[A couple years
ago, I spent a
fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel!
Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s sure
to set box office records!]
On two distinct
ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic scary comedy.
First things
first: Ghostbusters (1984)
is a really fun, funny, scary, entirely successful film, full of great performances, great music, and lines and moments that
have stuck with me to this day. (The less said about Ghostbusters II [1989], the better.) It’s important, in the course
of these analytical series, not to lose sight of the fact that summer
blockbusters are designed and intended, first and foremost, to entertain—that doesn’t
mean that they can’t or shouldn’t also be smart or interesting (none of that “It’s
not supposed to be Shakespeare” crap here, bud), just that we can’t overlook
the qualities that make them fun and make them endure. And Ghostbusters has endured as well as any summer
blockbuster I know, and indeed largely created (and certainly popularized) a
new genre—the
horror comedy—that to my mind has never been done any better than it was done
here.
But if you think
that means we can’t also analyze Ghostbusters—well,
you clearly didn’t read my
post on Baywatch! And when we
start to turn our analytical attention to the film, it seems to clearly take a
side within the longstanding and ongoing debate between science
and the supernatural (or spiritual). The film opens with our heroes getting fired from their
university research job because of their focus on the supernatural. Its
main antagonist (yes, Zuul is the climactic villain, but this guy’s hostility
drives much of the film) is William Atherton’s
incredibly annoying EPA agent Walter Peck. And when the Ghostbusters
convince the Mayor to side with them over that EPA agent, they do so by arguing that what’s going
to happen to New York is “a disaster of Biblical proportions… Old Testament,
real Wrath of God type stuff.” Just as Weird
Tales did in their own era, the film suggests that all our modern science
isn’t sufficient to engage with another side of the world, an older and perhaps more
primal supernatural side that demands its own understanding—and its own
heroes to combat it.
Yet at the same
time, the way those heroes combat the supernatural is precisely through
science: their energy streams
and containment units, all that they had been working on in that university
research role and brought with them to their “private sector” alternative. That
is, we could read the film’s attitudes as divided not between science and the
supernatural, but rather traditional vs. experimental science, cautious and
bureaucractic perspectives such as those of staid academics and the buttoned-up
EPA vs. the more liberated and forward-thinking ideas of Egon and his partners.
Those latter perspectives are certainly willing and able to engage with the
world’s oldest and deepest spiritual truths, but they are also much better
equipped to come up with modern answers for those supernatural threats. In that
way, we could see Ghostbusters as an
example of a modern American Gothic—recognizing a world full of darkness and
the supernatural, but ready to push back with courage and rationality. Who else
you gonna call?!
Next blockbuster
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?
No comments:
Post a Comment