Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s own Joe Aisenberg is turning his spotlight on Cinema, with his thoughts of a comedy/spooky classic: Who you gonna call, peeps?
By Joe Aisenberg
GHOSTBUSTERS (2016, not 1984)
Nothing could have been better for the 2016 remake of 1984’s mega hit Ghostbusters than a furious online campaign of originalist, sexist trolls who were such protectionist acolytes they couldn’t bear having their sacred movie remade, featuring a cast of women.
At the time, this gave seeing Ghostbusters an air of activist sanctimony, as if plunking down one’s money and parking one’s fat ass before the big screen were somehow doing society a favor. As it turned out, the nerds needn’t have worried. The movie’s underwhelming box office saved us all from a looming franchise. The people who should have been upset were fans of its stars, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon.
Yet the movie’s not totally terrible. Melissa McCarthy gets a chance to add nuance to her comedic range. With a plush physicality, she’s so finely tuned an artist she can, at will it seems, turn the volume on her effects all the way up to crazy stupid in movies like Bridesmaids or, as in Ghostbusters, pull everything back down to near normal, and still own the screen. Even when she’s subdued, as in Ghostbusters, one never knows quite what she’ll come out with, making her about the best reason to see a movie. What sucks is Ghostbuster’s dull-witted platitudinousness, another processed studio comedy built with an eye on an established audience nostalgic for ancient, moldy blockbusters. The need to make it “family friendly” gives the picture a tired kiddy atmosphere. No ghosts fellate anyone sadly, as happened to Dan Ackroyd during a clunky dream sequence in the original. Despite the comic possibilities of its premise — four women banding together to form a group of professional ghost exterminators — the result is confused, muddled by sci-fi supernatural conceits. It’s as if the filmmakers hadn’t had any idea what was on their minds beyond the fact they had a hot property as a star vehicle for women, and just made do with
the banal story beats and action finales tacked on to every Pixar movie. While it’s possible to get good comedy out of such ramshackle formula material — most comedy is cranked through some pretty rusty narrative machinery — it has to be transcended by a huge ratio of laughs. When dumb comedy is great it can be liberating with its deviant silliness, idiosyncratic bits of business and staging which seem to come out of nowhere and permanently lodge in one’s brain. But everything about Ghostbusters is so half-assedly soldered together; one has so much time twiddling one’s fingers not laughing, one can’t help dwelling on the extended setup and stretched out conclusion, til the thing collapses.
Although 144 million bucks or so got spent on this lumbering blob of a picture, you can’t tell where it went. Certainly not on Robert D. Yeoman’s cinematography. It has an apple-bright pop here and there but mostly it’s bland, in the over-lit style typical of studio comedies. If the money got burned on FX for the big spectral-parade the filmmakers cooked up to end the proceedings they ought to have gone another, cheaper direction. Less “believable” effects might have made for a funnier movie.
In the main, Ghostbusters constitutes a bunch of mildly amusing sketch situations and a lot of offensively inoffensive pandering to what the filmmakers assumed “progressive” audiences would approve of. There’s virtually no conflict between the characters (wasn’t much in the original either); the movie dotes on them, priming audiences to applaud female bonding and jokey action, because it features women as badass role models by re-defining the male comedy conventions of generations past. This is not an accomplishment. Understandably, everyone wanted a hit, but trotting out some piebald, warhorse moneymaker like Ghostbusters and trying to be high minded about it only served to underscore what unadventurous attitudinizing one had been getting from so many American films—comedy reduced to a series of life-lessons and uplift which ain’t all that edifying or uplifting. Instead of affirming the female bonding of its leads one would rather the new Ghostbuster’s screenwriters, Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, who also directed the movie, had gone lower and bitchier.
