by Chris Feil
A convergence of the romantic, the spooky, and the outright earnest happened in the early 90s with Ghost, most notably immortalized through song through the ripe feeling of The Righteous Brothers’ version of “Unchained Melody”. It was the kind of megasmash that only this era could have produced, and the kind of instantly classic movie moment that distills the era. But for the past thirty years, the sight of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in clay-mate-tion has been burned into our minds and our cultural loins in ways few musical scenes can equally measure.
We all know the scene: in the middle of the night, Swayze’s Sam Wheat stumbles to his beloved potteress, Moore’s Molly. As The Righteous Brothers begins on their fully functioning jukebox (by today’s standards, they’d be hipsters if not for Sam’s Wall Street job), Sam wraps himself around her as they try and fail to make some kind of very phallic vase. The song swells and they’re off to making passionate whoopy before even washing their clumpy hands. It’s all terribly, terribly sexy and it inspired a generation of lovers to take pottery classes and multiple generations of mocking, loving tributes.
Ghost is a straightfaced love story despite its outlandishness, and “Unchained Melody” is appropriately huge in its feeling. It’s an uncanny song for this romance, unabashedly earnest but with an otherworldly, gloomy quality. Bobby Hatfield’s vocal seems to come from beyond, the faint echo in the sound mix having a ghostly sound of grave sexual consequence. It’s a song that can and does manage a lot of the heavy lifting to project an earth-shattering kind of love, the kind you’d refuse to leave behind in the afterlife.
The song’s use in Ghost is iconic enough to also usurp its legacy to another film entirely, if understandably so. “Unchained Melody” originated as an original, Oscar nominated song for (wait for it) a prison B-movie called Unchained. After it become something of a standard repeated by many artists, The Righteous Brothers contributed their version a decade after its creation. Even though it was originally a B-side for the duo, it would still ultimately become the definitive version well before Sam and Molly got horny for pottery.
And yet the legacy of the song is inextricable from the genre-bending film - to hear it is to immediately envision the entwined, gloopy fingers of Swayze and Moore, a glimpse of that very image immediately flickers the opening coo into your brain. The kind of lighting bolt of culture that inspired immediately copycats and parodies - you can imagine the endless memes it would have created today. Instead, we had (and still have) the song set to riffs on its singular sexuality, or jabs about ghost boyfriends and the like. Singers on reality singing competitions can’t take a swing at the song without their celebrity judges making a punchline about clay.
But even beyond the jokes, there is still something indelible about the convergence of peak Patrick Swayze clad only in jeans, Demi’s bowl cut and sleeveless linen, and The Righteous Brothers conjoining them in profound musical ache and desire.
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