Movie Review/commentary: Ghostbusters
As one would expect, HERE BE SPOILERS, at least some.
Let's start with: I liked it! It's a hell of a lot of fun. It's a good origin story, it has verve. It doesn't need to stand up to comparison with the original, because it is entirely different from the original in feel and focus.
And that is the part I want to talk about. Because gender sure as hell plays into that. Not necessarily in "good" or "bad" ways, but ways.
The original Ghostbusters (hereafter OGB) was a plot-driven movie. There was something mysterious going on, and these wacky guys were trying to solve it. The characters were all different, and stuff happened, but in terms of interpersonal relationships between them (or even between Peter Venkman and Dana, who legit have a romance going by the end), not a goddamn thing happens. They are buddies at the beginning, and remain buddies at the end.
Whereas new Ghostbusters (hereafter NGB) has a plot because a movie needs to have a plot, but it is 100% a relationship movie. It is about how these four women, some of whom have past history with each other (Erin and Abby), or don't know each other at all until this moment (Erin and Holtzmann, Patty and everyone), all grow to be a team and good friends.
That is absolutely gender based. Men in our culture are not allowed to have feelings that grow and bloom, except maybe very contrasting dudes might become bros a la buddy-cop movies such as Lethal Weapon or Beverly Hills Cop. (I will refrain at this point from discussing how these are both cross-racial friendships, too. That is almost certainly significant, but not the focus of this blog post.)
NGB is about friendship. How these women negotiate the landscape of past slights, current crises, and all-new experiences together. Friendship is based on how people deal with adversity. Any two people can be friends if all is well--but Abby, Erin, Patty, and Holtzmann stick together and support each other through danger and crazy shit. The only fight among them is at the very beginning, when Erin is mad at Abby for republishing the book they wrote together in their youth, which is now jeopardizing Erin's application to get tenure at Columbia university.
I am grateful the movie doesn't do the "and then the friends fight, but eventually work it out and realize they need to stick together if they want to win" crap, a lesson we have seen a million times. Literally the only time they aren't stuck together is because they are physically separated by the crisis of the ghostsplosion in New York. Erin gets separated not by emotion but by events.
This is a lot more realistic to how actual friendships work.
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BUT ANYWAY, there was something in this whole business that I noticed, a comparison between the characters of OGB and NGB, and how they react to things.
The women of NGB are all earnest. With the exception of Holtzmann, they are taking the whole situation very seriously. Abby and Erin have past history with ghosts, Erin in particular, and they feel this situation needs to be studied and they are the only people who have the experience and integrity to study it. Patty takes it all very seriously, and points out that she has knowledge that will also help them address it. These three women are all there because they see a problem that needs to be solved, and they feel responsible to solve it.
Holtzmann--and let us note that she is the only NGB commonly referred to by her last name, by everyone except by the Bad Guy (I'll get back to this)--is the exception. I'm sure she feels responsible, too, but she has more than a little "mad scientist" going on. She is not taking the business seriously, except as a chance to develop cool toys. She does have an emotional spill at the end, and through the course of the movie, it's clear that she's here for her friends.
But the whole OMG GHOSTPOCAPLYPSE WE NEED TO STOP THIS doesn't seem to register on her the same way. She's enjoying the ride, glad to solve the problems, but not taking it as seriously as the others.
In this way she is very like the OGB. Venkman took nothing seriously. Ray and Egon were more serious, but never as earnest as NGB. There was always a comedic edge and exaggeration to their characters. Only Winston took it really seriously, but his character was there specifically to be the Everyman who could see how people in the real world might feel about a major metaphysical event in New York.
The OGB started their company as a business. Ghosts were a way to make fun toys and money.
The NGB don't even start a company. Erin and Abby are in it for the science, Holtzmann for the toys, and Patty because she can see there's a big problem that needs solving.
So...the guys go to fix it because who else can, but it's still mostly about playing with their fun toys; while the chicks take everything really seriously and feel personally responsible to fix a problem.
A succinct demonstration of how men and women are expected to behave differently in our culture.
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And that...is where it bugs me a bit. I think it is no coincidence that everyone who has seen this LOVES Holtzmann. She is a hoot, and we all wish we could be eccentric geniuses who do our thing and don't get wrapped up in bullshit. She isn't an irresponsible con-man asshat like Venkman, which makes her even more likeable--she's genuinely worth liking, not just finding clever and funny.
And while Erin and Abby are likeable, they're not even a tiny bit of fantasy for most women. They are resolutely normal* people with normal lives much like people any moderately well-off white person knows (except for the ghost thing). One has a PhD and the political concerns of someone trying to succeed in a tough field. The other is an educator at a fly-by-night college. You can like them, but you don't wish to be then, because if you're a middle- or upper-middle-class white woman, you already are them (or close enough). There is no projecting of self onto a more interesting person, no escapist facet to these characters.
Likewise Patty is normal, with a typical middle-class job (working for the subway system). Whether she is realistic is something I would rather leave to black women to address, but she feels like an exaggerated character/stereotype to me (speaking as a white person). I have seen other commentary from black women that seem to feel the same way. Regardless, Patty is also not a character about whom most viewers will think, "I want to be her." There are aspects of her we might aspire to--her outspokenness, for example--but not wholesale her whole life.
[And her outspokenness can be interpreted as falling into the "loud black woman" stereotype, which diminishes its value as a favorable character trait. This is complicated, and again, not something I as a white woman feel qualified to address other than to note I see there is A Thing That Is Probably A Problem.]
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There is verve in this movie. Great energy and very funny dialogue.
But there is no irreverence. As obnoxious as Venkman was, you still wanted to be that guy who could get away with saying "It's true, this man has no dick." You wanted to be cool and mysterious and odd Egon. (You didn't want to be easily-taken-advantage-of Ray, but he was a fun foil for Venkman and Egon.)
There is a deep undercurrent of earnestness that makes the NGB more anxious--and more culturally female--than their counterparts in OGB.
Yet we all love and want to be Holtzmann, the one NGB who is as irreverent as the old guys.
Yes, I'm glad we're seeing a movie that demonstrates that a comedy can be a comedy with realistic women characters.
But I can't help thinking I would have liked to see a version where Abby, Erin, and Patty were more eccentric and off-beat, more cool. Imagine if Abby was more like Melissa McCarthy's previous characters, mouthy and witty and cutting (we got flashes of that, but it wasn't central). If Erin funded the group with her millions from dot-com investments made in college because she knew lots of folks who went to Silicon Valley. If Patty were a PhD historian with expertise in NYC, but who wasn't able to get an academic job because things are tough out there for liberal arts folks, and her constant factlets of history were a confident, charming character quirk rather than an effort to prove her value to the team.
I loved this movie. I loved the relationships of the main characters.
But I wish more than one of them got to be "cool."
*yes, loaded word is loaded deliberately