ve rounded up all the jewel thieves!”
“I did? I mean, yes I did!”
I suppose that both Being There is a bit like that, although I don’t think the audience knows what the story is going in.
Another interesting edge case is “alternative timeline” movies, such as Sliding Doors, where the audience knows the key aspect of the narrative, but the characters by definition can’t.
It’s been years since I’ve seen the movie, but maybe Burn After Reading would count? I seem to remember at least one of the characters figured out how everything played out at the end, but I think it was a secondary character, not a protagonist.
Is the GSM dependent on the protagonist having the realization, or can it be any character? And if it’s the former, how do ensemble pieces work?
Well let’s see, the premise of Burn After Reading is that two knuckleheads find the memoirs of a spy. The key question is, do they know what it is? Or are they so dumb they’re somehow convinced it’s a cookbook?
Don’t most superhero origin story films have some kind of GSM? The audience knows going into the movie that Peter Parker will learn that he is to fight crime in a unitard using his spider-powers, but he doesn’t know that until well into the film(s).
(Although the GSM itself may not be as sharply defined, I think this may apply in its most extreme case to Smallville, where it takes ten full seasons before we actually get the GSM of “Superman” flying in the iconic tights as Clarke accepts his destiny.)
Smallville is an interesting case! On the one hand, it seems completely correct that Clark becoming Superman is the GSM. It’s the same as the Superman movie, just really slow.
But here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say the show ended WITHOUT Clark appearing as Superman. Let’s say it got cancelled suddenly, or the producers left it ambiguous in case there was interest in a movie. Then what? Is it then correct to say that the entire series has a GSM that’s inferred but never seen?
Here’s a fascinating case: the little-remembered John Cussack movie “Max,” in which Cussack plays a German art dealer who mentors a young painter… ADOLF HITLER. The movie ends when Hitler is just starting to rise to power. I think that this movie doesn’t have a Ghost Ship Moment, but it DOES have what we might call Ghost Ship Knowlege. We know what is going to happen to Hitler, and the characters don’t.
A more boring take on this movie is that it’s about a guy who mentors Hitler, so when Cussack says “I’d like to mentor you, Hitler,” that’s the GSM.
Smallville is complicated as well by constantly playing off against fan knowledge. “It’s X! But it’s not really X.” Watching that series with my sister, I was struck how often what might be considered inside information was basically irrelevant. “I could explain how this guy is based on a character who is an imp from another dimension, but really, that will not increase your enjoyment of this episode in any way.”
On the other hand, almost every other episode, it has a scene where the characters learn something plot relevant, that also has some simple or indirect connection to legacy superman information. So there’s the moment where he realises he can shoot heat vision, or see through walls, or where an introduced character’s powers are explained, or is called by the name of the thing they are a version of.
The series plays off the same kinds of feelings as ghost ship moments, with Lex and Clark chatting for series after series, but unlike us knowing that they are obviously going to turn out to be enemies as in some particular comic book, we also know it’s entirely possible that they will swerve from that at the last minute, and reveal that all along he was actually the version of “Alexander Luthor”, the heroic version from another earth, and the real Lex Luthor is his alternate universe version who was swapped at birth, and resents Lex and Clark for his stolen life etc.
But if you take Lex as a semi-protagonist, then he gets a Ghost Ship moment in his last episode, (and the last of the original creative team) when he finally discovers that Clark is from another planet. It’s possible this happened before, and he got his memory erased or something, (if so, I also forgot about it) but essentially they concluded an era of the show by revealing it’s premise to one of the characters.
This gives me an idea for a fun data-driven post: take a bunch of superhero movies with origin stories and log the points in the movie when we first see the character in full costume regalia, and when we first hear someone say the name of the character out loud. Not sure if there’s a hypothesis to prove (moments are coming sooner vs. later over time, etc.), but it would still be interesting to see if these story beats tend to happen at around the same point across multiple movies.
Smallville seems like a weird comparison to make, just because it’s a TV show, and the rest of the examples are movies. For a TV show, is there one GSM for the series, one each sesaon/arc, one each episode, etc.? (The 4th episode of season one is titled X-Ray, so the GSM must be when Clark realizes he has X-Ray vision, right? But that’s such a small beat in his overall arc, you wouldn’t call “discovering X-Ray vision” a GSM for the series.) But TV marketing is different from movie marketing, so you don’t have posters/taglines whatever, so it would hard to compile any real “level 1” information on an episode-by-episode basis.
