Leo D.M.J. Aurini - May 09, 2016


Why Ghostbusters Was Doomed from the Start

Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Paul Feig Scarlett Johansson Melissa McCarthy Robin Williams Walter Peck Dan Aykroyd Oscar Wilde Amy Pascal Ghostbusting Hawkeye Zarius
The Twofold Nature of the Sexes Three Arguments for Christianity： Ontological, Moral, and Historical

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

159.89

Word count

1,763

Sentence count

117

Harmful content

Misogyny

13

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The new Ghostbusters film hasn t even been released yet, and it s already turning into a disaster. Audiences are panning the trailers, heads are rolling at Sony, and the director, Paul Feig, is blaming it all on misogyny.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The new Ghostbusters film hasn't even been released yet, and it's already turning into
00:00:05.800 a disaster. Audiences are panning the trailers, heads are rolling at Sony, and the director,
00:00:11.440 Paul Feig, is blaming it all on misogyny. The problem with this film should have been obvious
00:00:16.900 from the beginning. There's a reason audiences have reacted so negatively even before the rumors
00:00:22.080 of the lame duck script were released. It's not just that they got the music wrong, turning 80s
00:00:27.180 synth into modern orchestral. It's not just that the outfits look dumpy, and the jokes are lame.
00:00:33.000 There's a far more fundamental problem which poisoned this film from the get-go, which no
00:00:37.900 amount of creativity could have compensated for. The problem with Ghostbusters 2016 is that the main
00:00:45.400 cast is all-female. Now am I saying that an all-female cast in a comedy-adventure movie aimed
00:00:52.560 at general audiences is an inevitable death knell? Am I confirming Feig's accusations of misogyny,
00:00:59.060 that audiences are just angry because they can't deal with strong female characters?
00:01:04.280 No, not at all. In fact, if you took the four women playing the Ghostbusters and put them into
00:01:09.820 another film, it could have been incredibly successful. In fact, the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids
00:01:15.380 had much the same cast, and the same director, and it was received extremely well. If instead of
00:01:21.060 Ghostbusters, the four of them had starred in a sequel to, say, Jumanji, just imagine it,
00:01:26.920 the same four actresses fighting off giant insects and killer plants while the great white hunter 0.90
00:01:31.940 comes after them, hating them for no reason at all? That could have worked as a comedy, as an
00:01:38.480 adventure, and it wouldn't have traipsed all over the goodwill from the Robin Williams film.
00:01:43.740 So is the problem with this film that it is a transparent feminist reboot, taking a beloved IP, 1.00
00:01:50.160 sex-swapping the lead roles, and pretending that this somehow makes women empowered? 0.97
00:01:55.340 Not exactly. While it's certainly a blatant slap in the face to audiences, that's nothing more than
00:02:01.000 the icing atop a concept that was fatally flawed from the beginning. The reason Ghostbusters doesn't
00:02:07.400 work with a female cast is because, at the core, it is a male story. Now I'd like to step back for a 0.88
00:02:15.520 moment and consider the term strong female character. My colleague Zarius had a video 0.99
00:02:20.780 where he discussed this topic at length, and he uses the term strong female character to mean
00:02:25.960 good female character, complex female character. It's a great video and I definitely recommend that
00:02:32.040 you check it out, but I'd like to go in a different direction and consider the specific wording that is
00:02:37.180 being used. Strong female character as opposed to powerful female character. Strength, physical 0.51
00:02:47.400 strength, is one of the defining aspects of masculinity. When you contrast the sexes, there's no contest.
00:02:54.760 The average man is stronger than 95% of women, and even female bodybuilders don't get much stronger
00:03:00.540 than your part-time gym rat. This is why hitting women is such a universal taboo. We expect men to 1.00
00:03:07.380 use their physical strength to protect women, not abuse them. Someone who's strong is someone who's
00:03:14.340 powerful. But strength isn't the only form of power. In Game of Thrones, neither Tyrion nor Varys are
00:03:22.400 strong physically. Tyrion because of his dwarfism, Varys because he was gelded. And yet both of them are 0.99
00:03:28.960 powerful and admirable despite physical weakness. This is why I find the phrase strong female
00:03:36.080 characters so interesting. It sets women up to fail, competing in an arena where men are the superior 0.98
00:03:43.060 sex. Or it requires that they be empowered by the director, who winds up giving superhuman abilities
00:03:50.720 to 120-pound Scarlett Johansson. This results in cognitive dissonance for the audience. In Avengers,
00:03:58.940 Black Widow is tough enough to beat up hardened Russian mobsters at the beginning of the movie. 1.00
00:04:04.260 But later on, when we see her fight Hawkeye, every healthy, well-adjusted person in the audience is
00:04:10.220 subconsciously outraged that this big man is beating a tiny woman. Strength isn't the only difference
00:04:18.480 between the sexes, though it's one of the most obvious. Men and women differ in so many ways.
00:04:24.280 In complementary ways. Each sex is specialized to work well with the other. Men are good at some 0.90
00:04:30.700 things. Women are good at different things. And trying to judge either sex by the standards of 1.00
00:04:35.960 their complement isn't just foolish, it's dehumanizing. So let's return to Ghostbusters. 0.97
00:04:42.740 The real Ghostbusters from 1984. What's this movie really about? When you strip away all of the
00:04:50.260 makeup, the setting, the ghosts, the gags, and the big-name actors, what is the kernel of narrative
00:04:57.260 that you find? It's a movie about four friends putting together a small business and the difficulties
00:05:04.600 they have to deal with, both from clients and from regulators. This is a masculine story at its core.
