The Real (Symbolic, and Imaginary) Ghostbusters

What do these have in common?
I’m glad you asked, heading text!  Let’s break it down.  The first example derives horror from writing.  Libraries remind us that human knowledge can be separated from human subjectivity: there’s something faintly obscene about all those books just sitting around with no one reading them.  The second derives horror from language:  the idea that the same actress can be both Dana and Zuul implies that changing something’s name can change it’s entire identity, or more simply, that the symbolic representation of a thing is independent of the thing-in-itself.  Finally, the third example derives horror from mere signification.  The Ghostbusters aren’t fighting evil in the last scene, they’re fighting a symbol plucked from Dan Aykroyd’s mind to stand in for the fearsome Thing which his mind could not represent.  The Stay-Puft Marshmellow man is frightening precisely because the representation is so inadequate to that which it represents.

Pulsating, liquescent flesh.

All of these scenes, then, are about the horror of symbols gone wrong: too numerous, too powerful, or too weak.   This underlines an important point about the subconscious:  if you think you’re conscious of your subconscious thoughts, they aren’t subconscious anymore.  Our own repressed subconscious can never truly appear in a horror film, or at least not to us.  But we are sometimes aware – and are usually frightened by – the boundaries and limits of conscious thought.  This is what these scenes in Ghostbusters access:  not the Freudian Subconscious, but the Lacanian Real, which Slavoj Žižek vividly describes as the pulsating, liquescent flesh beneath the shell of an insect or a mollusc, unwholesome precisely because it has no shape of its own.  Everything that we experience, we experience through symbols, but in the boundary regions, where symbols are excessive or inadequate, where a remainder or a gap can be felt… there Slimer dwells, always hovering just outside our field of vision, unknown but constantly known-all-along.