An interesting addition could be how close or far we get the Superhero name from the first costumed appearance. In the case of Superman, Batman, or Spider-man it is pretty close, but Thor is the name of the Odinson, so long before he dons his regalia, he is called Thor.
Or Captain America. He is wearing the tights and called Cap, but he isn’t really doing the business of Cap, only selling war bonds.
So is the GSM the moment they get powers, or do the work of a superhero, or get a name, or wear a costume?
I want to bring up a point that SHOULDN’T have been a GSM, but was. It also touches on the distinction between Level 1 vs. Level 2 information brought up in the video.
Terminator 2 is *brilliantly scripted* so that for the first 10 minutes or so, you have NO IDEA which is the good terminator and which is the bad one. If you saw the first movie (and I don’t know whether that’s Level 1, Level 2, or Level 0.5), then you were primed to believe Ah-nod was still the bad guy, and that Robert Patrick was going to be the savior. And the movie taken purely on its own keeps this 100 % ambiguous until the fight in the mall corridor when you discover that the future Gubernator is actually the hero of the piece.
Ideally, not a GSM, just an amazing, unexpected turnabout that the audience should never see coming. The poster for the movie doesn’t give it away, so ALMOST genius.
Except – In summer of 1987, which is far enough pre-web that you’d THINK avoiding spoilers would have been possible – it wasn’t. They put the reveal in the trailer, and all the news coverage of the movie gave away the secret too. So suddenly that fight IS a GSM, because it’s the reveal of a piece of information that you SHOULD have been able to avoid, but couldn’t.
Dammit.
Really interesting example! I guess according to my rules, the GSM of T2 is when Arnold arrives. That’s all the poster is telling us. But yeah, the trailer spills all the cyberbeans.
Here’s a variation on my favorite film which potentially didn’t have a GSM: From Dusk Till Dawn. I first saw this back in 2000 when I got to college and some guys on my floor were discussing it. When I mentioned that I hadn’t seen it, they got quiet and asked if I knew what it was about. When I told them that all I knew was that it was about two criminals on the run who kidnap a family, they said that I had to see it with them. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone who’s reading this comment, but there is a pretty big plot twist which Tarantino and Rodriguez include. Considering the marketing and concept behind the film which was designed to withhold a vital piece of information about the plot, I’d argue the film doesn’t have a GSM.
PS: Regarding Wes Anderson’s lack of GSMs, I’d argue that it is this lack which resulted in so many philistine renters complaining about his movies back when I worked at Blockbuster. The people who demanded their money back or angrily claimed “The Royal Tenenbaums is the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen!” might have been reacting on some level to the film’s lack of a clearly identifiable GSM.
PPS: I’ve heard people complain about the lengthy buildup to the romantic consummation in Brokeback Mountain. They seem to want the GSM to happen a whole lot sooner, when it’s arguable that the delay and tension between Ennis and Jack allows for the audience to identify and understand the risks involved with their forbidden love.
I am not sure if its a GSM, but I keep thinking about “Dark City”. The film is basically a sci-fi noir film, and like many mystery stories there is no GSM because the appeal of the story is the mystery. Granted the theatrical cut of the film gives a way much of the mystery in an opening narration but the main character doesn’t realize the lack of sunlight until three-quarters of the way through the film.
Can individual characters have their own Ghost Ship Moments? In Finding Nemo, Dory’s short-term memory loss allows for her to have a completely separate GSM from Marlin near the end of the movie.
The first GSM is fairly straightforward. 10-15 minutes in, Marlin’s son Nemo is kidnapped by the dentist and Marlin gives chase. Once he loses track of the boat, he realizes he, too, is lost in the open ocean. It’s the inciting incident, and for the rest of the movie, Marlin’s entire mission is right there in the title.
Then there’s Dory’s GSM, which occurs 10-15 minutes from the end. Dory is the one who actually finds Nemo, but because of her memory loss, she doesn’t know it’s him right away. (“Nemo? That’s a nice name…”) Seconds later, a flood of memories come rushing back as the entire movie up to that point flashes before her eyes and she realizes she’s found Nemo.
I guess the question is: IS that a Ghost Ship Moment? She suddenly remembers what movie she’s been in for the last hour and change, and it’s a realization that affects the course of the story, so I’d wager it counts.