As a director Feig doesn’t have a lot of visual resources. He’s improved since the formless cliché-fest which was Bridesmaids, though, and actually seemed to be getting somewhere with his previous flick, the very enjoyable Spy. That one had a little bite. The chic, glazed, long-finger-nailed nastiness of its villain, Rose Byrne, gave Melissa McCarthy something to butt up against. The two had a kinky chemistry as irresistible as the more conventional vibe between McCarthy and the goofy, charming Miranda Hart character. Meanwhile its male specimens—Jude Law sleekly outfitted with suave, Bond-style narcissism; Jason Statham so battle hardened he’s practically choking on masculinity, a walking talking phallus—were both sent up and glamorized simultaneously. The movie reveled in the absurd appeal such fantasy objects present, underscored by the surprise reveal at the end when McCarthy wakes up, presumably after a bout of drinking, to find herself in bed with Statham, a man she had purportedly despised all through. This final shock neatly toppled the “healthy” feminist note of sisterhood between McCarthy and Hart the film had seemed about to go out on; when McCarthy began screaming at the sight of Statham next to her, his weary arrogant response, “You loved it” was a last laugh leaving the gender politics floating through the rest of the movie unresolved, a real comic subject.
Therefore one would have thought by this point Feig could trust the audience and push his material to the outer reaches of lewd, brazen funniness. Especially as each of his performers are freakish dynamos of hilarity. We’d have been laughing so hard we didn’t notice the gray patchy plotting which had sapped most of the energy out of the original Ghostbusters as well. But the movie is so clean cut with its femme-positive “message” it verges on inspirational. It’s out to show women can be smart and funny…but then we already knew that despite what Christopher Hitchens said on the subject. It’s about women “having agency” and being brave enough to put themselves on the line for one another. It’s about the “woman code.” But this kind of thing was corny in male movies; foisting such sentimentalized virtues on women doesn’t honor them. It infantilizes them.
Ghostbusters amalgamates bits from the original movie and its terrible 1989 sequel, Ghostbusters II. Kristen Wiig plays Erin Gilbert, a prissy academic whose prissy job at a prissy college is threatened when a long out-of-print book about supernatural phenomena, which she apparently co-wrote with her ex-friend, Melissa McCarthy’s Abby Yates, goes on sale at Amazon.com (product placement). She learns of this when the book brings to her the owners of a haunted colonial style house-museum. Because she’s about to get tenure; because she doesn’t want her prissy superior thinking she’s some sort of charlatan quack, Erin tracks her ex-friend and co-author Abby down to a seedy community college, to ask her to stop selling the book. Abby now runs a lab with oddball nuclear engineer Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon), who crafts cool high tech gadgets later used to catch ghosties. Comic bickering between Wiig and McCarthy ensues, so muddily written the point to the argument never quite comes into focus. Is McCarthy’s character mad because Wigg betrayed their ideals and friendship for mainstream academic success? Or is all this about Wiig having realized long ago, ghosts aren’t real? Doesn’t matter. Probably things were structured this way originally so that Wiig and McCarthy would be able to go at one another comically throughout, only after this first scene they never do again. In any case, after awhile, Wiig’s goes, oh I forgot to tell you but someone needs help with a pesky haunting. This prompts McCarthy and McKinnon to high tail it over to the site of the colonial museum, Wiig tagging along after them.
Yup, there’s a slimy ghost. Afterward, excited by observable proof, Wiig apologizes to McCarthy; decides to join hers’ and McKinnon’s mission. After which the women promptly lose their jobs. The higher ups at McCarthy’s and McKinnon’s school, it turns out, hadn’t actually realized their dumb department existed, which made me chuckle thinking: and the point to all this was?…
Next comes a montage of the women looking for a new place to hang their shingle. They eventually take up residence in a set of offices located over a Chinese restaurant, which are supposed to be terrible but look as expensive as anything else. Where, one wonders, did these bitches get the money for offices in New York? I suppose one can’t begrudge the film this implausibility because it means McCarthy and the delivery guy (Karan Soni) working in the Chinese restaurant below, whom she coincidentally fought with earlier in the movie, get a couple more chances to snipe at one another. Their sour exchanges were the only stuff I enjoyed.
