This post was originally published in July 2008, in accordance with the New York and Self-Involvement blogathons. Ghostbusters was recently released on Blu-ray in honor of the 25th anniversary of the film’s premiere.
When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.
I should note from the outset that I’m too close to Ghostbusters to know whether or not it’s an empirically “good film.” But I do know it’s empirically fun to watch, and there are definitely aspects of its construction that are, at the very least, novel for its genre. It’s essentially a horror comedy made like a musical, the kind that was, in 1984, at least twenty years out of date.
“Listen!” says Ray early in the film. “Do you smell something?” This is classic screwball dialogue, delivered in a style that’s more sing-song than realistically conversational. A couple of scenes later, Venkmam actually seems to be singing along to the orchestral score when he grabs his fifth of whiskey, puts an arm around Ray and consoles him: “Call it fate/call it luck/call it kar-maaaaa/I believe/That everything happens/For a reason!” And as Ray grabs the bottle and starts rationalizing about their “ectocontainment system,” Venkman dances in place. Later, when he catches his first glimpse of Sigourney Weaver’s Dana Barrett, he’ll do a leap over a short fence; I swear Ivan Reitman stole it from Gene Kelly.
We first meet the Ghostbusters at the psych building of an unnamed university (it looks less like NYU than Columbia). The door to the parapsychology office is emblazoned with blood red graffiti: “Venkman, Burn in Hell”––giving lie to his later insistence, “But the kids love us!” And why *would* they love him? This is a guy who falsifies his experiments in order to give nerdy boys––prototypes for himself and his friends, really––electric shocks, whilst convincing superhot girls that they have psychic powers in hopes that it’ll spread their legs. He’s a gleeful, obvious sadist. And yet there’s something charming about his complete disregard for morality––he got into an an obscure corner of academia for the chicks!
From a very young age, I subconsciously understood that Ghostbusters is not really about the supernatural threat against Manhattan––it’s about this guy conquering the supernatural threat against Manhattan. It’s a Reagan-era Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the guy most able to think for himself is impervious to the threat. Except, that as scripted by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and played by Bill Murray, this anti-hero would look like a villain if not for his fluid, inexplicable charisma. (Note that the unlovable loser as savior archetype will be recycled in future sci fi action comedies ad infinitum; Affleck and Willis aside, Armageddon is about a whole crew of Venkmans saving the world. Scary stuff.)
A good first third of the film is an extended walk-and-talk, shot on real locations in NYC. There’s something almost Godardian (or, at least, Breathless-ian) about this; you can feel the “real” city’s energy on the margins of Reitman’s deeply nostalgic mish-mash of incongruous old Hollywood genres, even though, as the most expensive comedy ever made up to that point, the production was surely crowd controlled within an inch of its life. Still, this is a film with a deep love for a New York on a never-again brink: the anarcholibertarian spirit of the rough days of the 1970s lingered, but by 1984, everyone had money. What’s more libertarian than a redneck reticence to be ruled, backed up with a full bank account?
That reading gives Murray’s first great line in the film extra meaning. Giving the ghost-stunned librarian a basic psychlogical quiz, he asks the menopause-aged woman if she’s currently menstruating. The Eric Blore clone who apparently runs the joint scrunches his face in horror over the very idea of a functional female anatomy. “What has that got to do with it?” he groans. Murray tilts his head up to the man just slightly, as he’s going to whisper. He doesn’t. “Back off man,” he says. “I’m a scientist.” It’s a threat. It’s a Dirty Harry moment––a “Do you feel lucky, punk?” for science nerds who happen to also aspire to badassness. Ghostbusters is a movie about the scum of the earth re-setting nature’s rules, and in order to do anything like set it back, the traditional power brokers have to rely on these nerds, these scientists who are too punk rock for the academy––partially because they speak the scum of the earth’s language, but partially because they’ve got nothing left to lose.
Which isn’t to say that our boys in grey (as Casey Kasem refers to them during the “rise to fame” montage) aren’t fighting for the New Manhattan. Venkman even shape-shifts into the power-tied 80s capitalist ideal just long enough to goad Ray into financing their venture (”You’re not gonna lose the house–EVERYONE has three mortgages nowadays!”) They move into an abandoned firehouse in Tribeca, a building which Egon insists “should be condemned.” “The neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone,” he warns. Cut to Dana Barrett’s luxe apartment overlooking Central Park West, which we soon learn is ground zero for the city’s supernatural invasion.
The city’s real estate heirarchy is thus upended: still-scary downtown is a safe haven from the horrors of the high-rent district. In 1984, the city was in the first throes of the gentrification that, two decades later, has rendered the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side virtually indistinguishable. Paranormal blight is a Dorian Grey thing, the manifestation of repressed wrongs. Above all else, the Ghostbusters are laying the ground work for the city to self-homogenize, one borough at a time.
The narrative’s only joke about this is a minor one: that when the dead rise from the grave, they’ll inhabit the shells of wannabe old-money co-opers, who will then become indistinguishable from the homeless insane which their penthouses were supposed to protect them from. (I never realized until this viewing that Rick Moranis becomes possessed by the giant dog in the garden outside Tavern on the Green. No wonder I’ve always felt so fucking uncomfortable at those NYFF opening night parties.)
Ghostbusters makes it clear that evil is baked in to the city’s foundations, and like all gentrifiers, the Ghostbusters’ sanitation involves the erasure of history. The boys aren’t sure how to proceed with Dana, their first client, but the first thing that comes to Ray’s mind is to go to the hall of records and see if the building itself “has a history of psychic turbulence.” It, uh, does, and ultimately it’s demolished and rebuilt. Ghostbusters plays on an entire city’s anxieties that, as renters, our spaces don’t belong to us, that there’s a history to our homes that we’ll never know, and probably shouldn’t know. And anyone who’s ever had a roach problem won’t see Dana’s reaction when she finds an unwelcome visitor in her kitchen to be anything unfamiliar.
And like the unwelcome roommates crowding under fridges from the Battery to the Bronx, the threat in Ghostbusters is only scary because it’s so mundane. When the boys move down to scene of the library crime, they find a stack of books on the floor, extending upwards a couple of feet above their heads. The grand majority of mischiefs caused by ghosts in this film are completely everyday, and that’s why it works within the film’s shot-on-location realism––the easiest way to get a cynical audience to accept the fantastic is to make it unspectacular. The ghosts in Ghostbusters don’t kill––they don’t even make an attempt at violence until very close to the end of the film––they are very literally nothing but spectres, and the only threat they pose is a mostly psychological hindrance to everyday order.
Every time I watch it as an adult, I try to tap into what appealed to me about the film as a kid. What did I get, at 5 years old, out of a montage of the boys appearing on the covers of Omni and Atlantic Monthly? Most of the dialogue surely went over my head until I was in my teens. I’m not even talking about the subtle economic/social/moral/religious/and racial subtexts––what did I think was going on when Ray clearly gets a blow job from a poltergeist? How about when Dana, possessed by Zoul, lies under Peter and says, ” I want you inside me?” Was that double entendre unwound/negated completely by the next line––”Sounds like you got at least two people in there already”––or did I always know, subconsciously, that it wasn’t that simple? To watch this film is to necessarily grapple with how it warped my young mind, which is the height of self-involvement.
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