00:05:13.360 Not because women aren't capable of inventing a proton pack. Not because men have better instincts
00:05:19.040 for what sort of businesses will succeed. The reason it's a masculine story is because of the 0.97
00:05:24.660 psychological inheritance we received from our ancestors. Men evolved to go out and prove themselves
00:05:31.520 to women. To take big risks to bite off more than they can chew. Women evolved to find security in the 1.00
00:05:37.360 home environment so that they could raise their children successfully. Women who took risks wound up 0.51
00:05:42.960 failing the test of evolution. So did the men who played it safe. Because of this, our ancestors were
00:05:49.520 the risk-taking men who would do something like gamble on Ghostbusting being a successful business model.
00:05:55.280 And our ancestors were the cautious women who would rather achieve a stable income on Etsy even if
00:06:01.680 that means they'll never hit it big. Furthermore, we tend to have more sympathy for women than we do for 0.87
00:06:09.600 men. We're more likely to give them help when they encounter difficulty. There are good evolutionary
00:06:15.040 reasons for this. Reasons that are so obvious I won't even bother mentioning them. But when it comes to
00:06:20.480 Ghostbusters, this innate empathy undermines the conflict. In the original film, Walter Peck, the EPA
00:06:27.360 regulator, was an antagonist we loved to hate. But he wasn't a villain. At the end of the day, he was
00:06:34.000 just another man doing his job, even if he went about it foolishly, and his anger at the Ghostbusters
00:06:39.680 was comedic. Yes, it's true. This man has no dick. But replace Dan Aykroyd with Melissa McCarthy,
00:06:47.840 and we're right back to Hawkeye acting like a wife-beater. What was once a funny pissing match between a 1.00
00:06:53.760 couple of guys, is now an abusive misogynist who doesn't want women to succeed? For most of us,
00:07:00.720 the differences between the sexes are so obvious that they wind up being difficult for us to even
00:07:05.360 notice. Are men and women equal? Of course they are. What sort of savage would say otherwise?
00:07:11.760 Should you treat a gentleman in the same manner that you'd treat a lady? Why, of course not. What 0.94
00:07:17.600 poppycock. What an absurd suggestion. This is all so obvious to us on a subconscious level that when
00:07:24.640 something like Ghostbusters 2016 shows up on our radar, we just know it's wrong, even if we can't
00:07:30.960 quite orchestrate why. So if that's the case, how did Sony fail to realize that this was a disaster from
00:07:38.240 the beginning? It's time we looked at the director, Paul Feig. In a 2015 interview with Variety, he
00:07:46.080 discussed how his world had been female-centric from a young age, how he never learned about
00:07:50.880 masculinity from a father who was always working. In another interview with Hollywood Reporter,
00:07:56.240 he made a point of saying that his favorite color was purple. It is clear that Feig is a man who's
00:08:01.840 deeply confused about the sexes. Not because he's a dandy, necessarily. Oscar Wilde was a dandy,
00:08:07.760 and he had a very deep understanding of the sexes. But because, from the earliest of ages,
00:08:13.200 he was encouraged to identify with the female, to seek female primacy. He was a boy raised to be a
00:08:20.800 woman. And now that he is a man, he takes his malformed, stunted understanding of masculinity
00:08:26.960 and projects it onto the other sex. He wants to see women as saviors, as soldiers, as successful in 0.87
00:08:33.840 business. He wants a woman who will continue to over-mother him, protecting and providing for him. 0.99
00:08:40.480 His latent masculine instincts are screaming that he ought to be protecting and providing for women.
00:08:45.920 But because he never grew up, he projects those roles onto women.
00:08:51.440 Well, a mother, a real mother, is the most wonderful person in the world.
00:08:58.320 In their review of the Star Wars prequels, red-letter media pointed out that the biggest failures of those
00:09:03.840 movies was that they didn't tell a human story. Audiences couldn't relate to the characters on the
00:09:09.840 screen, and so once the dazzle of the special effects faded, there was little left to care about.
00:09:16.160 Man is the storytelling animal. All of our narratives are built off of rules and tropes embedded deep
00:09:22.960 within our subconscious. The reason that rescue the princess is a theme you find throughout all cultures
00:09:29.840 is because women have always been attracted to men who are strong enough to defend them.
00:09:34.480 When you flip the sexes, putting a woman in a position to rescue a man, 1.00
00:09:38.720 the romance at the end of the story evaporates. Instead of fighting to rescue a lover,
00:09:43.680 she is fighting to rescue her younger brother.
00:09:47.280 Everybody understands this, even if they can't put it into words. And when you present them with a narrative
00:09:52.000 that's broken from the get-go, they can all sense that something's wrong, even if they can't put their finger on it.
00:09:58.240 Both Paul Feig and Amy Pascal, the chairman of Sony Pictures, are deeply sexually confused,
00:10:04.480 and as such, are obsessed with forcing female bodies into character roles designed for men.
00:10:10.720 They want to see a strong princess go and rescue a weak man and then fall in love with him to everybody else's disgust.
00:10:21.440 It wasn't a bad script that killed this movie. It wasn't problems during production. And it certainly
00:10:26.720 wasn't fear or hatred of women. What doomed this movie from day one was the deep-set mental illness of 0.94
00:10:34.160 both Feig and Pascal. Rather than crafting a good film, they tried to force their sickness into the
00:10:40.400 world, twisting reality with contradictions and demanding that reality accommodate them. They went
00:10:46.400 against the logic of the human soul. And because of that, Ghostbusters was doomed from the start.
00:10:52.880 There's a bigger picture at hand here.