Next the gang hires stupid, gorgeous hunk Chris Hemsworth to be their receptionist, so dumb he wears glasses without lenses so he can scratch his eyes through them. Wiig sexually harasses him during his interview, which feels weirder than cute, but not quite weird enough to be especially funny. Meanwhile Leslie Jones, who works a booth in the subway, has a run in with a ghost, seeks the ghost-hunting women out and hires herself on to their crew. Thankfully her character isn’t the embarrassment Ernie Hudson’s was in the original movie. Hudson had nothing to do but stand around providing token diversity. Still, Leslie Jones doesn’t fit comfortably here either. One feels the filmmakers struggling for a way to make her integral to the situation; the idea they’ve come up with — she loves history and knows the city’s architectural particularities—isn’t bad but is put to little practical use. This may be why the filmmakers had Jones be the one to come up with the idea for how to get rid of the ghosts loosed on society at the end. She suggests they plunge the gang’s nuclear weaponized ghostbusters hearse thingie down the gullet of an inter-dimensional portal so its blast will seal the holes in the movie’s plot, advice which ought to have come from the McKinnon character.
The person who inflicts the nasties on New York’s populace this time around is not the heavy metal, Lovecraftian demon goddess from another dimension played by Sigourney Weaver (now deemed sexist?), but a disgruntled creep who works as janitor at an old Deco hotel played by Neil Casey. In its basement, he’s built a bunch of big stupid machines in order to wipe out the walls between dimensions and turn the world into a huge haunted house. Considering how bland the movie’s world is, it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. All of which has been constructed at the same level as supernatural writing for television, only not as good. There’s even a scene where the heroines put pins in a map only to realize that, viewed from a distance, they form a pattern at the center of which the villain presumably waits to be vanquished. Why do bad guys always do things in special evil patterns? It wouldn’t matter if there were enough far out jokes to keep things humming, but no.
Forthwith our plucky heroines confront the evil janitor and do him in. Only they don’t. His spirit’s still around and proceeds to possess various members of the gang, leading to the inevitable head-spinning joke on The Exorcist, before finally settling into Chris Hemsworth’s sinewy body. With Hemsworth able now to function as the baddie we no longer have to look at the ugly janitor Casey anymore. Hemsworth can do all the eviling that needs doing, thank God. Things then shift into high gear and go all Clash of the Titans. Ghosts march through the city, ride around in cars. Our heroines fight possessed Hemsworth who bewitches both police and military. He spews a few sexist putdowns so we’ll know how really awful he is right before the gang saves the day for real. And in the process each ghostbuster gal behaves with admirable courage. The whole goddamn crew pitches in. Wiig even jumps down the portal at the end of a rope, as we’ve seen a thousand people do in about a hundred thousand movies, to save McCarthy, who got dragged in by accident. There for a few minutes I was on the edge of my seat thinking McCarthy might really and truly get sucked into a hell dimension forever … okay, I wasn’t.
Afterward the thankless authorities who, previously, had shamed and publicly repudiated our Ghostbusters, even as they secretly begged them for help, now decide to fund their work on what I guess will be a DARPA-like basis. How could that go wrong, right? Since no sequel came, we never found out.
The film is peppered with actor cameos and “callbacks” from the original Ghostbusters, too numerous to tick off, paying obeisance to the sad nostalgia which spawned the movie. There’s something creepy about watching the kitsch of one’s youth being so ostentatiously remade and transferred from one generation to another, as if it truly were legendary stuff. But at this point, one no longer bothers arguing “classic” movies like Jaws or the hopelessly juvenile Star Wars weren’t all that great. I guess I must be missing some gene allowing one to recognize the unquestionable breathtaking wondrousness of a decent, entertaining movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Gremlins, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China; the execrable Short Circuit and trashily fun Evil Dead II.
Hearing junk like Ghostbusters spoken of in tones of high regard one wonders how it’s possible. It makes one feel almost as impotent as poor Solomon Northup watching the Lupita Nyon’go character get CGI-beaten in Twelve Years a Slave, one of the funniest slave-whipping scenes in movies, ever.
