Why Ghostbusters Was Doomed from the Start
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Summary
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
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The new Ghostbusters film hasn't even been released yet, and it's already turning into
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a disaster. Audiences are panning the trailers, heads are rolling at Sony, and the director,
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Paul Feig, is blaming it all on misogyny. The problem with this film should have been obvious
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from the beginning. There's a reason audiences have reacted so negatively even before the rumors
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of the lame duck script were released. It's not just that they got the music wrong, turning 80s
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synth into modern orchestral. It's not just that the outfits look dumpy, and the jokes are lame.
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There's a far more fundamental problem which poisoned this film from the get-go, which no
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amount of creativity could have compensated for. The problem with Ghostbusters 2016 is that the main
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cast is all-female. Now am I saying that an all-female cast in a comedy-adventure movie aimed
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at general audiences is an inevitable death knell? Am I confirming Feig's accusations of misogyny,
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that audiences are just angry because they can't deal with strong female characters?
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No, not at all. In fact, if you took the four women playing the Ghostbusters and put them into
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another film, it could have been incredibly successful. In fact, the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids
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had much the same cast, and the same director, and it was received extremely well. If instead of
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Ghostbusters, the four of them had starred in a sequel to, say, Jumanji, just imagine it,
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the same four actresses fighting off giant insects and killer plants while the great white hunter
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comes after them, hating them for no reason at all? That could have worked as a comedy, as an
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adventure, and it wouldn't have traipsed all over the goodwill from the Robin Williams film.
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So is the problem with this film that it is a transparent feminist reboot, taking a beloved IP,
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sex-swapping the lead roles, and pretending that this somehow makes women empowered?
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Not exactly. While it's certainly a blatant slap in the face to audiences, that's nothing more than
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the icing atop a concept that was fatally flawed from the beginning. The reason Ghostbusters doesn't
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work with a female cast is because, at the core, it is a male story. Now I'd like to step back for a
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moment and consider the term strong female character. My colleague Zarius had a video
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where he discussed this topic at length, and he uses the term strong female character to mean
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good female character, complex female character. It's a great video and I definitely recommend that
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you check it out, but I'd like to go in a different direction and consider the specific wording that is
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being used. Strong female character as opposed to powerful female character. Strength, physical
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strength, is one of the defining aspects of masculinity. When you contrast the sexes, there's no contest.
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The average man is stronger than 95% of women, and even female bodybuilders don't get much stronger
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than your part-time gym rat. This is why hitting women is such a universal taboo. We expect men to
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use their physical strength to protect women, not abuse them. Someone who's strong is someone who's
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powerful. But strength isn't the only form of power. In Game of Thrones, neither Tyrion nor Varys are
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strong physically. Tyrion because of his dwarfism, Varys because he was gelded. And yet both of them are
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powerful and admirable despite physical weakness. This is why I find the phrase strong female
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characters so interesting. It sets women up to fail, competing in an arena where men are the superior
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sex. Or it requires that they be empowered by the director, who winds up giving superhuman abilities
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to 120-pound Scarlett Johansson. This results in cognitive dissonance for the audience. In Avengers,
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Black Widow is tough enough to beat up hardened Russian mobsters at the beginning of the movie.
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But later on, when we see her fight Hawkeye, every healthy, well-adjusted person in the audience is
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subconsciously outraged that this big man is beating a tiny woman. Strength isn't the only difference
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between the sexes, though it's one of the most obvious. Men and women differ in so many ways.
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In complementary ways. Each sex is specialized to work well with the other. Men are good at some
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things. Women are good at different things. And trying to judge either sex by the standards of
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their complement isn't just foolish, it's dehumanizing. So let's return to Ghostbusters.
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The real Ghostbusters from 1984. What's this movie really about? When you strip away all of the
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makeup, the setting, the ghosts, the gags, and the big-name actors, what is the kernel of narrative
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that you find? It's a movie about four friends putting together a small business and the difficulties
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they have to deal with, both from clients and from regulators. This is a masculine story at its core.
