Why Ghostbusters Was Doomed from the Start

It wasn’t a bad script that killed Ghostbusters (2016); the movie was doomed from the start.

BassFzz’s Video: My Problem With “Empowered” Female Characters

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.

The problems with this film should have been obvious from the beginning. There’s a reason audiences have reacted so negatively, even before rumours of the lame duck script were released. It’s not just that they got the music wrong, turning 80s synth into modern orchestral; it’s not just that the outfits look dumpy, and the jokes are lame; there’s a far more fundamental problem which poisoned this film from the get go, which no amount of creativity could have compensated for.

The problem with Ghostbusters 2016 is that main cast is all women.

Now am I saying that an all-female cast in a comedy-adventure movie aimed at general audiences is an inevitable death knell? Am I confirming Feig’s accusations of misogyny, that audiences are just angry because they can’t deal with strong, female characters?

No; not at all. In fact, if you took the four women playing the ghostbusters and put them into another film it could have been incredibly successful; in fact, the 2011 comedy Bridesmaids had much of the same cast, and the same Director, and it was received extremely well; if, instead of Ghostbusters, the four of them had starred in a sequel to, say, Jumanji – just imagine it, the same four actresses fighting off giant insects and killer plants, while the Great White Hunter comes after them, hating them for no reason at all – that could have worked, as a comedy, as an adventure, and it wouldn’t have traipsed all over the good will from the Robin Williams film.

So is the problem that this is a transparent, feminist reboot? Taking a beloved IP, sex-swapping the lead roles, and pretending that this somehow makes women empowered? Not exactly. While it’s certainly a blatant slap in the face to audiences, that’s nothing more than the icing atop a concept that was fatally flawed from the beginning.

The reason Ghostbusters doesn’t work with a female cast is because at the core it is a male story.

Now I’d like to step back for a moment and consider the term “Strong Female Character”; my colleague Zarius has a video where he discusses this topic at length, and he uses the term “Strong Female Character” to mean Good female character; it’s a great video, and I definitely recommend that you check it out. But I’d like to go in a different direction, and consider the specific words that are being used. Strong Female Character as opposed to Powerful Female Character.

Strength – physical strength – is one of the defining aspects of masculinity. When you contrast the sexes, there’s no contest; the average man is stronger than 95% of women; and even female bodybuilders don’t get much stronger than your part-time gym rat. This is why hitting women is such a universal taboo. We expect men to use their physical strength to protect women – not abuse them.

Somebody who’s strong is somebody who’s powerful – but strength isn’t the only form of power. In Game of Thrones neither Tyrion nor Varys are strong physically – Tyrion because of his dwarfism, Varys because he was gelded – and yet both of them are powerful and admirable despite their physical weakness.

This is why I find the phrase “Strong Female Characters” so interesting; it sets women up to fail, competing in an arena where men are the superior sex – or it requires that they be “Empowered” by the director, who winds up giving superhuman abilities to 120 lb Scarlet Johansson. This results in cognitive dissonance for the audience. In Avengers, Black Widow is tough enough to beat up hardened Russian Mobsters at the beginning of the movie – but later on, when we see her fight Hawkeye, every healthy, well-adjusted person in the audience is subconsciously outraged that this big man is beating a tiny woman.

Strength isn’t the only difference between the sexes, though it’s one of the most obvious; men and women differ in so many ways – in complementary ways! Each sex is specialized to work well with the other; men are good at some things, women are good at different things, and trying to judge either sex by the standards of their complement isn’t just foolish; it’s dehumanizing.

So let’s return to Ghostbusters – the Real Ghostbusters from 1984. What’s this movie really about? When you strip away all of the makeup – the setting, the ghosts, the gags, and the big name actors – what is the kernel of narrative that you find?

It’s a movie about four friends putting together a start-up business, and the difficulties they have to deal with – both from clients, and from regulators.

This is a masculine story at its core. Not because women are incapable of inventing a proton-pack; not because men have better instincts for what sort of businesses will succeed; the reason it’s a masculine story is because of the psychological inheritance we received from our ancestors.

