Questionable Relationship Models for Children #2: Casper

I am not a very entertaining person at my own house, so when my friends come over, we typically watch movies or play Mario Party. I have a huge and diverse collection of movies, particularly of the "family" variety, and sometimes when we're all in a silly mood, we go through all my videotapes from when I was a kid. The other night we decided to watch Casper.

"Smash hit" might be exaggerating a little. "Theatrical" might also.

You might not know this because you are probably a normal person, and haven't seen Casper since you were eight (or ten, if you had a big fat crush on Devon Sawa like I did), but Casper is just chock full of screwed-up relationships. I'm not even talking about just romantic ones. Every character in this movie is going to have to go through family sessions with their therapist.

Luckily, they all have the same therapist!

I won't go into the weird relationships between secondary and tertiary characters (like Billy and that forgettable Popular Chick). I'll just give you the few main ones that stuck out to me.

Kat and Her Dad, Dr. James Harvey
Here is a classic American story: A grief-stricken widower, saddled with a whip-smart daughter on the brink of womanhood, packs up his life and moves around the country hoping to find his dead wife floating around in someone else's home.

Wait, what?

Dr. James Harvey is a traveling ghost therapist. That is his job.

In the car on a trip literally across the country (from Santa Fe to coastal Maine), his daughter, Kat, complains a lot about how she doesn't want to move so much, because she just wants to make friends, wahh. That's okay. She's twelve, whatever. We'll just let her whine about wanting to go to her first school dance.

But then she starts making cracks about her dad's career, and actually questioning his sanity. She tells him that ghosts, AKA his main source of income, don't exist, and that therefore his quest to find her dead mom is stupid and pointless. (Not to mention kind of traumatizing, when you think about it; her mom just died, and her dad is still insisting that she's out there somewhere, hiding from them.)

Surprisingly, Dr. James Harvey takes his daughter's complete disrespect of his life choices pretty well. I mean, she's still in the car when they get to Maine, so we have to assume.

When they get to the house, Casper pops up in Kat's room. Kat screams, and her dad comes running. After she manages to get out "UMTHERESAGHOST", he basically pats her on the head with an infuriatingly patronizing smile, and walks around her room opening doors and going, "WHERE'S THE GHOST, KAT? NO GHOST HERE. OH, NO GHOSTS HERE! NOPE. NONE HERE."

And then of course he sees Casper and screams. Because that is just what you do when you see Casper, and also, UMTHERESAGHOST.

Let's back up a bit.

Dr. James Harvey has just admitted that he has never ever seen a ghost before. You know, those things that he specializes in therapizing, and drives around he country taking people's calls and money to fix? He's never seen one before. In fact, until he actually sees Casper, he doesn't believe they exist. He has been told that this house is haunted by vicious, smelly ghosts. He has been hired to try and help said ghosts because he is widely renowned as a ghost therapist. He is here SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE OF GHOSTS, but when Kat tells him she saw one, he just smiles and goes "Oh, honey. You're so stupid."

Summary: Dr. James Harvey is a con man.

He's also a troll. "Let's find your dead mom, Kat! I don't actually believe that we'll ever find her, but let's spend a couple of years looking, JUST IN CASE."

What a nice, normal, all-American family. And speaking of families. . .

Casper's Uncles and. . . Well, Everyone
I'm not totally sure that the three other douchey ghosts who live in Whipstaff Manor are really Casper's uncles, like he says they are. No mention is ever made of his father having any brothers, and even though he knows nothing about his previous life and it really bugs him, he's never bothered to ask them.

It might just be because they're jerks.

But that doesn't seem likely.

Stinky, Fatso, and Stretch are great big douches to everyone indiscriminately, but they're particularly vile to their bulb-headed "nephew", Casper. They routinely fling him into space, throw fully digested food all over the house he has to clean, and stuff him into tight places when he's annoying them.

This is a weird relationship, not really an abusive one, because Casper can leave.

Yes. Casper is not tied to the house. He comes and goes as he pleases, and since he doesn't know anything about his life before Kat shows up (and ruins everything), there's no sentimental ties holding him there. He can leave any old time he wants to. He can also become invisible if he wants, so his uncles can't find him. But he doesn't.

When Dr. James Harvey and Kat move in, Casper's uncles kind of freak out and go on a rampage to try and get them out of the house. They do attend Dr. James Harvey's therapy sessions (where he seems totally out of his element, and he is, because HE IS A CON MAN), and learn that he has been searching for his dead wife. Naturally, the ghosts know his dead wife, and tell him they can totally hook a brother up.

Then they stage an elaborate prank in which the fat uncle dresses up like Jessica Rabbit and makes out with Dr. James Harvey.

What a bunch of swell guys.

Later on, they decide that they sort of like Dr. James Harvey, because he's so full of life (what with his obsession with death and debilitating loneliness and all), and take him out for a drink. Because as everyone who's besties with a clinically depressed and grieving single dad knows, drinking with ghosts fixing everything. I'm also pretty sure they're at a bar in Mexico, but that's not important.