In some ways the new Ghostbusters improves on the old. The only thing I missed from the original was Bill Murray, his bored wiseass routine. He had an appealing impudence. The way he mildly harassed a blonde, female telepathy test subject at the beginning of the movie and blithely antagonized authority figures like the putz William Atherton, a city official, marvelously undermined any stakes in the action-comedy situations. He took the piss out of everything. It almost seemed like Murray had been improvising his shtick, to keep from falling asleep; projecting a hip, self-amused, anarchic disdain for Ghostbuster’s blockheaded blockbuster sensibility which, ironically, was probably a big part of what made the clunky thing work so well as an actual blockbuster. I also missed Sigourney Weaver. With her statuesque look and intelligence, she just about managed to transcend a poorly written role, distracting us from the question why she had been chosen to be at the center of a cosmic battle for reality, other than narrative convenience. The rest of the cast — Ramis, Acroyd, Moranis; even wonderful Annie Potts — were fine but forgettable and ought to have been forgotten in the long ago nineteen-eighties.
The new version’s cast is a good deal fresher than the old, but there’s no defeating the plot machinery basic to Ghostbusters. Why? Kristen Wiig has shown a whacked out, wicked imaginative genius on Saturday Night Live. With her dingy, zany, blurry, stretchy features she can be everything, anything, a neurotic lesbian news anchor, a shallow entitled sorority girl, a demonic girl child or late-stage, pills-ed out Judy Garland. After she left the show and did her comedy hit Bridesmaids, she tried to push herself with interesting unsettling roles such as that of the unsympathetic mother in Diary of a Teenage Girl. It didn’t quite come off, because the screenwriter refused to follow through on the dramatic implications of the material, but it was a worthwhile, bracing attempt. Still, Wiig hasn’t quite figured herself out on the big screen. She always seems a little unsure, undeveloped. Her performances don’t go anywhere. She seems to work entirely top down, coming up with traits and ticks, hoping these will define her character’s essence. Maybe Feig didn’t give her much direction and left to her own devices she just kept trying out different approaches scene by scene, hoping to pull laughs from situations which don’t play. The buttoned up Wiig we see at the movie’s beginning doesn’t match the horny Wiig who aggressively harasses Hemsworth. The movie doesn’t have time even for the kind of pseudo feminist character growth you find in the lowest Goldie Hawn flicks, Bird on a Wire, Wildcats.
Kate McKinnon is similarly unplugged here, odd since her dedication to kooked out comedy has a total purity to it. With the handcrafted beauty of a stiff jointed marionette, all cheekbones and eyes, she’s monstrously lovely. On Saturday Night Live she had been allowed to play out scenes; was able to get a rhythm going with her weirdo characters, build them to a crescendo of belly laughs. In the process she usually upstaged everyone around her. In Ghostbusters Melissa Bretherton’s and Brent White’s editing keeps her scene stealing to a minimum; McKinnon never seems to get her act started let alone arrive anywhere. She’s all empty eccentricities. She gives a fractured clown performance made of bits and pieces which don’t cohere. I couldn’t even figure out what McKinnon was supposed to be making fun of. Q from the Bond films? If so the scriptwriters ought to have sent up the magical narrative convenience of such a figure. Throughout the movie one feels she’s about to ignite and take off into space, but the tension in her comedy timing is always being diffused due to scene or plot shifts. The only time she made me laugh outright was the scene where Wiig’s character mistakes McKinnon for a wig head sitting on a shelf, an old, old, old style gag unworthy of her.
The biggest disappointment by far, though, was Leslie Jones. One is glad she got a role in a big movie and made some money, but it’s not what she deserved. Jones is an extraordinary imposing figure. She has the total woman intensity to be able to re-define cinematic beauty on her own terms. This gorgeous giantess’ humor seems to have been forged in the fires of life experience, through pain and stubborn determination, sharpening her resources to pure sour glee; bringing together a daring form of sexual assault and violent laughter. I kept hoping Jones would explode the movie’s dumb comedy conventions with obscene honesty. That she didn’t walk off with the movie has to have been deliberate, the work of filmmakers determined to rub all the edges off this comic bombshell. Right off, her part goes wrong when she confronts a ghost in the subway tunnels, becomes bug-eyed frightened and runs away. Instinctively, one reacts against this. The comedy movie soul of Leslie Jones would never flee from a ghost, or anybody. No, she’d try to kick its immaterial ass back to the hell it came from and our laughter would derive from the crazed vigor of her assault and the foul mouthed anger she expressed at not being able to touch the goddamn thing. And couldn’t they have allowed her a little of the dirty cynicism that made her so alive and frightening on SNL? Sassy black women may be a pop culture cliché, but this movie desperately needed some sass, as well as grunge, which might have given us a little of the hip, drunk heckler’s pleasure Bill Murray provided the original movie. I know: Like they were ever going to do that in some kiddy supernatural comic action movie, but if not then why did they bother casting Leslie Jones?
