Headscratchers / Ghost (1990)

• While this is a favorite movie of mine, there’s one element I was never able to buy: Sam by the end gets so proficient at interacting with the physical world that it's really hard to believe the existence of ghosts could ever be doubted by the living. (Just to be clear—I'm not a believer in ghosts in the real world, I'm simply commenting on the film's internal logic.) By the end, he's levitating objects with ease and even composing coherent typed and written messages. If just a tiny percentage of ghosts had those powers, before long even the most dedicated skeptics would have a very hard time denying their existence. This is why most movies about ghosts (e.g. The Conjuring, The Sixth Sense, hell even Beetlejuice) place strict limits on what ghosts can do, providing at least some rationale for the idea that they can exist despite most living people not believing in them. Ghost would have fit just fine into that tradition if it had stuck with Sam's initial powers that he discovers, such as the ability to communicate through a medium or to scare the occasional cat. I'd even be okay if he figured out how to make objects move, as long as it remained an elusive and unreliable skill; you see that in plenty of ghost stories. The problem is that this film has Sam become such an expert at manipulating physical objects—and in so short a time—that by the end he's pretty much fully able to make his presence known to anyone he wants to. I think the film was trying to imply this power isn't known to most ghosts, and that the Subway Ghost figured it out by accident due to his mental problems but didn't share the secret with anyone else until Sam managed to convince him to do so. But this strikes me as a pretty Contrived Coincidence—that Sam just happened to come across the one ghost with this ability and just happened to be the one who found a way to get him to open up about it. With presumably billions of ghosts in the world, I imagine such a secret would have been discovered loads of times until it was no longer a secret—long before Sam became a ghost. The notion that it would be rare doesn't make much sense. Our willing suspension of disbelief can only go so far.
  • Looking at the evidence, I think the real issue is that most of the time ghosts don't have the right incentive to do anything physical. Most of the other ghosts we see want to talk with people they left behind, but from what we see Sam can't focus his emotional control to do more than lift certain objects for a few moments, so writing something with a pen isn't practical as it would require too much fine motor control, and passing on a message through the computer probably takes more effort (I picture Sam just typing a few keys and then setting it to copy and paste repeatedly when he was tormenting Carl). In the end, ghosts stay hidden because most of them are content to watch rather than interact with others; Sam just had a clear reason to want to do something more than pass on a message while he was still here on Earth.
• At the end, Sam allows himself to go to heaven because Molly is no longer in danger. However, upon his death, he (by his own choice) only stayed on Earth because Molly was begging him not to leave her, neither knowing about the set up and potential danger until a few days later. Am I missing something here?
  • Presumably after a whole movie of ghost shenanigans, he felt that she was able handle herself. Sticking around would probably also impair her ability to move on from her grief, which Sam wouldn't want to do, so he leaves.
• It was only a small moment, but was there any significance to Sam's "double-dream" upon his death?