Then they try to kill him.

They try to kill their new best friend with guns and javelins and knives. Because he's like, so cool, but he has to live, and that like, totally sucks.

He dies (not because of them, but it's not like they try to stop it) and they all fly back to the house with the newly ghostified Dr. James Harvey in tow, and proceed to make fun of Kat for being upset that her dad is now dead.

HAHAHA LET'S ALL LAUGH AT THE ORPHAN HAHAHA YOUR DAD IS DEAD.

I could seriously go on for hours about what special guys Casper's uncles are, but I really want to get to this next one. I hope you're comfortable, because we're going to be here a while.

Casper and Kat
Casper is just your average 12-year-old transparent flying kid. He just wants a friend, and every time he tries to make one, they run away screaming because he is a damned, undead soul. How sad.

While in the cartoon, he would have just tried to kill himself when his new friends ran away, the movie deviates a little bit and decides that what Casper really needs is therapy.

Hey, it's the 90's.

While listlessly flipping through channels that all seem to feature people running away from ghosts, Casper stumbles across a tabloid news show feature on Dr. James Harvey (that, by the way, is positively riddled with puns). He kinda perks up at the idea that there are apparently people who specialize in fixing the dead, but he doesn't really get excited until he sees that Dr. Harvey has a totally hot daughter who's his age.

Well, who would be his age if he hadn't been dead for the last hundred years.

He sets a plan in motion to get the evil blonde lady who owns the house to hire Dr. James Harvey, not because he wants therapy, but because he wants Kat. He could care less about priceless, rare ghost therapy. He just really wants some snarky prepubescent Christina Ricci.

Upon discovering that his plan actually worked, Casper goes through one of those cutesy little "what to say to this girl I have a crush on" montages, and decides that the best way to go about introducing himself is to make himself into a pillow and get under her head when she lies down.

Nope. Nothing weird here.

When Kat finally notices the weird, doting white mass floating around behind her, she, naturally, faints. When she comes to, Casper responds like any normal lovestruck little boy would, and wraps his body around her head, gagging her.

Above: How all great relationships start.

Over the next few days, Casper makes all Kat's meals, follows her to school, makes fun of her new school crush, and watches her sleep. He repeatedly whispers "Can I keep you?", which is SOMETHING A SERIAL KILLER WOULD SAY, in her ear while she is falling asleep.

When Kat refuses to take him to the class Halloween dance, because he is not a real live person, Casper, surprisingly, reacts pretty well.

Just kidding! He KIDNAPS her. He pushes her out her bedroom window, swoops down to grab her by the ankle, and while she is KICKING AND SCREAMING "NO", he flies her out over the ocean and drops her on a lighthouse somewhere so they can talk.

THESE ARE THINGS MURDERERS DO.

When Casper finally remembers who he is, he conveniently recalls that his brilliant scientist dad built a machine sometime back in the 1800s to bring him back to life. He gives Kat the responsibility to work the insanely complicated resurrection machine and make him a real boy again.

Why? All of his relatives and friends are dead. Except for Kat, that is. Casper wants to be alive again solely so that he can be Kat's boyfriend.

Come on, baby, it'll be easy. And then we can be together. Forever.

Can you imagine the guilt trips he'd send her on if that actually happened? Every time they got into a fight, he'd remind her that she's literally the only reason he's even alive.

Luckily for Kat, her dead dad shows up right then, and Casper decides it would probably better his chances with Kat if he lets her dad live instead of him. So Kat is off the hook, for now.

There's not really much more after that, just Casper turning into Devon Sawa for a slow dance with Kat, and they kiss, and then he re-ghostifies and everyone screams and runs away, and Casper and Kat and Dr. James Harvey dance happily.

And that's it. That's the end of the movie. There's no resolution at all.

Here. I'll give you resolution.

Do you really think Kat and Casper's relationship is going to last beyond this at all? She is going to go to school on Monday and be a complete outcast, ant that's only if her and her con man father don't get run out of town first. You know who she's going to blame for that? Casper. Because it is entirely his fault.

Kat is going to grow up, and Casper is going to stay twelve forever. He's not going to understand when Kat gets her first period, or when she wants to actually try to have a relationship. He's twelve, and a ghost. She'll be like, "Casper, I want to go out on a date," and he'll be like, "D'AWW SHUCKS KAT, LET'S PLAY PIRATES!"

Let's face it, they're not staying together. But he is going to be around for her first real boyfriend, and every boyfriend after that. Because he is never going to leave her alone. He is going to watch everything that she does, and guilt her about it. He is going to follow her for the rest of her life, and turn her into a big paranoid blubbering mass of Jell-O.

Which is basically what Casper is, actually.

And like I said, that's the best-case scenario: that she and her father aren't run out of town with pitchforks and torches. Or exorcised painfully, or sent to an institution, or killed in their sleep, for fraternizing with the reanimated spirits of dead people.

But let's be honest, here. When Casper realizes all this, he is probably just going to kill her.

CASPER
The REALLY Friendly Ghost

"You know, for kids!"