After Ghostbusters ended I couldn’t help feeling depressed by so much wasted talent. Isn’t there any way for these women to be able to make a living and also do respectable work? Will they be forced to have careers like Bette Middler and Richard Pryor?
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Another thing worth mentioning is the film’s classism. I do not wish to moralize exactly, since this sort of thing is so pervasive there’s no alternative to it even if one were “faux-fended” enough to go looking. I’d just like to point up what’s going on and ruminate. Late in Ghostbusters, when our gals confront the baddie janitor for the first time in his evil lair basement, he tells them his motivation for destroying the world is that he hates people, wants them all dead. Boringly, our heroines say he’s crazy. Janitor responds they don’t know what it’s like, being at the bottom of the social heap, i.e. a loser.
Au contraire, Melissa McCarthy says curtly, informing him she and the whole gang have been treated terribly pretty much their entire lives, which of course is crap. Yes, they were made fools of by the government, yet other than Leslie Jones, who’s supposed to be working class, we’ve seen how easy these ladies have been living on cushy academic jobs. Remember, McCarthy and McKinnon’s characters were getting paid to do whatever they wanted without their employers being aware they even existed!—the best of all possible worlds. Jones might have piped up with, “Love all y’all, but you bitches don’t got the first clue what the hell you talkin’ about.” When McCarthy says she’s been treated badly her whole life she means that, because she’s a woman, she’s been getting the short end of the stick as a matter of course. This brand of feminism says women are always complete and total underdogs no matter their actual circumstances. What’s wrong with this idea, is that due to the way movies manipulate an audience’s most self-serving emotions, being an underdog doesn’t just give one the right to bitch, it’s also an ennobling experience. Suffer and glow, basically. I trust no one reads this to be saying minorities, and women, aren’t the victims of systematic legalized bigotry going back before the country’s inception. I’m talking here about the shallow popular way it’s understood and deployed; who’s seen to be at blame for it.
The culprit of course, is the White Privilege wielded by heterosexual males. While this isn’t wrong there’s a cheat to how it gets portrayed in a lot of movies and TV shows. The way this straw man comes out of the pop cultural wash isn’t as privileged but a lower class stupe. A red neck. White trash. The drop out. He may be seen as a toothless cretin who lives in a trailer or yes basement, fat, sweaty, talking lewd and crude—since for many nothing is worse, or more dangerous, than the coarse uneducated talk of poor males jealous of nice middle class liberals. Of course the real criticism, we know, should be leveled at our country’s civilized owners, the One To Ten Percent, the congenitally wealthy, those professional men and women hatched from the Ivy League. Generation after generation, despite controlling the government, the courts, the means of production, they haven’t done everything they might to negate the effects of our Jim Crow heritage, because deplorable as they publicly claim to find the state of things, it’s still the best working of all possible systems, at least for them. And even though they nearly destroyed the world’s economy enriching themselves on the backs of the most vulnerable with the 2008 economic crisis, they’re well dressed and sure do speak pretty. Quite a contrast to the great unwashed who are, let’s face it, fucking disgusting. Sure, there have been more than a few rich baddies in movies, bankers and landlords etc, but when one compares their numbers to those of urban gang bangers and southern cockroaches unable to tell the difference between a woman, a cow or Ned Beatty’s ass, there’s just no contest. What’s going on here?
