"You're White": You Can Do Anything" Hollywood's Celebration of the Colonial Post in a Postapartheid Temporal Enclave

Abstract

The Ghost and the Darkness (dir. Stephen Hopkins, 1996) possesses ingredients that could have yielded a film that was popular and perhaps even iconic. It features Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas, two major stars in the 1990s. It was written by William Goldman and photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, both Oscar winners. Yet critics dismissed this period melodrama about killer lions as being derivative of Jaws (French; Newman). Even key players in the production expressed disappointment in Ghost’s quality (Goldman 94; Logan). Since its release, Ghost has not received critical reappraisal, nor has it achieved ironic cult status. Roger Ebert commented that Ghost “lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it’s funny. It’s just bad.” However, Ghost’s ineptitude is a key reason why postcolonial scholars interested in the environmental humanities should revisit this text.