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Not because women aren't capable of inventing a proton pack. Not because men have better instincts
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for what sort of businesses will succeed. The reason it's a masculine story is because of the
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psychological inheritance we received from our ancestors. Men evolved to go out and prove themselves
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to women. To take big risks to bite off more than they can chew. Women evolved to find security in the
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home environment so that they could raise their children successfully. Women who took risks wound up
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failing the test of evolution. So did the men who played it safe. Because of this, our ancestors were
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the risk-taking men who would do something like gamble on Ghostbusting being a successful business model.
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And our ancestors were the cautious women who would rather achieve a stable income on Etsy even if
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that means they'll never hit it big. Furthermore, we tend to have more sympathy for women than we do for
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men. We're more likely to give them help when they encounter difficulty. There are good evolutionary
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reasons for this. Reasons that are so obvious I won't even bother mentioning them. But when it comes to
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Ghostbusters, this innate empathy undermines the conflict. In the original film, Walter Peck, the EPA
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regulator, was an antagonist we loved to hate. But he wasn't a villain. At the end of the day, he was
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just another man doing his job, even if he went about it foolishly, and his anger at the Ghostbusters
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was comedic. Yes, it's true. This man has no dick. But replace Dan Aykroyd with Melissa McCarthy,
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and we're right back to Hawkeye acting like a wife-beater. What was once a funny pissing match between a
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couple of guys, is now an abusive misogynist who doesn't want women to succeed? For most of us,
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the differences between the sexes are so obvious that they wind up being difficult for us to even
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notice. Are men and women equal? Of course they are. What sort of savage would say otherwise?
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Should you treat a gentleman in the same manner that you'd treat a lady? Why, of course not. What
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poppycock. What an absurd suggestion. This is all so obvious to us on a subconscious level that when
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something like Ghostbusters 2016 shows up on our radar, we just know it's wrong, even if we can't
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quite orchestrate why. So if that's the case, how did Sony fail to realize that this was a disaster from
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the beginning? It's time we looked at the director, Paul Feig. In a 2015 interview with Variety, he
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discussed how his world had been female-centric from a young age, how he never learned about
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masculinity from a father who was always working. In another interview with Hollywood Reporter,
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he made a point of saying that his favorite color was purple. It is clear that Feig is a man who's
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deeply confused about the sexes. Not because he's a dandy, necessarily. Oscar Wilde was a dandy,
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and he had a very deep understanding of the sexes. But because, from the earliest of ages,
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he was encouraged to identify with the female, to seek female primacy. He was a boy raised to be a
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woman. And now that he is a man, he takes his malformed, stunted understanding of masculinity
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and projects it onto the other sex. He wants to see women as saviors, as soldiers, as successful in
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business. He wants a woman who will continue to over-mother him, protecting and providing for him.
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His latent masculine instincts are screaming that he ought to be protecting and providing for women.
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But because he never grew up, he projects those roles onto women.
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Well, a mother, a real mother, is the most wonderful person in the world.
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In their review of the Star Wars prequels, red-letter media pointed out that the biggest failures of those
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movies was that they didn't tell a human story. Audiences couldn't relate to the characters on the
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screen, and so once the dazzle of the special effects faded, there was little left to care about.
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Man is the storytelling animal. All of our narratives are built off of rules and tropes embedded deep
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within our subconscious. The reason that rescue the princess is a theme you find throughout all cultures
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is because women have always been attracted to men who are strong enough to defend them.
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When you flip the sexes, putting a woman in a position to rescue a man,
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the romance at the end of the story evaporates. Instead of fighting to rescue a lover,
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Everybody understands this, even if they can't put it into words. And when you present them with a narrative
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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.
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Both Paul Feig and Amy Pascal, the chairman of Sony Pictures, are deeply sexually confused,
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and as such, are obsessed with forcing female bodies into character roles designed for men.
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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.
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It wasn't a bad script that killed this movie. It wasn't problems during production. And it certainly
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wasn't fear or hatred of women. What doomed this movie from day one was the deep-set mental illness of
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both Feig and Pascal. Rather than crafting a good film, they tried to force their sickness into the
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world, twisting reality with contradictions and demanding that reality accommodate them. They went
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against the logic of the human soul. And because of that, Ghostbusters was doomed from the start.