Hollywood draws would-be artsy weirdos, fame-seekers; rich philistines who conflate power and sex. The weirdos, known as “creatives,” usually espouse liberal attitudes, but if they want to take part in running the great dream factory they eventually have to court fat cat One-Percenters who finance all the fun, which ultimately means not rocking the wrong boats. Also, maybe the weirdos never fit in back where they came from. Maybe it’s easy for them, in their movies, to side with sentimentalized (i.e. bourgeois-ized) marginal types as martyred symbols of liberation who, ironically, provide useful stories with which to beat down the angry poor as gross prejudiced creeps. Maybe the weirdos and some of the rich, once poor themselves, resent the peasant class at a visceral level, because such failure is frightening. You get the feeling that despite what such filmmakers say on NPR their view is that people occupying what they think of as flyover country are a bunch of dumb hick racists who don’t deserve sympathy, because their pain is nothing by comparison to other socio-economic casualties. Crude talking men and incels ought to stop whining and use their justly lowered status to make themselves better people. As if class consciousness were a zero sum game: empathize with one subset, take away from another.
It may seem like hysterical over reading to see some nothing pop movie like Ghostbusters as propaganda against the poor, but what else is it? The movie’s world-threatening villain is a destitute janitor so creepy even his bosses are afraid to fire him. And did we need another creepy janitor? Not only is it a tired trope, but an insult to hardworking people everywhere. Obviously the filmmakers weren’t
consciously trying to vilify poor men. I’m sure they just thought it’d be funny to have the most dangerous person in the world be some pathetic social malcontent, and it came out as a custodian. But that instinctive choice reveals the perspective. Reminds me a lot of Mike Judge’s well intended comedy Idiocricy, which made the revulsed point that the dumbing down and coarsening of our culture was explicitly Darwinian — i.e. that the poorer and darker shades of humanity were out breeding nice middle classers who are too educated to have the kids we need for a bright future. And despite the movie’s being a slobby, lowest common denominator sort of comedy the director Mike Judge really did think he was performing an entertaining public service with his movie, warning how the clods might eventually win out. Toward the end Judge did try to mitigate his eugenicist disgust into a condescendingly fake acceptance of future idiots but it’s a pro forma democratic uplift, which makes no sense given the rest of the movie.
Ghostbusters could have gone a different direction. At first the movie characterizes the monster janitor as an insane genius. I thought maybe the filmmakers might try to make fun of a hierarchical system which not only keeps women down but makes a point of rewarding pre-existing wealth and college certified mediocrity. But the movie retracts this by having Wiig and McCarthy discover in the janitor’s lair that the apocalyptic gadgets he’s knocked together are actually ripped off from their stupid book about supernatural phenomena, which had started the whole movie going in the first place—was it supposed to be an engineering manual? It doesn’t matter. All it means is that the janitor ultimately got his ideas from his betters. He’s not just a creep, but a derivative creep. At least the pathetic psycho custodian from the television show Lost, Ben, actually was smart even if he didn’t know his preordained place.
But it’s not just the annoying classism. It’s the conformist way the ghostbusting gang unquestioningly follows society’s rules. Why aren’t these ladies able to identify at all with the janitor’s destructive streak? As Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann pokes around the janitor-villain’s basement her response was depressingly square. “You hate to see the smart ones go bad.” Aren’t these goody-goodies due for a little badness? It would have been so much fun if she or Leslie Jones, or all of them, were less than passionate about stopping the janitor’s evil scheme, but they’re such safety-first-Clydes they not only seek to rid the world of this pipsqueak menace, they do so with Hollywood righteousness! And after saving reality the gang signs on to do research for the government. Presumably this means they’re joining the military industrial complex, which is the most dispiriting way imaginable for the movie to end. Bad as the original was, at least it didn’t try to edify you with national security concerns about the dangers of disaffected outsiders. Bill Murray was that disaffected outsider, and would never have let the ghostbusters become private contractors whose job it was to stamp out the poor and disenfranchised before they ruined things for the rich! Ultimately, Ghostbusters pretends to be a liberating feminist comedy by “punching down,” which is funnier than any actual gag in the film.
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Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.
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