Men evolved to go out and prove themselves to women; to take big risks, to bite off more than they can chew. Women evolved to find security in the home environment so that they could raise their children securely. Women who took risks wound up failing the test of evolution; so did the men who played it safe. Because of this our ancestors were the risk-taking men, who would do something like gamble on Ghostbusting being successful; and our ancestors were the cautious women, who would rather achieve a stable income on etsy, even if that means that they’ll never hit it big.

Furthermore; we tend to have more sympathy for women than we do for men; we’re more likely to give them help when they encounter difficulty. There are good evolutionary reasons for this (reasons that are so obvious I won’t even bother mentioning them), but when it comes to Ghostbusters this innate empathy undermines the conflict. In the original film, Walter Peck – the EPA regulator – was an antagonist we loved to hate; but he wasn’t a villain. At the end of the day he was just another man doing his job, even if he went about it foolishly, and his anger at the ghostbusters was comedic.

Replace Dan Aykroyd with Melissa McCarthy, however, and we’re right back to Hawkeye acting like a wife beater; what was once a funny pissing match between a couple of guys, is now an abusive misogynist who doesn’t want women to succeed.

For most people the differences between the sexes are so obvious that they wind up being difficult for us to even notice. Are men and women equal? Of course they are! What sort of savage would say otherwise? Should you treat a gentleman in the same manner that you’d treat a lady? Why of course not, what an absurd suggestion! This is all so obvious to us, on a subconscious level, that when something like Ghostbusters 2016 shows up on our radar, we just know it’s wrong, even if we can’t quite orchestrate why. So if that’s the case – how did Sony fail to realize that this was a disaster from the beginning?

It’s time we looked at the Director, Paul Feig. In a 2015 interview with Variety, he discussed how his world had been female-centric from a young age; how he never learned about masculinity from a father who was always working. In another interview with Hollywood Reporter, he made a point of saying that his favourite colour is purple.

According to Feig, his world has been female-centric from an early age. Growing up in Michigan an only child, and with a father busy running a surplus store, he spent a lot of time with his mother. “Most of my friends growing up were either women or sensitive guys like myself,” he notes. Though his last name is pronounced “Feeg,” its close enough to a gay slur that boys his age teased him. “You know how guy comedy is,” he says. “They would call me names and punch me. And I would think, ‘I don’t enjoy this male bonding!’ And I hated the locker room, because that’s where I got beaten up.”

It is clear that Feig is a man who’s deeply confused about the sexes. Not because he’s a dandy necessarily – Oscar Wilde was a dandy, and he had a very deep understanding of the sexes – but because from the earliest ages he was encouraged to identify with the female, to seek female primacy.

He was a boy raised to be a woman; and now that he is a man, he takes his malformed, stunted understanding of masculinity, and projects it onto the other sex. He wants to see women as saviours, as soldiers, as successful in business; he wants a woman who will continue to over-mother him, protecting and providing for him. His latent masculine instincts are screaming that he ought to be protecting and providing – but because he never grew up, he projects those roles on to women.

In their review of Star Wars prequels, Red Letter Media pointed out that the biggest failure of those movies was that they didn’t tell a human story. Audiences couldn’t relate to the characters on the screen, and so once the dazzle of the special effects faded, there was little left to care about.

Man is the story telling animal; all of our narratives are built off of rules and tropes embedded deep in our subconscious. The reason that “Rescue the Princess” is a theme you find throughout all cultures, is because women have always been attracted to men who are strong enough to defend them. When you flip the sexes, putting a woman in place to rescue a man, the romance at the end of the story evaporates. Instead of fighting to rescue a lover – she is fighting to rescue her younger brother.

Everybody understands this, even if they can’t put it into words; and when you present them with a narrative 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. Both Paul Feig and Amy Pascal, the Chairman of Sony Pictures, are deeply sexually confused, and as such are obsessed with forcing female bodies into character roles designed for men. 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.

It wasn’t a bad script that killed this movie; it wasn’t problems during production; and it certainly wasn’t fear or hatred of women. What doomed this movie from day one was the deep set mental illness of Feig and Pascal. Rather than crafting a good film, they tried to force their sickness into the world; twisting reality with contradictions, and demanding that reality accommodate them. They went against the logic of the human soul, and because of that, Ghostbusters was doomed from the start.